gpoyw: the adventures in packing edition; alternatively known as i could lie & say i’ve packed all my books, but…
Nelle, you have excellent priorities. ♥
(via bookshelfporn)
(Source: irinasof, via bookshelfporn)
An absolutely beautiful article about how paratext works when applied to online reading (and what web designers should do about it). The author is eloquent, compelling, and very obviously in love with reading & books; my inner bibliophile made a tiny noise of joy when I finished reading this.
“Think of your first encounter with a book. You look at the cover to get a sense of it, then perhaps flip to the back or the flaps to skim the publisher’s copy. Opening the book, you might glance at the title page, or quickly run your eyes over the table of contents. Maybe you peek into the back to check the page count, or casually assess the weight of the book in your hand. If it’s a hardcover, you might take the dust jacket off, lest it get in the way.
Most readers engage in at least one and usually several of these behaviors—they’re a kind of pre-reading ritual, part of the culture of books. And yet they serve an important purpose as well, in that they ease the transition between looking and reading. They help the reader establish interest, and they serve as an invitation to reading, setting the stage for the act that follows. Similar behaviors can be found on the web.”
“‘Meaning is irrelevant:’ declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning. The consequence of this freedom is the flood of information in which we are drowning. The immense size of modern databases gives us a feeling of meaninglessness. Information in such quantities reminds us of Borges’s library extending infinitely in all directions. It is our task as humans to bring meaning back into this wasteland. As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.”
louis althusser: ideology and ideological state apparatuses
A quick summary of the 1970 essay, mostly stolen from last year’s engl217 — my prof wants us to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road through Althusser and I have no idea why or how one could relate to the other.
?> Why do we work?
labour: reproduction of the conditions of production
- the productive forces
- the current relations of production (happy social relations)
+ keep in mind Marx on wages, superstructure must reproduce infrastructure base
know-how: (possibly from McLuhan) the capitalist education system schools us in skills and in submission to the ruling ideology
- false consciousness
- good subjects work by themselves
- (mis)identification upwards, with the bourgeoisie
RSA: repressive state apparatus
- one
- ex. gov’t, administration, army, police, courts, prisons
- f(x) by violence
- public sphere of institutions
ISA: ideological state apparatus(es)
- many, unified under ruling ideology
- ex. religion, education (dominant in mature capitalist social formation), lit, culture, family, political system, sports
- f(x) by consent
-private sphere of institutions
*** ideology: not a set of ideas, but a form of embodiment whose practice must be mastered
historically determined
ideas are material actions, inserted into practices governed by rituals, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus (169)
- discourse is a practice
- disappeared: ideas
- survive: subject, consciousness, belief, actions
- appear: practices, rituals, ideological apparatus
discursive definition of ideology: interpellation
- individual —> subject
- no choice: “ideology has always-already interpellated” (175)
- (act of hailing; Benveniste: idea of using “I” and appropriating all of language to oneself)
- concrete, material behaviour —> an inscription of “so be it”; material practices as submissive utterances
& so — you can’t speak from outside a subject position. you can’t get out of ideology. see also: eagleton.
answer, post-class
Focus on ideology as embodied physical practices: creating forms from formlessness. Physical, material rituals within the story. “Where you’ve nothing else construct ceremonies out of air and breathe on them” (74). (Re)constructing ideology in the wake of a societal collapse that has rendered institutions irrelevant. Subject construction within discourse: the only discourse in The Road is what exists in dialogue between the man and the boy.
"The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organisations, no matter how panoptic they may be: it is neither foreign to them (it can take place only within them) nor in conformity with them (it does not receive its identity from them). It creates shadows and ambiguities within them. It insets its multitudinous references and citations into them (social models, cultural mores, personal factors). Within them it is itself the effect of successive encounters and occasions that constantly alter it and make it the other’s blazon: in other words, it is like a peddler, carrying something surprising, transverse or attractive compared with the usual choice. These diverse aspects provide the basis of a rhetoric. They can even be said to define it."
— Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”
(it’s impossible to pull a short de Certeau quote, okay)
"The ordinary practitioners of the city … they are walkers … whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of the spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognised poems in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legibility. It is as though the practices organising a bustling city were characterised by their blindness. The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface …"
— Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”
I’m … conflicted. It’d make the book historians happy, at least.
something about power relations
FOUCAULT
(from “The Deployment of Sexuality”, The History of Sexuality)
~ page 100
— “we must conceive discourse as a series of discontinuous segments whose tactical f(x) is neither uniform nor stable”
— “Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are.”
— “discourse can be both an instrument & an effect of power, but also … a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy”
“the appearance in the 19thC psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality … made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of “perversity”; but it also made possible the formation of a “reverse” discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy of “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified” — F.
— so what’s going on here? it doesn’t match up with Irigaray’s claim that women (or whatever oppressed group, by extension) are denied a subject-position, & questions about how you can speak a way out of a discourse using the words it gives you.
— maybe because Foucault sees power as productive, whereas they (above) would see it as repressive only? ability to feed back into discourse & change it by speaking it? no obvious dominant/repressed relationship?
— can langue alter parole? should I not be talking about discourse using (phonocentric) ideas which Saussure meant to refer to langage only?
Q] Origin? Foucault isn’t saying discourses always-already are — ø power relations (& their complementary resistances) always-already exist. Does Foucault refer to discourse as a concretisation of (diffuse & mobile/transitory, productive, bottom-up, intentional/nonsubjective) relations of power? I.e., the development of a discourse on homosexuality, see above. Seems to contradict the idea of language “coming into being all at once” & :: discourse also — ø Benveniste & Ricoeur imply † discourse is one step up in integration from “language” (used loosely), † it builds upon language, so synchrony/diachrony/etc. don’t apply to discourse?
Q] Does discourse require subjects? Does it require the subjects to answer its hailing?
"Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions, without being exactly localised in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institution integration of power relationships."
— Michel Foucault
