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I just finished one of those overview books on intertextuality, the kind designed for students who are supposed to be revising years of education but are really only looking up the small part they'll have in an exam. It was interesting in that for about 160 pages it was charting ever increasing literary theory's attempts at charting new land, then it hit the feminist theory and all of a sudden it was on another planet. I'm having very definite thoughts about it. Edit: gently caress it, thoughts. They're mainly about the divide between categorising thought versus indulging experience. One side of the theories being cartographers trying to chart land, the other side being people existing within a land that has only had its borders drawn but never had its details made known. A good portion of the feminist theory of the book was about the idea of the mad woman, having to be destroyed for others to live, to die or sacrifice themselves to allow normality to emerge for others seeing the destruction, allowing the world to return to a balance. Then how feminist literature allowed the madness to be valuable in its own right. And that speaks to me at a level where oppression, maddening as it is, wasn't allowed the intellectual weight to have its own place. Instead new ways of experiencing the world and knowing the world were waded into without ever recognising that the world was only ever known from one, lofty position. This merged into post-colonial theories, and as I would see it, eventually into seeing the world as "literature as/by X" and "writing of/by other." An example from my own writing is telling the story, over a period of years, of someone coming out as transgender. A response I was given is "This has been done" and "There's already too many of these stories." That may be fair (I'm sure the story I wrote is at best middling and probably didn't do anything exciting) but again it speaks of literature as something where there's a charting of the new, the expansion of a collection of territories rather than living within a territory. For one set of people there's a desire to be unique, original, inventive, innovative, "new." For another set of people there's a desire for others to see their nuance as what it is, mostly unseen. Even if an experience is formally acknowledged (other as madness, trans coming out, living unseen) that doesn't amount to the collective understanding that has been analytically granted to "the canon." Simply categorising something, as modernist, feminist, post-colonial, etc. isn't the same as assimilating these stories into a knowing of literature and understanding of people. At best it's acknowledging them as a form of writing, but it's not seeing them in the significance of their place. It's a focus on the technical achievement, to be dissected, studied, and theoretically acknowledged, rather than the telling of a story, to be felt, assimilated and put into meaning. It's writing as a theory rather than reading as a practice. Mrenda fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 23, 2019 |
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Apr 23, 2019 06:54
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But who'll start an argument about it so we can have fun?
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Jun 4, 2020 01:03
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nut posted:I don’t get it that much I'll make an attempt. If you accept this post-structural idea of signifiers all the way down, to gain power what you need to do is establish your meaning of the signifier and have other meanings rejected. Not that power will come from this, but that establishing your meaning is power.
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Jun 4, 2020 01:13
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Mel Mudkiper posted:That's literally Post-Modernism I know. I was hoping someone would disagree.
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Jun 4, 2020 01:16
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nut posted:But isn’t there social consensus in the meaning of signifiers or else languages would be useless? A shared delusion. Or, possibly, laziness.
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Jun 4, 2020 01:27
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nut posted:Lazy as in you’re not disentangling what a chair is when you tell someone hey sit in that chair? I’m trying my best to start a fight Lazy in the sense it's not worth fighting over. It's "good enough." But what if there's someone it's not "good enough" for. That "chair" is something with four legs, a horizontal surface and padding, that you can sit on. For someone else it's the chair their mother sat in every evening before she died, it's her chair, not just "that chair." Is it still a chair, yes, is it also something else, yes. In this case a matter of precision, but also how things can have different meanings. But what if you extend it to ideas considered illnesses. Is that a webcam? Yes, it's what I use to videoconference with my brother. Is that a webcam? No, it's the device the CIA uses to watch me when I get undressed at night. It's just a webcam, you're acting crazy. Then why on videos with Bill Gates does he have his CIA device covered with tape? You're delusional in thinking it's the thing you use to videoconference on, it's a tool of the state to monitor and inflict torture on radicals.
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Jun 4, 2020 01:45
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nut posted:Woof, I think this helped a lot. Does this mean the dictionary is a fascist tool Now imagine that's not representing a conversation with someone, like a conversation with a doctor or therapist. Imagine that as a conversation someone's having in their own head.
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Jun 4, 2020 01:54
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Mel Mudkiper posted:And that's how you end up with my brain I wrote a book about it. But then I realised that "someone walking down the street, having crazy thoughts," written as an experience just reads as craziness without offering the perspective of it contextualised as craziness.
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Jun 4, 2020 01:57
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Now, we get to my biggest pet peeve in all of criticism. The misuse of the phrase "subjective." Too many people interpret the term "subjective" to mean "opinion, or personal taste." You often hear "quality is subjective" as an argument for why you can never criticize someone's taste or opinion. However, subjective is not something the subject has conscious control over. Subjectivity is not a "choice" it is a state. I know you chose not to deal with this(not in detail, anyway,) but I'll bite on it and run. That something is subjective is its state, and not a choice someone makes for it, but the appraisal of it can have conscious control. Maybe the unintentional posterchild of post-modernism (at least on the internet) is, "Haha, that's awful. It's great!" The idea that something can be both bad and good at the same time (without getting into the idea that extremes of anything can be considered exemplary and thus have a "Greatness.") But it gets at the contemporary. Extend that to how something can have many meanings to you. There's your reaction, one subjectivity, there's your considered analysis, another subjectivity. Now keep going. How many appraisals of something can you make? How many of them can be contradictory? Is any of them truth? Do you give weight to the thought that you "feel" strongly about, or the one that reinforces your existing beliefs most, or the one challenges you most, the one that's easiest to understand, or the one that worries you the least, or most. Do you have to stick with one thought? Can you validly change between them? If there's one thought that you keep coming back to does that means it's "the one" for you? If it keeps forcing itself on you does that mean it's correct, or an intrusion you wish didn't happen? Consider an apple, then you'll have figured out everything in the world.
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Jun 4, 2020 02:31
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I'm glad that I missed all of this, like a six-hour probation at 2 a.m. Please
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Jun 4, 2020 04:06
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Two things come to mind, firstly the idea of what a book actually is, secondly what books (or communication) can't be. There's plenty of thoughts throughout history about books as a recounting of reality, moving towards books as a telling of the mind, books addressing the nature of books, etc. If a book is written from the perspective of one person, then its their telling. But the book is the thing itself (before the reader comes into it to make it whole,) not the situation they, the protagonist (theoretically) has been through. If there was a magical book that somehow let the reader experience what the protagonist had been through it would still be limited by what the protagonist can make/relay of their perspective (sort of.) I've also seen people complain that books make them or expect them to do "too much" work. Where something isn't written-enough to fully create a "world" (although view-of-environment/situation might be better, experience-of better again.) This is certainly a potential flaw, but there's also the failing of the reader in bridging the "imaginative" gap between them and the book. If a book is to be experienced then what you could say is that the reader simulates the language of the book into a certain reality for the reader. It's not simply words communicating from the page a specific communication (that the author put down (as communication involves two parties)) but the affective/thoughtful creation the reader makes of it. If a book causes, i.e. the book brings the reader to make something from it, then you can say its been effective. One idea of this is the reader "engaging" with the book. That they're allowed, firstly, to perceive the words written, but secondly, allowed to perceive as someone not wholly dictated—i.e. without humanity/individuality—to by the book. Something so precise to relay exact information would be a flaw. Part of the nature of the books—even of reality—is that the experiencer becomes involved to make something of it. If everything was accounted for in the book the reader would become a golem. Secondly, and running from how pre-sign language deaf people "thought" there's more about putting individual experiences into relatable communications for third parties. Transgender people are running into this problem now. Their experience is pathologised and so forced to fit into perspectives, not of their own, but of medicine. The same can be said of people who are autistic or schizophrenic, a neurodivergent mindspace being shaped into the contains of a non-neurodivergent mind. With all these things you have existences that are at odds with the predominant view of existence, trying to form their existence into an acceptable shape for people who have never and may well not be able to understand it. Is it enough for a trans person to relay their experience of their body as "It feels" rather than "It feels like" when they, equally, have no understanding of the "like" from a non-trans perspective. Is it enough for a neurodivergent person to point out, "You make no sense," when their only idea of "your sense" is through mass-media they've been forced to become familiar with. Books are the "It feels like" not the "It feels."
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Jun 5, 2020 01:23
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Andrea Dworkin wrote about this pretty convincingly in the 70s, wondering how or to what degree the rigidity of gender roles in the era determined self-conception and expression of identity by the self—for everyone, but especially people who were marginalized or brutalized for nonconformity, like trans or gay people. Her speculation that people might find a wider range of self-understanding if the vocabulary of thinkable identities were expanded has to some degree come true with the range of nonbinary modes of expression that have emerged since then. I guess Judith Butler is the standard text for a more nuanced take, but I’ve never had the patience for her prose. Maybe one day. Yeah, absolutely. There's also the idea that other people—and relating/interacting with them—will necessarily force boundaries. Boundaries which have to be adhered to or broken. Understanding yourself, maybe, can only be an action once your-self becomes something not understood. To me that's in seeing yourself through others eyes, i.e. via the boundaries of what is and isn't acceptable. Similarly it's through the creation of language as a way to conceive of subject/object (and to go Freudian subject/object/the law/etc.,) the self, thought-as-thought-on-thought, of the self and other things. Once elements become external to us (as thought/thought-as-exterior/language-exterior-as-thought-conceiving can be) and existence not be naturally "gripped" (an assumed understanding/integrated understanding without needing to recognise understanding) then it sets us up to be alienated from ourselves. There's elements of physicality to a lot of trans people, a desire for a different body, something achievable—to a degree—with modern medicine. But self-conception as trauma or pathology can only exist once that self exists as something in opposition. Dialects or contrast highlight where the self is wrong/flawed, and its that contrast, or the conception of the contrast, that begins the self. However, language/thought, through our evolution and our learning of it, naturally sets the self as a party removed for the self in the first place. Basically, thinking (and the ability to conceive of thinking in outside terms) has hosed us up. I'm sure this is all basic bitch stuff, but it's what I can manage from my limited reading/thinking.
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Jun 5, 2020 03:15
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cda posted:I don't know if you've read Lacan or not but if you haven't I think you'd find a lot there that confirms what you're talking about, and if you have then your application of it to trans issues is real interesting. The closest I've come to Lacan is reading Kristeva, and to a degree Anti-Oedipus(not directly on Lacan), which I've still not finished, and I suppose some of attachment theory would apply. I'm not sold on the Freudian oedipal triangle though, mainly in its construction as a "triangle" and being based on "family" (natural or not.) People in the past have told me the psychoanalysis is effective in countries where its still popular, but I'm not sure if it's because it's a pure/truthful/grounded understanding of where people are at, or if it's because anyone with a system to interpret the world through will necessarily fare better (system/faith/perspective/whatever.) And my application of it to trans issues was just an example, not an analysis of anything specifically trans. I was just trying to get across the idea of having to relate (communicate) a phenomenological perception of the self (the state of being transgender)(from a pre-conscious state) via self-understanding/thought as thought-as-language/thought as mediated conception, to the understanding of another/third party. Applying it to neurodivergence would provide the same material.
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Jun 5, 2020 04:36
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