Destruction of Society (chpt 6 -19)

Palahniuk really begins to dismantle society and put a spot light on the “art for art’s sake” attitude of the elitist class.  At the beginning of the novel one might think that Tyler’s whole objective is chaos and the destruction of societies morals.   However, by the end of chapter 18 I realized that his destruction has a purpose, a goal.  Tyler wants to destroy history, which in my mind was the museum that they were about to blow up in chapter 1, but really I feel that he wants to destroy the history that does not include him.

It is this that I see both the narrator and Tyler having in common, a fear and loathing of rejection.  And feel this all comes out in Chapter 18, with the introduction of God.  Through out the novel so far there have been references to what it means to be a man in today’s society, which leads me to believe that a central goal to Tyler’s destruction of today’s society is to re-implement a society that includes him, that recognizes him and his values even if that means becoming infamous first in the eyes of God; “…Tyler saw it was that getting God’s attention for being bad was better than getting no attention at all.”  Apparently the whole idea of hitting rock bottom is so that one could then rise because one could fall not longer the only thing left to do would be to pull yourself up by the boot straps.

So what does this have to do with purposeful destruction and “art for art’s sake”.  I realized that Tyler recognizes and agrees that “A criminal is a criminal.” and that degrees or criminality are fictitious,  however he values his form of destruction over other forms of self destruction.  For instance the narrator makes a point to point out the fact that they stayed with in the speed limit the whole time while the conformist of society (other people in traffic) where eager to go outside of the speed limit and for what?  There was no enlightenment in breaking such a trivial law, what self actualization comes of that.  So from what I understand of this correlation Tyler wants to destroy history that does nothing for people.  He wants to then reinforce a history, his story that will empower and force society to realize that it must be saved and that he is the one to do it.  In a way he has seen modern societies, history, art as just a product and motive for consumerism which voids things or icons of any true meaning.  How Jameson of him!

The destruction of the cohesive self

“In this one moment, Marla’s lie reflects my lie, and all i can see are lies. In the middle of all their truth.”

It baffled me slightly that he saw all the people who were dying as in a moment of “their truth” when just a few lines before this one he was ridiculing them (the dying people and those who ran the work shop) to be all liers to some degree. They couldn’t look at death in the face and name it for what it was. I think that the narrator really does see the people in his group as a product or still living in a lie instead of accepting their death, I think that is why he revers Chloe so. However the only moments of truth from these people are when they have those involuntary occurrences do to their diseases, like going in to a ciesure because your brain has shrunken. Which is why I think that even in these beginning stages I would see in some respects the same person only that Tyler is freed by pain and the narrator is depressed by his inability to function with conviction.

This brings me to the whole duality subject. I was mostly interested in reading this book so that way I could see or read how an auther can split up a character without making it seem like two different ones until the very end. And i think he does it seamlessly. First he introducer “Tyler Durden” as a character all on its own, yet when Tyler speaks his voice is not differentiated from that of the narrator, and I think I only noticed it because I saw the movie and was looking for the distinction. And I believe this to be true only because of the way which the narrator always points to the you falling asleep, however I think that in some respects the narrator is talking about “tyler” falling asleep and then there are moments when Tyler is saying that the narrator has fallen asleep. It seems only evident when the narrator begins to talk about the same thing in two different lights. For instance the splicing of pornographic pictures in the movie at the first the narrator describes it as “your boring attempt to…

Jameson: lacking depth

Before I decided to write this post I combed Jameson once again to find some idea of what he was talking about and I came to a few conclusions while rereading his work.

First I realized that first I needed to put into context how Jameson saw the emergence of Postmodernism.  He first began talking about the “periodizing hypothesis” in which history works linearly.  However, this idea might lend one to think that it is “massive homogeneity” of one period.  I think that Jameson realizes that this is not totally true; history can be or at least artistic movements can be broken up into periods of time but this does not mean that there was no heterogeneity.  In fact the modernist movement can be identified in many ways and actually went through many stages in that one period.  Which leads me to the next thing that I realized.

Secondly Jameson sees post modernism as a period of “pure” capitalism.  When first reading this portion if the piece of his paper I thought that he was saying that the postmodernist era was an era of good capitalism.  And then I realized that this idea was absolutely absurd.  In fact what Ernest Mandel was saying that this era of capitalism was capitalism most efficient form, in which it had infiltrated all systems of culture  in the search for the “new”.  So in the past when artistic movements went against the social norm the form was ridiculed as not art because it did not work with in the forms of what art was at the time.  However, with post modernism this  did not happen, in fact it was pushed by the consumerist machine as new or “cutting edge”.  So in fact pieces of postmodernist art that should have been seen as a commentary on the present social systems became apart of the very social system and bastardized in the same type of false representation as Marilyn Monroe.  To Jameson post modernism is an entire culture that truly is a tool to mass produce Americanism all over the world, and any artist who works outside of the system is consumed and spat out as some cheap rendition of themselves and those who work with in the system lack “depth”.

The aspect of Jameson that I really had a hard time swallowing in class was the depth that he felt that postmodernism lacked, due to its inability to both reconstruct and respond to history or the present day.  Which I still feel is slightly in accurate.  Jameson argued that in Warhol’s piece “Diamond Dust Shoes” had no depth because there was no concrete place or time that those shoes could have existed, in fact they could have existed anywhere at the time of the production of those shoes and been worn by any number of people.  But I argue that it is part of the postmodernist form to deconstruct the notion of space.  So of course the shoes could have been apart of any number of physical histories, but it is not the space that mattered historically to Warhol, but the time frame of consumer fetishism.  But mostly I realized that in his description of Warhol’s photo versus Van Gogh’s painting the former lacked “truth” or the need for some sort of utopian resolution.  Instead Warhol’s piece just pointed to the nature of the time.

Lastly I think this is truly the depth that Jameson feels that postmodernism is lacking.  That in all of its pointing it gives no answers or hopes of better leaving it vulnerable to be used as society rendition of new and cutting edge art that is working outside of the guidelines made by the canon.  He even rags on postmodernist theory which discounts any truth of any other theory of art because it is very postmodern to see all truths not as absolutes as they see themselves but more so as different forms of socially constructed ideals.  And Jameson’s retort to this postmodernist thought of the death of truth i can only some up in the words of the lines of a song “how can you say there is no truth when you say it like you right?”

“We are the all singing, all dancing SHIT of the EARTH!”

I am just going to start off by saying genious… GENIOUS!!!

After having our discussion in class i realized that some of this stuff I realized before taking the class, or maybe it was just got the general concept of the movie.  But after the class I realized that I did not really have any general conception of the movie other than the fact collective cohesion was possible only in the ability of the leader to both present in inspiration but absent in physicality.  Which in my mind was a very niave assumption.  And then it dawned on me that in terms of media and postmodernism, specifically television and cinema, it is our biggest production and reserculation of ideas, images, art and literature.  Which brought to mind the one of the postmodern ideas of taking art and literature out of the avant garde and bring it to the masses, while simultaneously bringing the popular into the avant garde.  This idea of fusion was so prevelent in the movie.  The fact that Ficht Club is probably in every movie library of most college students, while also being spoken about in literature classes is in a way proof enough.  But my question is did it really fuze the barriers between the avante garde and the popular culture?

Through out the movie it was constantly noting so many artistic movements and ideas, as well as famous writers, and some of the most well known figures, like Ghandi.  But for some of the things that really you have to go to college to understand, like deconstucturalist theory or futurism, do the masses of students and adults get the references.  One thing that I think is extremly postmodern is the time in which art is continously referencing itself with in itself and breaking down the seems of its purpose.  In a way this movie was a chapter in an art textbook put into popular terms, but what is the point?  Was Fincher and Palaniuk before him, commentating on how the self referential nature of art falls on deaf ears (the return to the metanarrative of the love story)? 

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.  In many respects most of the metanarrative that we know to be intergral parts of our society can be dated back in many ways to when we were first able to record history.  For instance such a prevelent metanarrative with in the movie “Masculinity”, which can be traced back to before Christ with Egyptians and Romans, and their nessesity to have male heirs because in many historical contexts history can only pass from one male to the next. So yet again with this movie the re-occuring metanarrative are further implemented into todays generations through a popular means.  During the Renniassance (the time of rebirth)  most patrons where churches or very wealthy families who through another rising medium of their time reinstituted their power and ideas among the masses.

However maybe in this postmodern era with all skeptability towards truth, maybe art and education through media forms about history has taken on a new role, of no longer instilling truths but showing how each truth collapses under itself like the crashing buildings at the end of the movie.  But do the masses grasp that as a possible reading of this movie or do they just see “Anarchy… SWEET!” and think that these things in the movie are just cool, and not sound pretensious, but mostly do to an ignorance.  And not because the very things that we talk about in class are not in the media, because they are everywhere, re-occuring constantly, but because they do not see the historical corrilation or have the educational textualization.  So even if the point of the movie is to point out how we are creatures of habit, in the post modern idea of fusion between the masses and the avant garde and mass production, it falls on deaf ears with out the ability of contextualization.

End of Written on the Body: Where did reality go?

By the end of the novel I was left slightly bewildered, wondering what parts of Luise actually existed, and what parts were fabrications made by the narrator.  When I realized that almost all of it was fabricated because through out the novel, or in the beginning and the end Luise seemed like a transparant ghost that was fleeting.  And to have started out the novel in such a way makes me think that Luise as the object was always fleeting never really in the full grasp of the narrator.  This really became evident to me when the narrator began to speak about her in such clinical terms at the end of the novel, his/her physicality took over completely at this point in which even something that could seem so concrete became warped references to her biology.

All of this really put on blast the context and how the subject (I)/ narrator of literature has no real grasp on the object that it is supposed to be unravelling.  And so in the world of Postmodern writing how do we even find the subject.  Though it appears to have control over the narration or the story in general, our narrator in Written on the Body, clearly has no sense of self not even gender.  Granted by Winterson not making any allusions to what the gender of the narrator is she made the readers confront the social norms that we unconsciously and conscously place upon each sex or sexual orientation, however it also breaches the subject that why isn’t the narrator comfortable his/her sexuality.  If postmodernity is about navigating through truths (which really aren’t completely true)  then I guess it makes sense for Winterson to leave sex classifications out of this, in order to give her room to move the narrator through out these social dilema’s but it does not make sense for the narrator to this with in the realm of real interaction.  So this non-sex an ideal way to live, I guess not because of the ending of the book.  No one character was somplete in the sense that the narrator did not really have a complete depiction or understanding of them, and like wise did not know him/herself.  So how does one find or even navigate through false truths if one can not even pin point themselves in realtion to them all?

Postmodernism and the death of “I”

So for who does the “I” exist.  Does it exist for the individual who is constantly trying to identify with themselves or for society which is trying to identify and categorize  the masses?

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.  For instance the narrator of Written on the Body admits in the end that all of the perceptions that he/she has on Luise only exists in the reality of the narrator and is in no way a complete picture of Luise.  Does such an addmitance of objectification signal a death in the subject or a recognition that neither the subject or the object is stagnant in one realm of relation to the whole story.  If we were to hear Luise’s version of the “relationship” with the narrator it would still be only half of the story.  So in reality the subject simultaneously takes on the role of the object and visa versa.  Maybe this can be seen in the way that the narrator in a sense in never really formed, in a way her/his presonhood only exists in the world that is created in her/his depiction of love, desire, Luise, and life.

So if neither subject or object can give a complete account of a narrative piece how does one derive at some truth?  Or is that really what has died?  The reliance on absolute truths?  What if a narrative piece showed the flipping of both the subject and the object word truth still be lacking conviction?

Written on a Body

  Reading this book at first was so puzzling.  But slowly I began to realize that she (narrator) wasn’t talking to me the audience but to her lover through her self.  Up until page 19 it was all the narrators internal dialogue, which I found very interesting in the narrative form. As I began to read on the book does seem POSTMODERN in the sense that after page nineteen the narrative style changes she is now talking to me the audience, and slowly her characters start to form bodies and tendencies.  It was very bizarre but interesting.  I read her other novel Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit and I remember the “plot” being disjointed like a fading memory but I never looked at the with POSTMODERNISM in mind.  I wonder how this novel is relating the life or the love cycles of this woman, what does it mean to be a woman in love with women in a society that tells you that you are supposed to love only the opposite gender in that sexual way?  But I don’t think that the narrator ever specifies that she is a woman but as a reader somehow I know she is.  Hmmm interesting…….

PostModernism

MODERNISM:

According to Malpas this era in our dear planets history was all about the artist submersing themselves into form. Using specific characteristics of art to put on display specific characteristics of society. In a way it was the purpose of the Avant Garde to educate the masses… but to bad the masses have always been asses so they just didn’t get the joke. In a way art in a sense moved in a direction which removed the artist and just left the ART!

POSTMODERNISM:

(according to WordPress this is not one word… but i think it would be very post modern of me to make it one word!)

This is the stage in which form takes on objectivity. Spawned from the aftermath of Modernism this movement appears to me to take no definite form but works with many definite forms. And this collaboration of old and new it works to comment on a more contemporary society, while pushing mainstream into Museums, and the Avant Garde into vintage wallpaper. Everything is mass produced, and symbols are being re-used and redefined.

If my mother had actually bore me in the right time period I think that I would be right on the cusp of Modernism and Post Modernism. I have deep respect for the anal retentiveness of art FORM in its uses to reveal society and its flaws. However I do see great need in the collaboration of FORMS; paring them and using them against each other to maybe reveal new things about society. Maybe this is the Postmodern take on collage, in which artists are cutting and pasting with some sort of artistic agenda; revealing to many through the old the new and the used.