I was reading some of the press on Mike Wilson's up-coming novel, Zombie, and he used this xkcd comic to illustrate a point about the characters in his book. It reminded me of first year grad students who, after reading the following (a list comprising about half the readings for a Visual Studies course I'm requires to take) think that they have just taken the red pill and woken up from the "slavery of modernity" or something along those lines. That attitude is tiresome. Lately I've been thinking that rather than the enlightened one of Plato's allegory, we are more akin the slaves staring at shadows on the wall.
Michel Foucault, "Panopticism," in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Vintage Books, 1979), 195-228 [notes 316-17].
Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience," in Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977),
1-7.
Karl Marx, "The German Ideology: Part I" [selections], in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 149-65, 172-74.
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations (New
York: Shocken Books, 1969), 217-51.
Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-86.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy and
Painting (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121-60 [notes 388-91].
Judith Butler, "Critically Queer," in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 223-42 [notes 281-84].
Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Introduction: Rhizome," in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3-25 [notes 518-21].
3 comments:
Reminds me of what Zizek said about watching the Matrix next to its ideal audience: an idiot....
Nice. Plato. Great minds think alike.
Do you remember when Avilés commented that most literature doesn't do anything (pragmatical, functional) to change our lives (or something along those lines)? I agree that many students seem to think otherwise, but, in the end, how much does me knowing that I am controlled by an ISA change the way that I am going to live?
Last thing--do you think that we were free (before reading the list), and enslaved ourselves by doing it? That reminds me a lot of saudade.
I think texts such as those Ben mentions here can be good if it is remembered that these texts are just another way to see the world and not revelations of "the truth" which so many people in academia see them as. They do make us reconsider our outlook, beliefs, etc, yet once again, if the only thing that takes place is the establishment of a new hegemony (re-centering), then I don't think much has been gained.
Of course, what has this world ever been but the establishing of new hegemonies in the ashes of old ones? Our naivete and selective historical memory (I speak of all humanity here) often cause us to see the time in which we live as the right way to be, whereas in the past, they sure were stupid. Or, if we hate the time we live in, we can criticize it as decadent and hypocritical and be part of the vanguard of the "new _____" (fill in the blank with whatever philosophy, movement, or idea you like).
I have/had a professor here who always talks about "decentering" and how academic studies are conceived and doing away with reading lists, etc, and it makes me crazy because it seems that he really believes that simply by doing away with the supposedly restrictive, canonical reading list (for example) that a decentering will actually take place, whether in literary studies or academia or whatever. There will be a center, it will just be a new one.
In response to your comments, Jared, I think literature has the capacity, like these other texts, to make us think differently about something. That difference in thought, that realization, or whatever you want to call it, may make us act differently in order to accomplish something that, in our opinion, somehow remedies those things we have become aware of through literature. It doesn't make us act or give starving people rice or create world peace, but it can motivate individuals to work towards X goal.
And as far as being free before having said information that said texts provide? I don't know. I think it depends on your perspective. From a stereotypical (I emphasize stereotypical) right-wing neo-Nazi Christian conservative standpoint, there is obviously no liberation taking place since these authors and their followers represent the twisted imaginations of men perverting God's (or America's or the white nation's) truth. From a stereotypical radical liberal or a Marxist perspective, yes, perhaps there is liberation because they might see these texts as obvious truths that all the bourgeois sheep can't recognize because they're blinded by hypocritical capitalistic consumerism. Obviously I exaggerate, but I think these examples serve the purpose of demonstrating that "liberation" depends on the point of view of the "liberated".
In relation to the xkcd cartoon Ben posted, I think that if we consider ourselves to be enlightened because of our reading of these texts but we fail to see the humanity and individual worth of those around us with all their "unenlightmentness", then we remain just as "enslaved" in our academic jargon and snobbery as they are in their liberalism or their redneckiness or their Christianity or their atheism or their... I think if we (humans generally) can recognize our collective unenlightenmentness and help each other de-unelightenmentize ourselves, or at least tolerate our respective states of unenlightenment, life would be better. Yet that is a tall order to ask of anybody, Mormon, liberal academic, or Japanese.
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