When freud talks about the “uncanny” he is referencing things people experience which can be both familiar, yet, at the same time, strange (and often creepy as a result). The early example for this is Ernst Jentsch’s take on the short story “The Sandman,” which features a doll that is to life-like for its own good. He argues that the uncanniness (if that’s a word) of the dolls in the story is the fact that they are made to look as though they are alive, despite the fact that the beholder of the doll knows they are not.

Freud takes a different route to arrive to the idea of uncanniness. Freud’s main focus is the fact that the Sand-man likes to collect children’s eyes. He relates this back to your childhood and genitalia (because he’s Freud, and that’s pretty much his whole deal).  He argues that people as a whole have come to dread injury to the eye far beyond anything else, and this starts when you are a child. Children rely on eyesight more so than the other senses. The eye is linked with knowing what’s going on around you, and as we know, knowledge is power. Transitively, losing your eyes is losing your power (what little you may or may not have). (It reminds me of when babies cannot see certain objects and they believe it has ceased to exist; should the baby not be able to see anything, he loses his sense of the world; possibly nothing exists. This can easily be passed on into childhood.)  While I can absolutely agree with this, I think the castration anxiety is a bit of a stretch. Leave it to him to think “I’ve lost my eyes! What does that mean for my reproductive organs?!” But I understand that maybe there’s a sense of vulnerability that is applicable to both the eyes and genitalia, as both a very important to human beings, and if that’s the case then I can roll with it. Both are essential to a normal human experience, to be complete.

Maybe (likely) it’s a lack of understand on the concept of “The Uncanny” but I kind of feel Freud doesn’t really stick to the original idea of “Uncanny.” I thought it was supposed to be something familiar yet simultaneously strange and unnerving. Lacking eyes is unnerving, yes, but what’s the familiar part of it? Having eyes? I quite enjoy using Zombies as an “Uncanny” example: the familiarity of having the body of a human being, with a history and social connections/relationships who maybe were loving and good, but, being zombies, they are dangerous and unfeeling. They embody both those who you love and a soulless monster; life and death. Call me biased but I think that’s the best example, but really, I’ll take any excuse to include Zombies in anything…

Of all the essays we’ve read this semester, Lacan’s piece on “The Mirror Stage as Formative” was definitely among my favorites. I’ve always been fascinated with child psychology and development. When I lived in Florida, I was lifeguard who taught swimming lessons for children between the ages two and ten, I was also a camp counselor during the summer and babysat a ton.

Lacan’s mirror stage is a concept of psychoanalytic theory that occurs sometime during the time a child is eight to sixteen months old. The mirror stage suggests that when an infant peers at their reflection in the mirror, they’re fascinated by the image of themselves and usually around the time of sixteen months are they able to recognize the reflected image is themselves. Once this recognition is made, the infant will often spend a great deal of time exploring the image in relation to their body.

The connection the child makes between the image and the body is vastly important to the cognitive development of the ego. The ego is constructed based off the result of the conflict between the child’s visual appearance in direct relation to the emotional experience. When a child is six months old, they still lack the physical coordination to move about with ease. Between the ages of eight to twelve months a child’s physical body is very imbalanced. For example, the arms and hands are much more developed than the legs and feet, the hands appear large in contrast to other parts of the body, the legs may still appeared bowed and feet appear flat as the arch has not fully developed yet. These all cause the child to move awkwardly through life which, causing an emotional experience of imperfection. According to Lacan, when an infant in this stage views their image in the mirror they experience a false sense of wholesomeness and idea perfection that is not felt from within.

This image proves to be fictional because although the child understands the reflection to be entirely them, the child still remains fragmented in its movements and expressing themselves. During this stage of the child’s life, they don’t yet have the ability to vocalize their thoughts, they can’t move about as they please, they can’t eat when or what they want, they can’t control their bowl movement. Their entire existence is completely dependent on the parents and this can be extremely frustrating, hence the period of the ‘terrible two’s”. Even though the image appears and invokes a certain emotion within the child, doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘who’ the child is inside.

Another example of this in term of an adult appearance would be anorexia (as was mentioned in a previous blog) who see ‘fat’ on their body when they’re actually skin and bones. You can also see example of a false mirror image with individuals who may have been overweight as a child and lost the weight during adolescence, but may still see the chubby false image of themselves in the mirror. We live in a society today that prizes external beauty much more than internal beauty.

I recently saw this slam performance that is really suiting for contrasting the social ideas of what is pretty. I think this suiting for the false image of a reflection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

Just a reminder that a) we’ll be doing exam review tomorrow, so come prepared with any questions you have (testing yourself against the study questions is the best way to dig for questions) and b) your blog “greatest hits” are due.  For b), just find the posts and then cut/paste the URLs (http://mybestpost.com) into an email to me.

Finally, don’t forget to review my course online using Hunter’s system.  Thanks!

 For this blog, I decided to revisit Foucault’s excerpt on ‘The History of Sexuality’. Within this article he discusses a number of inferences throughout history regarding sexual discourse within societies. The first time I read this piece, I had difficulty comprehending the exact reasoning why societies in the 17th and 18th centuries radically changed their opinions regarding the discourse of sexuality activity. After reviewing it for a second time, I’ve realized not only the reasoning, but the connections between Victorian ideologies and how those ideologies changed with a growing society. 

The Victorian era was stereotyped as a time of sexual frigidity and instinctual repression. Foucault begins his discussion here. European culture in the 17th century veiled its discourse of sexuality behind a curtain of censorship or silence. This censorship imposed societal rules among “speakers and social structures” (1502).  “Areas were thus established, if not with utter silence, at least of tact and discretion: between parents and children, or teachers and pupils, or masters and domestic servants” (1502). This refinement of language created a structure of silence that was not broken until encouragement from a powerful institutional incitement. The evolution of the Catholic Church broke the silence of sex with encouragement “to speak about it with a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (1503). The church imposed that although sex should be a mute point in verbal conversation, it needed to be a vital discourse within confession. Due to the “Counter Reformation, yearly confession in Catholic countries increased and imposed meticulous rules of self-examination” (1503). During these confessions, the church attributed the confessor to “insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul; henceforth all this had to enter, in detail, into the process of confession and guidance” (1503). The church’s insistence on sexual discourse made a major headway in the taboos of sex in European society.

Another reason for acceptance of sexual discourse was sprung from scientific data on fertility and mortality rates. The Victorian Era was a time of unprecedented growth within Europe. The population grew from 13.9 million in 1831 to 32.5 million in 1901. That’s 18.6 million more people in a span of 70 years. Due to this exponential growth in population much research was conducted regarding “birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation” (1507). The research regarding “birthrate, age of marriage, legitimate and illegitimate births, the frequency of sexual relations, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptives” (1507) all created a conversation around a taboo subject, that in the end was the roots for a country that hoped to be rich and powerful. These conversations led to the transformation of sexual conduct of a couple into concerted economic and political behavior. For example, in China there is a one-child policy that deems parents are only able to have one child, with a number of controversial misnomers. This policy was introduced in 1979 to alleviate social, economic and environmental issues. The policy is leveled through fines to the family based upon income. In order to hold a society to these terms, the topic of sex must be deemed conversational, at least in the terms of the potential economic growth regarding population.

The third factor that integrated sexual discourse into society were secondary schools in the eighteenth century. “The architectural layout, the rules of discipline, and the whole internal organization” (1506) were constructed in regards to separating the sexuality of children. “The space for classes, the shape of tables, the planning of recreation lessons, the distribution of dormitories (with or without curtains, with or without partitions), the rules for monitoring bedtime and sleep periods” (1509) all were directly decided with thoughts of sex in mind. This practice holds true still today. When I was a girl at summer camp, all of the girls were separated to change away from the boys, the bathrooms were always separate, sometimes we were even separated when we went away on sleeping trips. I never questioned the reasoning why we were being separated at that age, other than the fact that I knew I was a girl and not a boy. When I was in elementary and middle school when we studied sexual development the girls and boys were taught separately and only on the sex of the class. I didn’t learn anything about human reproduction until I was in high school. 

Foucault’s writing highlights and shows the connections between different and seemingly small inferences that eventually broke down the taboo of sexual discourse within European society. I’ve always been interested in the taboos of different societies. It seems for many, that sex is still a strong taboo. Within the United States, it is inherently frowned upon to have sex or show sexual affection in public, romantic novels (Fifty Shades of Grey for example) are often deemed pornographic, pornographic film/photography, pornographic painting are all held with a sense of uncomfortableness in the public eye. I believe that breaking down negative connotations regarding sex is a very important and difficult thing to do. 

When I moved to New York, I met a young artist named Alexander Esguerra who is doing just that. His project titled ‘Love & Paint’ explores, breaks down and redefines the taboos of sex. The project entails a couple painting each other and making love on a canvas. The end result is a Jackson Pollack-esque display of their experience that is completely visceral and infectious. When you look at the finished result of any of these paintings it is impossible to decipher if the couple was gay, straight, married, adulterous, black, white etc. At the end of the day, any person who views one of these paintings will only see the movements and the energy that was shared between those two people in that moment in time. The concept of these paintings demand that all the negative societal judgements regarding monogamy, racism, homophobia, causal sex to become eliminated. The paintings represent an equality among everyone and that sex is the great equalizer among us all. 

If anyone is interested in this guys work, he’s incredibly talented.

Check out his work:

Love and Paint

Valentine’s Day Romance Love Art Gift

Judith Butler: Gender Trouble

Why does Judith Butler call gender “trouble? She starts off by explaining that the word trouble always caries a negative connotation with it, instead of thinking of trouble as something negative, we should embrace the idea of the indeterminacy of gender. “To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble” (Butler 2540). When Butler speaks about power, I believe she is speaking about the power an individual has in the rebellion against the “prevailing law”. Trouble is hard to escape when it comes to gender because trouble seems to threaten and linger all around it in its attempts to keep one out of trouble. Trouble is a paradoxical phenomenon because it convinces us to stay away from it but if you are a subject it is inevitable. “Power seemed to be more than an exchange between subjects or a relation of constant inversion between a subject and an Other; indeed, power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender” (Butler 2540). To be a female is to be subject to the male gaze power, therefore, to be female is to always be in trouble.

Why does Judith Butler speak about the body so much and why is it important? Speaking about the body is imperative to Judith Butler’s argument because it fits into the idea of inner and outer expression. Butler starts off by speaking about this “otherness” and the pollution of the body and how this all was constructed in society. “Any discourse that establishes the boundaries of the body serves the purpose of instating and naturalizing certain taboos regarding the appropriate limits, postures, and modes of exchange that define what it is that constitutes bodies” (Butler 2544) Bodies are seen to have boundaries, and when these boundaries are trespassed (taboos) they become demonized, are seen as pollution to the body, unnatural and uncivilized. Homosexuality is seen as crossing a boundary, which shows how bodies are permeable and impermeable in the power structure of hegemonic order. “Those sexual practices in both homosexual and heterosexual contexts that open surfaces and orifices to erotic signification or close down others effectively reinscribe the boundaries of the body along new cultural lines” (Butler 2545). I think in this piece, Butler wants to expose the power of hegemonic order and show how it has been naturalized through society, she then makes us realize that these “bodies” and “polluted actions” are not as black and white as we make them seem. Bodies and actions can cross boundaries as they are completely. Butler also speaks about abjection as the process of how we constitute “others” in our society. She goes on Young’s point about fitting into the hegemonic order, identities have been created to separate each other through exclusion and domination. “…homophobia, and racism, the repudiation of bodies for their sex, sexuality, and/or color is an ‘expulsion’ followed by a ‘repulsion’ that founds and consolidates culturally hegemonic identities along sex/race/sexuality axes of differentiation” (Butler 2546). Butler applies this to our body and excrement and explains the division between “inner” and “outer” worlds that causes us to form this idea of an “other”. Boundaries are being passed during the process of excrement, therefore, bodies show permeability as well. This relates to gender because Butler argues that gender is a permeable line that is not fixed with the actual anatomy.

Why is drag such an imperative point in her argument? Drag captures the epitome of her argument and acts as a proof or an example of the dynamics between the anatomy, gender identity and gender performance. “As much as drag creates a unified picture of ‘woman’ (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.” (Butler 2550). Drag is the proof that just because you have a penis, does not mean you have to act a certain way, but it also proves that you will be trained a certain way according to culture.

My favorite line within the piece that Butler presents is “That disciplinary production of gender effects a false stabilization of gender in the interests of the heterosexual construction and regulation of sexuality within the reproductive domain.” this line tells us that the construction of gender may operate as a part of a larger power structure of heterosexuality within our culture.

What If Katniss Didn’t Have to Choose Between Peeta and Gale?

NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote a great article about the gender dynamics in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and concluded, “…you could argue that Katniss’ conflict between Peeta and Gale is effectively a choice between a traditional Movie Girlfriend and a traditional Movie Boyfriend.” I do love the way Holmes puts this.

Minus the whole point about monogamy and polygamy, I believe that this article highlights Butler’s point about gender being performative. When Katniss is with Gale, she plays more of a nurturing role. When Katniss is with Peeta however, she plays a more masculine and protective role. Her gender role switches depending on the person she’s with, proving that sex and gender are two completely separate things and that gender is based on performance.

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey explicitly states that she is out to annihilate the, frankly, pervy delights audience members extract from their experiences at the cinema. Despite her aggression, she claims to be doing us a solid: through her destruction of the subconsciously engrained voyeuristic “pleasure centre”, Mulvey guarantees that we will receive “the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it” (2085), which will ultimately result in learning “a new language of desire” (2085). Basically, it is sort of like she is forcefully changing our car insurance on our behalf – she is switching out a lacking plan we are currently covered by (ie: where the pleasure of observation is derived entirely from the degradation of the female form to mere source of spectacle) in exchange for a more beneficial/substantial one.

That false reality we enter each time we sit in a pitch black theatre and the film is projected onto the screen in front of us? Our delusions about the similarities between ourselves and the characters we observe in that film? Mulvey wants us to get rid of all that, as well; to destroy our suspension of disbelief and to remain wary of the fictitious nature of films and the storylines they depict. We do not fight the bad guys and win. We do not get the smoking hot babe whom we have saved from danger countless times. A film’s protagonist is not the “projection of [our] repressed desire” (2087). Quit being a ninny, Mulvey is ultimately saying.

Scopophilia is defined as the “pleasure of looking”. Through our cinematic experiences, we are given the power to “[take] other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (2086). As spectators, we easily attain this power via the stark visual contrast of the movie theatre-going experience: Again, we are in a dark auditorium. All the while, these luminescent images flash on the screen before us. The physical divide between ourselves (people present in the real world and in real-time) and the manifestations on-screen (immortalized beings in an artificial construct of a world) gives the illusion that we are looking in on a private world. What is so appealing about this is that it is not a two-way street: we can do the observing without our self-consciousness being heightened by being observed ourselves. We can be “obsessive voyeurs” (2088) and get as creepy as we like and no one is the wiser.

 However, this perverse joy is almost restricted to men. Their active leering preys on the forcedly imposed passivity of the female, who makes an appearance in film primarily to be gawked at. She plays this role for two distinct audiences: the males within the story and those in the auditorium. This degradation of the female form is promoted further by stylistic choices, like the camera’s prolonged focus on fragments of the body.

 Women can be objectified and reduced to masturbation material, sure. But men? Not on your life. Mulvey states that this is due to their inability to “bear the burden of sexual objectification” (2089). The observer in the audience cannot take it upon himself to gaze at his eroticized likeness. This leaves the male protagonist to bring out the action and further the plot.

Freud explain to us the Oedipus Complex, a subject I find very fascinating. Freud relates every child’s latent desires to the tragedy of King Oedipus, in which through the act of destiny, he slays his father and weds his mother. The story’s appeal transcends even to our time because of how us, the audience, are able to relate to Oedipus. Freud theorizes that men all have sexual impulses towards their mothers beginning in childhood, and have murderous desires towards their father. Oedipus meets a tragic end, in which he blinds himself after realizing his horrendous acts. His demise serves as a repulsive force for us to refrain from committing similar acts, which explains why most people have their desires repressed.

I believe most people with a healthy mind would find Freud’s theory absurd, given the morals and traditions we’ve followed up to today. Freud takes our desires to a completely radical level, but still, we can’t deny that Freud’s ideas are logical in some sense. Admittedly, I had a strong attachment to my mother and many instances of hatred for my father when I was a child. If we assume that it is our morals that prevent us from going in the same path as Oedipus, would the desires Freud believes us to have still be repressed if our morals are altered? I don’t suppose that question can be answered unless we look into a parallel universe.

I would like to challenge Freud’s theory by talking about some of things he fails to address, that is: homosexuality and pedophilia. The Oedipus Complex explains our latent desires for the opposite sex parent, but in the case of those who are homosexual, the theory falls apart. Likewise, how would Freud explain the desires of pedophiles? Freud’s theory falls under the premise that people are inherently heterosexual and are attracted to people of similar or older age, but as we know it, many cases stray from that norm. Given the time in which Freud came up with the theory, topics such as homosexuality and pedophilia were probably not so prevalent in society, but certainly not absent. I would love to see how Freud would respond to such topics, even if it requires a separate theory.

Freud continues by talking about our dreams, in which he says that the latent content we perceive are only a part of a not-yet-deciphered transcript. He believes that dreams are conveyed in another language, in which we must interpret its meaning through a intricate series of steps to find the underlying meaning.

After reflecting on one of my recent dreams, I don’t believe that all dreams have as much of the underlying, manifest content, that Freud thinks they might have. The dream I reflected on, and am a little too embarrassed to share, was quite straight-forward in the sense that it didn’t require the complex process of condensation, displacement and translating the means of representation. This process would be more useful for dreams I find completely random, confusing, or seemingly irrelevant to my life. I never indulge too much on those dreams, so I cannot confirm that there is, in fact, a true underlying meaning.

In a previous lecture, we talked about Lacan’s theory of how we (as people) project idealized versions of ourselves in mirrors and how we desire to become this idealized version. A thought that came across my mind were how patients with anorexia nervosa correspond with the process of the “mirror stage”. Those with anorexia nervosa project a negative image of themselves, namely, an overweight/fattened version. This leads me to thinking of how this may correlate to their initial viewing of themselves as a baby/toddler, and how that may somehow have a lasting effect later in their life. Rather than what Lacan implies, that we strive for this projection, those with anorexia nervosa strives against their mirrored projection.

The drag show does not have to be a source of aporia. Yes drag performers can act out two conflicting roles (woman trapped in man’s body vs man playing with entrenched gender roles), but it is a rash generalization to say that individual performers in drag do not know which role they are acting out.  It does not make sense to think that a drag queen does not know whether or not he is actually more comfortable as a woman or if he is performing for the sake of satire.
My confusion is whether both views of drag can be viewed as a choice between the two or if they constitute a mixture that cannot really be combined or separated.

Also this clip from Modern Family
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H07vN7DstZA&w=560&h=315]

Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’  published in 1975, sparked a major discussion regarding the “interweaving of erotic pleasure within film, its meaning and in particular, the central place of the image of the woman” (2084). This essay was among the first to create a shift of film theory to a psychoanalytic framework, commonly influenced from the works of Freud and Lacan. Mulvey’s essay challenges the pleasure we experience from cinema by raising the concept of “women as an image and man as bearer of the look” (2088). 

Within cinematic displays, as a viewer we are “offered a number of possible pleasures” (2086). The first of pleasures we are offered is scopophilia or deriving pleasure from looking. “Freud isolated scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality which exist as drives quite independently of the erotogenic zones. At this point, he associated scopophilia with taking other people in as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (2086). By participating in the cinema, a viewer is immediately cast into a scopophilia based environment. The cinema “portrays a hermetically concealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy” (2086). The darkness of the theatre contrasting with the brightness of the projection also helps to promote the illusion of a voyeuristic separation. 

The second of pleasures we are offered in cinematic viewings is scopophilia developed into a narcissistic aspect. Most mainstream films pay attention to the human form. The characters within a cinematic production are recognized with likeness of the “human face, body, the relationships between human form and its surroundings- the visible presence of the person in the world” (2087). As a movie goer, the male viewer connects with the male protagonist or hero of the story. The character who has the big muscles, the big house in hollywood, the sports car and hot babe on his arm. Sympathizing with a character in this way allows the viewer to “act out a complex process of likeness and difference or the glamourous impersonates the ordinary” (2087). 

This narcissistic aspect of scopophilia directly related to Lacan’s theory involving the mirror stage within child development. Lacan implements the concept that when a child first views themselves in a mirror, their self-image becomes more complete. Due to the lack of motor skills, when a young child sees themselves in a mirror, they feel a sense of perfection that isn’t felt from their own body. The same theory applies in the cinema. An image on the screen creates a sense of recognition and misrecognition for the viewer: the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject which, re-introjected as the ego ideal. The viewer can lose their sense of self and ego as they re-imagine themselves living the life of the protagonist. 

Mulvey contrasts these two concepts of scopophilia with a woman as the direct object of a viewer. Within films throughout hollywood, women have been objectified as an image of the determining male gaze. “The female figure possesses strong exhibitionist roles, in which women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so they can be said to connote a ‘looked-at-ness’”(2088). The place of a women in cinematic productions creates “an indispensable element of spectacle in a narrative film” (2088). Her presence often works against the storyline, to freeze the flow of action in erotic contemplation. “The female character provokes and represents an idea that spurs a will or inspires a fear/love within the hero. The woman causes the man to act the way he does- but, the woman herself has not the slightest importance” (2089). 

Mulvey published this essay in 1975, during a time where most films portrayed a male hero with a female love interest. Films and television have changed dramatically in the last 38 years. An example of this would be the popular HBO series ‘Game of Thrones’. This show portrays several different story lines revolving around a private sphere of family (Starks), blood rivalry (Lannisters), a female protagonist with a male love interest (Kahlessi), an orphan male with a traditional female love interest (Snow) among many others. I feel that this show demonstrates the concept of scopophilia to an endless degree on many different spectrums for every type of viewer. There are many other modern cinematic works that stray from her theory of a woman as an objective image; however, the conversation she struck at the time of this articles publication pressured hollywood to re-examine the filmic strategies of classical hollywood.

                In T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, he situates tradition as the hallmark of significant works of art rather than uniqueness. Tradition can be loosely defined in the framework of Eliot’s writing as related to the reconstruction of the past or “archaeological reconstruction” (955). Eliot highlights the affinity of people to emphasize the individuality of a work of art as opposed to evaluating it based on how it fits into the existing tradition of art. Eliot states, “We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, […], we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed” (956). This idea of isolating one component of a work underscores one of his major points which is that you can’t divorce the work of art from it context steeped in both the traditional past and the present. He states, “You cannot value [the artist] alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (956). According to Eliot, this is where a work of art finds its value and significance. However, Eliot doesn’t advocate for a mindless imitation of works past. He states, “novelty is better than repetition” (956). He promotes an active participation in tradition – in the learning and reproduction of it. He states, “[tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour” (956). He details the historical sense which he deems necessary to be a prolific artist past the years of one’s youth. He defines the historical sense as the perception of the “pastness of the past” coupled with a “feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (956). This simultaneous order isn’t depicted as static but constantly changing as new works of art are added to it which reorders the whole structure. In this way, the new and contemporary alters the past or more specifically our perception of the past. He states, “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole readjusted” (957). This idea of some sort of trans-historical gallery of works of art with values determined by their comparison to one another seems plausible enough – although perhaps a little problematic. It is in my opinion, human nature to order entities of any kind and to make groupings of classifications. However, Eliot asserts that this order is in no way hierarchial. Order and comparison, in a way, connotes judgments of value. He states, “[the poet] must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same” (957). He speaks of a “refinement” rather than “improvement” but that also seems to suggest a progression and judgment. It is hard to situate what exactly the basis of this order is.

                Eliot states, “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” (958). Eliot aims for art to be seen as a science with different elements that combine to make a new work of art. In order to do this he states that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” (958). This “depersonalization” divorces the artist from his work. As practical as this may be, it seems to be in opposition to his emphasis of context in the beginning of his argument in Tradition and the Individual Talent. He posits the more mature artist as a “more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (958). He states, “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material” (959). This suggests that writing should be less cathartic for the author and more directed towards eliciting a desired effect upon the audience. This requires a mastery over the author’s self and their emotions. This provides more mastery over the audience and the desired response. This discipline involved and degree of separation/removal from the writing is required, for example, in the editing process. He states, “The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” (959). He devalues the emotions and personality of the author in favor of “the intensity of the artistic process” and “technical excellence” (961).  For Eliot, this removal of the author creates a variety that would not be able to sustain itself otherwise.

Separate thoughts:

Can one actually divorce themselves from their writings? The artists and works he cites as good examples of that – do they continuously follow this pattern or do intrusions of their personalities always crop up in veiled ways?

(I could be interpreting this wrong but….)

His order of works of art and tradition might be seen as putting greater emphasis on “European” and “traditional” literature but he also states that “the poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations” (957). He emphasizes the “whole of literature” on several occasions. He also states that he has “suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all poetry that has ever been written” (958). Although he uses the male European writers in his examples and they are inextricably tied to what many think of as canonical or traditional writers/artist, he does speak of a whole that deviates from what is currently popular because what is popular today may be less so tomorrow. Perhaps we give him less credit for being inclusive because he doesn’t give specific examples of artists we think of as outside the standard conception of tradition such as female artists. When he says “all” he could mean “all”. Here again, context is valuable. He is perhaps writing from a context – a history that is exclusionary – and therefore we can’t really judge his theories as separate from that context.