2W14 Reflection

This week has been a little distracted by moving so little in the way of work has been done. This is starting to become a concern for me as I would really like to have much more of a concrete idea of what I am going to work on next. Admittedly, I am quite absorbed in theory which is not a bad thing but it is taking my mind off of actually doing stuff. Most of the things I have been reading are heavily related to post modern thinking and I have been consulting a book I purchased a year ago, which I originally had some trouble reading. In returning to it, I have started to engage in the theories more and actually start to  understand them. I have already referenced one essay by Baudrillard a couple of weeks ago but there are other articles in the book which are just as interesting. Notably The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism by Craig Owens. Although about feminism, it interestingly enough raises a point that Michelle Henning also described in reference to Benjamin’s predictions of ‘a new kind of consciousness’, that being, the future mind and future interpretation of the world around us is one of symbiosis.  A vision, which is fused and not constantly reduced to binaries.

“Still, if one of the most salient aspects of our postmodern culture is  the presence of an insistent feminist voice (an I use the terms presence and voice advisedly), theories of postmodernism have tended either to neglect or to repress that voice. The absence of discussions of sexual difference in writings about postmodernism, as well as the fact that few women have engaged in the modernism/postmodernism debate, suggest that postmodernism may be another masculine invention engineered to exclude women. I would like to propose, however, that women’s insistence on difference and incommensurability may not only be compatible with, but also an instance of postmodern thought. Postmodern thought is no longer binary thought (as Lyotard observes when he writes, “Thiking by means of oppositions does not correspond to the liveliest modes of postmodern knowledge [le savoir postmoderne]”). The critique of binarism is sometimes dismissed as intellectual fashion; it is, however, and intellectual imperative, since the hierarchical opposition of marked and unmarked terms (the decisive/divisive presence/absence of the phallus) is the dominant form both of representing difference and justifying its subordination in our society. What we must learn, then, is how to conceive difference without opposition.”

Owens, C. The discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism in Foster, H. (ed.) (1998) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York Press, New York. P71.

When he speaks of learning to conceive difference without opposition, this is something which I personally can’t seem to achieve and I wonder if this is simply a western problem or whether it is actually a global one which signifies a massive difference between men and women.  A misconception of Japanese people is that they tend to think of opposites, for example, you are either one of them or not one of them. But the thinking is deeper than that. There are aspects of both inherent in each other and this really goes someway to illustrate my differences.

I need to continue to think about my PG essay this week as I need to produce some kind of abstract but there is more moving to do this week as well. I will have something of a week off work the following week, which I plan to use to really get going on the studying. Moving to Tokyo means finding more resources and more libraries that I will be able to use and this is fairly important.