Sia’s “Elastic Heart” Video & the Romantic Ideal

A little while back a friend of mine suggested I watch Sia’s “Elastic Heart” video starring Shia LaBeouf and Maddie Ziegler and wanted me to give my opinion of this beautiful but provocative video. This suggestion and request led to me going interpretively nuts on it, as well as a considerable amount of face-palming whilst reading through some of the comments and reactions to the video by those considering it some form of pedophilia.  This controversy eventually resulted in a desire to write this article.

It is my understanding that the video has very little to do with pedophilia. This interpretation comes, as one YouTube commentator aptly put it, from the projection of these experiences onto the video. It is true that on a certain level the video can be viewed in this manner, but I feel that this is a far too simplistic and misguided interpretation. What the video is portraying is instead much deeper and is, as I will argue below, closely related to the Romantic ideal of childlike innocence and a desire, struggle and eventual inability to completely return to this state.

Authorship & Theory in Paul Auster

In a previous article I argued that Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy is an exploration into The difficulties and desire to know another and that the first two of these texts read as a postmodern take on the detective novel, a genre that typically revolves around one human being following another and interpreting the movements and actions of this person in an attempt to understand the followed Other. In this article I will argue for a completely different reading of the text. Instead of focusing on the consequences of a prolonged absence of the Other I will instead argue that Auster’s The New York Trilogy is in fact an exploration into modern concepts of authorship and approaches to literary theory.

Can You Hear Me?

The Importance of Voice in Identity and the Recognition of the Other. 

In this article I will argue for the importance of Voice in our understanding of human identity and argue that the recognition of the Other is not dependent on vision alone but is supported by at least two of the other senses; touch and hearing.

A child’s vision takes time to develop, a new born can only distinguish forms and object a couple of inches away, yet their hearing and sense of touch are often more, or even fully, developed at birth. Indeed a baby, before being able to recognize the Other visually and before they are aware of their bodily limits and image, Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, they, through touch, are able to recognize the difference between touching and being touched, in other words, the physical limitation of their body.  Or as Merleau-Ponty (1962) argues on the importance of the body; ‘the body catches itself from the outside engaged in a cognitive process […] and initiates ‘a kind of reflection’ which is sufficient to distinguish it from objects.’(107).

Perfomativity in the Post-Human

The reappropriation of performativity in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Synecdoche New York.

In Bodies That Matter Judith Butler argues for a different understanding of gender and sexuality than was previously accepted. In this text Butler coins the term performativity in relation to gender roles and gender identity. Butler argues that none of us are born with a gender but that what we perceive as gender roles are social constructs. This idea of gender roles, or “sex” as Butler labels it, as a social construct does however come with a problem as ‘this relation between culture and nature implies a culture or an agency of the social which acts upon a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface, outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart’. The problem that has raised the issue of performativity for Butler is the idea that ‘bodies never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled’ (2)

Butler further argues that, once the normative ideal has been accepted, we are compelled to then act upon this ideal of gender roles and relate our own gender identity with this and perform accordingly, to act as is expected of us by both the Other and the Self. Butler continues by arguing that this act is exactly that, an act, or a performance. This performance is however a complicated idea as this performance of gender roles is different from that of actors on a stage. She thus labeled it performativity which she defines ‘not as a singular or deliberate “act,” but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names’ and produces ‘the phenomena that it regulates and constraints.’(2) Butler finally argues that the concept of performativity results in a radical ‘rethinking of the process by which a bodily norm is assumed, appropriated, taken on as not, strictly speaking, undergone by a subject, but rather that the subject, the speaking “I,” is formed by virtue of having gone through such a process of assuming a sex.’(3)

In this article I will look at three contemporary texts which, as I will argue, have taken the construct of performativity beyond the limits of gender roles and gender identity. I will argue that the 2006 novel Remainder by Tom McCarthy, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go and the 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York have taken Butler’s concept out of issues of gender and reapporpriated them for the post-human concept of identity and the disassociation of the self. I will argue that the forming of the subject through the assuming of a sex by performativity and normative ideals is not only limited to gender roles but is, in post-human society, further developed to envelop all of identity, the self, and our understanding of the human.

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and ADHD’s Implications For Education

A little while ago I decided to reread father of science fiction H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine after obtaining an absolutely gorgeous illustrated edition published by the Folio Society. Whilst reading through this short story I came across a particular section which sparked a new idea and again suggested to me the brilliance of Wells’ writing.

Part of The Time Machine’s charm lies in the speculations and theories with which the protagonist. the time traveller, tries to understand the strange sights, experiences, and societies of this future earth. The passage i was referring to earlier is one of the Time Traveller’s attempts to address the evolution of these new human-like beings that appear to populate earth at that future time, the Eloi;

“Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it had lived. […] Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure” (38-39)

Depicting War; Pavese & Rossellini on Italy’s WWII

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war. However, every age remains in the memory of those who lived through it and in the memory of those generations that follow. It is through the media of their time that these later generations are reminded of the events that took place before theirs.

However, every generation has its own internal logic, its own structure of feeling. Therefore, to truly understand what happened during a certain time period, one must look at the works contemporary of that time. It is through the films and literature of that place and period that we are reminded of stories and perspective of a war that would otherwise have been forgotten.

Two classic works that deal with Italy during World War II, a story often ignored in modern works today, are the neo-realist film Paisa by Roberto Rossellini and the novel La Luna e i Falo or The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese. Both works, though different in their chosen portrayal of the war, both deal with the importance of time passing and memory. With this essay I shall look at both these works and show the different ways in which both of them show the importance of time passing and memory in the representation of war.

Only Revolutions- Mark z. Danielewski’s Answer to the Ebook Debate

Anyone familiar with the name Danielewski is familiar with challenging books. Of those readers most will have read, or at the very least attempted to read, Danielewski’s masterful and best-selling debut “novel”  House of Leaves. His second novel Only Revolutions is just as experimental in its use of the concept “the book”  as his first.  Anyone who has attempted to read Danielewski’s House of Leaves has experienced a sense of dread and excitement whilst leaving through its pages for the first time and most will have wondered how to actually go about reading the text with all its interwoven story archs.  A similar literary challenge is presented to the reader with Only Revolutions. 

The Zombie Narrative & Political Discourse

Anyone even slightly interested in contemporary (pop) culture could not have helped but notice a steady increase and popularity of the zombie narrative in recent years after a significant period of having been marginalized to the fringes of contemporary culture and pulp fiction. A narrative that has often been dismissed as nothing more than brainless (pun intended) entertainment.

In recent years the zombie narrative van be said to be resurging and becoming more and more popular and mainstream. Movies such as “28 days/ Weeks Later”, “Shaun of the Dead”, “Resident Evil”, “Planet Terror”, and hosts of others have been coming out in increasing numbers and gaining more and more popularity. And I am not even mentioning the enormous popularity of “The Walking Dead”  both graphic novel and tv series. With this rediscovery of the genre also comes the question as to why these zombies have been rearing their undead heads again in popular culture after so many years of absence.

Banksy and the Global

As Kwame Anthony Appiah neatly describes in his book Cosmopolitanism, the way human beings interact and are exposed to each other has changed considerably . We used to spend most our lives within a single tribe, in which all of the faces we would meet during the day were those we had met all other days of our lives. Nowadays however, the massive increase of global population and the rise of large populated cities, populations which until relatively recent were unimaginable, force us to be confronted with a large number of faces, of which only a small part of a percentage makes up those we know. As Appiah argues; ‘once we started to build these larger societies, most people knew little about the ways of other tribes, and could affect just a few local lives.’ (10) However, as Ulrich Beck argues, the advent of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization gave rise to a host of new problems and questions. Indeed one of these is the notion that ‘ideas of global concerns are becoming part of the everyday local experiences and the “moral life-worlds” of the people’(17) Beck further asks that with the rise of

‘can the reasons which a society gives for the exclusion of strangers be questioned by members of this society and strangers alike? […] For example, may ‘foreigners’ participate in the process of discussion, definition and decision-making when it comes to the issue of civil rights?’(20)

In this essay I will argue that graffiti stencil art is a way of addressing and overcoming these and other issues put forth by globalization theorists. I will do this by focusing primarily on the Palestine wall pieces done by British graffiti artists Banksy.

Paul Auster’s – Winter Journal

Published thirty years after the publication of his debut novel The Invention of Solitude Paul Auster’s latest novel Winter Journal can (and has been) read as a continuation or rather a sequel of this first book. There are however striking differences between the two novel, something to be expected with a thirty year gap in between. More about this in a later post. For now I will first however address this novel on its own (and plentiful) merits.

Auster’s Winter Journal is, in its essence, a highly personal working through of questions that arise from getting older, of discovering that life’s good, the bad, and the traumatic experiences are ultimately finite and death comes for all at one point or another.

This reworking of the biographical novel opens several days before Auster’s 64^th birthday as he sits himself in front of his desk and begins the mull over his life and the text itself is a detailed account of it. This in itself is very nicely done and is certainly interesting for anyone trying to discover some of the secrets of this grandmaster of the postmodern novel. Indeed I suspect many prospective writers and students of literature will find this novel quite alluring as it gives a first-person account of the life of a writer. Yet any trying to attain an insight into Auster’s means of writing, of discovering how he writes what he writes will sadly be left disappointed.

Winter Journal, however, does something far more interesting than giving a peak into the inner workings of a literary mind. With this novel Auster is trying to over come that which many of his protagonists of his novels (The New York Trilogy, Oracle Night, The Country of Last Things etc etc) experience or suffer through, a loss of self and identity and to me Auster is attempting to cope with or even overcome this loss in much the same way that his protagonists do. By writing.  In some way this reading is highly reminiscent of Auster’s novel Man in Dark in which fiction and reality are intertwined (as with most Auster novels) and in which the “real” protagonist, a storyteller meets his fictional creation. In a sense this is similar to what happens in Winter Journal, Auster’s fiction has become real. Auster himself, in this autobiography is experiencing that which he has written about on so many occasions and is working through it in the same way his fictional characters have, by writing.

By the act of writing Winter Journal Auster has turned the page and ink receiving his thoughts into a symbolic other (in a Lacan and Butler sense) upon which to construct and reconstruct his own identity, something to reassess his sense of self upon. Winter Journal should thus be read as a diary of a man, late in life, trying to figure out who he was and who he is. Through this text Auster is taking stock of his own life, trying to find himself, or at the very least trying to make sense of who he is now that old age is distancing himself from his body, a body that is failing him more often, a body which through all its scars and marks should tell him who he is.

In conclusion then, this new novel by Paul Auster is something completely different from what one would expect to read in an autobiography. It is not a tale of a man relating his life story, it is the wanderings of a mind trying to come to terms with himself. In this it is a powerful and unique read. It is the search for the self that comes with old age, a search for understanding, and in doing this it is a novel which does what many texts try to do yet only the good ones achieve, one of the main purposes of good literary work; it teaches how to live, how to experience and how to cope with growing older, when our bodies can no longer do all the things we once could.