A nerdy video from the left

An interesting clip on Guy Debord. Who is Guy Debord? A critical Theorist in the lineage of the Frankfurt School and famous in his critique on modernity and its spectacular wonders. To him, I ask: How much is spectacle, how much is simply existence? Where is the point of intersection between the social imagination and the psychological construct? Enjoy.

A Post on Vegetarianism

Lately, I’ve been asked why I am a vegetarian. Because I grew up in a vegetarian family, sometimes I forget that vegetarianism is not the norm, that not all people understand why vegetarians would choose to not eat meat as a life conviction. “Meat is too good”, some people tell me, “Can’t survive without it”. Others add, “How do you know meat is not good if you’ve never tried it?” It’s true, there are certain things I can’t say if I’ve never tried eating meat. However, what I can say is that there are moral, environmental, religious, health, social, philosophical, political, and personal reasons for why I choose not to eat meat. Since I won’t be able to discuss all of these points in detail, I will focus this particular post on the personal reason. Personally, I chose not to eat meat out of a respect for and an awareness in the processes in life.

In the world we live in today, technology and globalization has made it easy to create, design, package, ship, shelve, and store products at such a rate previously unimaginable. Such an efficiency makes life more convenient, and it provides consumers with many more options to choose from. However, this inundation of products creates an overload that removes us from the process of production. When we walk into a supermarket, we see the product, the price, but not the process. This technological expediency creates a gap in our awareness between the product/price and the process that was involved. This awareness about the process, I would argue, is significant to living a meaning life, and the lack of awareness produces behaviors that are less sensitive to the cost/benefits, political dynamics, and interacting relationships in the world.

All things involve process, and this process can be considered like “history”. A leader has a history of learning and growth (going to school, growing up with friends, developing mentors, and finally becoming the leader perceived today), a product has a history of production, and an animal has a history of maturation (as all humans do), etc. To lose awareness in understanding such processes makes it more easy to navigate in our busy world. However, this detachment also removes a deeper respect and appreciation for the things we interact with. If I don’t know a leader personally, blaring headlines about his/her sudden death would mean little to me;  if I am unaware of the production process of a product, the fact that such items were produced with child/slave labor would mean little to me; if I forget that animals also live life, that they grew up from little babies, the fact that they were fattened up in cages,  injected with hormones, and cut up in a slaughter house will mean nothing to me as I order my 99 cent hamburger. Only the price would matter.

The loss in social meaning that results from detaching ourselves from the history of things around us can be illustrated in the following twists: what if the leader who died in the scenario above was your personal mentor who changed your life? What if the cheap diamond ring you bought on ebay was cut from a relative who was raped and killed in a third world country? What if the animal that was gutted and served to you in a 99 cent burger was the pet you had since you were 3? These alternative scenario clearly highlight how differently you would feel if these objects revealed their history as something that was intimately connected to your life. Ultimately, an appreciation for these inherent histories, an awareness that they exist, and a respect for their inherent values are what lend me personal strength in my conviction as a vegetarian.

Barthes’s Mythologies

I’m taking the lazy way out on my Blog posting by attaching a Precis I wrote for Roland Barthes’s “Mythologies. “Interestingly, I felt like I was reading a manual on being “French”,  as if I were peeking underneath the folds of the “French Zeitgeist” and finding nothing but emptiness. Too bad “Mythologies” was written in 1910s–I wondering what a Barthes treatment of contemporary corporate media culture would render… I bet the entries would probably take up 1000 pages, if not more. Enjoy the Precis.

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The basic message that Barthes seems to convey is that all things which can be read as text (objects, people, pictures, etc, and other representations) can be made into “myth”. To be made into a myth is to be emptied of historicity, to be removed from the contingent present. Barthes describes a myth in various ways: a myth is a type of speech, a naturalized symbol, a text stolen of its expressivity. A myth is depoliticized speech that is removed from the interactions in the world and made into ideology that is static and deliberate.

One “myth” that comes to mind could be the picture of the “Tank Man” standing before an army of tanks during the Tiananmen Square massacre. The tank man has been emptied of his history—after all, the man probably had to go home after his act of defiance and eat dinner. Yet, rather than be viewed in its full dynamism, the image of the tank man has become a natural symbol for the resistance of Democracy in the face of oppression. No other interpretations on the image seems to be as compelling as the mythology that has been achieved.

Bathes makes many other illustrations of the myths present in everyday life, and the entire first half of the book is dedicated to this project of breaking down and analyzing daily mythologies. The second half of the book takes a different turn and instead provides the argumentative thrust for his “myth busting” essays.  Basically, Barthes breaks down the semiotic structure of language to demonstrate how “mythologization” works on a linguistic level. He describes in detail how signification is attributed to a “signifier-signified” relationship, how second-order associations are constructed, and how meaning is re-constructed to create the mythology.

Barthes’s project of deconstructing the myths of everyday life seems to be situated in a kind critical theory that is a post-Marxist interrogation of the “manufactured ideologies” that have become naturalized through time. This approach also seems quite Nietzschean, as it attempts to reaffirm the possibility of radical re-signification by focusing on the seemingly trivial objects and symbols in the contingent present (Wine and Milk, wrestling, children toys, etc). The audience of such a work seems to be those who are engaged in a similar project of re-evaluating the social norms.

A few questions I had while reading Barthes’s Mythologies:
Where is “myth” located on the trafficking between the literal and the figurative?
Is it considered “artistic” in Wilde’s sense for a symbol to take on the figure of “myth”?
Is there an author for “myth making”? If so, who claims authority? Can it be controlled?
Does Nietzsche’s “How one becomes what one is” relate to the project of myth making?
What are the social implications of consuming mythologies?

The Mysterious World of Cosmetics

I haven’t blogged in forever, so I thought I should at least post something before my blog slowly withered and died. I was watching some videos on resistance to internet censorship in China when I came across this one youtube video on women cosmetics. I don’t know what got me curious enough to check it out, but as I watched it, my jaw dropped and hung loose for the rest of the video. I really never noticed makeup on women. It’s something I kind of treated like the leaves rustling on trees and the wind blowing around me–something completely natural and normalized in my life. After watching this video, I realized why women apply makeup, as well as how tricky, artistic, deceptive, and intriguing the entire process is. Basically, it’s art on the face, on oneself, a re-creation of what is to depict a more perfect ideal. To put it crudely, it is essentially a mask that covers what lies beneath. But then again, isn’t everything we do in life (what we wear, what we say, how we say it, what we watch, Facebook) a social mask unto itself? Enjoy the video.