Lif sucks when people think you're crazy

First, I would like to say that this class has been one of the most enjoyable experiences I have had at this school. Secondly, and most importantly, I think this class challenged me more than any other class I have ever had.

When we first got into theory it was foreign and difficult to understand but one day along the way it just clicked and I started to see some of what we are talking about. I feel that I have come a long way since then. I enjoyed and engaged in all of the theories covered by this class however I took a strong liking to post-structuralism, post-modernism, and psycho-analytic theory. Over the semester my class reading became my casual reading as I began to purchase works by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. I am planning on reading a collection of essays by Derrida in the near future. I can’t wait.

As for theory being dead, all I have to say is “… ….. …… …. .. … . …… .. ….. …….. … .. . … .. … …. …. .. ……”

By that I mean there is so much to say and still it is all nonexistent in many ways. So much that is beneath the surface, waiting to be uncovered by theory but ultimately who cares? It is after all just theory and cannot be put into practice. How are we ever supposed to take down the dominant, hegemonic, masculine structure that oppresses us all when the people we are trying to help don’t see it or interpret what we say as being crazy jargon? Look at the way Baudrillard was received. I think the man has a lot of great ideas but he was treated like a fraud pretending to be a philosopher. All I can really say is that I am thankful for the knowledge I now have but it may only aid in alienating myself from others even more.

This post about feminism, simulacra, the hyperreal, and ME!

I would first like to address one of Tonya Krause’s questions for discussion,
“How have you tended to define feminism in your own life, and how does thinking about feminist theoretical perspectives and approaches affect your personal definition?”
I recognize that my understanding of feminism on a personal, social, and enigmatic level has greatly changed during my life. When I was in my elementary years my understanding of the opposite sex was dominated by my conscious/unconscious need to “other” them. I played with boys almost exclusively. It was us and them as I’m sure it was for all of us growing up. As I got older I was beginning to approach the “logic” behind why we treat women and men the way that we do. Why were men privileged? “They just are.” I couldn’t help but give in to what I had been living inside of for my entire life. I gave in to the patriarchal hegemony that catered me so well. It was hard not to. It wasn’t until my high school years that I began to think about feminism on even a rudimentary level. I sympathized with the girls I went to school with when they discussed women’s issues on a national or global level. However I am not sure for which reasons. I had begun understanding women’s plight in a male dominated world but only in a physical sense. I thought their problem was that they were weaker then men and thus could never really overpower them or even be equal. I thought they were screwed for the rest of their lives and there was nothing they could do about it. And those reasons that I had for why women are oppressed are an example of me trying to think about feminism through a masculine discourse. I was trapped and I didn’t even know it. I was blind to the deep-seeded patriarchal influences that that exist in the social and the political. It consumed my entire perspective on the opposite sex. Since then I feel that my understanding has grown a fair amount but I am still far from getting it. I can now look back on my younger years and see that I too am oppressed by this masculine discourse. How can I really know what I am or what I like about myself and others if I have a model of what I am supposed to be, reinforced in all aspects of my life, acting almost like a stencil with which I am told to construct my identity?

I drew this in class the other day while thinking about this post:



I feel it visually demonstrates the way in which I think about feminism. I have made a mistake in the diagram. If you can, imagine a layer of “masculinity” under the “masculine discourse” layer. I should pay more attention to what I write. That aside, the socially constructed ideas of gender have molded us in the image of what we think we are or must be. Those false models are 4th order simulacra of the sexes. Our identity is lost in the hyperreal.

"Paper Signs"

Please don’t stop reading after the next sentence. My essay will be about a video game. Thank you for continuing to read. I wish to address issues of simulation, simulacra, post modernism, and post structuralism in a popular Nintendo franchise, Paper Mario. The series is a spin off of the already ever popular Super Mario parent franchise. The references I have selected to use are as follows.

1. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1994.

2. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.

3. Bogost, Ian. "Comparative Video Game Criticism". Games & Culture January 2006: 1-6.

As the majority of my referential preference, Baudrillards “Simulacra and Simulation” will be my main source. I am about halfway through the book and my brain is having digestive problems. It’s like the result of eating taco bell and oat bran all day. The book is dense. I am beginning to get some of it and should be really helpful in the construction of my essay.
My second source is the Barry book. This is because I was able to get the broad picture of postmodernism from it.
My final source is a critical article about issues of postmodernism in the entire market of video games. It highlights a few titles but does not go into much specific detail about individual cases. I feel that this article will help me localize my thoughts to the complicated realm of entertainment software.
I believe the game itself to be a simulation of a Mario Brothers that was lost. Its origin falling out of existence. This is because as younger and younger generations are not being exposed to the same library of titles that the “console boomers”(our generation) have heralded as staples in the canon of the video game archive, they are losing touch with the origin. The Mario games that exist now bare resemblance to their origin but only as altered images and representations that misconstrue the original meaning. I may not entirely grasp what I believe to be there now but by the time I finish S&S and play through Paper Mario again I think I will have a good idea.

A reflection on Boudrillard and Coca-Cola

I like Boudrillard a lot. This is partly because of his take on exchange-value versus use-value. It is clear in many cases that we value something because of who makes it more than we value the quality of the product. An example of this would be prefaded or frayed jeans. Taken out of context it makes no sense to want to spend more money on semidestroyed jeans than less money on fully constructed jeans, but these are the times we live in and frayed and prefaded jeans are what people like...I think. I'm not always on the up and up about fashion. Boudriallard's issues with marxism intruiged me as well. He noticed a heavy focus on consumption that Marx interperated as a focus on production. According to Boudrillard's ideas on exchange-value and sign-value we should be more concerned with consumption as it is really what drives economy more than production.
When Ken discusses Boudrillards ideas on simulation things start to get interesting. The example he uses of money is one that strikes a powerful chord with all of us. The paper money we use today represents an exchange value, that used to directly represent the value of a good we had that we wanted to exchange for other goods or services. Money has been so far removed from its origin that it no longer bears resemblance to what it once was. The way we experience money has completely changed especially with the advent of credit. This simulacrum is the most familiar to people but there are simulacra all around us. When I was getting a sub at Hidyan cafe earlier today I was trying to apply simulation and simulacra to my experience at the cafe. I thought about what the cafe was trying to be or represent. I completely disregarded any fears of looking too deep into the subject matter in an attempt to find the simulation. I found a few examples but one that really stuck out for me was the simulation of Coca-Cola, or more specificlly Coca-Cola:Classic. I thought about all of the forms Coke has taken over the years and how far its come. It was subject to change due to its lengthy existence and I feel that it is a simulation of what Coke used to be. Coke:Classic suggests that it is recapturing the "classic" taste of the "original" coke. Having never tasted "original" coke I can only assume it tastes like Coke:Classic. The way I experience Coke:classic is determined by my understanding of what it is suppossed to be. I believe that Coke:Classic bears some relevence to what it represents but I can never really be sure. I have yet to fully grasp this concept and I plan on giving it more thought this weekend when I watch the Matrix again and think about 9/11 and the gulf war. This guest lecture was a good read and I really want to read Boudrillard's book, Simulacra and Simulation. Have a good weekend.

"So the author has died (continued)" or "The Author is still dead"

"But there were literally hundreds of these essay periodicals that weren't canonical, and many of these were anonymously written. Or, I should say, pseudonymously, because one of the quickly-established features of the genre was an eponymous authorial persona. There were two Parrots, both written by parrots; a North Briton, written by an anonymous Scotsman; The Young Lady, written by a Young Lady, and so on."

I found this quote after ten or fifteen minutes of snooping around the list of links at our common "Critical Theory and the Academy" blog. Bitch Ph.D. has mentioned the concept of pseudonymity in the passage that I have pulled from her post entitled "Academic Blogging: Part 2".

You can find the post that I have mentioned right here.
http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2007/01/academic-blogging-part-ii.html

I feel that this passage presents a situation where the author is represented in their works in 18th century essays. I think that the pseudonymity in the "anonymous" authorship is evidence that the work transcends the confines of the paper and exists in the author as well

So the author has died.

In Barthes "The Death of the Author" I found many passages that powerfully illustrated his point that the author is a much smaller source of meaning in the text than we previously believed. The emphasis he puts on the reader as being the one who sees the writing as a crossroad of multiple writings coming from various points such as the author, the culture of that author, the culture of the reader, and the dominant culture of the times. Barthes says it very well in this passage:

"[The meaning]...[is] a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

From this I got the notion that the author is no more in control of the text than his predecessors or the reader, or anyone for that matter. I like that Barthes brings up the fact that it is impossible for an author to be original in his writing because the dictionary of words from which he draws his work from is constructed and available before he begins to write. This also makes me think of how the writing and the author exist together and one doesn't produce the other. The writing of the text is a temporal experience in both the existences of the author and the text itself.
When Barthes discusses how giving the text an author is to impose a limit on the text he suggests that the text has much more meaning outside of what the author had thought or intended and by limiting it to his specific meaning would be to hold it back from achieving its fullest potential. That is why the reader is truly in power and can read the text for what it can really be regardless of the intentions of the author.

Things in relation to other things.

"Signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" (39)
Saussure, in this almost poetic line, is implying that words hold meaning not because of what they represent but rather how what they represent differs from other words and what they represent. He uses the example of the words “male” and “female” and how the meaning of each word is as much about not being the other word as much as it means what it actually is. This relativity creates an elaborate network of signs (words) that all exist without positive or negative connotation. The point he is trying to make is that because all of these signs and their meanings are all arbitrary, the only way you get meaning out of the word itself is relative to the meanings of all other words. In one of his other examples he references how we distinguish a hut from a shed or a mansion from a palace. We are able to do this because we have taken a simple idea such as shelter and subcategorized it to further complicate its meaning. Now that we have the words shed, hut, house, mansion, and palace. Each word has a value that is relative to its surrounding words. If the word house did not exist, the meanings of the words shed and mansion would have been expanded to cover the lost meaning. Saussures ideas were taken and adapted by the structuralists as a model on which their ideas can be founded. His model of words and how they relate allowed them to measure their work in many ways.
When I step back and think about what it is I just learned from this reading I think to myself, "How incredibly simple yet so monumentally complex when brought into a social or cultural realm". When you think about aspects of our language like dialect you consider why there are different cultural values on two words that mean the same thing. Slang versus ornate language of the upper class, bubbler versus water fountain. A social hierarchy is recognized through conversation when certain words are used.
I am not entirely clear on everything I've read so far but I think I am starting to get it.