So, let’s recap. We learned that Marx believed that communism was the way to; to take down and destroy the class system and make everyone equal. He was all for massive rage revolution condoning such acts and giving the working class the ok-go and self-esteem they would need to carry out their plans. But, what else does Marx have to say about socialism, aka communism, and the class systems? Let’s all be happy…kind of.
“Ideology as an instrument of social reproduction”…what? Let me rephrase; the worker bees are led to believe that the economic interests of the ruling class are the economic interests of the working class. The working class is taught that they are happy to work for the upper class, which is too lazy and snooty to do the work themselves and feel like they accomplished something. You are an important member of society. You help the progress of our economy, helping us help you. Lies! The hard working bee is going out into the world, where death awaits at every corner, risking his life to get to that pretty flower and collect his honey for a stupid queen who is too lazy to get up off her big heinie and get her honey herself. No, she is the Queen Bee and she has her peons to do her work for. Her workers are led to believe that the queen loves them and every task that they are given is for the betterment of their society, thus for the betterment of themselves. (I think not.)
Marxism is a political ideology that implements socialism; a worldview for how to change and improve society. Marx believed that social occurred because of the struggle between the different class systems within society who are constantly contradicting one another. His analysis led to the conclusion that capitalism leads to the oppression of the working classes, the proletariats, who make up the majority of the population. Not only is the working class the big chunk in the pie chart, it is also the group of people that brings home the money for the upper class, the rich snobs, the bourgeoisie.
Marx, and his advocates, believes the only way to correct this inequality where the poor majority work and live for the rich minority (lazy pricks) is for there to be a revolution where the proles take over the government and hand over the benefits to their class. Private property is taken into government control, now run by the working class, and is transformed to benefit their class system. Essentially, this is a socialist economy, but Marx believed that this would eventually develop into a completely classless system, known as communism.
There is one flaw though; everyone wants to be equal but this is not really true. Everyone wants to be better than their neighbor, make more money then them so they can have something better: a better product, a better house, a better income, a better life. So, communism wouldn’t really work because there would be a full on riot between coworkers, feuds between friends, etc. all for the sole purpose of being better than the other. Of not really being equal.
In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author’s identity. Barthes says that that to give a text an author it imposes a limit on that text. In other words, if we look at a text and say that so and so wrote it then we automatically limit our perceptions of that text.We limit ourselves to what we let ourselves take away from the text and what we allow ourselves to imagine.
This being said, what he reader has to do is take away any and all ownership they have led to believe of that text, forget that they were told who wrote and in what time period, and read the text that way. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. Barthes draws an analogy between texts and textiles saying that a “text is a tissue, or fabric, of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture rather than from one, individual experience.” The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader rather than the passions or beliefs and tastes of the writer. A text’s unity lies not in its creator or origins but in its audience and its destination.
Barthes goes on to say that the author is no longer in charge, taking away its “authority” and is renamed the “scriptor”. The scriptor exists only to produce the work, not to explain it.The scriptor is born simultaneously with the text and is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing. Every text is written in the here and now and is eternal because every time it is read it is alive once again because the meaning lies exclusively in the language itself and its impression on the reader. Many critics ask the question, “How can we figure out what the writer intended?” The answer is we cannot. We can never know what the writer specifically intended because we are not the writer; we do not know what was going in their head when they sat in front of a desk and wrote the story. The purpose of “killing” the author is for the sole purpose of removing the restraints that it creates on the reader and their interpretations of the text. For example: When I read the books in the series of novels written by Sherrilyn Kenyon, I don’t know what Kenyon’s intentions were. Was it to give the reader a new grasp on mythology? Was it to give the reader a sense of self confidence? Was it to turn the reader into a crazed lunatic thinking that they can become vampire hunters and get into fights, thus eventually killing themselves? Who knows? To each reader they moral of the story is different. Each and every individual takes away something else from the text. The language of the text “speaks” to the reader a different story and lets them conceive their own ideals.
By destroying the author we open up a whole new world of reading and interpreting a text. High school English classes drill the students to analyze a text based on what they know and what research they have done on the text’s author. Although this allows for limited answers in a classroom and guides the students to certain definite answers, it doesn’t allow for interpretations beyond what the teacher has said. This method doesn’t allow the students to further examine what the text could possibly mean, therefore barring their development into how their individual minds work and how they as individuals perceive things.
In his writings and findings about dreams that he discusses in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud analyzes his own dreams as examples to proves his of the psychology of dreams. He makes a distinction between the surface level or “manifest” dream content and the unconscious or “latent” dream thoughts expressed through the special language of dreams. He poses the idea that all dreams represent the fulfillment of wishes and on the part of the dreamer and maintains that even dreams about anxiety and nightmares are expressions of unconscious desires. Freud goes on to explain that the censorship in dreams causes a distortion of the dream content and that through the process of analyses the details that seems trivial and unimportant can be shown to express a coherent set of ideas. Freud proposes that the ultimate value of dream analyses may lie in the revealing the hidden workings of the unconscious mind.
Taking what Freud has to say about dreams and the meanings that they hold in the dreamer’s subconscious mind, we can assume that when we have the most bizarre of dreams and wake up thinking My mind must be on ten levels of crazy to come up with that dream, our subconscious is telling us, or showing us, something that we wouldn’t have let ourselves perceive while awake. If someone has a nightmare about being chased around by a giant spider then that dream can either mean (in my own personal perception) that, obviously, the dreamer is deathly terrified of spiders and being anywhere near them or two, that the dreamer has a wish for adventure and thrill and the want to overcome their fear of spiders.
He had just handed over the down payment of his new studio to the realtor who greedily took his money. He had waited a long time for this moment, when he could finally own a place to call his own, a place where his art could feel safe and at peace. Putting everyone away in their canvas bags and hauling them from place to place had taken it's toll on him; his paintings were his friends; Matisse, Dali, Picasso, O'Keefe, Cezanne. Each had claimed a place in his heart, forever. The walls were bare and the floors dusty. There was no furniture, not even a side table, to occupy the magnificence of those four walls. He looked around and there, to his left, right below the ceiling-kissed window, he saw it: the perfect spot to hang his favorite friend. It was that spot on the musty wall that would forever be the permanent home to Cezanne. Forget furniture, forget cleaning up before the dust claimed his lungs, putting up that picture was the only thing on his mind. As he stood there, admiring the beauty of his creative and awe inspired decision, he could not have come up with a better resting place. It was a depiction of his life, his work, his everything. The death of one that led to the birth of the other.
Before I begin my analyses I have to clarify that I am a Creative Writing major and writing a story, of any sort, in 100 words just can't be done. =P
If we took a formalistic approach, all we would say was that there is no transcendent meaning to the discipline other than the literal content being created. In other words, there is nothing to this painting except the paint, the canvas and the actual picture created. There is no story behind the painting and there is no hidden meaning. Structuralism says otherwise. Structuralism is a theory in which human culture and various disciplines within it are analyzed semiotically (meaning they are analyzed as a system of signs and symbols). Structuralism argues that any specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas or the imagination. The reason for all of this ambiguity is because structuralism is largely known as a meta-thought process, which means it is a thought process behind the initial thought process. What I mean by this is that beneath everything in a certain discipline, the foundation of every system is its structure. For example, Foucault is employing structuralism when he analyzes sex during the Victorian Era as a linguistic function of repression. His main method is genealogy but the method behind that method is structuralism. The same can be said about a painting. When creating a painting, every artist approaches the canvas and their colors differently. No one piece of art is ever the same, even when looking at works from the same artist. They have similar qualities throughout all their work but there is no imitation of one piece in another. They analyze what’s around them: politics, people, actions, thoughts, scenes; everything has been taken into consideration to create a painting. A picture paints a thousand words they say, and an artist does just that when they put all that they have analyzed onto a strip of canvas. However, beneath all that, beneath all the freedom in color, shapes and brush strokes and patterns there is an underlying structure ruling them all. The structure of painting, never fully observed in the colors and shades of the paint in the pictures, takes it’s backseat and lets the driver steer the wheel, or the brush in this case, wherever the artist pleases, but at the same time never leaving the boundaries of what that structure has set forth. With everything good and pleasant, there is an underlying system that sets forth the rules for what can and can’t be done to avoid chaos and in turn, creates beauty.
"Amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force" (137)
Longinus's view on sublimity is that "nature is on the whole a law unto herself in matters of emotion and elevation." (137) He believes that when produced at the right moments, it can tear everything up. Sublimity is the creation, or acknowledgement, of an idea so pure generated from everything around us, that sets us apart and separates us from the standards of awe and transports us into a place of peace. If someone here’s something repeatedly and is left with nothing to reflect upon or does not impose its meaning unto that person, than it is not true sublimity. “Real sublimity contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory.” (138) Longinus believed that the most productive source of sublimity was the power to conceive great thoughts. He wrote elsewhere that “sublimity is the echo of a noble mind” (139). A person with a noble mind is one whose thoughts weigh heavily and are not full of trivial expressions.
“Our thoughts often travel beyond the boundaries of our surroundings. If anyone wants to know hat we were born for, let him look around at life and contemplate the splendour, grandeur, and beauty in which it everywhere abounds.” (151)
In this clip from Walt Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, Dave explains his fascination with his tesla coil experiments. He is physics major and is using the tesla coils to generate plasma. He say’s, “I got so fixated on the technical aspects of it that I almost didn’t notice something kind of beautiful.” Here he demonstrates an aspect of sublimity; he is of noble mind by creating plasma from the high frequency sound waves from the coils. He is nature, with a little help from modern technology, to create a part of nature that is not seen every day. His moment of sublimity arises when he finally sees beyond just the technical aspect of his experiments and notices that the experiment itself is a kind of beauty. He takes a step away from physics and calculations and looks through different eyes at what the coils are doing, creating. “They’re making their own music and it was lost on me. I was never able to appreciate it”.
Word Count: 386
Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
“Tesla Coil Scene Sorcerer's Apprentice (Secrets - OneRepublic). Perf. Jay Baruchel. 17 November 2010. YouTube. 20 February 2011.
In “The King’s Speech”, Colin Firth plays King George the VI of Britain, who is plagued with a stammer. In this scene, we can use Aristotle’s system of argument (speech) and Aristotle’s theory as to why art is good.
Aristotle believed that there were three different types of speech; deliberative, forensic and epideictic. Someone who is giving a deliberative speech is good at persuading their audience about what is going to happen in the future. A person who is giving a forensic speech appeals to the past and somehow relates it to what their argument is based on to give it merit. And lastly, a person giving an epideictic speech focuses on the present and appeals to their audiences ethos, pathos and logos; character, emotion and logic, respectively. In this short clip we see a moment in the film where the king is at another speech lesson with his therapist, played by Geoffrey Rush, and he starts throwing expletives left and right to get his anger out and calm his nerves so he can focus on improving his speech.
For those who haven’t seen the film, or don’t know anything about it, Geoffrey Rush’s character is a commoner, and Colin Firth’s character is the king. And we all know that kings do not interact with commoners, let alone befriend them and ask them for their help. Geoffrey Rush makes a wonderful argument when the king, begrudgingly, comes to him for help. He acts all posh and upper class and like, well, royalty and Geoffrey Rush doesn’t take any of it. He treats the king like any other person, or patient; like family, like a friend. The king, at first is outraged but as the film progresses the two grow a special bond. In this scene, Geoffrey Rush is appealing to the king’s ethos, pathos and logos while giving an epideictic speech. He acts according to the king’s character (ethos) using words and mannerisms that will appeal to him and make him break down his mental walls: that he is here to help him get better at his speech. Rush also uses a tone of voice and tells simple stories and analogies that appeal to the king’s emotional state of mind/character; his pathos. To appeal to his logos, Rush finds ways to be strict with the king but also still friendly so as to not make the king overly upset and turn away, by making him realize that his tantrums will not help him help his improvement in his speech.
Aristotle also believed that art was very important and important for the people. He believed that art was cathartic, creating a type of cleansing that lead to learning something about one’s self. In an earlier part of the film, (sadly I could not find the clip) Rush makes the king put on a pair of headphones and turns the music up very loud. He tells the king to recite a certain passage from Hamlet while the music is playing. The king complies, again begrudgingly, and begins to recite although not being able to hear himself at all. After becoming exasperated with the exercise he storms off home. Later, he plays the recording from that exercise and hears himself recite the passage with no hint of stammer. As he sits on the couch, he begins to cry as he realizes that there is hope for him after all, the he indeed does have a voice and the capability of speaking without stammering. This is a cathartic moment for the king where he learns something about himself that he didn’t know before, thus proving Aristotle’s belief that art is good for man.
Word Count: 609 "The King's Speech: The F Word Scene." Dir. Tom Hooper. Perf. Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush. 02 February 2011. YouTube. 14 Feb. 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka2g2ehdLj0
