Organizing concepts and questions this week:
- Racial and sexual identities: how can we talk usefully about different means of social/linguistic constructions of identity?
- Photographs and meaning—why do some images seem to wound us when we look at them?
- Frivolity in music. Outside of Lady Gaga, is there anyone making a real persona of themselves? Maybe Vampire Weekend has caught onto something with this African-inflected, Nantucket donning, horchata drinking thing…
In what way does David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men present us with a realist picture of everyday experience? How do DFW’s footnotes, revisions, re-visits, and self-referential language construct a sense of our disconnection from one another? What I do know the answer to is that I imitated him once before; and jumped on the obituary bandwagon a few years back. As always, RIP dude.
Roland Barthes’ confounding Camera Lucida tries to explain how photographs create meaning—tries to take apart the experience of being literally wounded by an aspect of a photo. He separates analysis of photography into studium and punctum. The former denotes meaning that comes from our understanding of historical, political, cultural references. The latter denotes the personal “wounding” that the photograph inflicts on viewers.
For me in this picture, the studium is Barthes’ Frenchness. The casual organization of his papers and the beautiful handwriting that I can only assume those folders in the background contains. The punctum for me is in the cigarette, limp, and forgotten while looking up toward some as-yet un-articulated thought. The cigarette for me stands in for the way Barthes must have interacted with the world, leaving aside objects and tactility while trying to figure out how to make sense of them in the first place.
Okay, so being the most famous African-American intellectual in the world couldn’t prevent Skip Gates from getting arrested “breaking into” his own home, but before the “Beer-Gate” fiasco, Gates’ The Signifying Monkey made important claims about the ability of language to construct racial identity. Gates tries to rehabilitate the conception of “blackness” by saying that racial identity gets constructed in discursive practice. In other words “ways of saying” translate into “ways of being.”
Really? My big problem with this claim is that it doesn’t seem to map onto the way that racial relations work in the real world. No one is a racist because of unshared discursive practices.
Album this Week:
Inspired by California? Okay, maybe. Whatever. Frivolity and playfulness, sure. There’s something about horchata that I think we can all agree makes us a little crazy. I agree with Pitchfork’s assessment that there’s still “plenty” for haters to hate about Vampire. But I don’t want to be the last person in the universe to say this: Contra makes an understated, very important claim in this sophomore release—it’s okay for music to be enjoyable, and even weird. Really. I do hope that they stop wearing those silly cardigans. God, I hate it when people wear those everywhere…
