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Kristeva’s “semiotic”: examples

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

I was thinking about how to demonstrate the way the “semiotic” processes are at work in some kind of poetry in ways that are more accessible to Anglo/American lit students than the Mallarme example Kristeva gives us. So here goes:

The end of Joyce’s Ulysses, narrated by Molly Bloom. The intense erotic energy of the “yesses” speak to the untrammeled pre-Oedipal polymorphous flows of desire that JK describes:

Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy …the last lines..

June 16th 2012 Bloomsday : the last lines of Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy to the backdrop of a Tribute Painting I painted this week…

And here’s Gertrude Stein, the great poet of the “semiotic” in JKs sense, giving an undulating “portrait” of Pablo Picasso:

Gertrude Stein reads If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso

Gertrude Stein reads her poem If I Had Told Him a Completed Portrait of Picasso.

 

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Deeply Lacanian joke incoming!

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

While riding to work this morning, I thought about how Lacan’s reading of the “mirror stage” is hilariously conjured up by a joke the narrator relates in Alexandr Hemon’s marvelous novel, The Lazarus Project:

mujo_Page_1

mujo_Page_2

 

This is a classic instance of what Lacan calls “meconnaissance” (misrecognition), whereby the subject identifies with the idealized figure in the mirror (here, the “brawny, suntanned” man with the hot wife and scads of money) to substitute for the unbearable fact of his own frustrated, discontinuous, dislocated self (Mujo, like the narrator himself, is an immigrant who, Lazarus-like, is permanently alive and dead, between two worlds, already over and beginning again).

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Lacan’s “four orders”

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

To help us contextualize the “mirror stage” essay, which narrates the formation of the ego and the advent of the “imaginary” in psychological life, check out this diagram:

This “knot” helps us see a few important things at once:

  • there are three zones that constitute the subject:
    • the Real is roughly equivalent to the Freudian “id”: it is “unsayable” and not representable in any direct way; the infant is all “Real,” in what appears to fully-developed subjects as a chaotic space, one that Kristeva describes for us as the “chora” and which Williams James once described as a “booming, buzzing confusion”
    • the Imaginary is dominated by preverbal signs, images that are tightly bound to the figure of the mother and the desires that attach to her
    • the Symbolic is the familiar world of Saussurean “structure”: we enter the symbolic by acquiring language, and we acquire language because the “father” forbids untrammeled access to the mother to meet all our needs. For “father” we can substitute widely: God, ideology, language, morality, all the “centers” in Derrida’s sense that govern the structures we live in. We speak language with some agency, but we don’t choose the “langue”: to speak is to be a “subject” in Althusser’s sense of the linguistic order. A subject, in order to meet their desires/needs, must channel them through this structure, with all the limitations and frustrations and repressions this entails.
  • These zones are only separate in theory: we don’t leave the Imaginary and Real behind when we enter the Symbolic as we acquire language. Thus the overlapping areas, which I won’t get into in any detail. But when we identify with the protagonist in a movie or respond to the seductive voice of a singer or fly into a rage at a partner’s odd habits for reasons we don’t understand, these reactions stem from these overlapping spaces. So, a Freudian slip overlaps symbolic/Real; weeping in the movies overlaps the Imaginary/Symbolic; a “symptom” in which the body is “speaking” through us (let’s say a compulsion to count to seven every time we cross train tracks) represents the crossroads of all three zones “talking at once.”
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midterm exam and instructions

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

It’s that time. Here are the instructions for your midterm and a link to the template you’ll use to write the exam and upload to Dropbox:

  • Due Wednesday March 22nd at 5pm via this upload link
  • Exams received after that time but before Thursday at midnight will be penalized one letter grade
  • Exams received after Thursday night will receive a zero.
  • I estimate the exam should take you about 2 hours, though of course your results may vary and feel free to take as much time as you need
  • Feel free to contact me with any issues, logistical or otherwise, via email
  • No class on Tuesday Mar 21: see you on Friday Mar 24 as usual
  • Write answers right on this document beneath the corresponding question and replace the word “template” above (in “midterm template”) with your last name

Here’s the template. Good luck, everyone!

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more Gramsci in the news

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Here’s some  more Gramsci for your cultural diet. The podcast The Dig recently featured the great Michael Denning, Professor of American Studies at Yale, who has written Gramscian analysis of US literature and culture for the past 30 years, including his magnificent book The Cultural Front. As a bonus, the second episode includes a riff on Althusser’s borrowing from and divergence from Gramsci about 3/4 of the way through. It’s a lot, but there’s a TON of stuff relevant to our course in here.
 

Gramsci & Hegemony w/ Michael Denning

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. Part one of an expansive two-part interview.

Gramsci, Organization, Crisis w/ Michael Denning

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Featuring Michael Denning on Antonio Gramsci. The second of a two-part interview.

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Gramsci in the news!

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Well, whaddya know: Antonio Gramsci made the news this week. The Chronicle of Higher Education is the premier “trade journal” of academica, where academics and university workers read about current goings-on. Here, the cultural studies critics Bruce Robbins is rehearsing an argument with the literary critic John Guillory, whose recent book Professing Criticism has spawned a vigorous debate on the role of politics in humanities teaching and writing in higher ed.

As you can see, Robbins invokes Gramsci’s distinction between “organic” and “traditional” intellectuals in order to clarify his objections to Guillory’s argument about the need for scholar/professors to work in a “self-authorizing” and autonomous way, rather than align themselves with political institutions and arguments (e.g., supporting Democratic Socialists of America or righting against the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe). Robbins believes that, although academics have generally been “traditional” intellectuals in Gramsci’s sense, aligned with a “neutral” institution (academia) that serves something “higher” than the partisan pursuits of capitalist accumulation and party politics, since the 60s, many academics have been plausibly “organic” to fundamental social groups.

We’ll talk more about these categories tomorrow, but I thought it was cool to find an unfolding argument in the ether that’s so perfectly targeted to our reading!

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Some resources on Marx

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

As promised, I wanted to alert you to a few things I’ve posted in the past for students with regard to Marx and Engels:

  • this post shows a picture of the “camera obscura” and explains the way the object works as a metaphor for Marx.
  • Here I talk a bit about the relevance of Marx in the 2010s and places you might go to dig deeper into Marx’s work or postmarxist political thinking.
  • This clip from the comedy series Portlandia captures, in a very funny and absurd way, some of the themes of Marx’s “fetishism of commodities” and “alienation of labor” arguments.
  • Finally, here’s a look at examples of the “fetishism” of commodities from our friends at Apple. We’ll dig into this stuff today.
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Prizes and Awards

Posted by Jeff Allred (he/him/his) on

Be sure to submit anything appropriate you have to the department’s annual awards. Cash money!!

Prizes & Awards

Every year the English Department offers a variety of prizes and awards for both undergraduate and graduate students. The prizes and awards program provides a wonderful opportunity for students to have their work recognized in the fields of literary analysis and criticism; linguistics and rhetoric; creative fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; personal essay; and drama.

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