In this clip Lucy and Ethel are the proletariat workers while their boss is clearly the bourgeoisie. Their boss intimidates them and makes them fear for their job if they do not do it quickly enough, without ever doing any of the physical work herself. She is only mental labor, the supervisor. While it is obviously meant to be humorous, it demonstrates the struggle of the physical laborers to keep production levels high. You are what you produce, and if you do not produce enough you are worthless. Your value is your ability to produce.
Another example I found myself thinking about as I learned about Marxism is Animal Farm. Marx could, in essence, be Old Major, the one who showed the animals that they were being mistreated and that they should rebel against their human master. In the beginning all of the animals were going to be equals, all working together. The pigs would be the mental labor and all of the other animals would be the physical labor, but they would be equal. This is Marxism, before things began to go awry. I think Animal Farm is pretty accurate though, it is only a matter of time before greed and laziness set in and begin to disrupt the shared labor and equality.
It's all About Marxism Analysis #4
All workers are equal, but some are more equal than others
Marx describes the work force in Communism. A worker is only as good as their production rate and the value of the item they are producing. “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor; because the relation of the producer’s to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. This is the reason that the products of labor become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses.” (664) The creation of a commodity is only possible if there is someone to labor over producing the commodity, and the labor itself therefore becomes commodified.
“The character that his own labor possesses of being socially useful takes the form of the condition, that the product must not be only useful, but useful for others, and the social character that this particular labor has of being equal of all other particular kinds of labor, takes the form that all physically different articles that are the products of labor, have one common quality, viz., that of having value” (666). If a product is not useful to others the labor is useless and a waste of time.
Footloose and Fancy Free Analysis #3
“Yes, in his mind the woman has got a penis, in spite of everything; but this penis is no longer the same as it was before. Something else has taken its place, has been appointed its substitute, as it were, and now inherits the interest, which was formerly directed to its predecessor. But this interest suffers an extraordinary increase as well, because the horror of castration has set up memorial to itself in the creation of this substitute. Furthermore, an aversion, which is never absent in any fetishist, to the female genitals remains a stigma indelebile of the repression that has taken place. We can now see what the fetish achieves and what it is that maintains it. It remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it. It also saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual, by endowing women with the characteristic that makes them tolerable as sexual objects. In later life, the fetishist feels that he enjoys yet another advantage from his substitute for a genital. The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all” (Freud, 843).
As Freud so eloquently explains, fetishes are a substitute for the penis in women. Born out of the realization that their mother’s do not have a penis, and the subsequent fear of their own castration. The fetish gives them something else to focus on, instead of a woman’s genitalia, which would be a constant reminder of the missing phallus for the fetishist.
Freud also talks about the superiority fetishists feel at the ease of their own self-fulfillment, since the subject that is gratifying it would not know the object of their fetish. I have actually witnessed this firsthand, I was once asked by an acquaintance if they could rub my earlobes. I did not think anything of the request except that it was strange, he explained it by merely saying it helps calm him when he is feeling nervous, and he only brings it up to women because they are less judgmental. In hindsight I realize now that this was probably a fetish, whether he knew it or not.
Fetishes are showcased in mainstream media more than people probably realize. Quentin Tarantino frequently showcases naked female feet in many of his movies. The following clip shows some of the more obvious instances of this.
In an interview where he was directly asked about whether or not he had a foot fetish Tarantino replied “I appreciate the female foot, but I've never said that I have a foot fetish. But I am a lower track guy. I like legs... I like booties... [Laughs] Let's just say, I have a black male sexuality.” He does not deny that he has a foot fetish, just that he has never admitted to saying he does.
Freud, Sigmund. "Fetishism". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Oh Meaning Where Art Thou?
“The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (1322).
Certain writers have tried to distance the text from the author. “Mellarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’ and not ‘me’ (1323). This is the beginning of the death of the author. Things should not be written for the author themselves, they should be written with the reader in mind, otherwise the work is meaningless to all but the author. Barthes suggests using ambiguous characters to resist writing in oneself. When the author is distanced from the text it becomes more easily accessible and allows readers to find meaning.
Oh Mother
This week we focused on psychoanalysis with Freud and Lacan.
“It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse toward our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Lauis and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us fulfillment of our own childhood wishes. But, more fortunate than he, we have meanwhile succeeded, in so far as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.” (816)
The Oedipus complex for Freud is the childhood desire to sleep with your mother and get rid of your father. Children are jealous of their father’s interaction and relationship with their mother, wanting their mother all to themselves.
“This act (of looking at oneself in the mirror), far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates—the child’s own body, and the person and things, around him” (1164).
Here Lacan is commenting on our fascination with mirrors as infants, which even chimpanzee’s realize is insignificant. The child begins to be fascinated by the imitation of gestures that occurs with the mirror. The child goes through a stage of desiring what others desire, in a way, imitating their gestures as if they were a reflection
Say What?
Saussere discusses semiotics, the study of language in relation to its impact on social life. Language is a major part of our lives, and is more involved than I had ever considered.
“Linguistic signs, though basically psychological, are not abstractions; associations which bear the stamp of collective approval—and which added together constitute language are realities that have their seat in the brain. In language there is only the sound-image, and this can be translated into a fixed visual image.”
Language is full of sound-images, words linked to a concept, which bring about a mental picture. When you say toothbrush, someone will have a mental picture of a toothbrush instead of an alligator. While these sound-images may not be completely universal (not everyone will picture the same toothbrush) they are still comparable. We develop these sound-images over time, but many are taught to us at an early age when we are learning language.
“A system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (857).
Huge chunks of our language have meaning because of other words, think binaries here. Right and wrong for example, if there was no right, would we have any idea what wrong was? Light and dark, if we never had light would we know dark?
Ferdinand De Saussure. "Course in General Linguistics". ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
