#emilypoststructuralism

Q: Give me an opening line for a horror story?

It doesn't have to be particularly witty or brilliant-- just a line that makes you want to read on.

Q: Parents said i cant drive my car?

So im 16 and i bought a car i pay the ensurance i have a job i dont need anything from my parents besides a house to live in. And they told me im not aloud to drive my car because i have bad grades in school. Can they legally tell me that?

A: Legality is a construct; where there is power, there is Law. Due to the incomplete saturation of Capitalism into society, there are still a few areas of life that contain non-economic demonstrations of power, and parentage is one such location. Regardless of civil law, you are under the heavier thumb of the Ur-Father.

I am more interested in the fact that “[ur] not aloud to drive.” Is it the sound of driving that is (metaphorically) driving your parents to distraction?? Are they simply demanding total silence, a movement that makes no noise? In itself, this is a far more effective punishment, because they are depriving you of voice, demanding an impossible task. Like Sisyphus in the Greek tradition, your release is contingent on impossibility. You are presumably “allowed” to drive, as long as it is not out loud. Your parents have engaged you in a classic double bind. You must either sacrifice movement or voice, but cannot have both.

Q: What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Q: What are the last signs of winter?

A: Ah! The signifier and the sign! Let’s talk meteorological semiotics! While we often think of “seasons” in terms of absolute fact, they are actually a complex of signs that indicate a social category--anyone who has lived in the upper Midwest knows that “snow” has almost no relation to “winter.” Snow is simply a sign that indicates an attempt by human language to encompass the impossible variety and chaos of the elements.

Additionally, each sign does not directly relate to the signifier; it is embedded in a system (“snow” is opposed to “rain”; “cold” to “heat”, etc) that gives both context and meaning. Furthermore, no single sign can independently relate to signified--indeed, its very physical presence displaces the signified, pushing it out of the system and always referring instead to an absence.

Looking at “winter” from a Derridian perspective, we can see that the “last signs” can only come when a system enters total closure, that is an ultimate Truth rather than an absence. Can we truly see that happen? Is winter ever truly over? If we look in the cracks in the meteoro-logic of human chronological systems, the signs of winter continually persist year-round; the signifier cannot truly disappear. Even in its absence, we can see traces of snow in rain, traces of death in life.

Q: Do you think that famous people are superior than the rest of us who arent famous?

A: “Fame” is a random manifestation of the social consciousness. We can read them as a libidinal expression of our own misplaced needs. They are created by the public as pure desire; they are randomly chosen--much like the sacrificial kings of pre-modern Europe described in Frazer’s Golden Bough--to purge our own needs. Since the social order exists to exclude the bulk of its members from full humanity, celebrity allows us to experience what we want by proxy, totally submerged in the Spectacle.

However, fame comes at the cost of full humanity; we need only look at the destruction of child stars to see the horror of celebrity. Unlike the Celtic Ur-Kings, these individuals sacrifice their own subjectivity in order to perpetuate the “public good.” In a way, Britney Spears does belong to us--she is not herself.

They are ourselves; the divide between their subjectivity and our own does not exist. They are the dark id that resides in our minds.

Q: I want my wife to remove her ex husbands name off her body. is this a reasonable request?

A: The body is a symbolically fraught territory. Following the concept of biopower from Foucault’s later work, domination and oppression begin with the control of the body, either through physical, social, religious, or psychological restrictions imposed by a ruling class. Western heteronormativity has long been interested in the domination of the female subject’s body through marriage, chastity, bikinis, make up, &ct. Indeed, it could be said that femininity can only exist when a woman’s body is elsewhere.

However, I have no idea who you are. If you are a woman, perhaps you are attempting to remove your wife from the matrix of heterosexual bondage. The alternative (that you are a man attempting to regulate your wife’s body) is too disgusting for me to consider at the moment. Therefore, I will proceed that you are a woman, albeit one who has jumped on the bandwagon of normalizing gay marriage.

Q: Good love song for 10th anniversary?

  A: John Cage’s seminal (de)composition, “4’33”” would make an excellent love song for your tenth anniversary. In the piece, any number of musicians sit down with their instruments and do not play them for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. While this is sometimes naively characterized as “silence,” it actually highlights the ambient noise created by bodies in space. The rustle of a program, the shifting in one’s seat, an errant fart: all of these are the music of the every day too often ignored by global capital because they cannot be monetized.

  By playing this for your anniversary, you will have room to realize how horrifying your bodies are, and how lucky you are for finding someone willing to ignore your own failures. The audio/visual “performance” of the song will highlight the years you have spent ignoring each other, growing increasingly older and more foreign, your bodies slowly decaying.

Q: Are turkeys real?

My sister keeps saying that they aren't real. I say that there are pictures of them but she says there are pictures of Santa. I told her that they have been scientifically documented and she said I needed to state my source. I told her to look on the internet but she said you can't know if things on the internet are true or false.

A: Your sister has a very astute understanding of the constructed quality of our human intervention into “nature.” Indeed, our epistemology of the “world” is ultimately based on categories that are constructed by language. A “turkey” does not exist any more than “humanity” exists--they are words that refer to a unfathomable experiential spectrum.

Your sister is also rightly suspect of the image--it divorces the object from the subject in a way that is always interpretive. Just like language, the image creates new meaning by displacing the “truth,” always alienating the word from the thing. A turkey may exist somewhere, but until we can bridge the impassable gap between knowing and being, we can only access “turkey” and its simulacra. Since this is impossible, the encounter between the subject and its Other (in this case the turkey) is impossible.