While I work my way through your very interesting final projects, I wanted to share a piece in yesterday’s NYT** about “slop.” I was dimly aware of the term from my teens at home, but this piece stretches the boundaries of “slop” to embrace a wide range of cultural fields and practices in ways that resonate with a number of things that we read. The author points to “slop bowls”: the trend towards modular fast-food options that basically throw abstract selectable components into a uniform bowl, often with formulas on the wall–PROTEIN + GREEN + RICE + ADD-INs–like a chemistry lab. And to “fast fashion” as a form of “slop” dress: ultra-cheap mail order from Temu et al. makes it possible to continually wear new things that … all look the same, are ill-fitted, and have a bland color palette. And especially the algorithmically served and limitless procession of cheaply-produced (and often AI-made) video content that’s designed to keep us minimally engaged so we remain on the platform and have our “behavioral surplus” extracted, kind of like unwitting mental plasma donation.

The piece name-checks Lacan, briefly, on the babble or “filler” analysands sometimes produce, as a form of “slop,” but for me, the closer theoretical cousins are the “cruel optimism” of Berlant, where what we supposedly want (new ‘fits, dopamine hits) hurts us, and Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” revision of Marx’s “alienated labor.” In a slop-filled cultural sphere, we experience an alienation from even consumption, where the things we desire and buy have some of the empty/abstract qualities of abstract waged “labor power” that Marx attributes to mid-19thC modern labor.

Enjoy your slop, everyone, and have a great summer.

** You know, right, that you can get free digital access to the NYT via Hunter’s Library, right? Take advantage while you can!!

We won’t have much time to review biographical details today, so I wanted to share these moving tributes from THE NATION,from academics, writers, and activists, to the late, great Lauren Berlant (who died in 2021).

Ahead of Monday’s class, I wanted to share a few links that might help you better grasp what Mulvey and Silverman are getting at in their revisions of Lacan’s work:

Here’s a splendid 20 min lecture on Mulvey’s argument. The lecturer has an extensive array of podcasts on hundreds of theoretical pieces, including some stuff that we’ve read together, here.

Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

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And here are some examples (with very little contextualization) from the kinds of classic Hollywood cinema that Mulvey analyzes:

Laura Mulvey-Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema examples

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And here’s a moving short piece on the model and actress Brooke Shields’ reflections on her being rendered as an object for others’ scopophilia in today’s New York Times. It’s not super theoretical but does convey a vivid sense of the human cost of the patriarchal cinematic apparatus that Mulvey analyzes [remember that you can get free digital access via the Library’s site]:

Opinion | Brooke Shields, Social Media and the Public’s Withering Gaze (Published 2023)

Some kids raised in the spotlight feel that their formative years were stolen.

Finally, here’s Hunter Library’s copy of the Harun Farocki film that Silverman close-reads in her excerpt:

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For problems with your NetID or password contact the ICIT Help Desk. Doctoral students from other campuses taking classes at Hunter should have their professors request off-campus access with us.

On THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS:

1. If there’s one thing you knew about Freud going in, it was the idea of the “Oedipus Complex.” What struck you about the way Freud uses a literary text, Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus the King, to make generalizations about the structure of the psyche? How does he explain the sustained power of Sophocles’s work? What’s the substance of the comparison between Oediupus and his much later counterpart, Shakespeare’s Hamlet?

2. As anyone who has ever dreamed knows, our dreams come to us in a fragmented, scattered, often nonsensical form. What does Freud do to demystify this “manifest content” that we cling to so tenuously upon waking? What are some of the elements of the “grammar” or “rhetoric” of dreams that Freud gives us?

On “Fetishism”

1. What do fetishes mean, according to Freud, and what do they do for the subjects who desire them? What is the “meaning and purpose” of every fetish, as Freud puts it, and how does he explain the amplitude, the sheer force, of the desire fetishists feel for their objects?

2. Like Marx, Freud puzzles over the “queer” way certain things seem to possess values that are irrational or untraceable for certain subjects. Unlike Marx, Freud struggles to fix this value in a stable way, try as he might. What are some of the problems Freud encounters in trying to explain fetishism? What strikes you as some of the limitations or problems in his conclusions? To circle back to the beginning, what is the problem with having a fetish in the first place, for Freud?

On “The Mirror Stage…”

1. We think of mirrors as a primitive technology for giving us back to ourselves, so to speak. At the risk of circularity, mirrors mirror, allowing us to admire ourselves. What does Lacan do to shatter this simplistic idea? What happens when a 6-18 month-old stands in front of a mirror? What is the relationship between the real, living body and its “specular” image?

2. We think of mirrors as passive things, as a means of showing what’s there. But Lacan emphasizes the way mirrors work to produce something that wasn’t there before. How does this work, in his argument? Bonus points if your answer contains the phrase “pigeon gonads.”

I hope everyone enjoyed a bit of a break and/or celebrated holidays with loved ones. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow to start over again, with our third major unit of the course, one on ideas about the “psyche,” the “subject,” and “affect.” This unit will range widely in terms of philosophical method and discipline, ranging from psychology to literary criticism (of course) to cinema studies. Tomorrow we’ll examine some foundational texts that, beginning in 1900 with Freud’s landmark book, The Interpretation of Dreams, initiates a new discourse about language, mind, and selfhood, one that is as foundational in its way as the parallel initiatory work of Marx/Engels and Nietzsche/de Saussure.

We’ll cover all this tomorrow (or as much as we can get to), but I wanted to share a couple of links and resources that might be helpful:

The New York Times had a piece last year  on renewed interest in Freudian models for psychotherapy and in the culture more broadly. Enjoy!

[Also, I’m officially reminding you that you all have free digital access to the NYT from the Library (works for computers, iOS, and Android devices).]

In case anyone’s not clear on the “rebus” analogy in Freud’s excerpt from The Interpretation of Dreams, here’s an example:  

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:

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).

Our LINKS page has a couple of podcasts that contain useful lectures on Freud, Lacan, and psychoanalysis more broadly. For convenience, here they are again:

• Philosophy of Psychoanalysis: Nina McIlwain’s charming podcast lectures giving broad overview of themes in psychoanalytic thought.
• Lectures on Lacan : Samuel McCormick’s close readings, with a reading group of practitioners, of key Lacan texts.

Both lecturers are dynamic, charming, and give a fairly accessible overview of key texts. McIlwain’s is more straightforwardly academic, as one might expect from an actual advanced undergraduate course, providing review of fundamental texts and giving a survey of the field in the aggregate. McCormick’s is more oriented towards psychoanalytic practice (though he’s a scholar of media and not a therapist himself), but gives admirably close readings of many, many of Lacan’s seminars and other writings.

HI 702ers:

I wanted to alert you to a needs-based cash award that the Department is offering for the first time, due to the generous donation of an anonymous alum of Hunter. Details are available via the application link…

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… but, in short, all you give is a 300-word personal statement that describes your financial need, and what you get, if selected, is money (a variable amount, since we try to spread funds equitably among all worthy candidates).

Feel free to email me with questions and spread the word.

Just for fun…

Marx and Engels Overview

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.

A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site.  In what follows, I will outline three things:

• a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
• a quick primer on how to create your first post
• a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post

First things first: why blog?

1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.  
2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences.  In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible.  And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class.  For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) you are free to create your own Commons name/avatar as you please, so you can use a pseudonym if you like; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class.  If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me.
3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future 306ers to see.
4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.

What makes for an excellent post?  For this class, posts should:

• contain at least 400 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
• explain a given text’s argument (or part of an argument), using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
• engage that argument critically, noting its limitations, its links to other texts we’ve read, its unstated assumptions, etc.

Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that gives some sense of what I’m looking for. Since we’re using contract grading, anything in the A-B range below is “satisfactory” for contract purposes.

What do I write about? You are free to choose any focus you wish and to write about any of the texts we’re reading in any combination. A couple of suggestions:

• You may write about what we’re about to discuss our what we’ve just discussed. I prefer that you not write about something we’ve discussed long ago. So, for Friday, you may write about Nietzsche or about de Saussure. By the time Blog Post #2 rolls around, I don’t want to hear about Nietzsche, since we’ll have moved on.
• Be careful how much you bite off. It’s better to “do more with less” than the opposite here. So a close examination of de Saussure is probably a better idea than a breezy, loose comparison of Nietzsche, de Saussure, and Culler, in which each gets a sentence or two.
• The perfect is the enemy of the good. Getting zeroes in the gradebook for the posts is deadly. Better to dash of something that’s not your best work than to leave it blank. And it’s good discipline: no one feels like they “got it” after reading Lacan for the first time, so writing your way towards clarity, no matter how messily, is valuable.
• Use the study questions: it’s perfectly permissible–even suggested–to simply answer one of the study questions in your blog post, or to use it as a springboard for a more complex argument. They’re there, so use them!

Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post.  I’ve annotated it using the hypothes.is tool, so you can see what makes it exemplary.  And remember: it’s not an exercise in cookie-cutting: your results may vary, and there are lots of ways to write an excellent post.