This is a commodities world.

The film, The Joneses, portrays a family built on the foundation of capital. What appears to be a super successful and thriving young family is really a marketing scheme undercover. They are not family members, but coworkers. Their purpose is to sell the life they appear to be living. Everything is for sale in their world, indeed, everything is a commodity. This film is an excellent portrayal of the capitalistic society Marx concentrated his writings on. Much like Marx’s writings, the film depicts a world completely constructed on the collection of things- the acquirement of commodities. The Joneses move into an upper middle class neighborhood and drive brand new cars. They have the latest toys and display their marriage and family life as healthy and thriving, all for the sake of a sale. The neighbors who surround them, trapped in the system of their materialistic existence, seek to replicate the Joneses happiness through the acquirement of similar or better commodities than they have in hopes of obtaining that mirage of content. But sadly, that day can never come. A capitalist system has one main focus-and so do the Joneses-capital. This relentless pursuit of profit leads the Joneses down a pit of estranged relationships, an end that Marx would very much attest to- an end that the capitalist system cannot escape.

Occupation precedes existence....

In our free market economy it is easy for the trained eye to notice the malignant forms of capitalism Marx and Engels had warned about. The detachment that the capitalist machine demands of the employer and the employee further alienate the human family and separates societies into unequal classes that clash in a bloody struggle to survive. With the state of the global economy in shambles and the American middle class spiraling down a turbulent tornado of unending debt and dried out unemployment benefits, one can turn to the communist writings and see this prophecy fulfilled over a hundred years ago. It is the inevitability of a corrupted system. I found these readings particularly helpful to my arsenal of societal scopes in which to view the various problems the world faces. Marx noted that: “Consciousness can never be anything else than the conscious existence and the existence of men is their life process,” (668). In other words and in opposition with previous enlightenment philosophies prior, our occupations constitute our existence. If a man works 15 hour days in a cramped cauldron of a warehouse with no room to grow and only enough free time to eat and sleep the bare minimum, where is his time for personal growth? Where in this day is he allotted the time to ponder and question within himself? Marx argued that he didn’t and this is one of the fundamental errors within a capitalist society. The man is defined by his work. It controls his being and if he is being exploited for profit, treated like everything else in the free market world; as a commodity, then it is not his existence that precedes essence but in fact his occupation that precedes his existence. It is the narrator of his state of mind and in an exploited economic system it can never lead to a happy ending.

Work Cited

Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

If a book is never read, does it exist?

Last week’s readings were, for me, very enjoyable. Probably because I was able to understand them coherently but also because I agree in the arguments presented. Sartre spoke of the simultaneous connection between the author and the reader and how the two share an on-going pact, or agreement, between the text and that this union is an active one. The reader feels what the characters feel, go through the same angst and complications that they do and are resolved when their characters triumph. Similar to Saussure and the structuralists, Heidegger spoke of the importance in language not as a device to convey poetry or prose but as the epicenter to our being. With that said in regards to the novel, it is what gives birth to the author. Its language creates the relationship between author and reader but also casts a shadow on the author. With the emergence of the reader comes the death of the author in Barthes view. Whence the reader becomes the controller of the text, investing time and emotions into the text then the author becomes irrelevant. For it is the reader who determines the outcome of the text, the author is merely a dictator, a scribe jotting down thoughts. So, like the age old question of the falling tree in the forest; if a book is never read, does it exist?

Oedipus who?

For Freud, the human race is a bunch of egocentric maniacs who wish to kill their fathers and live happily ever after in bed with their mothers. But the genius of our species is our ability to cover these conspiracies up within our mind, before creating a dystopian reality fit for an Anthony Burgess novel. Our mind, consisting of the main conscience and the subconscious is where we filter these primal urges to fit the face of societal norms. But to the coke snorting psychoanalyst, our subconscious was more influential than we’ve previously thought. Arguing the whole idea of ‘I think therefore I exist’ Freud contested that this wasn’t necessarily so, that ‘human reason is not master in its house’. He firmly believed that our subconscious was the driver of the car; that even though we may not in reality be stabbing our fathers and bedding our mothers we seek in our relationships and in other aspects of our lives what our subconscious really desires. We marry the woman with qualities like our mother or we date men who make us feel safe like our father; all in perfect accord of the super ego’s approval. But whether we live in total light of our ego or id, we’ll all be spending the rest of our days trying to replace the phallus and having nightmares of castration.

I know you are, because I'm not.

It is hard for one imagine a life without language. Our interaction through complex language is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom, but what is language? And do we speak, even when we don’t? Even in our thoughts there is a sort of discourse going on between the consciences’s and even in the unspoken lies an undercurrent of language. But what is that language? Saussure spoke of language as “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (857). Plainly put, language is a system of binaries. We distinguish a word, an object, from its counterpart, its immediate opposite. We wouldn’t know black without white, a dog without a cat or happiness without some form of pain to separate the feelings. But language is more than that also. It is a system of signs, all arbitrary in which we use myriad of images to place the word with the object. A dog isn’t only a dog. It is man’s best friend, it’s faithful, all loving. The one image of the word or of the creature conveys many different ideas which we connect with that one arbitrary image. If this isn’t confusing enough, Saussure also contended that since we know of something by knowing more clearly what it is not than the whole existence of that one idea exists solely in the basis of everything that exists without it. So, I guess the real saying is; I know you are because I’m not.

Work Cited
De Saussure, Ferdinand. "Course in General Linguistics." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

When the Tower(s) of Babel Fell.

Well, it goes without saying what this image is. Perhaps no other image in our own time tells a more vivid account of the last decade. September 11th was a day in which the American people saw a shift in their way of life. The destruction of those buildings was also the the destruction of a severe class division within our country. It tarnished the old American way of life, ushering in changes that trickled down to all the social spheres of our society. Forever shaping the way we interact with each other.

The decade leading up to September 11th, 2001 was a sort of golden age of American capitalism. The Clinton administration saw a surplus in the booming American economy and the only valid way to measure our wealth would have been to look up at our skyscrapers. The major cities of the country were blanketed by the cloud touching towers of major imperialist wealth- but a division existed. Wall Street and its allies were a society unto itself. The top mega conglomerates and their political puppets in the Capital were living and speaking in one part of the country, while the vast middle and lower classes lived among themselves, also divided by their own ideological road blocks. Like the Tower of Babel erected in Biblical scriptures, our own consumer crazed society separated the people from communicating with a common tongue. The different social spheres spoke in their own language. September 11th changed all of this. Similar to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival, the terrorist attacks on our country lifted the divisions within our own national community. Bakhtin stated that "all were considered equal during carnival"(10), as was the American people on September 12th. Rich man, poor man, school teacher and stock broker, politician and postal worker all shared a common voice- one of patriotic nationalism. We stood together not only in spirit but in the way we interacted. A new vocabulary was adopted were Puerto Ricans, Irish, and Afro-Americans alike were first ‘American’ and second everything else. The heteroglossia that had kept us apart for so long was crushed, our language of freedom was a concrete opinion. Phrases like, ‘the war on terror’ and ‘national security’, were understood by all and the divisions which segregated the realm of society for a decade was toppled by the forces of a peoples pride. Bakhtin stated that, "a unitary language is not something given but is always in essence posited. And at every moment of its linguistic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia"(35). And though the divisions of a heteroglossic world still permeate thru the global community, and American unity was established. We were a nation, standing together towards one common enemy, and we all spoke the same language; freedom.

Work Cited

Bakhtin, Mikail. Rabelias and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984. Print

"Seven Major Events in Afghanistan. Timeline." Dipity - Find, Create, and Embed Interactive Timelines. Web. 27 Feb. 2011. .

Enlighten me, please.

What is enlightenment? Is it Buddha perched upon a large rock in a mist filled forest in the dawn of day? Is it the Pastor preaching parables upon the masses? Or is it the newly liberated people of an oppressed nation? Is it discovering new knowledge or evaluating old ones? Like most of the topics on this blog, if not all, it is certainly objective and open to interpretation but there are some basics for which to guide you in your dark filled corridor toward enlightenment. It is a slow and gradual process, like puberty, sprouting from below and making its way up. The theorist Immanuel Kant simply put enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self imposed immaturity” (What is Enlightenment?, Kant). This is a unique claim in which our immaturity is self imposed rather than just a habit of our being, part of the human growth. But furthermore, what is immaturity? Is it a lack of peach fuzz on your chin or missing vibrato in ones voice? Again I turn to Kant who said “immaturity is the inability to use ones understanding without guidance from another” (What is Enlightenment?, Kant). As much as it is up to us to rid the mind of the affliction of immaturity it lies also in the hands of the community. An oppressed populace cannot claim enlightenment when their liberties are constricted and confined to the corners of a particular regime or ideology, only freedom can usher in enlightenment. When one is free to think for himself, free from the burdens of a career or designated post, and free from the obligations society demands, then and only then can a public take delight in its own enlightenment- only then can the shackles of an immature mind be lifted and allow man to teach himself and others.


"Kant's "What Is Enlightenment"" University of Pennsylvania | Department of English. Web. 26 Feb. 2011.