I just wanted to give a shout-out to some exemplary posts this time around. I’m really impressed with your hard work and creative thinking and could have picked almost anyone’s work this time. But these stood out for various reasons, so check out:

• Lizzie’s discussion of Marx and “alienation,” which gets at Marx’s attempt to move beyond “idealism” and link the mental and material aspects of “alienation” in labor.
• Lei’s fascinating reading of the video game “What Remains of Edith Finch.” The game features a sequence in which we “play” alienated labor–with disastrous results–in ways that amount to a mode of ideological critique.
• Evelyn and Tenzin took on Benjamin: Tenzin’s post explains the workings of “aura” beautifully and Evelyn’s unpacks Benjamin’s borrowing from Freud to posit an “optical unconscious” that photography and film render available for our analysis.
• Ayesha and James glossed Althusser (and props for tackling this tough text prior to our discussion!): Ayesha emphasized the ideological force of schooling and James, taking a different tack on the same topic, wonders what Althusser would do with the phenomenon of “woke” liberals and leftists in the academy teaching students to question the dominant order, just like we’re doing right now!

I came across this piece in the Times this weekend** and thought about our reading of Benjamin’s famous argument about “aura” and art.

As we’ll explore Monday, Benjamin notes the accelerating trend as of the 1930s towards the “mechanical reproduction” of art: taking the singular thing whose value and effect on viewers was enhanced by its “aura,” its quasi-sacred status by virtue of its being rare, singular, available on to certain people in certain spaces at certain times. You had to go to Delphi to consult the oracle in Greek antiquity; you have to go to the Metropolitan Museum to see Van Gogh today.

Benjamin is thinking about the way the auratic artwork can itself be mechanically reproduced (through engraved repros in the 19thC; on tote bags and posters and coffee mug and websites today). He’s even more interested in “born mechanically reproduced” artforms that started to emerge with the printing press in the 15th century, photography in the mid-19thC and then the phonograph, the cinema, and increasingly cheap and ubiquitous forms of printing of photographs (think newspapers and slick mags) in the early 20th.

So what about Beeple? Beeple is a digital artist who relentlessly generates digital artworks that themselves are made of “born digital” memes, logos, and other flotsam and jetsam of the digital world, reworked into (often very crude) remixes. So, as the article points out, he is part of a long-standing tradition in art invested in the stripping of the aura, so to speak, and posing as an insurgent, democratic force in the rarified art world.

But hold the phone: Beeple has become a very wealthy man through the creating of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) using blockchain technology. Read the article if you’re interested in the details (or just read the piece in the Onion); for our our purposes, the significant thing is that he thereby creates a new aura of sorts, making this synthetic, virtual, digital object something as singular, distant, and inaccessible to the masses as the Mona Lisa. What would Benjamin do with this? It’s fascinating to think about the afterlife of the social, economic, and cultural forces that Benjamin tackles in the 1930s at this much later stage of development, where so much of the particulars is different but some of the basic underpinnings of Benjmin’s analyis still apply.

**Note that all Hunter students can get free digital access to the New York Times through the library. This is basic “equipment for living” as literary theorist Kenneth Burke said of literature: get your subscription and get in the habit of reading it!

The Norton’s excerpt from Marx’s German Ideology contains the classic passage comparing “ideology” to a “camera obscura.”  What, you may ask, is a camera obscura?  Here’s an image:

[description from the Cabinet of Wonders blog]: The camera obscura works under the same principles as the pinhole camera: you make a small hole in the side of a box (either a real box or a room-sized box) and the light outside will get in through the hole and project itself onto a piece of paper or a wall, showing you a perfect image of the scene on the outside of the box. Because light travels in a straight line, and because the hole is small, the light on one side of the scene will have to come through at an opposing angle from the light on the other side of the scene.

As we will discuss, the metaphor points at the way cultural representations preserve a kind of fidelity to social reality (i.e., the representation issues from the real thing) but in a distorted manner.  So the work of “ideological criticism” is to re-establish the relationship between reality and representation, a job that’s much more complex in most cases than the simple two-dimensional “flip” in a camera obscura would suggest.

Just wanted to take a minute to thank you all for your excellent work on the third blog post. Literally every single one of you is showing impressive effort, and it’s exciting to see you writing your way towards increasing clarity and master of these often abstract and difficult texts.

As before, I wanted to highlight a couple of authors who really crushed it this time. As always, I’m not ranking here or laying out a template for others to follow, but just shining a light on a couple of the many posts I found insightful:

• Sofia’s post really embodies the ludic (>Latin, ludus, “play” or “game”) aspects of deconstruction as a critical mode with her self-reflexive riff on different ways of reading Johnson reading Melville. Really fun but also really on-point in terms of understanding what’s going on.
• Rich helps us to see de Saussure’s fingerprints all over Barthes’s reading of photographs. Really crystalline example of structuralism from “under the hood.”
• James’s post bravely plunges into the latter part of Johnson’s argument as she examines how Melville has us “judge judgment” through the figure of Vere.

Just wanted to follow up on Sofia’s interesting questions about the use of “mantrap” in Melville’s text. So of course I had to consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), every professor and poet’s favorite toy.

A “mantrap” is just what it sounds like, literally speaking: a trap to catch humans. I would love to research the history of such traps, which is surely bound up in histories of enslavement and exploitation. More to the point, it appears that “mantrap” referred to a conniving woman, especially one who wants to trick a man into marriage. Here we get a clearer sense of how Claggart’s fascination with Budd might have some erotic overtones in ways that critics like Eve Sedgwick and others have explored.

Finally, for those interested in how reading-as-play a la Roland Barthes might actually look, you can see my experiment with Hunter students transforming Billy Budd into a role-playing-game like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a bit hard to “read” as opposed to “playing” it, but that’s part of the point. At any rate, feel free to poke around: basically every player plays a role in (Budd, Claggart) or around (Melville himself, an editor of one of text’s editions, a composer turning it into an opera, a critics interpreting it) the text. Players “move” and interact by writing short texts “in character.”

Check out the obituary of J. Hillis Miller, a towering figure in the “Yale School,” along with Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida (whose work we’ll read soon). Miller and his confreres revolutionized the way we read in ways we’ll explore in some detail through the work of Derrida and Barbara Johnson (one of the first generation of critics trained at Yale by Miller et al.).

Bonus points for anyone who can find the Nietzsche reference in the obit…

I’ve just finished commenting on all the posts I’ve received and wanted to share a few thoughts and props:

• I’m impressed with the quality of your reading and writing over all: Nietzsche’s work is challenging, and many of your are reading/writing/thinking with great sophistication already, often pioneering into areas we left unexplored in our Zooms.
• Most of you grasped and nicely explained Nietzsche’s central polemic here, which is of course that “truth” as expressed in language and concepts is a network of “lies.” Thus, he’s not criticizing “liars” and urging them to tell the truth. If anything, it’s implicit that “liars” at least know they’re lying, whereas “truth-tellers” deceive themselves about the lying their language does.
• Relatively few of you ventured out into Nietzsche’s arguments about the implications of this first argument. What do we do if all our thinking and speaking yields “lies”? To review, and to make a long story very short, he explores the pathos and potential of the idea that humans are “architects” with language, and as such “superior to the bee” in that we create “hives” out of nothing. But when we forget that our constructions are just that–constructions–we imprison ourselves and live deadened lives. Instead, he wants us to boldly build and rebuild our reality, becoming people of “intuition” rather than solely pursuing the path of “reason” as modernity dictates we do.
• If you gave me something, you should have gotten something: a feedback sheet via Dropbox/email that I’ll continue using for you all term. Please reach out if you have questions.

All of you achieved some measure of success here, but a few students’ responses were especially keen, so I recommend that you check them out:

• Lizzie sums up the argument and closes with a convincing defense of how creative writers embody Nietzsche’s elevation of the person of “intuition” at the end of his essay.
• Evelyn compiles some well-chosen evidence and then closes with a provocative riff on what Nietzsche would think about extra-linguistic modes of expression, like music and dance. Great example of establishing the argument, then pushing beyond it to explore implications.
• Jason gives a thorough explanation of the argument that glosses the “reason” v “intuition” contrast nicely.
• Ayesha’s post is probably the most detailed walk-through of the argument, and she ends with a nice riff on style.

I’m not proposing these examples as cookie cutters for anyone, but I do think they make for valuable reading that we can learn from both in terms of sharper readings of the essay and of rhetorical examples to draw from. Thanks, you four!

The English department has a wide range of prizes and awards granted each year in the spring. If you have something you’ve written (or will write this term) that you’re proud of, put your hat in the ring. Details here:

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/english/student-opportunities/prizes-awards

In his essay “On Truth and Lying in a non-moral sense” Nietzsche delves into the complicated web of “truth”. He sets the basis for the essay by explaining that our fundamental understanding of reality is a fallacy. This fallacy occurs because how we experience reality is through our language and cognition. He posits that language does not equate to reality. Language is a human construct that we developed to make palatable the unreal or that which we are cognizant of. Say, for example, I was to give you a green pear for breakfast. You are cognizant that it is a green pear. But how do you know this object is green? or a pear? Nietzsche suggests that there is no point of creation for anything we know to be a fact. Rather the things we considered facts are watered-down versions of themselves or what he calls “metaphors”. In which an object exists and to understand said object we have to associate it with one of our senses and so the object goes through many transformations because no one sensory experience outweighs another. Thus, the “green pear” essentially stems off into three categories—our visual image of the green pear, the words “green pear” and the actual green pear. Though all three categories are of the same object, not one of them correlates to one another. The way we view the green pear matches our cognition; the words “green pear” is our attempt to encage the object in the construct of language, and the green pear itself is “theoretically” a green pear because we know it to be a green pear—a green pear is a green pear because it is a green pear. Challenging this statement would lead us to the realization that we have no basis on which to call a green pear a green pear because we have no knowledge of its “essential quality”. Consequently, does any single one of these categories outweigh another? Or does any single category make another less true? No, because they all form parts of the truth, yet still parts of the truth do not equate to the “truth”. This, Nietzsche explains, is the ultimate fallacy. We are so far gone into our intrinsic belief of the truth that we have forgotten that the basis of what forms our truths (the former 3 categories) are deceptions. A paradox of sorts, because then that would make us “architects” of our truth, and would that then not make us the point of creation if our induvial realities are subject to our discretion? If I give you a green pear for breakfast and you say, “no this is not a green pear this is a purple raspberry”, does it much matter who is being honest and who is being deceitful? There is room enough for more than one truth because no one reality is a shared experience.