So long

This class has being worst than a bad acid trip. Never had one but I hear they are terrible. But as I write this I am searching cheap copies of this book. I find the very interesting. I had learned so much about many things that I had explored before but never knew why I found them questionable. Everything changes according to the world we create. The main aim is to question life. "The life unexamined is not worth living." Some famous guy said this (Socrates). It sounds cliche since people use it often yet I feel that it is an important aspect of our individual and human experience. It is ironic perhaps that this was said in the 6th century yet we as a whole starter to follow it until postmodernism? Well we can argue that the industrial revolution had a lot to do with it and it is true. We believe education should be available for everyone. It is a strong belief I have and I try to follow it. I have a better understanding of all theories and I will be able to apply them more easily to whatever I am reading. I will be able to understand why some books, movies and stories are more important than others and why. Thank you so much.   

Exotic #7

"I like your accent" people tell me often. My responds used to be, "What accent?" Now my polite response is "Well thank you, I like yours too."This confuses people for the reason Anzaldua and Hughes agree is an eurocentric view. What is an accent and who has them? I assumed earlier that people who spoke two or more languages had accents but this is not so. British people have accents too and they speak only English. They speak the English that immigrated to the Americans. Ethnic Studies is the respond the the patriarchal, gringo based view of the world. Western thought excludes minorities as well as woman yet they create the identities of these groups. Orientalism suggest this theory by comparing the literature of Victorian writers who exposed Europe to the "exotic east."It is clear that the image of the orient were created by the west and that the orient or the real "orient" doesn't really exist. ( How come I don't see "Asian" men having sex in the media? I'm sure they are sexual beings too). This said Hugues acknowledge that as an minority, we tend to hide who we are and were we are coming from. I ask myself why is my accent so important or to be liked. We all have accents. People have the assumptions that some people required their answer to be mainstreamed. In my last speech, a classmate's evaluation said I had a "little accent." What does that mean? Is it wrong to have some type of accent and okay to have others? When the world is seen through what we, in the United States, we can view many things that had being assumed through generation as true and right. I used to be terribly upset when someone would speak of my accent like it was something exotic. I'm from Los Angeles. I have lived here most of my life. It makes me think everyone sees me as an outsider. Nevertheless as the author of Borderlands suggest, I cant punch people in the face forever "A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed;" I must educate people regarding what is part of my being and culture. With he world become more globalized, I think history should be told from all sides. What I mean is that all should be as unbiased as possible. Anzaldua proposed that as an individual, we should all get to know our dual nature. We should connect with our subconscious, ancestry, and culture. We should left anything behind or reject any even if wrong. In the forever state of nepantilism.

Me As Your Other #6

Lets talk about sex! We all know what an awesome conversation that can be. We have come to see sex as a commodity. A good that we can pay for, strive for and even sell. When I learned about past cultures and the treatment of women and I imagine what I will do in those cultures, I say I would be a prostitute. In The History of Sexuality Foucault argues that sex become a sort of entertainment by the 19th century. From that point sex has being in the controlled of the few. One example is the religious leader like a priest. In our modern society Sex is controlled also. Women's sexuality is controlled in different ways (media, abortions rights, free clinics, society, job forces). Women are the humans that are give birth to the next generation. They some agree must be more controlled than men. The debate of pro-choice and pro life has nothing to  do with the life of a would-be-human. For a feminist like myself, the debate is one of power.   The power to control female sexuality and desire. Whoever seems to think that they know when the woman ends and the child in her womb began seems to know nothing about what womanhood is and the autonomy of the woman involved. If the perfect setting abortion wouldnt be nessesary yet society has had the mistake idea that women expose themselves this type of situations. What we dont take into account is what  Beauvoir explains that woman is not a womb. Her reason in life is not to fulfilled other peoples desired to reproduced "Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not as herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being." If we talked about the equality of the genders we must reconsider language as well as biology. Abortion and the neglect of children in general is an issue of all people not just of a particular gender.  Women are the carriers of children but that is as different to men as they can be. Even when a woman tries to be the perfect woman it is contradictive "Although some women try zealously to incarnate this essense, It is hardly patentable. If the life of an unborn child is so important to our society than why not march and lobby for the annihilation of child poverty? Why not open more Planned Parenthood Clinics that offer free contraceptives to all women and men, no matter ethnicity, age, financial stability and sexual orientation? Why not condemn fathers that abandoned their children?  The debate of an unborn child will cease to exist and women as well as men will be able to in charge of their sexuality, and production.

I'm Rich Bitch #5

What do you want to do with when you grow up? I often asked people. Mostly they want to be rich. They want to have lots of money. I read in an article of The Los Angeles Times that the average UCLA college student wants to be a millionaire. I asked my fellow classmates here at CSUN and they too responded with the same answer. The reason is not so clear. Some students even assume the reason is obvious. We hear a lot of songs about money and the desire for it so for our society becoming rich has become common sense. But the question remains, Why do we want to be rich? This is the perfect example for a postmodern analysis. We are a culture of models and signs and we have lost all contact with the real world that preceded the model or map. So the sign for the idea of wealth has been lost its meaning over time. We want to be rich just to be rich but even in wealth I think most of us don't know what that really constitute. So lets say that we want to be rich because in wealth we will be able to do what we want, have the things we want and the people we want. Money then symbolizes choice or freedom. Yet the postmodern culture to Baudrillard is artificial because we have lost all ability to make sense of the real. So now if we deconstruct this word "money" we we still have no idea what choice or freedom is or what it means. We lost the ability to distinguish between the real and the simulacra. This explain the fixation we have towards the wealth of others and why we aspire to it. We desire only the simulacra without really knowing if its real. As Michael Foucault wanted people to know in his theory "is to show people that they are much freer than they feel."What we accept as true can be destroyed  criticized and never absolute.

Marxism and Love

How much is an engagement ring worth? Priceless? How much does it cost? Cant Buy Me Love by The Beatles doesn't ring true anymore these days. For a long while, romantic love has been diluted to a thing. A thing to buy or a thing to sell. Love in a capitalist society has become a commodity as Marx agrees"but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking" (656). Love or the need to pair up with someone in order to continue the species or join labor forces has change to something else. It is a statement of social statues. A thing to own because I am worth it. I'm also selling myself. I dye my hair, paint my nails, wear make up, and all kinds of creams and lotions to stay young and appealing. The products I use are the best in the market and quiet expensive. I am not an individual but a product that can be measured if needed as Marx said "the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself"(664). I have become a product to want and to desire. In the society we live now I and everyone else in it has become what Fraud might call a fetish. An unconscious attempt to come into terms with what we can no longer understand. We aim to look like people we cant even relate to. We cant afford most of the things we buy and yet we slave to this invisible master who guides our lives. In the hope to find love, happiness, freedom we continue the cycle. We continue to overwork and over-consume. As capitalism continues, we experience a wider separation of classes. This leads to the master and slave model since we no longer have (as it is argue we never did) a middle class. The diamond ring has become to represent, not the union of two people in holy matrimony but the worth of ones labor.  

Group Project

Structuralism is a subject that I particularly don't understand completely but after the research I did with my group I have a better understanding. So here it goes again. We go back to the "burrito." When a person hears the this or sees it, it becomes a metal image. and it depends on the culture where is reproduce. The identifier is the sound of the word being said in the mind but the identified can be two different things a small donkey or a tortilla wrapped meal. Lets take this a little further and realized that globalization has blurred some cultural contexts. the word "burrito" here and in lets say Mexico means the same thing now because the meal came to symbolize cheap food like that of Taco Bell. The sound of the word is the perfect example of how it has evolve into a hybrid of Spanish and English also loosely called Spanglish pronunciation. So "burrito" doesn't need a person to roll their Rs anymore but neither does it take on an "English" accent. I found it interesting that Saussure's theory helped other studies developed such as anthropology and psychoanalysis. Language is more of a symbol rather than a method to name things.

Hot Momma

Psychoanalysis
The fixation of today society with "hot" moms can be explain clearly with Sigmund Freud's Oedipus Complex. What can we say regarding these images of the two famous women? Is it art? is it the representation of motherhood in its naked glory? or is it the oppressed desired of men for their mothers? Lets assume that after the free love movement many children became fatherless and grew up confused about the world. The most confused were the boys whom never had the anxiety of becoming castrated by their biological father but by their step dad or other males in their society. For them it wasn't clear how to redirect their desired for mommy. They went in the search for "love" in a woman but unfortunately they only found women that had no desired to nurture them and hookers. So we now have a generation of men chasing older women or is it the other way around? Women chasing youth and business making lots of money from them. T-shirts with the letters "MILF" an acronym for Mother I'd like to umm have intercourse with, wore by plenty of celebrity moms and other women. Advertisement does such a good job in making Demi Moore and Britney Spears look terribly sexy even in their late stages of pregnancy that it makes one wonder if their aim is to show the beauty motherhood  or to satisfy the fetishism of a few men? This said, lets go back to the Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego.  So if the men desiring mothers have a certain anxiety of loosing their penis or desiring their mother and are in a constant battle with their conscious and their unconscious. A battle between to control the Id. Yet if we looked at ads. They are aim to trigger the unconscious. A men is afraid of loosing his penis like his mother has and tried to find reassurance. To answer the question of identity we go to Jacques Lacan. He said that the "I as we experience in psychoanalysis."is an identity that is continuous throughout life. The desire is redirected to hot moms. Media helps continue this feelings. So the "real" to Lacan would be the pure desired of the mother, or a mother figure. The "imaginary" the man's or boy's identity and the symbolic would be the word "MILF. Our society cannot explain this phenomena but we clearly find creative ways to name it. Its a very sexy world we live in.

Too Many Words#5

I chose English as my major not because I am in anyway good at it but because I see it as a very creative language. I can mix it up with my Spanish quiet well. It makes sense. So going back to structuralism I would like to study the word "burrito." Yes I know it sounds silly and it is. So according to Saussure, language is not "a naming process only" but a "concept and a sound-image."OK this is clear because the concept "burrito" means very different to someone that speaks Spanish only and one that Speak English also. I remember one day I was reading to my boyfriend in Spanish about a "burrito" that cross the road to a river bank. He gave me a puzzle look. In his mind a "burrito" is a carne asada filled wrapped tortilla not a donkey like the one in the story. So even though he understood my Spanish he knows "burrito" as food not as an animal. Lets take this a little farther and discuss the pronunciation of the word. The concept "burrito" no longer a small donkey, does not have the same Spanish pronunciation anymore. Because it is food and is readily available to hungry college students, its Spanish beginnings evolve to "booriro" a mixture of English and Spanish.  Now jumping to fryer, "burrito" now represents food. If we hear someone say it we think of food and in turn to a place like where we can get one like Taco Bell. Now I'm hungry.        

Cuddly with A Bomb #4

After a considered amount of thought, Cuddly could no longer deal with the frustration. He was never a bear of violence but his ability to remained neutral wore thin. He wanted things to be civil and for people to express themselves respectfully. This was not the case for Rosita's parents. They acted like chimpanzees with each other. They scream, broke things and when they felt tired, they shush each other saying something about their lawyer. "Rosita was not property" cuddly said to himself after witnessing one more brawl. He felt Rosita was not a thing lawyer could discuss and tired of being quiet about the whole ordeal decided to put his war education to use. With his Molotov in hand he yell "lawyer me this!" to the S.W.A.T team. When the smog disperse everyone wanted nothing to do but cuddle.
My picture is from the stencil artist Banksy. Some "dude" from Britain. I think he represents Bakhtin well. His art is a kind of satire that makes us think about some social issues a different way. In the picture for example, the bear is a symbol of childhood and is placed next to the special police force. One cant help by feel two totally different emotions. They contradict each other and make us see things differently. It is not clear if Banksy is mocking our values as a society or he indeed is asking us if we truly know our values. If we want our children to lived in a safe place why do we approve of guns and violence?

Ah I Can See #3

I wonder how Descartes felt when he utter the famous declaration "I think therefore I am." Was the self born right there and then? Impossible! right but how did the thinkers before that time thought what they did? Did they believed their thoughts derived from god or the gods? and how did that affected their thinking process? To a 21st century individual, it is hard to comprehend anything that rejects individualism. We are raised to believe that we are who we are because of what we think, experience and question. This thought process reflect The Enlightenment in western Europe: Rationalism, Empiricism and Skepticism. This gave way to so many more schools of thought and the birth to the educational and political system we know about today. Alexander Pope gave rise to the "man" not in the hip hop sense but the creation of the individual through thought (criticism) and expression (art). So lets reconsider how much human reality change over the course of three centuries. Once the individual was born more questions began to be asked. If we are all individuals how do we learn? How did we experience things? When Immanuel Kant came with The Four Type of Knowledge he asked in a sense for people to have courage  to use our own understanding. With the birth of individualism came the question that asked if  knowledge was subjective or objective. It all depended on reason. 

;) #2

One of my friends said in his Facebook status update that finally we once again had a use for the semicolon. We can use it to wink at people on Facebook or tweeter or blogger, or whatever other social network we use. It's this the end of society? or genius insight? The Professor Kevin O'Neil gave us a clear look on what it was to be an Athenian ( male one.) He said that there was two things they did: gym and dialogue. This was one of the reason why Rhetoric was so important. They thought it was essential, the freedom to argue and debate. It is essential for us today too. Most of us believe we have the right to express ourselves in any way we want. And now we can more than ever. We have so many different outlets to express ourselves on. And we have a bigger audience too. The professor knows about this and spoke a little about it. He made me ponder how we use the Aristotelian devices. Do we think about it before clicking send or post? Most of us are not Rhetoric experts or writers but do we understand the implications. We just want to send a message right? I have had so many misunderstanding through text and I amuse myself when someone wants to argue through the device. Are we logical in our post (Logos)? Are we aware of who is going to read them(Ethos)? Do we know how to grasp emotion( Pathos)? Do we really think we can translate sarcasm through the computer? We seem to think so but as the professor said. those post will be saved forever or for a very very long time. I think I will erase those drunken pictures I was tag on tonight.

Leap of Faith

In this clip from the movie Leap of Faith, Steve Martin embodies Jonas a traveling minister who takes his church to rural United States. In this scene, Jonas is confronted by a police officer that questions his ability to bring God or truth to people. Jonas is the typical Sophist who is eccentric hence his silver jacket, who gives speeches for donations. The police officer is like Plato who urges his town to stop giving Jonas power for lies. According to him, Jonas is feeding them stories, which aren’t true or have no value. He like Plato say that man do not want to be lied, “no one chooses and wants to be deceived in the most important part of himself and about the most important things” (Plato 51). He tells his people how Jonas is not the man they thought he was. But as the scene goes, the people do not know what to do. They want to believe Jonas. He makes them have faith. He looks like he knows what he is saying. Jonas knows that and agrees with the police officer. He has lied but for the purpose of showing them “truth.” He is like then and has fund the light. Truth to Jonas or any sophist depends on the situation. When Gorgias was defending Helen he said that Helen was a victim of her circumstances, “Either she did what she did because of the will of fortune and the plan of the gods and the decree of necessity, or she was seized by force, or persuaded by words, <or capture by love>”  (Gorgias 39). Jonas was able to keep his crowd by manipulating his way trough fancy music and speech. He acknowledges his bad behavior but excuse himself by saying that thanks to God he found his way. Plato warns his people regarding this type of behavior “that if the young men in our community hear this kind of thing and take it seriously, rather than regarding it as despicable and absurd, they’re hardly going to regard such behaviour as despicable in human beings like themselves and feel remorse when they also find themselves saying or doing these or similar things.” (Plato 54) but the people feel that they too have sin like he has.  He used that as an excuse to say that he knew more regarding the world of sin because he has sin. He claimed he had no choice due to his circumstances but that he found God and his salvation. That was enough proof for the people. They all came back and to further proof his redemption he offered the money back for everyone to take. Jonas like Gorgias knew their art and how to control their audience “the power of an incantation enchants, persuades, and alters it through bewitchment” (Gorgias 40). The clip ends proving two points. One is that Plato understood the importance of truth and how lies and manipulation are dangerous. The other point is that even though Jonas or a sophist like Gorgia used rhetoric to his advantage persuasion is a powerful tool for people. 

P.S I apologize for the low quality :( 

Ignorance is Bliss?

Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" made me think of television and my young cousins. Yes I know that children watch too much television these days. But it is true. One day I was conversing with my now 11 year old cousin about what she wanted to do when she grows up. She told me that she wanted to be a crime scene investigator because she liked the T.V show "Bones." My first reaction was, who in their right mind wants to see dead bodies in a estate of decomposition? Someone who watches reruns of Hannah Montana and never gets tired. My point is that i wonder truly if she has any idea the fowl smell of death. Sure she can watch Bones over and over but does she truly grasp her fixation on dead bodies. I in the other hand know how dead bodies look like, not human though but I was raised in a rural area and in my adventures I found dead animals often. I wish to explain to her the experience I had with dead and how it really is but she refused to listen. She as I type challenges me. She is so sure of her "reality." Now I am no one to kill her dream. She will do as she wishes or at least I hope she does. What I wonder is if she realizes the seriousness of her career. Television shows are entertainment or so they say but for many children like my cousin they are source of knowledge. She understand much of the world through what she sees on the box. She like the people watching the shadows understand the world different than someone who has witness the real thing. I try to explain it to her in a way she can understand but she trust 20th Century Fox more.    

Cus I do the Cha Cha On My Sleep

Hey Everyone! Welcome to My blog. I had wanted to create a blog prior to this class but I am happy to be able to do it now. The class is very interesting and many of you have very interesting things to say regarding theory. The only problem I have with this is that I might get confused once in a while. I felt like a total idiot for laughing at Yeast's poem. I apologize but just picturing a swan raping a woman is absurd. Or it sounded absurd at the moment. What I like about theory its not the lenses in which we can read literary work but also our own bias. For Example, I see birds as innocent feathery creatures and the thought of a God becoming one sounded stupid. Yet I thought about how the eagle, for example, is the symbol of the United States. This made me realize how my experience affects the way I see the world. This concept too help me understand Plato in some sense. I might not agree with him on his theory but I understand why he felt the sophist would manipulate the people of Athens. The experience he had in his time led him to question what was true and who had the power to control ideas. I cant wait for Aristotle.