There is no Spoon...

Thanks to Ken Rufo for a great post!

I really enjoyed reading this post and found the real world examples given by Mr.Rufo exceptionally helpful. For my post I want to talk about his discussion of the simulacrum, simulation and the hyperreal. A simulacrum mimics a simulation, however there is quite a distinctive difference. A simulacra is a copy without any real model. The example that Ken Rufo gives is the World Showcase in Disney's Epcot. Each nation is not actually a simulation of the nation. "They are so fake that they aren't actually copying anything." He says that the culture of the simulation does not allow us to discover the actual real on our own. Simulacra make things real and we are in effect, blinded from reality by these simulacra.

The hyperreal refers to forming our reality through a simulation of the reality. Ken Rufo gives the example of going to a national park and trying to imitate the famous pictures that we have all seem of these places. Our experience and knowledge of a place is experienced through simulations that we have previously experienced. This is the same as someone traveling to Pisa and taking the picture holding up the Leaning Tower. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is experienced for thousands of people a year take this same picture, because they have seen hundreds just like it before. They have this experience of the tower through all of the other pictures that they have seen, their "reality is filtered through a simulation of the reality."

I find that these ideas are seen every day in our lives. We experience things in the hyperreal everyday. We do something because we have seen what others have done before us. We travel out of travel guides, experience places through the simulated lens that Fromer provides us with. We take the "famous" pictures and partake in the cliche experiences.. simply because they are cliche. Our realities are formed by these cliches.


I would like to say thank you again to Ken Rufo. I hope that I did not too poorly butcher my explanations and thoughts on your post.


*Disney's "Italy"

Would a Rose by any other Name Smell as Sweet?

In Foucault's essay "What is an Author," he provides some very interesting ideas about the significance of the author and their name. Where Barthes discusses the death of the author, Foucault stresses some alterior functions that the author holds, other than as the scriptor of a work.

Foucault asks "How does the name of an author function?" He goes on to discuss that an author's name does not simply signify that they wrote a work, but also speaks about the work itself. "[The author's name's] presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a number of texts and thus differentiate from others. A name also establishes different forms of relationships among texts." When we think of Shakespeare we think of his works as a whole. We attribute comedies, dramas and sonnets to his name, and therefore we get a sense of his works as a whole. His name in our culture means something. Through Shakespeare we have a better knowledge of the sonnet genre as a whole and works written by him are seen as credible because they are attached to his name.

This idea is relatable to the pseudonimity that bloggers assume. Ms.Bean is of course not my given name. But here, on this blog, it is my identity. Dr.Crazy discussed the reasons behind using a pseudonym on her blog. She says that, "by disconnecting one's writing identity from one's "real life" identity, one preserves first a measure of control over how one's writing is perceived and second acquires a level of protection from certain kinds of scrutiny (often gendered)." The idea of controlling the way that one is perceived is quite related to the ideas that Foucault attributes to an author's name.

A pseudonym is a safe way for a lot of people, professors in this case, to openly discuss ideas without the danger of ruining their credibility. Dr.Crazy says, however, that even under a pseudonym we develop a reputation, "one has responsibilities under this identity, through one's relationships to others in the community. You're "known" as the identity that you've created, and you develop a reputation under that name." Our work is attributed to us, and people expect certain things out of our Blogger identity. To go against these expectations would be out of character.

I am definitely no Shakespeare but I think that the ideas Foucault expresses about the relevance of an author's name fits nicely into both the world of great authors and into the bloggosphere.

Gonna Keep on Loving You... Cuz its the Only Thing I Wanna Do

I think that Derrida's idea of love being narcissistic is a very interesting one to explore. In today's world the term narcissism has a very negative connotation. A person who is labeled narcissistic is considered to be self obsessed and vain. We talked in class about the psychoanalytic use of narcissism. Freud discusses narcissism as something that we are born with. As babies we are inherently narcissistic, unable to understand the needs of anyone but ourselves. We have no ability to create a distinction between the self and the Other. As we grow, we grow out of this implicit narcissism and form the abilities to recognize the needs of the other people in our lives.

Derrida however, says that we maintain some of this narcissism in our relationships. All love is narcissistic- that we project our own desires and needs onto the person that we love. I think that this also ties into what Derrida was saying in the film about truly loving someone or just loving something about someone. We look for people to love that fulfill our needs. Whether it be someone to make us laugh, someone that makes us feel beautiful, someone that can cook if we can't, someone who is supportive of our career and decision and a whole host of other things that we need from a partner. We look for self fulfillment in a partner.


I don't think that when Derrida discuses the narcissism of love he necessarily means it in a negative way. However, it is a very interesting notion to look at love in such a way Do we love only to be loved in return? Is love a selfish act?

Give the Sign and Swing Away

Reading Saussure last week was a little bit intimidating, but I will try to make some sense out of it. When he says, "in language there are only differences without positive terms," he is saying that meaning only comes from within the linguistic system. For example, our meaning of Night is only comprehensible because we understand Day and vice versa. Therefore he says "the idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it." Meaning that when we look at signifier and signified separately, their meaning is "differential and negative," but when looked at together, we are able to get a positive and total meaning. So, we can not understand the meaning of a word unless we look at it in the context of the linguistic system.

Post Structuralism works to challenge these ideas. For this theory it is not so simple to say that combining signifier and signified can give us a total meaning; they do not have a stable relationship. In class we discussed the idea that the signified keeps slipping farther and farther away, and in its place we continue to get more signifiers. Therefore we can truly never get at the meaning of something because the meaning keeps getting deferred. I want to try and give and example of this... bare with me.


Let's use 'baseball' as the signifier. You have the image in your head, and you know what it sounds like. So what is the signified? Is it the actual ball? Or do you take the meaning of 'baseball' to be the sport itself. If so, you start to see other signifiers right? Like players, teams and rules. With each one of these signifiers, the meaning of 'baseball' gets father and farther away from you. All these other and sounds and images expand and defer the meaning and we are unable to get a true and stable meaning of the word.


Hopefully, I didn't confuse you... because I am still kind of confused! Haha.



Ciao until next time!