supermassivestudentsheep-blog

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17th Oct. 2017, Photographs Reveal and Conceal by Errol Morris Erroll Morris essay about how photos play a role in story-telling is accessible and easy-to-follow. It’s also helpful that he directly converses with experts in fields such as “smile science” in order to help explain the photographs. What I found very interesting was the phenomenological bit with the duck-rabbit: you’ll probably see one or the other, depending on how your brain interprets the information it is given and the biases already in your mind. It was interesting how he used this example to show the ways in which people have used photography as evidence of their claim, even though they had to have a claim in the first place in order to see the photograph in a certain way that would corroborate their interpretation of events. Photos seem to be neutral according to the author, as it’s up to the viewer to put them into context. This makes sense, as photos are just atoms, but we call them photos because they seem to have a certain form and we connect the images and forms inside the larger form (photograph) to things we’re familiar with; what we’re familiar with, then, also plays a role in interpretation.

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10th Oct. 2017, “Citizen Four�� Jacob Appelbaum’s contribution to the presentation towards the end of the documentary had a very strong presence and called for attention: effectively, he made the connection between liberty and privacy, specifically that when we lose our privacy, we lose our liberty. When free speech is logged and monitored, it is no longer free. There is an inherent fear of retribution that comes about when one must speak around those who may hear. I see it in a classroom setting everyday: students are careful with what they say and what they write essays about, for the teacher might disagree and give the student an undesirable grade. In the world outside of public education, outside of a minor consequence like getting a bad mark on an essay, I can’t even imagine the potential “undesirable grades” a government could give an individual for the words she has used, or the websites she has visited, or the people with whom she has spoken via Facebook. It’s nice to say that all this monitoring is catered towards the improvement of marketing campaigns, but if the NSA is this quick to attack whistle-blowers, how can we assume that the monitoring of the internet is benign? The NSA clearly don’t think it is; why else would they try to hide it?

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10 Oct. 2017, “Amazing Revolt and Revolting Animation” The author provides not only an example of how to write about film, but also how to write a narrative for an entire worldview and the critique of it (critical theory, perhaps). While reading this, my ears sort of perked up: my attention was grabbed and pointed toward things I never even noticed about not just film, but also life in general. Their analysis of “Robots” was a prime example: the “mother” and “father” constructed a “child” out of new and spare parts, which now seems to blatantly comment on the constructs of society, but, watching that as a child, I never thought twice about such a concept. (I can’t even remember what I thought as a child; it would be interesting to try and parse my childhood ideas and thoughts. perhaps if I had kept a journal, I could more easily see the ways in which that childhood innocence, malleability, and non-conformity slowly developed into this formed and packaged human female.) The argument the author makes concerning the conceptual framework a select type of human has imposed upon animals--either in order to further the humans’ interests or merely accidentally--was hard to argue against, at least for me. But it raises many questions. How did this conceptual framework start? When did the conditioning start? What was it in response to? Do I need to become a psychoanalyst to figure this out--and if I become one, will I even figure it out or should I give up now? It seems this text mostly concerns itself with the current state of animation and society; and, although it offers readers a “real and compelling possibility of animating revolt,” it doesn’t really give us a sure-fire solution to taking advantage of this possibility (52). Our attention has been drawn to the issues: now what? Further, what are the specific, hypothetical or otherwise, ramifications of an entire generation being spoon-fed subtly revolutionary animated rhetoric? Will it be able to put a dent in this hetero-normative conceptual framework? If it does, what then? If “Pixarvolt” films are a response to capitalist and hetero-normative institutions, and if such films manage to shake the foundations of those institutions, will there still be a purpose for films like these in a new, more tolerant society--or do they only have value, according to the author, insofar as they respond to the current intolerant political, social, and economic climate?

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3 Oct. 2017, “A Hacker Manifesto” by McKenzie Wark The term “hacker” seems to be a sort of stand-in for any influential, experimental figure who exists outside society enough that he or she can comment on it. This hacker is still engaged, but perhaps in a less hand-on way than a politician or a member of the other classes Wark mentioned. The author clearly wishes to distinguish the “hacker” from any previous class of people—as such, perhaps the definition is more specific and I’ve missed something central to the author’s argument.  Perhaps the Hacker, according to Wark, synthesizes or at least contributes to the synthesis of information across disciplines. Such an idea is suggested when she emphasizes that “Only when free to express itself through the exploration and combination of any and every kind of knowledge, anywhere and everywhere in the world can the hacker class realize its potential, for itself and for the world” (381). A team project as multidisciplinary and, in a way, as transcendental as this reminds me of a project Jim Merod is working on: he’s planning on publishing Marie-Rose Logan’s long-time journal and inviting prominent figures from disciplines other than humanities to contribute. Such a journal could be a concrete example of the slogan of the hacker: “The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world united” (006).

However, if the hacker is she who synthesizes the works, does that mean she is not the one who creates the works? Why is it the “workings of the world united” specifically, as opposed to the “workers of the world united”? Are they mutually exclusive? What are “works of the world” according to the author? She specifically notes that poets and philosophers are examples of hackers; does this mean “works” are projects like the journal I mentioned earlier, or are “works” something else? She says, “Hackers are not joiners. [ . . .] What the times call for is a collective hack that realizes a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity” (006). Is not an alignment of differences a sort of joining? Why are those two things separate in her eyes?

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Sept. 21 2017, “Museums, Trauma, and the Aesthetics of Confrontation in Argentina” When I first started reading the article, I thought turning detention and torture facilities into museums or places of remembrance would cause more harm than help. Such places could serve as once-functioning examples of what to do when you have a dictatorship, rather than as a warning. Further, having lives and deaths used as data in a museum seems unfair to the victims; the dead and missing have no say over whether to share their stories and writings that were found after the fact. However, the article shows that some people still do not believe that the kidnappings or tortures happened, or even why they were wrong; they believe in the rhetoric in the government, and these museums and community centers “highlight a sense of collective responsibility to participate in the conservation of shared memories, to house and display the ongoing emergence of new knowledge about the dictatorship (Kaiser, 2015), and to counter the hegemonic political discourse in Lain America . . .” (128). Ex-Olimpo and ex-ESMA are valuable and helpful aids to “educate, and to display the ongoing process of accountability” (125). I was surprised the article did not discuss much the art involved in the remembrance movement, especially because the title includes “Aesthetics of Confrontation.” While reading the article, I thought of nueva canción, a genre politically charged and focused on human rights that was an important aspect of Latin American culture especially during the ‘70s and ‘80s. However, the article mostly focuses on art insofar as it is used in ex-facilities as diagrams and soundscape; perhaps revolutionary art in general is not as relevant to the purpose of the article.

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Sept. 19 2017, Trip to the Moon It was a surprising film. That the white men were exploring the unknown through the use of a canon blast was especially interesting. The moon looked pained. The native population were portrayed in an interesting way: they seemed tribal--covered with bones and displaying their spears--and what looked to be the ruler of the group was flanked by two very human-looking women who sat in suggestive poses. I’m not sure what was meant when one of the natives was able to climb onto the craft when the men came back to earth. Did the “alien” survive?

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Sept. 14 2017, Quipu Project documentary about the forced sterilizations in Peru It’s difficult to accept that these voices were made accessible to the world by the work of outsiders. By that I mean women who were not forcibly sterilized, who weren’t part of the insider group, had to help the sterilized women--had to provide some platform or foundation or means by which the victims could share the injustices committed against them. It’s frustrating and disappointing that these women aren’t being taken seriously by their own government, and that they need the aid of outsiders to get the justice they deserve. But regardless of technique, regardless of how they’re being heard, they are, and I hope the Quipu Project will linger in the mind of everyone who hears of it not only as a warning of the horrors we can wreak on each other, but also as an example of the way in which people can come together with hope regardless of the results or consequences. I admire these women for walking through unwelcoming streets with their signs held high; they support one another and rise higher by dissenting the apathetic--and, as the movie shows, often acerbic--majority.

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Sept. 12 2017, Globalizing Feminist Ethics by Alison M. Jaggar

This reading brought to my attention that feminism can be used as a tool to exploit the very people it seems to emancipate.

It never occurred to me that feminism as a concept could be used to discriminate between Us and Them in the same way that religion and history can. I never saw feminism as yet another means of colonialization and Westernization. But now that the reading has touched upon themes of the Other in feminism, I am better able to see that grievous mistakes are committed by those who act without allowing the very people who are supposedly exploited to share their experiences themselves. This seems self-evident now that I’ve read the paper; but prior to reading Alison Jaggar’s argument, I never would have observed the nuances and potential dangers that the proliferation of certain brands of feminism can have:

“For feminism to become global does not mean that Western feminists should think of themselves as missionaries carrying civilization to primitive and barbarous lands, but neither does it mean that people concerned about the subordination of women in their own culture may dismiss the plight of women in others. At least on the level of morality, global feminism means that feminists in each culture must re-examine our own communities in light of the perspectives produced by feminists in others, so that we may recognize some of the limits and biases of our own beliefs and assumptions.” (21)

She also emphasizes that community plays a central role in the development of what at the time may be considered radical ideas: “She must become part of a group that that explicitly recognizes itself as sharing a common condition of oppression—in Marxist terms, a group that constitutes itself as a class for itself as well as in itself. She must claim a collective identity distinct from her identification as the particular daughter, wife, and mother of particular others.” (12) This point especially made sense, for it’s something observable in class: when we students are part of a friendly group with one goal—whether that goal be to understand a text or to do well on a test—we seem to have better discussions and more supportive conversations, at least in the classes I’ve attended. We’ve taken on the identity of “student” and left “daughter” and “employee” temporarily at the wayside. This environment seems to be a springboard for further thought.