Analysis 4: The Commoditizing of Catcher Freeman

Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism is that the commodity and its money-making potential become more important than the labor behind it and those exploited in the monetary pursuit which in this case is black Americans.   Marx states “But for the very reason that personal dependence forms the ground-work of society, there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality” (Marx 668), that there is no reason to ascribe traits to the physical products of labor outside of their intended use.  The fetish lies in people transforming a product with its specific physical uses into a commodity which encompasses not only its uses but its ascribed cash-value.  Cash-value gives the product an appeal that goes beyond its intended function, an appeal that never existed until people granted it that power.  The slave-trade exists as a real life example.  Slave auctions occurred where people would bid over slaves.  The physical composition of a human being cannot literally function as a means to produce money yet the auctioneers ascribe cash value to slaves.  In a literal, material sense the slave’s physical being is able to do work such as housecleaning or cotton-picking but with the fetishism  over the slave’s muscles, stamina, and other traits, the slave’s physical being transcends its intended function by becoming a symbol of power, status, and control in the eyes of the auctioneers.  A slave’s physique does not literally have the power to conjure money but in the eyes of the auctioneers it is common sense that toned muscles or sexual attractiveness does indeed conjure money.  Black people were literally entrapped by this commoditization process as well as by slavery itself directly in the episode “The Story of Catcher Freeman.”  

(this is where a clip would go but youtube really cracked down on Boondocks stuff)

The episode features a stereotypical Uncle Tom house slave named Catcher Freeman that intended to earn his freedom by creating the very first screenplay in hopes that his master would overlook Catcher’s forbidden literacy due to the script’s marketability and entertainment value.  As Catcher planned, the master is pleased with the script and says, “If you are selling, I am buying, you are going to be a very rich man, son (winks)” finally taking ownership over his illegitimate child, and thusly shocking Catcher with the revelation.  At the core of this exchange lies the commoditization of a major historical black success, the creation of the very first screenplay.  Originally the script exists as sheets of paper functioning merely as a medium to transcribe words however it changed by being commoditized.  Catcher originally fetishized those pages into a symbol of his potential freedom as well his potential death should the master decide to slay him for the crime of literacy.  The script in the master’s eyes clearly assumed the “fantastic form” of money and fame which is indicated by his joy upon reading it as well as his superficial adopting of his son well over twenty years after his birth.  Master committed a blatant act of commodity fetishism by placing more importance in the script’s money-making potential than in actual love for his son.  Catcher is effectively reduced to a product while his script is upgraded to the human status of being the master’s son, indicating that black success in America has traditionally been a costly matter in which monetary success is paid by becoming even more vulnerable to the distortion of one’s own identity.

Marxism and Commodities

In class this week we learned about Karl Marx and one thing in particular that is still very relevant to the modern day is his thoughts on commodity fetishism.  In short, commodity fetishism is the process of degrading people into things while simultaneously upgrading things into a people-like status.  That is to say that objects gain qualities and values that humans have ascribed to them that are literally non-existent within the raw materials of the object.  This fetishism is measured in the cash-value that people have ascribed to the object which transforms it into a commodity.  An example would be a new pair of Michael Jordon Nikes.  The original function of these shoes is to literally cover your feet to protect them from the harsh ground and from dirt.  However, many Michael Jordon fans fetishize this object and recall the famous free-throw line dunk that’s depicted in the logo or Jordon’s athleticism, clutch victories, and legacy in general.  It is this fetishism, the needless value added to merely a few dollars’ worth of fabric, bringing the retail price up to over a hundred dollars. 

There are also more components to this commodity fetishism seeing as that is only the process of a thing becoming more person-like when there is also the process of the people behind the product becoming more thing-like.  We are blinded by the beautiful commodity, those precious Jordons while at the same time we don’t think about the laborers who are being paid the least possible wage that the owners can get away with.  We are blinded by our fetishism of the commodity so much so that we forget about the possible child laborers, or outsourcing of prison labor, or 15-hour shifts that people went through to produce it.  The commodity is brought to the forefront, the labor and suffering is hidden in the background.  It is the final product, the fetishized commodity, seen on the shelves in the stores, in advertisements, on television, on our bodies, in our closets, and wherever else rather than the laborers and their plight.

Analysis 3: Reader Response to the Misadventures of Nick Twisp

                Reader response theory is an idea that states that meaning within a narrative is not derived solely on the writings and wishes of the creator and that meaning is primary derived from the readers’ own interpretation and take on it.  This theory can be applied to any text and for the purposes of this write-up we shall examine C.D. Payne’s “Youth In Revolt.”  This novel has a rather large cult following and that is mainly attributable to the intensely crude variety of situational humor, sexuality, and morally questionable decisions.  At the surface it is taken as a hilarious book widely appreciated for its toilet humor.  However, that is only one established reading of the book and there lies a certain depth and sophistication to it; so much so that I personally first read this novel in an academic setting in a community college critical thinking English class.

                Beyond the crude surface of the language lie numerous subtexts and insipient stories within the work.  A very basic reading would be that the nerdy and misguided protagonist, Nick Twisp, a naïve adolescent that believes he can learn and do anything from reading a book on it, vies for the affections and body of Sheeny Saunders through a string of over-the-top situations to weave a tale of dirty jokes and moral ambiguity.  However, different readers pick up on the different subtexts to weave their primary understanding of the novel.  An alternate reading may place not an emphasis on the blue material but rather on the subpar parenthood and lack of responsible adults throughout the book.  Every parent, middle-aged citizen, older sibling, etc. within the book all set grossly irresponsible examples and standards for the teenagers to follow.  They’re also naïve and blind to the goings-on of their children which may stand to be holding the mirror to the current state of American families; the cluelessness, the apathy, the detachment between parent (or guardian) and child.  Another reader may interpret that the primary meaning behind the story is one closely associated to ideals of adventure and freedom that resemble novels such as Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.”  The main protagonist in that novel, Sal Paradise and Nick Twisp both chase after ideal personas that they wish to follow or achieve –Dean Moriaty for Sal, Sheeny Saunders for Nick.  They follow these ideal personas and on their wild adventures they meet many people, get in misadventures, chase and hunger a freedom and experience, and all the while attempting to stave off forces such as loneliness or consequence.  Another reading could closely follow the collapse of the moral fiber of America and that the novel is a parody on our moral degradation of our adults, how it trickles down to the children, and how the irresponsible use of deception, drugs, sex, theft, etc. has horrid consequences and that in our reality they’re manifested in different forms.  The burning of Berkeley within the novel could be seen as the ultimate decaying and compromise of our values through the very real consequences of the “Youth In Revolt” adolescent behavior that can be teen pregnancy, drug addiction, jailed parents, neglected children, etc.  The point is that the amount of readings for even the simplest text varies and interpretations become vast because the filter within the mind of each reader is bound to vary considerably; reader response theory is in recognition of this.

Language as Language; It's Birth as Death

          Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author” is an intriguing piece that presents to us a powerful contradiction.  That paradox summed up as the author’s act of writing as his own death; birth of text begetting a death of the author.  He states that “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.  Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing”; that the first voice eradicated is that of the author.  He asserts that the attachment of narrative to the person who writes it and our idea of what an author is serves as a relatively new function born no more than a few hundred years ago and that meaning within a work is centered on the author’s life and experiences to a fault; that the author’s voice is lost in the voices their writings give rise to such as the voice the reader who reads adds to a text, the language, by writers who intentionally avoid writing characters they’ve experienced in their actual lives and so on.  Barthes speaks to make us aware of the implications that the existence of the author holds on our understanding and interpretation of literary works. 

By removing the author and the implications related to his existence we then can focus on other more numerous voices within the text.  Such implications that the author presents would be the author’s past and his life experience providing a context for the setting and characters within a narrative.  Another would be the belief that the author feeds his being into a narrative and acts as its God, suggesting again that the author’s life impacts the goings-on of a narrative.  However, when the author is removed we can focus on other ways to view a narrative.  One way would be to focus on the language without the implication of the author’s cadence behind the words; the way the reader speaks and reads the narrative may give rise to new interpretations and understandings of a work.  Removal of an author also assist in providing validity in many more interpretations of a literary work because the existence of a single author implies the existence of a single, correct, immovable intention and interpretation imposed by that author but without him that limit does not exist.  Ultimately, it is the death of our internalized concept of an author and all its implications that give birth to a much more vast array of readings and understandings for narratives; it breaths much more life to narrative than it kills off.

Freud: "Don't Castrate Me!"

Sigmund Freud had many interesting theories that are still studied and looked at today although the relevance of some of these them are heavily questioned or dismissed as ridiculous.  Many of those deals with his assertions about the latent fear of castration that young boys have growing up such as in the “Oedipus complex.”  He explains his perceived competition between a young boy and his father for his mother’s affections by saying that a young boy sees his mother’s privates for the first time thinking that everyone is supposed to have a phallus.  The boy thinks that it was the father that took it from her and from that point on he fears and tries to compete with his father in an attempt to avoid having his phallus taken away just like the mother’s was taken.  This competition occurs in the form of the son vying against his father for his mother’s affections and Freud goes so far as to suggest that the son wants to have sex with her.

                This theory is considered to be taboo within our current social context but as far as a competition over the mother’s affections between the father and son goes then the theory is valid and does exist within our media.  I just recently saw it in the Simpsons in the episode where Bart bests Homer in tennis and becomes Marge’s doubles partner for the tournament, thusly bringing about Homer’s jealousy of his own son.

                Part of the reason why Homer is seen as inadequate is seen in the above clip: he’s really bad and on top of that he embarrasses his wife.  However, towards the end of the clip we see that Bart is actually pretty decent at tennis which later leads to Marge picking her son over her husband and Bart being victorious in that Oedipal struggle for his mother’s affection.  That’s only a small instance in which that struggle occurs and the figurative castration of Bart would appear in the classic longest running gag in the show which is Homer choking Bart violently.

Analysis 2: Structuralism and Heavy Rain

                The previous blog explained the basics of Saussure’s take on semiotics and how the majority of the way we understand each other and the world is through this process of completing symbols.  Our language is understood as a system of symbols as well as the way we apply meaning and labels to what we see from a day to day basis.  The following is a piece of a video game I’ve been playing recently called Heavy Rain. 

                The game is an interactive narrative in which we unravel the secrets of this murder mystery and the kidnapping of the Ethan Mars’ (the man in the clip) son by going through the narrative and making decisions for the characters.  The end of the story is decided completely by the player and whether they decide to keep characters alive, allows them to access clues, choosing whether or not to let them interact with other characters at points in the game, etc.  To paraphrase, the man’s son will eventually drown as the rain continues to increase and his quest is to complete challenges sent to his phone from this serial killer who’s killed 8 other young boys through this slow drowning process.  Thusly we have the name of the game, Heavy Rain.

                Saussure’s view of semiotics explains the nature of the game and its story through breaking down the title.  The sign is literally a heavy rain.  Heavy rain is found on the game’s cover, it’s present throughout the entire story, and it’s central to the story’s progression.  The signifier is solely the rain itself but there are various signified concepts.  At a most basic level the rain signifies our sensations such as the wetness we feel, the dark clouds we see, the sounds of the rain on our roofs and so on.  However at a more intangible level the signified concepts are more emotional.  The rain stands for emotions such as the despair in Ethan Mars’ heart for his kidnapped son and the terror he feels as he’s told to drive on the wrong side of the highway.  The presence of heavy rain within the context of this story represents the overall gloomy nature of the game, the deaths, the despair people feel, the sadness of the victims’ families, etc.  Another signified concept would be that the rain represents the progression of time.  The rain is the killing agent that will eventually drown Shawn Mars and the characters are in a race against time to find the killer and the boy before 6 feet of rain falls over the course of 3 or 4 days.  With each passing scene the amount of rainfall during the story appears in the bottom right corner during the first few seconds of new scenes.  And finally to our knowledge there is lots of rain only in specific times of the year so the fall season (winter if you’re in California) serves as a signifying concept of rain.  Rain as a complete sign within the context of our everyday lives and the game serves to trigger many sensory, emotional, and time-based associations in our own mind and the heavy rain in this game is a perfect example of a modern day function of Saussure’s semiotics.

Semiotics; The World is Signs

                As Pase Rock said “We must read the signs.” Ferdinand De Saussure believed in semiotics which places emphasis on finding meaning in the symbolisms and signs in the world.  It is quoted to be “A science that studies the life of signs within society” and that from those signs we can derive meaning.  Image serves as one of the largest known practices in semiotics.  The linguistic sign is broken down as the signified which is what the drawing or spoken word is supposed to represent in real life (a cat, dog, etc.), and the signifier which is the concept that is represented by the signified which makes up the sign which is the relationship between the signifier and signified as a whole. 

                As you can see the above image is composed of feathers; the sign has feathers in it.  In the sign above there is the signifier which is the feathers and the signified concept which can be many things.  When we see feathers the signified concept can be birds, flights, the feathers themselves.  If you take the color into account we can get specific with the signified concept and assume that the concept can be parrots or peacocks or any other multi-colored bird.  The combination of the signified concept and the signifier in the picture combine to make a sign.  The signifier and the sign which are both the same thing (the picture and what is depicted in it) but the major difference is that the complete sign encompasses meaning (the signified concepts).  That is an example of the basic way we use semiotics in today.  We can strip it down even more and replace the image with the simple word “feather” to show how linguistics is a practice of semiotics.  If a sign on the street said “feather” on it then the signifier would be the word itself written down and the signified concepts would be things like birds, flight, wings, etc.  The concepts represented combined with the signifier or the word itself that made you think of those things fuse together to infuse meaning into our language and makes a complete sign.