Top Ten Reasons Why the MLA Handbook Stinks

So, the new seventh edition of the MLA handbook has been out for a little over half a year now, and it has a few basic changes that the kindhearted folks over at Purdue have nicely explained [here]. But it still stinks.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against style guidelines in principle, and for the most part, the rules for doing citations are actually rational if you really think about them. It’s all too obvious why we need citations and why we need to organize them in some way — alphabetically, for instance – that enables the reader to easily understand what they are and to find them quickly, without too much headache. It also makes sense to me why historians would prefer Chicago style, and social scientists would prefer APA style, but what about MLA? This is supposed to be the style of choice for literary types like myself, but I think there’s a pretty good reason why so many literary journals and publishers don’t use the MLA style, and why they instead use some variation of the Chicago rules. The Chicago style also just works better if you’re doing a lot of historically grounded, archival work, and since the field of literature has shifted towards this kind of scholarly work, perhaps we should (in my never humble, and often overstated opinion) just jettison the MLA rules altogether. As I aim to show in this cranky and admittedly ridiculous, over-the-top blog post, the MLA is generally out of touch and out of date…. And even with the improvements of the new edition, it still is. (And yes, I admit it; I am a major nerd.)

So, here are my top ten reasons why the MLA handbook stinks:

1.     The new seventh edition of the MLA handbook now says we have to specify ”Print” or “Web” or “ProQuest” depending on where we got the newspaper or magazine article. This is called a ”medium marker.” Back in the not-so-golden olden days, of course, one could only read stuff if it was printed, so we’d just put the date of publication and the page number and all was hunky-dory, but now there are so many ways to access the same thing — so many media for our media — it’s all quite wacky and we need medium markers. I suppose the MLA thinks it’s being hip to the new technology, but in my view, it hardly matters. A New York Times article is a New York Time article, no matter where you got it from. I remember the first time a student turned in a paper with her citation from ProQuest, and I was, like, “What the heck? ProQuest is just a database, not a source, don’t you know the difference?” And then to my horror, I realized the student was right, and I was wrong. Or rather, I realized that the MLA was wrong. (The student was still wrong, because she forgot to even mention the New York Times and really thought ProQuest was the source and included a ridiculously long URL for ProQuest with a long string of numbers and letters.) Part of me wonders whether the folks down at the MLA headquarters in New York (right by the stock exchange, mind you) aren’t making secret backroom deals with some corporate sponsors on this one. Perhaps a few kickbacks from the folks over at EBSCOhost?

2.     Having to put both the date of the article and the date you got it off the internet. So, this is the same schtick as my previous remark. If it’s a New York Times article, the day I happened to look at it hardly matters, in my opinion. For us historians who like the Chicago Style, it’s the date of publication that we care about. Granted, if it’s a website whose content actually might change from day-to-day, then the date of the viewing does matter, but we should be able to tell the difference between that kind of website and the other kind, shouldn’t we? Neither the New York Times or anything appearing on ProQuest revises their articles on their websites after they have been published. At least now after the new 2009 edition of MLA rules, we have to use our media markers “Web” or “Print” or whatever, so there’s a nifty little explanatory word between the publication date and the viewing date — a nifty little word that helps us understand why both dates are there. Do you all remember the old sixth edition rule (the sixth edition published way, way back in the dark ages of 2003) when you’d just have two dates right next to each other? Which was which? Now, I know that the first date was supposed to be the publication date and the second was supposed to be the time you happened to see it on the internet (that crazy, ephemeral internet — so protean, so postmodern, so wild wild west), but still, how awkward looking and unsightly was that? OMG, dude, like, totally lame.

3.     And how about the whole underline or italicize rule? It took the MLA twenty years to realize that nobody uses typewriters anymore. I mean… hello?… don’t they realize that computers can do italics so there’s no need to underline? I’ve always suspected that the MLA style-guide book confuses my students whose usage of italics and underlining and quotation marks is so often completely random. Certainly my students have no one to blame but themselves, because the rule is really, really, really not that hard. I mean — come on — big things are (or were) underlined and small things are (and still are)  in quotations marks… big, small… big, small… get it? But still, dude, you gotta admit, the MLA’s refusal to catch up to present-day reality didn’t help. The students are reading books and articles and stuff that uses italics (because everything real does), but then they look at their handbook and see that they are supposed to underline in their papers. It’s confusing, I grant my students that. So, not until this year’s seventh edition did the MLA finally switch over from having to underline the titles of books and periodicals (i.e., the big things, NOT the small things like articles, chapters, short stories, etc.) to having to italicize them. Even as late as their 2003 edition of the Handbook… um, or rather, the Handbook… they were still asking us to underline stuff. Underlining made sense when we were using typewriters and didn’t have italics, but come on!!! The Chicago and APA styles switched over long ago. (And I suspect that’s because Chicago is the style that real publishers use, so Chicago had to keep up with the real world all along. Now, I am aware that the MLA actually said that EITHER underlining OR italics was acceptable, but their examples were all the former, never the latter. And I am also aware that maybe I should stop complaining, since the MLA has this year finally switched.)

4.     And what about the heading and title page? Does any teacher actually want their students to turn papers in like that? First, let’s consider the header and page number deal. I think we all appreciate the last name and page number in the upper right hand corner, so, yes, the MLA is right about that, but NOT ON THE FIRST PAGE. Come on, MLA, haven’t you figured out that function on your word processor so you only have that header start on page two? For years I was wondering why my students couldn’t figure out that function, and then I consulted my handbook and realized that (once again) I was the one who was wrong, because it’s not my students, but the MLA who doesn’t understand how to use the computer. And secondly, why do they insist on double-spacing the name, class, and date stuff? Who wants that double spaced? Not me. And why do they put the professor’s name right below the student’s name? Am I some kind of co-author or something? It makes more sense for my name to be right under the name of my class. (And, in addition, I also add the name of the assignment above the name of the class, and below the student’s name, because in case I get a late paper or am just way behind in my grading, it’s convenient to have that information in plain view.) And lastly, isn’t it nicer to boldface the title? We have a boldface function now. Again, hello technology! Catch up, MLA. Bold-faced titles just look nicer.

5.     And finally, in the seventh edition, the MLA finally realized how ridiculous it was to require people to put the whole URL for everything. (Remember those URL’s that went on for three lines on the page… totally lame.) But I’m still not sure them folks over at the MLA headquarters really get how the internet works. Doesn’t it look funny that we have to say that we got the thing from CNN.com and that this – in case you couldn’t figure it out — is the same thing as CNN, so you have to write them both CNN.com and CNN right next to each other? Weirdly, now the website is in italics, but the actual source is not, which is the reverse of what it used to be… or what you’d intuitively expect it to be. (Okay, I’ll backtrack on this. I admit that – technically – CNN or New York Times is now the publisher, not the name of the periodicle, as it used to be in the not-so-golden olden days, and I understand that that the website is now the name of the periodicle, but it looks strange and is confusing to me. Perhaps this is not the MLA’s fault and is just an effect of our rapidly changing world.)

6.     There’s something strangely American about the MLA rules. (England’s Oxford style is more similar to our Chicago, by the way.) And what I mean by “American” is the amnesic, unhistorical tendency of Americans. As I mentioned before, the MLA works just fine if you think of texts as timeless artifacts containing universal truth. And it works just fine if you’re planning to spend about two or three pages explicating one little passage of poetry. The MLA lends itself to that airy-fairy kind of philosophizing that you might expect in a theology department and that English departments used to do but stopped doing in the mid-1990s.  But for those of us who care about history and who actually do research, the footnotes of the Chicago style make sense because then you can list all of the many archival and secondary sources you consulted. In other words, for those of us who actually do real work, we like Chicago. Unlike President George W. Bush, we scholars actually consult more than one source of information before making judgements and decisions. And let’s be honest here: we all agree that footnotes are just a whole lot more fun than Works Cited pages. Click on the word processing program’s little “footnote” function, and Bang!, there it is, all nice and pretty. And to be clear, I like footnotes — which are nice and easy to see right at the bottom of the page, right then and there – not those evil end notes which are yet another holdover from the days of typewriters and which force the readers to flip back and forth between the page they’re reading and the page with the information on it. In the 21st century, we all have a footnote function on our computers, so the days of end notes should be over, right?… Right? What, with the computers and all?

7.     Oh, crap… I only have six reasons. I guess I really don’t have enough reasons to say that the MLA Handbook stinks. My bad. Can anyone think of any more?

Well, I guess I just have to suck it up and keep teaching the MLA style the way all the style handbooks say that I have to, because that’s the style that all of us writing instructors have agreed to follow through our democratically elected representatives at the MLA (oh, hold on, wait, why are there so many MLA committees on that website, but not one of them is about MLA style guidelines? Democracy?) I wonder how much input the MLA actually gets from college instructors?

And I admit that MLA style is probably better for undergraduates than Chicago, which is really meant for published work. This is why the MLA now has two style guides, one for undergrads and one for grads and scholars. But I still think it’s strange for students in the age of computers and the internet to read published work that looks one way, but then have to turn in papers that look another way. I suppose this is what bothers me the most about the handbook — how different its format is from the format of the stuff that gets published and that my students read.

I suspect that in the near future students will just submit papers on-line with hyperlinks directly to the source.  And I wonder how long it will take MLA to catch up to that innovation?

I also admit that APA has its own set of weirdnesses. Sometimes it’s intuitive and rational, but sometimes it’s counter-intuitive for me. For instance, on the one hand, it is completely sensible that APA would want the date second rather than (like MLA) last, given the nature of social science research that has multiple authors, updated laboratory results, etc. It’s also clear why APA would call them “References” instead of “Works Cited” because in social science work you might refer the reader to quite a lot of stuff that you’re not actually citing. But on the other hand, why are the titles of articles in APA all in lower case letters? Maybe I’m missing something since I’m not in the social sciences.

Well, that’s enough of my silly rant. I was just complaining for the fun of it and because I’m a pathetic nerd, not because I seriously want MLA style to die a quiet death. My real hope all along was that my rant would help to teach my students some of the rules  in an amusing way.

The Ideology of Hollywood Remakes

For the spring semester of 2011, I’ve been asked to teach an introductory undergraduate class on film, and what I’m imagining is teaching the class by looking at various remakes. My idea is that the students can learn to critique film by discerning the subtle (or not-so-subtle) differences between two versions of the same story. So, if anyone has any suggestions for movies I might use, please let me know.

For instance, Hairspray originally was a witty, satirical, transgressive movie directed by John Waters in 1988. Then it was made into a Broadway musical in 2002, and then into a new movie in 2007. What struck me when I watched both the 1988 and the 2007 movies back-to-back is that the original, independently-made movie was satirical and the big-budget, Hollywood re-make was sentimental. The changes in the story were often very slight — just a sentence or two deleted here, a scene added there, a different choreography for some of the dances and songs – but the effect of these slight changes in tone and content was that the original was transgressive, smart, and interesting while the remake was conservative, confused, and boring. Something similar could be said about the new version of Shaft starring Samuel Jackson that came out in 2000 compared to the original Shaft that came out in 1971. The original is smart; the remake is stupid.

One might ask, “Are remakes always worse? Are they always conservative versions of earlier progressive or transgressive stories?” It would seem so, because I can’t think of an exception . . . except for the Cohen brother’s movie version of No Country for Old Men, which is more witty and less racist than the novel it’s based upon. Perhaps what’s more interesting than remakes are homages or new films that deconstruct old genres. For instance, Quentin Terantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) is a wonderful homage to the career of Pam Grier and her early 1970s films Coffee, Foxy Brown, and Sheba, Baby. I’m glad he didn’t simply remake an old film but instead created an entirely new film with more mature characters. Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (1968) is a brilliant deconstruction of the classic western that quotes entire scenes from earlier films but does so in a way that reverses their meaning (or, “flips the script.”)

Recently, I just taught the movie Real Women Have Curves (2002) alongside the play of the same title by Josefina Lopez that it’s based upon. The difference between the two is striking and indicates the power of Hollywood’s conservative ideology. The play is set in a maquiladora in East Los Angeles in 1987 immediately following President Ronald Reagan’s new immigration reforms that incited racist violence against Latinos. The characters are the women who work there, including the owner (Estella), her mother (Carmen), and her younger sister (Ana) as well as Pancha and Rosali. Estella is clearly being exploited by the powerful company for whom she makes expenses dresses and is afraid to confront the company for fear that it will retaliate by getting her deported. Ana is hoping to go to college the next year. At the beginning of the play, Ana’s progressive feminism and sense of sexual independence conflicts with the conservative sensibilities of the older women, but by the end of the play, they all learn from each other and come together in solidarity. They decide to pool their resources and start their own business in the manner that has become very fashionable these days after Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace prize for his highly successful work on microfinance. (Note that artists such as Josefina Lopez and progressive activists were imagining such microfinance projects many years before the mainstream community of economists and Pope Benedict XVI finally appreciated Yunus’s work.)

The movie, on the other hand, focuses almost entirely on the character of Ana, her frustration at working in the “sweatshop,” and her desire to go to Columbia University in New York. Cut entirely from the movie are the political issue of undocumented workers and the solidarity of the women. Added to the movie are Ana’s romance with a wealthy white boy from Beverly Hills, the efforts of her teacher to help her get into college, and the doting love of her father and grandfather. Noticeably, while in the play, all of the women come together in solidarity, in the movie Ana’s relationship to all the women (including her mother) is outright hostile. Instead, Ana is repeatedly helped by the men in her life who give her money, appreciate her appearance even though she is a little plump, and call her their “gold” (suggesting a creepy equivalence between her person and money.) While the play carefully explores different versions of feminism (liberal feminism, working-class feminism, and ethnic feminism), the movie is ideologically patriarchal – sneakily slipping its paternalistic changes and additions into a formerly feminist plot.

In addition, while the play celebrates community, the movie champions the ideology of individualism. The final scene of the play is the women creating their new factory together. In contrast, in the movie, the women all disperse, and the final scene is Ana leaving her family behind for bright lights of New York City.

Certainly, Hollywood’s decisions to change the story so much are in part due to its desire to appeal to a broad, movie-going teenage audience. As one of my students suggested quite correctly, the average teenager in America would probably relate more to Ana’s alienation from her family, her dating for the first time, and her going to college than he or she could relate to solidarity among factory workers. But, in my view, this is precisely how ideology works. Why wouldn’t a movie about a community of workers be more fun to watch than a movie about teen angst? For example, as Jonathan Kim says in this YouTube restrospect on the 1979 movie Norma Rae, why hasn’t there been a pro-union movie for the past twenty or thirty years?

Norma Rae won awards, as have movies such as Erin Brocovitch and North Country, so apparently people did (and still do) find this kind of story interesting. Personally, I find movies about resistance to oppression much more interesting than movies about embittered teens. Might we ask (as the movie Josie and the Pussycats does) whether young teens today have been brainwashed by a conservative Hollywood establishment about what they should enjoy? Might we ask whether the choices to change this film were not just about ticket sales (since it’s very likely that the movie would have made more money in the long term if it had tackled the tough questions), but were instead ideological?

OMG, Weezer Snuggie, LOL

Gosh, I just don’t know what to say about the Weezer Snuggie infomercial. I wish I had some pithy, theory-nerd kind of read on it, but I don’t.

But the trusty internet has a few twittering, non-theory-nerd reactions here, here, and here.

Love and Anger in the Commonwealth

Thanks to Topspun’s post about Paolo Virno and other recent books of theory at his Seven Red blog, I just started reading Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s new book, Commonwealth. In this book, they explore what a viable ethics might look like in an era of postmodern globalization – an era they called Empire with a capital “E” in their earlier book Empire, which was an international bestseller nine years ago. I haven’t got very far into the new book yet, because I just bought it yesterday on the way home from work, and because I should be grading a ton of papers right now, not reading stuff for fun… and then also, because something they wrote got me to looking up stuff on the internet instead of reading further. Yes, yes, that’s right, I was procrastinating, but anyway, what they wrote is that the two central concepts of the book are “poverty” and “love,” and of course they define love not in terms of the bourgeois romantic love between two people that leads to marital bliss and the white picket fence in a capitalist economy, but in terms of the production of commonalities and social life that leads to a radical interrogation of — and resistance to — the privations of capitalism… and that leads to a breaking down of the white picket fence and to a sharing of the common wealth.

In some ways, I like this starting point, but I couldn’t help but wonder about love as a central concept for a revolutionary political project. What about its opposite, anger and hate? So, just for fun, I did three searches on Amazon.com, first “love” and then “anger” and “hate.” Not surprisingly, most of the titles that came up for all three words were “self-help” books, which I’ve heard is one of the most profitable genres in bookstores these days. Also not surprisingly, the books that came up for love were all about expressing love, finding the right love, and even love’s utility (or use value, which I throught was a bit odd), etc. In contrast, the books that came up for anger were all about controlling, repressing, overcoming, and transcending anger. And this is not surprising since for Christians, love is good, while both anger and hate are bad. To put it another way, we are supposed to transcend anger and hate, but we are not supposed to transcend love. Love is the path to transcendence, enlightenment, civility, social life, and so on.

But what if we flip this? Isn’t it possible that sometimes love can be bad, and sometimes anger and hate can be good? Consider that love can sometimes lead one into self-destructive attachments and mistaken identifications. Consider too that there are lot of injustices in the world that one ought to be angry about and hate. In fact, not being angry about injustice is (one might say) a sign that you are ethically dead. And one can imagine two people coming together in love after first discovering a shared hatred of social injustice. So, I’m curious what a book whose starting point is anger and hate might look like. Are anger and hate ever ethical?… What about rage? What would a book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt that began with “rage and wealth” as its central concepts instead of “poverty and love” look like?

Perhaps it’s better that their starting points are love and poverty, but it’s hard for me not to consider anger when I start thinking about all the injustices of global capitalism (e.g., sweatshops, slavery, sexual abuse, destruction of the environment, war, etc.) I got to thinking about starting points a few days ago after watching the movie Examined Life, which just came out on DVD. This movie interviews a number of very different philosophers and theorists: Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, and Sunaura Taylor…  and also Michael Hardt. The director of the film presents each of them with two prompts. The first is a statement by Socrates that “the unexamined life isn’t worth living,” and the second is the notion of taking philosophy out of the university and putting it in the streets. (This is inspired, I suppose, by the Greek notion of philosophy as a paripatetic endeavor — i.e., philosophy while walking, philosophy as movement — and so all of the philosophers in the movie are walking around somewhere as they talk.) What’s nice about this film is that it offers undergraduates an image of some of today’s biggest names in philosophy talking about stuff they see as they walk around like ordinary people in the world. What is disappointing about the film is that none of them are making philosophical arguments with any depth or rigor. And none of them explain how their approach might differ from another philosopher’s approach, so the stakes of their points of view are never clear. Also, most of them rarely engage with their environment in any significant way, so ultimately what we-the-audience are left with is something that’s not really philosophy and not really in the streets.

However, what I find most useful about this film is not what they are saying but their starting points and where each philosopher chose to situate himself or herself. If I were to teach this in  a classroom, that’s what I would ask all my students to pay attention to and compare/contrast. A public park? an airport terminal? shops on the street? I think the choices of location by the analytic philosophsers (Nussbaum, Appiah, and Singer respectively) reveal how unimaginative, boring, and (at the end of the day) less useful their senses of ethics are. In contrast, Hardt’s choice is beautifully ironic, since he is rowing a boat around a pond in New York’s central park while talking about his experience meeting communists in El Salvador who understood revolution in terms of guns and struggle against oppression. His choice illuminates what’s hard about thinking about a revolution that would connect both locations, and I thought this choice was more honest and less trite than if he had walked around an impoverished neighborhood and expressed love for random homeless people (as the concepts “love” and “poverty” in his book Commonwealth might suggest he would do.) Even better than Hardt is Zizek, who begins by walking around piles of trash in a dump — in other words, if we really want to examine ourselves as Socrates says we should, we need to start with our shit. And perhaps even better than Zizek is Butler, who begins by taking a walk and talking with someone with a severe disability. In other words, in contrast to all of the other philosophers in the movie, Butler starts with dialogue rather than with monologue. And she also starts with doing something that is so easy for most of us that we might take it for granted, but so difficult for the one she is talking to.

So… starting points… love and anger…. That is the question.

Obama/McCain: speculations on the psychology of symbols

In an interview a month or two ago, Obama was asked about the apparent ecstacy among his fans. Last spring and into the summer, some journalists were observing that political rallies for Obama almost looked like religious revivals and that becoming an Obama supporter was a bit like having a conversion experience. Obama made the very astute and self-aware observation that “people seem to see in me what they want to see.” And he admitted that this made him uncomfortable, perhaps because it distracted from the specific features of his political vision and from the very real challenges of negotiation and compromise that inevitably accompanies policy-making. And we can speculate further that the dreamy hopes projected onto Obama by his fans are fed by deep historic anxieties about who we have been as a nation and what we have become.  To speak more broadly, I think all of us who have been paying attention to the political rhetoric and media spin surrounding any presidential race, not just his one, have noticed that it appears to be as much about symbolic meaning as it is about policy differences. A similar point was made in a conversation that took place about the “meaning of Obama” for African nations on the Zeleza Post [here] by specialists in African literature, history, and culture, and it was this conversation that inspired the topic of my blog post today.

But it wasn’t only the Zeleza Post that inspired this blog. In addition, just yesterday I was reminded of the often contradictory nature of psychological symbols in our daily lives when I drove past a motercyclist who was wearing all the protective gear (special leather chaps over his jeans, special boots and gloves) EXCEPT for no helmet. The obvious question I was tempted to ask him was “what’s the point of the leather chaps if you’re not wearing a helmet?” And since I came across him on the suburban streets where the speed limit is 25 to 35, one had to wonder what any of all his biker accoutrement was for. But for the motorcyclist, just as for those suburbanites who own oversized pickup trucks, the black leather chaps are probably more about self-expression than about self-protection, and not wearing a helmet is meant to symbolize a sense of anti-authoritarian independence – and I know myself well enough to know that we are all a little irrational and fetishistic about the objects we choose to express ourselves with. Indulging this irrational side of ourselves is even a source of pleasure and escape from the weight of our daily responsibilities.

Before I continue with this blog post, I will admit that I intend to vote for Obama, and admire both him, his wife, and his running mate, Joe Biden, but the goal of this blog post is not to take a side for any political party. I belong to the Green Party anyway, which never wins. Rather, I’d like to just throw out some food for thought about how to analyze the psychology of political symbols. Since this is a blog, it certainly won’t be an exhaustive analysis, and I wouldn’t be able to give an exhaustive analysis anyway, since I generally find political hype to be annoyingly pointless and so I avoid it. (In fact, I probably know less about the hype surrounding McCain and Obama than any of my colleagues.) Whatever one’s political commitments, I think it is important to be circumspective and to work through one’s own unconscious — how certain symbols may be playing more of a role there than one would want to admit.

So, given my own political bias and lifestyle, I couldn’t help but draw a connection between that motercyclist I saw and the adoring fans of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Nobody can deny the powerful and surprising effect the choice of Palin had on the energy of McCain’s campaign. But here we have the case of somebody with very little experience and seemingly very little knowledge even about what the job of vice president would entail. Unlike the other candidates who tried their best to demonstrate their expertise and ability to articulate clear positions on various issues, Palin fans seem to delight in her ignorance and her stubborn unwillingness to answer questions about actual stuff. They imagine that she is a straight-talker, that she will represent them because she talks like them, that she connects to their values, and that she will reform Washington because she has no respect for it or for its laws and codes of conduct. In that sense, as a colleague pointed out to me, she resembles George W. Bush who (if you can remember his presidency before 9/11/01) struggled for the first few months of his term to appear “presidential.” At the time, even though Bush was the son of a Washington insider, his folksy demeanor convinced voters who felt alienated from the political machinery that he was actually an outsider, just like them.

And Obama fans like Obama for similar reasons — in a sense, his very racial identity communicates an outsider identity.

Of course, like Bush and Obama, Palin is no outsider. Her political agenda is quite in line with the interests of large corporations, not the average working American. But what Democrats fail to understand is that there is a real power in her rhetoric for people who simply don’t express their identity in terms of the principles of “equal opportunity” and “social safety net.” (Honestly, who would want to express their identity that way?) For most of us, in actual practice, it’s almost impossible to know what is truly in our best interests, economically speaking, and for all I know, McCain-Palin’s policies might do the greatest good for the greatest number (though I doubt it.) Almost always, in the face of our own inability to understand the totality of our world and our inability to predict the future, we look elsewhere for something meaningful. To put it another way, we all have commodity fetishes (to uses Karl Marx’s famous phrase) that link indirectly to our political identities, and for some, these commodity fetishes are big cars and big guns, not organic vegetables and hybrid cars.

It is surely obvious to anyone reading this blog that I have no respect for Palin, but ironically, the concern I have about the possibility of her vice presidency is actually very similar to the concern I have when I imagine the future of an Obama presidency. There is a gap between the many symbolic spaces Obama and Palin occupy and the economic reality they participate in. Now, of course, this is true of all political candidates, but the gap here seems significantly larger.

Symbolically, Obama means quite a lot — perhaps too much. To some, he embodies the American dream and the hopeful belief in the possibility of change that has always been at the core of that dream; to those living in the third world or descended from third-world immigrants, he symbolizes new global and even Pan-African identities and horizons; and to others he symbolizes the end of racism in America — the end of its painful history. He is, in a sense, an embodiment of what the neo-con philosopher Francis Fukuyama has called the ”last man,” meaning the archetype of mankind after the end of the ethnic conflict that has characterised world history, an “end” supposedly brought into being by a new world order of liberal democracy and socially responsible capitalism. Thus he has become a focal point (or cathexis, to use the Freudian psychoanalytic term) for the energy and desire of those frustrated and angry at the Bush administration. I would even go so far to say that Obama symbolizes redemption for a barely conscious collective guilt we all feel as a nation — guilt over the lawless violence continuously inflicted on the world since that horrible day, October 7, 2001, when we killed many innocent people in our bombing of Afghanistan. In a nominally democratic country, American citizens have only themselves to blame for this evil, as well as the evil of our recent economic crisis. It’s not honest to scapegoat the president — at least not 100%.

It is perhaps worth noting that Obama’s ability to symbolize all these things goes far beyong the borders of America, as politicians world-wide celebrate him. Here, for instance, is a political YouTube video made by an Oromo artist (and I have blogged on the Oromo desire for cultural and political independence from Ethiopia earlier here.)

But in reality, Obama is essentially a pro-business Democrat, and not an especially progressive one. His political vision beneath the symbolism exhibits the same old contradictions as McCain’s — the same contradictions that have persisted at the core of American economics since the mercantilist seventeenth century. On the one hand, expanding a universally free market. On the other hand, arbitrary ad hoc protectionism. This is the contradictory core of the European and American political economy, and it is a core that has caused incredible damage to Africa for hundreds of years. To give you an example of what I mean, Obama genuinely wants African countries to succeed in the global economy, but he is also very much in the pocket of the corporate agribusiness lobby and is one of the biggest supporters of its protectionist farm policies, which — it is well known — make it harder for African countries to succeed. Every leader of America since it was just little colony has followed a similar contradictory political agenda, an agenda that is covered up by a blanket of patriotic ideology and a tenacious faith in the market. However, in practice, these economic contradictions have historically been managed not with diplomacy, democracy, universal rights (including economic rights), or smart business practices, but with violent force.

And of course, most “third world” people are astute enough about this. For instance, a couple months ago, at the Oromo Studies Association conference, I was chatting with a young Oromo-American woman who actually works in Obama’s Senate office, answering phone calls from the “public” (many of which are simply racist crank calls, unfortunately), and even though she shares some of Obama’s ethnic heritage and even though she works for him, she knows full well that he will not be able to do anything for the Oromo people’s struggle in Ethiopia even if he wanted to.

So, we have the symbol and we have the real. My concern is that once the gap between these two becomes apparent, then faith in Obama will plummet. To be clear, the symbol is in no danger. The symbols of the American dream will continue to be the center of American political rhetoric, but Obama will no longer be the living embodiment of that symbol. What makes Obama unique here is the excess and intensity with which he embodies that symbol. All politicians try to do it. But Obama’s intensity evokes a sense of his purity, a sense that one quickly discovers in a conversation with one of his devoted followers.

The McCain-Palin campagin is based in a similar rhetorical purity — their ability to embody an American mythology — though less so than Obama. Unlike his campaign in 2000 against George W. Bush, McCain has made strong use of his own personal mythology this time, and it has worked. What’s remarkable about both campaigns is that their symbolic capital has little to do with any pragmatic political vision. The high principles, the outsider status, the purity, the standing firm are all contrary to the business view, yet both have gained support from the business community precisely because of the business community’s perception of Obama and McCain’s pragmatic willingness to work with the infamous corporate agenda and to buy into what they imagine to be “the real.” (And I say “what they imagine to be the real, because this pragmatic agenda is as much a symbolic construct as any “idealistic” or “radical” position. Pragmatism is too often a convenient position for those who occupy a position of economic and political privilege, not for those who don’t.) Of course, the recent economic disaster so clearly caused by the Republican agenda of anti-regulation has made McCain’s so-called pragmatism far less tenable, which is why he is desperately tryint to appear to be someone who will “work toward a solution.”

So, to briefly sum up, the moral of the story (the the goal of this brief psychonanalysis) is to begin to work through the symbolic and the imaginary nature of our political world, so that after the election is over, then we can begin the real political work of solving problems.

But before I sign off, I should also add that the psychology of symbols works against candidates as much as for them. Although Obama certainly appeals to those who desire an end to America’s racist history, the very real fact is that racism still subsists in the American unconscious (if not in its social consciousness), and that fact should have been readily apparent to anyone watching the debate last Friday. As even the moderator of the debate (and many commentators) observed, McCain was simply rude and dismissive of Obama and refused to even look at him. And Obama was overly cautious and careful, instead of being his usual dynamic self. For me, watching Obama being so polite in the face of McCain’s rudeness was a painful experience. As Brent Staples has recently observed in an editorial for the NY Times [here], the deep structure of American racism may not be visible to most, but it is still in effect. Nobody likes to admit that they are a racist, and likewise, nobody likes to admit that their political commitments are as just as often irrational and emotional as they are logical, but until we admit this, we can never work through the weirdness of our culture and work towards real solutions to our problems.

police raid the homes of protestors

In Minneapolis, more than 100 people were arrested this Friday and Saturday (August 29 and 30) by police officers who raided the homes of people suspected of planning protests of the Republican National Convention. You can read about it in the Minnesota StarTribune [here] and [here],TwinCitiesIndyMedia [here], and the Associated Press [here].

One can only imagine the amount of surveillance and planning by both the police and high-level government officials that led up to this profoundly unconstitutional act. And I call it an unconstitutional act because of the first ammendment right to assembly that we all have – a right we even have in public space, not to mention the privacy of our own homes — a right the framers of the constitution felt was so necessary for the functioning of democracy that they made it the FIRST amendment.

The police raid is not the only instance of the city and state government’s interference in the protest the RNC. For months and months, protest organizers have been negotiating with the city government for a planned route for the march. First, the government stalled and didn’t come to a decision in a reasonably timely manner as it is required to do by law. Then, the government forced the protest organizers to march far away from the site of the convention. The American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting the government’s decision for months on the grounds that its plan effectively stifles the constitutional right to be heard. The ACLU has also questioned why Minneapolis and St. Paul can’t be more like Washington D.C., which has very large, peacefully run protest marches all the time, without any significant incident. But the ACLU has not had success.

My guess — and I have to read up on this more, obviously, since I’m just guessing here – is that some of the protestors were planning some activity in the space the city designated off limits to protesting. Hence, in the eyes of the city government, the particular protestors that they arrested would be considered criminal because of the city’s decision to create a protest-free zone.

As I understand it, the city has taken an unprecedented role in managing the space around the RNC site, and in the course of doing so, has temporarily suspended several laws, made public space un-public, and even taken an active role in directing private businesses in how to behave. In doing so, they have created what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has recently called a “state of exception.” In such a state, the government believes that it can break its own laws in order to ultimately protect those laws.

In order to legitimate its unlawful activity, the state must invent a threat to the social order. In other words, they must demonize the protestors as people who are themselves so far outside the law that the state is justified in suspending its own laws in order to preemptively strike against them. (This is the same logic that enabled the strike against Iraq, the creation of prisons in Guatanamo, and torture.)

Here, of course, we have the state’s belief that the protestors are all amoral anarchists intent on wreaking chaos, violence, and destruction. Of course, this is a silly stereotype, and anyone who has ever read anarchist literature or met anarchists knows that chaos and violence is not really their goal. Rather, free love and play are. And I think this YouTube video made by an anarchist organization hilariously mocks that stereotype.

The question that I want to raise in this rather hastily written blog post is what to do? How best rhetorically to respond?

In other words, does one respond by simply asserting the constitutional right to assemble? Does one invoke Orwell’s novel 1984 to inspire a paranoid fear of an increasingly undemocratic, right wing government? How rhetorically successful will it be to accuse the government of behaving in the manner of a fascist police state? I don’t think this goes far enough, because if you read the comments below the StarTribune story, you will see that many people are sincerely worried that dangerous anarchists are going to damage property and loot businesses. Thus, in their minds, the police behaved justly. Although the “home” is enshrined in our constitution as an almoust religiously sacred space, we all know that the police can invade that space with a warrant if they have probably cause to believe a crime is being committed there.

True, we can question this logic in this particular case by asserting (1) that political activity is protected by the constitution and is clearly NOT criminal, and (2) that the vast majority of the organizers under police surveillance are obviously non-violent, and finally (3) that by grouping all protestors under one umbrella and treating them like criminals, the police have essentially criminalized dissent. However, doing so may not convince those who believe anarchists to be criminals. (Moreover, this belief is a confusion that is fostered by many misguided anarchists who romantically emphasize transgression for its own sake and forget to emphasize the positive love that both transcends the law and is imminent to all social behavior.) In my view, it is wrong to raid the home of any protestor, no matter who he or she is.

Therefore, in addition to the rhetoric of rights, one also needs to convincingly represent political protest in positive ways to correct the rhetoric of demonization that we know the government and police will use. For instance, the humanity of the protestors must be articulated as well as the joyfulness and sacredness of political protest. I suspect that a sense of humor about this can go a long way, though I know very well how hard it is to have a sense of humor about such a morally disgusting witch hunt. In other words, in the face of horror, we need creativity and imagination — no easy task, for sure.

mo’ po-mo re-visions (for summer reading)

In our class, we just finished reading Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World, which one could classify (if one were prone to classifying) as a postmodern and postcolonial revision of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter — a revision that, in my view, beautifully expands the scope of Hawthorne’s investigation of the paradoxes of language, culture, and social institutions by having a Hester-like figure leave New England for India and eventually fall in love with a Hindu raja.

Mukherjee is certainly not the first to re-write The Scarlet Letter and definitely not the first to re-write a classic, and so in this blog, I want to give you some ideas for your summer reading. For instance, John Updike re-wrote Hawthorne’s classic three times: Roger’s Version, A Month of Sundays, and S. In addition, there is I, Tituba by Maryse Conde and The Scarlet Letter Plays by Suzan-Lori Parks. And those are just the best of the bunch, as there is quite a bunch of scarlet literature, including a recent Korean film noir called The Scarlet Letter. And revising old work is nothing new, as we know that West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet which in turn is Pyarmus and Thisbe.

We can raise a bunch of questions about revisions. What makes a revision a postmodern revision rather than just a borrowing or immitation. I don’t think we’d call West Side Story postmodern, but we would call Tom Stoppard’s brilliant and hilarious revision of Hamlet — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead — postmodern.

And perhaps more to the point (because classification schemes quickly get boring), there are various ways to think about a revisions as you are reading it.

The old T.S. Eliot sort of way is to appeal to the literary tradition and to universal archetypes. This idea is what, perhaps, inspired James Joyce to write Ulysses which uses the Odyssey myth to structure one day in the life of an ordinary man. And perhaps also it inspired Ernesto Quinonez’s  Bodega Dreams, which thinks about the myth of the American Dream as it rewrites Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby in Spanish Harlem. Likewise, Emile Habiby’s brilliantly satirical The Secret Life of Saeed rewrites Voltaire’s Candide and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in modern-day Israel/Palestine.

However, what I’m sure you all noticed with Mukherjee’s novel is that these novels don’t just appeal to universal archetypes, immitate the older classic, and borrow the plot. They do something else as well. What’s important about their revision is precisely the revision — the difference. So often the revision will, like Rosencrantz and Guildsenstern are Dead, tell the story from a different point of view — the point of view of minor characters. And Jean Rhyss’s postcolonial novel Wide Sargasso Sea invents a prequel to Charlotte Bronte’s famous Jane Eyre that investigates the issues of race and colonialism that are marginalized in Bronte’s novel. In this way, the new work actually critiques the old work by offering a point of view that was repressed or even displaced in the old work.

And some novels not only foreground a point of view that was previously in the background. They also deconstruct the so-called archetype. Nobel prize winning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee deconstructs Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in his novel Foe by ironically showing the way in which stories get written and published. This novel would be a wonderful follow-up to this theory course and to the postcolonial literature course that you took. And another nobel prize winner Toni Morrison deconstructs the Dick and Jane children’s books in her novel The Bluest Eye. . . . I could go on, but I’ll stop there. Happy reading!!!

deconstructing…

In class we deconstructed J-Lo’s pop hit “Jenny from the Block” and also the perhaps misleading “conclusion” to The Scarlet Letter that Hawthorne teases us with.  But in this post, I’d like to review deconstruction because I know that many of you still find it to be a strange and nebulous thing.  Since my own speciality is early American literature, I will try to perform several different readings of two famous paintings that I often teach in my English 346 class so you can see different ways of reading the same “text.” I will use a painting as my “text,” instead of a poem or novel, to save you from having to read pages and pages.

But, before I go on, I also want to remind you of something that Jaques Derrida said in his 1996 interview with Amnesty International at Oxford University that  we watched in class. His interlocutor asked him what deconstruction is, and Derrida added parenthetically “if it exists.”And his reason for saying that, of course, is because deconstruction is by definition not a definable method. In contrast, the scientific method has certain norms and assumptions for analyzing plants and animals just as the ”new critical” or “formalist” method has certain norms and assumptions for analyzing poetry in terms of metaphor, irony, thematic tension, etc. Deconstruction, essentially, is not a method but rather a strategy of reading that unravels contradictions, contexts, and indeterminacies within the text to reveal alternative meanings. For more on that, click [here].

Now let us look at an old painting from 1575 by Theodor Galle of Amerigo Vespucci discovering America.

How might we analyze this painting like a poem? Well, let’s first analyze it in the way that a traditional “new critic” or formalist might analyze a poem — perhaps the way you were taught in high school. The theme obviously is the discovery. Vespucci’s identity as an explorer is emphasized metonymically by the sextant he holds before him and by the ship in the background. America’s identity is represented metaphorically by the figure of a naked woman. Moreover, her leg and arm are V-shaped so that her knee forms a pointer that focuses the viewer’s attention on the background scene which is framed by the V of her arm. In the background (which is hard to see on the internet) are several cannibals roasting a human leg above a fire, a leg which is a mirror image of the woman’s leg. Not only is the background framed by the foreground, it is also an inverted image of the foreground. Thus, by means of the form of the painting, its structure, the painter meaningfully connects the foreground and the background, and in so doing, he creates an ironic tension between a sense of America as an innocent and fertile new world and a sense of America as dangererous and amoral.

OK, now let’s move on to demystification. Demystification would begin by pointing out the ideology of the Spanish conquest. Vespucci is represented as a heroic man and America as a woman willing to submit to him. The native Americans are represented as amoral cannibals who must be conquered and brought to God by the civilized Vespucci. That is the ideology that was invented to justify the European conquest of America, and maybe you were even taught that in your high school history class. To demystify this ideology, we would point out the reality, and the reality of Spanish conquest is that the Native Americans were not cannibals. In fact, many of the European sailors who were shipwrecked or stranded in America became cannibals themselves, and so the representation of the Native Americans as cannibals is what we might call, using psychoanalytic terms, a “displacement.” Also, the reality of Spanish conquest was hardly civilizing. Rather, it was a brutal massacre and enslavement of thousands and thousands of people. And certainly, the metaphor of America as a willing, naked woman is not too hard to demystify as something really, really creepy . . . or to use some fancy vocabulary instead of the word “creepy,” we might say Eurocentric and male chauvenistic.

OK, now for deconstruction. In some ways deconstruction will look a lot like demystification, but in other ways it will look a lot like formalism. The center of the European narrative of conquest is always the binary relationship between the discoverer and his discovery. However, the background image of the cannibals (the mirror image of the foreground) is the other “center” of this painting that reveals the psychological anxiety surrounding the colonial enterprize. The metonymic linkage of the woman and the cannibals creates a strange association between sex and violence — the sex and violence that became very much a part of the colonial project as a fantasy of European power – a fantasy that is expressed over and over again, not just in narratives of exploration such as Sir Walter Ralegh’s Beautiful Empire of Guiana but also in John Donne’s famous poem “To his Mistress Going to Bed.” In addition, Vespucci here is expressing his “manhood” metonymically through his “tool” of exploration (the sextant). He seems to want to reveal his superior knowledge, but ironically, this painting is not really about the knowledge he already has, but about the knowledge he seeks to gain and take from “America.” Metaphorically, “she” is the “knowledge” that he seeks, and her own knowledge of herself is repressed by the Latin inscription below the painting which says “Americen Americus retexit; semel vocavit inde. semper exitam” which can be translated into English as ”Amerigo discovered (or, more literally, undressed) America, and once called, thenceforth she will always be awake (or, more literally, excited.)” The Latin draws attention to America as a repetition of Amerigo’s name (Americen Americus), and reminds us that “America” itself is a metaphorical figure (an other) through which Vespucci creates his own identity. In addition, we can intertextually link the sexual puns in Latin on discovery and undressing to the name for maps of the world commonly used in the 15th and 16th centuries — mappae mundi, which literally meant “clothes of the world.”  

Thus, not only is Vespucci’s knowledge expressed in sexual terms, but also in Eurocentric terms as it appears America is only a subject of knowledge (is only “awake”) when “she” is interpellated (or called out) by the European male. The figure of the cannibals in the background that represent Europe’s fear of America exposes both the European’s repression of his own selfhood as well as his repression of the Native American’s knowledge of themselves.

We can go on, but why don’t we stop there. This painting is telling a story, and, as I hope you can see, deconstruction is not so much a method as it is a strategy of reading that story that (1) highlights the the margins of the text (i.e., the cannibals in the background) rather than the center (i.e., Vespucci), (2) traces the odd and often contradictory associations among the different parts of the story, and (3) draws in the historical context and intertextual connections between this painting and other paintings, novels, desires, etc.

Let’s look at another painting, this one made more than two hundred years later by the famous poet and engraver, William Blake. The painting is called “Europe Supported by Africa and America.” How might you analyze this painting formally? How might you demystify it? How might you deconstruct it?

Free Subjects

A couple years ago, The New York Times analyzed all of the “State of the Union” speeches by President Bush and discovered that he used the word “freedom” more than any other word, even more than the word “terror.” Probably nobody reading that article would be surprised by this fact considering that no other word is more important to American identity today (though, we might also wonder why, to our founding fathers, the word “equality” was just as important.)

A year later, I was flipping through the 2007 edition of the World in Figures — it’s a reference guide for information such as which countries have the highest and lowest GDP, which countries produce the most coffee, which countries have the worst standard of living, etc. One of its statistics surprised and impressed me. The United States has more people in jail than any other country in the world — even more than China, which is a significant fact when you consider that China’s population is more than four times as large as ours and also since we tend to think of China’s government as excessively strict and repressive. If you measure the population of prisoners in per capita, the U.S. is second only to Rwanda, a nation that recently experienced a massive genocidal terror, and with 0.72% of our people in jail (almost one out of every hundred people), we are far ahead of the third place country, Russia with 0.58%. The World in Figures only includes the top 23 countries, with 23rd place being 0.33%, so I don’t know what the statistics are for other “first-world” countries such as Italy or Canada, and even China doesn’t make the top 23 countries. The U.S. is the only “first-world” country on the per capita list.

What does it mean that a country that considers itself the “land of the free” should have so many more people in jail than other countries? Does this mean that our penal system is more effective or less effective?

The fact of America’s ideology of “freedom” and the fact of its excessive imprisonment of its people is a surprising paradox — a surprising contradiction — that might give us a way to think about Michel Foucault’s history of the penal system, Discipline and Punish. One of Foucault’s main points is that our very souls (our subjectivity) are not as free and immutable as we tend to think they are. That, rather, we are in many ways ”effects” of a complex of disciplinary apparatuses including schools and the workplace — a complex of apparatuses epitomized by the penal system.

Another way to think about it is this. When we celebrate our own freedom, we inevitably point to how we are different from those who aren’t free. In other words, our very identity as “free subjects” who can exercize our “free will” depends on how we are different from those who are in jail. In other wourds, our subjectivity is always in part an effect of our position vis-a-vis the penal system. And the penal system always involves a lot more than just putting criminals in jail — it also involves the ideology of a nation and the many forms of discourse (psychology, sociology, etc.) that labels and stigmitizes various people in our society. Even if one has never had any trouble with the law, his or her identity is still structured by it, whether he or she is conscious of it or not. Perhaps this is perhaps why so many television shows, movies, and novels are about crime. Foucault’s discussion of the penal system in the 17th century illustrates how the King literally terrorized his “subjects” into submission in part through a public spectacle that made them feel happy that they weren’t the ones being hung.

Considering the effect of “position” vis-a-vis the “penal machinery” that both Foucault and Nathaniel Hawthorne talke about, I began to wonder if a “free” person might read differently than a “slave” or a “prisoner.” Interestingly, last fall, the NPR radio program This American Life had an episode about prisoners performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a maxium security prison. All of these prisoners had been convicted of murder, and of course, if you’ve read Hamlet, you know that Hamlet contemplates the murder of his uncle and mistakenly murders his uncle’s advisor. The radio show interviewed the prisoners, asking them to “interpret” the play, and as I listened to their interpretations, I began to think of the play in ways that I had never thought of before, even though I had read it numerous times, seen it performed numerous times, and even taught it.

authors and the difficulty of questions

I’ve been reading a lot of your blogs and noticing that many of you are finding the readings to be painfully difficult, so I want to say something that I hope will clarify things a bit. And I’m also worried that many of you are overstating the author’s death, either because you are glad the author is dead or because you are really angry that anyone might suggest such a horrible thing.

Let’s start with Orwell’s essay “Why I Write.” There, Orwell narrated his own development as a writer. He said he began to write because he wanted others to appreciate him. This was his egoistic phase, right?

Just as Orwell said that he wanted to be appreciated, so does a baby want its mother’s attention when it cries. And so, we can compare the act of writing literature to the act of communication in general. Although people do talk to themselves, usually they are talking to others, and writers who are published were almost always writing for somebody.

Orwell eventually grew out of his baby-phase, and because of the terrible things he witnessed (e.g., war, torture, exploitation, poverty), he felt compelled to write in order to change the way people thought and acted. This was the fourth phase of his development as a writer, and you probably noticed that it was this phase when he actually published things people wanted to read. (In the other phases, he wrote boring things.)

However, I hope you notice something about the way I have just now written about Orwell’s intentions. Certainly his desire and his intentions are important, but in writing about Orwell’s development as a writer, I have also talked about his readers and his context. Without readers and without a context, Orwell would have nothing to write and nobody to write to. So, isn’t the context and the reader just as important as the author then? Authors aren’t just dropped from the sky fully formed with beautiful quill pens and flourishing imaginations. They are born, grow up, have conversations, learn from others . . . . And for those authors who actually get published, they will tell you that they read a lot, practice and practice and revise, read some more, and get feedback, and revise again.

Let’s put Orwell’s “Why I Write” in conversation with T. S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” for a moment. Orwell says he wants to change the way people think, and Eliot says that good writing always involves a “depersonalization.” These are two very different statements about writing. But imagine that you are writing a story because you want to change the way people think about the Iraq war or immigrants or poverty. Or more modestly, perhaps you are writing a poem because you want to convince someone to go out to dinner with you. Do you simply express your feelings about these issues? How successful will your self-expression be? Considering that the people whose minds you most want to change might disagree with you, probably you’d have to be more strategic about how you go about “expressing yourself.” You’d have to pay attention to your reader, to the past, to your context and your reader’s. You probably would make an effort to learn a bit more about the subject (and novelists often do quite a bit of research — e.g., Hawthorne.) In fact, it’s kind of unfair for you to expect someone to pay attention to you if you’re not also willing to pay attention to them, right? And likewise, thinking ahead to our next unit on “readers and subjects,” perhaps we shouldn’t just be analzing the author.  To understand a text, maybe just knowing something about the author isn’t enough. We also have to think critically about who we are as readers.

Now let’s consider Eliot, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and the Theory Toolbox. Are they saying that the author should not be important at all? Some of you seem to think that’s what they are saying, but I don’t think that’s the argument. They aren’t saying the author is nothing. They are saying that the author isn’t the ONLY thing.

True, Barthes says the author is dead, but the dead are not unimportant. The dead are not nothing. (And by the way, for the record, I think Barthes is overstating his point in a dramatic fashion because he was a bit of a drama queen. Moreover, Eliot and Foucault don’t completely agree with him.)

What is our personal connection to an author? Certainly, when we have conversations, we have some kind of personal connection to the people we speak to. If you are having an argument with your mother, sometimes the whole history of your personal connection seems to affect the things you and she are saying at that moment. 

 And if the simple act of communicating with your mother (or whomever) can get this complicated sometimes, then the relationship between you and book would be even more complicated, right? 

And because there is always an imagined relationship between a reader and an author, Foucault shows us that the author still functions. But Foucault also argues that in order for us to be truly free readers and writers, we need to pay attention to how we and the authors we read are affected by so many, many things. How free are you really if all you do is repeat what others have said? In any act of communication, writing, or reading, how free are you really if you are both trapped by a history of stuff and a matrix of social relations that you aren’t even always aware of?