Halberstam has written an amazing piece of literature which has been insightful to say the least. First and foremost, she explains her primary aim of the essay which involves addressing and conveying the relationships of men, women and what she calls and to me should be a factual term “female masculinity”. This term is the essence of her written masterpiece. She says people see female masculinity in a social and political form as ugly. This makes sense because as she brought up social and political power she addressed white male heterosexuality. I myself agree with all of her points that she laid out before me. In addition, women and female masculinity were criticized and even discriminated women who acted more masculine. This is the false masculinity as oppose to male masculinity which is called authentic or real masculinity. So when she brings up the good the bad and the ugly there are meanings for all three categories which she dives into. The good represents what white male heterosexual constructed social and political power is and that only white male masculinity is good. The bad is the false masculinity as called female masculinity. What society did not recognize or bother to accept is that there are men who are feminine even if they are heterosexual and there are females that act masculine even if they are heterosexual. In other words there is no real category to place each sex as to erotic excitement or masculinity and femininity. Also all masculinity is masculinity. Men or women. And vice versa. She started giving vivid examples through different movies. What her argument is that in every triangle of two men and a women in the movies they always have the man wining the woman with the heterosexual fantasy. What she does with the triangle is interesting. She says if men can act more feminine and masculine then the lesbian woman will be attracted to them or have a chance at them being attracted to the male. This raised some eyebrows and gave me a better grasp at the reading material. Now the ugly side represents how men viewed female masculinity. They showed examples of men showing there disgust for the female because she had a mustache. There are women who have hair on their bodies, but society looks at that as disgusting. Then she asks a very important question. Men’s body represent good health and beauty while women’s represent ugliness. So this was a way of putting down females and show the narcissist mind of the male. Interesting information. Thank you for the reading professor.

Sex, gender, and sexuality are very common words used in our current society. However, we intertwine the meaning of each word and mistakenly use each one of them. In other words, we tend to think they are all the same. But, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick clarifies this in her book. Sex is a biological differentiation between individuals who have the chromosomes XX and those who have the XY chromosome and their respective genital organs (Sedgwick 2570).  So what we call sex is just “chromosomal sex.” On the other hand, gender is a socially constructed (Sedgwick 2751). It is a set of cultural beliefs that we stick to chromosomal sex. Meanwhile, sexuality has to do with identification, genital sensations, and practice that we do for pleasure and/or reproduction (Sedgwick 2752). Society has tough us that female/male gender formation over sex are opposites but this is not actually true. The only opposite relationship among these terms is between sex and sexuality.

Due to our misuse of the terms, the relationship between “sex” and “gender” is misinterpreted. There is not opposite relation between chromosomal sex and gender. To be more accurate, chromosomal sex is the raw material in which gender is constructed. As Sedgwick explains, gender elaborates a concept of contradiction between the individuals with XX chromosomes and XY chromosomes. But although they are distinctive, there are no characteristics that suggest a contradiction. The belief that male and female are opposites only exist within the confines of t gender concept and it is used to control the power socioeconomic status of individuals in society. For instance, Sedgwick says, “the purpose of that strategy has been to gain analytic and critical leverage on the female-disadvantaging social arrangements that prevail in a given time in a given society.” In other words, male and female are not opposites. It is just a belief within gender to control female’s status in society. With this said, let’s look at the only contradictive relationship stated by Sedgwick.

Sexuality is the very opposite of what we call chromosomal sex. Sedgwick states that sexuality “could occupy, instead, even more than ‘gender’ the polar of the relational….” (2472). Our species, like most species in this planet, come in two sexes. Sex allows the reproduction of the species. On the other hand, sexuality has to do with how we experiences pleasure through genital formation with whom we decided to do this with. While sex is the most predetermined, physically rooted, and innate while sexuality is the most aleatory, symbolically infused, and learned (Sedgwick 2472). In addition, there are only two sexes and it is already predetermined. Nevertheless, sexuality is a matter of choice and identity, and there are many different kinds of sexuality. Now let’s look at the relationship between gender and sexuality.

If gender does not have a reciprocal relationship with sex unlike sexuality, then what is the relationship of gender to these concepts? Gender is socially constructed to control us and prevent a direct connection between sex and sexuality. Sedgwick says “gender is definitionally built into determinations of sexuality, in a way that neither of them is intertwined with…” (Sedgwick  2473). In other words, that gender is limiting our thinking to just male/female and heterosexual/homosexual concepts of sexuality. But, it does not allow us to think about other types of sexuality.  That is why we tend to not grasp the concept of alloerotic. We can also see that gender tries to enclose different types of sexuality within its confines. For instance, we see terms such as female masculinity or make femininity in references to Judith Halberstam’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

For my Archival Research class we just had to read about feminist historiographers using distant reading. The entire article was about incorporating and amending feminist methodologies for physical archives in digital ones and finding digital sources that would diversify and expand their research. Distant reading was one of the topics they brought up and I was excited to see it in this sort of practice. The goal of many feminist rhetoricians is to “recover” lost histories of women, that have been silenced in all sorts of ways. It focuses intensely on the individual stories of women; this is completely opposite in distant reading which Moretti calls a collective system, it’s entire purpose is to see the whole system in order to identify patterns. The authors of the article admit that on the surface distant reading goes against their values but could be useful in “exploring the circulation of the women’s text…of how women’s texts have appeared and traveled across time and space.” The researchers used a program called the Ngram Reader, which “reads” Google books for particular terms. The historiographers searched for Aspasia, the rhetorical teacher of Pericles. Information of this rhetor is quite slim and relies on the “accounts of others from Plato to Plutarch.” In searching Aspasia’s name they weren’t able to discover any new information about the real Aspasia but they did see when she had peaks of interest. For example, she had her highest peak in the 1870s, in which, the researchers  discovered, that her romantic relationship with Pericles was written about in two novels.

Despite the lack of new information, the feminist historiographers found distant reading useful in seeing how this woman was written about through history. Also, its a useful tool for other historiographers to discover how and what women wrote and spoke about, and how this information has been remembered and rewritten. However, the authors also mention that the source they used, the Google corpus, isn’t a perfect and unbiased, as they gather their texts from libraries that don’t keep large collections of women authors, so the information some feminist researchers may be looking for won’t be represented. Maybe, this is the hopefulness of distant reading. Yes, looking at a select few individual texts won’t give you an accurate view of the novels published at certain times, but we can’t say that distant reading does that exactly either. As men tried to push women out of the publishing world; they could of also pushed them out of institutions that held their work, pushing them out of the corpus used for distant reading. This is not to say Moretti thinks the program is absolute; for example, the pattern of the sudden disappearance of genres is not fully understood by him yet. I do think the article makes really good use of his method. The researchers are searching for a “pattern as a whole”, in looking for the ways these women’s words were rewritten. In combing with Moretti the feminist historiographers could even look at what genres women were pulled to throughout history, in attempts to get published or various cultural reasons. Overall, they created another possible way this data could be used for interpretation.

Lacan’s mirror stage involves the formation of the Ideal- I, which becomes the idealized version of ourselves. The mirror itself gives the baby nothing but, from it, the baby projects a fictional version of themselves on this visual image. The perfect Ideal-I isn’t the baby’s true self, which is just an uncoordinated mess. Similarly, Zizek’s Lady is fiction, the knight’s mirror. She is just another reflection for the knight to see a perfected version of himself.  She gives the knight nothing; she is a cold empty character, derived of any substance, but the knight projects this role onto her. She is just a representation of the ideal woman who will complete the knight. In day-to-day conversations, I hear people still sort of talk about this the idea of finding your soul mate that will complete you, or make your half a whole. It’s the same idea with the knight; through attracting the Lady’s perfection he will become the perfect man. The baby as well sees itself as a totality, a complete whole, in the mirror. The act of courtly love is never about her desires and wants of the knight but his desires and attempts to woo her. Even descriptions of her are empty; she’s never described in her strengths or talents but only as how she is the dream woman of the knight and how he tries to court her.

The Lady, like the Ideal-I is inaccessible. Lacan describe the relationship of the subject and its idealized version as asymptotical due to their inability of meeting together.  The Lady is often married in stories of courtly love and is even inaccessible in the way she’s approached. Zizek mentions, in order to get to the Object Lady the knight must use detours because “proceeding straight on ensures that we[ the knight] misses the target.’(pg2413).  The knight trying to get to his idealized woman would fail since she’s inherently empty and he would realize this as soon as he tries. But, according to Zizek, through these detours and grand gestures of attempting to court her he would actually create the Object Lady. I found this really similar to the subject and Ideal-I in Lacan’s mirror stage. First, Zizek describes the Object as a “distorted form”; in actuality this is the Ideal-I. It’s a distorted image of who the baby actually is. Also, when a baby first sees their reflection I would imagine they would try to touch it. Touching the mirror is the same as the knight proceeding straight toward the Lady. They miss the target, in order for the baby to make contact with this ideal self it sees it needs to take detours that ultimately don’t lead it to the ideal-I either. Zizek talks about the creation of artificial hindrances to give the illusion that the object is accessible. This was something I found quite interesting. I think, I remember Professor Allred mentioning that the Ideal-I isn’t directly accessible in our consciousness. I found this funny because when I first read about the Ideal-I, I immediately thought about the way I think. I always tend to think “If I were smarter/better at zyx, such and such situation wouldn’t happen” and I guilt myself, because I haven’t become this person! In reality, this ideal version of me is ridiculous and inaccesible, and even if I were to become “better” person, I still wouldn’t be satisfied, if the situation happened or not. This idea goes back to Zizek’s idea of artificial hindrance, using fake obstacles to make certain ideas about ourselves or our desires more manageable.

The mirror stage also reminded me of the masochism present in courtly love. Zizek says that masochism “is made to measure the victim”; the victim decides the limits within the contract they start with the master. The baby in the mirror stage parallels this, they initiate contact with this image, which ultimately serves as the face of their desire(d self). Also, the imago doesn’t create the parameters of the dynamic, which would be impossible since it doesn’t exist until this moment. The baby, like the victim, is never able to fully satisfy themselves in this situation, as Zizek says the “masochist constantly maintains a kind of reflective distance.”

These processes also exist as means of self-externalization. For Zizek, the victim externalizes their intimate desires, which become objects, bartered and limited with contracts. For Lacan, the mirror stage serves to establish a connection between the baby and its world, a connection between the Innenwelt and Umwelt.

The mirror stage and masochism are also described as theatrical. Lacan calls the mirror stage “a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation”(pg 1165). Similarly, masochism starts from a lack of something, for the knight it’s the Lady.  Also, masochism is totally about anticipation, for the knight, its all about anticipation, and never about receiving the desired Lady. For Zizek, the victim is also the stage director; they write the script they decide what the Master can do to them. In courtly love, in order to get Lady, the knight acts out the strict social formula to get the Lady.

and it started off with me and a group of people walking out of this hotel to go and see someone’s body. So to pass the time we decided to tell each other some stories. I’ve been married, so I introduce myself and my husbands before I tell my story. I remember saying that he was reading a book about me one day and I ripped three pages out of it and then he hit me and I fell. When I got up I hit him back. I told this story three times before I finally told my story. So what does that mean?

If you haven’t figured it out yet, what I just described was the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Wif of Bathe Prologue, but I thought it would be more interesting to apply Sigmund Freud’s dream theory to something other than a dream. You know, since this is a literary theory course. So in interpreting this “dream” we must first understand that these dream thoughts are merely condensed, meagre and laconic dreams. We must understand that the mind is censoring my “dream” to protect myself against a breakdown. Or in the case of literature, the author can be be producing this piece of literature- dream to the people- self and create it so that it is not blatantly offensive to the norm, but offensive enough for the people to see an issue in society. The incidents in the book are just a manifest of a bunch of signifiers with no content because they are a means of representation for the true issue.

Though this is completely arguable, the Wif of Bathe can be seen as a commentary by Chaucer on societal norms regarding women. The Wif has often been argued a post feminist character, while others argue that Chaucer made this character to be more comical than serious. Whether you want to believe that the character is a means to laugh at women or empower them it is evident that she has a purpose in this collection of pilgrims. She is the only secular woman on the pilgrimage and the only one that speaks of the womenly woes of marriage. If we applied Freud’s theory to literature this character and her prologue and tale hold more weight than amusement. She holds the potential to be commentary on the issues in 14th century England, whether unconsciously or consciously Chaucer included her for a reason. And every word that comes from her mouth needs to be scrutinized, because she has been condensed and transformed to entertain, protect and maybe warn 14th century England about themselves.

Dear Zizek!
We did it! We made it to the end of literary theory —almost. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to write about you! again; you! see, you! were in my last post too. 

Legally Blonde Final

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In Legally Blonde, “We did it!” is how Elle Woods finishes her valedictorian speech to the Class of 2004 of Harvard Law School. She throws her hands up in the air and squeals. I emulated her in my elementary school valedictorian speech; the response was laughter, whether jeering or not, I did not care much; I wanted to be Elle Woods, an independent woman who eventually rejects the man for whom she had gone through so much trouble, gets a law degree from Harvard, and wins a high-profile court case against almost everyone’s expectations. Is this embarrassing yet? Throughout my entire childhood, I always wanted to be Elle Woods; I still do, in fact, but I find myself wondering whether Elle Woods and countless other role-models such as Cristina Yang of Grey’s Anatomy, who embody fiercely independent women —notice I don’t use the verb to be — whether they are simply black holes, figments of the imagination, onto which I project my own, even inaccurate (due to all the hailing) desires. I guess I already know the answer, but what fun is that? When, according to you!, it’s all about the process. Anyway, what if everyone is the knight, especially in this culture where better is never good enough and best is impossible? What if everyone is a masochist? I think you! would agree, if you haven’t already stated it, that masochism is indeed universal and that we all have an eternal desire to be in the progressive and repeated state of desiring whether the object of desire is physical pleasure or not.

As human beings, we have an irritating tendency to look to the future and set “goals.” To make these goals, we tend to look toward someone older or more advanced in some area in order to do so; we have to build on what we already know, so we choose our role-models. Just like the knight cannot see the Lady for who she really is, we cannot see who our role-models really are, whether they are distant celebrities or our friends and family themselves. We see their Ideal-I in place of their scattered mess, namely, what they choose to express, and we are completely ignorant to what they have chosen to censor after a life-time. Therefore, we are left with a limited, censored, and edited version of themselves, Freud’s typical dream, a selfie, an instagram portfolio, if you will pardon my jargon, a black hole, or a distorted view of things. This distorted image of the other which the other voluntarily provides incites a desire because the other is perfect and we are this uncensored, scattered mess who cannot reach our Ideal-I. This is where I would argue against Lacan. When we look in the mirror, we do see the ideal version of ourselves, and, yes, internally, we are forever incompatible with the perfect, complete version of ourselves, but I would emphasize what Lacan does not, if I understood him correctly. The mirror stage is more than a solidifying stage en route to identifying yourself as separate from others; it is a stage in which you realize you are separate from yourself, which is all the more terrifying and not the least bit relieving because, due to censorship when engaging in the creation of intersubjective meaning, everyone else has seemingly achieved the Ideal-I already.

Since the mirror stage, we are incomplete, severed, and the possibility of desiring provides us with relief from that concept because when desiring we are at least trying to become whole again. Once we see the lady for who she really is, our outlet is destroyed. Moreover, once we see the lady for who she really is, our entire world is destroyed. Imagine knowing the censored parts of everyone or seeing everyone as dehiscent messes. There would be no boundaries or defining lines which order in our society demands. Our world depends on desire or unattainability, that black hole, the unattainability of the Ding an sich within us and without us.

Zizek!, I still want to be Elle Woods, but now I know she isn’t the Lady I thought she was.

P.S. You should watch 500 days of Summer. Joseph Gordon Levitt, who plays the protagonist,Tom Hansen, will tell you why.

Tom develops a mildly delusional obsession over a girl onto whom he projects all these fantasies. He thinks she’ll give his life meaning because he doesn’t care about much else going on in his life. A lot of boys and girls think their lives will have meaning if they find a partner who wants nothing else in life but them. That’s not healthy. That’s falling in love with the idea of a person, not the actual person.

Okay, JGL doesn’t know that it’s impossible to fall in love with the actual person, but everything else he says is pretty spot on.

I’m not quite sure if this is too late in the section, or completely aside the questions we examine. But questions of identity and its epistemic origin, for me, relate directly to our society’s fundamental liberal concept: property. Since I’ve read Locke (and probably since I was a kid), I’ve conceived of property as an object on which labor–as some form of energy directed at an object and meant to manipulate or alter it–is performed. Of course, I’ve never found this understanding satisfactory.  For instance, intellectual property has remained incomprehensible to me with this definition. How could one claim ownership of an abstraction?

Liberal philosophy, if I am not mistaken, is premised on the sanctity of individual liberties and a conception of labor that allows for the equal opportunity to elaborate on  one’s property. As I’ve mentioned, we attain property through the physical and mental exertions that our labor imparts on an object. In this sense, our body is our most basic property from which we exert the necessary energy to acquire more property. Such a conception is premised on a body that is, in a sense, impermeable to all but our minds–we retain total control of it biologically. Foucault would argue against this point but he would not challenge the prima facie assumption of a body-mind duality that is coexisting yet theoretically separated. Our section on psychoanalysis, however, has illuminated an all too significant aspect of ownership: identification. We choose to own most of our things in a social act that allows other people to read our clothing, for instance, as a signifier of our social standing (among many imbricated identities). The conscious decisions we make in presenting an image of ourselves to the world through an ensemble of stuff is the most patent and ubiquitous performance which Butler identifies. I want to forget her thematic focus on gender for a moment, and focus instead on the deep chasm she spells by breaking the Cartesian binary of mind-body.

How does a body that is permeable and shaped by the social discourse affect notions of property? I think a conception of identity, according to the Lacanians, is an apposite model for this little exercise. Identity formation is a reciprocal process in which the Self construes the Other as an object allowing for a sense of subjectivity, while the concomitant subject construes a Self in the Other so as to gain a sense of objectivity. Property is, in this sense, the identification of the Self in the object to which we have directed our labor. We own our bodies through the act of identifying and claiming a unifying principle with them. I could conceive, along these lines, of an intellectual property, yet I still find the concept moronic.

Why is female masculinity important? Well first we must see how Halberstam defines female masculinity to understand the importance of this term. Halberstam says “The term female masculinity  stages several different kids of interventions into contemporary gender theory and practice: first, it refuses the authentication of masculinity through maleness and maleness alone, and it names a deliberately counterfeit masculinity that undermines the currency of maleness.” (2639) Wow that was a whole lot to digest but what I take from this statement is that we should not be looking at masculinity as only accessible through being a male. Therefore if we do not see it only as male that means we are allowed for either gender to be able to have access to a type of masculinity. Masculinity is define from it’s differences from femininity It is important to note that when Halberstam is talking about masculinity she/he is talking about it in regards to the white male normative who embody this phallus power. Female masculinity is counterfeit because it allows females to take away the misogyny and social power out of male masculinity. It is also define as counterfeit because it does not possess strictly only male nor female traits but some where in between.

Now to the point of my argument. The reason why female masculinity is important is that it takes away the white normative perspective of whats masculine. It allows us to realize how much power it really has opposite to femininity. Halberstam says “Such accounts can only read masculinity as the powerful and active alternative to female passivity and as the expression therefore of white male subjectivity.”(2639) When we look at female masculinity and we do not acknowledge masculinity as only for males we can take away that power. We also see that female masculinity becomes powerful and active unlike like femininity where it contains passive trait. This is exactly what pisses off over masculine white males who want to keep this status quo. The third point to Halberstam’s female masculinity is “female masculinity may be an embodied assault up compulsory heterosexuality, and it offers one powerful model of what inauthentic masculinity can look like, how it produces and deploys desire, and what new social, sexual and political relations it can foster.” (2639) The example of a butch female comes to mind when we think about a powerful model that represents a masculine female.

I explained the very basic of Halberstam’s theory of there being a female masculinity. Now I wish to apply the basis of her theory to a theory of my own that I have been thinking about for a long time now. I apologize now if my language is excessive but I’m trying to drive home a point. http://www.tmz.com/2015/12/04/the-game-fight-stitches-mug-shot/

The n word has been used to classify African Americans during the dark times of America. Later in music after the word became a no no word to use by mainly white people, black people took the word and changed it to “nigg@”. A ton of bad stereotypes became associated with the word. Such as being lazy, ignorant, violent, gang member and other negative views of black people. For black people this new n word was a way to change how other black people saw this word. The emergence of gangsta rap saw the word cultured used by many minorities.When you said the phrase my n word to your friends it lose the negativity that was once placed on it. In today’s society it has been culturally accepted that it is okay to use the n word if it is not in a negative tone. In reality we have two different meanings from the same word one negative and one positive that is based upon who says it. This is why I posted the story about this rapper Stitches who not only is white and uses the n word but carries the negative stereotypes that once labeled the word. This rapper name Stitches had been harassing the rapper The Game over the internet and when The Game was in Miami, Stitches waited for him outside of the club he was in for hours. He posted videos out side of him waiting, cursing out The Game and even spits on the mans vehicle. After The Game leaves the club Stitches walks up to him trying to start a fight but ends up getting knocked out and thrown in jail. Why am I telling you all of this? What does it mean? Sure the guy acts like a jackass stereotype but so what? Well I’m trying to argue that the n word needs to no longer be associated with only African Americans. Instead the negative context to this word should be allowed to apply to anyone who embodies these negative stereotype out rightly. Instead of only the view of the n word being a ignorant stereotypical black person it can be anyone trying to embody this negativity. This man Stitches exemplifies, and identifies as the negative stereotype depicted by that word that African Americans have been trying to get away from. I’m arguing that if he is not an n word then like Halberstain says about female masculinity being a counterfeit masculinity that there must be a counterfeit n word. In this counterfeit n word any person no matter the race or gender who feels the need to embodied the negativity stereotypes can identify as one. The rapper Stitches would be the model of this counterfeit. If you want to argue it is because Stitches is a white rapper and in rap it is okay to use the n word I would like to bring up Eminem. Eminem is known throughout the world as the best white rapper and some may argue the best rapper in the history of rap. Eminem uses derogatory terms which our offensive but he never uses the n word. He never needs that lyrical cultural crutch unlike Stitches. Overall in a perfect world I would like the stigma around the word to change or the creation of a word that can be applied to all races in American culture.

I came across a funny thing, embedded above, perusing Instagram today. One could argue, in a semi-serious way at least, that the meme is its own acute form of criticism, and to have Moretti’s meandering mode of inquiry summed up so concisely in sign-oriented rhetoric of the meme brings me some kind of childish delight.

All in all, I respect Moretti’s mission. I’m sympathetic to it, I fear, because I find the mode of inquiry to be such a novel one– I kneel, move my mouth in prayer, and the graph that outputs on Google Analytics looks like it make sense. Maybe I adjust the smoothing. And then when I see something that looks good, I work out the mechanics of the theoretical skeleton. Perhaps Moretti is a little misguided, resolving a complex about the study of literature’s soft gaze (whoops, hope I’m not offending anyone), and an equally potent inferiority complex that students of the humanities often have about those who embark upon the hard sciences.

So when Moretti rationalizes his methodological shift towards a quantitative mode of literary theory, I applaud. The appeal to the rigid truth of numbers, in contrast to woozy and highly subjective qualitative narratives and the human folly from which they arise, strikes me as a purifying act by Moretti, who has something to fear, and demons to exorcise. It’s a cool turn. But simultaneously, I have my own discomfort, stemming from the fact that while I recognize the incredibly permeating way mathematics can be used to explain and model the world, I want to believe in some kind of romantic verve that will elide mathematical analysis. Thus, I say that perhaps Moretti has some kind of epistemological bias (clearly a reaction to generations of a certain mode of inquiry, a history I have no interest in denying lol).

Graphs are fun, though, so there is something pleasing to the eye about recognizing similar curves such as the ones visible in Figure 1. My friend looked over my shoulder and told me that “all this shit is garbage”, calling attention to the fact that the narrow sample of countries omits a large amount of other nations. Of course, if one has hedges in their front yard, they ought to be expected to trim them. Moretti stays in the clear, though, purified by his constant chastity and a willingness to engage in what (at least has been repeated to me for years now) is the central basis of good academic work: transparent use of sources. Moretti’s unwavering faith in the research of his fellows is commendable; he writes that “quantitative work is truly cooperation: not only in the pragmatic sense that it takes forever to gather the data, but because such data are ideally independent from any individual researcher, and can thus be shared by others, and combined in more than one way.” There is something empowering about constructing knowledge in such a positivistic way that is very much unlike more Negative Nancys like, let’s say, Nietzsche.

But heck, Moretti has some really great things to say, too. His note on the increased important of novels into India around the time of the 58 rebellion in colonial India is a fascinating one. His construction of the novel as a deeply indeterminate commodity bears a great bit to unpack. In the way that one can step a level up, and see three parallel axis– from bottom to top, Time, then Genre, and above Form– I imagine these three corresponding timeliness similar to Ferdinand de Sassuere’s diagram of the functioning sign, in that at any given point in time, corresponding moments in Form, Genre, and History condense inextricably into one another and are indexed within the Novel. Because for however much Moretti understands that he is asking tricky questions, he is on the money to assert that “the aesthetic sphere is the most appropriate to reflect overall changes of mental climate”, and a broad-bracketed concern with how mental climates/aesthetic attitudes cycle over time is a pretttttty good one, if you ask me.