A Postmodern Haiku

The Rhizome Transmits
A Hyperreality
All Simulacra.

A Second Haiku (because):

The map is not the
territory but then all
is just hyperreal.

Achebe's National Psychology

 I found this to be the most profound statements in Achebe's essay:

Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate. Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the picture has to be hidden away to safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity.

Achebe is playing with the idea that a nation, like a person, has a psychology.  In 1975, however, psychology was still relatively psychoanalytic; as I understand, concepts like repression and the tripartite mind were still in use. (This is in comparison with today, where these ideas are largely relegated to folk psychology and are widely considered pseudoscientific.) Freudian psychology considers the mind to be determined by subconscious and irrational urges and desires.  These desires are formed as a result of early experiences and are almost always sexual in nature.  The thing to take away from this is: if Achebe believes that a nation can be analyzed as though it were an individual, then that nation is subject to the same irrational urges as an individual.  More importantly, its processes should be considered as the manifestations of repressed sexual desires.

Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different, one good, the other bad? Yes, but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that worries Conrad but the lurking hint of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

The idea of a nation being an individual leads to numerous psychological implications, some of them amusing (e.g. we seemed to have manifested our Oedipus complex somewhere around the American Revolution), some of them less so (e.g. repression of unwanted "behaviors," i.e. people, typically women or minorities).  However, it also says something about responsibility: if nations are like individuals, then they behave like individuals.  And if they behave like individuals, then they, like individuals, are accountable for their actions.  So, nations are morally responsible for their behavior, and when their behavior violates certain moral norms, they deserve to be punished as a whole, to follow Achebe's analysis.

At the same time, this seems a little much.  After all, surely not everyone is responsible for the actions that their nation, as a whole, committed.  And yet, Achebe isn't really implying anything new; we do this sort of thing all the time.  For a great deal of Americans, Germans after WWII were Nazis, Asians after 1950 were communists, and Muslims after 9/11 were terrorists, to name a few.

I worry that I'm taking Achebe's metaphor too far, but at the same time, I can't shake the sense that he's oversimplifying.  Simplifying is useful insofar as it can help to make sense of something, but in this case, I think that Achebe is just making the problem worse: in considering nations as people, you eliminate its actual individuals as moral agents.  It's a helpful metaphor, but taken further, it's just misleading, not unlike psychoanalysis as a whole.

A Call for Postmodern Blackness at Whitworth

You guys remember Josh Swayne? Or Jarvis? (Take a moment for a nostalgic sigh.) Anyway, Josh wrote an article for the Whitworthian a couple years ago that seems particularly relevant to our current study of bell hooks.

The article, called "Identity as 'black' lies in one's own interpretation," pointed out the ways that notions of a unified black identity often alienated certain black students who shared the skin color but not the same sense of identification with the constructed black identity. It brought to the surface the way that students can feel when the color of their skin is regarded as the most important part of them.

Even if it isn't skin color, there are other racial and ethnic identities which ought to be secondary to the experience of any given individual, black or otherwise.

When Swayne draws his conclusion, he is actually arguing for what hooks would call the "authority of experience":

So my fellow white people, if people you know use "black" to describe themselves, let them define "black" as they use it to express their identity, but get to know that identity, black and otherwise. Better than wondering what "black" means would be wondering how someone is doing, who they are and what they are truly like.

"Authority of experience," in my understanding, means that the lived identities of black people are more significant to who they are than their black essence. Asking how someone is doing is an alternative that focuses on the experience of that person, rather than his or her racial category.

Through quoting Jarvis, Swayne shows that not all black people even perceive the black identity as relevant to them, showing the separation from the constructed notion of "blackness" and the reality of possessing dark skin:

Junior Jarvis Lunalo is from Kenya. He identifies himself as black, but for him "black" simply means he has dark skin, and he chooses to identify himself as a Kenyan, not as a member of the black community, while in the United States. One of Lunalo's complaints about the U.S. is that people, when they learn he is from Kenya, make asking him about Kenya the basis of their friendship with him.

This article reveals the social and political importance for a broad understanding of Postmodern Blackness at Whitworth.

I bless the rains down in Africa...

gonna take some time to read the theory we never havaaaaaaave...wah wah. Now Toto is stuck in your head.




Chinua Achebe didn't deter me from my clothes/fashion kick of last post. I've read this piece by Achebe before, but what struck me this time as new and interesting, was his focus on settings. While I have read some eco-theory, this is a different type of focus.

Achebe notes:
Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, "... the thought of their humanity -- like yours .... Ugly."

The point of my observations should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?
(Achebe 1619).

How often do we dissect character development, dialogue, and plot progression for instances of sexism, racism, bigotry, and other unpleasantries? Rarely have I examined the setting of stories and books as maker for societal morals and issues. Simplifying a collection of peoples, countries, and culture, an entire continent to a motif, is wrong.

Yet how often do we still do this?

Harry Potter needs to be exotic, so he attends school in Scotland, a subordinate of Britain. In Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert was unhappy and unsatisafied with her boring and faithful husband, so she left him to travel to Italy, India, and Indonesia, where she ultimately marries a factory owner in Bali after communing with peasants. They help her feel worth and the lands heal her. In the animated movie Rio, a bird from the US is shown how to unwind and let go of his intellectual worries and bossiness and fall in love by the passionate simpler Brazilian birds, all while the land and setting is reinforcing the same ideas.

Yes, but what fashion and travel! Here are the current ads for some major chains and designers:

Banana Rep: new advertising campaign is "stylish safari"


Conde Nast Travel magazine: I get this magazine, and the ads and articles often seem to promote travel to ex-colonies, where I can spend a lot of money to people who live there to cook me things and clean my room and provide me with the best products and services that island/colony/country has to offer. Other than the obvious, another problem is that the travel industry aligns people with landscapes, and in turn makes tourists associate both with ideals. For example: Come to Hawaii! The sunsets and rain forests are magical! The people are incredible/simple/always happy/here to serve you! Just like the land! Go to the spa where the water and the servants will make you feel better! Like Achebe says, there is a dehumanization of the people, and an alignment of the setting with an abstract. It goes along with what Nat was saying in her post about tourism as well.

(Also, side note Bridger, Reddit is owned by Conde Nast).

Think this is only in the travel industry? What about all the recent attention to the death of Osama Bin Laden? How many articles aligned Pakistan, the compound, and Bin Laden as a single unit? Our forces went in there and got him. The "there" and setting is aligned with our ideas of the Middle East as another Other. MSNBS describes the situation as "sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish" (MSNBC).

Even Obama aligned country with people, he noted in his speech that "over the years, I’ve repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we’ve done. But it’s important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding. Indeed, bin Laden had declared war against Pakistan as well, and ordered attacks against the Pakistani people" (HuffPo) Pakistan is something that harbors Osama Bin Laden, talks with Obama, and in where the US enters to take action.


Achebe concludes that the point is not setting, but instead:
The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad's great talents (Achebe 1619).

"This One's For The Girls" but is it for the feminists?

Virginia Woolf would not have a positive reaction to this song due to the way it asserts a separation between men and women. The declaration that “this one is for the girls” does not contain the smallest hint of androgyny. It does, however, show a sense of sisterhood and female relationship, but even that relationship is one that patriarchy assumes exists. It does not open our eyes to the secret complexities in the relationships between women in the same way that the phrase “Chloe liked Olivia” might. The women in this song are reacting to the pressures to look good and be in love. The reactionary nature of this song about girls only perpetuates gender divisions.

Simone de Beauvoir would not appreciate that this song suggests that there is a female essence, especially in the lines “we’re all the same inside from 1 to 99.” Her existential might appreciate the focus on female experience, rather than essence for most of the song (even though that experience is very narrow) but it all gets undone in that line. Not all women are the same inside. It is fortunate that this song does not portray women as either irrational or mysterious. It shows a genuine experience of women in patriarchy, what it feels like for them to be a “second sex.” The lyrics of the song also focus on a woman’s dreams (when it says, “this one is for the girls who love without holding back, who dream with everything they have”), suggesting her transcendence rather than being pure immanence. Even that quote, however might suggest that part of a woman’s worth is in loving with all she has (a man?). There is not a hint of motherhood in the song. It could be a spinster song.

I was going to go about looking at the rest of our feminists, but that would be very long, so for those of you who love to comment, feel free to take on the other feminists too.

Hebdige Looks Down the Hall

Noise incites panic.

Flex universal taboos.

Incorporated.

Haikus are easy, But sometimes they don't make sense. Assimilation

The Internet and Simulacra:

I hide behind light
With perfect picture and facts.
No one escapes the script.

The Epistemology of Hyperreality

Shrouded in nostalgia

Veil over simulacra

That that is is not.

Noise Dreams of Rapture

Nostalgia takes root
where rhizomes circle concepts.
Words rise up to mean—

Youth Subculture:

Rebel discourse where

ideology fights culture

then assimilates.

also this: http://www.everypoet.com/haiku/default.htm

'Cause, y'know, Haikus are cool.

(Sub)culture Incorporation

Noise--streams intertwined--
break, tame, return to the Main.
We are all Others.

Haiku

"Knowledge has progressed"

Knowledge has progressed

Rhizomes sprout simulacra

We tread above ground

A (short and rather incomplete) History of American Subcultures

Dick Hebdige’s ideas are very straightforward. Culture exists, and subcultures rebel against those cultures. Once the culture recognizes the existence of the subculture; the subculture can be “trivialized, naturalized, domesticated” (2486), or the subculture can be “transformed into a meaningless exotica” (2486). While reflecting about these two approaches to dealing with subculture, I thought about the various malls by house in Phoenix and Spokane, and all the different subcultures that have been domesticated or rendered exotic and lame. Malls are sort of subculture zoos of sorts. We (the mainstream) go there to look at all the different ways we can buy subcultures that have been neutered or lobotomized to be tame. The polar bear isn’t going to try to eat me at the zoo, just as the punks aren’t going to jump out of the cage at Hot Topic. We have safe exotic subcultures, like the Silver Safari, where the continent of Africa, cheap imported crap and (gasp)piercings! can be yours for $49.99 or less!

As I was thinking about this, I tried to trace the journeys of all of the famous American subcultures, from their status of AHH! DANGER! To their demise in the mall. Here’s what I came up with:

Zoot Suit folks. In the 1940’s, specifically in LA, many young men within Latino communities wore suits that were a:

high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed pegged trousers (Spanish: tramos), and a long coat (Spanish: carlango) with wide lapels and wide padded shoulders. Often zoot suiters wear a felt hat with a long feather (Spanish: tapa or tanda) and pointy, French-style shoes (Spanish: calcos). A young Malcolm X described the zoot suit as: "a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic's cell".[4] Zoot suits usually featured a watch chain dangling from the belt to the knee or below, and then back to a side pocket.

The amount of material and tailoring required made them luxury items, so much so that the U.S. War Production Board said that they wasted materials that should be devoted to the World War II war effort.[5] This extravagance during wartime was a factor in the Zoot Suit Riots.[6]Wearing the oversized suit was a declaration of freedom and self-determination, even rebelliousness (Zoot Suits).

The Zoot suit riots were in some ways similar to the harassment and assault that many Americans faced after Sept. 11th, due to the way the dressed. However, from a Hebdige perspective, the zoot suit went on to be a mainstream fashion icon for big band dancers, and finally was even cited in pop music as something cool to wear. Total transformation from subculture to mainstream.

Current Store: The Web.

The Beats. In the 1950’s, along with rock, brought the Beats. The Beat generation was uncovered, labeled communist and/or demons, but then satirized to submission. It’s not that they themselves became domesticated, but the public became desensitized and comfortable with the image and reputation of the beats.

Current Store: Gap.

Hippies. The official title of this subculture is The Hippie Countercultural movement. We think of hippies now as the Halloween costume we see every October composed of neon colors and blonde permed wigs, when instead they actually looked like hipsters. Or were naked. Or whatever. Because they were countercultural. But in reality, hippie really is etymologically derived from the word hipster.

Hippies came. They offended. They were conquered. Hippies are now something some references by saying, “dude” and smoking a lot of pot, and reading countercultural anything? The 1960’s hipster has been so washed out into tie-dye and Mom and Pop touristy beachwear that they are no longer a threat to society. Some say this was the point of these hipsters, to force society to widen its gaze, but I think instead of making their views accepted by the mainstream, hippies instead themselves were made to be mainstreamed, negating their goal.

Current Store: Wallmart.

1970: Transitional decade that included hippies, punks, geeks, and freaks. Also drugs, androgyny, and disco. Do not have time for this mess.

Punk rock, Goths, and Heavy Metal. 1980s? Same story as the hippies. They came, they really offended, they were marketed. MTV was born out of this subculture. MTV is in many ways Hebdige’s ideas incarnate. It sort of lives to domesticate and market offensive things. Sex Pistols? Check. Rolling Stones? Check. Ozzy? Check. Madonna? Check. Brilliance though. Who else would have thought, “you know what we should do? Let’s charge bands and artists pay to make commercials, and then we’ll charge consumers to watch those commercials for the artists’ product, and we’ll tell everyone we’re the voice of the rebellious youth. And we will in no way be a cult.”

Current store: Hot Topic.

Cut to recent times:

Emo kids, Scenesters, and hipsters:

It’s the same! First emo kids only knew about emo kids. They listened to unsigned bands, and everyone made fun of them for their bangs and wristbands. Then it went mainstream and parents started joking about it, pop bands were labeled as emo, and everyone had the 2004 mullet (sadness in the front, spiky strength in the back). Hot Topic then ate the movement.

Our hipsters aren’t a novelty or a subculture. While this definition rocks, it still doesn't recognize that hipsters are almost part f the mainstream. They are known and easily referenced in most settings. 30 Rock last week had hipster cameos, and parodies exist left and right. And, the biggest sign of all that they are domesticated, the American Church knows about them. Seriously, they are two months away from being out of style. Mainstream fashion wants us to look like them, academia wants us to be as well read as them, and our parents are just now learning what they are. They are practically domesticated. Which leaves us in an upcoming transitional period of waiting for culture to devour another subculture. Who will it be next! Fingers crossed its programming nerdom.

Current Store(s): anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, American Apparel

Theory, politics, and the human "race"

Steward Hall, as a cultural critic, was interested in the material forces that drive culture. This links him to Marx. He differed from Marx, however, in the fact that he strove to “move intellectual and political paradigms from a sole focus on economic factors to a more complex understanding of the multiple determinants of people’s allegiances, attitudes, and beliefs” (1779).

As I read the Norton introduction says, his “founding work in cultural studies characteristically came to the world in the form of edited volumes in which eight to twelve authors address a topic, arguing with each other but also moving toward and overarching delineation of the factors that need to be considered if the topic is to be adequately analyzed” (1779). This sense of conversation is necessary to the whole idea of cultural criticism. Culture is always changing because people are constantly contributing to it. For this reason, cultural criticism will never contain an axiom. It will always be a growing collection of conversations encompassing more and more factors that determine and are determined by culture.

Cultural criticism will also always resist definition because it is a criticism of criticism, which changes with every critique. Hall deals with the politics of theory, a politics that inevitably changes as it is described.

Another interesting factor of cultural criticism is that it necessarily shifts the critical focus from the high art of modernism to the things that most influence the public. This means that the critical focus is on the utterances of popular culture, namely, contemporary art, especially video and other emerging urban art forms.

His focus on materialism and progressive conversation has a hint (or more) of Hegel in it (not a surprise). He seems to understand Hegel better than Hegel understood himself, because he knows that his thinking will not lead to a definitive answer. He actually calls himself a police of the theory, making sure that it never becomes conclusive. Thus, his work is “self-consciously nondogmatic, restless, and open to new ideas and changing social conditions” (1779).

Hall’s notion that art is not merely a cultural production but also a cultural determinant provides a sense of political hope. This opens the door for artists like Banksy to change the way a culture thinks. Banksy is outside of the economic structure, even undermining it by using vandalism as an art medium. This fits with the Cultural Critic’s fears of institutionalization.

British graffiti artist Banksy is a cultural critic, wrestling with many of the same tensions that Hall describes.

Hall focuses on a very concrete example of the tensions of cultural criticism: AIDS. “It’s a site at which not only people will die, but desire and pleasure will also die if certain metaphors do not survive, or survive in the wrong way. Unless we operate in this tension, we don’t know what cultural studies can do. It has to analyze certain things about the constitutive and political nature of representation itself, about its complexities, about the effects of language, about textuality as a site of life and death” (1793).

Banksy’s work is very explicitly a site of life and death. He deals with the weight of culture, but also has a rebellious sense of humor. You can tell that sometimes he is just being creative, making something different out of what is already there. On the other side of the coin, he generates disturbing social commentary by juxtaposing images of children with soldiers, weapons, or machinery.

“It [cultural criticism] constantly allows the one [political tension] to irritate, bother, and disturb the other [theoretical tension], without insisting on some final theoretical closure” (1792).

The playfulness of his work is subversive, opening up potentially new meanings for the things that he marks such as this elephant.

"The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some people are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising some people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers." –Banksy

This quote shows a theoretical view of language, by recognizing the deconstructive pun in the word “race.” At the same time it is a decisive political commentary, suggesting a propositional meaning.

What interests me most about the selection we read, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” is the fact that it is an analysis of the development of theory itself as a cultural utterance. This mixing between theoretical and artistic practice opens up the door for us to analyze art itself as a kind of cultural theoretical practice. Art is a criticism of culture that is produced by the culture.

Banksy isn't completely outside of institutions either. Fox recruited him to write an opening for the Simpsons, which critiqued Fox. They used 95% of his material despite its politics because, like Banksy, they have a sense of humor that is on the edge.

I Liked *insert fad* Before It Was Mainstream.

With such fun times popping up around the undead as Humans Versus Zombies game last fall and the new zomBcon in Seattle (during which Evil Dead star Bruce Campbell officiated a wedding and several renewals of vows), it's hard to imagine the zombie culture as anything but a facet of the mainstream. Just look at the blockbusters like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland (that's over $13 and $75 million gross in the USA alone), along with the Resident Evil franchise and the Left 4 Dead games, and you'll be just starting on the massive cultural fad.

But, believe it or not, zombies weren't always fun and games, despite the rising surge of zombie romance novels. There was a time when the zombie culture was considered full of paranoid geeks, the militant right-wingers of the nerd-kingdom. (There are actually several prep sites available for perusal, not to mention a best-selling book by Max Brooks). Pre-fad, if someone even considered preparing for the zombie-apocalypse, s/he would likely receive odd looks and be deemed suffering from paranoid delusions brought on by far too many video games (citation: personal experience). Now, however, should a person mention zombie-preparation,

the more common response would be a laugh and a tactical discussion (like the pros and cons of holing up in a supermarket or what to keep in you Mobile Zombie Preparedness Kit); my own discussions involve the building-fortification potential at Whitworth (not promising, considering Whitworth seems to love glass) or the biological/physiological details of an actual "undead." And this is not ridiculed so much as indulged. Because now it's mainstream.

This absorption of a pseudo-rebellious culture into the mainstream is a lot like Hebdige's process of recuperation: "(1) The conversion of subcultural signs (dress, music, etc.) into mass-produced objects (i.e. the commodity form); (2) The 'labelling' and re-definition of deviant behavior by dominant groups--the police, the media, the judiciary (i.e. the ideological form)" (2484). Commodification? Done, done, and done (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has both a prequel and a sequel, by the way). Re-definition? Movies, video games, and music have had instances of portraying zombies as either humanized, not-really-zombies, or humorous (I maintain that the zombies in RE 4 and 5 are not actually undead; they are infected living humans--at least until mutation, then t

hey're infected living mutant-monsters). It's not common for zombies to be seen as terrifying or apocalyptic (though 28 Days later has a funny part...or two...). They've been mass-produced into plushies or comedic characters/plots on Comedy Central TV shows (the room

mate in Ugly Americans or the "Zombie Attack" episode of South Park [caused by Worcestershire Sauce]).

The point is that "meanings [are] being constantly created and reconfigured," with culture absorbing, spitting out, shunning, and reabsorbing subcultures. When something crops up in society that makes an anti-statement, culture acts the like the magpie with a shiny object, pecking and heckling before picking it up for itself (and then probably dumping it in its hidey-hole and forgetting about it for a few years).

Look at it, plotting its future life of crime, the thieving little bugger.

Also: a Magic the Gathering card.

Die, in the Name of Science

In the section entitled "Ramses, or Rose-Coloured Resurrection" of his Precession of Simulacra, Baudrillard describes the scientific methodology and its relation to the simulacra.  A year or so ago, I stumbled across "Ant Superhighway," a YouTube clip showing a group of archaeologists excavating what *was* the largest living ant colony on Earth at 50 square meters in area, and 8 meters in depth.  In relative terms, the colony was essentially a subterranean city on part with one of our Wonders of the World.

To discover the structure of the colony, the archaologists pumped approximately 40 tons of cement into the entrance, filling every tunnel and pathway.  They then painstakingly excavated the underground city by digging and brushing away the dirt around the (now dried) cement.

When Baudrillard talked about science, he talked about it in terms of its motivations, rather than its social effects.  "The logical evolution of a science," he says, "is to distance itself ever further from its object until it dispenses with it entirely" (1561).  We see this pretty clearly in the video; I mean, it is ants that we're dealing with here, and not higher-level mammals, but still, I did feel weirdly uncomfortable at the thought of ant-genocide in the name of science.  The archaeologists didn't seem particularly bummed about it; maybe I'm just sentimental.  But in any case, Baudrillard's claim makes a lot of sense here.  Indeed, he goes further to say that specimen "mean nothing to us: only the mummy is of inestimable worth since it is what guarantees that accumulation means something."  In other words, "we all become living speciments under the spectral light of ethonology" (1562).

At some point, this sort of knowledge-accumulation becomes absurd.  This excavation was certainly an interesting stunt, and perhaps it will somehow deepen our knowledge of ant-architecture, but honestly, I couldn't help thinking that there must have been a better way to go about discovering and "preserving" (in the loosest sense of the word) these sorts of colonies.  In "preserving" the ant colony (for study, at least), the archaeologists have just destroyed it, which drives home Baudrillard's claim that "for ethnology to live, its object must die" (1562).  I couldn't shake the sense that the whole ordeal was interesting, but at the same time, irrelevant to an almost embarrassing extent.

About This Tourism Thing...

Something that has always fascinated me is the world of tourism. This especially hit home as I went to Thailand, and realized the true difference between a tourist driven culture and a more 'authentic' culture.

However, after reading Jean Baudrillard, I'm curious how the tourist industry fits with his idea of the world as simulacrum. On the one hand, it makes sense. Disneyland is the world. It's presented as imaginary so we'll think that the world around it is the real world, while it's all a simulation. Similarly, if I go to Thailand, do the tourist parts of it align with Disneyland, in that they are the imaginary contrasting with the supposed real? Or is there actually a distinction?

I'm curious about the relationship between the tourist culture and the more 'authentic' culture. I've always wondered if, on entering another culture, we can even see the authentic side of it. Regardless of where we go, even if it's miles and hours off the beaten track, we won't be able to fully access the true culture, or the heart of the culture. The tourist has an inherent inability to truly see the, shall I say, real culture. Because of this, everything I see of another culture is in a way a simulacrum.

This said, I wonder if there even can be a 'real' culture. Baudrillard says not. The whole world is a simulacrum. Western society has disintegrated and left in its wake a simulation of what it once was. Since this is the case, it would appear that any 'tourism' is only a further attempt to satisfy our nostalgia. We hope that we can see the culture, but since it isn't there to begin with, the tourist industry only supports the imaginary, to comfort us and protect us from the realization that all culture is simulation.

Harry Potter and the NH!

Where is the line between author and text? Greenblatt and Foucault have a hard time placing it. Is Nietzsche’s life relevant to his work? Are his later writings publishable, or do we need to establish a line that clearly marks the difference between his art versus his ramblings. Are all artifacts relevant for contributions for the text? Where is the line between biography, author interviews, and information relevant to the text? So many questions for you New Historicists!

While thinking about this, I took a look at a series we all know (except for Natalie) reasonably well: Harry Potter. In case you don’t know the premise, Harry Potter is a series of fantasy young adult books revolving around the seven years in which Harry Potter attends school for Wizards, makes friends, and defeats the very face of evil. Hurray!

However, an examination of J.K. Rowling’s life does add to the text. Rowling wrote the first few books in a café in Edinburgh that overlooks a street that looks like this.
Several scenes in the book/movie looks like this.
She used to also write in a pub that overlooked the Edinburgh Castle.
Here's Hogwarts.

In the book, the students have to pass their O.W.L.S. which has a similar name to actual standardized tests in England. However, more interesting are the historical and political connections Rowling’s knowledge of history and her own experiences draw. In an article from 2007, she noted that:

The expressions "pure-blood," "half-blood," and "Muggle-born" have been coined by people to whom these distinctions matter, and express their originators' prejudices. ... If you think this is far-fetched, look at some of the real charts the Nazis used to show what constituted "Aryan" or "Jewish" blood. I saw one in the Holocaust Museum in Washington when I had already devised the "pure-blood," "half-blood," and "Muggle-born" definitions and was chilled to see that the Nazi used precisely the same warped logic as the Death Eaters. A single Jewish grandparent "polluted" the blood, according to their propaganda (Goldstein).

She deliberately wrote in political and historical references within her fictional world, a fact that reflects how knowledge of historical events, like World War II contribute to a reading of the Harry Potter books. In this same article, however, Goldstein notes how Rowling, while outwardly goes against racism and negative attention to race, also contributes to a long held dialogue within the fantasy genre:

Like Tolkien, Rowling depicts a variety of magical species in addition to human wizards. Tolkien unabashedly racialized his magical beings; Tall, pale Elves spoke a beautiful Latinate tongue; little Hobbits were simple, fun-loving, loyal folk; and dark-skinned "southern" human tribes sided in battle with orcs, savage creatures no better than animals.
Rowling's world isn't all that different. A magical species called Veelas are high-born, fairy-like creatures who seduce men and possess unnatural, silvery-white beauty. Over the course of the books, the young wizards do learn to respect house elves, a species in slavery to human masters. Yet even in freedom, the elves' personalities are depicted as fundamentally servile. A rather pathetic elf named Kreacher feels his subordination so keenly that when he fails in tasks assigned to him by Harry, he beats himself to a pulp. We're meant to feel sorry for Kreacher, but elves have no agency -- they owe even their liberation movement to humans (Goldstein).

This reading, while different from the traditional New Historicist interpretation fits nicely with Cultural critics and Post Colonial, again showing the far reaching effects of this school of theory.
However a final question resides for me. It is appropriate to value Rowling’s ideas about her inspiration (Edinburgh), and even her own ideas about historical ties to her own piece. But Rowling also added tons of character information completely separate from the text, which to many people seemed to kill questions rather than spark interest. She gave us sexual orientation and psychology of characters. She wrote an epilogue that most people hated.
Where is the line between facts that contribute? Should we publish everything? Where is the line between crazy, helpful, and unnecessary?

"Piss Christ" and Deconstruction

Andres Serrano's rather infamous "Piss Christ" was destroyed yesterday by Christian protesters.  "Piss Christ," a supersaturated photograph of a crucifix suspended in the artist's own urine, caused a scandal when first exhibited in 1987.  Protests were in part driven by the fact that Serrano received $15,000 for the work, part of which was taxpayer-funded.  The attack yesterday was performed using hammers and/or ice-picks while on exhibit in Avignon, France.

Numerous accounts and opinions of "Piss Christ" have been given.  Sister Wendy Beckett, an art critic and Catholic nun, stated in a television interview with Bill Moyers that she regarded the work not as blasphemous but as a statement on "what we have done to Christ": that is, the way contemporary society has come to regard Christ and the values he represents.  In contrast, art critic Lucy R. Lippard has presented a constructive case for the formal value of Serrano's Piss Christ, which she characterizes as mysterious and beautiful.  She writes that the work is "a darkly beautiful photographic image… the small wood and plastic crucifix becomes virtually monumental as it floats, photographically enlarged, in a deep rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious." Lippard suggests that the formal values of the image can be regarded separately from other meanings.

In a way, both Beckett and Lippard are taking deconstructionist perspectives.  Beckett seems to recognize the fact that meaning is not static, and that even Christ, a figure that is intended to in terms of certain characteristics (e.g. agape love), still relies on language for its meaning.  On the other hand, as a formalist, Lippard also seems to be taking a deconstructive approach in that she is taking the meaning itself out of the work--as if to say that there really is no meaning in actual things, only the meaning that we place upon them.

Then again, perhaps the fact that "Piss Christ" was damaged beyond repair by protesters yesterday suggests a resistance to this sort of deconstructive process--a process which the work itself seems to embody.  Perhaps society is seeking to shed off its postmodern perspective; then again, maybe people were just sufficiently "pissed off."  Hurr hurr.

Link.

Other source.

Deconstructing Gender

Today at SIRC, I was in a Southern Renaissance panel in which - inevitably - Faulkner surfaced. As we were discussing Faulkner's treatment and opinion of women, one of the people in the audience noted that in Faulkner's literature, women are treated as a "text" to be read and interpreted according to the other characters in the novel. I thought this was an interesting idea, and one certainly not limited to Faulkner, nor literature. We do, in many ways, read each other as "texts," bringing in our own understandings, biases, and expectations when we are interacting with others. And this certainly relates to gender in real life as well as in The Sound and The Fury. Simone de Beauvoir asks "the myth of woman plays a considerable part in literature; but what is its importance in daily life," and this "myth" is the lens through which the "text" of woman is read through (1265).

And on that note, enter: Deconstruction. In continuing with the idea of women and gender as a text, looking through a deconstructive view, it's no wonder that we are still arguing about it. Paul de Man says "literature cannot merely be received as a definite unit of referential meaning that can be decoded without leaving a residue," and in the same way, neither can an understanding of the text of women (1366). I won’t even begin to delve into the “residue” left by trying to interpret gender, but I think we can agree that gender disputes always fail to encapsulate the whole of the issue and even the interpretations themselves often fail to reach any real understanding. How can we possibly discuss gender and feel we’ve even begun to capture the different facets of each individual member of that gender? We can’t. Just as de Man talks about the issues we face with readings becoming reductive, so do the "readings" of gender. There is no way in which to summarize the whole, and certainly no way to understand it.

So then really, what’s the point of trying to “read” gender? Seeing as the text of woman is no more stagnant than language, the readings will always be changing, turning, and contradicting themselves. The readings of different individuals will always be challenging each other. Is there ever a “correct” reading to be had? If we can’t read the text of women, if there is inevitably going to be a residue, why bother? Well, probably because we should at least try. The deconstructionists don’t say not to ever even attempt to interpret; they just say we have to recognize we’re never going to catch everything. There’s always going to be residue. There’s always going to be meanings that are brought in that no one intended. There’s always absence and presence interacting. We don’t have to avoid these things; we just have to recognize them. So perhaps that’s why the gender discussions can become so grating. People like to present their ideas as absolutes (take the video Morgan posted, for example) and don’t acknowledge that there is no possible way to capture the whole. So maybe we should be a little more deconstructionist when reading the “text” of gender. Maybe if we took out the absolutes and quit applying what we think are comprehensive theories we might actually get somewhere. Or maybe we won’t……never know.