Blog Post 1: Eliot

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot explains his view on the role of poetry and how it really has nothing to do with the poet’s thoughts and feelings. I, for one, have always seen poetry as a way to symbolically portray what one is feeling. According to Eliot, the function of the poet is not to express his own feelings and emotions in his poems, but to make pieces of literature that reflects what came before it and can be integrated in the history of literature. He feels poetry should be impersonal to the poet, and for it to mean nothing emotionally to them. I have always seen poetry as an outlet to portray one’s emotions, in almost a secretive way.

Eliot begins to speak of the word “tradition”. He explains that this word is not a positive term in the history of criticism. Critics would use it as an adjective describing works and it was awful if your work was described as “too traditional”. He found it ironic, as the majority of literary works did not contain tradition and because of this he wanted to create one. He explains that critics look for things in writing that differentiates them from other writers; some kind of uniqueness and individuality. Eliot thinks that the best part of a writer’s work is the section that pays tribute to those who came before him, by praising their literary works. These tributes allow poets to be immortal. Eliot believes that the sections that poets assert their immortality robustly are where their individuality can be distinguished.

Eliot does not support “repetition just for repetition” and recognizes that originality is better than something that has been done before. This concept is very relatable , because stories and literary works that are original and unique are far more intriguing to me than something that I have heard before. He feels innovation is better than repetition and those who keep rewriting stories from the past will get lost in translation. He believes that in order for a poet to be unique he must combine tradition and modernity, in which both influence each other. I agree with this kind of logic because historical sense in a literary work is important but is the most interesting when combined with personal experiences or compared to things of the present. Almost like allowing the past and present to live together in existence instead of two separate entities

Blog Post: Saussure

Language is used to express thought. In actuality language consists of sounds (words) that portray a thought. Without language explanations would be very broad and vague. Saussure explains how language works. You have a concept thats connected to sounds which are called the signifiers and the signified. Saussure believes that language has value in and of itself and is not random sounds that create an image or idea. I believe that there is unlimited amounts of ways to express an idea. Language is not limited. Saussure says that the system of language is created by differences in sounds and differences in ideas. This concept was a little difficult to grasp but I have concluded that language and what it consists of does not have one concrete meaning.

I found it very interesting to learn about the Syntagmatic Relations. The placement of words in a sentence can determine the meaning of the thought. A sentence is never concrete. If you rearrange the words and emphasis on words in the same sentence, you could end up with a different meaning entirely. This ties back to my belief that language is never concrete and there is an unlimited amount of words to create ideas. Saussure also explains Associative Relations and how words with similar sounds are linked together. This is completely different from linguistic structure and falls under a symbolic expression. I was always under the impression that language and linguistics were pretty concrete but after reading this article it seems as if language is a very vague concept. So many theories are linked to but its functions are quite specific.
I like that Saussure refers to language as a chess game. According to him language is separated into two parts, langue and parole. Langue is the utterances and words. It is the part of language that has rules and is limited in numbers. Parole is compared to the moves in chess. There are an infinite amount of moves in chess and it is a concept that it more free and infinite. Language speaks you, you don’t speak language. Langue is learned and absent while parole is something that cannot be seen but could be heard and we could learn from it. This was a difficult topic to grasp, so the analogy was perfect. Grammar is an example of language but ways to express concepts is an example of parole. Saussure is known for this theory, and it is a valid one at that.

Blog 4 Gramsci Prison Notes

In Antonio Gramsci’s “The Formation of the Intellectuals” he describes what an intellectual is and what it means to be one. He describes the different types of intellectuals there are and each of their functions in society. He begins to speak about the traditional intellectuals, which was the easiest to understand from the reading. We associate lawyers, scientists, philosophers, doctors, and scholars as traditional intellectuals. Gramsci feels that these types of intellectuals are independent of the dominant social group and self-governing because they feel that they’re group is essential to social and political change. These are the type of careers that even people now are trying to get into because they hold such a prestigious reputation amongst society. You must obtain special qualifications as well as talents to have such a title, and that in and of itself is reputable.

Gramsci mentions the organic intellectual, and it is quite different than the traditional. He explains that this intellectual has created and organized production instead of participating in it. He explains that they are organizers in different areas of society who are tied to economic production. These include entrepreneurs who create their own businesses rather than be a part of one. After reading this I could definitely acknowledge the difference and why they have different purposes in society.

Aside from describing these intellectuals, he also mentions that even men who have physical based jobs also utilize their intellect. He feels that no matter how mechanical a job is, any type of work requires some kind of creative intellect. He feels every individual uses their intellect in different ways but that does not mean they are not an intellectual. Society makes us believe that intellectuals are philosophers and scientists and all those cliché “smart” careers, but in reality everyone is an intellectual in their own right.

Gramsci believes that the degree of intellectual activity varies within every individual and that however this intellect is distributed will determine their place in society. Their function in society will also be discovered from their intellectual activity. This plays a role in how culture is formed and how society is organized. I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, especially now in the modern times. I feel as if I’m living life for me and choosing my career for some kind of fulfillment in my life but little did I know that no matter what I choose, I will be serving a purpose in society.

In Antonio Gramsci’s “The Formation of the Intellectuals” he describes what an intellectual is and what it means to be one. He describes the different types of intellectuals there are and each of their functions in society. He begins to speak about the traditional intellectuals, which was the easiest to understand from the reading. We associate lawyers, scientists, philosophers, doctors, and scholars as traditional intellectuals. Gramsci feels that these types of intellectuals are independent of the dominant social group and self-governing because they feel that they’re group is essential to social and political change. These are the type of careers that even people now are trying to get into because they hold such a prestigious reputation amongst society. You must obtain special qualifications as well as talents to have such a title, and that in and of itself is reputable.

Gramsci mentions the organic intellectual, and it is quite different than the traditional. He explains that this intellectual has created and organized production instead of participating in it. He explains that they are organizers in different areas of society who are tied to economic production. These include entrepreneurs who create their own businesses rather than be a part of one. After reading this I could definitely acknowledge the difference and why they have different purposes in society.

Aside from describing these intellectuals, he also mentions that even men who have physical based jobs also utilize their intellect. He feels that no matter how mechanical a job is, any type of work requires some kind of creative intellect. He feels every individual uses their intellect in different ways but that does not mean they are not an intellectual. Society makes us believe that intellectuals are philosophers and scientists and all those cliché “smart” careers, but in reality everyone is an intellectual in their own right.

Gramsci believes that the degree of intellectual activity varies within every individual and that however this intellect is distributed will determine their place in society. Their function in society will also be discovered from their intellectual activity. This plays a role in how culture is formed and how society is organized. I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, especially now in the modern times. I feel as if I’m living life for me and choosing my career for some kind of fulfillment in my life but little did I know that no matter what I choose, I will be serving a purpose in society.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot explains his view on the role of poetry and how it really has nothing to do with the poet’s thoughts and feelings. I, for one, have always seen poetry as a way to symbolically portray what one is feeling. According to Eliot, the function of the poet is not to express his own feelings and emotions in his poems, but to make pieces of literature that reflects what came before it and can be integrated in the history of literature. He feels poetry should be impersonal to the poet, and for it to mean nothing emotionally to them. I have always seen poetry as an outlet to portray one’s emotions, in almost a secretive way.

Eliot begins to speak of the word “tradition”. He explains that this word is not a positive term in the history of criticism. Critics would use it as an adjective describing works and it was awful if your work was described as “too traditional”. He found it ironic, as the majority of literary works did not contain tradition and because of this he wanted to create one. He explains that critics look for things in writing that differentiates them from other writers; some kind of uniqueness and individuality. Eliot thinks that the best part of a writer’s work is the section that pays tribute to those who came before him, by praising their literary works. These tributes allow poets to be immortal. Eliot believes that the sections that poets assert their immortality robustly are where their individuality can be distinguished.

Eliot does not support “repetition just for repetition” and recognizes that originality is better than something that has been done before. This concept is very relatable , because stories and literary works that are original and unique are far more intriguing to me than something that I have heard before. He feels innovation is better than repetition and those who keep rewriting stories from the past will get lost in translation. He believes that in order for a poet to be unique he must combine tradition and modernity, in which both influence each other. I agree with this kind of logic because historical sense in a literary work is important but is the most interesting when combined with personal experiences or compared to things of the present. Almost like allowing the past and present to live together in existence instead of two separate entities.

Over the summer, I nannied a two month old child, and one of the first things I can remember doing when I held him for the first time was walking in front of the mirror and trying to get him to recognize himself. After reading Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage”, I know why he failed to recognize himself. It’s interesting to me that infants who still are unable to recognize themselves in the mirror are nevertheless fascinated by the image they see; they can’t possibly conceive of it only being a reflection, when they realize it is them between fifteen and eighteen months.

Lacan argues that once a child recognizes their own reflection, it transforms their understanding of themselves from a being that is locked within the view of the first person to an object that can be seen outside of itself. The realization that the child is an object that can be witnessed aids in the formation of the child’s knowledge of self. To further complicate this, although the child is able to recognize a cohesive corporeal being that is themself, this physicality is in conflict with the level of motor skills the child possesses when they are able to recognize themself. Because the child has such little control over their body but can recognize their physical being as whole, Lacan suggests that the irreconcilable differences between the Ego (which is formed by the child’s identification of their own image) and the body cause the child existential turmoil until their motor skills match the whole being they see in the mirror. The child sees their reflection as a rival, because they cannot reconcile the wholeness of the image with their fragmented sense of self.

Now, to bring this topic to more recent times as far as what we’ve been doing in class (since this post is embarrassingly late), I’d like to investigate Kaja Silverman’s take on “The Mirror Image” and the implications of the child’s recognition of self. In The Threshold of the Visible World, Silverman states that the Ego is derived from the body as well as from outside the body. Lacan states that the happiness the child gets from the illusion of wholeness is from the mirror stage, whereas Kaja Silverman argues that the experience is not because of the bodily wholeness of the child’s image but because of the integration of the visual self-image with the internal sense of self. Furthermore, Silverman disagrees with Lacan in that she theorizes that the child seeks wholeness not because it sees itself as fragmented, but because culture avows the importance of wholeness and unity, which gives the child a fragmented sense of self.

            The legend of Oedipus Rex is a tragedy of destiny. Tragedy of destiny is the attempt of man to defy the will of gods. The moral of tragic destiny is that man is unable to defy the will of god and realize how powerless he truly is in relation to the divine.

            The legend begins with the king Laius being told from an oracle that his son Oedipus would murder him and marry Laius’ wife. Laius sends away his son in hopes to stop this prophecy. Many years pass and just as the prophecy of Oedipus had stated he would end up killing Laius and marrying his own mother Jocasta. Time passes again and the oracle tells Oedipus that he has murdered his father and married his mother. Oedipus disgusted with himself blinds himself and forsakes his home.

            The story of Oedipus Rex had a deep effect on the audience that other tragedy of destiny was not able to produce. This effect doesn’t come from the battle between man’s will and destiny. Instead the effect comes from our childhood desires that became oppressed as they grew up. The curse put on Oedipus to murder his father and marry his mother is the same as our childhood impulses. Our first sexual desire is directed towards our mother and our first impulse of jealousy and hatred is directed towards our father. As a child our dreams reenacted this and confirmed our first desires. Oedipus ends up fulfilling our childhood wishes by making his prophecy come true. The great effect of this legend is that it reminds the audience to recognize those childhood impulses that we have suppressed in our own mind. Just like Oedipus, we live in ignorance of these desires, which nature has forced upon us on purpose. Many men have had dreams of having sexual relation with their mother, and look back at the dreams with astonishment and indignation. In addition, men have a dream of murdering their father. The story of Oedipus is the reaction to these two common desires. These dreams as an adult are followed by feelings of repulsion. Just as adults dreams end in repulsion. The story of Oedipus ends in horror and self-punishment because of this repulsion. When Oedipus realizes our childhood impulse has come in to realization for him, he is unable to cope with what he had done. The story of Oedipus is not just a tragedy of destiny, but instead a realization for the audience of a battle their childhood impulses and the suppression of these desires as they grow into an adult.  

Foucault’s theories on the theory of sexuality bring us initially to the social mindset of the 17^th century, where he introduces the “repressive hypothesis.” This concept states that the “bourgeois societies” of the time were attempting to gain control over, what seems like, the very idea of sex and sexuality and proposed to do so with censorship. “It had first been necessary to subjugate it to the level of language…expunge it from things that were said and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present.” (pg 1648, Norton) This censorship made public discussions of sex taboo, regulating it ok to talk about sex only under certain circumstances. This makes sex itself seem almost taboo, something to be shameful for. In order to even speak of sex, one must have had to have accommodated the topic of conversation with the right place, time and people (I’m thinking behind closed doors, at night, under a full moon, when Jupiter is at its brightest in the sky…) I’m agreeing with the idea that this entire thing was done to prevent promiscuity, which is highly frowned upon. “If sex is bad to talk about, I shouldn’t be having it.”

This censorship on the discussion of sex leads to the Church having to encourage and listen to the sexual confessions of its members. These confessions however begin to evolve not just to regrettable actions that people are looking to atone for, but feelings and desires as well. Confession becomes the only safe haven for people to talk about their…needs. In the 18^th century the ruling powers in European countries began to see the idea of population “as wealth, as labor capacity,” and realized the problem of “population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.” (1652-1653, Norton) They began to see the effects of sex itself. The growth of the nation is pretty much influenced by all the sex its people are having. Too much or too little sexual reproduction affects the amount of labor a country can provide and the resources it can create or consume. This forced sex to be discussed more openly, as it became recognized as an essential topic in economy and politics as a potential problem (or possibly even a strength.) Foucault also writes of 18^th century schools as an institution which inevitably had to acknowledge sex in order to function the way it did. What comes to mind is when he points out that dorms were fashioned certain ways depending on sex, and sleep times were monitored because of “the sexuality of the children.” The whole thing revolved around boys and girls turning into women and men, and therefore it could not hide from sex as a topic of discussion any more than the church or politics could.

Foucault shows how important sex is to the lives of everyday humans and that it is not something to run from or to be ashamed of. Despite the attempts to subdue and control it, it cannot be ignored from society. It is literally the driving factor for the continuation of our species for crying out loud. 

When freud talks about the “uncanny” he is referencing things people experience which can be both familiar, yet, at the same time, strange (and often creepy as a result). The early example for this is Ernst Jentsch’s take on the short story “The Sandman,” which features a doll that is to life-like for its own good. He argues that the uncanniness (if that’s a word) of the dolls in the story is the fact that they are made to look as though they are alive, despite the fact that the beholder of the doll knows they are not.

Freud takes a different route to arrive to the idea of uncanniness. Freud’s main focus is the fact that the Sand-man likes to collect children’s eyes. He relates this back to your childhood and genitalia (because he’s Freud, and that’s pretty much his whole deal).  He argues that people as a whole have come to dread injury to the eye far beyond anything else, and this starts when you are a child. Children rely on eyesight more so than the other senses. The eye is linked with knowing what’s going on around you, and as we know, knowledge is power. Transitively, losing your eyes is losing your power (what little you may or may not have). (It reminds me of when babies cannot see certain objects and they believe it has ceased to exist; should the baby not be able to see anything, he loses his sense of the world; possibly nothing exists. This can easily be passed on into childhood.)  While I can absolutely agree with this, I think the castration anxiety is a bit of a stretch. Leave it to him to think “I’ve lost my eyes! What does that mean for my reproductive organs?!” But I understand that maybe there’s a sense of vulnerability that is applicable to both the eyes and genitalia, as both a very important to human beings, and if that’s the case then I can roll with it. Both are essential to a normal human experience, to be complete.

Maybe (likely) it’s a lack of understand on the concept of “The Uncanny” but I kind of feel Freud doesn’t really stick to the original idea of “Uncanny.” I thought it was supposed to be something familiar yet simultaneously strange and unnerving. Lacking eyes is unnerving, yes, but what’s the familiar part of it? Having eyes? I quite enjoy using Zombies as an “Uncanny” example: the familiarity of having the body of a human being, with a history and social connections/relationships who maybe were loving and good, but, being zombies, they are dangerous and unfeeling. They embody both those who you love and a soulless monster; life and death. Call me biased but I think that’s the best example, but really, I’ll take any excuse to include Zombies in anything…

Of all the essays we’ve read this semester, Lacan’s piece on “The Mirror Stage as Formative” was definitely among my favorites. I’ve always been fascinated with child psychology and development. When I lived in Florida, I was lifeguard who taught swimming lessons for children between the ages two and ten, I was also a camp counselor during the summer and babysat a ton.

Lacan’s mirror stage is a concept of psychoanalytic theory that occurs sometime during the time a child is eight to sixteen months old. The mirror stage suggests that when an infant peers at their reflection in the mirror, they’re fascinated by the image of themselves and usually around the time of sixteen months are they able to recognize the reflected image is themselves. Once this recognition is made, the infant will often spend a great deal of time exploring the image in relation to their body.

The connection the child makes between the image and the body is vastly important to the cognitive development of the ego. The ego is constructed based off the result of the conflict between the child’s visual appearance in direct relation to the emotional experience. When a child is six months old, they still lack the physical coordination to move about with ease. Between the ages of eight to twelve months a child’s physical body is very imbalanced. For example, the arms and hands are much more developed than the legs and feet, the hands appear large in contrast to other parts of the body, the legs may still appeared bowed and feet appear flat as the arch has not fully developed yet. These all cause the child to move awkwardly through life which, causing an emotional experience of imperfection. According to Lacan, when an infant in this stage views their image in the mirror they experience a false sense of wholesomeness and idea perfection that is not felt from within.

This image proves to be fictional because although the child understands the reflection to be entirely them, the child still remains fragmented in its movements and expressing themselves. During this stage of the child’s life, they don’t yet have the ability to vocalize their thoughts, they can’t move about as they please, they can’t eat when or what they want, they can’t control their bowl movement. Their entire existence is completely dependent on the parents and this can be extremely frustrating, hence the period of the ‘terrible two’s”. Even though the image appears and invokes a certain emotion within the child, doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘who’ the child is inside.

Another example of this in term of an adult appearance would be anorexia (as was mentioned in a previous blog) who see ‘fat’ on their body when they’re actually skin and bones. You can also see example of a false mirror image with individuals who may have been overweight as a child and lost the weight during adolescence, but may still see the chubby false image of themselves in the mirror. We live in a society today that prizes external beauty much more than internal beauty.

I recently saw this slam performance that is really suiting for contrasting the social ideas of what is pretty. I think this suiting for the false image of a reflection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

Just a reminder that a) we’ll be doing exam review tomorrow, so come prepared with any questions you have (testing yourself against the study questions is the best way to dig for questions) and b) your blog “greatest hits” are due.  For b), just find the posts and then cut/paste the URLs (http://mybestpost.com) into an email to me.

Finally, don’t forget to review my course online using Hunter’s system.  Thanks!

 For this blog, I decided to revisit Foucault’s excerpt on ‘The History of Sexuality’. Within this article he discusses a number of inferences throughout history regarding sexual discourse within societies. The first time I read this piece, I had difficulty comprehending the exact reasoning why societies in the 17th and 18th centuries radically changed their opinions regarding the discourse of sexuality activity. After reviewing it for a second time, I’ve realized not only the reasoning, but the connections between Victorian ideologies and how those ideologies changed with a growing society. 

The Victorian era was stereotyped as a time of sexual frigidity and instinctual repression. Foucault begins his discussion here. European culture in the 17th century veiled its discourse of sexuality behind a curtain of censorship or silence. This censorship imposed societal rules among “speakers and social structures” (1502).  “Areas were thus established, if not with utter silence, at least of tact and discretion: between parents and children, or teachers and pupils, or masters and domestic servants” (1502). This refinement of language created a structure of silence that was not broken until encouragement from a powerful institutional incitement. The evolution of the Catholic Church broke the silence of sex with encouragement “to speak about it with a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (1503). The church imposed that although sex should be a mute point in verbal conversation, it needed to be a vital discourse within confession. Due to the “Counter Reformation, yearly confession in Catholic countries increased and imposed meticulous rules of self-examination” (1503). During these confessions, the church attributed the confessor to “insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul; henceforth all this had to enter, in detail, into the process of confession and guidance” (1503). The church’s insistence on sexual discourse made a major headway in the taboos of sex in European society.

Another reason for acceptance of sexual discourse was sprung from scientific data on fertility and mortality rates. The Victorian Era was a time of unprecedented growth within Europe. The population grew from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901. That’s 18.6 million more people in a span of 70 years. Due to this exponential growth in population much research was conducted regarding “birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation” (1507). The research regarding “birthrate, age of marriage, legitimate and illegitimate births, the frequency of sexual relations, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptives” (1507) all created a conversation around a taboo subject, that in the end was the roots for a country that hoped to be rich and powerful. These conversations led to the transformation of sexual conduct of a couple into concerted economic and political behavior. For example, in China there is a one-child policy that deems parents are only able to have one child, with a number of controversial misnomers. This policy was introduced in 1979 to alleviate social, economic and environmental issues. The policy is leveled through fines to the family based upon income. In order to hold a society to these terms, the topic of sex must be deemed conversational, at least in the terms of the potential economic growth regarding population.

The third factor that integrated sexual discourse into society were secondary schools in the eighteenth century. “The architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and the whole internal organization” (1506) were constructed in regards to separating the sexuality of children. “The space for classes, the shape of tables, the planning of recreation lessons, the distribution of dormitories (with or without curtains, with or without partitions), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods” (1509) all were directly decided with thoughts of sex in mind. This practice holds true still today. When I was a girl at summer camp, all of the girls were separated to change away from the boys, the bathrooms were always separate, sometimes we were even separated when we went away on sleeping trips. I never questioned the reasoning why we were being separated at that age, other than the fact that I knew I was a girl and not a boy. When I was in elementary and middle school when we studied sexual development the girls and boys were taught separately and only on the sex of the class. I didn’t learn anything about human reproduction until I was in high school. 

Foucault’s writing highlights and shows the connections between different and seemingly small inferences that eventually broke down the taboo of sexual discourse within European society. I’ve always been interested in the taboos of different societies. It seems for many, that sex is still a strong taboo. Within the United States, it is inherently frowned upon to have sex or show sexual affection in public, romantic novels (Fifty Shades of Grey for example) are often deemed pornographic, pornographic film/photography, pornographic painting are all held with a sense of uncomfortableness in the public eye. I believe that breaking down negative connotations regarding sex is a very important and difficult thing to do. 

When I moved to New York, I met a young artist named Alexander Esguerra who is doing just that. His project titled ‘Love & Paint’ explores, breaks down and redefines the taboos of sex. The project entails a couple painting each other and making love on a canvas. The end result is a Jackson Pollack-esque display of their experience that is completely visceral and infectious. When you look at the finished result of any of these paintings it is impossible to decipher if the couple was gay, straight, married, adulterous, black, white etc. At the end of the day, any person who views one of these paintings will only see the movements and the energy that was shared between those two people in that moment in time. The concept of these paintings demand that all the negative societal judgements regarding monogamy, racism, homophobia, causal sex to become eliminated. The paintings represent an equality among everyone and that sex is the great equalizer among us all. 

If anyone is interested in this guys work, he’s incredibly talented.

Check out his work:

Love and Paint

Valentine’s Day Romance Love Art Gift