Reflection: Marxism

After going over my notes and rereading the Marxism material from last week, I have a better grasp of Marxist Theory and Criticism. And after reading an essay by Leon Trotsky online pertaining to  Leo Tolstoy it gives me inspiration to read a couple of his epic novels like War and Peace, Ana Karenina, not to mention, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s epic novel, The Brothers Karamazov. It seemed from Dr. Wexler’s perspective, Marx, although he, Marx, felt capitalism was inherently flawed, was somewhat in awe of it; however, his communist ideal did not include totalitarianism, which subsequent autocratic leaders assumed or hijacked. The film clip we saw in class for about ten minutes starring Alec Baldwin—the name of the film eludes me—reflects the negative aspects of capitalism: exploitation and class antagonism. Remarkably, there were several acclaimed actors in that one scene; nevertheless, I thought the dialogue was overdramatic and camp, albeit, sending a strong message.

April 3, 2011:

I finished reading Louis Althusser, who among other things, had a satirical perspective of religion as an ideology; and I finished reading Andrew Ross, who is an advocate for the exploited-downtrodden, a talented writer, and an articulate spokesman for higher education's embattled work force. I will post my perspective of Ross's discourse as a continuation to my Marxism analysis.

Analysis #4 Marxism

From my reading of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Trotsky, and Raymond Williams (at this time I have not read Louis Althusser and Andrew Ross yet) some literature and film come to mind which I can relate the aforementioned discourse to.  Of particular interest to me, and I can see the relevancy, is class struggle, antagonism, and hegemony of the superstructure. However, In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the dystopia of the future has precluded class struggle and antagonism by brainwashing the proletariat soon after they are chemically hatched. Thus Marxism’s alienated labor is obviated. The hegemony of religion does not figure in either because it is non-existent in this after-Ford society. As far as the ruling class, Mustafa Mond and other world leaders have de facto totalitarian power. So Marx’s and Engles’ prediction that “the internal tensions and contradictions in capitalism would lead inevitably to its demise” does not come to realization and is averted in the Brave New World society (Leitch 648). However, in George Orwell’s 1984, the intellectuals and ruling class repress the majority and class conflict not only with brainwashing, but with violence and restrictions to literature and media too.  This is to a degree exemplified in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Some theorists believe in fact that Lenin and Stalin hijacked Marxism by instituting a totalitarian regime, “and it is generally believed that he [Stalin] ordered Trotsky’s murder” (878).

Who knows what the course of history may have taken had Trotsky not met such an untimely death. In one of his essays, “Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel,” Trotsky sympathetically discusses the class struggle that Tolstoy had gone through his career (Online Marxist.org 1-11). This essay, written and published in 1908 when Tolstoy was eighty, reflects how Tolstoy tried in both his private and professional life to come to terms with class struggle inherent in capitalistic society but perhaps never overcame his superstructure class: “From the first years of his consciousness he was, as he remains to this very day, an aristocrat, in the deepest and most secret recesses of his creativeness; and this, despite all his subsequent spiritual crises” (1). I do not want to be a hypocrite—I have only completed reading one of Tolstoy’s novels—but I imagine that Tolstoy, in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s terminology was a “traditional intellectual,” and never quite actualized into an “organic intellectual” (Leitch 1000). To clarify, “traditional intellectuals are the administrators and apologists for existing and cultural institutions” while “organic intellectuals rise out of membership in social groups (or classes) that have an antagonistic relationship to established institutions and official power." According to those criteria Marx, Engels, and Gramsci are indeed organic intellectuals, while Huxley, Tolstoy, Williams, and Orwell are more traditional intellectuals. If indeed we can categorize him as an intellectual, what would we call the contemporary Oliver Stone, aside from being controversial?

English 436 Analysis #4 Marxism Part II

I give a lot of kudos to Andrew Ross for articulating exploitation of black recording artists, artists in general, adjunct and part time college professors, and primary and secondary school teachers, even though he has a seemingly secure position—he is department chair—at New York University.  Ross is at odds with greed inherent in our society and corporate-like takeover of our colleges, which creates discount labor at the expense of artists and Ph.D. college professors.  In the clip that Dr. Wexler posted Ross blames a lot of the unemployment condition on “two decades of deregulation.” According to Ross, employers have taken advantage of the discounted flex labor pool, and have incorporated corporate like exploitive policies regarding mental labor, viz., professors.

“One of Ross’s more trenchant charges is that many current jobs return to conditions of the sweatshop, mobilizing cultural ideas of enjoyable work to extract long hours for low pay” (Leitch 2576).  In his chapter on “The Mental Labor Problem” (2578-97) which is part of his 2004 book, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor (2578) Ross expounds on his positions. He maintains that “the largest subsidy to the arts has always come from workers themselves,” hence, the “cultural discount” (2579).  Referring to the dire circumstances of adjunct and part time college professors, he points out that “Baumol and Bowen” in their 1989 study of graduate education forecast “widespread tenure-track openings in the professoriat…and may have bootlessly lured thousands into doctoral programs,” which to me in part explains the fertile environment for exploitation: oversupply of mental labor, and lack of demand from  employers--universities--due in part from lack of funding, in addition to exploitive corporate tactics. Ross maintains, however, [and we have to take into consideration that this discourse was published in 2004, and the Great Recessions had not yet impacted us] “If colleges were still hiring full-time tenure-track professors, instead of part-timers and adjuncts, today’s labor supply would more closely approximate employer demand” (Leitch Note 2 2581).  Ross goes on to discuss “No-Collar” jobs of a neo-bohemian” workforce whom the tech companies gladly hired while incorporating the “sweat equity” proposition of “stock options” being profitable.

Accordingly, Ross compares the free labor of techies to the public’s “romantic notion of engarreted and starving artist” (2585). Ross takes exception to the “antediluvian” and “gimcrack rationales for paying people less than they deserve” (2585). Regarding artwork, Ross points out an interesting concept that “patrons have been extracting personal prestige and profit from their own association with the labor of art” and in fact, virtually all artists did not profit from the “surplus value” created (2585). He reflects that someone like “Van Gogh” exemplifies this (2586). To make matters worse, Ross maintains that “there persists an ingrained prejudice on the left against being well-paid occupationally, whether in the arts or in the academy” (2587). Consequently, he supports the hip-hop artists for making very good compensation and being sharp enough not to be exploited like their African-American forerunners. Ross acknowledges the “crass nouveau riche version of American success, but it cannot be divorced for reparations for almost a full century in which black artists had been robbed blind of their rights and royalties by the music industry” (2587).

Ross revisits the quagmire of higher education employees—college professors—when “in the 1990s, the corporatization of higher education set in for real, and casualization began to take a heavy toll on institutions nominally built on tenure, academic freedom, and faculty governance…where a large percentage of part-time labor force was soon struggling to earn any kind of living wage (2589). Furthermore, “As for regular faculty, their salaries have stagnated against the average wage…their job security serves as window dressing for a system designed to ensure a continuous flow of cheap, easily replaceable labor” (2590-91). Ross also comments on secondary charter schools, which reduces union membership and online courses which teaches a “disaggerated student body” and maintains tighter “control over the workforce and, potentially the curriculum” (2593). However, on the optimistic side, Ross sees the potential for part-time college professors unionizing in an economy where the unions have been weakening.

Works Cited

Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2^nd ed. New York:

  W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print

Trotsky, Leon. “Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel” 26 March 2011,  

     Marxists.org/archive/…/Tolstoy.htm, Web

Analysis #3: Psychoanalysis Theory and Criticism

My analysis concerns Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), and their contribution to psychoanalysis theory and criticism. Psychoanalysis has become progressively more prominent in our daily lives during the last one-hundred and fifty years in western civilization (although psychoanalysis critical theory may have waned a bit), even to the point that we can now choose virtually any literary text from any era and explicate it psychoanalytically. For instance, our Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism discusses a few literary works psychoanalytically in Oedipus Rex, by Sophocles; Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; and “The Purloined Letter,” by Edgar Allan Poe, all of which I will discuss from a psychoanalytical perspective.

Freud’s theory of psycho-sexual developments in the formative years specifies  that any fixation at a particular stage creates a problem, namely neurosis, later on. These stages are oral, anal, phallic, and genital. It appears that Hamlet may have had a fixation at the phallic stage during his formative years, which answers in part why he was unable to consummate sexual intimacy with his love, Ophelia. He may have never successfully overcome the prerequisite for the genital stage. Instead, Hamlet’s unresolved Oedipus complex created a fixation with his mother. Furthermore, Freud maintains that his inability to exact revenge on his murderous uncle “who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes his own childhood realized” (Leitch 817-819). This explains why Hamlet is subconsciously conflicted over killing a man who did what Hamlet subconsciously wanted to do himself, kill his father, the King.

According to another of Freud’s psychoanalytical explications, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, it is apparent that the author had unconscious awareness of Freud’s psycho-sexual theories, again, the fixation of the phallic stage. “King Oedipus, who slew his father, Laïus, and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes” (Leitch 816). Furthermore, Freud implores us to acknowledge “those same impulses, though suppressed, are still to be found” (Leitch 816). Lacan continues Freud’s tradition of psychoanalysis explication of literature with his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter”’ in 1955 (Leitch 1158). 

Poe’s short story, published in 1845 (Leitch 1158), deals with a signifier, a letter, that presumably has no signified, as no one, save the Queen, knows what is in the letter (Poe 1-14). However, as readers we can imagine a signified in the context that the letter’s revelation to the King spells a lot of trouble for the Queen. Accordingly, the letter could be from a lover, a political figure involved in intrigue, or just about anyone that fits the reader’s fancy. Though, as a reading audience, we can only assume. The quest for the letter, according to Lacan, is in effect Freud’s repetition compulsion, which Lacan calls repetition automotive (Leitch 1158). According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, repetition compulsion is “an irresistible tendency to repeat an emotional experience or return to a previous psychological state.” For the protagonist, Dupin, it is the satisfaction of doing to Minister D what Minister D had done to the Queen, stealing back the purloined letter, thereby out-foxing Minister D while at the same time making a hefty financial profit from the reward. We can only conjecture when Poe wrote this short story that he may have intuitively known what repetition automotive was, even if it had not been articulated by Freud and Lacan at that time. Nevertheless, from Lacan’s perspective, Poe was having a “good time” writing this erudite short story, incorporating his knowledge of Latin, French and his refined vocabulary, in this superb psychological mystery story (Lacan  1-12).  Thus, these three perspectives of literary works exemplify psychoanalysis criticism and theory at work. Consequently, it stands to reason that literary critics, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and major critical theory students have the ability to explicate literature psychoanalytically, and thus gain a more intimate knowledge of the authors and their characters.

Works Cited

Lacan, Jacques. “Seminar on The Purloined Letter,” 20 March 2011,  

     www.lacan.com/purloined.htm, Web.

Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2^nd ed. New York:  

     W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print

Poe, Edgar. “The Purloined Letter, 18 March 2011, enotes 

     http://www.enotes.com/purloined-    letter-text,  Web.

Reflection: Phenomenology and Reader-Response Theory

    For me, there was a lot of drama concerning Martin Heidegger and his affiliation with the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, so I downloaded his interview with Der Spiegel Magazine taken in 1966 to be published posthumously, according to Heidegger’s agreement to talk about the subject for the first and last time. I thought his explanations appeared plausible and ethical, and mentioned it to Dr. Wexler, who reacted somewhat  incredulously by recommending to me to read one of his books--the title of which escapes me--the implication that everything was not exactly kosher with Heidegger. His discourse on “Language” was challenging for me. Jean-Paul Sartre was more comprehensible and his past was commendable as part of the French Resistance during WWII.  Reading Wolfgang Iser, at least, the first half of his “Interaction Between Text and Reader” was clearer to me; however, I found the last few pages to be esoteric and challenging as I did Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author." A common threads that I got from all the reading was the important trust the reader must have for the author and vice versa. Also, it is ultimately the reader who perceives the text. However, what reader, contemporary or posterity?

    I spent the weekend rereading Iser, Barthes, Freud, and Lacan, and did some research on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” and Jacques Lacan’s seminar from 1955 on the subject, about which I wrote the first draft  and will publish it tomorrow.

Reflection: Psychoanalysis Theory and Criticism 3/13/11

After the readings, Dr. Wexler’s extensive lecture, and class activities last week, I appreciate Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s contribution to literary theory and criticism more. The concept that the character, Hamlet, according to Dr. Wexler’s posit and take on Freudian psychoanalysis theory, procrastinated killing his uncle, Claudius, basically because he [unconsciously?] identifies with the uncle as having perpetrated the killing of Hamlet’s father, namely, the Oedipus complex, is a fascinating thought.  After seeing the five-minute clip of Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Hamlet along with his mother Gertrude, played by Glenn Close, it fits with Freud’s explication quite well. It appears that Hamlet’s Id is finally winning the struggle with his Superego in creating a very disturbed Ego: Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, and Hamlet’s crazed emotions then sexual moments with his mother. I look more forward to reading Hamlet in a Shakespeare course here at CSUN—the first and last time I had read it was 1966 in a college class in New York City—and explicating it from a psychoanalysis theory perspective.

The two family portraits by Peale (1778-1860) and Bellei (1857-1922) that Dr. Wexler showed us led to an interesting discussion of the family members’ psychological states.  There were a lot of illuminatingly different analyses by class members, which makes me ponder, now, as to what artists consciously feel when painting and how much is unconscious.  Peale lived prior to Freud’s (1856-1939) theories, whereas, Bellei   was Freud’s contemporary. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Bellei’s painting is more spontaneous, more revealing of emotions, and less in a “posing” mode  than Peale’s painting.

During class, I agreed wholeheartedly with Dr. Wexler’s statement that Freud “kicks man off his ‘enlightenment’ pedestal,” for example, Immanuel Kant’s imploring us to use our consciously mature minds more and rely less on other people’s minds, similar to Ralph Waldo Emerson discourse on Self-Reliance. However,  according to Freud, our actions, or lack of, are predicated or controlled more by our unconscious mind. Freud’s psycho-sexual development stages make a lot of sense to me; however, I want to know more about why Carl Jung departed from Freud’s theory.  Same with Lacan, whom I want to read again, and who departs from Freud’s “castration theory” and discourse, and is another major contributor to psychoanalysis theory. Also, I want to learn more as to why Freud was criticized by later theorists as having “bourgeois” tendencies and theories. It stands to reason that Freud was  from a patriarchal dominated time and that later psychoanalysis theorists probably delve into psychoanalysis more equally from feminist’s perspective.

Reflection on Structuralism and Semiotics

Last week I wrote my analysis on Formalism and Carnivalesque, and with the reading of  Shklovsky and Bakhtin, coupled with class discussion and Dr. Wexler’s incorporation of the Bananas defamiliarization clip, I have a pretty decent comprehension of the material. I was concerned, however, over what I felt was complex material of Saussure semiology last week, and I was relieved to be able to grasp it better in a quick discussion with a classmate-Jan—and then Dr. Wexler’s advertisement exercise, which distinguished the signification process of the signifier and the signified, i.e. semiotics. 

 At class’s end I overheard an animated conversation between Eric and Dr. Wexler of “archetypes” in the movie Clockwork Orange, which I would have found more interesting had I seen the movie in the last thirty-five years and had retained Northrop Frye’s discourse on “The Archetypes in Literature” better, so the next day I went to Best Buy and bought the Clockwork Orange DVD—which I hope to see soon, and I reread Frye.

We do have a lot of theorists to cover in class, and I hope we can spend some more time in discussing Frye, and Tzvetan Todorov. Frye, I believe, tied in Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis theory of the collective archetypical memory to his “archetypes” in literature.  Todorov’s discourse on narratology is very structured; it is interesting how he creates “a scientific knowledge of literature” (Leitch 2022).

For tomorrow’s class, I have read Sigmund Freud, and I can see how one can incorporate his theories to literature as he has done with Oedipus Rex and Hamlet. Later tonight, I will read Jacques Lacan.  It is interesting, but I think Todorov up to this point is the only critic who remains living. Tomorrow, I look forward to the class presentation and Dr. Wexler’s lecture and exercises.