Feb 202010
 

My favourite part is the girl who says, “I see you. I see you. I see you.”

Though I can’t quite put my finger on it, there is something ineffably sad about this (aside from the obvious comedy). It’s a parody of a reality TV show about really stupid people re-enacting a really obvious Hollywood reiteration of the Romance of the Noble Savage old-style Euro-colonial racism, thus a parody of an imitation of an imitation of a bad idea. It reminds me of Don Quixote, of course, who is imitating characters in a romantic adventure novel about knights in armour long after people had forgotten what those thugs-in-chain mail  were really like. And Dostoevsky said Don Quixote was the saddest book of all.

Maybe it’s this: our inability to feel real unless we are acting a role, our need for a gesture or form that gives us substance. When we see this in others, it’s comic. But it’s the kind of comedy that expresses a latent fear, in this case the fear that if we look too closely the Self will seem unbearably empty.

dg

Feb 032010
 

Funny how ideas seem to develop threads of their own. The theoretical subject is important to writers because it has an impact on ideas of self, soul, character, and society. The subject here is what we used to call the self, Descartes’ thinking self, that which is conscious (of something). More and more it is thought of as a relation and not an thing itself. That’s because it is difficult to imagine being conscious without being conscious of something. Hence consciousness (the subject) somehow resides in the object (the thing you are conscious of). I come into focus the moment you (the Other) are on the scene. This is much like what happens in a story or an essay in which characters come to life as soon as they are in action (relation, conflict) with other characters or society (or some force or rule which begins to define the subject in opposition).

“I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one might find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course, from a number of rules, styles and conventions that can be found in the cultural setting.”

Michel Foucault. (1996) [1984]. An Aesthetics of Existence. In Foucault Live. collected Interviews, 1961-1984. Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.). New York: Semiotext(e), p. 452. Translation modified.

In this regard, here’s a link to the famous Roland Barthes’ essay about the Death of the Author.

I got set onto this little meditation looking at Andrew Gallix’s blog. See the blogroll for the site.

I also realize we seem suddenly to be descending into Theory in a big way. Not to worry–it is a temporary fever that will pass.

dg

Feb 022010
 

Interestingly, from the point of view of a writer creating an objective correlative, there are places language can go that are impossible actually to think. They are like Black Holes in the text, haunting, uncanny. Fascinating to contemplate and try to get into a piece of fiction not just theoretical nonfiction as here.

“All theoretical projects require a subject that can conduct the project. At least this is a marker of all successful theoretical projects. One can imagine a theory which cannot be conducted by a subject, but any elucidation of this project would be–in Austin’s terms–infelicitous.” Geoff Wildanger See full post here.

“And this brings me to a possible Lacanian definition of auratic presence: it is simply the fantasm, the fantasm as – for Lacan – an imaginary scenario which stages an impossible scene, something that could only be seen from the point of impossibility.” Slavoj Zizek. See full excerpt from Lacanian Ink here.

dg