The Mirror Stage

"The child, at an early age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental inteliigence, can nevertheless recognize as such his own image in a mirror" (Lacan 441).


(my son Tyler in the mirror after a bath)

Ever since my son could focus his eyes on an object, he was able to identify himself. The mirror seemed like a magical place where the being on the other side of the glass was their best friend. At nine months he was waving to himself when we would pass any reflective object in the house. It was like seeing an old friend. There was excitement and joy across his face. At one year he began to walk, and give big sloppy open mouth kisses. It wasn't long before we found him laying a wet one on the bedroom mirror. "Give yourself a kiss," we would say, and with both hands on the glass, he would lean in for a kiss. Now, he is 17 months, and each night when he is pulled from his bubble bath and wrapped in a towel, we spend a few minutes reflecting in the bathroom mirror. He loves seeing his hair wet and his eye lashes clumped together. He laughs and giggles at himself, and is overcome with pure joy.

Jacques Lacan's phenomenon "The Mirror Stage," is not just a step in development. "it illistrates the conflictional nature of the dual relationship." This dual that Lacan implies, is one between the Ego and the body, the real vs. the imaginary. The baby, as early as six months, is able to recognize himself through his own uncontrollable body movements.

"This moment in which the mirror stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification wiht the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primoedial jealousy. The dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations" (Lacan 444). Lacan's term meconnaissances (misrecognitions)means a false recognition of the baby's image.



Thursday, April 22, 2010
Discipline and Punish

This week in class we talked about Foucault's "Discipline and Punish," and applied it to two videos withing Bye Bye Birdie and West Side Story. In West Side Story one of the gangs sings a song about being shove around from psychiatrists to social workers to penetentaries so that they can be fixed of their "bad" ways. The song is a mockery of this system, but it was when they call their delinquincies a "social disease," is when they play into Foucault's power of knowledge. I think that the following clip of Life is Beautiful, clearly illustrates how these powerful positions can influence citizens just by saying what they think is true. In the clip, Guido, a Jewish man pretends to be an inspector from Rome, sent to teach the children in Italy that Jews are a less superior race. Guido goes to the school to impress a girl he likes and finds himself mistaken for the inspector. Guido then has no choice but to follow along and makes a mockery of the lies.



"Where can you find someone more handsome than me?...I am an original 'superior race' pure Aryan...The ear. Look at the perfection of this ear...They dream about these in France." During the holocaust, this superiority in races was taught and people on both sides were convinced because they were TOLD so.


Another movie I feel really reflects Foucault's theories of the Panopticism and universalizing versus individualizing is the movie, Law Abiding Citizen. I feel like this movie breaks down this idea of the Panopticism because Foucault says if you have guards at the center of the cells, the inmates will behave because there is a possibility of being watched. Below is the trailer to the movie. In Law Abiding Citizen, Clyde Shelton's wife and daughter are brutally murdered. One of the murderers is let out after three years and one sent to the death penalty. Ten years pass, and Clyde reemerges with a plan for Justice. He brutally kills both men, and then once arrested and inside the prison, he kills everyone who touched the case ten years ago and let the murderers walk free. Clyde is in solitary confinement, but still manages to "misbehave" while in the watch of the prison guards. Foucault would say that inmates would be less likely to misbehave for fear of being watched. Clyde has everything planned to a T, and completely breaks down the Panopticon. Clyde punishes those that did not give his family justise. He also tries to make deals with the D.A. so that other lives will be saved. But when they don't agree to the bargain he presents and they don't keep to their word, they are punished and the consequences are fatal.






Lacan, Jacques. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 441-446. Print.

My Structuralism Group

As a contributor to my group, I emailed everyone videos and web links that I thought really helped to show the concept of the sign, signifier, signified, as well as the history of the concept. In the email i inserted youtube videos of a Baby Einstein video clip and a "Your Baby Can Read," clip. These shows children a word, the narrator says the word, and then there is a series of images related to the word in able to teach babies and toddlers the two part sign system. We all met as a group the day class was cancelled and spit out ideas for the presentation. I contributed a number of historical context, cultural import, and theoretical practice ideas and facts to Francesca to integrate into the powerpoint presentation. I also collected examples of signifiers with multiple possible signified images creating multiple examples of signs and then emailed them to Amy. Our group was very vocal and very open to listening to eachother's ideas.

Photo Story

The Old Woman Who Lived By the Sea



The old woman lived by the sea and no one knew her name. The town of Astoria, Oregon, was small and quiet, but that only made the old woman more mysterious. With a town so enclosed, there wasn’t a move you could make without your neighbor knowing. So this old woman made sure she had no neighbors, and settled in a house at the very tip of a cliff. The dark waves broke onto the cliff splashing upward like clawing arms. The sheer force must have rattled her house with every approach.

The sun never visited the old woman who lived by the sea, and some say that this slowly drove her mad. She only emerged from her weathered home when the rain spit so hard from the sky, that her emergence was invisible. She hid behind the raindrops, letting each one wash her away.

With a copper teapot in hand, she scuffled down the cliff, towards the rushing sea. On a washed up log she sat, alone and hidden, sipping chamomile tea with rose petals. On some days she lingered on the edge of her ceramic tea cups with spearmint and lemongrass or vanilla rooibus with apple slices.

Once the rain subsided, all that would be left on the old weathered log, was her empty, washed out tea cups. It would be the only sign to all the Astorians, that the woman who lived by the sea was still living on.

Semiotic Analysis

This photograph has four signifiers: “log,” “teacup,” “ocean” and “rain.” All of the signifiers have a common signified. Meaning that the internal image that comes to mind when we see or hear these words, is the same concept that everyone else sees. This is also arbitrary due to different cultures ideas of the signifier.

The creative narrative based on this photograph above was written by looking at the elements of the picture, without listing the images, but by defamiliarizing it. Subconsciously I wrote a story using the signified concepts I received mentally when I looked at the four signifiers. I didn’t do this on purpose because I was not familiar with the idea of Saussure’s semiology.

From a semiotic analysis the image of rain can symbolize doom, tragedy, or sorrow. The teacups are in pastel, feminine, and floral colors and patters. They have gold handles and are clean and in perfect condition. This gives the idea of someone from an older generation, most likely a woman. The ocean is blurred in the background and even though it is not the center of the attention of the photograph it still plays on the meaning behind the teacups. When you think of the beach, you don’t think of rain automatically, unless you think of Oregon or Washington. Those two states are the most wet places in America, and both have a coast facing the pacific ocean. So with those keys we piece together a sorrowful, elderly woman, drinking tea, in Oregon, by the ocean. The viewer may also guess that the woman is wealthy, because to live by the sea, especially with an ocean view, would mean someone of higher status and money.

The log gives us a place, where the woman and the teacups meet. It is the center setting of the photograph. The log is of pine or red wood which can be found in a conifer forest. This provides more evidence for the fact that this scene takes place up north. Southern California beaches are more common with palm trees rather than pine. All these elements play together to provide a deeper meaning of the picture to the viewer.


Rivkin, Julie & Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Formalism.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 4-6

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 14-21.

Heteroglossia

In Mikhail Bahktin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel,” he coins the term heteroglossia. So we start by breaking this term down. Hetero means “other” or “different, where the combining word gloss- can mean “word” or “speech,” like the term glossary. Heteroglossia: Other speech.

This is pretty much what Bahktin gets to in his essay. Heteroglossia refers to use of different languages, where languages can be the point of view of the narrator and the different dialogue of the characters. By creating a novel with heteroglossia, the text is able to be readable to many people and not just one particular group.

“Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permit’s a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different (always more or less dialogized.)…-this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel (Bahktin 263).

For example I use heteroglossia in my own life. As a Starbucks barista, I use one language with my customers, "Hello! How are you? What can I get for you today? Would you like anything to eat with your latte today Jim?" Then I switch to a different mode of language more suitable (and less fake) when talking to my coworkers: "Spencer can you check the bathrooms? Tuck in your shirt." My language becomes more choppy and I change my tone as if I was talking to one of my friends. The language I use with my mother is COMPLETELY different than the language I use around my father, and the language I use around my friends is EXTREMELY different than the language I use around my one year old son. We change our speech so that listener better understands us.


Living Without Heteroglossia:


In the comic, the platypus and the woman have nothing in common, and are using two differnt modes of language, both speaking on different subjects. This would be an example of a world without heteroglossia.


Bahktin's idea of heteroglossia is a mode of formalism that we can use to interpret the text. "The Russian Formalists were interested both in describing the genreal characteristics of literary language and in analyzing the specific devices or modes of operation of such language" (Rivkin 3).







Bahktin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.

Battle at Kruger

Battle at Kruger

The “Battle at Kruger” is said to be the creator of youtube.com’s favorite video, and has become an icon in the geographic world. It is a video of survival and a story of hope and justice. It is what takes me to my elevated state of consciousness. The Battle at Kruger is my sublime. In Longinus' On the Sublime, he says that "although nature is for the most part subject only to her own laws where matters of emotion and elevation are concerned, she is not given to acting at random and wholly without system. Nature is the first cause and the fundamental creative principle in all activities" (Murray 115).
In this almost eight and a half minute long video, every second of it will leave you breathless For eight minutes I guarantee you will be silent and still. Your heart will race and you will feel emotions that may have been deeply suppressed. This is the "Battle at Kruger":





If we start the video at 1:04, we can see the lions, crouched and waiting, pawing their claws on the ground, preparing their moment of attack. The video pans left and three buffalo are walking along the embankment. Two adults and one baby are walking literally into a lion’s den. As we are able to immediately point out is that all five lions are female, and in this type of feline pack, the lioness is the hunter. The buffalo approaching are not a game, they are food. They are lusting for the buffalo with the appetitive part of their being.
Nearly a minute the chase begins and quickly ends, one lion lands on the baby buffalo, rolling the both of them off the embankment and down to the edge of the water. All five females crowd the baby, teeth and dagger sharp claws embedded into the helpless baby. As the baby submerges deeper and deeper in the African river, another visitor comes in for the attack. A crocodile snatches the baby’s thigh and thus begins a tug of war between the lions and the crocodile. The five carnivorous cats prove stronger than the croc, and almost drag the croc out of the water with the baby. The buffalo is free from the water but not the jaws of the surrounding lioness. Almost immediately the herd moves in. Whether guided by instinct or rage, the herd tramples in closer and closer to the large cats. The buffalo move as one, and now have the advantage. They are much larger than the pack of lions, an therefore are given the upper hand. Plato’s theory was that justice was a worthwhile action. The herd had no idea if they would find the baby dead or alive, but they had the advantage and they took it.
The herd never stops. They inch closer and closer to the pinned down baby. Soon they begin prodding and swatting at the lions, bucking and kicking at them, chasing them away one by one.




The herd works as individuals and as one. They separate the lions, and push them as far down the embankment as possible. One buffalo even bucks one of the cats into the air sending her flying. Once the lions let go, the baby gets up on it’s own, and runs back into the safety of the herd.
According to Aristotle’s ideas of tragedy, this video fits in perfectly. The “Battle at Kruger” is ultimately performed as a tragedy. "In tragedy it is action that is imitated, and this action is brought about by agents who necessarily display certain distinctive qualities both of character and of thought, according to which we also define the nature of the actions; and it is on their actions that all men depend for success or failure. The representation of the action is the plot of the tragedy" (Murray 64). The video is serious, and tells a story that is performed rather than narrated, which are all elements that Aristotle points out to be part of a tragedy. The video arouses feelings of pity and fear. When the struggle of the baby locked in the jaws of the crocodile and the lions takes place, I fear for the baby buffalo and I endure pity on it.




Like humans, animals endure pain and suffering, and for the buffalo being so young, it resonates with the viewer. This is a story about an epic hero that takes back what rightfully belonged to his herd. In the beginning of the video, the baby and two adult buffalo are walking ahead of the rest, unaware of the crouching lions before them. This is where the hero, the adult buffalo, makes it’s fatal mistake. The baby is left open and unguarded. The tragedy continues, and the hero brings the herd in together and takes the lions head on.
The “Battle at Kruger” transcends limits, and stirs emotions. It is a tragedy and an epic poem in one. It is my sublime, and hopefully will now be yours too.




For more information on this video check out the link below
http://www.battleatkruger.com.



Battle at Kruger [video]. (2007) Retrieved January 30, 2009, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU8DDYz68kM

Murray, Penelope. Classical Literary Criticism. Penguin Books: New York, 2004

Plato's Use of Direct Quotes Help Prove His Theories

In Plato’s Ion, Socrates questions Ion’s knowledge of Homer. Socrates analyzes Homer’s text along with Ion’s statement that he is the most knowledgeable when it comes to the work of Homer. What Socrates is trying to prove is that if you can announce who is a good speaker, you should be able to announce who is a bad speaker, and therefore you should be knowledgeable about both bad and good speakers. Where Ion only knows of Homer and nothing else, Socrates uses analysis and theories to prove his points. With every theory and point that Socrates makes, he backs it up with direct quotes, making Ion a very philosophical piece.

"And you’re right too, Ion. So come now and do as I did for you when I picked out from the odyssey and the Iliad the sorts of things that concern the seer and the doctor and the fisherman;you now pick out for me, since you are much more knowledgeable about the works of Homer than I am, the sorts of things that concern the rhapsode’s skills, Ion- things which it’s appropriate for the rhapsode to consider and judge better than other people" (Murray 11).

After Socrates had proved his point that other skilled people could interpret and understand Homer’s text better than Ion, he allows Ion to debate back and give his own examples from Homer’s text to prove that he is the most knowledgeable. Ion returns by stating that he is better at everything. Ion does not give proof or examples, he is unclear and vague making his argument less affective and believable than Socrates.

I really liked Ion and the Republics 2,3, and 10, because Plato’s philosophy and structure of his writing is so clear and organized with examples from the text backing up every idea that he has. In Republic 2, the argument is that...

"a child cannot distinguish between what is allegorical and what is not, and opinions formed at the age tend to become permanent and indelible. For these reasons everything must be done to ensure that the first stories they hear are as suitable as possible for the encouragement of virtue" (Murray 17).

He argues that stories about the Gods, including myths, are unsuitable for children and only give them wrong ideas because they are too young to interpret the underlying message.




Murray, Penelope. Classical Literary Criticism. Penguin Books: New York, 2004.