Art, Rufo, and Baudrillard

Thanks to Ken Rufo for making Baudrillard's idea of simulation a little clearer to me. I especially liked his example of Universal Studio's ET ride.

My roommate is currently working on her senior studio art project. What she is doing is having people think of and then draw their most memorable dream. She then draws her own interpretation of her dream from the dreamer's depiction. After which she paints the dream somewhere on the person's body using both drawings as reference. In addition, she is also using other artist's depictions of dreams as reference. Finally, she will photograph the painting in order to display it in her exhibit. Through Rufo's description I thought that this could be related to Baudrillard's ideas when looking at the three steps of simulation.

1. Simulation stands in for or represents basic reality:
The dreamer's drawing captures or seems to represent the reality of what happened in the dream.

2. Simulation hides the absence of reality or misrepresents/distorts reality behind it:
The artist uses the drawing to create her own depiction of what the dream might have been like. Since she is
most often using drawings from 'non-artists' as reference, the artist is using an already distorted replica of
'reality'(or at least a sort of original, I understand calling a dream reality is problematic in itself but bear
with me please) and further distorts it by making it more aesthetically pleasing, almost romanticizing it.

3. Simulation produces it own reality/disguises the fact there is no corresponding reality underneath:
The artist produces painting on body by looking at images not only created by her and the dreamer but of
other artists' dream paintings as well. This further romanticizes it and hides the true 'reality' of the dream. It
hides the absence of original ( the dream) because it has been distorted so much it loses touch with the
original.

I hope this made some sense to you.

Over and out,
J.H.

Barthes killed the author, now the author is haunting him?

Barthes says, " to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." What he is saying (or what I believe he is saying) is that by asserting an author, the biases or experiences of an author serve as the definitive explanation of meaning within the text.

I read a quick post from a blog on wordpress (here) that briefly describes his take on Barthes' theories. In it he says, "in literature, even though the writer is the origin of the words on the page, the voice it could be could be anyone’s." This got me thinking about the pseudonyms we picked for our blogs. A pseudonym allows a blog to be personal because it can be anybody. It can be you. It is void of the author's context and allows the reader to be unbiased. With an author, the reader can, even unconciously, think about an author's life or previous works which may lead the reader to preconceived meanings associated with the author.

Barthes is, however, (although he does not think who is speaking matters within a text) still concerned with where the power in the text is coming from. He wants to explore the author's relation to the text without an unequivocal appeal to them as authority of meaning.

With that being said, I kind of think of Barthes' idea of an author as a ghost writer. A ghost writer's text has an author, yet his anonymity can create unbiased readings. I hope Barthes can sleep at night with all those ghost hanging around.

Love,
Juliana

Derrida

I think there is a sense of irony in attempting to capture the true Derrida in a documentary film. He kind of deconstructs the idea of making a documentary, pointing out that it is impossible to accurately portray somebody once the camera is present. Derrida even makes it a point to tell the crew that he would usually stay in his pajamas all day if they were not there. Hence, the cameras presence cannot do what they came to do, accurately portray Derrida's everyday life. I think Derrida would agree that the film is more telling of the creator because they are making it the way they want to and portraying him the way they think he should be portrayed. So really it is a better biography of the producers? hmmmm...

The fact that the creators decided to keep this little bit in shows they probably understand the irony in their work. They instead seem to try to work with Derrida on understanding whether or not an author's ideas and contributions are all that matters. Are the specifics of personal biography relevant to understanding the work? But then again, I guess we have already come to understand that there is little possibility of creating a true biography, so should this question even stand?

tree huggers and post-structuralists.

The idea that "the bond between the signifier and signified is radically arbitrary" makes sense to me. The signifier is the sound or text while the signifier is the concept or idea. The signified and the signifier make a sign. So the signifier would be 'tree' and the signified would be the leafy thing outside. What Saussure is saying is that the relationship between the word 'tree' and what a tree actually is arbitrary. Basically, somebody just made it up. The word 'tree' in no way reflects the essential treeness of the tree. Although, the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, that does not mean the sign is not important. Sticking with the tree example, when I say tree in English everybody I am talking to understands what I mean. Although they may have a different type of tree in mind, they have a basic understanding, and this makes signs important.

I think the readings on post-structuralism supplemented my understanding of this statement. They did, however, complicate my understanding of truths and facts. While structuralists find stable meaning through binary opposition (i.e. day/night, hot/cold, etc), post-structuralists believe that there is none. Post-structuralists find that there are no facts, only interpretations. This is because the signifier is attached to many meanings and there is no stable relationship between the sign and the signified, so there is no truth. This is not to say there is no meaning to the sign. Because post-structuralists do not find stable meaning with binary oppositions, their center is not fixed and this causes a mere slippage of meaning when trying to center/decenter the text.