Ken Rufo Response

Well, its safe to say I have my work cut out for me this week. I don't THINK I'm lost, and thats a good sign, right?

I think I was in the same horrible cloud of confusion that Ryan described in his most recent post, but our recent guest Ken Rufo brushed away that which blinded me with his mighty hand of wisdom and truth. So lets see if i can reproduce his strongest points of Baudrillard's thinking.

First and foremost, there is "sign value", or the idea that what an object represents or signifies is often more important than how much it costs or the quality of its construction. Rufo uses Tommy Hilfiger as an example of a designer that utilizes sign value, in that he takes cheap clothing made in a sweatshop and slaps his name onto it to give it a higher value. For this reason, there is a focus on consumption over production.

As Baudrillard's ideas progressed, he started to believe that the Marxist concept of a commodity was not a preexisting discovery, but rather an invention by the theorist. This then creates a theoretical commodity. So, as Rufo puts it, in the same way that one would buy stuff with their money, Marxism can explain stuff with theories and concepts. Voila! Connections!

We find connections to commodity in Saussure's semiotics. The signified and signifier of a commodity is replaced with the use-value and exchange value. Marx considers money to be the pure commodity form because it can be exchanged for anything.

Everything I have written in this post up until this point has been a reminder to myself, above anything. A point of reference when I dive back into this material. I still feel like I have a bit to wrap my mind around, but for now lets get into the good stuff - simulation.

So the three basic orders of simulation as proposed by Baudrillard's book Symbolic Exchange and Death, are as follows
1. Simulation stands in for reality - so if the star player is reality and you are simulation, coach will put you in in the event that the star player is not able to play in the field of language (since language constitutes a reality and all that jazz)
2. Simulation hides the absence of reality
3. Simulation produces its own reality

Later on Baudrillard adds a fourth stage to the mix, the fractal/viral stage. This is the point where simulation is everywhere with no need for models. Ken Rufo uses an awesome example of credit and virtual banking being the fractal stage of our use of money. We hardly see money anymore, because its not physically there. We borrow and spend and save up cash that may as well not even exist. Upon first reading about this stage of simulation, I had difficulty in applying it to anything "real" (for lack of a better word). Thinking of money as simulation, though, has me seriously considering the validity of this theory. This also brings us back to Baudrillard's idea that it is consumption that makes capitalism work, not production. This holds a lot of weight for me, that we are so completely reliant on something such as money is not a new idea, but realizing how little of it we see is almost scary. It may as well not be real, and yet we cannot separate ourselves from it.

So yeah, I have a lot to think about for awhile. This is interesting stuff, but still terribly complicated in many ways. Ken Rufo's post did help greatly though, so this is appreciated.

Oh, and by the way Ken, Skylarking is one of my favorite albums ever. I can't hold anything against a guy who appreciates XTC (the BAND, get your minds out of the gutter).

Ding Dong the Author's Dead!

Okay, so resulting in my tendency to write my blog posts at the last possible minute, I had the benefit of seeing the posts of just about everyone else in class before I contribute anything. Unfortunately, the two blogs that had immediately jumped out at me at first have been used by just about everyone, which is alas, a downside of being the last to write anything. The indie kid in me will not settle for an overused blog reference.

From the few blogs I've stalked, this one only appeared once. Hopefully I don't need to explain why this one popped out at me initially (aside from its obvious presence as the first in our shared list of academic blogs), but in the strange event that you just aren't getting it - look at the font! The content is also, quite appropriately, acknowledging the author's need to please his/her readers. "Do PEOPLE not recognize the ADVANTAGES of random blockquoting or UnNecessary bullets 1. and outlines that would shock YOUR high school English teacher?" The post feels like a jumbled, frustrated mess, but in relatively few words contains quite a bit about the author's responsibility to its readers and vice versa, especially in the world of blogging.

The subjectivity tied to language is apparent in his first line, as he debates how to blog best, implying nobody has such empirical knowledge. If such a thing exists, who decides what is "best" or even "well"? Clearly there is confusion between what constitutes such words - the concept of "best" is vague. And what may be considered best to the author is not necessarily for the reader. In the end, his experimental usage of font and brief, somewhat nonsensical rambling comes around to "no, this isn't what the reader wants". At which point, the author/blogger effectively dies... figuratively.

Reader killed the Literary Star

As with just about everything on the planet, I have very mixed feelings about this whole 'death of the author' thing.

I have always admired the artist that chooses to disclose nothing of their works' meaning. Leonard Cohen, for example, will rarely speak about intended meanings of his songs. When he does, his explanations are minimalistic and deliberately vague. We are barely given a context. The mystery of the art's 'true' meaning is still intact, and we can bend and shape and morph of it into whatever our lens for looking at the world desires.

It would be somewhat naive to believe that a writer, or any artist for that matter, could effectively convey something exactly as they see it, and I think that is along the lines of what Barthes is trying to say. Language does not have the benefit of holding the same unified meaning between any two people, because we all experience language differently. When I mention the name Daniel Johnston, I have a very fixed notion of who he was and what he created. To most people, that name is meaningless, but my knowledge of him, in many ways, has shaped the way I view the world. Of the relatively few people who are familiar with him, many are probably annoyed or put off by his 'art'. Clearly, they don't see what I see, or rather hear what I hear (he is a musician, for those who do not know). Or maybe they do, and that is their reason for NOT liking him. Maybe they feel just as passionate about his music as I do, but their reason for appreciating it is completely different from mine. We can both share the opinion that he makes 'good' music, but may take totally different roads in getting to that conclusion, so what may seem like a shared vision is actually quite different in that we are appreciating two different aspects of the same thing (or person, Danny was a person and he don't rapp).

So even the simplest ideas, when applied to language, become very confusing and varied in meaning. The simple notion of what makes art 'good' is questionable, so how the hell are we going to have a unified understanding of the intention the artist intended. How is it possible, or even reasonable, to place the author's voice over everyone else, when his intentions are questionable? I think by killing the author, and maybe Barthes doesn't ever really hint at this, but this is simply what I'd like to take from it, we are acknowledging that no voice reigns over another. We kill the author because we know that our world is subjective, and the presumption that we can make sense of the author and find a way, through his/her text, to experience the world exactly the way they do is to be limiting (to the readers and the author himself) and unrealistic.

Even so, killing might be going slightly overboard, lets just put him in a dark room for awhile, just until we've come to terms with ourselves.

That boy needs therapy!

I want to start this post with my take on Freud and his ideas. I am intrigued by the unconscious. I value his exploration of that which we do not 'see' or 'know' about ourselves. I would like to think of dreams as some sort of 'escape hatch' through which the repressed seeks an outlet into the conscious mind. These ideas are fascinating to me.

Where I disagree with Freud is in his proposed ability to discover a 'definitive' answer within the unconscious. I say this with the 'Dora' case study in mind, officially titled 'Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria', in which he completely and irresponsibly misread his eighteen year old female patient. It is questionable enough to claim answers to something as complex as the unconscious mind, but to then misuse that 'knowledge' in this way is truly disgusting. Barry also acknowledges Freud's work as being overwhelmingly masculinist (what with the Oedipal complex, the phallus, and the vagina representing a 'void' or 'emptiness'). Okay, we get it! Penises are ever present, like God or Jesus or my mother's relentless nagging voice telling me I'm not good enough.




I tried to hold back, honest i did, but it was TOO good to pass up. Wonder what Freud would have to say about this?

On that note, let's talk about love. Derrida describes love as narcissistic. This statement alone feels like an unprecedented deconstruction of love. Love is supposed to be selfless and pure, right? What could be selfish about love, the most beautiful emotion that the 'human experience' has to offer? Hate to burst your bubble, dude, but Its the love for yourself that is radiating so strongly from this person, this Other. Derrida jumbles things up quite a bit when he differentiates the what and who (is it you I love or something ABOUT you?). Its all very confusing in a sort of post-structuralist-pick-apart-everything sort of way. I believe Derrida also said at one point that love cannot be generalized, so of course, this narcissist thing is not necessarily true of everyone (though the cynic in me is very much in agreement).

I also want to mention briefly Derrida's comment to the director that 'this is not my biography, this is your autobiography'. In the same way that he views love as narcissistic, as a sort of projection of the self onto the Other, the director(s) takes parts of Derrida's being and applies it to herself. This is not Derrida as he sees himself, or as he 'really' is, its Derrida through the lens of anOther. Interpreted, picked apart, and edited together in pieces.

For once I'd like to end my blog post with some sort of conclusion, instead of abruptly stopping.

I'm a Word

Come on come all! Join me in my quest to make sense of the following statement:

"In language there are only differences without positive terms."

So one of the big ideas in structuralism is this obsession with value and meaning. Meaning in itself is considered to be both arbitrary and relational. When we talk about relational or relative meaning, we are saying that meaning itself cannot exist without some sort of opposite. We define sadness and happiness by what the other is not - otherwise, what makes them distinguishable? We spoke in class about how words give our world meaning. Without language to describe it, how do we comprehend happiness? How do we know we're depressed unless someone slaps the label onto us? Or gay or straight?

Words construct meaning and that meaning is only clear through difference, the structuralist argues. A positive term cannot exist because no single word can stand on its own, unpolluted by others. The fact that we need to use words to define other words suggests a huge relational necessity in language. Values and terms can never be positive. Happiness has unstable meaning, and how do we balance that out? Sadness. Paired opposites are where structure is founded (Take notes kids, this is kinda important).

So how does this change the way I think of language? In terms of the statement above, because meaning is unstable and necessitates an opposite it kind of rejects the notion of objectivity. Without positive terms there is no objectivity, which means there is only subjective meaning. Apply this idea to art or the world and it really is liberating. Speaking of structuralism more broadly, and not limited to the above quotation, it has made things seem more possible. The world seems bigger, because where it once felt like there was a name for everything is now seems like there is so much that people are missing. It also makes the world feel less intimidating, because I now have this knowledge that language constitutes a kind of reality as opposed to a SOLE reality. During one of our lectures, I wrote "We don't see that which isn't named." Having read that again, the world grew 100 times its size, as did my curiosity to really 'see' it.