#post-structuralism

[analysisroulette]

This episode, Duck presents a #poststructural analysis of #HowlsMovingCastle. Amongst other things, this involved finding out what #poststrucuralism means.

[against-forms-recognizable]

This week and last week my reading circle went over a 2006 essay by the anarchist philosopher Todd May, titled Michel Foucault's Guide to Living. (Searchable on Anna's Archive) In it, he asks: what is left to us, as philosophers? In a day when philosophy is tamed, chained to the institution of the university and at the mercy of state funding, when any advancements within it seem less and less relevant to people's lives, how do we find meaning in what we do?

In exploring this question, he compares the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' text Meditations, a compilation of privately penned reflections on life, to the writings of Michel Foucault. The Meditations, he says, are meant as a spiritual exercise; entry after entry presents the same short, concise ethical principles over and over again, with reflections on how to adhere to these lessons in the face of a complex society of people who all want you to bend to their way of living and thinking, a way to return yourself to a core set of values as the world constantly tries to lead you astray.

Conversely, Michel Foucault was a philosopher who rejected the idea of ethics, the idea that there was one correct way to live. Instead his philosophy is focused on aesthetics, the art of living, of constructing your life as a piece of art, of formulating your personal truth and expressing it in its utmost form. Could we perhaps extract spiritual exercises from Foucault's philosophy, then, that allow us to orient ourselves towards such a self-formulated cause, to dedicating ourselves to exploring personal truth, and in doing so finding a new way for philosophy to exist within our lives?

[mindrat]

Quote of the Day:

Judith Butler's gripping account of the evolution of the post-structuralist understanding of power in social relations

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

[innabesedina]

Post-structuralism

POST-STRUCTURALISM IS A TERM FOR PHILOSOPHICAL, THEORETICAL AND LITERARY FORMS OF THEORY THAT BOTH BUILD UPON AND REJECT IDEAS ESTABLISHED BY STRUCTURALISM, THE INTELLECTUAL PROJECT THAT PRECEDED IT. THOUGH POST-STRUCTURALISTS ALL PRESENT DIFFERENT CRITIQUES OF STRUCTURALISM, COMMON THEMES AMONG THEM INCLUDE THE REJECTION OF THE SELF-SUFFICIENCY OF STRUCTURALISM, AS WELL AS AN INTERROGATION OF THE BINARY OPPOSITIONS THAT CONSTITUTE ITS STRUCTURES. ACCORDINGLY, POST-STRUCTURALISM DISCARDS THE IDEA OF INTERPRETING MEDIA (OR THE WORLD) WITHIN PRE-ESTABLISHED, SOCIALLY-CONSTRUCTED STRUCTURES.

[itsbrucey]

Big fan of sun motifs in characters not necessarily being about positivity and happiness and how they're so " bright and warm" but instead being about fucking brutal they are.

Radiant. A FORCE of nature that will turn you to ash. That warmth that burns so hot it feels like ice. Piercing yellow and red and white. A character being a Sun because you cannot challenge a Sun without burning alive or taking everything down with them if victorious.

[hurumi]

Week10_Poststructuralism

I think understanding post-structuralism is very helpful and relevant to understanding contemporary art. I think that the attitude of trying to distinguish between what is art and what is not art is an outdated value that I personally should avoid having as an artist. Marcel Duchamp's <Fountain> is an important work that can support this idea, as it was able to be recognized as art for its body of work. As Wendy Warhol, a representative artist of contemporary art and a pioneer of pop art, demonstrates in his <Brillobox>, the distinction between real and fake becomes irrelevant (='breaking down the boundaries of art'), and this thinking, together with the philosophy of post-structuralism, explains where to place the value of a work as art with the keyword of 'flexibility' in thinking.

And it is precisely this post-structuralism that gives rise to the "flexibility" that I consider to be the most important attitude to evaluate the value of art today. To see the combination of signifier and signified as accidental, the only way to connect them is to find the difference between them and to delay in this process. It is in this process that a work of art is endowed with symbolism on its own, and it is all done through 'flexibility'.

It is my position to think that this process should be applied to all processes in which an artist perceives and decides something.

[goldensunset]

feel free to elaborate in tags of course on how easy or hard cosplaying them would be

bonus question: how much do you WANT to look like your icon. like are they the goal you aspire to

[agentravensong]

thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.

thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.

no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.

compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point. instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.

those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.

[yunsung0304]

POST-STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism is a view that argues that society and the world should be understood as a whole through structure.

Linguistics, for example, states that language exists as a system, so it should be explained through relationships between elements rather than individual grammatical elements. Alphabet A alone has no value, and its value arises from its confrontation with other alphabets.

Post-structuralism began by criticising the characteristics of idealistic structuralism that believe in the connection between all symbols and objects, including language. Post-structuralism breaks away from the dichotomy mindset and recognizes and embraces 'others'. In other words, a single symbol or word can contain many meanings.

This is a work called a flying plane.In this work, each element of an object is combined according to certain rules to form a total. In structuralism, the structure is a component, and the component forms a certain structure.  It can be seen from this work that in order to understand an object, the structure of the total must be understood.

Design in any field today is inevitable in human life and at the same time exists as an area of culture. As humans live their lives, communication with others is natural, and they share expressions and values through meaning delivery in each other's structural systems. Human communication methods can be divided into Verbal Communication and Non-verbal Communication. In general, design can be said to be a medium with the properties of 'non-verbal communication'.

In conclusion, I think structuralism and design are very closely related. (WORD COUNT: 250)

Reference Citations:

-YouTube video-

“절대주의+나르는+비행기 : 네이버 이미지검색.” search.naver.com. Accessed April 8, 2023. https://search.naver.com/search.naver?where=image&sm=tab_jum&query=%EC%A0%88%EB%8C%80%EC%A3%BC%EC%9D%98%2B%EB%82%98%EB%A5%B4%EB%8A%94%2B%EB%B9%84%ED%96%89%EA%B8%B0#imgId=image_sas%3Ablog21105531%7C18%7C70091864137_519566054.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 3: Enveloping Feelings.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 4 (soon))

[oxigendoi]

Viermele oricărui enunț roade și în expresii

​Suntem prizonieri unei regresii infinite pentru că identitatea și negația vor neapărat despărțite dar nu pot una fără alta. Povestea univers​​ului e una. Semnificația ei pentru fiecare parte a poveștii e.. altă poveste. Îmi imaginez că am putea surprinde povestea universului. Istoria universului. Toate datele cu privire la ce s-a întâmplat, înregistrate. Un set obiectiv de date.Am spune că…

[cheekylittlepupp]

I am unwell.

[sylphoxide]

YOU LIED TO US

[cats2019forthenintendoswitch]

Early Adventure Time episodes: Ice King "kidnaps" Wire Princess, a vaguely humanoid heap of scrap with a smiley face painted on its "head" which he obviously made. Finn wants to stop him on the principle of kidnapping being bad, while Jake argues that since his "victim" is an inanimate piece of junk, no one's getting hurt and it might even quell his kidnapping thirst. After a series of shenanigans, Ice King attacks Jake, at which point Wire Princess speaks, revealing that not only was she alive, but consenting to the kidnapping as well, because of Ice King's fluffy beard. But now that she has seen him attack Jake, another fluffy thing, her heart is wavering and she must journey alone to find the true meaning of fluff. The end gag is Ice King screaming "She was alive?"

Middle Adventure Time episode: Raggedy Princess' kingdom is being attacked, and the assailant is revealed to be none other than Wire Princess, whose quest for fluff has turned destructive. PB appears excessively distraught by this, and it's revealed that she created Wire and Raggedy Princess (then known as cloth princess) in a recreation of the monkey experiment to best gauge her approach to ruling, in the early days of the Candy Kingdom. However, when the Wire Princess AI realized the candy people were more driven to Cloth Princess' caring nature, it logically concluded the only biological need of candy people is "fluff", and so tried her best to imitate Cloth's behavior, while Cloth Princess' deeply ingrained love for her citizens caused her to attempt to physically care for them. Declaring the experiment a failure, PB mind-wiped them both, gave Cloth Princess a new kingdom and name, and put WP in sleep mode, as well as left her in Ice King's junk pile. Jake, who has been listening, says "PB, that's messed up, man". Although they deliberate whether to reboot her again, she ends up being smashed by a gumball guardian or something. While everyone staress in shock, Raggedy Princess says "That's messed up, man. Also I didn't have time to say this earlier but I'm fine with either Raggedy Princess or Cloth Princess. So, um, yeah. Anyway, I'm going to call the cleanup crew"

Late Adventure Time episode: A strange techno-magical maze appears out of the blue in the Ice Kingdom. Finn and Jake explore it and find imagery of both softness and some sort of pre-apocalypse university, ultimately discovering it was created by Magic Woman/Betty mind-melding with Wire Princes, who was trying to reverse engineer an AI with love magic infused through Simon or whatever. She inadvertently mind-melded then, accidentally creating the semi-physical maze with her magic powers, and in turn realized that WP was, in fact, not only functional and aware this whole time, but she also had a slowed down perception of time. Finn and Jake sever the link after fighting some techno-nightmares. Magic Woman, despite only having been mind-melded for a day, has experienced a whole year, and appears distraught. But this is only momentary, as she declares that her accelerated madness means that her magic will grow exponentially stronger, and runs off appearing to have a plan. Finn and Jake are worried about Wire Princess going haywire (the pun is pointed out), but she clarifies (her voicebox is working now, but not much else) that actually, since she didn't have or understand emotions for most of her aware existence, she was just fine then. She then goes on a beautiful monologue about how, since she's now bonded to one, she finally, truly understands emotional beings and their complex needs. She renames herself "wire knight", and downloads her consciousnesses onto Finn's arm. A later episode has BMO and Wire Knight debating the trolley problem

[penhive]

Existentialism from Christian Apologetics

I have read the Philosophies of both Sartre and Camus. For Camus life is absurd, meaningless and monotonous and he used the myth-metaphor of Sisyphus where Sisyphus rolls a boulder uphill and the Gods roll it down and he is forced to do this meaningless, repetitive task. And Sartre has said that existence precedes essence.

Existentialism from Christian Apologetics

I categorically proclaim with affirmation and joy that life with Christ is the celebration of meaning, yes, life is the celebration of meaning.

Again Sartre has said man is condemned to be free as he is forced to make choices in life of which he is responsible.

I counter Sartre by saying that life with Christ, man is privileged to be free. There is no condemnation but grace of life. Yes, man is privileged to be free. And the reward of this life is a sojourn in eternity with Christ.

[utilitycaster]

playing a warlock is a metaphor for the imperfect moral decisions we all must make. playing fighter is a metaphor for being good at something and then you can decide to explore whether it's natural, whether it's taught, and whether or not you are proud of this. playing a druid is about existing in a parallel system to the mainstream but one with its own flaws and power structures. playing a druid is also about the balance of extremes and the validity of that balance. playing a barbarian isn't actually about anger but rather is a metaphor about surrendering to a flow state. playing a cleric is about belief in the existence of something greater than yourself, whether concrete or abstract. playing a paladin is about a conviction deep within you, whether or not the thing greater than yourself exists. playing a monk is an exploration of specialization and what it means to narrow your focus to a point. playing a wizard is a metaphor for the boons of scientific discovery and the consequences. playing a wizard is also a metaphor for academia. playing an artificer is about the sacrifices you must make in science and academia when you choose the applied over the theoretical. playing a sorcerer is a metaphor for the things about yourself that you cannot change. playing a sorcerer is also sometimes a metaphor for inherited wealth or other privileges of birth. playing a bard is very straightforwardly about the power of art and self-expression and communication, and is sort of a metaphor about how jealousy and self-interest will hamper you in those pursuits. playing a rogue serves to validate the truths explored by playing a bard. playing a ranger is a metaphor for having obscure knowledge and soft skills and working in the background.