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
Oh Mother
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.
Word Picture Analysis #2
It’s getting late, the streets are deserted, but they aren’t ready to leave one another just yet. They see a café open and duck in to have coffee and to draw the night out a little longer. They realize almost immediately that this was a mistake, the café is far too empty, the waiter appears far too desperate, but they sit down and order anyway. They notice one other diner, a man sitting by himself completely absorbed in his own thoughts and oblivious to them. The waiter seems to realize this guest is a lost cause, and so he focuses his attention upon them. Hoping they will order something more, and if not, that they will leave him a good tip anyway, it had not been a good night. The waiter miscalculates by attempting to strike up a conversation with the gentleman, he has completely isolated the companion, and she is sitting there studying her manicure out of boredom. He can tell by the stony look on the gentleman’s face that this is a lost cause, he will not be ordering anything else, or receiving a satisfactory tip.
Structuralism is the analysis of a text using signs and symbols from within. “It is the social side of speech, outside the individual who can never create nor modify it by himself; it exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community” (850). A lot of these signs exist because as a community we agree that they do. If meaning is found through the signs and symbols within a text, and these signs have meaning because of a general agreement, then aren’t we partially responsible for the meaning we draw from the text? I think this is particularly true with this exercise. We look at a picture, and write a story about it, obviously when we write the story it will be based on the signs and symbols we find within the picture. Now we go back and analyze the story written with the signs and symbols that we identified. Therefore we are partially responsible for the meaning we find in it.
Each person in the picture is dressed rather nicely, which provides a stark contrast to the unadorned, simple café they are in. There is no art on the walls; it is primarily empty, except for the bar where all three customers are sitting. This emptiness brings about a sense of loneliness and desperation, especially demonstrated in the lone customer seemingly in the same room as everyone else, but at the same time completely apart from the others. The waiter seems desperate because he is pictured in an awkward, ready to serve you at a moment’s notice, stance. He seems focused on the gentleman, but his lady friend clearly could care less about what they are discussing.
Habitual auto pilot
“If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us.”
Shklovsky discusses perception becoming habitual or automatic. Think about how many times you’ve heard someone use the phrase “auto pilot” to describe an action. I have this feeling fairly frequently after driving to work or driving home, where I remember getting to my car, and getting to my destination, but do I really remember the drive? The details blend together with the details from all the other times I’ve drove the same route. If I compare the first time I drove that route to now, it is a completely different experience, Shklovsky is absolutely right.
“After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it-hence we cannot say anything, significant about it.”
I applied this to thinking about a toothbrush. When you look at a toothbrush, you think about brushing your teeth--even the name suggests its utility. If I stopped to think about it, I could describe my toothbrush in detail, but we do not do this every day, this general habitualization of our daily perception is what Shklovsky commenting on. The object becomes its utility and loses its own significance.
What I really want to say I can't define
Sublimity
“In ordinary life, nothing is truly great which it is great to despise; wealth, honor, reputation, absolute power—anything in short which has a lot of external trappings—can never be supremely good to the wise man because it is no small good to despise them” (Longinus, 138).
People spend their lives chasing after material possessions and wealth, believing them to be the source of true sublimity. In reality these people are fools, wasting their lives, chasing false happiness. I agree with Longinus here, anything that has a lot of external trappings cannot be sublime. These things are too easily lost, and have no universality to them.
“Real sublimity contains much food for reflection, is difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory. In a word, reckon anything those things which pleases everybody all the time as genuinely and finely sublime. When people of all different trainings, ways of life, tastes, ages, and manners all agree about something, the judgment and assent of so many distinct voices lends strength and irrefutability to the conviction that their admiration is rightly directed” (Longinus, 138).
Sublimity is subjective. Longinus argues that real sublimity is ‘those things which pleases everybody all the time’ but this cannot be true. If I find something sublime, but every other person does not agree with me at all times, it does not discount the sublimity I have found in it.
“Sublimity produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator’s true power at a single blow” (Longinus, 137).
Longinus. "On The Sublime." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Analysis #1
I selected a clip from The Big Lebowski to show that Aristotle's Rhetoric Model can be used by anyone. The tone and language used in my clip are not particularly elegant as is usually heard in rhetoric speeches. Walter is using rhetoric throughout his expletive filled speech, and it is shown that rhetoric is no less effective when performed in this way.
First you may ask what exactly is rhetoric? Aristotle defines it as "an ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion…Persuasion occurs through the argument when we show the truth or the apparent truth from whatever is persuasive in each case." (P.115-116) So rhetoric is used whenever you are speaking to someone and trying to convince them of something, whether it is true or not. There are three main forms of rhetoric: ethos, an appeal based on the character of the speaker; logos, which is an appeal based on logic or reason; and pathos, which is an appeal based on emotion.
There are three characters represented in the clip: Donny, Walter, and the Dude. Walter is using pathos while talking to the Dude about his ruined rug. The Dude was very attached to this rug, he is upset that it was ruined, but he does not think that there is any action to be taken against the man who ruined it. He was going to leave the situation as is, but Walter does not let the subject go, he continues provoking the Dude and his feelings about the rug: “This was a valued rug” and again “That rug really tied the room together, did it not?” (The Big Lebowski). Walter attacks Donny using logos saying he has no frame of reference to enter the conversation or offer an opinion while he continues convincing the Dude that he needs to take action. Walter uses ethos through his appearance, he is on the same level as the Dude, his language also attests to his character, he uses the same language as the Dude. The Dude and Walter are equals. This makes Walter more credible.
Walter is successful in using rhetoric to persuade the Dude that the man he previously considered to be at fault for ruining his rug, is not actually at fault. Instead he shifts the blame to a millionaire and convinces the Dude, using logos, that he should be the one to pay for the rug.
Works Cited
Leitch, Vincent B. et al., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton,
2001. Print
The Big Lebowski, movie
Reflection #2
This week we spent the majority of class sitting in on a lecture by Dr. Kevin O’Neal on Aristotelian Logic. Dr. O’Neal focused quite a bit on the actual structure of rhetoric, which reminded me quite a bit of a Philosophy class (General Logic) I took a few years ago.
I really enjoyed the lecture, and learned quite a few new things. I thought Dr. O’Neal did a particularly good job of breaking down the subject matter into terms anyone would be able to understand. I also enjoyed how he pointed out that the Greeks never made anything; their society was centered on speech--I had never realized this before. The Greeks spent the majority of their time talking and debating. He described how rhetoric’s purpose is to persuade someone of something. This leads into the key of rhetoric, which, as he puts it, is: “keep it memorable, keep it short.” The most effective Rhetoric is short and sweet (Think back to “Encomium of Helen”).
After the lecture, back in class, we watched a scene from Wall Street and analyzed the different kinds of rhetoric used by Gordon Gecko, many of which we had just learned more about in Dr. O’Neal’s lecture, that were used in the scene. I found this to be a good exercise, and listening to everyone’s responses made me notice examples I had missed. It made me feel more confident that I would be able to recognize all of the different forms of rhetoric in the future as well.
