El Sur

«A la realidad le gustan las simetrías y los leves anacronismos.»

Borges always overwhelms me a little. The thing is that his tales are so full of symbolism, intertextuality and every other kind of outside reference that every written line flows with meaning and reading possibilities.  The South is no exception. Where to focus? What to write about? Did I actually get this story?

Anyway, let’s begin to approach the story through the aspect that I found most captivating: The constant play between two different realities and two different times, all interlaced by similar events that add symmetry and a sense of parallel universe to the narration. In both realities the ‘beginning of the end’ starts with Juan Dahlmann trying to read The Arabian Nights followed by something hitting his head, in one case it’s the jamb of a window on the other it’s tiny bread balls which create a series of consequences that finally lead to his death; a humiliating one in the hospital due to a septicemia and a romantic one in a man to man duel that reminds us of his Argentinian grandfather’s death.

Before his accident and that the back and forward between reality at the hospital and reality at the South started, it seems like Dahlmann already lived two different experiences of life; his everyday as a librarian and a different one through his books.
Juan Dahlmann is a character that lives a life of dualities. His from German decent but deeply identifies himself as Argentinian, even though his lifestyle resembles more that of a German evangelical pastor like his paternal grandfather than the lifestyle of a true Argentinian gaucho like his mother’s side grandfather, a person he profoundly admires. It is funny that Dahlmann considers the south and that kind of lifestyle an ideal when a common aspiration in Latin America is to leave that behind and move to the North, the North is usually the ideal.

It is also very interesting that the copy of The Arabian Nights he so eagerly wants to read is a German translation done by the orientalist Gustav Weil, a detail that is thrown into the story in a rather ‘matter of factly’ way but helps reinforce the perception that Dahlmann is more influenced by his German heritage than he realizes or than he likes to admit. Also, that Borges chooses The Arabian Nights is of course no accident. Sherezade the main character of the book resorts to the telling of stories in order to entertain the prince and save her life; she changes her destiny through these stories much like Dalhmann changes his when he finds refuge from reality in his self-made tale of the south.

The South seems like a story of a man who lives a life of dissonance between his self-acknowledged identity and the way in which he actually experiences life, a dissonance that can only be restored through the dream of an honorable Argentinian death in The South.

Guha

In The Prose of Counter-Insurgency Ranajit Guha explores the way in which depicted peasant insurgency acts in XIX century India attributing the nature of the uprisings to factors outside the peasant’s conscious will. Guha states that in the way that these revolts are depicted, it gives the impression that they’re a natural consequence of a series of situations that in a primitive way alter the life of the peasant but never as a planned, mindful act. He then proceeds to explain the three types of discourses that can be found regarding the uprisings and how these discourses blatantly incorporate the subaltern only as an object that can serve to the construction of the hegemonic discourse.
Each of the three types of discourse have their particularities and their different levels of “objectivity” because they are written at different moments in time and, in the cases of secondary and tertiary discourses, the actions and previous texts are approached by people that did not have a direct link with the action. Even with this personal and chronological separation, the discourses seem to be highly permeated by colonialist or nationalist ideas that indicate and interpret history from their own point of view, even if their trying to avoid it like in tertiary discourses.
It is very clear, at least to me, that history is made by the people in power in order to legitimize themselves and create an Other that serves this legitimization, that is why on same action can be understood as the “upraising of peasants in the name of better life conditions” or as the “revolt of barbaric peasants intoxicated by religious fervor” depending on which side of the action is telling the story, the problem is that only one of those versions becomes official and the other one is silenced.
What Guha doesn’t explain clearly is how one would be able to understand or even to address the consciousness of the subaltern and how one can if not part of subalternity avoid inaccurate representations. That is, one of the main characteristics of the subaltern is that he doesn’t have the means to raise his voice because he’s oppressed, there is a more powerful voice silencing his. So the only way for him to make himself heard would be if he won power, in which moment he would stop being a subaltern, or through someone who is part of the group in power who decides to serve as a “microphone”- to continue with the voice metaphor-; to me this inevitably falls into the category of representation. In this way the subaltern is probably portrayed in a less subjective manner but he’s still “portrayed”, “represented”, “depicted”, he still has to go through the filter of the dominant; the dominant is still in control.

Orientalism and What is an author?

Orientalism

There are two main ideas that stuck in my mind after I finished reading Said’s text on Orientalism. The first thing was the idea that every text no matter its genre is in some way or another interpolated by politics because its creation is immersed in a politicized world that no one can escape from. This is relevant for us as readers because it opens another door of approximation to a text that allows us to look further than only the formal aspects of what is written.

Even though the final idea that Said has with regards to the importance of an author differs from what Foucault states What is an author? , as Said does think that the author as an individual has a direct effect on a text, I believe there is an aspect in which they both meet and that is that is the notion that what an author writes is highly and inevitably influenced by the political, social and cultural conditions that surround him.

This brings me to the other aspect I would like to talk about and that is the arbitrariness of orientalism. As every other human creation orientalismis based on a set rules determined by the people in a condition of power but there is nothing “natural” about it, the characteristics given to the study of the so called Orient are not inherent to that region of the world, furthermore this region is so diverse that it is hard to wrap the brain around the idea of studying at as whole. The characteristics of the Orient are determined by orientalism only as a set of aspects that exist in negative relation to the Occident. This reminds me of Saussure the arbitrariness of the sign and the negative “nature” of it, the Orient is the Orient because it is not the Occident. Orientalism is created by people from occident who in their historical condition of imperialists and colonialists study it from a point of view of superiority and approach it and represent it as the other that needs to be guided, the other that is not as smart, the other that needs to be repressed in order to “civilized”.

Furthermore, this occidental-oriental approach led to other dichotomies like first world-third world, developed-underdeveloped, etc. that in the same way as the oriental example are created  through perception of otherness that U.S. and E.U. have of the rest of the world. What seems most shocking to me is that this discourse is so solid that it is used and perpetuated by Occidentals and Orientals equally.

What is an author?

In What is an Author? Foucault addresses the much debated issue of the relationship between the author and the written work; however I believe that what he says may be applied to other kinds of artistic manifestations too.

It is very difficult to read this text without automatically relating it to Barthes’ Death of the Author but Foucault isn’t too interested in wiping the author out of the picture but in exploring what an author really is. To do this he introduces the idea of function-author which I find absolutely compelling. He explains how an author is not only a name but it may convey a whole discourse, a writing style, a sense of authority, it may differentiate a text from a common everyday words, it is a characteristic that affects the way in which the text exists, circulates and works within a society.

The important thing here is to understand that the author has a function in relation to the text but it is not the text, it is, as I said before, a characteristic of it, an author doesn’t exist before the text, what exists before it is a broader plain of social texts in which the author is immersed. The author is definitely relevant for a discourse it has a very complex relation with it and that it why it appears a little bit too harsh to kill it altogether. At least that is how I understand it.

A Good Man is Hard to FInd

A Good Man is Hard to Find is a short-story that manages to put together humor, shock and morals all in one tale which makes up for a pretty amusing reading experience.

There were a couple of aspects that caught my attention, the one has to do with gender representation (last week’s readings sure affected me) I found interesting that of the three female characters that were part of the family – I assume it’s three but maybe it’s four, considering we don’t know the baby’s sex- only one of them has a name, June Star, who is a kid. The other two adult woman characters grandmother and the wife are referred to just like that. And outside the family we have of course Red Sammy’s wife. I don’t think this is a coincidence considering that every other character has a name- even the cat- and some are pretty elaborate and representative of the southern culture of the United States. However, I don’t quite know what to make of it. It may have something to do with religion, bearing in mind the moralizing theme of the story and that in the end it was a woman, the grandmother, who brought tragedy to the family… like the original sinner. Or is it just a reflection on women stereotyping? That is, the woman without individuality, only existing in relation to a man or to her family.

The title A Good Man is Hard to Find, (Isn’t there a jazz song with that name?) seems ironic when the character that appears as most worried about the crooked path that society has taken and the difficulty to find “a good man” is the grandmother; a woman who is the perfect example of everything that’s wrong with society. She is vain, selfish, manipulative, uses her condition of “lady” to try to get away from trouble… A good man is hard to find but finding a good woman is equally as hard. The fact is that there are no real notions of what a good person is as it changes with time, apparently the older generations are always better than the newer. But since when has this been happening? How far back in time should we go in order to find the original good man? Is the original good man Jesus, the man that died for our sins? Is he the father The Misfit killed? And for that matter isn’t he the father that we all killed? Within this frame of thought, it appears to me that The Misfit’s final remark “there is no pleasure in life” comes from the religious idea that we are all born guilty of a crime for which we will be punished if we decide not to acknowledge it, and acknowledging it means to follow the religious path blindly, if not, everything you do will be mean, an offense. And whichever path one chooses to take will end in the same pleasure empty life. But as The Misfit says, we cannot know for sure that we are guilty of this crime and that’s what’s maddening.

In the end the grandmother or any other character isn’t too different from The Misfit, she lives with the same doubts as he does only she is not conscious of them. It is only at the end of her life when she realizes that they are both the same.

 

Paris is Burning- bell hooks and Judith Butler

Is Paris Burning? – bell hooks

In Is Paris Burning? bell hooks harshly criticizes the documentary Paris is Burning as she perceives it creates a sensation of spectacle around a matter she considers as serious and worrisome. First, hooks seems to fixate on this idea of drag as ridiculing women and perpetuating a fetishistic view of white women as a primary object of what-beauty-is. She also has the impression that men in drag cross over from a sphere of power to powerlessness as they assume the roles of women. It seems, at first, that her problem doesn’t lie with men in drag per se, but the idea of black men in drag reaffirming patriarchal/colonialist views of black men as disempowered and feminine trying to portray themselves as white women. However, these ideas are just the stemming point of an essay that as it progressed seemed to divert a lot from the initial theoretical approach into the realm of personal perception and experience. The main thing that bothers hooks throughout the essay is the fact that the ball is the central point of the documentary and not the social struggles of the subjects presented in it (the film is called Paris is Burning because that is the name of one the most important drag balls in New York, so hooks should’ve suspected the principal aim of the documentary) and the fact that the filmmaker is Jennie Livingston a white lesbian woman with a very privileged background; an outsider.

hooks focuses on how the condition of privilege of Jennie Livingston as a white woman shaped the documentary into some sort of a mockery of the lives of these specific groups of drag queens, homosexuals and transgender individuals in New York. She argued that in order for Livingstone to maintain her status of “innocent observer” she purposely avoided deepening into the conditions of oppression and marginalization in which these individuals exist in great extent due to white supremacy and avoided also any other reference outside their marginalized lives like their families or background to concentrate mainly on the balls turning these people into objects of a spectacle instead of victims of a certain kind of society.

I agree with hooks that more personal approach to the individuals in the documentary could’ve enormously enriched the final product however one might have to accept that that was not the goal of the filmmaker. Furthermore, I believe that hooks position is also of an outsider in the sense that even though she feels more in touch with the situation because she is a black person she is also considerably privileged in front of those portrayed in the documentary and very far from understanding the experience of a drag queen or a transgender. So, as right as she may be when she says that the documentary was being shaped by a white, lesbian woman who absents herself but still controls what is shared, that is also true for her a black, straight woman who wishes she could’ve controlled what was shown.

Paris is Burning is indeed a subjective view of this certain group of people in New York. But how can one avoid subjectivity when there are constraints of time and space and a million other personal factors that shape the way we portray things? Wasn’t hooks as influenced by her racial condition when watching the documentary as Livingston while making it? What would’ve been an objective and neutral way of portraying the situation?

Gender is Burning-Judith Butler

While bell hooks focused most of her attention in Is Paris Burning? on race and the position of disadvantage in which the subject of the documentary lived in, Judith Butler did so on gender, sex and sexuality introducing a more complicating reading of the documentary and its implications.

Gender is burning: questions and appropriation and subversion was not an easy text for me to approach. This was however, my first encounter with gender theory so I am not familiar with a lot of the terminology and the ideas this text presented so I’m choosing to believe that reason why I felt little bit lost while reading it. That said I would like to recover some of the aspects that caught my attention:

 

• The idea of drag being a way subversive behavior that questions the “originality and naturalness” of heterosexual behavior but at the same time as it is portrayed in the film it continues to perpetuate the need for a heterosexual society to marginalize a behavior that it perceives as dangerous to the status quo.
• The drag queens of the film at the same time that they subvert against racist, misogynist, and homophobic forms of oppression they also appropriate them with the risk of turning into an unsubversive type of appropriation. This happens in the extent that the appropriation causes a re-idealization of the oppressive conduct.
• According to Butler most of the expectations of the girls in the film and many of the categories of the balls were more related to class than to race so she finds it fit to present gender as the “phantasmatic” (symbolic?) transformation of the nexus between class and gender.
• In contrast to hooks, for Butler the goal of the subjects in the documentary is not to achieve whiteness but to achieve realness as a woman, a model, a dancer, a student or any of the other categories in the ball that are symbolic to “real life”.
• Heterosexual behavior is based on social symbolic and ever changing practices. Butler is presenting heterosexuality as ambivalent as any other “marginalized” gender or sexual practice.
• Finally, for hooks the role of the filmmaker is leading in terms of how the film is perceived. The filmmaker being a white, lesbian, Ivy League woman is an almost perfect representative of what hooks considers an oppressive figure. How does this relate to the phallic representation that Butler gives to the camera/filmmaker? Could phallic and white be interpreted similarly?

 

 

 

 

Derrida-Searle

Too bad Austin didn’t live to see the heated debate his ideas aroused between Derrida and Searle. Furthermore, he could have explained to these guys what he actually intended when he wrote How to do things with words.  But no, wait, his intentions should be evident and clearly conveyed in order for his writing to be effective.  Is that so? Or is writing supposed to communicate and replicate itself without regards for an author a reader or a fixated context?

This is two opposing ideas are what I understood Searle and Derrida respectively defend essentially in their texts. And they both use Austin’s text as a source of support for their ideas. Derrida is first attracted to Austin’s propositions they separate from the classic notion that language is only a sign and its significance and it is essentially use to deliver a meaning and it is irremediably anchored to some kind or referent. The idea that a part of language is not sense but action and that it cannot be valued through a true/false dichotomy, as Austin presents with his performative utterances, profoundly seduces Derrida. However, he is quickly disappointed when he realizes that for Austin these performative qualities of language can only function when certain very specific conditions are met; that is, the performative is anchored to context. This sparks Derrida’s criticism that then Searle, in a confrontational manner, calls a misreading of Austin’s ideas.

In Searl’s response I was particularly “conflicted” by the importance of intention. Every utterance has an intention behind, it can be conscious or not, I will not argue that, but intention cannot be how one values the effectiveness of a text. “To the extent that the author says what he means, the text is the expression of his intention”. How can we know for sure what the author meant with what he wrote? If one fails to understand a text as it was intended does it make it hollow? Wasn’t that exactly what happened between Austin’s text and Derrida according to Searle? And in the case of perfomative expressions such as “I promise”, isn’t it possible to say such thing with a further intention than just a promise, like fooling someone into trusting you? Does that make the expression an infelicity? It seems like there should be some kind of moral responsibility between what one says and one does for performatives to be “happy”.  Are performatives with hidden intentions parasitary then?

In Derrida’s response I have a lot of trouble understanding the relation between the signature and truth. When he says that if Searle believed what he wrote was “obviously true” then he should not have signed it, does he mean that truth doesn’t belong to anyone? (Something I agree with) But it seems like he is saying that writing doesn’t belong to anyone, because writing exists in itself it is a code one uses but doesn’t own. Or is it that everything one writes and says is a repetition, even one’s signature?  If something is “obviously true” you are also obviously not its author because it is only a product of the iterability of language. So can we claim ownership over ideas? Apparently, for Derrida this would be futile since this idea in its written form will detach from you and reiterate by itself. I don’t know what I think about this.

So many ideas going back and forward from one author to the other have produced more confusion than clarity in me, as it is evident in my previous paragraphs. But it is definitely exciting to start to ponder language especially written language away from conventional formal considerations.

How to do things with words

Austin presents a new notion in language with the introduction of the performative utterance. This kind utterance doesn’t describe an action like a constatative utterance, but indicates an action in itself. He gives some examples being the expression “I promise” the most referenced to in the text, what’s particular about this expression is that its corresponding action takes place spiritually no physically. That’s the first thing I found interesting, how can one study language in terms of the spiritual act that occurs when certain phrases are being uttered? Austin sort of answers this question when he continues to talk about the impossibility of studying performatives in a true/false basis. According to him this kind of utterances should be considered in terms of felicities or infelicities which occur when the set of “conditions” that surround the performatives in order for them work appropriately are successfully met or not, respectively.

Conditions like expressing the utterance within the boundaries of an accepted conventional procedure and having this done by the person who is conventionally entitled to perform this procedure. Every person who participates in the procedure must follow correctly and step by step its conventional rules and in some cases participants need also to have the adequate feelings and thoughts to go with a particular action. If these conditions are not met the action is then considered “hollow”. I don’t know if I have understood correctly the implications of Austin’s ideas, however, it appears as what seemed to be the introduction of notions that liberated language from the restrictiveness form with all these conditions it seems to be providing only with more bars to encage it. He transforms the true/false dichotomy into a right/wrong one.

In a related idea, Austin admits that every performative utterance that is based on a convention is naturally susceptible to infelicities and that there are many non performative utterances that may suffer the same infelicities, with that in mind it could be said that most (every?) utterances are speech acts and in that case there are more “unhappy” performatives than happy ones, right?

Finally, in reference to the performatives used in theater Austin says that these are also hollow and calls them “etiolations”, this is probably the same case of the ones used in literature. So how does this theory help us approach a literary text?

 

In the Penal Colony

The first time I read In the Penal Colony was almost four years ago and my mind completely focused on the ethical and moral aspects in it. This time around I was able to make a broader reading.

What I found most interesting about the story was the idea of justice by which this particular penal system worked. To us a system where a person is determined guilty without a trial and condemned to death through torture without him even knowing what his crime was seems (and probably is) completely barbaric and unjust. However, for some reason the officer could not see what was wrong with it, he believed in the complete power of the system over the common people and moreover in its superiority over the common people, I think that is why he thought there wasn’t really a need for a trial because “the system knows better”, it can’t be wrong. He believed in it so much that when he found himself and his machine being accused by the explorer he didn’t even hesitate on applying the system to himself and paying his crime like any other person would inside the colony.

This got me to thinking, do we believe in our system as blindly as the officer does? Is that why we feel so shocked (torture aside) by what happens at Kafka’s penal colony? Because in the end our “penal machine” doesn’t work as smoothly either and some may argue that it is designed not so much to protect people as to protect the state from any kind threat to its stability. Moreover, it is also through the use of force and violence that we are made to fit into its mechanism. Maybe this is exactly what Kafka is criticizing. How just is our system really? How can one determine what is just and what is not?

On a last note, I must say I was very intrigued by the ending of the story when the explorer practically escapes the island leaving the soldier and the condemned man behind. It seems like in the end he sympathized with the officer and felt like the barbaric ones were the rest of the colony. Perhaps he was just running away from it all, without even attempting to help the people inside the island. It seems to me like a criticism to the international community. I don’t know I think this text is so rich that it gives room to every kind reading and interpretation. It will be an interesting seminar session for sure.

 

In the Penal Colony

The first time I read In the Penal Colony was almost four years ago and my mind completely focused on the ethical and moral aspects in it. This time around I was able to make a broader reading.

What I found most interesting about the story was the idea of justice by which this particular penal system worked. To us a system where a person is determined guilty without a trial and condemned to death through torture without him even knowing what his crime was seems (and probably is) completely barbaric and unjust. However, for some reason the officer could not see what was wrong with it, he believed in the complete power of the system over the common people and moreover in its superiority over the common people, I think that is why he thought there wasn’t really a need for a trial because “the system knows better”, it can’t be wrong. He believed in it so much that when he found himself and his machine being accused by the explorer he didn’t even hesitate on applying the system to himself and paying his crime like any other person would inside the colony.

This got me to thinking, do we believe in our system as blindly as the officer does? Is that why we feel so shocked (torture aside) by what happens at Kafka’s penal colony? Because in the end our “penal machine” doesn’t work as smoothly either and some may argue that it is designed not so much to protect people as to protect the state from any kind threat to its stability. Moreover, it is also through the use of force and violence that we are made to fit into its mechanism. Maybe this is exactly what Kafka is criticizing. How just is our system really? How can one determine what is just and what is not?

On a last note, I must say I was very intrigued by the ending of the story when the explorer practically escapes the island leaving the soldier and the condemned man behind. It seems like in the end he sympathized with the officer and felt like the barbaric ones were the rest of the colony. Perhaps he was just running away from it all, without even attempting to help the people inside the island. It seems to me like a criticism to the international community. I don’t know I think this text is so rich that it gives room to every kind reading and interpretation. It will be an interesting seminar session for sure.

 

Ideology and Ideological State Apparathusses

In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Althusser recovers Marx idea of the reproduction of the conditions of production in order to maintain these conditions of production. This reproduction is achieved by the reproduction of labor power which is ensured by giving labor power the material to reproduce itself, in other words by wages; and  the reproduction of the existing relations of production carried out through the Ideological State Apparatuses. These new apparatuses go hand in hand with the State Apparatus but work in a very different way. While the State Apparatus functions through repressive force i.e. government, administration, army, the police, courts, prisons, etc. the Ideological State Apparatuses are represented by distinct and specialized institutions, such as religion, education, family, media, culture, political parties, etc. and have as a goal to ensure society’s assimilation of the ruling power’s ideology.

Personally, I couldn’t agree more with the idea introduced by Althusser, there are so many other gears inside the State’s machine working in other to assure its prevalence. I couldn’t help but think about what happened in Mexico a couple of months ago during the presidential elections. Enrique Peña Nieto the PRI’s candidate, the now president elect, was the chosen candidate by the State to protect the interests of the ruling power. What happened next was incredible, every major TV network, radio station, newspaper (except for the left wing one), many actors, actresses, soccer players, writers, academics, etc. started openly reinforcing the dominant ideology in order to guarantee the electoral triumph of Peña Nieto and in the end succeeded (with a little extra help from some other friends, of course but succeeded). To me election time is one of the best circumstances where one could appreciate the Ideological State Apparatus working at full steam.

What I find most compelling about the ISA is the fact that it is not as impermeable as the SA, so the classes that are not in power are often able to sneak in and raise their voices. I really like Althusser’s idea of the ISAs being the place where the class struggle happens because we have seen it happen in history through music, literature, religion, etc. We have seen books being burnt, artists banned and religions turned into paganism and we have also seen many of these examples survive the persecution. Ideology is stronger than any army or repressive state, it is very hard to change but if and when it does it is also very hard to contain. Could we say that perhaps ideology is at the same time what oppresses and what liberates us?