Analysis #4

Background:

       What differentiates man from the animals? Man produces his/her means of subsidence. And what type of man you are is based on how and what they produce; however, symbolically there is still an animalistic food chain amongst men. Divisions of labor, within production, dictate how far up the food chain you are. The ruling class: the bourgeois, rule the material force of society and simultaneously rule the intellectual force of society. Mortality, religion, metaphysics, ECT (ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness) lack independence. Everything origionates from and is connected to man developing his/her material production and his/her material intercourse. I.E. Production alters man’s existence, their thinking and the product of their collective thinking. Everything then is said to be related to the history of class struggles.

Today’s class structure:

Industrial Millionaires/Modern Bourgeois: Made powerful by way of political developments, modern industry, and world-market. The bourgeois have gained exclusive political sway. The state solely serves the bourgeois interests. Relationships between men are based solely on self-interest. The bourgeois draw all nations into an industrial nation ideal and compel all nations to adopt their means of production.

Proletarians: Live only as long as they can find work and they find work only as long as their labor increases capital. They are a commodity and are vulnerable to market fluctuations. These days the proletarians have no charm or specialized labor, they are merely appendages of the industrial machine.

Analysis of cartoon:

                In order to keep the proletariat down the bourgeoisie fuel a dated ideal of the American dream: the idea that true men, real men, work their way from the bottom and in doing so will one day be part of the ruling class. In truth, it is impossibly hard to crash through such a glass ceiling. Through media, music, education, ECT the proletariat becomes enchanted with this concept and give faith to an idea of the middle class (a supposed middle ground pathway to the upper class). This idea lets laborers (even those whose labor does not create tangible goods) believe that to be a laborer is a good thing because it means they are working towards the American Dream. The cartoon illustrates this smoke and glass mirrors concept. A man walks by a window displaying a sign that reads “Gentleman must wear blue collars.” This cartoon implies that a man with a superior social position is one who works. The irony of this is that the traditional definition of a gentleman implied a well-mannered, charming, and man of means, who did not have to work. This irony is infused within the cartoon by the underlying belief that if one works hard enough they will one day be wealthy enough to not work. This social lie allows the proletariat to believe they are happy or to believe that they will one day be happy so that they do not become depressed by the fact that they are commodities.

Analysis #3

The above video clip accurately depicts Jacques Lacan’s  Psychoanalytical theory “The Mirror Stage.”

                During infancy, all human’s pass through a mirror phase whereby an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror or represented to the infant through the primary caregiver) produces a psychological response that gives rise to and produces the mental representation of an “I.”
In the above video, the infant identifies the image as his, and in doing so, begins to build a perception of his self. As Lacan states, “We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image—“ (1164). The mirror stage then reflects and represents the Ego’s dependence upon external objects and people.

Why this is interesting to me:

As an individual grows up and enters into social relations and situations he or she strives to become the “I” that is seen by others and the mirror. And later, as one matures and begins to master the creative power of language and imagery, one will then begin to project what he or she wishes to be seen as.

Interesting side story:

Lacan, in his essay “The Mirror stage as Formative,” reflects upon the fact that an infant recognizes him or herself before gaining full motor and speech function and as a result views themselves as fragmented. This leads to a child striving to reach the ideal portrayed in the mirror.

A good friend of mine, Ms. Kimberly King, has a young daughter. When I was telling her about Lacan’s Mirror stage theory, while asking her to share her personal thoughts, she told me the most interesting side story. After her daughter, Amy, began to see herself as a separate person, in the mirror, she became more temperamental and could only be soothed by being given a hand held mirror.  Perhaps then, Amy’s infantile feelings of anxiety, fragmentation, and loss of control were soothed by the presence of a mirror because the mirror gave the young girl a feeling of separate wholeness. 

Dreaming of Freud

Freud and “The Interpretation of Dreams”

                According to Freud, the motivation behind dream content is wish fulfillment. That is to say that, dreams are founded by or provoked by daily activities and thoughts which have produced or instilled a want within the dreamer. However, discerning what specific wish fulfillment is being subconsciously mulled over/appeased is a difficult task due to the distorted nature of dreams. Manifest content is disguised by latent dream thoughts present in the subconscious. Thus, the true significance of one’s personal dreams is always concealed from the dreamer.

                Freud elaborates on this distortion by offering up the theory that the super-ego censors or resists the wishes of the unconscious and attempts to repress them/keep them away from consciousness to such an extent that even when such wishes are revealed through dreams, resistance from the super ego is still capable of distorting and disguising such revelations. Dreams then are a type of compromise between the subconscious and the super-ego self. Repressed wishes are depicted in convoluted ways that allude to a false sense of fulfillment, so as to appease the unconscious while not disturbing the dreamer.

Dream Work (sorting through manifest content in order to reach latent content)

* Condensation – one dream object stands for several associations and ideas; thus "dreams are brief, meager and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts."

* Displacement – a dream object's emotional significance is separated from its real object or content and attached to an entirely different one that does not raise the censor's suspicions.

* Representation – a thought is translated to visual images.

* Symbolism – a symbol replaces an action, person, or idea.

(This is not to say that Feud believed that manifest content could, once analyzed, be viewed as part of a coherent whole.)

Going further- Anxiety dreams and/or nightmares are representative of the ego’s reaction to a dreamer’s awareness of repressed wishes that are powerful and poorly disguised.

Note-Traumatic dreams (reliving a traumatic even through dreams) are an exception.

Personal Response:

                The idea that I am split individual, that is to say that I am both a self formed by repressed urges and a self formed by my perception of self in relation to my world (super ego) is a troubling concept. Even more troubling is the theory that I subconsciously work to protect myself from myself. It seems to me that my repressed self is a truer version of myself because it is free from social construction and restraint and yet, due to my internal urge (instinct?) to maintain my developed sense of self (super ego) I shall never know this, perhaps truer version, of myself. If we were wild things, disconnected from structure and theory, purely reliant on pleasure and self-preservation would we then be split in such a fashion?  Do wild animals dream and if they do dream, do they too dream manifest content so as to keep from themselves latent and repressed content/urges?

On a personal note, I find that I dream vivid, colorful, musical, and often disturbing dreams which leave me in momentary states of anxiety upon waking, am I then to conclude that I (perhaps without realizing it) know what my repressed urges are and thus my super ego is reacting to such awareness through disturbing imagery and mock sensory overload?

Freud,Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 2nd Ed.

        New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.807-821. Print.

Structuralism and Semiotics Group Work

Group Presentation

Outline from my power point:

Structuralism Theory

“Decoding Literature”

Structuralism:

An interdisciplinary approach to all branches of human knowledge that rejects ontological and epistemological sources of meaning in favor of an anti-metaphysical approach that posits that all humanistic pursuits are the products of deep structures that predate human consciousness.

Structuralism: Human culture is analyzed semiotically (I.E. as a system of signs)

Structuralist Critisism relates texts to a larger structure.

Examples:                 1)genre

                                2) Intertextual connections

                                3) model of universal narrative structure

                                4) system of patterns or motifs

Structuralism relies on the theory that there is structure within every text. Every written work is governed by specific rules that are garnered from educational and social institutions.  In order to understand a text, one musk “unmask” and analyze these rules.

Problems with this theory:

Structuralism is a highly reductive approach to Literary theory. When a work is considered formulaic and structured, despite an author’s intentions, it tends to loose its appearance of originality. With structuralism, originality lies in the creation of new signs and structure, not in plot and character.

Ferdinand de Saussure:

Language is a medium in which meaning is formed and communicated and it is also the medium through which we form knowledge about ourselves and the social world.

Saussure and Semiotics: The study of Signs.

Meaning is produced by way of the differences between signs.

Signifier is the medium of signs. Example: sound, image, or mark that forms a word on a page.

Signified = concepts/conveyed meaning. Meaning is fluid. (I.E. subject to history and culture) Meaning is not universal. Cultural codes create meaning through conventions. Example: Red is not just a color; it can also mean “stop.” 

Roland Barthes:

Cultural mythology:

-- Denotation: descriptive and literal meaning.

Example: Pig = farm animal, Pork.

-- Connotation: meaning derived by connecting signifier to cultural concerns.

Example: Pig = Bad cop, Chauvinist male.

* One sign has multiple meanings. When connotations become naturalized and accepted (I.E. used to make sense of the world) they create myths.

Myths are cultural constructions that appear to be universal truths.

Signs and Signifiers create Denotative meaning. This is the “first” or literal form of language. This language in turn becomes Connotative and mythological in meaning, thus developing a “second” language.

Structuralism seeks to separate and analyze these two languages.

Northrop Frye:

Frye explores ways in which genres of Western Literature fall into his four Myths

1)    1) Theory of Mods, or historical criticism (tragic, comic, and thematic)

2)    2)Theory of symbols or ethical criticism (literal/descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic)

3)    3)Theory of myths, or archetypal criticism (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony/satire)

4)    4)Theory of genres or rhetorical criticism (epos, prose, drama, lyric)

                         Significance of Myths:

Individual works derive their cultural significance from their re-enactment of the deeply structured codes/mythical values which enact the fundamental human experience of seasonality and of the passage from birth to death.

Tzvetan Todorov:

Literary Science

Emphasis on narrative:

Structuralist narratology implies to some degree an inductive approach. Literary theory is best approached with precise, empirical knowledge. Such analysis will discover in each work what it has in common with others.

Example: genres and periods.

View Literary analysis as a Science

Focus on intrinsic properties of a work in order to create a more objective approach.

The proper focus of structural analysis is Plot. Plot is two moments of equilibrium, similar and different, separated by a period of imbalance, which is composed of a process of degeneration and a process of improvement.

Focus on syntax of narrative.

8 Main points in Schematic formulation (Analogy between a sentence and a narrative)

1) The minimal element of the plot can be considered as equivalent to a clause;

2) Each narrative “clause” contains an agent/subject and a predicate that may consist of a verb (an action which will modify the preceding situation) and/or an adjective/epithet which describes the forms;

3) Each action, and thus clause, has either a positive or negative status;

4) Each clause possesses a particular modality (E.G. the indicative or the imperative), which are distinguished by the fact that they refer to actions that have actually transpired (the indicative) or exist in potentiality;

5) Each clause contains a particular perspective (s), the different points of view of a character (s), and the narrator;

6) There are identifiable relations between clauses; temporal (relations of succession), causal (relations of entailment versus presupposition), and spatical (parallelism);

7) The syntagmatic progression of the clauses form a sequence (sometimes the entire narrative, sometimes part of the narrative);

8) Each  genre, too, may be distinguished by the modality of the clauses which prevails in a given sequence.

In Summary

Structuralism Theory attempts to reduce the literary language of a work to a secondary meta language (linguistic) that provides a structured image of the work.