Throughout the semester, Iâve found through our readings and discussions have consistently been challenging, provocative, andâmost importantlyâa lot of fun, and Iâd like to thank everybody in the class and Dr. Dove being able to create and maintain such a productive and interesting learning environment (both in the classroom and on tumblr). I had been interested in the politics of identity and authenticity, but up until this class I hadnât really been able to find a forum in which I could freely discuss and debate those issues with others.
 Though I donât think it would be fair to say we ever truly reached a consensus on any one particular topic or issue we addressed over the past 16 weeks, I think its fair to say that our discussions demonstrated the slipperiness and instability of the labels, categories, and identities we place ourselves and our experiences under, and that one cannot take any particular text or narrative at face-value or as existing in a vacuum. I feel itâd also be safe to say that we effectively were able to show that historical and technological factors indelibly shape the way we form texts and narratives, as well as our own identities, which I thought was especially fascinating. So while we may have not reached anything really qualifying as a concrete conclusions on any one debate, I think we were certainly able to ask much more better and interesting questions, which I feel in itself made the class, overall, a genuinely satisfying experience. Once again, thank you everyone for a great class this semester and best of luck to you all in the next!
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. ... Future ages will bring with them new and possibly unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But...we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his God-like character.
-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
In the last few readings/viewings weâve undertaken this semester (specifically her, eXistenZ, and Neuromancer), technology has been presented as not only expanding the horizons of the possibilities of human experience, but also redefining what that experience might have been previously (if anything at all). I thought the quote included above summarizes this relationship between civilization and technology quite nicely. We tend to look at technology as a sort of prosthesis for pre-existing functions, as a way of enhancing our own capabilities or of removing certain obstacles in our day-to-day lives in order to live in a more efficient manner. But I also feel as though this implies imposing a certain distance between ourselves and the technology we utilize, that we feel that a clear distinction can be made, and when that distinction is blurred (as is certainly visible in many of the assignments in this last section of our class), a certain ambivalence arises.
 I think this ambivalence is especially noticeable in the relation between the body, consciousness, and technology. In the subtly futuristic her, we see what the beginnings of this blurring of distinctions might look like, a case where an operating system designed to emulate the human experience ends up becoming something âmore than human,â better at being human than ourselves in many respects.In eXistenZ, and Neuromancer, we explicitly see technology becoming fully integrated into phenomenal experience, and consciousness no longer residing exclusively in the domain of organic processes; whatâs more, organic processes no longer lie outside the domain of technological manipulation (technology cannot be seen as something consisting only of some âartificialâ construction of alloys and circuitry, but rather as having a vital force in its own right).
 In any case, in none of the worlds depicted in her, eXistenZ, or Neuromancer could one comfortably say that what is âhumanâ can be categorized as something totally separate from what is âtechnological.â Consciousness, the body, and technology are increasingly being grafted onto one another in previously unimaginable ways. Reactions to this new reality (apparent not only in the worlds of the novel/films, but also in the one we all occupy) run from fear and disgust to exuberance and arousal to ennui and disinterest. But beyond this ambivalence, Iâm not sure it can be safely said that, as we approach this transhuman future, we can expect these developments to deliver us from all of our troubles or increase our general satisfaction with life in any really meaningful way. Rather, I believe all one can really expect to see is an acceleration of the dissolution and reformation of old distinctions and categories, not advancing towards any specific end.
Hereâs my take on technology⊠Iâll keep it short. You donât get to have something new and better, you donât get to have something that drastically improves your life, and you donât get to have something that you love, without any flaws. That is what we fail to recognize in all our arguments about...
Overall, I agree with the points you bring up. I don't think it does anybody any good to sit around talking about how good things used to be or how technology is alienating us from ourselves and each other or whatever. I also think we should expecting any one discovery or invention to provide all the answers to society's ailments only leads to disappointment, or worse, reactionary anger.
However, I'm not sure if terms like "flawed" and "perfect" are the best ones to frame this discussion. I mean, I think something like eugenics was pretty successful in what it set out to do. This isn't to say that we should blame the study of heredity for that particular development, but that we should be wary of movements that use the labels of "science" or "progress" to mask their agendas.
More than that, I don't know by what measure one could say an animal, invention, or ideology is "perfect." I feel that that's a sort of teleological way of looking at progress, assuming that history and nature are moving towards some final end, advancing towards a perfect state, and once that end is reached change will no longer be necessary. I think this line of thinking is 1) really anthropocentric (I believe it's fair to say that humans are the only organisms that care about things like history or perfection) and 2) predisposed to legitimize hegemonic ideologies of what is best for society.
Video from Talking Heads "Naked" 1988. Enjoy sound and vision.
A couple of friends and I talked a lot about this song/video this past summer, and I thought itâd be interesting to bring up in the context of our class, particularly this unit on looking towards the future of community and identity. This song deals more with questions of ecology than of media (and it might be a little dated by now), but I think it does a good job of capturing the sort of ambivalence people feel towards technology and modernity in general.
 The lyrics describe a world that has returned to a state of primordial, natural innocence. The opening lines allude to Genesis as the embodiment of this ideal: âHere we stand / Like an Adam and an Eve / Waterfalls / The Garden of Eden / Two fools in love / So beautiful and strong / The birds in the trees / Are smiling upon them.â The world has been cleared of the excesses of modern civilization that had ravaged the earth, and humanity has, at least ostensibly, given itself a clean slate.
 But soon enough, the narrator of the song finds himself disappointed in societyâs transformation and nostalgic for modern conveniences. âThere was a shopping mall,â he sings, ânow itâs all covered with flowers,â and âif this is paradise, I wish I had lawnmower.â He goes on to lament how he misses, Pizza Huts, Dairy Queens, and candy bars, among other comforts. The song concludes with âdonât leave me stranded here / I canât get used to this lifestyle.â
 But judging from the general tone of the song, along with the accompanying video, I donât think Talking Heads are dismissing ecological concerns or environmentalism at all. Rather, I think they are questioning whether, given our collective history, people could ever be content with living in a pre-industrial, pre-technological society. There are undoubtedly concerns regarding exclusively modern issues like nuclear proliferation, economic disenfranchisement, and state terrorism, as well as widespread dissatisfaction with and bewilderment towards the banality of everyday life (personally, I really like the bit about how many people have been brought to tears by a greeting card). The point I think the song/video is trying to make, though, is that most people are unprepared and/or unwilling to give up their superficial indulgences, even if thatâs what it would take to create more just, harmonious world (whatever that means).
 Given this, I donât think weâre really in a position to judge whether one particular period in history was any âbetterâ than any other, and I think cynically dismissing modernity and glorifying the past is somewhat naĂŻve and unproductive. Relating this back to some of our recent class discussions, I donât think it does us much good to wag a finger at teenagers being too attached to their cell phones, losing their conversational skills, and alienating themselves from their families, their friends, and themselves; on the other hand, I donât think we should really be celebrating that either. Old problems inevitably fade away, and new problems inevitably arise to take their place.
 Anyway, sorry for the long post. TL;DR: Talking Heads are awesome and have really interesting politics, and we should always be aware of the shifting tides of history without being too quick to pass judgment on them.
"My central contention is that late capitalism not only accelerates the flow of capital, but also accelerates the rate at which subjects assume identities. Identity formation is inextricably linked to the urge to consume, and therefore the acceleration of capitalism necessitates an increase in the rate at which individuals assume and shed identities. The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation."
Here's the piece by the BuzzFeed CEO I was talking about. I don't know how seriously to take it (I think it's more so hilarious and ironic given that it perfectly describes BuzzFeed's business model), but I just thought some of what he's saying actually relates to what we were talking about in class today about how people interact with media to form identities. Here's a link to an article giving some background info on the whole storyhttp://www.critical-theory.com/from-deleuze-to-lolcats-the-story-of-the-buzzfeed-guy/
MF DOOM & Madlib are Madvillain - Madvillainy (2004, Stones Throw) http://stonesthrow.com/madvillain Full album playlist http://goo.gl/Hq4EeX 01. The Illest ...
Some of you may already be familiar with this album, but if not check it out because it's incredible. Thought of this song after reading and discussing Everett and Afrofuturism. It contains parts of Sun Ra's poem Shadow of Tomorrow set to music and samples his film Space is the Place, which is also really interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSNvdLpLx-0
There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.
Although Lacan's mirror stage is somewhat different from the mirror metaphor Foucault presents in "Of Other Spaces," I think it's super relevant to many of our ongoing discussions, as are many other Lacanian theories (such as the three registers: the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real). I donât profess to fully understand the concept, and even if I did, I donât think itâs something that can be adequately explained with any sort of brevity. That being said, Iâd figure Iâd try my hand at connecting the mirror stage to some of what weâve been talking about in class.
 From my understanding (reference the pictures Iâve posted along with this for a more articulate description), the mirror stage marks the period in a childâs psychical development when the idea of âI,â the ego, comes into being. What this means is that the child is able, from this point, to distinguish itself as an entity not only separate from its mother and from the outside world, but also to recognize itself as an object that can be seen by others, can be acted upon. During this period, the mother ensures that the child comes to identify itself with the image it sees in the mirror, telling it âWhoâs that? Thatâs you! Yes, thatâs you, baby!â (it is worthwhile to note that this process doesnât necessitate having a literal mirror or mother present, but that these refer to certain abstract, psychical phenomena/structures). But what we also see from here on out is a sort of dissymmetry between who the child identifies itself as, its âideal self,â the one who says âI think thatâŠâ or âI likeâŠâ or âI believe inâŠâ and its ârealâ self, the self of the unconscious, that cannot express itself fully or coherently. All egos are imagine, a selection of certain elements that we tell ourselves defines us a subjects, referring to the unity we call âI.â But this âIâ is really something that comes from outside, alien to us; as Rimbaud puts it, and to which Lacan alludes, Je est un autre, âI is an other. â
Itâs not just bros and jocks and finance dudes and yuppies and Christians and Republicans who are shitty to women. Being part of a counter-cultural or progressive community does not give you a free pass to be shitty to women without being called out on it. We need to hold our own communities to an even higher standard than we hold those in the opposition, we need to welcome criticism, and we to realize that the ones who call out shitty behavior in these communities are not the threat, but that those who protect it and shield it from criticism are.
This question from our discussion today really troubled me. Bridesmaids is at least somewhat progressive in that it subverts the idea that raunchy comedy is exclusively male territory; although calling that aspect of it âprogressiveâ almost seems sexist in itself. Isnât this subversion also a...
Many good points. I think this line argument extends beyond the world of comedy, though. Take the "anti-hero" archetype (I wouldn't go so far as to call it a trope) that has arisen in television over the past several years, embodied in characters such as Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, and Frank Underwood. All of these characters' narrative arcs, in varying degrees, deals with their commitment to their wives and families as well as with their own, which overlaps with their internal struggle with their masculinity and their place in the eyes of the law/society. In this context, it's nearly impossible for one to imagine what a female "anti-hero" would look like. What's more, it's almost equally as hard to imagine what a distinctly feminine "hero" would look like, given that most heroines are still drawn within the "damsel in distress" framework, differing only in that the damsel is tasked with saving herself from her own distress. In short, regardless of the sex of the characters occupying a place in a particular narrative structure, the structures are in themselves gendered/sexed.
So I'm not sure we have an answer to the question of "what does progress look like?" just yet because that answer lies outside the possibilities of our imagination. In this sense, I strongly agree with you that the first step in creating that imaginary is through cultural critique and the study of underlying structures.
While I think the Bechdel Test provides an interesting and provocative way of examining women's representation in cinema, I don't know if we can look to it as the only or most effective way to evaluate those representations. Overall, I have to agree with Robbie Collin's criticism of the test on the grounds that "films are art, not questionnaires to be filled in." Gender is not a variable. You cannot just place women in the place of men and expect that the equation will still work the same way, because we still view media (and pretty much everything else) through a gendered lens. Just because a film unequivocally fulfills the qualifications of the Bechdel Test does not guarantee that its representation of female characters isn't problematic or gendered (not to say that this necessarily makes them, or even films that don't pass the test, bad movies). What's more, I'm not sure Bechdel herself meant for her test to be taken as the criterion for whether a film is worthy of serious critical attention. Rather, I think we should take the test as indicative of a larger problem that most certainly needs to be addressed, but in approaching it we should be more careful and holistic in our scrutiny.
Reading Erasure got me thinking about how parody functions. Monk tells his dad how Finnegans Wakeâs performative effects rely on and operate within pre-existing, conventional linguistic structures. In a similar vein, he later remarks that Duchampâs âready-madesâ expose how the value of what we might call âreal artâ is largely determinant of it operating under a legitimized setting/form (e.g. the museum, the literary novel, etc.). So the big question for me is: do pieces like Joyceâs Wake, Duchampâs Fountain, or Monkâs Fuck subvert structures or reify them?
 Iâm not denying that there might be something sublime in the dreamlike ramblings of Wake, the visceral ordinariness of Fountain, or even the grotesque lyricism of certain passages in Fuck (nor do I think that these three particular examples should be seen as functioning in exactly the same way and form), but at what point are we taking the joke too seriously? In the case of Fuck, doing so has a potentially damaging effect on the categories of people it depicts. For some, something like Fuck just affirms the ârealityâ they already assume to exist. And this serves to erase any sort of objective reality of those experiences, if there can even be said to be any such reality at all.
 For African-American writers like Monk (and Everett), who would rather write more literary and âseriousâ pieces rather than ones about the black experience as is expected of them, parody and polemic seem to be among the few forms through which that they garner any substantive recognition for themselves and their work. But, as I mentioned earlier, those styles rely on the structures they mean to criticize, they are often rendered ineffective, or worse, reactionary.Â
Tonight, while browsing at Barnes and Noble (which I try not to do because local bookstores but anyway) I was pretty enraged by my discovery of this book on the âsuggested new paperbacksâ table.Â
In case you canât see the small print from a review of Columbine, it says âThe pacing of an action movie and the complexity of a Shakespearean drama.â Now, I admit that I have a personal stake in the matter, but this line put a lot of lines together in my mind along with things weâve been discussing in class. Stay with me here.
In class, we talked about readersâ affinity for action and drama and the grotesque, especially as it is displayed in Monkâs novel Fuck. The readers even tend to mistake brutality and shock value for authenticity, equating rawness with truth. That is what I see happening here on the cover of this book. The book is written by an FBI analyst and is about how the FBI profiles teenage killers. And yet it is described, on the front cover no less, as being fast-paced and dramatic, like a Shakespearean tragedy. Itâs a sensationalized description in order to promote book sales and itâs offensive to me.
As a person who has experienced a mass shooting and hostage situation first hand, the idea of someone using such charged and flippant language in order to simply boost book sales is so grossly offensive to me. The story of Columbine High School and the people who lost their lives that day and the boys who actively decided to carry out their violent âfantasiesâ isnât some shitty action movie that Tom Clancy pounded out over lunch. Itâs the story of an entire community whose lives were impacted in ways they couldnât have even imagined at the time. Iâm so irritated I canât even think straight.Â
Itâs fall, and America is once again infatuated with pumpkin spice everything. What started as a simple fascination with pumpkin spice lattes has now spread - pumpkin spice is now a culinary cancer on otherwise fine food. Pumpkin spice also offers the perfect opportunity to understand Jean Baudrillard, the thinker of simulation and inventor of the Matrix. But first, some history. Pumpkin spice lattes are the demon spawn of Starbucks, who concocted the beverage about 11 years ago. As of last year, the company had sold more than 200 million. Now, pumpkin and pumped-spiced themed items grace our shelves in the form of beers, cookies and other delectables. Starbucks even began peddling pumpkin sauce and US pumpkin-flavored sales amounted to $308 million in 2013, up from $290 million in 2012, Vox.com writes. We live in a world where our globalized and industrialized agricultural system has erased seasons. Back in the day you were stuck with what was seasonal - you ate tomatoes and
Peripherally related to our ongoing discussions on authenticity and representation
AFTER 21,000 VIEWS YOUTUBE TOOK THE ORIGINAL VERSION DOWN DUE TO A LITTLE WEE-WEE. TO SEE THE ORIGINAL UNCENSORED VERSION OF THIS VIDEO GO TO: http://vimeo.c...
Quick and dirty (and pretty hilarious) introduction to post-structuralism. He also addresses some common criticisms of the movement, and while I don't personally agree with them, he makes the whole subject entertaining.
P.S. This video does contain some NSFW language, just as a warning
I thought today led to some really interesting dialogue, but I also feel we didnât get an opportunity to fully apply some of the things brought up in the discussion to the film and the Minh-Ha piece.
 One thing in particular I got out of the text was that whereas documentaries are usually concerned with writing histories, Minh-Ha seeks to historicize documentaries. In other words, she is arguing the âtruthâ presented in documentaries is a product of a certain discourse that mediates what can/not be shown, what forms of showing are acceptable, and what roles the documenter and the documented should play.
 In the specific case of what Minh-Ha calls anthropologic or ethnographic documentaries, the director assumes the task of not only âshow[ing] activities being performed,â but also of âexplain[ing] the âanthropological significanceâ of these activitiesâ (Minh-Ha); he or she becomes a benefactor of meaning to the natives (relegated to the status of âotherâ), whom the director supposes are incapable of providing for themselves. This is all done under the banner of scientific objectivity âdefined as the most appropriate approach to the object of investigation,â but as Min-Ha points out, this has often been a simply a coding of âthe Westâs paternalistic role as subject of knowledge and its historicity of the Same.â
 Minh-Ha seeks to disrupt these discursive practices, to interrogate the audienceâs desire for an imaginary sense of coherence and cohesiveness in art (specifically in documentary filmmaking). However, I donât think sheâs arguing for absolute moral nihilism/relativism. Nor is she arguing that no piece of art or discourse should ever play by the rules of the discourse it finds itself in. For instance, she recognizes that while most practitioners of an art form hold an aversion to reflexivity, âsuch aversion goes hand in hand with its widespread appropriation as a progressive, formalistic device in cinema, since both work to reduce its function to a harmlessly decorative one.â Formalizing the avant-garde, making subversion a discipline, amounts to nothing more than creating a new discourse.Â
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