Whoa

I'd like to begin this post by thanking Ken Rufo for his fantastic post about Jean Baudrillard, taking very complicated and apparently 'meaningless' ideas, and making them understandable to a non-theorist. The section that I was most interested in was his discussion of Baudrillard's ideas about other theories, such as Marxism or psychoanalysis as simulated models that actually invent what they claim to discover.

This is an idea that I have been grappling with throughout the entire semester, the idea that these men, as we've only read men so far, simply discovered these abstract ideas out of thin air, and didn't invent them to promote their ideas. Rufo's post specifically references Baudrillard's criticism of psychoanalysis' claim of discovering the unconscious, when he felt that the unconscious was invented and used to further ideas that psychoanalysts wished to push forward. These are ideas that I have always had about theory both prior to and during this class. While I have to admit that much of that was due to my own lack of knowledge and understanding of these complex ideas, and I am beginning to realize that these ideas can be useful in at the very least questioning human existence, it still must be brought up that these are mostly invented ideas, not essential truths about human nature.

However, I also couldn't help but stop and think how Baudrillard could possibly make these claims about other theories and theorists, or the language they use, while he was in essence doing the same thing. While I understand he was proposing different ideas, it was still theory and anyone could make the same claim against him, that he was inventing ideas and concepts that he claimed were natural. Yet I need to move on, as Baudrillard is a theorist who I enjoy and think proposes some very interesting ideas particularly his most famous ideas, those of the simulacra and simulation.

My first introduction to Baudrillard was last semester in regards to Don Delillo's novel White Noise. In it is a scene when the main character goes to look at the 'most photographed barn in America', a completely inauthentic experience. Knowing that this barn is supposed to be the quintessiential barn, the perfect photograph, you can no longer actually see the barn, but only the idea of the barn. What you are actually seeing is the barn in reference to it as a photograph, there is no authenticity to the true object you are seeing, because you can never see it for what it truly is, it is a simulation of the real. Rufo makes this point in his post as well, using the example of waiting in line for the ET ride at Universal Studios, which goes a step further than the barn example. While waiting in line you're placed in a re-creation of the forest from the movie ET, so you are in a re-creation of a representation of a forest, all while thinking you are experiencing something real, something authentic. When you really think about that, it's mind-blowing, how deep the simulation can go, and how far removed they are from a 'real' thing.

Finally, I just have to comment on how astonished I was when reading Baudrillard's obituary from the Chronicle of Higher Education and how unbelievably venomous it was. While it has to be understood that this sort of writing isn't for everyone I just couldn't believe that some of that article ever got published, particularly after the man had just died. While I understand there was some lingering animosity towards Baudrillard in the United States over his writings regarding the Gulf War and September 11th, the fact that a publication of higher education would stoop to that level boggles my mind. It just served as an example to me that a lot of people do regularly engage themselves in reading these kinds of works, and apparently people have much stronger opinions on them than I have yet to form.

I think there's a mouse in my room

While I know the directions for this blog post were to find a blog focused on the academic or on theory, a posting I just read on my usual blog seems to fit this assignment perfectly. This article from the sports blog Deadspin, which operates out of Gawker media, provides an interesting take on the pseudonymity and anonymity the blogworld gives us, in this case on the topic of race. The author of the article, Will Leitch, does a good job explaining the background of the issue he's discussing, the last four paragraphs are particularly of interest. Leitch counters the idea of a growing "angry white man" culture with the idea that people simply are taking advantage of being anonymous in a public forum to voice their unpopular and offensive opinions.

He goes on to describe how blogs begin to take the shape of their author, which I think Barthes or Foucault would disagree with. While the author may be putting their opinion into their work, their personality is not a part of their writing, they are removed once they click post, just as I will be removed from this post. The idea that bloggers and commenters have the anonymity that newspaper columnists or authors of books often don't have allow them to say things they may feel deep down but would never express to others, for better or for worse. In this you have to wonder does the blogosphere change the idea of authorship altogether? In this new medium, people no longer have to have accountability; granted people have been writing under pen names for centuries, but not in the numbers that people are today. Millions of people have been empowered by this new anonymity and are becoming "authors", which may be redefining the concept as many "readers" are now also "authors".

Mr. Fab

Reading Barthes' "The Death of an Author" makes me realize my senior year high school English teacher must have been a fan of his. The one comment he made all year that has stood with me all these years was the idea that he "didn't care who the author was or what they meant to say, once the words are on the page, that's what they mean." I remember thinking at the time that this was a crazy idea, but as I've continued in English I think I'm starting to feel the same way. Barthes' piece ends with the line "the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" and this is okay with me.

While the Author is a necessary component to the composition of the novel, he is not the end all be all of the final product. One cannot blame any deficiencies of a work on the Author's flaws in life, but rather on the work itself, the language that makes up the text. Through this realization we also open up the door to a new wave of criticism, one that doesn't over value the Author, but allows the reader to gain some importance in the understanding and analysis of the text. This concept of removing the Author from the final work might seem a bit odd at first, but when you really think about it, my teacher was right, who cares what they meant to say, what did they say? By giving the reader more authority in understanding the text it is only logical that someone loses authority, and who more fitting than the Author.

Le Vrai Derrida?

In the Derrida film, the directors were making an attempt to show a side of Jacques Derrida that most people didn't get the opportunity to see. Rather than simply (as if it's simple) knowing him through his philosophical writings they wanted to document his everyday life, show him as just another guy eating his breakfast or watching television. Yet, rather than simplifying Derrida through these depictions they actually help get his idea of deconstruction across to the viewer. Whether intentional or not, the directors succeed in making natural everyday events look unnatural and of course Derrida points this out.

Derrida's continually refers to the cameras, microphones and people milling around him while he is supposed to be performing everyday inconsequential actions. In most documentaries the subjects attempt to disregard these peripherals and showcase the fact that the viewer is seeing a natural normal occurrence, yet Derrida can't allow this to happen. Rather than having people see his image as one of his normal life he has to point out the unnatural aspects of what is happening around him, and also how he is acting differently because of the cameras. The directors are looking for the 'true' Derrida and he makes sure to tell viewers that that is not what they are getting.

This idea of capturing who Derrida really is also poses a problem because it assumes there is one true identity within a person, an idea which deconstruction inherently disagrees with. I think the filmmakers understand this and through their choices to leave in the scenes in which Derrida is questioning the authenticity of the experiences he is going through for the film, they are acknowledging that these are powerful examples of deconstruction.

This documentary does succeed in that it gives viewers an idea of who Derrida is as a person, but more importantly the entire film serves as an example of his work. By including excerpts of his writing throughout the movie they explicitly introduce his philosophical ideas, but by the end of the movie it becomes more clear that the entire project is an expression of deconstruction, the de-naturalizing of situations we take for granted.

Signifi-can't

Saussure's excerpt brought up a few very abstract but intriguing ideas about how language operates. The idea that I'll discuss is that "signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position" (39) This idea is a strong contradiction to what we are originally led to believe, that objects' names seem to emanate out of them, their name is almost part of their essence. Saussure is saying that this is not true at all, a sign has no intrinsic value, no true connection to what it is supposed to represent, rather its function only rises to the surface when compared to other signs. The relative position is determined through the system of negative difference that he also discusses. Something has meaning strictly because it is not something else, this system is what gives signs a relative position and in turn, a function.

Our recent discussion on post-structuralism complicates Saussure's ideas in that his ideas on the system of difference included its stability. However, post-structuralists, while believing in the system of negative difference to define meaning, think of it as an unstable structure. Their ideas work to deconstruct and decenter ideas, trying to expose the lack of stability in language, and in this particular case in the idea of meaning through position, or difference.