context

I really enjoyed reading Barthes: A Biography (English tranlsation by Andrew Brown 2017, original in French by Tiphaine Samoyault, 2015) and I didn't really know why. But just now, referring back to it and thinking about it, I think it's because Samoyault entwines Barthes's ideas with his life and relates those ideas and that life to other thinkers, like Foucault and Kristeva. 

so there's a very nice fusion of the intellectual life and the lived experience, and it establishes a kind of relationship between you, the reader, and the subject - Roland Barthes. It's interesting to think about this in relation to Barthes's idea of 'the death of the author'. On the one hand, Samoyault doesn't intrude on the text. Her concern is to tell us about Barthes. But, on the other hand, it is her unique capabilities and sensibilities that enable her to do this so well. So, by forgoing the role of the intermediary, she acts as a very effective intermediary. 

and I think that gives us some insight into the true meaning of Roland Barthes's famous idea of  'the death of the author'....actually, when I use the word 'true', I'm probably just talking about a meaning that I feel comfortable with and that I like - a meaning that I find interesting and thought provoking. It's not about saying that a text is not the expression of the author or that texts are composed by historical and social forces (although some people pretty much do end up expressing these kinds of views). It's about the role of the reader in constructing meaning and the way that the actual life of the author has very little bearing on that process. Like, for example, a lot of people enjoy the 'Game of Thrones' books and TV series, but they aren't that interested in George R. R. Martin, and most importantly, nobody needs to ask Martin what the real or true meaning of the texts is. Enjoying the books and the TV show may lead people to take an interest in George R. R. Martin, and it's always interesting to hear a writer's view about their own work, but they are different matters. When you're watching Game of Thrones, you don't even think about George R. R. Martin - you're thinking about the characters and the story. 

This separation of the text from the author is a good example, actually, of how birth is a also a kind of death. As soon as you express something, it becomes a thing in its own right, and the fact that it is separate, even from you, the one who expressed it, is born out by the way that you engage with it. We write to get a sense of what we think. Somehow we don't know, and we are as surprised as anyone at what comes out. That's what makes conversation so interesting.

social media

i remember the first time i looked at tumblr....i didn't get it. the main distniguishing factor back then (in 2014) was that it had a lot of movement, while facebook and twitter didn't have that. now all the platforms have it. it's normal for pictures to move. 

the other thing was that I didn't get the style of it. i thought it would be informative and serious. i followed tumblrs about teaching and they had these moving images with captions that had nothing to do with teaching...they were a kind of satire. it seemed really busy. in each post, there were multiple frames and in each frame the action would advance a little bit more....it seemed frenetic and it was disorienting. 

but it was like that with all the different websites....i didn't understand twitter, facebook, pinterest, linked in, when I first started using them. probably the one that took me the longest to get was reddit because it seemed to have very definite rules and you needed to know the rules to play. 

east and west

the volleyball hit the end of i think it was my thumb and it took weeks to heal....i remember the guy whose specialty was standing behind the baseline and when the ball was just about to land - just inside the line - he would dive and punch the ball into the air and over the net

i remember moving from an apartment complex to a flat with a bay window and an ocean view and wood floors...the apartment complex was new and clean, but the flat was one of the nicest places i've lived and there was a bookshop there all my life i've been near the beach or outwest....moving further and further outwest until visting places that were closer to the city was like going back in time and then, when I moved east, visiting places in the west was like going back in time

what to write

I have 4 youtube subscribers now. That's a 400% increase since last year! woo hoo! 

I sometimes toy with the idea of doing a vlog. At the moment, I'm more keen to wrte a book though. I hear a question from the crowd.....hey - what kind of book? Originally (by which I mean a couple of days ago) I was planning to write something kind of academic....like a published thesis....but that's problematic. Not only is it a lot of work, which would probably take years, even though I do have a draft already, but the bigger problem is to do with copyright. When you write and sell a book, you can't just quote from texts the way you do when you're writing an essay or thesis as a student. You have to get permission to quote from someone else's work. 

So, I'm just not down for that any more. I do love writing essays though, so I was thinking that I could write a series of 'personal' essays. I can still quote from texts because most of the literary texts that I like the most are old and in the public domain...you can access them on websites like project gutenberg and archive.org. I just won't be engaging with 'cutting edge' scholarship, but I'm not that keen to do that anyway. Or if I do, I can just write about their ideas without quoting from their work. I'll be giving my take on their ideas. 

I like the idea of writing creatively but not having to write a story, and I like the idea of writing essays without being restricted to the rules of writing academic essays. 

point of view

The places we live - both physically and mentally, inner and outer lives - have the quality of palimpsests. A palimpsest, according to one definition, is 'something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form'. 

Often, what we experience as a crisis, is the removal of what we have known to make way for something new and surprisingly good. 

The way we see ourselves is different from how others see us, and I think their view is closer to the truth. 

implications of theory

I shouldn't be judged by the things that I 'like' on facebook. I'm intrigued by thinking that I don't necessarily agree with. I've been further exploring the arguments against critical theory. 

There are actually some good points, I think, against the critical theory/ post-modernist/ social justice....insert lots of other ideological lenses here.....paradigms. I made an interesting discovery. I've been associating opposition to these ways of thinking with Christianity. There's a long-standing, ongoing dispute between Christianity and post-modernism, etc. But then I discovered that some of the people who are most strongly and directly critiquing critical theory are also critical of theism and talk about how it makes no sense to believe in God. 

So, they lose me on that. The Christian critique of critical theory loses me as a thinker and the humanist critique of critital theory loses me as a Christian. But anyway, neither of those are the main point. The main point is that I like critical theory and am fascinated by it. 

A lot of what I'm calling the humanist critique comes from inside academia itself. Harold Bloom spoke of 'the school of resentment'. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physicist, published a paper in a cultural studies journal which was purportedly about the application of post modern theory to physics. Then, after the paper was reviewed, accepted and published, he announced that it was a hoax to expose the shortcomings of post modern theory, because it was basically a bunch of nonsense that nevertheless conformed to their expectations about what constitutes scholarship. A similar thing was done more recently (in the last couple of years) by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose. They wrote a whole series of papers that effectively used the discourse of critical theory to make arguments that were seriously flawed but were reviewed and published anyway - and some praised as ground-breaking - because they represented acceptable ideology. They, and others, call the dominant movement in academia at the moment, 'grievance studies'. 

These examples remind me of the Ern Malley affair which happened in Australia in 1943. Conservative writers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, wanted to mock modernist poetry and show how vacuous and lacking in real literary value it was, so they wrote 16 poems in one day, imitating the style of modernist poetry, and submitted them to a modernist literary journal, claiming that they were the work of Ern Malley, who didn't actually exist. The literary journal devoted a whole issue to Ern Malley and hailed him as a genius. So, it was pretty embarrassing for Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins - the literary journal in which the poems had appeared - when it was revealed that the poems were a hoax. The hoax affected the reputation of modernism in Australia and undermined, not just modernist poetry and poets, but also novelists - for example, Patrick White - and artists who painted in an abstract, modernist style. 

Interestingly, McAuley went on to found a periodical called Quadrant, which is still around today, and just three days ago published an article titled, 'The True Crisis of the Humanities', which brings us back to the current issue. 

Personally, I have a deep appreciation for literature and history, which was only encouraged by my Arts degree. I think the criticism of the academic enterprise as it is currently conducted is a bit misplaced, although I do accept some of the points that are being made. This hatred for critical theory or literary theory is too much, and it's very negative. Aside from the quality of the argument being made, I just don't like negative arguments or books where the whole thesis is a negative statement. For example - and I want to give an example that's not related to this issue that I'm writing about - books that argue that the internet is adversely affecting our minds and lives, and the whole book is about that. I don't see the point of doing all that work of writing a book, and the main function of the book is to point out a problem - to say something is wrong. 

I thought it was interesting that, in the Quadrant article, the writer singles out the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism as representative of everything anti-western culture and traditional humanities. Come on....that's going too far. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism includes representative work from a vast range of the most important scholars and thinkers going back to Aristotle and Plato. 

.....I'm reading the article as I wrote this, so it's like a live commentary....

now the writer is criticising structuralism, which he says, 'reduces human beings to place-markers in an infinite system of signs'. I'm not sure what that means but it's not how I understand structuralism. 

but I want to change tack and agree with the anti-theory argument in some ways, but in a way that shows why I disagree with them in other ways. I've noticed the decline in English (as in English literature) as a separate discipline. The movement is towards 'cultural studies'. A lot of universities don't have separate schools or faculties of English like they used to - they've been brought under the aegis of media studies, communication. Where English courses are offered, they often don't have any reference to actual works of literature. I've heard from students who desperately want to study literature, because that's why they chose to do English, and some semesters, there is not one course available to them that actually deals with literature. So, I see that and I don't like it. It's part of what those who are saying there is a crisis are talking about. 

But - and this is just my own personal view - theory, literary theory, critical theory, whatever you want to call it, is intrinsic to the study of literature. Theory is not the enemy or the problem. 

symbiosis

I published my first e-book on Amazon (Daemons and Radicals), although it's more like a pamphlet than a book, at 15 pages, but I have plans to write actual books now. It's probably going to be a while before I publish anything, because I want to work on a few different books of different types. There's at least three that I have in mind and I'm going to work on, or have already started.

I like the idea that they will influence and relate to each other - that, in some ways, they will be about each other.