My Hyperreality

Apparently my last post wasn’t as funny to other people as it was to me - so perhaps I need to explain myself? Let’s just say that it was a hilarious pseudo discussion of Judith Butler’s hatred of the nickname “Judy” in public spaces because she feels that it separates her, the individual, from her scholarly work. In other words it makes her identity less important, more controllable, more child-like, if you would. Some of the reasons that these associations are made when one uses the name “Judy” instead of “Judith” are A) because “Judy” is a nickname, familiar, while “Judith” is more formal and demands more respect and B) because thanks to actresses like Judy Garland the name “Judy” is alludes to a nostalgic representation of traditional femininity. Hence the hilarity of the statement “One Judy alludes to all Judy’s” and the inclusion of the photo of Judy Garland herself.

Just trust me, okay? It was funny.

In other news the three weeks ahead look like they will be stress filled, after all, The End Of The Universe Is Nigh. Or rather, University. And then it’s time for fun fun fun! By which, of course, I mean “time to find a full time job for the break in order to earn lots of monneys”.

It’s moments like these when I think of that “Retirement” song by the Kaiser Chiefs:

There are many things that I would be proud of
If I’d only invented them such as the wheel
The washing machine and the tumble dryer
On these inventions surely I could retire

I want to retire
No longer required
I want to get by without the man on my back
A tear in my eye
With a heart full of pride
I must go out on a high
And tell nobody why

There are many things that I know I could do
If I’d only have wanted to, such as create
The perfect soulmate everyone would admire
On this creation surely I could retire

If you’re interested, you can find the rest of this song’s lyrics here.

I, too, “want to retire,” preferably before I finish my degree and actually have to work. I just wish that I could invent something so spectacular and useful that I could retire off of it. Of course, I think that this is a common dream for our society (after all, it’s such a popular dream that songs are being written about it). Maybe it’s a reaction to seeing previous generations slaving away at hated jobs for years and years and years and only being able to actually enjoy their lives upon retirement. Let me be a bit clearer in terms of my desire to retire: it’s not that I don’t want to work at all, it’s that I want to work at doing something I love, and get paid enough that I get to do other things I love during my free time and still be able to pay rent/ a mortgage/ bills/ food costs. And unfortunately there are a lot of examples in recent history of this not being the status quo.

Anyways, I’m sort of distracted and flakey this evening, so I might just call it a night and go to bed, wake up early tomorrow morning and try and get a head start on the day/ my life. How lovely it will be to wake up at 5 in the morning to do assignments!

I’m still getting a handle on the intricacies of setting up my very own wordpress website. Tim has been a fantastic help, giving me various tips that I’ll try to put in to practice in the next few days. I must say, though, that I am somewhat annoyed by little niggly things that don’t work out how I think they should - for instance, though I have a “tag cloud” set up on my page (check it out - it’s over to the right of this post, and currently has the oh-so-clever name of “Signifiers“), it doesn’t look like the tags with which I have been tagging my entries (I use the plural form of this word, even though I’ve only written one other entry, because I am highly pretentious) aren’t showing up as part of the actual “tags” section at the bottom of these aforemention entries.

Speaking of convoluted sentences which run on forever, imagine my horror when I learned that my beloved Judith Butler was named winner of the “Bad Writing Contest” in 1998. Granted, the sentence is a bit on the long side:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

But should a theorist so fantastic and so controversial be subjected to the expectations of clear and comprehensible writing that the rest of us mere plebes must adhere to? I think not! After all, convoluted and dense writing means that readers must try harder to understand what she’s writing about! Butler is so amazing that not only does her theory force us to rethink conventions of gender representation, but the way she writes about her theory forces us to confront and reevaluate dominant ideologies about the construction of a sentence! Lead on, Judy, lead on!

And before anyone jumps on me and says “OMG YOU FOOL DON’T CALL JUDITH BUTLER JUDY SHE HATES THAT” I will preemptively respond with: I KNOW. I WAS BEING IRONIC. IT WAS HILARIOUS. I totally get that “It’s Judy in the living room, Judith in public.” Not that I know Judith in the living room .. If I did I probably wouldn’t call her Judy, though. I’d call her “J”. Or something. And while I myself never got a chance to read the fanzine Judy! (Which, incidentally, the big B herself was not a fan of), I totally wish it was still in publication. Check out what Richard Burt had to say about Judy! in his article “Getting off the Subject; Iconoclasm, Queer Sexuality, and the Celebrity Intellectual“:

“It is perhaps clear why Butler dislikes both being called Judy and the fanzine Judy!. For the fanzine is a form of imitation and gender insubordination that mimes and critically exposes Butler’s reliance on “the phallic regulatory norms of institutionalized criticism”: Judy! is a “speculative excess” that exposes the way Butler legitimates her performance of performativity through her own body, or more precisely, through the promise of access to it. Butler’s body matters, it’s “the body you want,” because it will make your body matter. Butler is the critic who will take you inside academia and out, “beyond the confines of the ivory tower” as the introduction to the Artforum interview puts it, if you purchase and mime Butler’s books in the appropriate way, if you submit, that is, to the authority of her lesbian phallus. This is precisely the serious point made comically in Judy!. On a page with the words lesbian phallus written in large Gothic script across it, we read this appreciation of Butler: “Judy is the number one dominator, and the only thing you or I can do is submit gladly. Take it with pride. Think of it like this: Kaja Silverman might be the Phallus masquerading as lack, and Teresa de Lauretis might be lack masquerading as the Phallus, but Judy is the Phallus masquerading as the Phallus.” Judy! isn’t simply a frivolous parody of Butler’s “serious” work, but seriously reveals the excessive, unwittingly self-parodying elements of that work. It puts “seriousness” in quotation marks, deconstructing the opposition between serious original and subversive parody.”

And now, for a little bit of color (of the gray scale sort), I give you a picture of Judy Garland, because one Judy alludes to all Judy’s.

I’ve created this blog (for a second time) in a bid to try and increase my thought coherency, and to have somewhere to record all those little bizarre musings I make (so that I don’t have to bother my long-suffering boyfriend or house mates with them). I’ve promised myself to write something on here once a week - regardless of how insane or stupid it may sound to me. Who knows, maybe something that I think sounds ridiculous may spark a religion, and soon the world would be covered with Ser-worshippers …

A brief note on the word “hyperreality” – a hunt through a dictionary might tell you that the term “hyperreality” refers to an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, but this is a pretty simplistic definition. Of course, mine is not likely to be much better, because I did say that this was going to be brief. French theorist Jean Baudrillard, now sadly deceased (I wanted to have his babies), theorized that our world has become so saturated with images and symbols (thank you consumerism) that any sense of objective reality lying behind these images or symbols has been obliterated. It is a world overrun with simulacra (another delicious Baudrillardian term): Images are reproduced so many times that they become objects themselves, rather than representing or reflecting them, self referential and devoid of their original meanings. These images, which simulate what they are representing, begin to be viewed as what they are representing, if that makes any grammatical sense at all to somebody other than myself.

Frederic Jameson’s notion of the depthless pastiche links in quite nicely to simulacra and hyperreality, as he theorizes that in our current postmodern environment we have a habit of simply yanking symbols and signifiers out of the past, ignoring and destroying its history as we mash it together with something else. Think of the proliferation of t-shirts with that iconic image of Che Guevara – I’m sure that there are some people out there who brand themselves with an image of El Che because they agree with his leftist guerilla actions, but I’m also sure that there are many people who buy and wear these shirts because they look awesome, and they’ve seen other people wearing them, so they must be awesome. The image of Che Guevera becomes a fashion statement, not a political statement.

I seem to have gone off topic a bit here … But that’s pretty standard for me. This is the interwebs, after all. Also, because this is the interwebs, and because right now I’m feeling lazy (and getting a headache due to sitting in a dark room and staring at a screen) I’m not going to give you any references, nya nya nya. But for a more in depth look at these theories, I recommend checking out Baudrillard’s own work, particularly his book Simulacra and Simulation, or Jameson’s book Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Also, The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought is a must in the arsenal of any individual who professes him/herself to be a cultural theorist.