Fanon discusses racism in a explicit way but also very poetic in which a person goes into the inside layers of someone who’s a victim of racism. On page three he says, “…it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person.” He then continues on to say, “I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.” What Fanon is talking about is how he isn’t just representing himself, but his whole race and his past ancestors as well. He carries the weight of many and not just himself, hence why he calls himself a “triple person”.

Fanon writes about what many oppressed groups go through when it comes to racism. Reading Fanon’s work reminded me of the many racist encounters I’ve had and how I’m not just representing myself but my ethnicity and all the Muslims in the world. I remember my first encounter of racism back when I was in elementary school. I wasn’t called out for being a terrorist, but to apologize for what “my people did” because I was “responsible” for a crime that I didn’t do, but some group that has no connection to me besides a belief they pretend to follow. This essay also reminds me of the Japanese Americans in world war 2 who were victims of relocation camps because of racism. Fanon’s essay really awakens the reader about racism and how the oppressed are representing everyone, their ancestors, other people as well as themselves and for this reason they aren’t in control.

Fanon also points out that, “When people like me, they tell me it is in spite of my color. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because of my color. Either way, I’m locked into the infernal circle.” This also shows how a person isn’t looked at for anything besides his/her race. They are always stuck with being perceived as their skin color and not who they are as a person. If a person does something good it’s because of their race, if they do something bad it’s also because of their race.

Fanon says in his work, “I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good.” This is an example of internalized racism, of self hate in someone who has dealt with racism, with ignorance, with stereotypes. This remind me of all those years when I would apologize on every anniversary of 9/11 in elementary, middle and high school. I felt guilty for something I never did, however I felt obligated to apologize, to prove to people that I am not the stereotype. I remember reading a book about the Japanese Americans in world war 2 in my Asian american literature class and the children would lie to people saying their Chinese, hiding who they were. The would apologize when someone bumped into them, when someone pushed them, and it was all because of the guilt. This guilt that so many people have because of the racism built in, because of how the world has perceived them and this is exactly what Fanon shows as well.

In conclusion, Fanon’s work was one of my favorite mainly because I can relate. He shows racism and he shows the depth of emotions one has because of it. He shows how a person isn’t an individual but a representation for everything in the past and the present.

Jonathan Culler wrote our class’ introduction to the wide spectrum of ‘Literary Theory’. One of the first ideas we were made to grasp is the acceptance that a theory, or the theories we would learn within this class, are much more than just hunches or hypothesis. They are much more complex ideas that come from various factors of the theory’s focus. They are based off of the thoughts and writings of others, which is why they vary. However, literary theories go beyond just literature and become their own genres and subjects as they become a part of the theorist and idea it’s presenting.

Nietzsche proposed his theory that language as a whole cannot be trusted, almost cancelling out or discrediting past works of theoretical analysis. The true traitors are the perception of the theorizer, because of our individual ability to process and pick apart the world around us, thus making one theory by one person make no sense to another because of that individual thought process. Saussure had an interesting thought that reminded me of Nietzsche’s because it also had to do with individual perception, particularly how and why we identify and explain the world around us. Saussure proposes that we see the world through a ‘signifier’ and a ‘signified’, or how we associate sounds, images and the world around us as a whole according to our understanding of it. This could be exemplified by the words or names we use to describe or refer to the things, places and feelings we see, experience and feel. Yet another theory based off of perception, Nietzsche and Saussure approach the idea of literary theory with a challenging explanation to it. Can we really trust ourselves to articulate our theories completely? Poetics forms another challenge, as Jakobson also explains how poetics can be understood and articulated by several different people in several different ways.

We move past just literature and individual perception, as verbal communication is not the only way theory is composed. Saussure’s theory was how we verbalize what we see, but Barthes’ is how we react to what we see. He uses political figures’ portraits as an example. Not only does this show how judgmental people can be based off appearance but also how we analyze the appearance and associate that appearance with our own perceptions of what looks ‘trustworthy’. Which brings us to Johnson’s analysis of the characters of Billy Budd. The characters and plot contradict themselves as it sets up readers to believe that certain characters are ‘good’ while others are ‘bad’, only to make the characters’ actions contradict their goodness or untrustworthiness. Johnson’s analysis is how we react to what we know or what we’ve been told. The discrepancies between the known and the shown.

Marx takes us into society and the real world with his theory of relations within society. His ideology is that society imposes rules and regulations on people that cause them to act as the society wants them to. With a large number of people following society’s expectations, few act out of lines, Marx labels this as “queer”. Marx penetrates the surface and analyzes what materials are manifested to us and shows us how the same literary analysis and unpacking of a novel can happen with labor. He believes that the relationship is based off of alienation, the distance between a worker and its product. This alienation comes from things such as assembly lines that make it impossible for one person in particular to completely construct and finish a product. It also comes from the alienation caused by wages because it puts an association between your being and worth with the money you make. A more common example of this would be a prostitute. Gramsci focuses on a similar analysis having to do with society and its constructs, particularly the organic and traditional features of a society. What keeps a class together, as well as where the class came from and what remains of that past.

Literary theory moves far passed just novels and essays, looking deeper into the consciousness of how people think, react and feel towards things in a whole. These reactions and thoughts work in control of a society and one individual’s perception as opposed to another’s. So how do we decipher a theory? A theory may only be able to be deciphered one person at a time.

Looking at the term “Alienation” from work in the passages of Karl Marx and Andrew Ross what does this term mean to them and how does it apply to the workers in their respected eras? How does this term evolve or change from Marx’s time to the more present time of Ross?

Marx’s alienation was about people receiving wages for labor hours.The hours of labor in production gets the worker money, which alienates the worker from what they have made.”In conditions dealt with by political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and object-bondage; appropriation as estrangement as alienation”(653) Marx is talking about how we lose a sense of what we are making when we do not make the entire object. For example in the assembly line each worker has their own specific part of the construction of the object, and they are masters at that one task in the larger project. This causes the worker to feel far removed from the overall production of the object. It also points out that this labor that is put into making this object can not afford you the object. The worker in this industrialized world makes a fraction in labor of what they are producing. Both of these factors cause the worker to feel alienated from their work.

For Ross the term alienation for workers in the technology industries is non existent. “In return for the opportunity to purse personally gratifying work, the liberated individuals takes over, from state institutions or company organizations, all responsibility for his or her economic survival and welfare.(2584) Ross is saying that the new model of workers are thought of as artists in the work are not alienated. This meaning they are more free to handle their work by self managing themselves with little supervision. The work place became not something that was seeking to increase production but to bring a sense of ownership back to the worker. The worker is now more responsible for helping their company because they are in control of their work. The investment that the individual puts into their work will decide if the company will be successful or will fail causing them to be in control of their financial income.

The term alienation changes from the Marx’s perspective of the workers being alienated from the objects they make, how they make them and ownership of their labor; to Ross’s perspective of the worker not being alienated from their work because they have a much greater connection to it.  The assembly line in this post industrialized era does not work in relation to the internet industries. Therefore the work is more “gratifying” because the individual chooses it and they do not need a supervisor or anyone else help in the completion of their work. “The creative entrepreneur is no longer alienated; there are no structures to be alienated from.”(2584) The industrial structure of Marx’s time no longer restricts the technology industries because there are no set rules to follow. Since we are producing meaningful work without the structure that alienated the worker before it allows us to reclaim ourselves as individuals. This means the safety net has been taken away. There is no job security therefore you are solely responsible for maintaining and finding new work. All the great benefits that people get from alienated work such as 401k health care and so on is not available to the newly liberated individuals working in this unalienated jobs.

Drawing from ideas of different arguments, what would be the best solution to “Alienation” in mass production? First describe what it is according to Marx and be able to use examples.

According to Marx’s theory on political economy, workers become a “powerless commodity” and are then alienated by the laws of production, lead by the ruling class. He, the worker, gets no say as to what goes into the product or how it is made, and is instructed in detail on what to do with the parts provided. He becomes less a part of the product by industrialization because he is not allowed creativity, and so becomes the mode of production itself. This opens up to his argument that political economists have created alienation to the worker in three forms: process, wages, and accessibility by the mode of mass production. The consumer, I argue is also alienated then, by his concept of the “queer commodity” in which the consumer knows nothing of the labor by focusing on the “use” and “exchange” values and neglecting the “real” labor values. So, as the consumers disconnected from labors of the product, the workers of labor are conversely disconnected to the product itself. The propertyless worker is unacknowledged and his labor is demanded unfairly. When the worker feels closer to the product, alienation is less persistent.

In occupations today, access to products has become a little easier to the new type of worker because materialism is popular, especially among young workers. For a lot of these materialistic products of brands, showing it off means having it all. People of the middle and lower class have also accustomed to this type of materialistic attitude by the desire to consume the newest and latest, speaking from personal experience. Companies, who are well aware of this trend, have created rules to enforce the use of “employee discounts” as a way to assure that workers are spending their hard earned money towards the company. A smart tactic to keep their money flowing within and outside of the company. Ross also mentions that in the new political economy,

“…play and recreation [is] encouraged in the workplace because [the workers are] perceived to add value to the work product. Employees [are] encouraged to work as and when the spirit [takes] them.” (pp. 2583).

I instantly thought of the retail workers who can most probably relate to Ross’s observation of the new worker’s environment. Though the worker of this sort does not take part in making the product persae, they do become more invested with selling the products and are forced to advertise by being consumers too. The workers have to become models and trained advertisers of the brand. It is then easier to invest oneself into the work when they feel as though they are the faces of the company. The distinguished parts of production: product making and product selling become important when considering alienation. By allowing some access or sometimes enforcing it and paying higher wages, alienation becomes less prominent in new workers and new artists who are the product sellers.

Comparable to Ross’s observation, early philosophers who searched for the meaning of life thought the love for a craft (like art) is crucial for knowing one’s purpose. It was thought by some that everyone is born to do something they are good at in order to contribute to society in some way. People are to spend their lives in search of that craft and become the best at it. However, as Ross mentions, powers higher than the young worker who has found his/her craft is exploited by enforced commitments, responsibilities, and wage agreements in contracts. The agreement is to do work within the department of (name craft) for little to no pay, while also receiving less of the credit for any successful outcomes. Since it is required to have hours of experience, the creative and innovative artist too becomes a powerless commodity. Alienation though, is less severe because of the love for the craft aspect.

Blog #2 Nietzsche

The honest divine truth behind the intellectual which derives them as other than then non intellectual is the natural tendency to steer clear of “wearing the masks worn by most, which consists of lying, cheating, speaking behind the backs of others, keeping up appearances, living in borrowed finery, the drapery of convention”. The intensity of the description of human nature sounds way more harsh than the actuality of what he describes, all these horrific sounding things are completely normal-and really necessary in order to function in society without being labeled “crazy” “rude” “standoffish” etc. The extent to which people play into these roles is contingent on the environment as well as their own relationship with themselves. This leads to Nietzsche’s next point, of the individuals wishes to preserve himself on relation to other individuals, “in the state of nature he mostly used thus intellect for concealment and dissimulation; however because of necessity and boredom also lead men to want to live in societies and herds, they need a peace treaty”. Therefore these masks and compromises within ones “self” to co exist with other “self’s” there is an unspoken peace treaty of agreeing to disagree without letting the other know they do not agree. Ironic. What if the fake agreement-really meant these individuals agreed in the first place? And, because they were conditioned to think a certain way because of unspoken rules-it lead them to put on one of these masks for no reason. Confusing myself with my own point, in this the point Nietzsche was making to begin with? “Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into concept” IE human beings feel emotion toward their actions, which are generated from want and need, rather than acting out of primal necessity of needing only.

When speaking of the waking human being from Greek Mythology this hits-“the artisan who dreams 12 hours he is king is as happy as the king who dreams 12 hours he is an artisan” (who sleeps 12 hours?) But the point is human beings are happy to live in their dream world or as my mom, bf and grandma love to tell me “lala land”. To enchant oneself with happiness is a human trait-and what is wrong with being happy?

The intellectual’s ability to work on the same task as labors with a different approach than their usual dull-spirited attitude of servitude does not maker them less of a man, at all. To be happy with the job, given the exact same tools and feel content is a beautiful thing.

For a change of pace and to help focus our exam review, please follow the following prompt for Blog Post #5, due Tuesday 10/27:

Put yourself in my shoes and write a plausible essay question for the exam. Then put your own shoes back on and answer it. Some suggestions:

1. The question should require one to marshal evidence from more than one writer we’ve read.
2. Ideally, the question should require an argument to answer it. So it should not ask for description or regurgitation, but for taking a position on something.
3. The question should need a substantial response to adequately deal with it: maybe 1000 words, on the long end of our usual blog posts.

Have fun with it!

As you know, there is a midterm for this class.  It is, however, a bit eccentric: I’ve scheduled it to coincide with a day that I’m missing, so it’s a takehome essay exam that you will have 24 hrs to complete and submit via email.  The exam will be open-book, open-note, and it will require you to think rather than regurgitate.  I will scale it to take about 90 mins on average (though of course you’re free to take more time), since I want to limit your time expenditure to what you would be doing if the exam were in-class.  A few more detailed guidelines:

FORMAT: short answer + long essay

I will give you five questions that can be answered in a longish paragraph.  These will look an awful lot like the study questions I’ve posted on the blog (hint, hint).  There will be some choice as well: perhaps seven questions of which to choose five.

I will also give a few longer essay topics, of which you will choose one.  These will be meatier and ask you to make connections across texts.  The best essays will be at least a few paragraphs in length, have an argument, and use evidence from the texts to support that argument.

TIME BUDGET/SCORING:

The short answers will require about 6 mins each (for 30 mins all together) and will earn up to 8 points each (45 points in total)

The essay will require about 60 mins and will earn up to 55 points.

LOGISTICS:

I will post the exam on the course blog by 10am on Friday, 10/30.  You will email it to me by 10am on Saturday, 10/31 (spooky, I know).  You will write the essay on MS Word or Google Docs or whatever word processor, and send it as an attachment or link to [email protected].  It is your responsibility to make time/space to have a working computer and internet connection over the course of the 24 hours to make this happen.  Given the many resources the College offers in terms of library laptop loans, computer labs, etc., not to mention the tens of thousands of free wifi hotspots around the city, I won’t accept any “the dog ate my email” excuses.  I will check my email on 10/31 and immediately contact you via email if there’s a problem.  If you don’t hear from me, rest assured that I got your exam.

HOW TO STUDY:

The first priority is to make sure you’ve caught up on your reading.  Anything we will have read by Tuesday, 10/27 is fair game.  Second, you should review all notes you’ve taken in class, since I often track the study questions posted on the blog rather closely in leading discussions.  Third, you should test yourself by attempting to answer the aforementioned questions.  Finally, try to think about broader themes that link texts together, since that’s what I’ll be thinking about when I draft the questions for the long essay.

Althusser’s work “Ideology and ISAs” strongly hints to me a Marxist concern with movements of physical bodies. This is undoubtedly in line with Marx’s rejection of Hegel and Feuerbach, who for him dwelled too deeply in a world where Ideas occupy a certain privileged territory (such that from them arise physical realities), and also is touched on lightly when Althusser briefly engages with Aristotle, shirking the full potential of his ideas, but conceding that he gives some credence to “matter in its ‘physical’ modality”.

What I read from Althusser here is an assertion of how physical bodies (flesh and bone humans) articulated by social conditions (their daily “jobs” and acts of consumption) have the ability both to be constitutive of Ideology and, in equal turn, constituted by it. We are offered a jocular example by Pascal, who inverts a conception of a religious ritual, writing that one must “Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”

A broad tradition of philosophical writing would hardly believe that thoughts sprout from actions, as opposed to the other way around. This particular idea, to consider it more loosely, is also one that young children are taught by their parents, who repeat the catechism of “Think before you act”—not that this is bad advice.

But if we buy Pascal, and similarly Althusser, it is hard to deny that habits in physical reality very seriously engender corresponding mental notions; these notions often give symbiotic life back to our habits, providing the comfort of Rationale and Reason for the seemingly sense impulses that guide our bodies through action.

When we engage Marxist vocabulary words of Practice and Ritual, it elucidates the quiet truth that even the most minute things humans do—the handshake is a good example here—can be chased up to reveal certain routines that make up systems whose functioning has become normalized. Some decades ago, where a white American sat on the bus everyday was part of a larger coded system of human relationships that explicitly denoted the subordination of black people. When you are avoiding the empty subway car because you suspect that there is a homeless person within it, you are not merely acting viscerally but also OK’ing (whether this guilt falls on you in full is up to you) the result of decades of racist housing policies. When you cross the street when the light is red, you are displaying an awareness of, how even though you are aware that Law permeates society, how law on the books is not always equivalent to law in the world. When you get a flu shot, you are consenting to the epistemological basis of the farcical Scientific Method and the lie of Medicine (just kidding). By spiking your Mohawk in the morning after getting dressed for school, you exhibit how thin the line is between conformity and deviance. By going to school, you are taking the carrot of meritocratic Education and drilling yourself in punctuality so that, to paraphrase Marx, you return to the office every morning at 9 on the dot.

To think like this is not too far a stone throw away from Marx, for whom the daily toil of human bodies is the point of departure for ascribing a complex world of both social topology and mental states.

The soldier for whom killing is no small issue does not only think that killing for a moral cause is normal. The soldier also goosesteps, loudly enunciates Hoo-rahs. The sonic and kinetic elements of the act are necessary for the Ideology to be concrete. Subjection is not merely “brainwashing”, mental conditioning—it is Theater.

At the beginning of the semester, we read “The Rise of English” by Terry Eagleton. In this essay we learn how literature replaced religion as the source of truth, values and ideals that nurtures the society and keep it stable during the 19^th century. It is a very interesting concept that I would like to discuss from the perspective of Marx and Gramsci’s theories. Literature is described as a positively influential phenomenon. Yet I would like to see literature from a darker perspective. Like religion, literature is an ideology used by the ruling class to keep the working class under control.

Religion, like many other disciplines, is an ideology (used by the clergy). But “literature, in the meaning of the word we have inherited, is an ideology” (Eagleton 44). To further expand this statement, literature expresses truths and values that plant deep in human unconsciousness. Yet, Marx and Engels definition of ideology can be used to describe literature. Marx and Engels described ideology as following: “If in all ideology men, and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura…” (Marx and Engels 656). In other words, ideology is a set of beliefs that are a distorted or inverted image of the real world. Ideologies do not represent the world as it is but represent it as certain individuals perceive it. Since ideologies are strongly held beliefs, they can be used to control the lives of people. Literature is an ideology, and thus, it can be used for this purpose as it represent. From a Marxist perspective, literature does not represent the real world; it just gives society a distorted representation of the world that allows the ruling class.

But an ideology does not manifest in the society by itself neither does literature. There are individuals who are in charge of applying ideologies. According to Antonio Gramsci, these individuals are called “intellectuals.” Intellectuals “must have the capacity to be an organiser of society in general…because of the need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class” (Gramsci 1002). These individuals are members of the ruling class and they are in charge of establishing the ideology and creating the education system and job positions in a society for the benefit of their own class. Gramsci talks about traditional intellectual who come from preceding economic systems. One example of this traditional intellectuals is the clergy. They had a monopoly in society that comes from centuries of history.

However, the power of the clergy started to fail during the 19^th century. In his essay, Eagleton says that “immensely powerful ideological form,” religion, was no longer accepted by the hearts of the people due to political and social changes and literature was wining the hearts of people. It means that non-ecclesiastic intellectuals were using literature as the ideology that keeps the society in the hands of the ruling class since religion was failing to do so.  This intellectuals can be “organic,” which means they were created in the society’s current economic system, or they can be traditional intellectuals. But regardless of their origins, this intellectuals are writers whose creation, literature, is an ideological form that adapts to the changes of the society since the 19^th century. Therefore, it has given the working class a distorted perception of the world. It keeps then hoping of a promising future, and consequently, doing what the ruling class wants.

In Franz Fanon’s essay “The Fact of Blackness” he addresses the ontological issues that arise when discussing “blackness”. For the theorist “blackness” is not a self-created identity, but one that is imposed upon black people. For Fanon “blackness” are not only what is psychically seen or the outer appearance, but also blackness as a social uniform which functions on the larger scale of society to oppress and alienate the black man. Fanon expresses the idea that as a result of not being seen through your individual identity in society, but rather being seen through a specifically molded perspective of a black individual, this derives the deeper ontological issue that deals with the essence of black. For Fanon existing as a third-person, understands that there are three different ways his identity is viewed. Fanon states, “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (3). Fan explains the notion of “third-person consciousness” as the action of self-awareness in our action and us. Through this self-awareness we are able to see ourselves through the eyes of others and the process of othering begins which is an alienating experience for the black man to see himself through the eyes of a white man. In the same way W.E.B. Du Bois describes that identity is divided into several categories. As a theoretical tool, double consciousness reveals the psycho-social divisions in American society and based on the individual allows for a complete understanding of those divisions. For Du Bois, the concept of double consciousness is characterized by two particular and distinct signifiers; the first is ‘second sight’ – the inherent duality of African American identity and vision. The second, and more problematic signifier, is that of existing ‘behind the veil’ and this may be defined as the limitations of seeing and being seen unclearly. Du Bois makes the claim that double consciousness denies African Americans the opportunity to embrace a their true self identity and rather, the individual is characterized by two categories, as a American and a Negro, thus they are subjected to see themselves through the eyes of others and therefore unable to reconcile their two identities. Fanon uses Philosopher, John Paul Sartre’s theory of existentialism, which emphasizes the existence of the individual as free responsible agents determining their own development through free will.