Stories

Just to remind you that last time we decided for the last day of this term to be the deadline for your stories. So far we got only 2 of them: one is here, and the other you can find in the BLE (it was too long to form a post) if you log in, then click on the Myth and Mythmaking course, then click on 'Teaching Resources' and open the folder 'Demeter and Persephone'.

For those of you who still have no idea what this storytelling businness is (i'm sure there is someone...), I suggest you go back and read some previous posts in this blog, here and here.

I hope it's all clear.

Have fun.

UPDATE: now (Wed 3/12) there is a third story to read on the BLE!

Reliable Web?

About our conversations of last time on the reliability of the informations on the Internet, check out this article on the CNN website.

Second Order Signification?

From Prospect Magazine:

Reading Sarah Palin’s anguished interview with Greta van Susteren of Fox News just after the election, I had an epiphany: Palin is a poet, and a fine one at that. What the philistine media take for incoherence is, in fact, the fruitful ambiguity of verse.

Here she is, in a work I have taken to calling “The Relevance of Africa.” (Not a single word or comma has been changed, but the line breaks are placed where they naturally fall.) In it, Palin blends the energy of free verse with the austerity of a classic 14-line sonnet.

It reads: “And the relevance to me /With that issue, /As we spoke /About Africa and some /Of the countries /There that were /Kind of the people succumbing /To the dictators /And the corruption /Of some collapsed governments /On the /Continent, /The relevance /Was Alaska’s.”

A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges. A great poet does not self-censor; Sarah Palin seems authentically innocent of what she is saying. She could be the most natural, visionary poet since William Blake.

Guess What

Here we go with the questions:

Do you think that Barthes' theory of a second-order semiological system is a helpful way of looking at how 'myth' works? Do you agree with Barthes' when he says (p. 117) that 'myth has in fact a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us'. What contemporary examples of this 'double function' of myth can you think of?

Moreover, i believe it is time for you to start thinking seriously about essay topics... Prepare some questions if you need, and we can spend some time brainstorming about that.

Art for the masses?

A few very scattered thoughts on art. I would love to knit them together better but am trying to concentrate on my real homework (honest). Please feel free to comment below.

Following a psuedo-structuralist discussion we had in the smoking area about the marvel, or not, of Rothko "Is it red? Is it Burgundy? Does it matter?" I thought you might be interested to read this. The journalist writes how art is replacing the religious experience in this supposedly 'increasingly unreligious world'.

Rothko himself, who committed suicide in 1970 from anti-depressants, found painting to be a release from the pressures that life placed upon him and at the same time gained comfort from the feeling of solidarity from his admirers: "The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.", he said.

Many people ask the questions: what is art? Who gets to say? What is at stake? Is producing and experiencing art a purely aesthetic experience? Is art shaped by the world around us? and many many more...

On a recent rip to the Tate Modern armed with a new found interest in the links between art and politcs I bumped into one of our fellow class mates who had free entry to the Rothko exhibition. At £12.50 a ticket to what was previously a free exhibition in the same museum one has to question whether the next government will keep to their promise of free entry.

As we face the largest economic crisis since the 1930's sales of art are experiencing the same crashes as elsewhere. Read also at Press TV.

When art is produced purely as an item to be sold, rather than as an expression of the artists creativity, art becomes a slave to capitalist competition and consumerist contortions.

Barthes - Mythologies

hello everyone here is a link to Mythologies. its amazing read it. well you can if you like.

Mythologies by Roland Barthes, as selected and translated by Annette Lavers

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Music Spirituality world magic

Being (hyper)Historical

I was reading something related to our nice conversations of today and I thought to share a passage about history by Tomoko Masuzawa that I find very nice:

What if "being historical" is not a matter of recovering and reconstructing a richly nuanced narrative truth, full of "thick descriptions", of a certain wholeness of a past, but instead is a matter of more or less outwitting such a compelling narrative truth and letting some forgotten moments and contours of the past "flare up", as Walter Benjamin would say, in order to illumine and decompose the compulsive narrativity of history that dictates the ideology of the present?

You find it in the chapter called 'Culture' in M.C.Taylor's Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: Chigago University Press, p.91). It's in the library (many copies) for the most willing of you (A210.14 /826952).

By the way, coming back to my 'hypertext' historical theory (that the most lucky of you enjoyed today) think for a second about what I've just done: I copied a passage from a book (a passage chosen by me and eradicated from the context), posted it onto a blog, and i've hyperlinked it to other texts. For all practical purposes I've 'exploded' it to both a wider range of users and to a wider network of informations/meanings.

How postmodern of me.

And finally, the question(s)

I know you've all been impatient, but finally here are the questions for our next tutorial:

Under modernism, why are modernity and history opposed? What is at stake in setting these up as an opposition? What does de Man suggest might be the reason for this? How might de Man's reflections on the literature of modernity be applied to the modernist appropriation of myth? And what does this tell us about the relationship of the category 'myth' to modern conceptions of past, present and future?

Of course, if you want more questions, you will be given more.

See you soon.

Ideology&Roses (and the Hope for the Future)

The great philosopher Slavoj Žižek (above, the one that with a microphone does not look that cool) pronounced his authoritative opinion about the recent election of Barak Obama in this article (hinting in the title at of one of the greatest albums of rock history...how dare he?).

Anyway, after reporting the words of someone else, he comments:

Rarely was the function of ideology described in clearer terms: to defend the existing system against any serious critique, legitimising it as a direct expression of human nature.

This -at least- we like.

To question or not to question, that is the question...

...and since we can't access the BLE we need to know what the question is. Does anybody know what is--if, indeed, there is one--the question? (I don't know how to do em-rules on my new computer. SORRY)

To blog or not to blog

I have noted with deep dismay that some people still have done nothing to create a Gmail account and join the blog. Not many, I could name them, but that would be embarrassing wouldn't it?
Now, if you belong to this short list, why not spend 5 minutes of your precious time at the computer to do it and email me about it?

Be nice.

To Know what it is like to Know

I was you-tubing around watching old physics lectures from the 60s (I must be a real dork) and I ran into this video. If you have never heard of Richard Feynman, you can either click on his name and visit the wikipedia page or just be happy of knowing that he was a big shot American physicist, won the Nobel prize in 1965, is famous for a series of lectures in physics he gave in 1961 at Caltech, and was a quite annoying mysoginist. In the field, he is a myth. They even made a movie about him.

But this is not the point: watch the video, and please do comment (don't let it go like the Foucault-Chomsky videos: I was very hearbroken that no one liked them). I think I lot could be taken out of it and it is quite coherent with what we discussed last time in the tutorial.

Fired Up! Ready to Go!

Dearest Myth and Mythmaking people,

As always, I'm posting here the question for next week's tutorial

Do you agree that Frazer’s concern with facticity is an attempt to authorise evolutionary anthropology and comparative mythology? Why should this be necessary if it is the case? What strategies does Frazer employ to achieve this authorisation? What is at stake for Frazer himself in his work and how does it contribute to the production of that very work?

I hope you had a great and relaxing reading week, full of reading and sleeping.

See you soon

Demeter and Persephone: A Re-Telling

You can read the latest fantastic re-telling of Demeter and Persephone by going to the BLE (http://www.ble.ac.uk/), clicking on 'Teaching Resources', opening the folder 'Demeter and Persephone' and tada, there it will be. Alternatively, you can click on the title of this blog entry and should almost take you there.

Conference at SOAS this weekend.

Historical Materialism is a high level conference with some fabulous speakers right on our dorrsteps at SOAS this weekend.

Sessions on Adorno-Emancipatory praxis and conceptuality in Adorno: Some notes on the time of insurrection. One on "All that is fluid is frozen to stone: sex, individuality, non-identity"

Vygotsky, Gramsci, Zizek, Althusser, Lucaks, Orientalism, Postcolonialism, New left in Palestine and much more.

It suggests a donation for entrance but you could blag it if you bemoan the fact that we are studying at universties in a neo-liberal world; (correct this time? please, please say yes) fees, kids, having to work etc!!

Call me on 07958 034 181 if you want to meet up.

Link to website and full program: http://mercury.soas.ac.uk/hm/

Two sessions to wet (whet?) your whistle eg. Friday 10am:

MARX AND PHILOSOPHY SOCIETY: NORMATIVITY AND ALIENATION
Chair: Martin McIvor
Sean Sayers
Alienation as a critical concept
Gaspar Miklos Tamas
The uniqueness of capitalism and the normative content of a socialist political philosophy
Nicholas Joll
The normativity problem in critical theory: Adorno, Bernstein, Freyenhagen

MARXISMS AND RELIGION
Chair: Peter Thomas
John Roberts
Marx and the "critique of the critique of religion‟ today
Sami Khatib
Capitalism as religion: Re-reading Walter Benjamin‟s Marxism
Alberto Toscano
The mask of apocalypse, the flag of fanaticism: Marxism, religion and revolt

Anyway, hope to see you there...x