TMZ, OMG, and the Panopticon

Michel Foucault’s observations of Western societies and their means of keeping their people in their right place and order lead him to contemplate the similarities between civil vigilance and Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. The Panopticon is a circular-shaped building, which can serve the purposes of a prison because of its separate rooms lining the outsides and a control/watch tower situated in the center of the building. Foucault says in Discipline and Punish, that:

The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions – to enclose, to deprive of light, and to hide – it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. (554)

Taking that model into consideration, it is reasonable to say then that media outlets such as TMZ or OMG.com function in very much the same way as the panopticon for those who are either brave enough or foolish enough to undertake the task of entertaining the masses for profit. Entertainment media sources such as TMZ also reverse the idea of the dungeon in that they provide their “prisoners” with plenty of light (the spotlight and the flashing lights of the paparazzis’ cameras) and they reveal to the general public everything and anything which they can possibly find out about their prey, the celebrities. The only thing that celebrity gossip sites do keep from the “dungeon” is the idea of confinement; Foucault says that “Visibility is a trap.” (554). Unfortunately, the celebrities who see themselves trapped within this societal prison can do nothing but try to brush off all of the unwanted press.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. "Discipline and Punish." Ed. Julie Rivkin. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. 549-66. Print.

SmartPictures / PacificCoastNews.com. Rihanna Can Get Away with Wearing Just about Any Outfit ... as Long as It Doesn't Consist of a Purple Metallic Cap, Ill-fitting Sweatshirt, and Terribly Unflattering Trousers. 2010. Photograph. Www.OMG.com. Yahoo, 12 May 2010. Web. 17 May 2010.

Difference, Différance, It's All the Same... Right?

Have you ever sat and listened to someone’s conversation and suddenly find yourself thinking about the nature of what people are vocalizing? How do people know what to say? How is it that people have ever been able to decipher the multitudes of different sounds, pauses, and inflections? How is it that we as human beings can hear a word and automatically make sense of it and derive meaning? Jacques Derrida says that people derive meaning from language according to what each person has experienced about each word and that we communicate through “signifiers” in order to produce “signifieds.” He calls his theoryDifférance due to the fact that is deals with the differentiation between words that are similar to each other and the meanings that people construct (279).

This may all sound interesting, however, it can also be very cryptic. A simple example of Derrida’s signifier-signified is through the use of the word “house.” If one person hears the word “house,” he may automatically think of the building where he lived his childhood which may then bring forth other memories and meanings for “house.” However, someone else may hear the same word and think of Dr. House MD because he is a weekly watcher of the T.V. show by that name. The signifier there would be the word “house” and the “signified” would be the meaning that each man initially thought of when he heard the word, whether it’s a building or a television character. It occurs, then, that Différance functions in very much the same way as Google does: through our conversations, other people may input a signifier such as “house,” and the search engine (our minds) may output what might be the signified for that particular situation.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. "Différance." Ed. Julie Rivkin. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second ed. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. 278-99. Print.

Eutopia?

Surfing through Youtube, I there came across a video of ex U.S. President Bill Clinton at a birthday celebration in 2006 for the President of the state of Israel. It was a video in which an Israeli singer, Liel Kolet, was performing and she spontaneously asked Clinton to join her on stage for a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I have to admit that as I saw a former Western ruler and a Middle Eastern teenage girl performing there with “forty Jewish children and forty Arabic children”, I got chills at the thought of the world ever really coming together despite political, economic, or religious reasons. Karl Marx was a German philosopher who, before John lennon, Bill Clinton, or Liel Kolet, imagined a world in which humanity could coexist and everyone’s needs were met. Unfortunately, the world and the human race do not work that way. Applying Marxist ideals to the real world have never worked the way that they are intended to, and will likely never work, because of the simple fact that people will never be happy with being average and having just the basics.

One of the first things that people ask when meeting someone new is “So what do you do?” which is many times followed by “So how did you get involved that field?” But what are people truly looking for when they ask that question? If someone asks “What do you do?” would it be appropriate to respond, “Well, in the morning I wake up, jump in the shower, get dressed, and go to work. Then I…”? That response would leave the other person confused and would make the rest of the meeting very awkward. The reason for that is that the average person understands that being asked about what one does is supposed to be met with an explanation of one’s profession which then gives the other person an idea of where to place him or her in the social order. Karl Marx says in “The German Ideology” that people “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence [people] are indirectly producing their actual material life.” (653). This type of question, when met by an appropriate response, serves as some sort of validation, for the person being questioned, about their stance in society. The person being interviewed is able to prove that he or she is producing enough work to sustain him or herself and is then also able to show it off through material possessions. However, if people are placed in a society in which everyone is the same, their jobs are the same as everyone else’s, and everyone has the same materials, people would eventually get tired of being just like everyone else and not standing out, as is the case in Communist Cuba where people would rather risk death in the ocean in an attempt to escape than stay in a country and system of government which was supposed to be for their benefit.

There is much propaganda floating around with Marxist ideology; messages about a better world where people can live together in harmony and social, economic, and political equality. Those messages may sometimes help to keep people like myself looking ahead to a brighter future. However, the real chances of such a Eutopia ever existing are slim to none because of the real human need to stand out in their means of providing for themselves and their need to accumulate material wealth to prove their ability to provide.

Works Cited

Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie. Ryan, Michael. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 653. Print.

The Party Must Go On...

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Have you ever noticed that no matter how bad a situation is, no matter how many negative things people have to deal with, there is always time for them to set everything aside and throw a big party? And it always seems to be the people who have the least to celebrate! What is it about a huge party, a carnival atmosphere, which draws so many people in no matter what else is going on? Mikhail Bakhtin says in “Rebelais and His World” that “carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the basis of laughter.” So why is it that “the people’s” second life revolves around laughter? Well, I know that most of us have at one point or another heard that “laughter is the best medicine,” but what is it that people are trying to heal? People, especially those who have been continuously stuck in the lower classes, have much to try to heal; physically, emotionally, and mentally. It is not an easy thing to have to have to work much harder than the upper classes only to earn a fraction of their income. I think that what Bakhtin was trying to say is that people periodically need a break from all of the stresses that abound; a time in which they can feel liberated of the systemic pressures; whether they are sociological, economical, political, or religious. But let us not leave the upper classes to assume the position of all-mighty strong and powerful people. They too have much to deal with (especially during these times of economic crisis) and so they join the festivities. So what carnival does is that it brings all people together in the spirit of fun and laughter. While it elevates the hoi polloi, it also degrades (temporarily) the ruling class. In the video clip posted above, for example, New Orleans’ Mayor Ray Nagin dressed up in costume to the delight of the crowds in New Orleans’ Fat Tuesday celebration, a time in which we can all gather around and laugh at the ridiculousness of our current situations and trade them in for beads, drinks, and maybe (for some) a little drunken debauchery.

Liberated Woman or Woman Trapped??

In looking at a simple painting, a group of people who belong to the same cultural background may see similar characteristics and attribute similar meanings to it. Regardless of individual interpretations, the fact is that cultural background plays a vital role in shaping what each person places significance in and to what degree. However, what if that simple painting was viewed by someone who was from a completely different background as the person who originally created it? Jonathan Culler argues in his Structuralist Poetics that “The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules: rules which do not regulate behavior so much as create the possibility of particular forms of behavior” (Rivkin 56). Keeping that in mind, let us now take a second look at the painting for which I previously wrote a poem.

As a westerner woman, when I first looked at this painting I thought of a liberated woman rising above trials and tribulations in order to confront a world full of challenges. I drew this interpretation based on my basic knowledge of symbolism attached to the colors black and white, which are the two major colors in this painting. To me, the black background symbolizes hardships and the evils of the world where as the white in which the woman is painted depicts her true purity despite living in a tainted world. However, when I showed the same painting to a man from a completely different background, a Chinese man, to be specific, he drew a completely different meaning from it. When he looked at this same painting, he said that he thought it was about a woman trying to break away from a place of solitude. When I asked him what it was about the painting that brought about that interpretation, he said that there is a Chinese story about a lonely woman who lives on the moon and is very sad that she cannot come down; the black circle being the moon, the white swirls being the clouds, and the brown and gray lines behind the circle representing the inside of a “box” in which the sad woman on the moon (Chang’e) is trapped.

In looking at a simple painting of a feminine silhouette on a black background, the interpretations between people of differing cultures may be tremendous. Culler proposes that this is because meaning is constructed by the individual based on the true knowledge of each culture’s system of symbols. It is very obvious to me that the main player in the difference in interpretations made by me, a Mexican-American woman (West), and that of a Chinese man (East) was simply our difference in cultural backgrounds. We both saw a woman rising, but from there on, our takes on her story went in completely opposite directions. I derived a somewhat feminist meaning from it and he derived a more tragic meaning based on his knowledge of Chinese legends. Maybe those of us who care to know more about the way that people derive meaning from literature should pay closer attention to Jonathan Culler. Maybe he knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

** Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. 1975. Ed. Rivkin, Julie. Ryan, Michael. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Edition. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. Print.

The Risen

The Risen

From out of the mist she rises

A new day for her has come

The day when she holds her head up;

She is woman, hear her roar.

Her silhouette’s not as simple

As those to whom she’s compared

But that thing which makes her different

Gives her power in her own respect.

She looks at the world with courage

And a fire that burns for truth

For she knows that if she doesn’t

The ways of the world will consume.

She stretches her arms in compassion

To those who may just need a hand

And in pulling her people up slowly

She shows how to do the same.

She rose from that mist which had blinded

And now she can see very clear

That her struggle has not been in vane

She has risen a strong human being.

**Painting is by Kay Sandoval, a local artist from my community. http://www.kristysandoval.com

I Can ALMOST Feel Your Needle in My Arm…

Did the title catch your eye? It was meant to. Just like many other titles that you might have heard before. Hurt. Have you heard that one? Maybe you remember that title and you can already hear Trent Reznor’s voice in your head. Or maybe Johnny Cash is who you picture in your mind’s eye as he strums that acoustic and pictures float by of his wife and kids. So which one has the greater impact on you? Is it Reznor’s version (the original, I might add), or does Cash’s endless collage hit harder? What if instead of Trent or Johnny, it was Kermit? That’s right; Kermit the Frog. Would it still make the song a tragic story or would the fact that it’s covered by a Muppet turn it into comedy? Well, According to Plato, that song, or any other song/poem, has no business being performed by anyone other than the author or someone who has been in the exact same situation and can therefore do it justice because (s)he has the experience to draw from. I have to agree with Plato that a work loses its original value once it has been through many different voices. However, I think that Plato was a little too strict in his views and there is definitely room for people to show their own takes on a song such as this one.

It is very obvious to me that songs such as Reznor’s Hurt are reproduced so many times by so many people because of the intensity with which it describes something as personal as a man’s battle with drug addiction. Johnny Cash was definitely someone who could draw from his life experiences as a long-time drug addict to bring the song to life. Socrates says to the Rhapsode in Plato’s Ion, “Now what about when Homer says that Hecamede, Nestor’s concubine, gives a potion to the wounded Machaon to drink. He says something like this:

…with Pramnian wine; over it she grated goat’s cheese

With a bronze grater; with it an onion as relish. *

Is it for the doctor’s skill or for the rhapsode’s to decide whether Homer speaks correctly here or not?” What Socrates was trying to tell the Rhapsode was that there is no one better to talk about something like medical procedures than a doctor. Because of this, he, being nothing more than an artistic performer, would not meet the same qualifications to explain Homer's works because he is not a medical doctor. Taking that into consideration, I am sure that when Johnny Cash heard the lyrics to the song, he was very moved and inspired to sing it himself because it applied directly to his personal life and therefore he was well qualified. The problem then becomes what to say or how to react when you see something like a spoof on the song which is made with Kermit the Frog pretending to be Johnny Cash. It is obviously not to be taken seriously and very few would put much thought into it other than to maybe forward the link to the video to all of their friends (because it really is a very funny video).

So in short, what I’m trying to ask is where do we draw the line for artistic integrity? Should we draw a line at all? Do we just allow for people to play with such texts? Should we learn to appreciate all of them for what they’re worth? I think so. Somebody like me could make another cover of the song even though I’ve never had a drug problem, but I could still draw from my own experiences in knowing people with drug addictions. There is nothing wrong with people wanting to imitate something as a song that they thought was great. I think that Plato might have been just a little too stringent in his views. After all, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.

*Ion, Plato, Classical Literary Criticism, Murray & Dorsch, Penguin Classics, 1965, Pg. 10.