FoolsCap

I’m thinking of Shaviro’s "Intro to Grad Study of Film" and Pruchnic’s "Composition Theory."  Anyone know what Jeff P is going to be theorizing about in the fall?

The subject line is my tribute to Kant.

I’ve not been reading, much to my dismay.  Or rather, I’ve not been able to get to the reading I want to do outside of my coursework.  Frustrating, of course, because I worry that I’m missing opportunities to get ahead of the game.  So, despair.  I did find time over the recent break to read Freakonomics, that "weird" economics book.  I’ll offer some cherce bits from it later, but on the whole it didn’t offer much to me.  The cover image, though, is provocative: an apple sliced open to reveal an orange’s interior.

I wonder if there’s an interesting assignment in the idea of comparing (as Levitt and Dubner’s book claims to) apples and oranges.  Possible assignment:

Student randomly picks two objects out of a box.  No information is given about the objects.  Through research, the student has to find some number of things the objects have in common and three ways they’re different.

Sort of a vague sketch for an assignment, I know.

Essentially, the big point to be made in the book is that often data don’t reveal their secrets not because the people working with them aren’t brilliant or are incompetent, but because the question they’re asking presupposes some answer rather than another.  something to think about.

Other things I’m not reading (in order they’re not being read):

• Shaviro’s Connected
• Ulmer’s Internet Invention
• Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther
• Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse
• The Essential Foucault
• The big stack of rhet-comp articles I printed in, oh, late January or early February
• Eisner/Miller
• It’s Superman! by, um, some guy [Tom DeHaven–Thanks, Amazon!]
• Stern’s Tristram Shandy
• DeLillo’s Libra
• Nick Kent’s The Dark Stuff

Savvy readers will know that I’ve been stuck in the middle with (Thanks, Steeler’s Wheel!) Shaviro and Ulmer for quite some time now.  I promise myself–and you, dear readers–I will finish those books by semester’s end.

One of the books.

By the end of summer.

I swear.

Flatley had us read Rousseau in order to Derrida on Rousseau and Terada on Derrida on Rousseau.  By far, the most enjoyable of the three for me was Rousseau.  For one thing, although I’ve made my peace with Derrida and even, you know, admitted his influence on my scholastic interestt, he’s still not funny.  Or, rather, he is, in that French way, which just means he’s not funny.  Sorry to any Froggies out there reading this.  Anyway, we saved your asses in double-ya-double-ya-TWO, so quityerbitchin’.

But Rousseau amuses me for two reasons:

1. He writes things that are funny.
2. The charm of antique scholarship.

Some samples of the first reason:

• After two lengthy (and for me incomprehensible) paragraphs about accents and grammarians and some paradox or other: "I cannot imagine what might be said in response to this."  I think R might be advising a certain president I know. . .
• "In order to make a language cold and monotonous in no time, one only has to establish academies among the people that speaks it."
• Before starting two long chapters on the formation of languages: "I amentering upon a long digression on a subject so hackneyed it is trivial."
• "The extent to which man in naturally lazy is inconceivable.  One would say that he lives only in order to sleep, to vegetate, to remain immobile; he can scarcely resolve to devote the motions necessary to prevent himself from dying of hunger."
• "Fanaticism always appears ridiculous to us, because among us it has no voice to make itself heard.  Even our fanatics are not true fanatics, there are merely knaves or fools."

And of the second, a general comment:  I wish I could write like Rousseau.  Obviously, there are writers to whom his work is a reply, but much of the "Essay on the Origin of Languages" sort seems like bullshit, as though Rousseau decided to come up with crazy stories about how language could have had its origins.  Compared to today’s research work, when we’re asked to have read some undefined number of sources for our own work to count as credible, the charm of Rousseau’s work lies for me in the air of improvisation.  I’m not claiming he didn’t do research, but the demands of his era didn’t require him to cite authors and page numbers every time he rips someone’s ideas off wholesale.  While I’m certainly not advocating plagiarism or anything, there’s something to be gained from thinking of writing research as an improvisation, as jamming on the ideas you’re interested. 

Research as finding the groove, writing as the riff.

More metaphor. . .

p. 328: "The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were."  and, where WB quotes Valery in note 63 (p. 352): "Beauty may require the servile imitation of what in indefinable in things."  

Both points I’d compare to Barthes’ description of punctum in "The Third Meaning."  The punctum, as Barthes describes it, is the affective sting of the image that can’t be attributed to a precise detail of its significatory functions, on either the literal of figurative levels–hence, the third meaning.  In a sense, then, the punctum of an image might be related to WB’s "posthumous shock," but clearly WB is more concerned with ideas of aurality and "authenticity," where Barthes might argue that what is authentic in an image (regardless of its relation to the object represented) is the subject’s affective response to it.  For Barthes, then, the affective sting or punctum exceeds language; it is a sensation of too-much-feeling that language is not large enough to accomodate–and thus too might be related to the Kantian sublime.  I think Barthes here doesn’t precisely limit the power of language so much as acknowledge there are affecttive sensations that we cannot cognize linguistically.  Valery, however (as cited by WB), locates that moment of affect in a failure of lanugage rather than a transcendance of it.  Which is too say, contrary to Barthes, that there are things language cannot do.  I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I’m trying to remain relatively concise.  To whit: For Valery, affect lies in the inadequacies of language; for Barthes, affect lies in that which exceeds our linguistic experience.

p. 338: "Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed.  Where this expectation is met […], there is an experience of the aura in all its fullness. [. . . .] Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationships between humans and inanimate or natural objects."

My thoughts here aren’t as fleshed out as they are above, but there’s something here that helps clarify Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."  In Mulvey, of course, the male spectator-voyeur who looks at the female form on screen is in an inevitable position of power over the female image: his gaze is unrestricted and free to make of her image what he pleases.  But I think WB here clarfies the process through which Mulvey’s theory works: If experience lies in the returned gaze of an object, then obviously the mechanically reproduced image-object renders no experience–it is incapable of returning a gaze because it is, after all, only an image.  So Mulvey’s spectator is doubly powerful: his is an all-consuming gaze that at once takes pleasure in the visual object while he negates the threat of his own discovery as voyeur, because (the spectator can rationalize) it’s only an image. 
 

I think part of my resistance to Flatley’s class has been the simple fact that I don’t identify with the models of subjectivity we’ve been studying.

As a sidebar. . .one thing to note for future (much future) syllabus-construction: The real object of study in a class should never, under any circumstances, be reflected in the course title.  "History of Rhetoric" is in fact about pedagogy and epistemology; "Affect and Aesthetics" is about models of subjectivity; "Media Reception" is about, um, receiving media.  Okay, so it’s a willful fallacy, and also, it’s just the way the database is growing.  The history of rhetoric is, in part about pedagogy and epistemology, just as theories of affect and aesthetics are dependent on an understanding of how the subject works to apprehend his or her world–so, a study of subjectivity as well.

Back to bidness.

What makes Kant and Freud particularly difficult, I think, is that their models of subjectivity seem alien to my own experience.  Kant describes an elaborate system of powers and abilities the subject possesses (imagination, judgment, reason, understanding) and each has its own appropriate abilities and functions and domains of execution.  As a shorthand, I like to think of Kant’s model as describing the apparatus of subjectivity, because (although Kant is a transcendental philosopher), this model seems very mechanistic to me; just to look at an object and understand what it is requires sensory impressions from the imagination being compared to concepts of the understanding and then acted upon by the lawfullness of the reason (or something like that)–such that cognition becomes almost an assembly line construct.

Freud, of course, has his famous ego, supergo, libido, and id, which at the time of Studies in Hysteria had not been fully developed yet, but he’d already begun making the distinction between conscious and unconscious minds.  For all the mucking about with the sub- and unconciousnesses, Freud’s view of subjectivity seems very biological, as though the mind were little more than an extension of the immune system.  Trauma and emotional shock need to be properly abreacted by consciousness or else they take hold in the subconscious, like viruses almost, and generate hysterical somatic symptoms.  Of course, you can always go through psychoanalysis and have the good doctor clear it out through the talking cure–where you have relive your trauma so the conscious mind can go at it properly this time.

Admittedly, I’m being vastly reductive in each case.  But my comment remains the same: I don’t think my subjectivity is either the Kantian apparatus or the Freudian immune system.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s hard not to reject either model outright when reading these descriptions.

Of course, then we read Rei Terada and found out that there’s no such thing as the subject anyway, so it’s kind of a moot point.  More on that later.