Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
material on abstract labor cut from Theorizing the Web presentation
Another way of understanding the dynamism of capitalism is through its continual need to produce a flow of “abstract labor” as well as opportunities for profit. Capitalism presupposes an ever expandable amount of needs to satisfy with commodities and thus an ever growing amount of potential work to produce those commodities. Thus it requires a general sense that work is fungible or “abstract”, measurable as a certain amount of money (a wage). And it requires a sense that any activity whatever on the part of a worker can be productive, as value inheres in human effort itself. In capitalism, the value of labor is not contextual and contingent, not dependent on traditions and secure, stable structure of productive relations (think the mythical precapitalist community, with little class mobility and hereditary rank and occupations), but is “liberated” to be deployable in whatever ways suit capital; capitalism thus remakes local, traditional arrangements in its image. Workers becomes nothing (no integral identity is given, in theory), but have the potential of making anything, and must make something of themselves. This is the source of capitalism’s power to bring novelty into the social world. The formation of social bonds becomes a source of value -- the power of cooperation, the creation of value that exceeds the independent effort of any one person.
Capitalism must be able to attract or codify this sort of “living labor” and render it “abstract labor” amenable to rationalization, measurement and control -- the sort of labor that can be the input to a profitable production process. Hence a fundamental problem for capitalism: how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable.
Living labor can be understood as identity-making effort (in the absence of traditional prescriptions); it is the productivity of open-ended potentiality
Abstract labor is the quantification of the self, making that labor of self-creation and identity shaping productive by allowing it to conform to pre-existing measuring tools that allow for commodification. A matter of fitting oneself to the yardstick.
The capitalist development of technology has in part been driven by a need to render “living labor” into “abstract labor” without snuffing it out altogether. Put another way, it’s not only machines that embody technical knowledge to improve productivity, but also subjects, who are freed to produce new needs and hence new opportunities for profit. Subjectivity becomes a developed from of capital, with an enhanced productive potential. (We think to want more; we are determined to express ourselves in original ways; we are driven to discover ourselves rather than take our identity as given and fixed.) The development of machinery and now computer technology and augmentation nullifies inherent differences and particularities in users, leveling pre-existing human variety while producing an urgent need to manufacture new distinctions. It takes pre-existing qualities, makes the quantifiable and then uses those quantities to impel production.
Capitalism requires labor as such (abstract labor). But this prompts the critique that work is personally meaningless, alienating. To answer this critique, capitalism must make the process of valorization in production into a kind of self-production for workers at the same time. What enables this is the underlying ability to transform life experience (self-production, self-expression, relationship forming, etc.) into something abstract and redeployable behind the scenes by capitalist firms: data. Work (now becoming -- in ideology, if not in actual fact -- a matter of “immaterial labor” -- the filtering of production through lifestyles, branding, symbolic layering) can become meaningful and social and self-fulfilling because it is at the same time generating data. The data self is the sort of capitalist subject that experiences its “alienation” as liberation and an open-ended process of self-discovery; it experiences the quantification of life (once strictly a matter of reducing human effort into abstract labor power measured in wages) not as alienating and reductive but as positive, descriptive, self-defining, revealing.
All Facebook profiles in theory are born equal; they allow the same exact repertoire of actions to shape and improve them. It seems like an opportunity and a medium in which to develop the self, but it is also a way to contain and control those efforts, making sure they are producing value within capitalism (rather than liberation from it).
Social media extend the experience and range of applicability of living labor while simultaneously transforming it into “abstract labor” -- into fungible data. They attempt to control and capture the productive capital of subjectivity engendered by capitalism in liberating us from our stable place in traditional hierarchies and so on. They give shape to the emerging social factory, integrating it into existing ways of doing business, prompting investment flows, and harvesting and distributing profit.
Social media are part of the new spirit, part of network-driven capitalism’s effort to justify and limit itself to make sure it doesn’t become too immiserating to continue. Social media presuppose the conditions of their popularity (network capitalism) are permanent, present themselves as solution to what they are actually instrumental in causing and perpetuating. They ameliorate the ideological crisis that stems from the conflict between abstract and living labor.
Social media are ways to contain and recapture the productive and potentially disruptive energy of the cooperation engendered by the capitalist production process, which depends on bringing workers together, dividing labor among them, and generating/capturing the surplus that emerges from their effort to work together. Cooperative efforts are captured within social media and made into data -- that is, they are made fungible, abstract, countable. This data can set cooperative workers back into competition with one another, now competing over and in terms of measurable influence, attention, contribution, network links and so on.
Capitalism must be able to attract or codify this sort of “living labor” and render it “abstract labor” amenable to rationalization, measurement and control -- the sort of labor that can be the input to a profitable production process. Hence a fundamental problem for capitalism: how to maintain a supply of workers who are (a) flexible, creative, and motivated at the same time they are (b) manageable, controllable, and predictable.
Living labor can be understood as identity-making effort (in the absence of traditional prescriptions); it is the productivity of open-ended potentiality
Abstract labor is the quantification of the self, making that labor of self-creation and identity shaping productive by allowing it to conform to pre-existing measuring tools that allow for commodification. A matter of fitting oneself to the yardstick.
The capitalist development of technology has in part been driven by a need to render “living labor” into “abstract labor” without snuffing it out altogether. Put another way, it’s not only machines that embody technical knowledge to improve productivity, but also subjects, who are freed to produce new needs and hence new opportunities for profit. Subjectivity becomes a developed from of capital, with an enhanced productive potential. (We think to want more; we are determined to express ourselves in original ways; we are driven to discover ourselves rather than take our identity as given and fixed.) The development of machinery and now computer technology and augmentation nullifies inherent differences and particularities in users, leveling pre-existing human variety while producing an urgent need to manufacture new distinctions. It takes pre-existing qualities, makes the quantifiable and then uses those quantities to impel production.
Capitalism requires labor as such (abstract labor). But this prompts the critique that work is personally meaningless, alienating. To answer this critique, capitalism must make the process of valorization in production into a kind of self-production for workers at the same time. What enables this is the underlying ability to transform life experience (self-production, self-expression, relationship forming, etc.) into something abstract and redeployable behind the scenes by capitalist firms: data. Work (now becoming -- in ideology, if not in actual fact -- a matter of “immaterial labor” -- the filtering of production through lifestyles, branding, symbolic layering) can become meaningful and social and self-fulfilling because it is at the same time generating data. The data self is the sort of capitalist subject that experiences its “alienation” as liberation and an open-ended process of self-discovery; it experiences the quantification of life (once strictly a matter of reducing human effort into abstract labor power measured in wages) not as alienating and reductive but as positive, descriptive, self-defining, revealing.
All Facebook profiles in theory are born equal; they allow the same exact repertoire of actions to shape and improve them. It seems like an opportunity and a medium in which to develop the self, but it is also a way to contain and control those efforts, making sure they are producing value within capitalism (rather than liberation from it).
Social media extend the experience and range of applicability of living labor while simultaneously transforming it into “abstract labor” -- into fungible data. They attempt to control and capture the productive capital of subjectivity engendered by capitalism in liberating us from our stable place in traditional hierarchies and so on. They give shape to the emerging social factory, integrating it into existing ways of doing business, prompting investment flows, and harvesting and distributing profit.
Social media are part of the new spirit, part of network-driven capitalism’s effort to justify and limit itself to make sure it doesn’t become too immiserating to continue. Social media presuppose the conditions of their popularity (network capitalism) are permanent, present themselves as solution to what they are actually instrumental in causing and perpetuating. They ameliorate the ideological crisis that stems from the conflict between abstract and living labor.
Social media are ways to contain and recapture the productive and potentially disruptive energy of the cooperation engendered by the capitalist production process, which depends on bringing workers together, dividing labor among them, and generating/capturing the surplus that emerges from their effort to work together. Cooperative efforts are captured within social media and made into data -- that is, they are made fungible, abstract, countable. This data can set cooperative workers back into competition with one another, now competing over and in terms of measurable influence, attention, contribution, network links and so on.
Thursday, April 05, 2012
James Raven's Judging New Wealth; contradictions in the commodity form of the book
Raven examines the British book business in the second half of the 18th century, explaining how the book became more of an everyday commodity as the reading public expanded. The growing market led to a streamlined product to meet it, which in turn grew the market further. With books, this meant genre formulas were refined and generalized so audiences would know what they were getting. Critics of the period recognized this; one likened fiction to a "drug" engineered to be addictive through its standardized tropes and stereotypes.
But Raven's main concern, as the title suggests, is the prominence of stories about the nouveau riche, the demand for which was inexhaustible in the period -- unsurprisingly given the middle class makeup of the new reading public. The fiction of the era catered to a need in readers to disavow their own dubious origins and established a different means for establishing character than bloodlines, namely the sensibility to appreciate fiction and respond emotionally to it.
Part of what happens is that taste stops meaning aristocratic discrimination and starts meaning the ability to be ahead of the fashion curve. Those are often the same thing in practice, if you think fashions emerge from hierarchical emulation. But the shift in emphasis indicates a shift in imagined possibilities -- the new commodities allow one to believe that taste can be achieved. No longer a matter of blood but a matter of wise consumer choices. The book market is microcosm of the larger democratization of taste through open markets in fashionable goods. This has destabilizing effects throughout the class hierarchy, prompting an acceleration in the cycling through of signifiers of status. This acceleration with urgently spun as freedom by capitalism's ideologues, and who knows? Maybe they were right. We can't project backward and know whether we would have enjoyed the "ontological security" of being consigned for life to a particular social caste. Perhaps Gilles Lipovetsky is right and fashion is a small price to pay for social mobility (even uneven and imperfect mobility). But this is certainly an important basis of emerging consumerist ideology — the right to have Meaningful Taste and to find life's purpose in it rather than upholding one's place in the Great Chain of Being.
In 18th century England, the "new definition of social awkwardness" promulgated by novels of manners, Raven argues, drove an impulse for a standardization in fashionable objects, an orderly process for their passage through fashionability. This helps allow for the emulation that preserves the status hierarchy by making it legible. Commodities as a form, as a symbolizing medium, become a stable ground or field within which status can be derived and measured. (Books are just one salient example of this process of making goods, creating markets for them, and tolerably embedding those markets into existing social relations.)
Raven notes the apparent contradiction in the substance of commoditized books: They promise to inculcate proper social conduct, but their form is engineered to teach one simply to become addicted to reading more books. The form says "consume more," regardless of content -- this is basically true of all commercial media products. The worship of novelty is built in, so the allegedly permanent, always true ethical advice or aesthetic taste these early books could offer was always compromised. They offered the experience of having learned the "last word" about some moral or aesthetic question as something you could consume again and again -- moral certitude as a commodity. Experiencing morality (or connoisseurship) vicariously as entertainment replaces the need to act morally in the world to demonstrate that one has learned and understood some precept.
The new reader's yearning for permanence is leveraged into an appreciation for the exhilarating experience of ephemerality. This is how commoditized books, commercial fiction reproduce their market, making these contradictory desires cohere, coexist. Media consumption in general perhaps performs this work, manufacturing a necessary illusion for capitalism, that one can consume one's way to solidity, that one can experience stability serially, as a string of vicarious consumption experiences.
But Raven's main concern, as the title suggests, is the prominence of stories about the nouveau riche, the demand for which was inexhaustible in the period -- unsurprisingly given the middle class makeup of the new reading public. The fiction of the era catered to a need in readers to disavow their own dubious origins and established a different means for establishing character than bloodlines, namely the sensibility to appreciate fiction and respond emotionally to it.
Part of what happens is that taste stops meaning aristocratic discrimination and starts meaning the ability to be ahead of the fashion curve. Those are often the same thing in practice, if you think fashions emerge from hierarchical emulation. But the shift in emphasis indicates a shift in imagined possibilities -- the new commodities allow one to believe that taste can be achieved. No longer a matter of blood but a matter of wise consumer choices. The book market is microcosm of the larger democratization of taste through open markets in fashionable goods. This has destabilizing effects throughout the class hierarchy, prompting an acceleration in the cycling through of signifiers of status. This acceleration with urgently spun as freedom by capitalism's ideologues, and who knows? Maybe they were right. We can't project backward and know whether we would have enjoyed the "ontological security" of being consigned for life to a particular social caste. Perhaps Gilles Lipovetsky is right and fashion is a small price to pay for social mobility (even uneven and imperfect mobility). But this is certainly an important basis of emerging consumerist ideology — the right to have Meaningful Taste and to find life's purpose in it rather than upholding one's place in the Great Chain of Being.
In 18th century England, the "new definition of social awkwardness" promulgated by novels of manners, Raven argues, drove an impulse for a standardization in fashionable objects, an orderly process for their passage through fashionability. This helps allow for the emulation that preserves the status hierarchy by making it legible. Commodities as a form, as a symbolizing medium, become a stable ground or field within which status can be derived and measured. (Books are just one salient example of this process of making goods, creating markets for them, and tolerably embedding those markets into existing social relations.)
Raven notes the apparent contradiction in the substance of commoditized books: They promise to inculcate proper social conduct, but their form is engineered to teach one simply to become addicted to reading more books. The form says "consume more," regardless of content -- this is basically true of all commercial media products. The worship of novelty is built in, so the allegedly permanent, always true ethical advice or aesthetic taste these early books could offer was always compromised. They offered the experience of having learned the "last word" about some moral or aesthetic question as something you could consume again and again -- moral certitude as a commodity. Experiencing morality (or connoisseurship) vicariously as entertainment replaces the need to act morally in the world to demonstrate that one has learned and understood some precept.
The new reader's yearning for permanence is leveraged into an appreciation for the exhilarating experience of ephemerality. This is how commoditized books, commercial fiction reproduce their market, making these contradictory desires cohere, coexist. Media consumption in general perhaps performs this work, manufacturing a necessary illusion for capitalism, that one can consume one's way to solidity, that one can experience stability serially, as a string of vicarious consumption experiences.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Francesca Woodman notes
Preliminary ideas
Francesca Woodman is definitely the sort of artist whose work is overshadowed by her life. I'm forced to wonder if I ever would have seen her photographs if not for her life story, and it tempts to think that I would have been among those who were aesthetically insightful enough to recognize her genius, while the rest of the dopes need a human interest story to draw them in and imbue with "authenticity" and "real feeling" -- what the middlebrow art consumer is looking for in works rather than some higher-order formal achievement. They need to view art through biography to give it meaning, while I have some higher poetic power to discover meaning qua meaning in the abstract.
So Woodman's work occasions a temptation to a particular snobbery, a particular fantasy about possessing a particular special insight, which ironically enough is probably what Woodman must have felt pressured to feel herself, an isolating superiority, a terror of being pleased by what pleases the vulgar crowd, a horror of discovering that there is nothing special in the way you see things, that you have no eye that elevates you to distinction.
Francesca Woodman is definitely the sort of artist whose work is overshadowed by her life. I'm forced to wonder if I ever would have seen her photographs if not for her life story, and it tempts to think that I would have been among those who were aesthetically insightful enough to recognize her genius, while the rest of the dopes need a human interest story to draw them in and imbue with "authenticity" and "real feeling" -- what the middlebrow art consumer is looking for in works rather than some higher-order formal achievement. They need to view art through biography to give it meaning, while I have some higher poetic power to discover meaning qua meaning in the abstract.
So Woodman's work occasions a temptation to a particular snobbery, a particular fantasy about possessing a particular special insight, which ironically enough is probably what Woodman must have felt pressured to feel herself, an isolating superiority, a terror of being pleased by what pleases the vulgar crowd, a horror of discovering that there is nothing special in the way you see things, that you have no eye that elevates you to distinction.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
social graph vs. social class
I've hated the term social graph since Facebook first seized upon it to try to legitimate and intellectualize their project of subsuming people's social lives. But it turns out the term may be useful in drawing a distinction between the concepts of social organization that social media serve to reinforce and the class-based analyses they work to prevent.
Social media support, obviously, a view of society as a network of individual nodes that define themselves by their difference from other nodes; each individual's value lies in establishing and expressing that difference, finding comparative advantage relative to other nodes. Connections to other people serve to spread that message of difference, the existence of that differential value, meaning that relations charted in that network (aka the social graph) are lines of competition of well as mere affiliation. It means also that individuals in the network are faced with an ongoing tactical situation, under pressure to constant innovate the nature of their identity in the network to find new advantages, invent new differences, propagate new bases for judgment and new implied hierarchies to dominate (e.g. "I'm the person with the coolest Deep Purple bootleg blog"; "I'm the quickest to retweet that Teju Cole post"; "I invented a meme that combines Deleuze passages with pictures of Rihanna"; etc.).
This interpretation of how society is organized precludes an interpretation that sees the possibility of class, of concrete groups with shared interests that they work to construct and then use as the basis for forcing concessions from capital. The social graph traces intricate constellations that are always becoming ever more complex and require massive computer power and elaborate algorithms to interpret and trace out underlying patterns of significance. Generally, only capital has the resources to summon such power, so the commonalities called into being through such analysis of network data are commercial ones. But to forge a social class, a different sort of work is required, called forth by a different conception of society, based on antagonisms between blocs (and ongoing fights that require long-term strategies) not antagonisms between individuals (whose spontaneous skirmishes require more or less ad hoc tactics).
The social graph purports to passively record social arrangements that emerge organically and thus reflect some sort of true and undistorted account of how society works. That conception discourages the possibility of those plotted on the graph from making a social class. Social media users don't take advantage of their connectedness to undertake the work of finding the bases by which they can see their concerns as being shared, being in some way equivalent. Instead, their connectedness drives them to preen for attention and personal brand enhancement. One must work against social media's grain to use it to develop lasting, convincing political groupings.
I'm deriving this network vs. class scheme from chapter 5 of Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism, "Undermining the Defenses of the World of Work," which mainly traces how neoliberalism's ideological propositions about flexibility and autonomy brought on deunionization and crippled the force of critique. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that in the crises capitalism faced from 1968 to the early 1980s the "artistic critique" (emphasizing worker autonomy and on-job creativity) won out over the "social critique" (emphasizing justice and mitigating inequality), leading to the acceptance of neoliberalist reforms as potentially liberating, as defensible progress (and not dismantling of norms of economic security). The once legitimate artistic critique was rehabilitated by the new spirit of capitalism, and those who persisted in pursuing the tenets of the artistic critique (Boltanski and Chiapello list autonomy, authenticity, creativity, liberation) became hipsters rather than social critics. That mode of resistance became instead an entrepreneurial mode of personal branding. The space it opened for conflict was reclaimed.
That is how neoliberalism has generally proceeded. It tries to disguise antagonism, the existence of conflictual classes. We are freed to think or everybody as basically being middle class by default, obviating the work that went into building solidarity, "establishing equivalence" among disparate people so they could participate in common struggles. Instead, we got to be unique idiosyncratic selves with special unique talents, and the main political problem was getting that specialness properly recognized. And accordingly, we all need to negotiate our wages on an individual basis; no reason to be unionized.
The result of all that?
Like neoliberalist ideology and post-Fordist management techniques, social media work to "restore the salience of particularities" and "construct a world sensitive to differences," to use Boltanski and Chiapello's phrases. This yields a "confused, fragmented universe, composed solely of a juxtaposition of individual destinies." We all flounder to get ahead personally but never unite in a meaningfully political way. The 99% dissolves and all that's shared is statuses, photos, and tweets. And everything remains fucked up and bullshit.
Social media support, obviously, a view of society as a network of individual nodes that define themselves by their difference from other nodes; each individual's value lies in establishing and expressing that difference, finding comparative advantage relative to other nodes. Connections to other people serve to spread that message of difference, the existence of that differential value, meaning that relations charted in that network (aka the social graph) are lines of competition of well as mere affiliation. It means also that individuals in the network are faced with an ongoing tactical situation, under pressure to constant innovate the nature of their identity in the network to find new advantages, invent new differences, propagate new bases for judgment and new implied hierarchies to dominate (e.g. "I'm the person with the coolest Deep Purple bootleg blog"; "I'm the quickest to retweet that Teju Cole post"; "I invented a meme that combines Deleuze passages with pictures of Rihanna"; etc.).
This interpretation of how society is organized precludes an interpretation that sees the possibility of class, of concrete groups with shared interests that they work to construct and then use as the basis for forcing concessions from capital. The social graph traces intricate constellations that are always becoming ever more complex and require massive computer power and elaborate algorithms to interpret and trace out underlying patterns of significance. Generally, only capital has the resources to summon such power, so the commonalities called into being through such analysis of network data are commercial ones. But to forge a social class, a different sort of work is required, called forth by a different conception of society, based on antagonisms between blocs (and ongoing fights that require long-term strategies) not antagonisms between individuals (whose spontaneous skirmishes require more or less ad hoc tactics).
The social graph purports to passively record social arrangements that emerge organically and thus reflect some sort of true and undistorted account of how society works. That conception discourages the possibility of those plotted on the graph from making a social class. Social media users don't take advantage of their connectedness to undertake the work of finding the bases by which they can see their concerns as being shared, being in some way equivalent. Instead, their connectedness drives them to preen for attention and personal brand enhancement. One must work against social media's grain to use it to develop lasting, convincing political groupings.
I'm deriving this network vs. class scheme from chapter 5 of Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism, "Undermining the Defenses of the World of Work," which mainly traces how neoliberalism's ideological propositions about flexibility and autonomy brought on deunionization and crippled the force of critique. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that in the crises capitalism faced from 1968 to the early 1980s the "artistic critique" (emphasizing worker autonomy and on-job creativity) won out over the "social critique" (emphasizing justice and mitigating inequality), leading to the acceptance of neoliberalist reforms as potentially liberating, as defensible progress (and not dismantling of norms of economic security). The once legitimate artistic critique was rehabilitated by the new spirit of capitalism, and those who persisted in pursuing the tenets of the artistic critique (Boltanski and Chiapello list autonomy, authenticity, creativity, liberation) became hipsters rather than social critics. That mode of resistance became instead an entrepreneurial mode of personal branding. The space it opened for conflict was reclaimed.
That is how neoliberalism has generally proceeded. It tries to disguise antagonism, the existence of conflictual classes. We are freed to think or everybody as basically being middle class by default, obviating the work that went into building solidarity, "establishing equivalence" among disparate people so they could participate in common struggles. Instead, we got to be unique idiosyncratic selves with special unique talents, and the main political problem was getting that specialness properly recognized. And accordingly, we all need to negotiate our wages on an individual basis; no reason to be unionized.
The result of all that?
The opportunities offered for the flourishing of the self went together with the exclusion of those individuals or groups that did not possess the requisite resources to seize those opportunities and, consequently, with an increase in poverty and inequality.I think that's what Freddie deBoer is trying to get at from a far more personal angle in this post.
Like neoliberalist ideology and post-Fordist management techniques, social media work to "restore the salience of particularities" and "construct a world sensitive to differences," to use Boltanski and Chiapello's phrases. This yields a "confused, fragmented universe, composed solely of a juxtaposition of individual destinies." We all flounder to get ahead personally but never unite in a meaningfully political way. The 99% dissolves and all that's shared is statuses, photos, and tweets. And everything remains fucked up and bullshit.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Final exam I once gave
ENGLISH 101 final exam
Choose ONE of the following questions, and write a well-organized, mechanically sound essay in response.
1. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “the tension between plot and image is what gives film an enormous capacity for containing contradictions” (28). Explain what she means by this, and demonstrate how it informs her argument in either one of the essays dealing with Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
2. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “genre is a means through which an audience brings knowledge to a film: thrillers, westerns, horror films, comedies, etc., provide frameworks in which the audience’s capacity to recognize certain stock elements of plot, theme and image creates the potential for great subtlety of meaning where these conventions may be stretched, played with or subverted” (29). Explain what she means by this, and demonstrate how it informs her argument in either one of the essays dealing with Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
3. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “anyone interested in the fantasies and fears of our culture should pay close attention to successful films, for their success means precisely that they have touched on the fantasies and fears of a great many people” (27). Explain what she means by this, and demonstrate how it informs her argument in either one of the essays dealing with Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
4. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “we have to take seriously the complexities of film language and not assume that things we don’t like or understand don’t make sense” (30). Explain why this is important, and how this mission fulfilled by one of her essays dealing with either Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
You have until 10:00 AM. You may leave as soon as you are finished.
A reminder: if you have not turned in all three essays, a midterm, and this final by 5:00 PM today, you will fail this course.
Thanks, and enjoy your summer.
Choose ONE of the following questions, and write a well-organized, mechanically sound essay in response.
1. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “the tension between plot and image is what gives film an enormous capacity for containing contradictions” (28). Explain what she means by this, and demonstrate how it informs her argument in either one of the essays dealing with Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
2. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “genre is a means through which an audience brings knowledge to a film: thrillers, westerns, horror films, comedies, etc., provide frameworks in which the audience’s capacity to recognize certain stock elements of plot, theme and image creates the potential for great subtlety of meaning where these conventions may be stretched, played with or subverted” (29). Explain what she means by this, and demonstrate how it informs her argument in either one of the essays dealing with Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
3. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “anyone interested in the fantasies and fears of our culture should pay close attention to successful films, for their success means precisely that they have touched on the fantasies and fears of a great many people” (27). Explain what she means by this, and demonstrate how it informs her argument in either one of the essays dealing with Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
4. In “Symptoms,” Judith Williamson writes that “we have to take seriously the complexities of film language and not assume that things we don’t like or understand don’t make sense” (30). Explain why this is important, and how this mission fulfilled by one of her essays dealing with either Top Gun or Fatal Attraction.
You have until 10:00 AM. You may leave as soon as you are finished.
A reminder: if you have not turned in all three essays, a midterm, and this final by 5:00 PM today, you will fail this course.
Thanks, and enjoy your summer.
Dryden and panegyric
So I can find this if for some reason I ever need to.
"The careful Devil:" Dryden's Praise of Beauty
In the dedicatory epistle to the Duchess of York that prefaces The State of Innocence, Dryden provides a remarkable exposition of the divine power of beauty. He begins the epistle by reducing the poet's active imagination to "a desire of Pleasing" those who can forward his fame, who can be divided into "the Beautiful and the Great." Of poets he claims that "Beauty is their Deity to which they sacrifice, and Greatness is their Guardian-Angel which protects them" (81). Naturally, the Duchess of York embodies both, but in the epistle Dryden is primarily concerned with her beauty, which he claims is even rarer than Greatness. Her beauty, in its purity and perfection, resolves "the differing Judgements of Mankind" and renders language essentially useless (82). "Our sight is so intent on the Object of its Admiration, that our Tongues have not leisure even to praise you: for Language seems to low a thing to express your Excellence...." (83). Her beauty also has the power to transcend the power of the law. "You have subverted (may I dare to accuse you of it) even our Fundamental Laws; and Reign absolute over the hearts of a stubborn and Free-born people tenacious almost to madness of their Liberty" (83). Her husband, the incipient king, will have his divinely derived power augmented; for, as Dryden writes, God "has plac'd You so near a Crown, that You add a Lustre to it by Your Beauty" (82). But her beauty is not merely an adjunct to a King's divine right. Her beauty, when cast upon an unsuspecting soul, "strikes an impression of awful reverence," the "rapture which Anchorites find in Prayer," and thus transforms "Admiration into Religion" (83-4). Indeed, this kind of beauty is a "Deity," that not only inspires, but demands "sacrifice."
It seems strange that poets should be confined to finding their inspiration in a Beauty that renders rhetoric and moral suasion impossible. If beauty such as that of the Duchess is beyond debate, and inspires a religious duty that supplants even the law, then what has a poet to say about such beauty? But just as God's omnipotence certainly does not stifle preachers from endlessly delineating His power, beauty's limitless power need not silence the poet. Instead, by thus exalting beauty, Dryden makes prophets out of poets, who are uniquely empowered to give voice to the awe and servile reverence such beauty inspires universally. So the poet has a motive to make of beauty an irresistible force, a divine restorative power, as Dryden admits in the dedicatory epistle's first sentence. "Ambition is so far from being a Vice in Poets," he confesses, "that 'tis almost impossible for them to succeed without it." But what initially seems a servile and sycophantic reduction of the poet becomes finally an exaltation, by which the poet becomes the vessel for the otherwise inexpressible power of beauty. Panegyric prostration and obsequious humility only attempt to mask what seems an apparent grab for personal power.
In the Prologue to the Duchess on her Return from Scotland, and later, in the ode To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormond, we see the sort of poetry that is derived from such a motive. The Prologue to the Duchess translates the investment of beauty with political power seen in the dedicatory epistle into verse. The first eleven lines elucidate the consequences of the Duchess's departure. In her absence "The Muses droop'd with their forsaken arts,/ And the sad cupids broke their useless darts" (ll. 3-4). Apparently she carries with her a portable paradise, for when she leaves England's "fruitful plains to wilds and deserts turn'd,/ Like Eden's face when banish'd man it mourn'd" (ll. 5-6). This mirrors the dedicatory epistle, where Dryden tells the Duchess, "your Person is a Paradice, and your Soul a Cherubin within to guard it" (84). Her beauty seems to simply embody the prerequisites for paradise, and her return to England then would appropriately signify the return of a Golden Age.
But a conundrum lies in her very departure. Her departure had been forced by "factious rage," the disloyalty and ingratitude of which had toppled Love's "awful throne" (ll. 1, 8). We must then unpack the ambiguous syntax of the following line, "Love cou'd no longer after beauty stay," accordingly. In the wake of the disloyalty inherent in the Exclusion crisis, love is so undermined that it can no longer be attendant to beauty. Love is inspired by the beauty of the Duchess, yet love is impossible without loyalty despite that beauty. The matter is further complicated but the later assertion that "Far from her sight flew faction, strife, and pride" (l. 18). The poet's eagerness to symbolically empower her beauty is belied by the history that occasions the poem. If her beauty was insufficient to prevent "factious rage," then how can its return alone be enough to restore love, and assure that "Distempered zeal, sedition, canker'd hate,/ No more shall vex the Church and tear the State" (ll. 39-40)?
The answer to this question may be in the role of the panegyrical poet, who empowers such beauty through expression, who enumerates those "awful charms" that "on her fair forehead sit,/ Dispensing what she never will admit" (ll. 35-36). Her beauty is notably and naturally a passive force, an inspiration, a latency. Even the Duchess's mind, in the dedicatory epistle, is regarded as "Ornament," as an "object of Wonder" (85). The power dormant in her beauty depends ultimately on those who perceive it. Most are incapable of activating it. "Thus, MADAM," Dryden writes in the epistle, "in the midst of Crouds you reign in Solitude; and are ador'd with the deepest Veneration, that of Silence" (83). When in the presence of her awesome beauty, the crowd "are speechless for the time that it continues, and prostrate and dead when it departs." In the poem, her beauty is described as "Pleasing, yet cold, like Cynthia's silver beam" (l. 37). In and of itself, her beauty is remote, and diffuse in its effect. It is the "people's wonder," but more importantly, it is the "poet's theme" (l. 38). It is the labor of the poet to translate her beauty's latent power into the harmonious "Discord like that of music's various parts" (l. 43). In this way the mere flattery of the panegyrical poet is transformed into a more general power. For the audience for such poetry as this is not necessarily the Duchess herself but her future subjects. As James D. Garrison points out, "during the Exclusion crisis in particular, Dryden considers the theater audience as the representatives of the whole English nation" (144). Dryden longs to be able to articulate the effects of the beauty of the Duchess on themselves individually and collectively. Harnessing that power as his own, may focus it towards his own end, and use her beauty to exemplify ends and virtues of his own choosing.
"The careful Devil:" Dryden's Praise of Beauty
In the dedicatory epistle to the Duchess of York that prefaces The State of Innocence, Dryden provides a remarkable exposition of the divine power of beauty. He begins the epistle by reducing the poet's active imagination to "a desire of Pleasing" those who can forward his fame, who can be divided into "the Beautiful and the Great." Of poets he claims that "Beauty is their Deity to which they sacrifice, and Greatness is their Guardian-Angel which protects them" (81). Naturally, the Duchess of York embodies both, but in the epistle Dryden is primarily concerned with her beauty, which he claims is even rarer than Greatness. Her beauty, in its purity and perfection, resolves "the differing Judgements of Mankind" and renders language essentially useless (82). "Our sight is so intent on the Object of its Admiration, that our Tongues have not leisure even to praise you: for Language seems to low a thing to express your Excellence...." (83). Her beauty also has the power to transcend the power of the law. "You have subverted (may I dare to accuse you of it) even our Fundamental Laws; and Reign absolute over the hearts of a stubborn and Free-born people tenacious almost to madness of their Liberty" (83). Her husband, the incipient king, will have his divinely derived power augmented; for, as Dryden writes, God "has plac'd You so near a Crown, that You add a Lustre to it by Your Beauty" (82). But her beauty is not merely an adjunct to a King's divine right. Her beauty, when cast upon an unsuspecting soul, "strikes an impression of awful reverence," the "rapture which Anchorites find in Prayer," and thus transforms "Admiration into Religion" (83-4). Indeed, this kind of beauty is a "Deity," that not only inspires, but demands "sacrifice."
It seems strange that poets should be confined to finding their inspiration in a Beauty that renders rhetoric and moral suasion impossible. If beauty such as that of the Duchess is beyond debate, and inspires a religious duty that supplants even the law, then what has a poet to say about such beauty? But just as God's omnipotence certainly does not stifle preachers from endlessly delineating His power, beauty's limitless power need not silence the poet. Instead, by thus exalting beauty, Dryden makes prophets out of poets, who are uniquely empowered to give voice to the awe and servile reverence such beauty inspires universally. So the poet has a motive to make of beauty an irresistible force, a divine restorative power, as Dryden admits in the dedicatory epistle's first sentence. "Ambition is so far from being a Vice in Poets," he confesses, "that 'tis almost impossible for them to succeed without it." But what initially seems a servile and sycophantic reduction of the poet becomes finally an exaltation, by which the poet becomes the vessel for the otherwise inexpressible power of beauty. Panegyric prostration and obsequious humility only attempt to mask what seems an apparent grab for personal power.
In the Prologue to the Duchess on her Return from Scotland, and later, in the ode To Her Grace the Duchess of Ormond, we see the sort of poetry that is derived from such a motive. The Prologue to the Duchess translates the investment of beauty with political power seen in the dedicatory epistle into verse. The first eleven lines elucidate the consequences of the Duchess's departure. In her absence "The Muses droop'd with their forsaken arts,/ And the sad cupids broke their useless darts" (ll. 3-4). Apparently she carries with her a portable paradise, for when she leaves England's "fruitful plains to wilds and deserts turn'd,/ Like Eden's face when banish'd man it mourn'd" (ll. 5-6). This mirrors the dedicatory epistle, where Dryden tells the Duchess, "your Person is a Paradice, and your Soul a Cherubin within to guard it" (84). Her beauty seems to simply embody the prerequisites for paradise, and her return to England then would appropriately signify the return of a Golden Age.
For her the ground is clad in cheerful green,
For her the nightingales are taught to sing,
And Nature has for her delay'd the spring.
The Muse resumes her long-forgotten lays,
And love, restor'd, his ancient realm surveys (ll. 27-31)
But a conundrum lies in her very departure. Her departure had been forced by "factious rage," the disloyalty and ingratitude of which had toppled Love's "awful throne" (ll. 1, 8). We must then unpack the ambiguous syntax of the following line, "Love cou'd no longer after beauty stay," accordingly. In the wake of the disloyalty inherent in the Exclusion crisis, love is so undermined that it can no longer be attendant to beauty. Love is inspired by the beauty of the Duchess, yet love is impossible without loyalty despite that beauty. The matter is further complicated but the later assertion that "Far from her sight flew faction, strife, and pride" (l. 18). The poet's eagerness to symbolically empower her beauty is belied by the history that occasions the poem. If her beauty was insufficient to prevent "factious rage," then how can its return alone be enough to restore love, and assure that "Distempered zeal, sedition, canker'd hate,/ No more shall vex the Church and tear the State" (ll. 39-40)?
The answer to this question may be in the role of the panegyrical poet, who empowers such beauty through expression, who enumerates those "awful charms" that "on her fair forehead sit,/ Dispensing what she never will admit" (ll. 35-36). Her beauty is notably and naturally a passive force, an inspiration, a latency. Even the Duchess's mind, in the dedicatory epistle, is regarded as "Ornament," as an "object of Wonder" (85). The power dormant in her beauty depends ultimately on those who perceive it. Most are incapable of activating it. "Thus, MADAM," Dryden writes in the epistle, "in the midst of Crouds you reign in Solitude; and are ador'd with the deepest Veneration, that of Silence" (83). When in the presence of her awesome beauty, the crowd "are speechless for the time that it continues, and prostrate and dead when it departs." In the poem, her beauty is described as "Pleasing, yet cold, like Cynthia's silver beam" (l. 37). In and of itself, her beauty is remote, and diffuse in its effect. It is the "people's wonder," but more importantly, it is the "poet's theme" (l. 38). It is the labor of the poet to translate her beauty's latent power into the harmonious "Discord like that of music's various parts" (l. 43). In this way the mere flattery of the panegyrical poet is transformed into a more general power. For the audience for such poetry as this is not necessarily the Duchess herself but her future subjects. As James D. Garrison points out, "during the Exclusion crisis in particular, Dryden considers the theater audience as the representatives of the whole English nation" (144). Dryden longs to be able to articulate the effects of the beauty of the Duchess on themselves individually and collectively. Harnessing that power as his own, may focus it towards his own end, and use her beauty to exemplify ends and virtues of his own choosing.
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