THEN COME THE INVASION OF THE ZOMBIES:

In fact most of these characters could be considered zombies going about their daily lives not asserting themselves to make any sort of difference.  They each conform to the hegemonic state and even the only male who assimilates to a more respectable role of hegemony is still apart of the whole social design.  But then when real zombies actually appear then each person much reconstruct the way in which they see themselves and negate any questioning of their zombification by hegemony.

If we look at the transformation of Shaun’s girlfriend, who at first did not see Shaun as the successful male and thus could not fulfill her role as the complacent girlfriend, instead she must assume the male role of leadership.  But when the zombies attack it forces Shaun to assume his role as the male in the relationship thus and Liz can assume the position of the female, even though she knows that this new assertion on Shaun’s part is a farce.  In fact at one point when Shaun gives his speech about working together to fight off the zombies and he quotes someone that no one thinks to question, except for Liz who knows that he got it off a beer bottle.

Then by the end of the movie the zombies have been assimilated and commodified to accept their roles with in the capitalist structure as laborers, that will not try to usurp  the social hegemony.  The social order of the male and the female power structure is now also put in place, and Shaun and Liz become zombies once again to their gender roles.

In this second portion that we had to read in APEX I found a very disturbing passage in which the narrator is talking about a childhood lego game. I understood that this game Ekho created in the 50′s as the narrator states creates these very one dimensional worlds of the American utopia. However this is not where the fun was in creating these Ekho worlds it was in “Deviating from the blueprints.” These possible deviations allowed for personal “morals and prejudices and genetic predisposition to certain illness” to manifest themselves out side of the utopian world that was the Ekho directions in an isolated arena that did not effect the “sterling HMO” but manifested in the dark reality of the “hospital without a waiting room, or one equipped with a particularly large morgue.”

When a new political identity is created it is not created in the sense to call into being a group that is apart of the whole social identity but in fact one that must be isolated for fear that it may contaminate and shed light on the dark corners of the Ekho Village. This hegemonic form of Ekho was okay because everyone stayed in their area, the reality was left to the imagination and the imagination became the reality. This game as capitalist product is in some ways the exact definition of Jameson’s idea of postmodernity, in which their is a comodification of a false nostalgic history that is emulated as reality and the real history if sold as imagination.

Now Hall says that from this alienation the group of the other is supposed to then come together to work against and recreate their identity against the hegemonic identity that was created for them, which I guess is signified by the “counterculture, the political tumult” that then forced the American Ekho to readjust to the new social norms. Hear I agree with Hall in that the masses can effect the depiction of itself, however as Jameson notes the real genius of the Postmodern capitalism is its ability to induce hegemony through comodification of culture. So then the Ekho is now made to include “brown bulbs (that were no too brown) and yellow bulbs (that corresponded to some hypothetical Asian skin pigment) according to ratios informed by sales research.” This is the effected political change that the other creates with in the social hegemony, in which multiplicity is marketed in the nostalgia of the old identities that are now placed into the American Ekho dream that they never existed in. For their reality is still in the imagination of the isolated deviation that no one see because the ones that are seen assimilate to the dream whose “values” are constant, with a different face.

And if historically society is always trying to create a hegemonic identity of itself in relation to not being something of “otherness” then it creates other social identities for the “other” that does not fit into the norm. Thus a single identity with in the splintering of a Postmodern culture is dictated and influenced by many different definitions of otherness. I believe that it is Horkiemer and Adorno that talk about the idea that all of these absolutes are ultimately incomplete and actually must use pieces of each other to in some sense create a whole, thus each defining factor of otherness is defined in relation to another idea of “other”. For instance the African American female, can not with in this hegemonic society see herself as apart of the male dominated society solely because she is female. But femaleness is still not enough to define her because she is still isolated more, she is not a white female. Thus she must be African American but not an African American male. Therefore with in this Postmodern structure is their more of an alienation of identity with the commodification of “otherness” as a way to represent “new budding identities”?

Just to get the ranting out of the way, I have to wonder what is this guys deal, who is he? In opening the novel this way, how role does this narrator, who mentions himself in third person, see himself in roles of authority? And what is his obsession with naming? What is in a name?

What is in a name?

Saussure state that language is what carries social norms and language paired with imagery creates the symbolic form of an idea, even in a word. So in essence naming something calls it into being, solidifying it with in society. For this author the name carries all authority and weight, it is even immortal (5) A name can give an exact profile of a person, place or anything. And thus certain types of names must place a hierarchy upon the things that they call into being. So then must ask who gets to choose the names and what happens to those things that are just not named at all?

The essence of Brand:

It seems as thought the author is specifically obsessed with brand names and particular objects that represent the status of the elite. For instance when he meets Jack and Dolly even though he does not specifically name the brands of clothes that they where it is almost as though their attire is a brand in it of its self, of upper class white Americans. Jack’s “white collar erupted out of his V-neck.” And from this the narrator constructs an entire biography that is nostalgic at most as though this status, this name of white collar American holds some social norm, a code that they follow. Which according to Saussure is true because in some respects the name white collar was created to differentiate the upper from the lower and from that a whole identity was constructed. He does the same thing with the garages that he sees while driving through suburbia all decked out in the middle class man, with his name brand tools that assert his manliness. However the narrator is nameless, with no identity other than a Nomenclature Consultant, and the fact that I think he may be black.

The Nomenclature Consultant:

So he is the man whose only job is to names things. And he is in this old town of Winthrop to rename it, something that would emulate the direction that Lucky plans to take it. He has had some sort of misfortune with his toe which has effected his ability to work and this town is supposed to be his come back, in which the names will just flow back to him. However, he does not name himself, as though he is absent from this process and actually that it a well oiled machinery that enables him to produce names that embody the perfect identities of his products. “The things you name go on without you… he felt reduced again, half erased.” Why does he refer to himself in the third person, it is almost as though he has no ownership of his own identity. As though it has been created for him for the purpose of him falling into the specific niche created for him which is a “Quincy man.”

So this person the narrator who is supposed to be this objective mediator for the naming this town must create a name that suggest a future and forgets the past. In some respects Jameson would say that this is Postmodernity at its best, creating a a way to market and identity by alienating it from the tangible past. However I must wonder what is the tangible past of this town, who is this Winthrop that came and made this town the epicenter for barbwire growth. What alienated history does the name Winthrop attach to this town?

The ending of this novel created a spawn of unsettling questions that have cause me to rethink to some degree the point of education and what is its active role beyond the analysis.

If this is true what is the real point of studying literature.  If education is an elitist form that traps those educated in  a bubble of their own theory, have we distanced ourselves from the reality of humanity? Have we thought that our analysis of the human condition and society given us the tools to recreate it?  And what does it mean to create something?

At the beginning of this novel when Lentz and Powers where planning on creating the prototype of the human cognition, and how it was supposed to be in some was the “perfect” replication of the human mind; I couldn’t help think about our own creation myth and what it really means.  The dominant creation myth of our society is that we where created in God’s image, and in this novel some how we are playing God.  Now this forces me to ask two questions.

If we are created in God’s image then as a replica of him does that make us in fact God?

And if we then take on the role of God as the closest manifestation of this being is everything that we create therefore some image of ourselves? War machines, Capitalism

And if according to Hutcheon, our modes of articulation, media, art, literature are all self reflexive are they two an image of us, and what does it mean to study our selves.  We even have different dominant ways in which to describe ourselves.

Through all of this self reflexivity  are we just recycling old ideas and notions the same ontological and epistemological questions that have plagued our idea of existence?

For McHale the Postmodern is an extension of the epistemological questions of Modernism. Modernism is an epistemological questioning of the unanswered by the system of living. And in some ways as described before looking for the utopia in which all questions are answered by a single notion that balances it all out and things fall into place. And it is in turn the subject of these texts that construes reality and creates their own utopia that may answer their own issues of who what when where and why.

When the epistemological questions did not create the utopia that Modernism sought to create Postmodernism turned inwards to a more ontological form of reflection, in which it calls into question the essence of being in itself.

This I think I understand but what I really find interesting is the way in which the personal reading shifts the dominant reading of a text. Thus one can look at a text from both an epistemological and an ontological lens. And if I have this right this is what McHale would call the “transhistorical”. Which definitely enables a gateway between the modern and the postmodern.

• Is it just me or does the “Center” at U. resemble the “net” that Powers continually discusses or browses through?
• Is there a difference between science and the humanities?
• What is the Neural Network? Is it the middle of learning?
• What is connectionism?
• Writing Codes?
• Neurological Analog?
• How does memory fit into learning?

The Center: So the Center is literally the center of U.  which i guess is symbolically centered around the sciences.  On top of that  the Powers in the book is describing the nature of the Center at some points and then the world net at others and they seem quite similar. And referencing the foreign language that he mentioned before Powers describes this place as a “virtual space” (pg 6) in which one would never encounter the same person twice and was also literally his window in the actual “world web” which he describes on pg 7 as “another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it.”  This quote is very important because it also references that the web as a technological advancement is a product of the scientific findings and experimentation, thus science has become the “status quo” or the literal Center of the educational fields.

Science vs. Humanities: By the end of this section one thing occurred to me: What is at stake if Lentz and Powers teach this computer to analyze literature and come to the same types of conclusions with out any form of actual interaction?  What does this mean for the construction of our identities as human beings?                                                                   In the beginning of this novel Powers in a sense is giving a literary analysis of the Center and its inhumane forms of interaction.  And in some ways characterizing the scientist that work in the Center as void of human interaction and thus their works lack any basis in actual human life “a neighborhood more efficiently lonely.”  Which I think Powers equates to understanding the Center.  So how in the realm of science is this literary idea of understanding broken down; its de-constructed into a series of sparked synapses.  These firings are the biological equivalent to learning as Powers would understand it.  They are supposed to be the polar opposites, but what if they are the same.  What if the mechanics of learning the way that Lentz’s machine would is a replica of the human process of learning because in fact we have created it?

Neural Network: Simply the net is a simulation of the neurological make up of the brain, in which information is fed into the brain and this sets off a series of signals.  Synapses with the greater association will have a stronger memory of the information.  And for some reason this does seem in some ways similar to the ways that we learn cultural norms and create or fit into identities.  Lentz’s machine is fed sentences or information and the net has to spew out words or something in resemblance to what went in and the responses are given either encouragement or discouragement.  As people on an interactive level we see and hear different types of images and feelings and society tells us from when we are young that some are encouraged and some are discouraged against. And one could argue but this net does not know the idea or the sensation of feeling, yet I have to argue that like Hutcheon our senses are still representations of the real that never existed.  In many respects we have named and given meaning to our sensations and recorded them through visuals, and literature which continual reinforces these ideas and notions.

Connectionism: Definition: the theory that all mental processes can be described as the operation of inherited or acquired bonds between stimulus and response.  This idea makes me wonder, what in fact are our stimuli? And how are our responses logged?

Writing Codes: Powers makes a reference to one of his past jobs of writing codes for programs, usually in the form of the “if then” statement.  So in a sense these codes ensured that if such and such occurs then the program produces this.  But with in a postmodern society, because as Jameson argues it has become an entire culture and not just a movement, codes in this sense can only work as absolutes.  Postmodernism recognizes these forms of encoding yet does not accept them as the only viable responses.  However if one where to use encoding in a different way a way that ensures that the same codes will be used through out the evolutionary changes of society.  In many respects these are our social symbols like: freedom, femininity, love, power, justice, wrong, right, good, evil.  Each of these are encoded into our society however they take on many different forms and thus can be implemented to any system.  Which is all documented in literature, visual arts, history etc.  It is replicated in many respects all forms of human creation.  So a computer or a neural net which logs patterns would pick up on these patterns and be able to associate these globalized themes with mostly anything especially literature.

Neurological Analog: neurology: the science of the nerves and nervous system, and the diseases that affect them.                                                                                                            analog: mechanism that represents data by measurement of a continuous physical variable as voltage or pressure.

So for Lentz’s net the continual physical variable is literature and it is supposed to emulate the brains nervous system and how it as an analog represents data and measures it.  But how does the brain measure such data?  And what is our associative data?

Memory: After going through most of these questions I am glad that I left this one for the last, because through out this novel Powers is recording his memory of C. And also memory plays a key role in learning, in order to map out patterns in order to create association.

09/04/2007-PostModernism

09/06/2007- Written On The Body

09/21/2007- PostModernism The Death of “I”

09/24/2007- Where did Reality Go

09/24/2007- All Sining All Dancing

09/30/2007- Lacking Depth

09/30/2007- Cohesive Self

10/09/2007- Destruction of Society

10/09/2007- Purifying Society

10/11/2007- Unnatural Woman

Comments

09/30/2007- Kim C. Jameson

THE BIG CRACK DOWN:

It appears that I am absolutely fascinated with the idea of the individual and its perception of the world. I know that through all of this theory I am finding that in trying to relate to anything one would both be object and subject. Here are some of the things that I feel I really tried to dog deep into:

In my thoughts on the subject of the DEATH Of I , I wrote:

In literary terms who has the power of narration; the I’s have it. It is the subject of the story that controls the way in which space, time and character interacts with each other, and it is through that lense that the objects under refelection are objectified. Now to say that in Postmodernism there is the death of the subject, I am not sure that I can agree. Maybe the subject is not depicted wholely, like in Written on the Body, but the subject is there none the less. It is still in control of perception and uses itself as a reference for all things that it reflects on.

Here I find it hard to say that in Postmodernism we have relieved ourselves of the notion of the subject. Though I think that many postmodernist works do move in the direction of creating a falable “I” the subject is there none the less. And I think that more so in many ways the subject now has taken on the role of the disjointed persona, which splinters all of the images or “realities” that it tries to explain. I found this to be more so true in my Fight Club Posts too.

ALL SINGING ALL DANCING:

And then I thought about the line “We are the all singing, all dancing shit of the earth” made me think of the ways in which we as a culture even a species has recorded ourselves and for what purpose, we still make the same mistakes and revert back into old habits. Are we essentially still in cave and recylcing old ideas and shadows of a better human being.

I think that this post right here is when I started to question our recycling of our identities and the mass production of the subject. In which I almost want to agree with Jameson’s idea’s of capitalism stripping art of its depth and historical context. I began to question the idea of “reality” and where would one go to find it. And also how does the idea of a subject automatically control who is the object.

And Then Came Cindy Sherman:

So my question then is what is she saying about femininity. I realized that in many of her pictures, even thought they are her, there seems to be no realness. Everything seems posed and it has lost its notion of natural. Granted none of these notions of “woman” are all together natural but those who painted them made it seem natural; real.

After reading Hutcheon and looking at the Cindy Sherman still frames, it hit me that possibly all reality has been fabricated by a controlling “I”. And so I have this thing about trying to dismantle the “I” the prevailing subject but how would one do that. Cindy Sherman is a perfect example of how one must still use the signifier to call attention to that signified. Is there ever a possibility to put the subject and the object on an even playing field? I am not exactly sure.

THE CRACK DOWN PART II:

My Best Posts:

Jameson’s: Lack of Depth

In many ways I see this as probably my best post, only because of the fact that I delved into the text instead of just responding to its themes.  I really tried to pick Jameson apart and find some sort of common ground, and each paragraph I think shows that progression.  And also unlike previous takes where I just made generalizations, I think here I actually used the text.  Sometimes I know that I go off on my own emotional tangents which is okay but, I forget to analyze the text critically and thorough to grasp what the author is saying.

Purifying Society

With this one I mostly proud because I stuck to one theme and really tried to see how it linked to images specifically from the novel.  It is hard to pay attention to or grasp always all of the images because they are splintered in so many ways in relation to all themes.  And so here I thought that i did an okay job of mapping the image of soap and the idea of cleansing a society and connecting that to the splintering idea of the replacement system that Tyler had in mind.

AWESOME CLASSMATE BLOG!!!!

Making Sense????

I really think that Kim did such a good job on her blog and I really do aspire to be as detailed and really be able to break down the theorist the way that she does.  Her blog is very clear even as she muddles her way through the work but she breaks it down and puts it into terms that are alot clearer than even the authors.  YAY !!!! KIM!!!!!

MY GOALS

• be able to connect the literature to the theorist
• stick to the point of what I am trying to discuss

• break down the theory into points

Hopefully I can achieve this by first breaking up the theorist into themes or points then seeing how those points apply!

Immediatly the first thing that popped into my head was actually two paintings. I saw the woman in the paitning to be a rendishion of the “Madonna” an epherial mother which has been produced through out art by many painters spanning from the realist to the modernist.  But the head in her hand specifically reminded me of a Moreau “The Apparition”c. 1876 which shows the beheading of John the Baptist.  Which if true I thought to be a peculiar reference.

The woman in this painting has her arms open as though wantingto give comfort while have this stone cold expression and a person’s head in her hand.  The lighting that Sherman uses makes the woman’s stomach look as though she is pregnant; which to me symbolizes two of the many ways that femininity has been depicted through out history.  One being a temptress that results in dire consequences (physical death) and then also the mother and nuturer.  and what makes it even more peculiar because the painting that I believe it to be refernecing by Moreau about the death of John the Baptist, is about a mother who married a King, who was named a whore by John th Baptist.  The mother ordered her daughter to dance for her new husband the King and that the King would then grant the daughter any desire.  And the daughter half naked dances and then in return asks for her mother’s enemy to be killed she asks for the head of John the Baptist.

So my question then is what is she saying about femininity.  I realized that in many of her pictures, even thought they are her, there seems to be no realness.  Everything seems posed and it has lost its notion of natural.  Granted none of these notions of “woman” are all together natural but those who painted them made it seem natural; real.

And I dont think it stopped there either, the metaphor of Tyler sitting in this perfect wooden construction (his view of society) creating a hand that casts over everything at the perfect moment (project mayhem) and him at the center in the dark (the legend). In a way project mayhem working as an organism regardless of Tyler being active ensures that the societal cleansing will continue.  However with the ending of the novel I do not think that Tyler is actually dead, since he is there holding a conversation with God.  And I wondered in the society that he wishes to forge through the cleansing of humanity, does Tyler the “son” then plan to replace the “father” and take on the throne of God???