Sex, Scandal, and…Capitalism

David Lurie is a victim.  Perhaps not quite like the other characters, but he is a victim nonetheless of the capitalist and gender systems.  Althusser says that a person like David is alienated from his labor–he’s disconnected from the benefit of his own work in a way.  David doesn’t like teaching.  Not Communications, anyway.  He is detached from the potential in his students, the ideology that his instruction will advace their intelligence and perception.  In the middle of what Althusser calls the dominant ideological State Apparatus–the education system–David fails to produce the young adults the capitalist system needs to survive. He is detached from his work and from what he produces (apathetic students).  But this has the opposite effect of Althusser’s theory: By example, David is indirectly teaching his students that it’s okay not to care.  The ideals of knowledge and academic advancement are just a farce.

Althusser aslo discusses how not all the Ideological State Apparatuses are driven by pure ideology; nor do Repressive State Apparatuses operate only on the use of violence and discipline.  “There is no such thing as a purely ideological apparatus,” he writes. “Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion…” (1490).  These institutions have to protect their ideologies and morals, and when a member of the system threatens that, the apparatus takes action.  David marks Melanie present when she’s not there, fakes her grade on the midterm and, oh yeah, has sex with a student.  Obviously, this isn’t the best way to break from the apparatus if one desired to do so, but how would one do it? Any “rebel” teacher could end up expelled.

Anyway, onto the women.  Soraya is the manifestation of Gayle Rubin’s take on “gift-giving.”  The agency has a hold over her–namely, her salary–which allows them to pass her to male clients.  Rubin suggests, “If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it” (1672).  Soraya is, in a sense, the means of production that keeps this male-to-male transaction alive.  When she and David meet, they are undoubtedly operating in a patriarchal, gift-giving world.  When David meets Melanie, though, things get more tangled.  About her, he thinks, “She does not own herself.  Beauty does not own itself” (16).  But he doesn’t control her or himself.  He desires her constantly, but they have no passion together and she doesn’t want to be with him.  David recognizes this later when he realizes that “perhaps he does not own himself either” (18).  Melanie is confusing, to say the least.  Why does she go to him if she doesn’t want to? Makes me suspicious.  

Black Skin White Masks

So I followed my own advice and looked up Frantz Fanon.  And it’s a good thing I did–as soon as I read some of the webpages on him, I went, Ohhhh, so that was his position on racism.  While reading, I felt like he had never solidified a stance.  I thought, maybe that’s the point of the whole piece.  But I doubted it.  Several sites said that Fanon wrote from a postcolonial viewpoint. Duh.  Ever have those days when you’re looking so hard for something that’s right in front of you? Yeah, that was me. 

At www.english.emery.edu, the author of Fanon’s bio page, Jennifer Poulos, mentions that Fanon believed the white culture desired to “alienate the consciousness” of the black man.  Heard that before.  Althusser suggests that this is exactly what the State Apparatuses are doing–the capitalists alienate the working class from the relations of production.  Which actually makes perfect sense because Fanon, in the fifth chapter of Black Skin White Masks, relates the domination of whites over blacks to the control of the workman by the bourgeoisie. Fanon writes, “when I tried, on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to recalim my negritude, it was snatched away from me” (132).  Jean-Paul Sartre is the thief.  Sartre writes, “The idea of negritude ‘passes,’ as Hegel puts it, into the objective, positive, exact idea of proletariat” (132-3).  He continues, “The most ardent poets of negritude are at the same time militant Marxists” (133).  But it’s not the same, cries Fanon.  The alienation is different. 

Which leads me to my biggest stumbling block of Fanon’s work.  Does he want blacks and whites to recognize the similarities in each other and band together under their common struggles, or does he want the black culture and struggle to be recognized for what it is, which is wholly separate from whiteness?  Can both of these concepts coexist?  It seems impossible for blacks to reconcile themselves with a white culture that has taken away blacks’ collective identity and replaced it with one that whites see fit.  Blacks, says Fanon, are defined by whites.  Blacks do not exist as a separate entity anymore, but they need to find a way to get there.  “I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency…and above all else, “Sho’ good eatin’.” Fanon writes.  This made me think of W.E.B. DuBois’ idea of double consciousness: You are yourself, and then you are what you are through others’ eyes.  The soul is divided according to your own standards, and the ones held up to you by scrutinizers.  So what does one do? He puts on a white mask, says Fanon, whether he’s aware of it or not.  The white man is industry, mechanisms.  The black man is emotion, earth.  Fanon said that after white scientists “reluctantly conceded that the Negro was a human being,” the white race still had no desire for interracial contact and connection (119).  But Fanon himself doesn’t seem to want that, either.  He wants not only to be seen as a member of the human race, but to “reclaim my negritude.”  But maybe it’s the same thing as some types of feminism–we don’t hate men, but we hate the patriarchal system.  Perhaps Fanon has the same mindset, where he hates the white culture and all it’s done to him, but doesn’t necessarily want to forgo connections with white people individually.      

Back to Theory

This class hasn’t been a cakewalk by any means, but so far I think I’m getting a handle on it.  I’m glad I learned early on that to avoid excessive frustration, I have to accept that I’m not going to understand everything I read or every idea presented.  Just take the pieces that you know or that pique your interests and go from there.  When I sit down and read these pieces, it’s a different method from that which I use in reading poems, short stories, or a textbook.  I try to read deliberately slow and without distraction (which isn’t always possible), since theory requires active, not passive, reading.  When I write afterward, it’s almost like I’m freewriting–sometimes I end up molding ideas as I go, and more questions might arise that I hadn’t thought of while reading.  I try not to lose my own voice, because my blog is the place where I have the upper hand: Where in the reading, the author persuades the reader to jump on her theory-bandwagon, the reader, in her blog, has the chance to speak when before she had to be quiet. She can refuse, question, or  ardently agree with the author.   

I’m definitely more of a listener than a talker.  I like listening without interruption to see how similar or how entirely different mine and another’s viewpoints can be.  Working with a group is like a mini-conversation, but no less intellectual.  Actually, I like getting together with my carnival group because since there’s a smaller number of us, the conversation is more intense and focused, and we can bounce more ideas off of each other.  As far as the classwide conversations go, I want to resolve to stop holding back ideas if I want to throw them out there.  Sometimes I’ll pass to give other people the chance to speak or because I don’t think my input is relevant to the particular topic.  But in the future, I’m going to try to say what I want to say if I think it’s important to me.   

Actually, running a search on the author of the week’s piece or on the history of the theory itself isn’t a bad idea.  I did that once in a while, but I don’t think I used it enough.  Esther’s picture of Gayle Rubin, for instance, just made everything click, like, Okay.  That’s Rubin.  If her theory on women in the system were to have a human form, she would be it.  Since I usually bring my own context to whatever it is that I’m reading (or writing), it couldn’t hurt to know the origins of the author or his or her works. 

 Above all, I want to know where I stand.  Even if I don’t fully understand a theorist’s work or point of view (which is usually the case), I still want to take a position on it.  Sounds impossible, but I think what I mean is that if there’s anything I don’t agree with, I will not reject that disagreement as unintelligent.  If I did, I’d be letting theory use me. 

The Political Economy of Sex

There was a whole lot of information offered in Gayle Rubin’s piece–some of which I found conflicted each other and just plain confused me.  When she whipped out Marx, Derrida, Freud, and Levi-Strauss, I was just shy of ecstatic (yay! I know these guys!) but then I wondered why she would base an essay which takes a feminist point of view on the works of male thinkers.  She was born in 1949; I’m not sure when this piece was written, but surely there were works out there written by women, or at least written with a woman’s perspective in mind.  She even mentions this herself later on: “Levi-Strauss sees women as being like words, which are misused when they are not ‘communicated’ and exchanged” (1678).  I wonder how her ideas would have been shaped if she had read and used women’s writings in conjunction with her own. 

I recognize the sex v. gender issue from English 112, which helped a bit in my understanding of the piece.  Sex connotes the biological differences between males and females, whereas gender represents the roles males and females are assigned in society.  I’m a bit of a feminist myself, I think, and it disturbed me (as I hope it would disturb all readers), that women were the subjects of trade and gift-giving and not participants.  In other words, they were the form of barter, and, in this specific gender role, were (are) not as socially important as men.  I’m still not one hundred percent sure about kinship systems–she seems to have several definitions for this term.  But I understand when she writes, “They [kinship systems] therefore transform males and females into “men” and “women,” each an imcomplete half which can only find wholeness when united in the other” (1674).  I think that goes back to sex v. gender–the only way we can cure this, as Rubin mentions, is to completely deconstruct the nature of society and culture as it is, which will be near impossible, since this system has been in place ever since society has existed.  In the beginning, I thought Rubin was explaining how capitalism was related to these restrictive gender roles, like how housework, done for “free” by women, reproduces the system.  But later, she refutes this, saying “their work [Freud and Levi-Strauss] enables us to isolate sex and gender from ‘mode of production’ and to counter a certain tendency to explain sex oppression as a reflex of economic forces” (1680). 

Louis Althusser hearts Karl Marx

Althusser’s “From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” although rather pessimistic about structured society, was clear enough for me to get through it. Generally, the state–ha, state–of the world will always inspire a few rebels to take action, and there’s always going to be some friction.  The State Apparatuses are formed, as Marx concluded, by the capitalist class to repress and exploit the proletariat.  The proletariat, in turn, come to realize this after a point, and will push for a better system in which capitalists don’t build their wealth off their backs anymore.  But as Michael mentioned before, communism doesn’t solve any problems in the long run.  There will most likely be someone, or a group of people, who enforce the rules of communism, and the structure of society will inevitably shift into a pyramid in which the economically and socially advantaged are on the top.  The same thing is inevitable in The Watchmen.  Veidt’s Eden-esque society and the “perfect” structure it creates crumble whenever a member of the proletariat discovers the scheme.  Rorschach was the only one who was willing to take the risk of dragging the world back toward war in order to expose the truth.  The editor mutters about the Russians, taking his disgust and frustration out in the office because American society forbids denouncing another culture. 

The author’s view of Ideological State Apparatuses is pretty cynical, too, although (idealist that I am) I admit I find a lot of truth in his theory.  Ideology, Althusser says, is the imaginary relationship of people to the relations of production.  He mentions the Church as having held the role as dominant ISA throughout the Middle Ages; it seemed to grow more and more like a Repressive State Apparatus in its characteristics as it housed “not only religious functions, but also educational ones, and a large proportions of the functions of communications and culture” (1493).   The only way to belong to such a function, the author writes, is if you either accept the terms and norms that apply blindly, or if you aren’t aware that there are other ideas or perceptions out there.  This person, “if he believes in God, he goes to Church…kneels, prays, confesses…naturally repents, and so on” (1501).  But I think what he overlooks is that you don’t have to follow all of the rules to believe or to partake in the institution, albeit you won’t be warmly accepted.  People genuinely believe in a Christian God but don’t participate in the rituals or don’t agree with the dogma.  People firmly believe in Justice but often find themselves on the other side of the law for practicing their rights or for standing up for what’s important to them. 

What went right over my head was the theory of ideology as a tool of alienation.  Maybe what Althusser is suggesting is that humankind uses ideology and the “imaginary” concepts that accompany certain ideologies to distance itself from reality, from the “conditions of existence.”  Or maybe it isn’t the public itself that seeks to alienate, but those in charge of the State Apparatuses in order to disguise exploitation as voluntary compliance. 

Bricoleur V. Engineer: Watchmen Style

 One artist’s depiction of the Apocalypse…

I have to admit–I’d skipped ahead earlier and figured out that Veidt wasn’t innocent, that he had something to do with the Comedian’s death.  Coincidentally, I was still surprised at hoe surprised I was to figure out his motives.  Veidt, Rorschach, Dan, and Laurie were all in one room, and each person thought his or her take on things was the right one. It reminded me of Mason’s blurb in Under the Hood when he comments on the strong personalities that make up masked superheroes: “the chances of eight such personalities getting along together were about seventy-eleven million to one against.”  Veidt honestly thinks he’s morally right in scheming to wipe out New York City in order to “save” the world from war.  And Rorschach, on the opposite end of the spectrum, stands firmly by his belief that the corrupt should be individually punished.  He thinks Veidt’s bloody plan to be an ethical disaster.  Dan and Laurie are helpless.  They want to side with Rorschach and believe that they can both expose Veidt and still eliminate the source of evil in the world.  They’re heroes, but they’re human too.  As I’ve mentioned before, Alan Moore makes substitutions within the comic book structure.  Dan and Laurie aren’t the run-of-the-mill superheroes.  They don’t save the world despite insurmountable adversity.  It doesn’t end nicely and neatly.

Weirdly, Jon, the only real superhero here, doesn’t seem to take a stand on this weighty issue.  He doesn’t even seem to care–he cops out in the end and goes to a universe that is less complicated than ours, as he puts it.  The superhero, the mutant with superhuman powers, seems to lack the courage to stay in the world in which he was created. 

The ending seems so unrealistic to me.  Veidt’s constructed alien probably would have stalled nuclear warfare and hostilities–but that’s all it would do: stall it.  No matter how big the news is, people forget it as the story wears out its welcome.  People move on to the next crisis or disaster, as the the media stresses its importance and urgency at that present time.  On the last page, the editor’s tone is tinged with ethnocentrism: “Don’t say that word…I won’t have Russian spoken in this office.”

Veidt, to me, is the Saussure type.  in class, we talked about Saussure versus Derrida in terms of the engineer and the bricoleur.  To paraphrase, Saussure thinks of himself as an engineer–he can see the structure (in his case, of language), and that engine, to him, is perfect.  It’s the only way to see language.  Veidt’s fake-alien, knocking-out-masked-vigilantes scheme is the only way to bring the world back to the glory days of Rome and Greece.  Derrida’s bricoleur theory, however, says that the engineer is a myth.  You cannot creat something out of nothing.  Rather, you create using borrowed details, using thoughts and ideas born before.  You use it with the awareness that nothing’s complete without combining all the pieces.  Veidt isn’t right, Rorschach isn’t right, Dan and Laurie aren’t right, Jon isn’t right.  Not one of them represents the collective human soul and opinion.  All together, however, they do.  Using the bricolage idea, all of the, are a microcosm for humanity’s moral struggles.

Reality Probably Doesn’t Exist for Alan Moore

I was reading around about comic books and The Watchmen, and it seems the general consensus is that Alan Moore set out to write a novel as distanced from the comic book norms as possible.  The way he crafts the novel draws upon Derrida’s theory of freeplay within a structure; that is, Moore is making substitutions within the structure of the comic book.  He doesn’t employ the same superheo and hero archetypes, and writes in complex and overlapping storylines.  One of Derrida’s characteristics of freeplay is the noncenter.  The center of comic books seems to be the characters and, in most cases, the hero or superhero.  Moore still uses the comic book medium but writes without this center.  The characters aren’t “super”–they don’t have powers, save for Dr. Manhattan.  They’re human and have all the vulnerabilities–physically and emotionally–that civilians (non-crimebusters/vigilantes, whatever you want to call them) have. 

Moore is also playing with reality.  The reader experiences the interplay of absence and presence–of what is and isn’t reality.  Moore builds more credibility by providing documents at the end of each chapter outside of the comic book medium.  He writes in Hollis Mason’s autobiography on his stint as the Nite Owl, an academic piece on Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach’s arrest records, to name a few.  The story in the novel is the only reality Moore wants the reader to know, and he accomplishes this using several media inside one encompassing one.  He keeps disrupting the presence of the reader within this reality when the story of The Black Freighter is intertwined with the newspaper vendor’s assessment of the destruction of the world.  How does the reader know what the real world is?  Where the reader herself is and what reality is is constantly redirected by Moore.

The Watchmen, Ch 1-3

 There’s a movie out? Speaking of…

The way The Watchmen is set up reminds me of a movie; I could almost see movement happening in the panels.  But that’s probably the intention of graphic novels and comics–I just haven’t read much of them.  It’s refreshing.  A little strange, but at least it’s not one of the usual canon books. 

The panels make me envision the storyboard of a movie–to me, they represent the different shots.  When there’s no dialogue, I can imagine the character–like Danny on page 13–sighing, his shoulders going limp.  I think graphic novels, because of the panels, have the benefit of effective juxtaposition.  In the third chapter, Doc Manhattan’s interview is twisted up with the fight scene between Danny and Laurie and the thugs.  Both parties are surrounded, outnumbered, and attacked. Moore and Gibbons don’t mess around–they’ve crafted each panel for a purpose.  When a reporter remarks to Doc Manhattan that Wally Weaver, one of his associates, died of cancer, he describes the end of his life as “sudden and quite painful.”  That phrase, however, appears on the panel where Danny strikes one of his unsuspecting attackers. 

Though I haven’t read too many comic books, I’ve seen the movies based on them.  Now, the movies probably don’t do the comics justice, but from what I can tell, the characters aren’t quite as developed as those in The Watchmen–at least, they’re not as original.  Laurie’s mother, Sally Jupiter, who was one of the original Minutemen, is pretty complex.  She’s had to make some tough decisions in order to keep her head above water.  Her reputation isn’t squeaky clean, but that doesn’t make her a bad person.  The Comedian is intriguing too–maybe he’s right when he tells the Minutemen that prancing around in “costumes” isn’t the best way to rid the city of its crimes.  And although he puts up a facade of selfishness and heartlessness, he shows his vulnerabilities and remorse when he confesses his crimes against humanity one night to Moloch.

I think it was Delueze and Guatarri who proposed the theory that the world is chaos, and that books should reflect the world.  Books, therefore, need to be chaotic and about chaos.  I think The Watchmen accomplishes this pretty well.  When I first started reading, I thought it was set sometime in the future because of all the immorality and destruction Rorschach describes–I was a little shocked to learn it takes place in 1985.  I wonder what Rorschach would have said about the state of the world today.  But he’s right, the world was (and is) a mess, and Moore and Gibbons illustrate that through the language, the scenarios, and the images.  Chapter III threw me off a little with the comic book embedded in the graphic novel.  Confusing how the comic book story is broken up between the real story, and even more so when you don’t know it’s coming. Deleuze and Guatarri never covered graphic novels, though, so they couldn’t apply the rhizome theory to comic book panels, but here, it’s another dimension, another tool with which to realize the chaos of the world through literature. 

Star Wars and the Bonaventure Hotel

Aaaand I think it worked.  Behold the most gloified picture of a movie robot ever, haha. 

I think I got Jameson.  All it takes are some really weird examples.  I actually think I understand the distiction between parody and pastiche (although that might change in class tomorrow).  Parody is making fun of a style, or as Jameson puts it, a “linguistic island,” a way people speak or write.  But when you’re on that island and you separate yourself completely from eveyrone else’s “island,” you get rid of the universal linguistic norm.  Then, since you don’t know–and no one else knows–what the norm is which you can make fun of, then parody doesn’t exist anymore.  Pastiche replicates a style, but unknowlingly (I think?).  No satire involved. 

Then he moves on to Star Wars to illustrate pastiche in the form of a nostalgia film.  And I think I got it then too–pastiche is characterized negatively–by not knowing the techniques and styles and even the parodies of styles that came before.  Jameson says, “Star Wars reinvents this experience in the form of a pastiche: that is, there is no longer any point to a parody of such serials since they are long extinct” (1966).  It reinvents the “feel” of the Buck Rogers adventures of the past, but doesn’t parody them. 

 The Bonaventure Hotel helped me understand postmodernism as well.  It is its own little city, Jameson says, but it is not part of the city.  Like the language-islands, it has broken away from what is around it and what fostered it.  The entryways and the reflective outside serve to further separate the hotel.  Postmodernism rests on the back of nothing, only the present.  I’m not exactly sure how that happens, but hey, I’m at least happy I got that much.

Derrida

I felt like there was one thing out of “Structure, Sign, and Play…” that Derrida may have been hitting us over the head with, since the idea was repeated throughout the piece.  He kept saying that nothing has a center–I didn’t quite get this until he introduced the orchestra example later on.  Levi-Strauss, he says, puts it this way: “The myth and musical work thus appear as orchestra conductors whose listeners are the silent performers” (921).  There isn’t a center here–no focal point, and therefore no real structure.  The image kind of reminds me of M.C. Escher’s paintings, where the stairs or streams have no beginning, end, or direction.  The concept, to me, doesn’t seem that different from Deleuze’s and Guatarri’s theory of the rhizome: How the world is chaotic, and the book needs to reflect the world.  No need for order or structure.  All three are non-linear as well. 

Levi-Strauss says that myths have no authors.  Since he defines a center as the presence of an author and a subject, myths, therefore, have no center.  But Derrida writes that “everything [in a myth] begins with its structure, the configuration, the relationship” (921).  To me, this seems to contradict Levi-Strauss’ argument, unless I haven’t quite separated “center” from “structure.”  Another thing–unless I missed it, does Derrida ever define what a myth is in his terms?  When I think “myth,” I think of folktales or stories that are supposedly completely invented–like Bigfoot, or the City of Atlantis.  That’s the kind of myth I’ve always known.  With these stories in mind, I don’t see the connection to Derrida’s and Levi-Strauss’ concepts of myth.