In “The Reality Effect,” Barthes investigates the purpose of what we might today call “filler description” in literary fiction. By calling on passing details in a short story by Flaubert, he remarks that while these details may have some functional relevance with regard to a fiction’s characters or atmosphere, they’ve been overlooked in literary criticism because they don’t directly pertain to narrative structure. He goes on to explain that “insignificant notation” is detached from what we think of as narrative because it lacks a “predictive” quality. That means it isn’t temporal, or related to a chain of cause-and-effect that gives substance to a plot; it isn’t “significant” to this sort of contextual ordering that produces the legible “meaning” that de Saussure talked about with regard to language. Barthes then makes a brief foray into the aesthetic role of description and gives Flaubert some credit where it’s due: in his novel Madame Bovary, Flaubert “paints” his setting of the real-life town of Rouen not to capture it in its most empirically accurate state but to use it as a vessel for “the jewels of a rare number of metaphors,” and painstakingly revised his descriptions of the place simply to avoid the phonic repetitions he detested (144). He goes on to argue that–even while carefully crafted by the hand of an artist–Flaubert’s descriptions still lack meaning within the mechanism of narrative, and therefore fill a separate purpose even while being arbitrary. That’s all to say that these details are signs shed of what they would otherwise signify: they create the illusion of referencing something, but they surely don’t reference anything to do with plot. Standing “alone,” they have the effect of seeming “real,” just like rain hammering against your window on a Tuesday evening has no structural or symbolic meaning in your real life, it just “is.” Barthes makes the great point that harnessing mundane, random, but ultimately recognizable details is an important gesture in literary realism and part of a necessary breakthrough into that genre.

While Johnson doesn’t discuss Melville in terms of realism, I think “Melville’s Fist” makes for an interesting extension of what happens in fiction when the relationship between sign and the signified is complicated. As we discussed in class, the narrative structure of Billy Budd in fact hinges on the binary qualities of its characters being crisscrossed, the “tension between two incompatible possibilities,” the “polarizing gap between what was said and what was meant,” and that in the end maybe the late Melville was trying to draw our attention to the scrambled delineations of “difference between.” What Johnson seems to be getting at are the moral implications of reading, or judging, based on a simplified relationship between the sign and the signified (even if reversed in the Claggartian “ironic” way). Is that “insignificant notation” Barthes referred to–in which the sign is detached, points to nowhere, ultimately escaping judgment–another way of wielding ambiguity in fiction? Does Melville’s purgatorial use of ambiguity through Captain Vere, before the execution is finalized, create the “reality effect” in a story that would otherwise be allegorical and therefore plainly predictive? I don’t think they can be associated so simply, but reading Johnson has helped me rethink what the greater purpose of the “reality effect” might be. I’ve recently become very interested in what exactly makes a work of art (man-made, constructed, artificial by nature) feel “real,” I think especially in the context of virtual realities, the “deepfake,” the drive for immersion and roundabout ways of simulating whatever we want to think of now as “real life.” What is accomplished by getting at the “real” via the fictional or “fake”?

P.S. Sorry for the late-night post! Have been suffering at the hand of nyc housing applications, which I’ll say involves some concrete examples of the tension between two incompatible possibilities. (:

In her work, Melville’s Fist, Barbara Johnson winds up a classic American story and lets it totters off in new directions, playing with language and our concept of the role of characters in texts. Herman Melville’s Billy Budd reveals to us a few notable characters with apparently allegorical and archetypal roles that consumers of literature would quickly identify: Billy Budd, the innocent, naive, face-value do-gooder; John Claggart, the persnickety, paranoid villain; and Captain Vere, the trustworthy, mediating, authority figure. Johnson notes how masterfully Melville upends the perceptions of his cast through the prior two characters’ counter-intuitive actions. Billy, the beautiful and benevolent, kills while Claggart, the schemer, falls victim to an act of violence. Johnson describes this role reversal as a chiasmus, a crossing which breaks these two men into opposing functions. 

Farther along, Johnson expands this idea by explicating how the characters read their setting, circumstances, and each other. She writes, “It seems evidence that Billy’s reading method consists in taking everything at face value, while Claggart’s consists in seeing a mantrap under every daisy” (2330). They have a set intention, a kind of worldview that they purport to use as a lens by which to make meaning of their lives. Johnson notes that despite their own value systems and intentions, both the naive Billy and the contrarian Claggart act, think, and speak in ways that show their limited cohesion and consistency to their reading styles. Billy does not, indeed, take everything at face value, and Claggart maintains a bias – without critiquing or challenging the signs –  towards anything that fits his perception of treachery around every corner. There is a slippery nature to how they interpret the signs around them. They bring their own inconsistencies, multiplicity of logics, and human error to each reading of each other and life aboard the Bellipotent.

Vere, for Johnson, represents a third type of reader who takes into account the political and historical context as well as reads and speaks in an active performative manner distinct of the other characters. She postulates, “Vere, on the other hand, interrogates both past and future for interpretative guidance. While Budd and Claggart thus oppose each other directly, without regard for circumstance or consequence, Vere reads solely in function of the attending historical situation: the…mutinies (2332). He peruses not only the frames of mind and perspectives of the two antagonistic forces but also mulls over meaning within time and space – reading in a multidimensional way, as it were. Johnson aptly addresses how Vere’s poring over the situation in judgment also includes an introspective reading of self and how his interpretative performance will be received and subsequently interpreted itself. The layers pile on. As she explores Billy Budd beyond the limits of allegory and simple significations, meaning and language become playthings for Johnson. Rather than coloring within the lines and parsing out binaries such as knowing vs doing performance vs cognition, Johnson plays with the text and imagines the “deadly space” as “that which, within cognition, functions as an act …that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” (2337). The center of the issue evades and yet within this interior vacuum, rather than the supposed opposing boundaries, there remains a multiplicity of readings and meanings.

Johnson’s whimsy with reading characters as readers themselves is a pleasant and expansive twist that destabilizes limiting understandings of a two-dimensional fashion. This advent with the play of subject and object, language and the looseness of signs, signifiers, and signified, can be amplified further with a play in a different direction – that of the readers as characters, themselves acting, performing within a text. Just as Vere brings a wide context of the sociopolitical atmosphere with his reading, we flesh and blood readers enter the world of Billy Budd and Melville’s Fist with our own lived contexts and outer-world understandings. The physical scribblings on the pages of each work fail to become a text, and thus their characters, readers (or anything/anyone else), until the reader incarnates into said text. How could the meanings of the actions, speech, and personalities of the characters be altered through the interrelationship between each of them and each reader? How do sign, signified, signifier, and the space between and among and outside and inside and through each of these become infleshed and defleshed with each individual reader (and each reading done by one individual)? How can a text be further wound up and unleashed in new, undetermined, unpredictable directions? What are the limits between the “reality” within a work, the reality of the outside readers, and the multiple realities bridging and spinning between them? Just as Vere’s judgment, the act of speak-reading is, in turn, judged and read; perhaps there is some dynamism, reciprocity, and troubling of identifiers between characters as readers and us readers as characters as well.

In Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” he discusses the problem of the “center” in structuralist thinking and how despite the fact that structuralists look to this center for stability and organization, it does not even really exist due to the fact that meaning is fluid and shifting and the center can never be unchanging; it is arbitrary. In his critique of Levi-Strauss, Deridda notes that Levi-Strauss frames incest prohibition as a universal structure that is necessary for the functioning of society. He says that it is a foundational rule that structures kinship and social organization. Deridda argues that that incest taboo cannot be universally structured or fixed since ‘universal truths’ are ever-changing and involve the play of difference and interpretation. I may be over-simplifying or misunderstanding Deridda’s point here, but as I was reading I couldn’t help but think to myself, isn’t incest universally structured in terms of it’s right or it’s wrong?

I had a hard time understanding why Deridda uses this as an example since it does seem to me like a structure that either is or is not. Another example besides incest prohibition I was thinking about were the justice system / morality / laws. To me, this seems like an example that would better fit Deridda’s point: these are structures that are complicated and nuanced in relation to the fact that they are ever-changing, vary from one social structure to another, and have fluidity in terms of cultural norms and meanings. If I were to find some sort of answer to this query in Deridda’s work, he says “It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical conceptualization, which is systematic with the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition of incest” (283-284). My understanding of this notion is that the nature/culture opposition is structured in such a way that it makes certain ideas ‘unthinkable’ such as the origin of the prohibition of incest. The actual original creation of this law or rule that prohibits incest is not something that is thought about, when really it is essential to understanding how the system functions.

I wonder how knowing a system or structure’s origin makes it more ‘thinkable?’ If Deridda is suggesting that structures are fluid and constantly changing, then wouldn’t knowing a structure’s origin be a moot point? In other words, if we take the example of the judicial system, wouldn’t the most recent law established or the most recent changing to a law be the most prevalent to a society or culture rather than the origin of that law? Deridda notes that once Levi-Strauss confronts the implications of the universality of the incest taboo, he has two possible paths. The one he says Levi-Strauss more so takes is that he acknowledges these discoveries but places no real ‘truth value’ on them. He says that Levi-Strauss conserves these older concepts “…within the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments appear more useful” (284). I struggle to grasp why Derrida believes this path is so wrong. If Derrida thinks that structure is unfixed, unstable, and always open to interpretation and meaning, how can any structure or system have any truth value? Shouldn’t he be celebrating the ability to abandon one meaning to move on to another more ‘useful’ one? Or is Derrida insinuating that it is impossible to attribute new meanings to structures without having a fixed point, or origin to jump off of?

In the two Mythologies we read by Roland Barthes, what stood out, after the class discussion, was the difference between the Structuralist approach in “ The World of Wrestling” and the Post-Structuralist approach he takes in “The Eiffel Tower” and in the differences there arises the temporal nature of signs that Culler writes of in regards to Saussure.  In class, it was noted that in “The World of Wrestling” one is left with a sense of Barthes’s ability to “exhaust” wrestling, analyze it to a form of completion and show how as a sign system it is complete as well. The analysis then is not temporal, but only of the spectacle itself as Barthes writes of it. He writes that of the audience in wrestling “what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees (13).”  There is the theatrical element in wrestling, each wrestler conforms to an expectation through their signification. “The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight (16).”  Then, as in the real world, suffering, defeat, and justice are contained and shown to the audience through a match (17). And what Barthes concludes is that wrestling makes reality intelligible, writing “What is portrayed in wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before a panoramic view of the univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction (23).”  Thus Wrestling is a way of giving the viewer a sign system that is completely intelligible, and not muddled, so the structure of wrestling is a truth, or I think this is what Barthes is getting at, and that there is a notion that there are sign systems that are completely understandable and reveal an idyllic, simplified version of “reality” for which the viewer can then use to understand an external reality that is not wrestling.

So in the later Mythology of the Eiffel Tower, Barthes moves away from the concreteness of the structuralist sign toward the emptiness of the post-structuralist one, I think.  Barthes writes, “This pure—virtually empty—sign—is ineluctable, because it means everything.”  This moves away from the concreteness which he posited for wrestling. In the vagueness of the Eiffel Tower then, as a sign, it can come to inhabit so much in the minds of those who think of it, who see it, who think of Paris and who visit the Tower. Similarly, it encompasses both ideas of “seeing” and “being seen” as one can view it from Paris and view Paris from it as it recedes from view. This then allows Barthes to argue that:

“This radiant position in the order of perception gives it a prodigious propensity to meaning: the Tower attracts meaning, the way a lighting rod attracts thunderbolts; for all lovers of signification, it plays a glamorous part, that of pure signifier, i.e., of a form in which men unceasingly put meaning (which they extract at will from their knowledge, their dreams, their history), without this meaning thereby ever being finite and fixed: who can say what the tower will be for humanity tomorrow? But there can be no doubt it will always be something, and something of humanity itself (5).”   

In this turn from the signs and signified in wrestling, which told the spectator how to read reality through wrestling into tidy conclusions, we get the post structural sign, a sign in which the viewer then assigns meaning to the sign and over time those meanings will and can shift, for example the signification of modernity. It is harder to see the tower now, I would argue, as a sign of modernity when we have reached the moon and built buildings like the Burj Khalifa, yet the tower still means something today to those who see it and think of Paris, as Barthes notes. I think this is the main difference between these two mythologies. The shift from concreteness to arbitrariness of signs.

The idea of signs in language over time was also mentioned in the Culler piece on de Saussure in reference to Synchronic and Diachronic perspectives (45-47).  Synchronic being the study of language at a singular moment and Diachronic being the study “of its evolution over time (45).”  Saussure opted for the synchronic study “because language is a wholly historical entity, always open to change, [so] one must focus on the relations that exist in a particular synchronic state if one is to define its elements (47).”  As Barthes uses the methodology of Saussure the Eiffel Tower mythology becomes more complex when one asks how to approach a sign over time.  I would argue that the Post-Structuralist sign, since arbitrary and meaningless, allows for the sign to shift in so many ways, that it becomes unstable, just as the Eiffel Tower is. So my question then is was part of the shift from Structuralism to Post-Structuralism in how to see a sign? Or a combination of seeing with the mass influx of signs in the then modern world? Perhaps in the modern world, the signs worth “mythologizing” are ones that somehow have persevered that transition from more concrete to arbitrary. In my head I am thinking something like a color, from Melville’s chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale” to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.  They expand over time, just as Barthes claims the Eiffel Tower will as well.  Also there is an essayist Eliot Weinberger who has an essay on “The Vortex” whose image and meaning he traces over time and cultures weaving from India to the Aztecs to Ezra Pound.  What then complicates the sign in this sense, in my head at least, is how to write and study one in a realm where there is this sense of “pure signifiers” that then can branch off in any which way as any person assigns some meaning to these “pure signifiers?”  Or perhaps Barthes achieves such a intelligible study of the Tower by looking at what gives it this ability to be a pure signifier as opposed to what all of its significations are. In this case, it would be interesting to see what would happen to wrestling when viewed in this way. Perhaps the viewers don’t leave necessarily with a sense of understanding, but wrestling signifies something else culturally, and viewers can apply what they want to the theatrics they witness?    

Roland Barthes shatters traditional literary interpretation, where meaning originated from the author but was constructed by the reader. In the section, The Death of the Author, Roland states, “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intranstively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, the disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins.” (page 1268) He opens allusion with this denial of the author’s meaning within a text. He reinforces this by declaring, “but there is one place where his multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.” (page 1271) The end of such a monstrosity makes the not ridiculously solitary authoritative interpretation.

In Mythologies, Barthes extends this claim to the mass culture, offering semiotic analysis on the latter. Professional wrestling, instead of being an authentic sport, is dismissed as a symbolic performance since “he combines a sharp eye for the social life of signs with a subtle critque of the naturalizations of the ethnocentric, patriarchal, petit-bourgeois French worldview”. (page 1263) His analysis of Paris Match includes a critique of how the media creates myths to sustain the ideologies of those already dominant. For example, the image of a diverse group of people smiling together in an ad for a company give the illusion of inclusivity while overlooking the company’s history of unfair labor practices or lack of diversity in higher positions.

His theories form the foundation for all literary and cultural studies, impacting reader-response criticism, semiotics, and media analysis. The authority of texts and cultural symbols is thus reframed in accordance with the shifting authority from the author.

In “Melville’s Fist”, Barbara Johnson takes Billy Budd and the subsequent body of criticism as a point of departure to make a series of arguments about reading as judgement and the irresolvable ambiguities inherent in language which reading navigates. Removed from plot, the characters appear like Barthes’ wrestlers, a series of ideal types and perfect signs whose physical qualities map their character. Billy appears to be innocence and truth embodied in a good natured soldier, while Claggart’s untrustworthiness is literally written in his descriptive traits (or lack thereof) . The moment of intersection that reverses these roles and leads Johnson to describe the plot as a chiasmus or “cruci-fiction” occurs when Billy is accused of ‘plotting’ mutiny and strikes Claggart, unintentionally killing him. Captain Vere, “the third reader” of the plot, must make a judgement which goes against his sentiment. He feels that Billy is innocent of wrongdoing, but must be put to death in light of recent history and possible futures resounding from his ‘reading’ or judgement of Billy’s act. In the criticism Johnson surveys, this apparent “gap between being and doing” has been read in two main ways: “the ‘testament of acceptance’ school on the one hand and the ‘testament of resistance’ or ‘irony’ school on the other” (2330). Johnson notes the way in which these camps mirror the reading style of Budd and Claggart in the text, either refusing to see any disjunction between signifier and signified, or reading all signs as arbitrary, with an ironic chasm between signifier and signified.

For Johnson, Captain Vere’s mode of reading is distinct in the way that it is determined not by a characteristic attitude towards signs as motivated or arbitrary, but through his understanding and direct reference to social/martial structure, his role in said structure, recent events, and textual allusion. For Johnson, as for Vere, “arbitrariness and motivation, irony and literality, are parameters between which language constantly fluctuates, but only historical context determines which proportion of each is perceptible to each reader” (2332). Vere is not ex-culpated from his role in the plot’s crucible though, bringing together Budd and Claggart before the blow which makes Vere take on his role as “a reader who kills… precisely by means of speaking” (2333), seeking to bring ambiguity out only to reduce it back into a polarized, and deathly definitive, judgement. 

I’m particularly interested in the way in which Johnson plays these polarities of character and critic to bring out the role of history in ‘reading’ (which may take the form of more ideological criticism, legal judgement, “playing the text” à la Barthes, adaptation, etc.) It seems that these histories can be equally personal or social, with great impact on any interpretive act. A reader familiar with Melville’s earlier work Benito Cereno (which also deals with mis-/reading, mutiny and murder through law) will note that Billy Budd opens with the “handsome sailor” archetype introduced anecdotally through an African sailor the narrator saw fifty years prior, before this archetype is transferred to Budd himself. This reader might reasonably take that as a sign to carry a certain reading through the course of the text simply by virtue of foreknowledge and a reasonable invocation in the opening pages.

*spoiler alert for the excellent film Beau Travail (1999) below*

Similarly, in reading Johnson this week, I found it hard not to wonder if Claire Denis had read the piece prior to writing her film Beau Travail, which is loosely adapted from Billy Budd. Denis’ film reads the text for ambiguity. Set in a French Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti and presented with minimal dialogue, the plot is reduced in concrete facts if not in intensity (the Claggart figure does not die when struck, the Billy figure likely survives his punishment). While the film raises queer and post-colonial aspects latent in Melville to the fore, they are presented without marshaling us towards a singular reading. The film achingly depicts these gaps and ambiguities, which Johnson describes in BB as “…that which, within cognition, functions as an act; it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand.” (2337)

In the film’s final scene, the Claggart figure, Galoup, has been removed from his post due to his actions, he makes his bed and lays in it, clutching a pistol to his chest, a closeup of his twitching bicep cuts to black as “The Rhythm of the Night” by Corona begins. Galoup dances beautifully, violently and ecstatically in an empty night club, in a sequence that could be a dream, a recollection, or an experience of death. The viewer is left with no conclusive ‘blow’ to close the gaps within cognition as act and cognizance in action, instead we are thrown into the space between as the credits roll.

Beau Travail (1999) – Ending

The famous dance scene from Claire Denis’s movie Beau Travail (1999)

There is some irony involved in writing about Friedrich Nietzsche in the context of higher education. After all, he would most likely regard our university — in fact, our way of speaking — as a manifestation of the prison-like “edifice of concepts” built by language (originally) and science (subsequently). For Nietzsche, the original human misfortune starts with the emergence of cognition, which he equates with deception as it deceives humans about the value of pure being. The human intellect, he continues, “shows its greatest strengths in dissimulation, since this is the means to preserve those weaker, less robust individuals who, by nature, are denied horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (753). Nietzsche seems to idealize the state of being pre-cognition (before it gets corrupted by language and reason) where humans experience existence not just as a type of unmediated onslaught of sense impressions and feelings, but also as a struggle for survival. This confrontation of reason and intuition recurs in part 2 of Nietzsche’s essay where he describes the empirical world of reason and concepts as being challenged by the invincible human drive to form metaphors, which persists despite “the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products — concepts — in order to imprison it in a fortress” (759). It is in myth and art, Nietzsche claims, that humans find a new sphere for their drive to form metaphors. In so doing, the “liberated intellect” uses the framework the reasonable man clings to “as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions” (761). Shortly after, Nietzsche harks back to the motif of existential struggle by saying there are eras where “the man of reason and the man of intuition stand side by side,” both seeking “to rule over life. . . .”  The motif of intensity, pure-being and struggle in conjunction with the recurring terms intellect (pejorative) and intuition reminds me of Umberto Eco essay “Ur-Fascism.” In his analysis Eco outlines several characteristic traits that commonly appear in fascist movements. One of those traits is the rejection of modernism, which Eco describes as an aversion to the rationalistic intellectual and philosophical development of so-called Western culture since the Enlightenment (17^th and 18^th century). Fascist movements tend to view this as a descend into degeneracy, and I would argue that Nietzsche, considering his repeated pejorative use of the words intellect and reason, emits a similar rejection of the empirical world. His return to antiquity (myth and arts) as an area for humans to draw on reinforces his rejection of modernism. According to Eco, the cult of action for action’s sake is another common element of fascist movements and understands action as valuable in itself and to be taken without reflection. Eco emphasizes that this is connected to an anti-intellectual, essentially irrational impulse. In this regard we can recognize an additional echo in Nietzsche’s writing; for example, the motif of struggle, intensity and pure-being, or the emphasis on intuition at the expense of reason. The scene where the ”liberated intellect” uses the framework reasonable man clings to as a sort of staging ground for his wild jumble of actions illustrates this in an impressive way. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay should be read as a proto-fascist text; however, it strikes me nevertheless how neatly central points of his argument fit into the structure of fascist thought as described by Umberto Eco.

I just wanted to give kudos in general for a very stimulating batch of posts right out of the gate: you’re all reading/writing/thinking well, and I really look forward to the rest of the term.

A few posts caught my attention for their thematization of particular moments or aspects of theorists’ work, and I wanted to highlight them. They’re not necessarily the “best,” whatever that means (and, full disclosure, I find rankings and quantification of humanistic work, like grades, to be very much a “prison-house” in Nietzsche’s sense), but they’re worth thinking with in various ways:

• Keegan’s post on Nietzsche nicely differentiates the stoner dorm-room vibes of the first part of the essay (“a leaf…. [exhales and coughs lightly] is just an abstraction of, like, all the leaves ever”) and the more subtle arguments about the “man of intuition” at the end. Though he also notes, in ways that anticipate our reading in the Marxist tradition, that N’s individualism precludes thinking about collective agency and structural oppression.
• Kate’s post on poetry and linearity/syntagmatics in de Saussure speculates on how line breaks in poetry both call attention to the fundamental structuring force of syntax and the liberating/enlivening things that happen when poets use line breaks to underscore and problematize linearity in language.
• Chloee’s examination of “drive” in Nietzsche’s essay takes a rather subtle moment in the essay–N’s early claim of a “drive” to metaphorical representation”–and speculates on what it might meant to put metaphorization up there with, say, needing food and shelter.
• Ian’s reading of de Saussure and Nietzsche, which draws on Culler’s work and emphasizes the way N’s valorization of disruptive uses of metaphor anticipates experiments in non- and antireferential art by Surrealists and others in the early 20thC.

A final PSA for reading each other’s work to the extent you have time and leaving comments on each other’s work. This is not a requirement, but I’ll begin sprinkling in public comments from here on out and invite you to do the same. I won’t grade your work (or even “grade” it) in public, which would be unethical and illegal, but I will kick around ideas with all of you in a nonevaluative mode of intellectual exchange.

After class today, there’s at least one question that remains for me about the Nietzsche essay. Nietzsche sets up his argument by posing a central question: “where on earth can the drive to truth possibly have come from?” (753). But by the end of the essay, I had totally forgotten that this was (one of) his animating queries! The question can be read a number of ways–for example, does Nietzsche aim to locate a historical, biological, sociological or even psychoanalytic point of origin for the truth drive? Why pose this question and then (kind of) abandon it? Thinking it through, I wonder if the question is primarily a provocation. Ultimately, Nietzsche seems to use it as a rhetorical strategy that allows him to move away from the truth drive’s genesis and instead to identify the truest human impulse as one towards abstraction. Nietzsche calls the drive to form metaphors “that fundamental human drive which cannot be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves” (759). Part of what makes this drive a fundamental one is that the first metaphor is baked into the process of perception (“the stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image”), then that metaphor is doubled by the process of communication/language (“the image is then imitated by a sound”) (755). 

Given this, maybe Nietzsche is arguing that what we conceive of as an impulse towards truth is in reality an innate drive towards abstraction. It’s provocative to name metaphor as the “fundamental” human drive. (It makes me laugh, for example, to think about metaphor being placed among the basic hierarchy of human needs–food, water, shelter, etc.) But by emphasizing the centrality of metaphor to the identity of human beings, Nietzsche emphasizes his argument that humans have little relationship to “the essence of things” (756). In this way, he suggests that humans might move through the world without ever actually intersecting with its objects, with the thing itself, with truth. Instead, we’re floating around in our own consciousness, which is walled off even from our own essential bodily processes. (753). I’d be curious to hear whether others think Nietzsche answers his own question about the origins of the truth drive, or if it really is just a way into his argument.

Ultimately, the impression that I’m left with from the essay is a call to remember the ways in which metaphor is inherent to the processes of human cognition. Nietzsche bemoans the fact that we “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions” (756). I think he’s asking us to move a little closer to the animal kingdom, to our bodies, our senses. What would it be like to let ourselves experience a singular leaf for what it is? That would require, of course, not naming or recognizing a leaf as “a leaf” at all. What would it be like to “forget this primitive world of metaphor” and return to the “hot, liquid stream” of our imagination? (757). Nietzsche argues that “human beings allow themselves to be lied to” in both our dream and waking states (753), but how can we avoid that lie when abstraction is our most fundamental impulse?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is a barrage against conventional morality, religion, and even the very foundation of Western thought itself with overcoming oneself and individual power. He renounced the notion of absolute truth and instead purported that the core motivating force in human life he termed the will to power. Whereas philosophers before him had postulated that human behavior was impelled either by reason or survival instincts, Nietzsche’s philosophy was based on the premise that people are essentially driven to assert their strength, create, and dominate their environment. This is not just restricted to physical power but encompasses the intellect and artistic expression, ambition, and even the drive for self-improvement. One of Nietzsche’s most famous declarations is the death of God, which he saw as the collapse of traditional religious authority in the modern world. As stated in the Norton Anthology, he says that “the murdered and resurrected god whose myth embodies this worldview is a tragic Dionysus, not the comic Christ” (page 739), illustrating his beliefs on this change in society’s future in more detail.

He claimed that the human society had gradually lost reliance on religious morality to such an extent that it became incapable of living with a situation of existential indeterminacy, and humanity without God was at liberty to fashion its own values. He viewed this condition as both crisis and opportunity-that is, not only did a lack of a guiding religious conception possibly lead humanity into nihilism, but in doing so opened the door of creation to free will, inventing meaning through the human art form. Not clinging to irrelevant moral systems stood out as irrelevant for human betterment. Arguably, an important part of Nietzsche’s polemic against morality derives from what he calls his master-slave morality theory. He believed that conventional morality had its roots in two opposing perspectives.

Master morality, with which he associated strength, creativity, and self-overcoming, was the morality of the noble and the powerful. By contrast, slave morality-originated in weakness, resentment, and the yearning for revenge against the strong. He connected this morality with religious traditions, especially Christianity, which he saw as grounded in humility, obedience, and self-denial. It states in the Norton Anthology that, “This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in humankind, where deception, flattery, lying and cheating, speaking behind…-in short, the constant fluttering of human beings around the one flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that there is virtually nothing which defies understanding so much as the fact that an honest and pure drive towards truth should ever have emerged in them” (page 753). Nietzsche believed these values actually perpetuated passivity and hindered the best of what humanity could achieve. He preferred an ethic based on self-will and individual greatness. It was within this context of a moral world in disintegration that Nietzsche brought up the concept of the Übermensch (Overman): an individual beyond conventional human limitations who would create his own values. The Übermensch is dependent on no authorities, be it religion or tradition, and instead carves his way, embracing struggle and self-overcoming. Nietzsche believed that mankind should strive to become this superior being rather than being stuck with conventional morality and mediocrity.

Later on, his idea would be misinterpreted and abused, especially in political contexts, but actually, it had to do with personal empowerment and the quest for greatness. Another profound idea of Nietzsche is the eternal recurrence, which is a thought experiment that poses the question of whether one would be willing to relive their life exactly as it is, over and over again, for eternity. According to the Norton Anthology, “this man, who otherwise seeks only honest, truth, freedom from illusions, and protection from the onslaughts of things which might distract him, now performs, in the midst of misfortune, a masterpiece of pretence, just as the other did in the midst of happiness” (page 762). It makes the individual confront whether he or she is really living in a manner he or she would want to repeat. It dares people to take responsibility for their choices and to live authentically. The work of Nietzsche remains influential in existentialism, postmodernism, and literary criticism. His ideas sharply question the concepts of truth, morality, and human potential, urging one to break free from conformity and embrace self-overcoming. It is through these radical critiques that he continues to inspire those seeking deeper meaning in life and the courage to create their own values.