Even though Ken Rufo was a little drawn out at times, I found it easy to keep my focus on what he was writing about. There were times in the lecture where I had no idea what he was talking about but I understood the example he gave. I differently have a better understanding of commodity. “Marx says that money is the pure commodity form because money can be exchanged for anything; in other words, it is pure exchange value and of course this hides all the labor that went into making it, labor that was probably dine in order to make the object have a use-value, and that was probably exploited so that the capitalist could turn it into surplus-value.” Thinking of commodity as money makes it easier to put into perceptive.
In my opinion Marxism is flawed because there can never be a moment where the workers unit and everyone will get equal share of everything. See this was the Chinese government,
Does this relate to the idea of the “mass production of objects and the general flow of wealth is making it possible more and more for people of lower classes to ‘simulate’ living like people in upper classes”? The mass production of items helps lower the value which in terms helps the lower class because now they can afford these ideas.
I wasn’t really big on the hay, cow exchange because I couldn’t stop thinking about wouldn’t you need the hay to feed the cow. But I grew up in the city so I’m not quite sure if cows eat hay. Anyways, I did like and understand the idea of the stock market. “Think about the stock if you want to see carried out (principle of simulation) to its extreme: a company can appear to be doing well because it exceeded expectations, even though the expectations were very low and it’s still not making a profit, and yet the value of the stock, and this the company, rises independently of the value of what they produce or how well their good are being received.” But I guess this all goes back to my question, does mass production have anything to do with the lower class balancing out with upper class?
I also really liked the example of the Epcot ride at Universal Studios, which is I’m assuming the ride where you get to see all the different parts from around the world, and the song “It’s a small world after all” keeps playing over and over again. And in the end of the ride Rufo thinks there’s really no hope of uncovering the real on our own. I can understand if you’ve lived or your from one of the countries and you see your culture represented my the dolls, your idea of the ‘real’ would not be corrupted. Whereas, if I see those dolls and go to the one of the countries represented, I’m not going to be influenced or have a preconceived notion of what the country is going to be like. Because I know the dolls or the doll makers interruption it going to be something totally different from what I experience. But I do agree with Baudrillard on that there can be no illusion in a world where everything is “realized”. But for the most part I think there is some and can realized and distinguished from others.
4 comments:
I too think I understand Marxism better after Rufo's guest lecture. I do think that you might be getting a little wrapped up in the political party rather that the literary theory which I believe are different. I also think that we have naturalized labour in our country, we don't care who made a product or how it was made, we just want to buy it. Also I'm not sure he was talking about the ride at Epcot (sp?) as much as he was talking about the whole place in general, but I do like what you said about the ride for the most part. It is all fake, Japan is not filled with women in kimonos, but we all believe it is because that is what is represented to us. Epcot is a simulacra.
Interestingly, Baudrillard's first use of simulation is in his very first book, System of Objects, in which he asserts that one of the benefits of mass production (and later, improvements in design) is it allows the lower classes to effectively "simulate" higher class life. For example, you can afford to buy a print of a Monet now, where you would never have been able to afford an actual Monet.
I feel like I understand Marxism a little better now as well, but still only in the form of communism. I never fully grasped how to analyze literature through a marxist view and I still don't.
Well think about Marxist criticism as either:
1) An explanation of how the literature helps produce false consciousness - how do the characters teach readers to be reconciled to their condition. For example, hero narratives, where one person makes all the difference, teaches the cult of the individual rather than collective, and encourages us to wait for a savior-figure, rather than work toward the revolution. Or sometimes literature will show how important it is to be true to yourself, rather than reform society. In this case, the literature is a vehicle of capitalist oppression.
2) As a product of the current tensions in capitalism, in which case you would analyze how the novel only came to be written as a result of capitalism. Rhetoric scholars use the term "invention," which describes this whole process by which a work comes to be. So think about how a work like The Secret is planned, from the beginning, to appeal to business folks. In this case, the literature is a symptom of the larger (capitalist) social structure from which it emerges, and this may be an intended or unintended (or at least unrecognized) process on the part of the "inventors."
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