I’ve just finished commenting on all the posts I’ve received and wanted to share a few thoughts and props:

• I’m impressed with the quality of your reading and writing over all: Nietzsche’s work is challenging, and many of your are reading/writing/thinking with great sophistication already, often pioneering into areas we left unexplored in our Zooms.
• Most of you grasped and nicely explained Nietzsche’s central polemic here, which is of course that “truth” as expressed in language and concepts is a network of “lies.” Thus, he’s not criticizing “liars” and urging them to tell the truth. If anything, it’s implicit that “liars” at least know they’re lying, whereas “truth-tellers” deceive themselves about the lying their language does.
• Relatively few of you ventured out into Nietzsche’s arguments about the implications of this first argument. What do we do if all our thinking and speaking yields “lies”? To review, and to make a long story very short, he explores the pathos and potential of the idea that humans are “architects” with language, and as such “superior to the bee” in that we create “hives” out of nothing. But when we forget that our constructions are just that–constructions–we imprison ourselves and live deadened lives. Instead, he wants us to boldly build and rebuild our reality, becoming people of “intuition” rather than solely pursuing the path of “reason” as modernity dictates we do.
• If you gave me something, you should have gotten something: a feedback sheet via Dropbox/email that I’ll continue using for you all term. Please reach out if you have questions.

All of you achieved some measure of success here, but a few students’ responses were especially keen, so I recommend that you check them out:

• Lizzie sums up the argument and closes with a convincing defense of how creative writers embody Nietzsche’s elevation of the person of “intuition” at the end of his essay.
• Evelyn compiles some well-chosen evidence and then closes with a provocative riff on what Nietzsche would think about extra-linguistic modes of expression, like music and dance. Great example of establishing the argument, then pushing beyond it to explore implications.
• Jason gives a thorough explanation of the argument that glosses the “reason” v “intuition” contrast nicely.
• Ayesha’s post is probably the most detailed walk-through of the argument, and she ends with a nice riff on style.

I’m not proposing these examples as cookie cutters for anyone, but I do think they make for valuable reading that we can learn from both in terms of sharper readings of the essay and of rhetorical examples to draw from. Thanks, you four!

The English department has a wide range of prizes and awards granted each year in the spring. If you have something you’ve written (or will write this term) that you’re proud of, put your hat in the ring. Details here:

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/english/student-opportunities/prizes-awards

In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a non-moral sense” Nietzsche delves into the complicated web of “truth”. He sets the basis for the essay by explaining that our fundamental understanding of reality is a fallacy. This fallacy occurs because how we experience reality is through our language and cognition. He posits that language does not equate to reality. Language is a human construct that we developed to make palatable the unreal or that which we are cognizant of. Say, for example, I was to give you a green pear for breakfast. You are cognizant that it is a green pear. But how do you know this object is green? or a pear? Nietzsche suggests that there is no point of creation for anything we know to be a fact. Rather the things we considered facts are watered-down versions of themselves or what he calls “metaphors”. In which an object exists and to understand said object we have to associate it with one of our senses and so the object goes through many transformations because no one sensory experience outweighs another. Thus, the “green pear” essentially stems off into three categories—our visual image of the green pear, the words “green pear” and the actual green pear. Though all three categories are of the same object, not one of them correlates to one another. The way we view the green pear matches our cognition; the words “green pear” is our attempt to encage the object in the construct of language, and the green pear itself is “theoretically” a green pear because we know it to be a green pear—a green pear is a green pear because it is a green pear. Challenging this statement would lead us to the realization that we have no basis on which to call a green pear a green pear because we have no knowledge of its “essential quality”. Consequently, does any single one of these categories outweigh another? Or does any single category make another less true? No, because they all form parts of the truth, yet still parts of the truth do not equate to the “truth”. This, Nietzsche explains, is the ultimate fallacy. We are so far gone into our intrinsic belief of the truth that we have forgotten that the basis of what forms our truths (the former 3 categories) are deceptions. A paradox of sorts, because then that would make us “architects” of our truth, and would that then not make us the point of creation if our induvial realities are subject to our discretion? If I give you a green pear for breakfast and you say, “no this is not a green pear this is a purple raspberry”, does it much matter who is being honest and who is being deceitful? There is room enough for more than one truth because no one reality is a shared experience.

In natural sense, on truth and lying on No-Moral Sense is literally can be taken as the truth. This might be the author’s conception of the word truth, which assumes to be beneficial. In one way the other it’s a metaphor because it’s not objective.
Respectively, truth might refer to amalgamation of conceptions and metaphor that might attune to physical stimuli or some objects as well as images. The drawback to misconception of truth is that we accept it, therefore we embrace it but have no knowledge about it. In respect, most of the things we assume to be truthful is not true. Truth is constructed and dwell on it and transport it further to make it sound truthful.
“Nietzsche, noted that truth might be evolutional nature” “He noted that clever animals invented cognition”. He declared that “truth and lying in a Non-Moral Sense”. Evolution by Darwin, which explained the appearance of the will to truth and the concept of truth itself. However, the idea of invention. It was noted that there was slyness in the clever animals who discovered cognition because it seemed the invention was fabricated so the implication was deceptive than what assumed to be truthful.
Apparently, “Evolution can be classified as survival of the fittest”. This might be truthful because “Evolution rewards the selfish first before other”. For instance, “a hunter who face an option of sharing or hoarding his kill”. Moreover, the hunter’s direct completion, evolution therefore is survival. The hoarding in context, is logical selection for evolution because it lead to direct increase of in fitness. In result, “hoarders increase in the society as a whole in a generation to come”. There would be an increase with evolution who would choose the gene set.
Truthfully, concepts are metaphors, which do not lead to reality. It is manufactured by humans to help facilitate communication. However, human beings forget fact after discovering it and turn around to “believe that it is the truth and reliable and correspond to reality”( Nietzsche 876). On the other way truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are. Finally, metaphor has no power, coin has lost its pictures and is a metal and no coins anymore. Truth and lies are human language and is manufactured by human. In a nutshell, the post- modem theory is “on the truth and lies in Non moral Sense”. Humans discover things and make it real.

Hunter’s leadership has organized a “community read” semester-long event in which we’re encouraged to read the late, great Audre Lorde’s essays together. Please do: here are instructions on how to download a copy from our library. We may find a way to work this into our syllabus near the end of the course as well.

When I first read “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I, at first glance, assumed the ‘work’ in the title referred to something like a piece or creation (i.e. great ‘works’ of art) but then realized that he is instead referring to the the actual work that art can do in a new era where art can be rapidly reproduced, circulated, and accessed by the public. The piece argues towards a theory of art that allows for the creation and reproduction of art to work as a sort of revolutionary praxis; Benjamin wants to develop a theory that is useless for the purposes of fascism, but “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (1052).

Benjamin states that the age of mechanical reproduction has changed the way that society looks at and interacts with different forms of art. This is particularly because the ability to mass reproduce the image of paintings for example, has diminished in the painting what he calls the aura, which is found in the “uniqueness and permanence” of the painting (1055). As the image of the painting is reproduced and made available to the masses, the aura of the original painting is diminished and there is no aura to the reproduction; it is able to be engaged with, touched, made available to the public. For example, it’s likely that if you go to see the Mona Lisa in Paris, you have already seen the image of the Mona Lisa reproduced multiple times in your life, on coffee mugs, on calendars, on brochures.

Benjamin particularly recognizes film as a medium which has revolutionary potential because there is no ‘authenticity’ or ‘aura’ to film, its sole purpose is to have an audience participating with it. As opposed to a painting, there isn’t much of a ‘true’ original for film; potential opulence of a premiere aside, whether you see a film at its first ever screening or you see it months later in your local movie theatre, you are going to see the same movie.

I’m interested in film, so I particularly like this essay because of its analysis of cinema as a medium. A favorite movie of mine is Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy which is very obviously influenced and inspired by Benjamin’s essay. One of the main components of the movie is centered around one of the main characters’ book, which is called “certified Copy.” It’s quite clearly a riff of Benjamin, though with some differences, where the character, James, argues that the art history world should not be concerned with issues of ‘authenticity’ vs. ‘forgeries’ or ‘copies’ because every work of art is, at its very basis, a copy of something else. Even the Mona Lisa, he argues, is a copy of the woman who modeled for the painting, or of the image of a woman that Leonardo had in his head while painting it. However, what’s most interesting about the film are the interactions between James and Elle, played by Juliette Binoche, who is an antiques dealer that James meets while promoting his book in Italy. While traveling through Tuscany to sightsee, they are often assumed by strangers to be husband and wife, which, as the movie goes on, also starts to be a problem for the viewer. It becomes increasingly more difficult to discern whether the two are themselves an ‘authentic’ married couple or a ‘copy’ of one. As a film it’s a bit meandering and minimalist if you’re not used to that type of thing, but I think it’s really brilliant and lovely to watch, and interesting to consider in relation to this Benjamin essay.

In his essay “The Fact of Blackness” Fanon combines his personal experiences with his background in psychiatry to examine the “uniform” of blackness (260). He begins his discussion by stating that “not only must the black man be black; he must also be black in relation to the white man” (257). Pointing out this framework of a foil, Fanon explains that whiteness constructs itself in relation to blackness, which must then be constructed as inferior in order to reinforce the idea that whiteness is superior. On page 260, Fanon further writes, “A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man.” In this way, white supremacy cannot function by simply isolating and casting aside the racial ‘other,’ but must construct an identity around them and subordinate them so as to maintain its control.

He further goes on to describe the individual experience of being black in a racist society, where “assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema” (258). Fanon argues that instead of inhabiting, and coming to know, his own body and attempting to look at, make sense, and interact with the world around him through the knowledge of what his own particular body can and cannot do, he is instead known by the world around him, and is forced to know himself, within the framework of race and the attributes that society includes in the construct of blackness. This comes to define how he interacts with the world – no longer through the corporeal, but through the epidermal.

Fanon describes becoming aware of his body not “in the third person but in a triple person” (259). For Fanon, it is not just of question of knowing that an image of you exists in the minds of others as a ‘third person’ as he/she/it, but that but that he is forced to be aware of his own body, aware of the negative identity and set of images that are applied not only to him, but to his ancestors, to everyone who is incorporated into the construct of blackness, and aware of the way others interpret and assign meaning to him when seeing his skin color. And while Fanon notes that there are similarities between how Black people live in a racist society and how white Jewish people live in a racist society (notably that an antisemite is inevitably anti-black), this experience of your identity being determined for you by your outer appearance is where he makes the distinction between anti-black racism and antisemitism. He references Sartre, who states that being Jewish in a racist society is a case of being “overdetermined from the inside,” where you “live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype” (260). Fanon argues, however, that he is “given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.” He writes that “The Jew is disliked from the moment he is tracked down” but that being black means that even when you “progress by crawling,” there is no way out; you are already “being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes” (260-1). While white Jews live with the fear of their actions fulfilling antisemitic stereotypes, being black means being “locked into the infernal circle” (261). All of your actions will be made to fulfill anti-black stereotypes because “the evidence was there, unalterable” (261).

An interesting essay that I enjoyed and was reminded of while reading this Fanon piece talks about how representations and discourses of love, desire, and sexuality are racialized and coded around which bodies are deemed worthy of the ‘work’ of love. It’s worth a read: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love

Judith Butler begins her piece in Gender Trouble by discussing what it means to be, be in, and make ‘trouble.’ Reflecting on her childhood, Butler notes that ‘trouble’ presented itself to her as an inevitable condition since “the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep out of trouble” (2540). She states that the ambiguities around what it meant to cause or be ‘trouble,’ gave her early insight into the subtleties of certain structures of power, particularly because ‘trouble’ was a problem that was typically coded with, or attached to, femininity. Butler notes that for Beauvoir and Sartre, for example, trouble is found, and defined, through the shifting subjectivities of masculine and feminine positions and the power dynamics within this exchange. However, Butler goes further to argue that power is not solely operating in the relationship between masculine and feminine subjects, but within the larger construction of any ‘true’ gender binary (2540).

Butler wants to complicate, or, rather, to destabilize, the distinctions of sex and gender which serve as a point of reference for feminist theory and politics. Whereas some feminist scholars (many of them, it seems, at the time that Butler is writing) would represent the sex/gender distinction as being something that has a point of departure from the body, Butler rejects the idea that there is any kind of ‘true’ body from which those distinctions can emerge: “Any theory of the culturally constructed body…ought to question ‘the body’ as a construct of suspect generality when it is figured as passive and prior to discourse” (2542). She extends this argument by building on and expanding other writers’ understandings of the body, most significantly that of Foucault’s. Though I’m a little less confident with Foucault’s exact argument, through Butler’s explanation I understanding his description of the body as being like a blank page on which things are inscribed; our everyday actions and interactions with different structures of power ‘write’ our identity onto our body. However, Butler tries to expand this, saying that the body is not so clear in its boundaries, it exists in relationship to other things and therefore it must be reinforced through repetitive performances. For Butler, the body isn’t so much a blank page upon which identity is written, but is created through the ‘writing’ itself, and that this is seen significantly through gender. Gender is therefore not an expression of an internal identity, but a performance that, through its action, constitutes an identity.

It’s with this inner/outer identity distinction that Butler situates her discussion of drag. Butler finds drag interesting and subversive because it shows “the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency,” as well as revealing “that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin” (2550). With drag, the question of whether a queen is someone with a masculine ‘inside’ performing femininity on the ‘outside’ or someone with a ‘true’ feminine ‘inside’ that resides in a ‘masculine body,’ makes it clear that there is no simple or ‘true’ original distinction of gender and sex. Ultimately, what we understand as gender non-conformity or deviation from gender, is more accurately a practice of “gender transformation…that exposes the phantasmic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (2552).

George R. R. Martin’s love for the 80’s word processor is something akin to writers hand writing the first draft of their greatest works. Our generation is so used to words being auto capitalized and having a squiggly red line under misspelled words that it’s almost like the words on the paper are not our own. I’m not surprised by the amount of writers that have stuck with what we consider “old fashioned” writing processors because they want the words to be their own with their flaws and all. Wordstar is not a processor that i’ve had the bitter pleasure to use but if it is anything like early 90’s Microsoft word, I’m glad I didn’t. While I, a person in their 20’s, would rather not have to go through the harsh task of navigating through software that requires more than a few steps, an older generation found solace in it’s outline. the Article describes it at taking the layout of a typewriter while also having every editing tool only have one function so that there is authenticity without the struggle of having to write something long hand. And while anyone can appreciate not having to write something out, most have grown accustomed to having a computer do all the work for you. Take this wordpress website for instance. when typing out a new post, it does not automatically capitalize the first letter of a new sentence and i’m pretty sure the first time I noticed I rolled my eyes and had to go back and manually fix it. this is a product of having a writing system that does it for you and Wordstar did not do that. At the point of its conception and its golden years, no one could even fathom a system that fixed all the small mistakes on its own and they were satisfied with what they had. Of course there are still the writers that prefer to do the fixing themselves but for ordinary people, having to use an older system would be annoying and tedious. Of course there is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche about our writing tools shaping our thoughts and it’s true. We find our styles and our typing patters with the hold of what we are given. We have the possibility to write thousands of words in such a short amount of time and without getting a cramp in our wrists because we have technology to do the hard work for us. It’s important to appreciate and understand the history of this tech and how much it has done for writers and readers alike.