The missing piece in the puzzle of language, like the missing piece in the puzzle of humans' desire for wholeness, guarantees our never-ending longing for something, and a never-ending generation of language. Our desire is continuously displaced among different objects as we see in them possible solutions to fill a void that is constitutive and therefore impossible to fill. Once we achieve an object of desire, we see that it doesn't provide what we were looking for. How could it? Pure wholeness seems to be only touched asymptotically by the subject, never reached, but impressing upon the human mind the impression that it can be. Identically, the signifier will only refer us to another signifier for the signified is the missing piece, and only as such it is constituent of language. As long as we are alive, we are only teased it seems to me. We are teased with the seemingly extreme proximity of something that we will never reach. We are teased in believing that we can reach a meaning that is not even there.
Dr. Shelden's explanation of the death drive makes me thing that the "death drive" is our reaction at acknowledging the teasing nature of life; the way we react when we acknowledge that reaching wholeness could not be possible to us. At certain moments, tired of pursuing objects of desire that only displace desire and do not satisfy it, the death drive takes place. We long for and reach the only wholeness that is possible to the human condition. Tired of pursuing a wholeness that seems to be impossible to reach-wholeness through building a satisfied, self-sufficient identity through the means of inner structures and constructions- we wholeheartedly resign to the only possible wholeness, letting go of all the structures that we have built to separate us from the universe, and reaching the only wholeness possible to us, that of dying as a subject and becoming part of the universe. Lacan 's example is orgasm, a moment when merging with a human partner, one actually lets go of all subject identity. It seems that the French have come very close to this wisdom by calling orgasm "la petite mort"- the little death, as Dr. Shelden explains. Other instances might be deep meditation and other spiritual, religious experiences. But is orgasm always an expression of the death drive?
Lacan claims the death drive is manifested in the sexual act and orgasm because it is the moment when people forget themselves. This is interesting because you can still have other things on your mind at the moment of orgasm. For some, there may be theatrics or performance involved so their partner is aware of the pleasure they are experiencing. Or they may just not have a satisfying enough orgasm to shatter their sense of self. It just might not be the same for all people all of the time. It is also possible that there could be other moments or other ways of achieving a manifestation of the death drive. Listening to a piece of music might cause some to forget the world and their sense of self. Other instances might be deep meditation and other spiritual, religious experiences. Or people commit crimes in moments of passion that arguably cause them to forget who they are and what they are doing or the consequences of it. In other words, does the death drive always have to be manifested in sexual gratification? Are there not other things ways of experiencing jouissance?
To add a piece of interesting information, we can relate the death drive to a notion in psychology called "flow". Unlike the death drive, which is the total disinvolvment with the physical word, flow is the experience of optimal functioning. The death drive is the complete detachment from oneself and one's identity. Flow is the result of an increase in brain functioning, when one is totally involved in the moment, focusing on one specific task. This total involvement reinforces an aspect of one's identity, since identity always exists within the symbolic.
"Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death." - George Orwell, 1984
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
The Camera's Lens, Self-Lovin', and Taking Apart a Baby's Heart
Jacques Derrida was a post-structuralist who believed in a decentered universe. He asserted that there was no center or “norm” to how things work. The documentary Derrida allegedly captures the spirit of Derrida in his true light; however, as he points out himself, it cannot be purely authentic to his behavior in the documentary. He knows he is being filmed and alters his way of living in ways that he realizes (by wearing clothes rather than his normal pajamas and bath robe) and in ways he couldn’t even recognize.
In the beginning of the film, Derrida goes through the simple process of putting on his jacket and walking out the door. While this seemingly every day, mundane act appears normal onscreen, Derrida looks at the camera, laughs, and apologizes for not saying hello. He then says, “It’s a bit difficult…” Before exiting, Derrida stops in the doorway to explain to the directors the process in which he is about to proceed to get his hair cut. This is clearly not a matter in which he does every time he wants a haircut, further proof that the “truth” is no longer apparent the moment the cameras came into his life.
The filmmakers, not Derrida, are responsible for the “center” or “norm” which now exists for Derrida. Regardless of the fact if Derrida is meant to stop and explain his every movement or action to the camera, the directors left the footage in the film on purpose. The filmmakers are proving there is no legitimate structure or center to the way things work. The directors do not simply tell Derrida to act as though they do not exist and go about life in that manner; their known presence is intentional.
They probe Derrida with questions which they know will be difficult and of interest to Derrida and the future audience. When one director asks him about his thoughts on love, Derrida is apprehensive to respond. In an intellectual setting, which is where he sits in that moment in the film, this question appears normal. It is doubtful that this question is asked of him every day after his morning coffee. They also strive to ask him deliberate questions about matters they know will spawn interesting thoughts. Derrida and crew are standing in a museum when the director asks Derrida what he thinks of the oiled painting of himself hanging above. He responds that it makes him “very anxious.” It is unlikely (but supposedly probable) that Derrida would on any given day head over to a museum to look at pictures of himself. The filmmakers, however, are interested in this response to his own image.
The filmmakers are going into Derrida’s life to disrupt his everyday routine in order to make a good film. They unhinge his normal activities by making simple processes more complicated, and siege him with questions they know will draw interest. The directors are not necessarily looking for a Derrida living through the mundane acts of his life, but for a candid, in-the-moment perspective of an intellectual whose thoughts and beliefs may be portrayed expressively in a documentary-type film. While this tactic provides Derrida’s “true” perspective, the center is lost in his typical day-to-day moments, and the “true” Derrida does not actually exist.
The lyric “I’m in love with a Jacques Derrida/Read a page and know what I need to/Take apart my baby’s heart” corresponds to Derrida’s thoughts on love between the “I” and the “Other.” While the “I” represents the way in which a person views himself, the “Other” refers to the outsider’s perspective. Derrida believes in a highly narcissistic purpose behind love; meaning the individual loves the aspects of another person which they can attribute to themselves directly. Scritti Politti singing “I’m in love with a Jacques Derrida” may symbolize a person loving another who shares Derrida’s view on love. This person knows what they “need to take apart my baby’s heart” because they know what it is about themselves that person loves. If you take away those characteristics, or alter them in some way, it emphasizes the death of love; or highlights the difference between an individual loving a person or the individual loving something about that person. When you know something about how your partner loves, you retain a lot of power over that person.
This is also tied to Derrida’s explanation of the word “love.” He theorizes love as a philosophical concept that he cannot begin to talk about. When the film maker asks him to “say something about love,” Derrida shrugs and explains that he has nothing to say. Love is the origin of philosophy. To speak about love, is to speak about the origin of philosophy. Derrida explains how the genesis of love is consistently “caught” between the “who” and “what.” Do we love someone for WHO this person is? (Their specificity/their “oneness”) Or do we love this person for WHAT they are. (How they view you as their lover? Their mannerisms….etc.) This, according to Derrida, is problematic. To love someone for “who they are,” is to call into question two things. One is the Cartesian idea of the “self.” [Cogito, Ergo, Sum] The self is fragmented. It is not whole. And the second is to the concept of “being.” What does it mean to be? How are we possibly able to use these unstable groundings as the reason/cause for “love?” Derrida believes that love is reflexive. Reflexive love is merely the appropriation of the other as the self. This is due to the fact, that love is narcissistic. You only love someone, for how they love you. He speaks about the “movements of the heart,” which, in turn, are nothing more than the qualities of the person you “love.” This unfortunately leads to what Derrida calls the “death of love.” This is the deconstructing process surrounding the elements of said emotion. When asked to “say something about love,” Derrida simply did the very thing that he does best. He deconstructed it.
In the beginning of the film, Derrida goes through the simple process of putting on his jacket and walking out the door. While this seemingly every day, mundane act appears normal onscreen, Derrida looks at the camera, laughs, and apologizes for not saying hello. He then says, “It’s a bit difficult…” Before exiting, Derrida stops in the doorway to explain to the directors the process in which he is about to proceed to get his hair cut. This is clearly not a matter in which he does every time he wants a haircut, further proof that the “truth” is no longer apparent the moment the cameras came into his life.
The filmmakers, not Derrida, are responsible for the “center” or “norm” which now exists for Derrida. Regardless of the fact if Derrida is meant to stop and explain his every movement or action to the camera, the directors left the footage in the film on purpose. The filmmakers are proving there is no legitimate structure or center to the way things work. The directors do not simply tell Derrida to act as though they do not exist and go about life in that manner; their known presence is intentional.
They probe Derrida with questions which they know will be difficult and of interest to Derrida and the future audience. When one director asks him about his thoughts on love, Derrida is apprehensive to respond. In an intellectual setting, which is where he sits in that moment in the film, this question appears normal. It is doubtful that this question is asked of him every day after his morning coffee. They also strive to ask him deliberate questions about matters they know will spawn interesting thoughts. Derrida and crew are standing in a museum when the director asks Derrida what he thinks of the oiled painting of himself hanging above. He responds that it makes him “very anxious.” It is unlikely (but supposedly probable) that Derrida would on any given day head over to a museum to look at pictures of himself. The filmmakers, however, are interested in this response to his own image.
The filmmakers are going into Derrida’s life to disrupt his everyday routine in order to make a good film. They unhinge his normal activities by making simple processes more complicated, and siege him with questions they know will draw interest. The directors are not necessarily looking for a Derrida living through the mundane acts of his life, but for a candid, in-the-moment perspective of an intellectual whose thoughts and beliefs may be portrayed expressively in a documentary-type film. While this tactic provides Derrida’s “true” perspective, the center is lost in his typical day-to-day moments, and the “true” Derrida does not actually exist.
The lyric “I’m in love with a Jacques Derrida/Read a page and know what I need to/Take apart my baby’s heart” corresponds to Derrida’s thoughts on love between the “I” and the “Other.” While the “I” represents the way in which a person views himself, the “Other” refers to the outsider’s perspective. Derrida believes in a highly narcissistic purpose behind love; meaning the individual loves the aspects of another person which they can attribute to themselves directly. Scritti Politti singing “I’m in love with a Jacques Derrida” may symbolize a person loving another who shares Derrida’s view on love. This person knows what they “need to take apart my baby’s heart” because they know what it is about themselves that person loves. If you take away those characteristics, or alter them in some way, it emphasizes the death of love; or highlights the difference between an individual loving a person or the individual loving something about that person. When you know something about how your partner loves, you retain a lot of power over that person.
This is also tied to Derrida’s explanation of the word “love.” He theorizes love as a philosophical concept that he cannot begin to talk about. When the film maker asks him to “say something about love,” Derrida shrugs and explains that he has nothing to say. Love is the origin of philosophy. To speak about love, is to speak about the origin of philosophy. Derrida explains how the genesis of love is consistently “caught” between the “who” and “what.” Do we love someone for WHO this person is? (Their specificity/their “oneness”) Or do we love this person for WHAT they are. (How they view you as their lover? Their mannerisms….etc.) This, according to Derrida, is problematic. To love someone for “who they are,” is to call into question two things. One is the Cartesian idea of the “self.” [Cogito, Ergo, Sum] The self is fragmented. It is not whole. And the second is to the concept of “being.” What does it mean to be? How are we possibly able to use these unstable groundings as the reason/cause for “love?” Derrida believes that love is reflexive. Reflexive love is merely the appropriation of the other as the self. This is due to the fact, that love is narcissistic. You only love someone, for how they love you. He speaks about the “movements of the heart,” which, in turn, are nothing more than the qualities of the person you “love.” This unfortunately leads to what Derrida calls the “death of love.” This is the deconstructing process surrounding the elements of said emotion. When asked to “say something about love,” Derrida simply did the very thing that he does best. He deconstructed it.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Exploring Structuralism
It was Ferdinand de Saussure who realized that language needed to be understood as a structural system of relationships among words, rather than a collection of individual words with individual histories and meanings. What he meant was that the components of a structure are not a collection of independent items. Rather, they form a working unit only because they exist in relation to one another. According to structuralism and Saussure, the human mind perceives differences most often using opposites. Structuralism refers to this notion as “binary opposition.” Essentially, “binary opposition” states that the way we understand an idea is through its opposition to another idea. For example, if we believed all objects were the same color, we would not need the word “black” at all. Black is black only because we perceive it to be different from other colors, such as “white” which some may define as the absence of color. Another example is how we understand the “down” as the opposite of “up” and “good” as the opposite of “evil”. The meaning of each idea is an effect of its binary opposite. This is what Saussure meant when he said “signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position." In other words, we are able to perceive individual components only because we perceive their difference from other signs.
Signs are what makes up content in language. Structuralism looks at the system that makes content possible. Language assigns meanings to things which then makes them real. In this way, language shapes our reality rather than describes it. An example of this can be seen in the way that other cultures have words that don’t exist in our language. Every culture has words for the things that are important to them but because they have named them they become part of the reality. Because everything is defined by it’s relationship to something else, if one element changes, then that brings changes to all. As Saussure says, “…the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified.” An example of this can be seen here at Emmanuel College. Last year, the addition of the Wilkens Science Center on campus changed the way the Administration Building floors were numbered. The floors of the old building were changed to line up with the floors of the new building. The ground floor became the first floor and because of this change, all of the names of the other floors had to change too. The floors changed only in name but in our reality the first floor became the second, the second became the third, and so on. Thus their value was changed.
Structuralism can be applied to many areas of study and people have different reactions to it. "You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids”, a verse form the song "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" is a response to Saussure's theory of structuralism and its incapacity to understand love. To the author of these lyrics, the concept of “structure” itself is like a bulldozer that cannot shed any light on the nature of love—to study or understand love under structuralism would be similar to studying orchids with a bulldozer. Obviously Saussure's theory has a much larger scope. His discussion is not from the perspective of somebody who merely doesn't believe in love. Rather, as we have voluminously discussed, he does not believe in the intrinsic meaning of anything at all. He believes that the sign “love”, like all other signs, can be understood only if contrasted by what it is not. In the chain of words “indifference”, “respect”, “admiration”, “love”, and “idol-worship”, love can be understood only through its relation to these neighbors. It follows that love is neither merely “admiration” nor is it as blind and self-sacrificing as “idol-worship”. Just like the 8:25 train that is just what will transport you if you want to leave after 7:25 but before 9:25, love for Saussure will be what you feel when you more than just admire somebody but do not raise her or him to the level of an idol.
It is not that the lyric writer necessarily disagrees with Saussure's notion of meaning as a difference between negatives. The narrator himself might even agree with De Saussure but yet he decides to kill him. Here is how the narrator excuses himself and explains his motivations in the last stanza:
I’m just a great composer
And not a violent man
But I lost my composure [20]
And I shot Ferdinand
Crying “it’s well and kosher
to say you don’t understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-
Holland”
So "the great composer" kills Saussure for Holland-Dozier-Holland. Googling the song I found out that Holland-Dozier-Holland is a Motown production team whose song lyrics and text refer to love as something concrete, tangible, almost an object, a solid entity, attributes which not only doesn't Saussure see in something as abstract as love, but not even in something concrete as the 8.25 train. Thus the composer kills Ferdinand de Saussure not because he thinks he is wrong but potentially for the opposite reason. He knows Saussure is right and he finds this state of affairs too cruel to bear. Maybe like a Peter Pan who doesn't want to grow up he shelters himself in the naiveté of Holland-Dozier-Holland whose lyrics give us the comforting illusion of stable meaning.
Signs are what makes up content in language. Structuralism looks at the system that makes content possible. Language assigns meanings to things which then makes them real. In this way, language shapes our reality rather than describes it. An example of this can be seen in the way that other cultures have words that don’t exist in our language. Every culture has words for the things that are important to them but because they have named them they become part of the reality. Because everything is defined by it’s relationship to something else, if one element changes, then that brings changes to all. As Saussure says, “…the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified.” An example of this can be seen here at Emmanuel College. Last year, the addition of the Wilkens Science Center on campus changed the way the Administration Building floors were numbered. The floors of the old building were changed to line up with the floors of the new building. The ground floor became the first floor and because of this change, all of the names of the other floors had to change too. The floors changed only in name but in our reality the first floor became the second, the second became the third, and so on. Thus their value was changed.
Structuralism can be applied to many areas of study and people have different reactions to it. "You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids”, a verse form the song "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" is a response to Saussure's theory of structuralism and its incapacity to understand love. To the author of these lyrics, the concept of “structure” itself is like a bulldozer that cannot shed any light on the nature of love—to study or understand love under structuralism would be similar to studying orchids with a bulldozer. Obviously Saussure's theory has a much larger scope. His discussion is not from the perspective of somebody who merely doesn't believe in love. Rather, as we have voluminously discussed, he does not believe in the intrinsic meaning of anything at all. He believes that the sign “love”, like all other signs, can be understood only if contrasted by what it is not. In the chain of words “indifference”, “respect”, “admiration”, “love”, and “idol-worship”, love can be understood only through its relation to these neighbors. It follows that love is neither merely “admiration” nor is it as blind and self-sacrificing as “idol-worship”. Just like the 8:25 train that is just what will transport you if you want to leave after 7:25 but before 9:25, love for Saussure will be what you feel when you more than just admire somebody but do not raise her or him to the level of an idol.
It is not that the lyric writer necessarily disagrees with Saussure's notion of meaning as a difference between negatives. The narrator himself might even agree with De Saussure but yet he decides to kill him. Here is how the narrator excuses himself and explains his motivations in the last stanza:
I’m just a great composer
And not a violent man
But I lost my composure [20]
And I shot Ferdinand
Crying “it’s well and kosher
to say you don’t understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-
Holland”
So "the great composer" kills Saussure for Holland-Dozier-Holland. Googling the song I found out that Holland-Dozier-Holland is a Motown production team whose song lyrics and text refer to love as something concrete, tangible, almost an object, a solid entity, attributes which not only doesn't Saussure see in something as abstract as love, but not even in something concrete as the 8.25 train. Thus the composer kills Ferdinand de Saussure not because he thinks he is wrong but potentially for the opposite reason. He knows Saussure is right and he finds this state of affairs too cruel to bear. Maybe like a Peter Pan who doesn't want to grow up he shelters himself in the naiveté of Holland-Dozier-Holland whose lyrics give us the comforting illusion of stable meaning.
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