This is actually brilliantly put. Well done! You've uncovered the latent Hegelianism in Jameson's Marxism -- the dialectic is never far to look for in his work.

Yes, absolutely -- you've hit the nail on the head. So, you don't read any given text for a single ideological message, but for how it blends and weaves together multiple ideologies, social configurations, and modes of production.

Actually, only material conditions have history, so even consciousness does not really have a history. Instead, we could say that consciousness is an epiphenomenon determined in the last instance by material conditions, though it can be raised and altered through cultural interventions as well.

very interesting!

Isn't this the essence of conversion narratives, though? Saul becomes Paul in a process of epiphany/interpellation, etc.?

Yes, absolutely -- by praying whether you believe or not, you objectively believe and thus practice an ideology that you may not believe you believe. The effect is that your behaviour constitutes your ideological commitment even if you don't think you think what your actions say you do.

Put simply, the big Subject is "the man" -- the wizard behind the curtain, the fictional originator and controller of ideology and the social.

Adorno goes even further to claim that television and entertainment, in its episodic formulas, replicates factory work so that the rhythm of the work day continues as the rhythm of leisure time as well. Slavoj Zizek takes this even further, arguing that things like laugh tracks in shows make it so that you don't even have to enjoy yourself -- the show will enjoy itself for you, so that objectively speaking you have had a good time.

excellent question!

Yes, but ALL in the unconscious -- if we are conscious of it, we are at a remove and have limited means of influencing it. Limited: not impossible.

Yes -- the form, the process -- are ultimately important. Content is secondary and changeable so long as the apparatus persists.

Butler addresses Althusser directly in the first part of The Psychic Life of Power

the shift to image-based social media has been huge -- the people behind those platforms know that text is a distant second to image when it comes to eliciting specific affective responses (bypassing the logical part of the brain, or rather, distracting it, so that the ideological message can hit home).

will do!

For this we need Agamben and the idea of the homo sacer.

Recognition = re-cognition = to know again, to recall (as in, to recall the lost wholeness we once experienced).

yes, absolutely -- there is no "outside ideology"

All interpellation is unconscious, unfortunately -- there is no question of refusing it.

The "individual" is a useful fiction -- there is no such thing, only subjectivity.

Lots of cool work being done these days on the affect of theory -- we'll see this next week with Felski and Latour

Doing so would be grotesque -- the point is to understand the political, not to isolate it.

Yes, precisely.

The point for Jameson is not intention so much as origin -- what conditions are operative on the production of a text? These are not determinative (e.g., that a man cannot write a convincing female character) but they are constitutive and over-determining.

Also, doing so breaks with the New Critical insistence that the text be treated in splendid isolation from its contexts. For Jameson, the text is a product of a subject in a time and place -- that's why and how it encodes the social and political. To pretend otherwise is just ideological obfuscation.

Great question -- to what extent is queerness (in)compatible with realist narrative, and how is it enabled or domesticated in experimental narratives? The part about the subject standing above its own experience is essentially the trope of the first person narrator recounting events - how might this make the traditional realist novel itself an ideologically "straightening" form?

Wonderful! Let the games begin!

I canNOT wait to get into ideology theory next week!

Great book on this: Evolution's RainbowItalic**

Yes -- the grammatical placeholder is the signifier of the objet a, a signifer without a signified (that is, the phallus). We obtain the signifier (the grammatical placeholder) only to learn that it is empty and that the "real" object has slipped off somewhere.

That is, I suppose, post "Child" as an ideological abstraction, but not post "children."

If queerness is negation, it need not be gloomy, though. Think of Nietzsche's affirmative nihilism -- you don't necessarily need a tomorrow to party today.

Yes, absolutely!

This sounds to me very much like Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau's definition of the social as producing antagonism, rather than as a means of containing it. That is, there is no sociality without antagonism, and the more tightly we seek to control the social, the more we guarantee antagonism as a condition. (see Hegemony and Socialist Strategy).**

really interesting!

interesting -- I've also seen the reverse, where having children is seen as irresponsible both to the children and to the world whose resources they will consume. My 11-year-old son is a firm extinctionist. For him, the best thing that could happen is for humans to die out.

I would go even further - queerness is another name for negation, for difference, or even différance. It names the residue, the remainder, the excess that cannot be accounted for or incorporated -- the movement of negation itself, the self-overcoming or self-fraying movement of anything that pretends to be present or full.

Very nicely put -- great parsing!

You make excellent points about the middle east. I'd just add that part of the discourse of orientalism is precisely configured along the lines of viewing levantine masculinity as soft, decadent, perverse, etc. precisely because it is not heteronormative on the lines of the Western imaginary. That is, orientalism is itself predicated upon patterns of gendering and homosocial policing.

Also, the categories of "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are themselves historically contingent, coming into use around the end of the nineteenth century (see Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I) Though there have long been practices and pleasures, the idea that they constituted an identity is of relatively recent vintage. If such categories are historically contingent, then it might just be possible to declare along with Rouhani, that there are no homosexuals in Iran even if there are men who practise erotic contact with one another! **

It might be something as simple as normalizing one straight man saying to another, "I love you" without adding "man" or "dude," or "bro" or -- much worse -- "no homo." But I suspect that for Sedgwick it includes the end of capitalist relations of production and consumption, built upon the notion of an endlessly growing market and endlessly expanding desire.

I don't think Sedgwick sees this as a misconception -- for her, it is true, and reason why getting rid of homophobia is in fact a wider social revolution.

Yes, but ... even trans people remain trans after transition, right? That is, a residue of that original sexuation persists regardless.

This may be true in terms of potential problems, but generalizing is not by any means necessarily universalizing. For example, we could generalize about how boys experience socialisation differently than girls in elementary school and be pretty sure that we are accurate for most of them. That is, we can generalize about experience (and what bell hooks will call the authority of experience) without essentializing. **

Yes, exactly right -- there is no "own" to come into for Butler.

I think Lacan would say that there is knowing -- as in recognizing -- and then there is effectivity -- as in a knowledge that produces an effect. For example, someone can be addicted to smoking and say, "I know I'm addicted to cigarettes," and be right. But that knowledge is not effective since it is not a mode of knowing in the same way as experiencing addiction fully -- i.e., being deprived of cigarettes and experiencing the full unavoidable knowledge of one's addiction as a physical, psychological, social, and emotional fact. The same is true of psychoanalytic treatment -- someone can diagnose you and say, "you suffer from a repressed urge to assert yourself because you saw what happened to your mother when she asserted herself, so you've adopted a defensive posture." They may be right and you may even believe them, but that knowledge is not effective until you live it and experience its truth as a mode of effectivity. This is one reason why, I think, Lacan wanted his work to be difficult -- you can have it explained to you, but until you live that difficulty and pass through it, you will not really know it. **

Keep in mind that St. Augustine described the full beatitude of heaven as a permanent state of orgasm (!). And the French do call it le petit mort or the little death.

Because lack is endemic to subjectivity -- it is the condition of possibility for becoming a subject -- even an infant raised by wolves would eventually discover that the mother-function lacks something, and thereby enter the symbolic/desire/subjectivity/language.

I don't think there's any real argument against this, except as Barbara points out that the notion of a journey from an idyllic past through a fallen world to a restored idyllic state is awfully common across cultures. But the question of whether the culture takes the shape of the psyche or the psyche takes the shape of the culture is the ultimate shoal on which the attempt to fuse Marxism with psychoanalysis constantly founders -- you're on to a really key point!

what about conversions? Saul=Paul, for example, in which there is a fundamental shift in subjectivity, most readily signified by a change in signifier (name)?

If you point out that the emperor has no clothes, does that reinforce the notion that he's the emperor?

The objet petit a is in the imaginary, and corresponds to the phallus in the symbolic. The phallus is a signifier, and so in the symbolic. The objet a emerges at the same time as the phallus -- both emerge at the moment in which their absence is detected -- when the infant realizes the not-all of the mother (that she's been 'castrated') and enters language as a means of trying to suture over or supplement that lack.

the signifiers -- the signs over the doors -- make the rooms what they are; they determine the signified.

The phallus is in no way to be confused with the penis. It is a signifier of power, of the objet a, and can be linked to any subject whatever.

Actually, Lacan would say that desire is external to the subject -- it is extimate (as opposed to intimate). There is no real inside of the subject for Lacan -- or, rather, all that's there is a void, a rupture or opening, a déhiscence.

The Imaginary also designates a field that is non-linguistic, but image-based (image = imaginary). It's not the Imaginary because it's false or fictional, but because it is organized around and by images. The operations of it are unavailable to consciousness directly, though, so it would be a bit more complicated than just analyzing images in Snap or Insta

yes.

Not quite yet -- that only happens at the end of the Oedipal stage when we begin to talk and enter language.

super interesting example! Of course, Lacan died before social media, but he would have had a field day with it -- what a playground for the Imaginary and structures of desire/fantasy!

the problem with the Buddhism parallel is that for Buddhism the evacuation of the self is a real possibility; for Lacan it is simply a universal neurosis

The tricky part of the unconscious in Lacan is that we don't have an unconscious; the unconscious has us. The Imaginary is not the unconscious. Rather, the Symbolic is the Unconscious. It is the discourse of the Other which thinks us "there where we do not think to think."

Yes, absolutely -- we are just signifiers: "the subject is a signifier for other signifiers"

All it means to say that structures don't have history is that they are snapshots, moments frozen out of time, so they don't have a temporal dimension to them. They are structures, and therefore static, not dynamic. As soon as you introduce history, they cease to be structures.

It's like with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: you can either know the location of a particle, or its velocity, but not both at the same time. To know its location you must arrest it's movement so it has no velocity. To know its velocity you must measure it in movement so it has no location. Structures would correspond to the effort to measure location -- they arrest movement.

"Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars." -- Flaubert

You raise excellent points about the potentially corrosive power of deconstruction when it is used simplistically or reductively. But, there is a powerful ethics in it as well, and Derrida was a highly political individual. The "post-truth" world of today has much more to do with faith-based rejections of science than with post-structuralism -- Chris Douglas, in our department, is a world leading expert on this history, from the Scopes trial on down to today.

We are going to see desire emerge as the key term in the process of signification with Lacan. The line about "coherence in contradiction expresses the force of desire" in Derrida anchors systems of sign-making in human psychology -- the anxiety of the aporia is real.

Exactly right.

Yes -- precisely!

For Derrida, the point is that there is no centre, that we project one as a mythopoetic function. Just as there is no centre of the universe since everywhere is equally distant from every other point.

There is no centre; it is an absent centre we constantly supplement with myths of presence.

He makes this kind of move a lot: • several places where he says “there are two ways to go with this” • “two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified” • “language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique” • “two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization” • “the reference to play is always caught up in tension” • “there are two interpretations of interpretation”

What's up with that?

Event is an interesting signifier because it has no actual signified, but is instead a signifier of rupture, of collapse, and breakdown.

the event is both rupture and the sudden catastrophic emergence of history into what looks synchronic. It bursts the appearance of presence, finality, stasis, and so on. Eventality will become a huge term in subsequent theory, especially for Alain Badiou, who premises politics and ethics on it.

we will talk about supplementarity today -- it is key to Derrida's theory, since it is at once paradoxical and foundational *(if that term can be used her unironically)!

Presence arrests play -- it anchors the substitutability of the terms in the structure. It is self-adequate and self-consistent, so it is not susceptible to wiggle room, ambiguity, or play. Play is the movement of difference that not only operates between terms in the system, but infiltrates each term at its core and keeps it from coinciding fully with itself.

SHOW DA KITTY!!!

Even more, if "all discourse is bricoleur," then the engineer is a) a myth of bricolage, and b) does not exist as such, so that c) bricolage does not exist either. And that's what we call an aporia

More: language does not exist within structure -- it is the principle of structurability itself.

This substitutability illustrates the scandalous "structurality of structure"

There was difference first, then islands in difference, produced by difference. Difference is the condition of possibility of all signification, of all epistemology.

Yes ! The origin, centre, arche, telos, presence, are all myths produced by language -- they are the posthumous guarantors of their own consistency: mythopoetic, in Levi-Strauss's terms.

Yes, precisely right -- Derrida takes Saussure through to his logical conclusion.

It's not even a need so much as a raw necessity -- the priority of necessity over truth is fundamental here. Think of Kafka's priest: "“No," said the priest, "you don't need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary." "Depressing view," said K. "The lie made into the rule of the world.”"

We'll talk about the event in our zoom session later today, but it is a crucial part of this essay and refers not to the instantiation of a centre, but the rupture that exposes its absence.

There is always-already structure, and there is no question of getting outside it. The "play" in the structure is a) playful -- a game, b) play as in wiggle-room or "give" in the system, and c) performance.

But if you have an opposition between myth and history, and discover that history is itself myth, then does that opposition not vanish (i.e., no myth anymore, either)?

Yes, absolutely -- this is one of the key ways that Derrida's thought takes flight in subsequent work.

This is a brilliant paragraph! It illustrates Derrida's maxim that it is not so easy to step outside of the binaries that structure language and thinking -- that failure to do so is inevitable, but also that not all ways of failing are of equal pertinence.

The key phrase here is "as we know it," and is in that respect I think misleading. As I understand it (and I may be wrong), the intention was never to produce theory as we know it now, but to allow the aesthetic and the theoretical to inter-implicate and generate, no? For poesia and theoria to coller in an unsanctioned but passionate embrace so that we can see how the aesthetic theorizes and theory aestheticizes. Loy's poetry is theory, her practice a theory of the avant-garde/en dehors garde. Why not let it teach us how to think it?

Wonderful! It also suggests the unexpected, that which comes from "dehors" what can be guarded, and re-garded.

Does it, though? Isn't the very point of the avant-garde from the outset to mock, humiliate, and undermine "standards and values"?

This seems to me to miss the point at least a bit (and at least in Duchamps' case): the readymades were meant in part to undermine the edifice of Art, and to open things up for anyone to make it (or for anyone to point out that nothing was inherently more artistic than anything else). Can't the avant-garde persist even now as an iteration of this move, exploding the very calcified version of Avant-Garde Hong is reacting against?

(Yes, I know -- I'm a straight white guy with tenure arguing on behalf of an artistic movement that has just been called racist and masculinist. The irony doesn't escape me.)

And Indigenous people, too!

Neglect: from the Latin Neg- and -legere --> to be unread.

Don't forget how often they had their work appropriated and displayed by men as their own, and now guys like Pound tried to destroy powerful female poets like Amy Lowell.

sounds good

sounds good

sounds good

First button -- "Not sure how to use Linked Data?" Here you go fuckers.

what is linked data and why should you be interested? This db allows you to... You can ask questions such as...

We need a quick button that lets people see what a search would look like: v. Woolf to TSE, e.g. -- a sample that shows what linked data looks like

Now a specific hunger artist -- move from general to particular is almost imperceptible.

Not pronounced "Hen-ree".

Rather than 'natural' maybe this should be 'neutral' or 'default' to avoid naturalizing tech.