Is it a Call for Culture or Anarchy ?

The Compulsory Education Act in 1870 in the Victorian England led to the emergence of a new generation of newly educated middle class people. These people believed in modern civilization and wanted to be part of the growing empire. They had their own ambitions of a better life among a never changing conservative society. At that time, reading and writing was a privilege of the elite like Tennyson, Arnold, Browning …etc., that is not supposed to be practiced by the so called “Philistines”, referring to the new rising middle class generation. Therefore, Arnold considers them the enemies of culture and the reason behind anarchy.

Arnold, assumes himself very well cultured, and accordingly; “perfect” ,as he sees the function of culture, not only in terms of gaining knowledge, but also in doing good “ it is not merely the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also the moral and social passion for doing good”827. But he is not doing any good to himself nor to anyone else by reflecting such discriminative thoughts against his people and using offensive terminology that doesn’t show the reality of things.
I was really astonished when I checked the meaning of the word “Philistines” in the American Heritage Dictionary and it showed like this:
“ a. A smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values. b. The one who lacks knowledge in a specific area.” If Arnold uses the word in this sense, it means that he is promoting hatred and discrimination, rather than making religion “to prevail” or “ perfecting himself”, by the name of culture. I was really offended when I read this article and I do believe that good intention and objectives should be approached and achieved by good means. And I see that Arnold is not doing so.

Structural Analysis of De Man’s Essay “Semiology and Rhetoric”

PART ONE
Form and content

Unwitting assumption of critical theories

FORM VS CONTENT
Outside VS inside
Extrinsic VS intrinsic
(Formalism, structuralism, historicism) VS deconstruction
Outside reference VS no outside reference
(author, period, history, reader or culture) VS text
Shell VS kernel

Even if the metaphor has been reversed, theories are still entangled in the same polarity of the same metaphor:

Content --------> outside
And
form --------> inside

OR
Content --------> inside
And
form --------> outside

PART TWO

SEMIOLOGY VS GRAMMAR

Syntagmatic VS Paradigmatic
Superior VS inferior
Conveys meaning VS cannot convey meaning
Main VS subordinate
Suspends logic VS logical

PART THREE (Conclusion)

METAPHORE AND METONYMY

Metonymy of metaphor --------->rhetoricizes grammar

Power of rhetoric ---------> discernable grammatical system

Death of the Author and the Hypertext

Building on our in class discussion regarding the death of the author and the hyper text, check this interesting essay that discuses the same question. (you have to download it first)
http://www.dmc.dit.ie/maim2002/riccardo/essays%20and%20mp/essays/media%20philosophy.doc

Practicing the Death of the Author

The following quotations from Barthe’s essay “The Death of The Author,” will serve as guides for composing a practical lesson plan.

- “who is speaking thus”
- “writing is the destruction of every voice”
- “ writing is a neutral composite space where our subject slips away”
- “an author does not exist prior to or outside of language”
- “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified”
- “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”
- “ A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, contestations, but there is one place this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader not … the author.”



Experimental micro-lesson plan

Objectives
- To reinforce students’ personal interpretation of poetry. (recreating the text through the act of reading)
- To help students to free themselves from the limits imposed by the author, and to give them the chance discover new meanings rather than those intended by the author.
- To let students set out their own understanding of the characteristics of the voice in the poem of discussion depending on their reading of the text not on the author’s biography.
- To ask students to write down the inter-textuality brought to their minds by the text.

Methodology
- Students will read Ben Jonson’s “ON MY FIRST SON” in groups of four.

1 FAREWELL, thou child of my right hand, and joy,
2 My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy;
3 Seven years th' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
4 Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
5 O, I could lose all father now. For why
6 Will man lament the state he should envy?
7 To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
8 And, if no other misery, yet age?
9 Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say here doth lie
10 Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry;
11 For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
12 As what he loves may never like too much.

- The poem will be presented without the name of the poet or the time of writing.
- Students will be required to discuss the following questions:
What do you thing the meaning of the poem is?
What is your personal interpretation of the first and tenth lines?
Does it remind you of any other literary text (inter-textuality)? What are the facets of similarity?
What are the characteristic of the voice in the poem.? What are the textual signs or details that made you think so?
- students should be provided with the intended meaning of the author, and should be asked to compare it to their own interpretation.

Check this interseting critique of " the death of the Author" http://mh.cla.umn.edu/ebibss5.html

Transcendental Signified as the Basis of Deconstruction Theory

In his defense of writing in his book Of Grammatology , Derrida introduces some concepts that later became central to the deconstruction theory. The most important of which is the transcendental signified “If reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical….” 1825. To explain the meaning of the transcendental signified with reference to the article itself as well as my previous understanding of this concept, I can say that Derrida assumes that the entire history of Western metaphysics from Plato to the present is founded on a classic, fundamental error. This error is searching for a transcendental signified, an “ external point of reference” ( like God, religion, reason, science….) upon which one may build a concept or philosophy. This transcendental signified would provide the ultimate meaning and would be the origin of origins. This transcendental signified is centered in the process of interpretation and whatever else is decentered. To Derrida THIS IS A GREAT ERROR because
1. There is no ultimate truth or a unifying element in universe, and thus no ultimate reality (including whatever transcendental signified). What is left is only difference.
2. Any text, in the light of this fact, has almost an infinite number of possible interpretations, and there is no assumed one signified meaning.
Accordingly, whatever pre-constructed meaning of a text has to be deconstructed to examine the possible different meanings. What is centered has to be decentered and what is privileged has to be unprivileged. Rather than providing how a text means ( like new criticism methodology), or discovering how a text means ( Structuralism methodology), Deconstruction aim at showing that what a text claims saying and what it actually says are “discernibly” different.
I have to say at the end, that Derrida requires eliminating whatever transcendental signified in the process of interpretation, but, at the same time, he himself constructs a transcendental signified. Rejecting whatever value or outside referent in the process of interpretation is a referent itself and assuming that is no ultimate truth is a transcendental signified as well. It is a referent that we have to keep in mind and refer to all the time and before doing anything. Therefore, how can Derrida ask us to practice what he is not actually doing himself?