Posted for Yingxue Annie Hui

Precis

               “The Death of a Revolutionary: Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society. But she couldn’t live in it” by Susan Faludi provides an account of Shulamith Firestone and her devotion to bringing about social change and equality for women. However, in her article, Faludi cannot understand the poor conditions Firestone was subjected to prior to her demise. The government together with the women rights movement seemed to have forgotten about Firestone’s contributions in the 1960s towards the liberation of women. Faludi brings out the irony in Firestone’s death as her memorial service was filled to capacity attracting influential leaders in government and society, yet she might have died of starvation as no one care to look after her during her late age. This article provides a brief account of the forgotten heroine and the ignorance of people, particularly women who enjoy Firestone’s effort without appreciating her. Firestone helped create many feminist movements including the Redstockings and New York Radical Feminists which were instrumental in the fights for women rights.

            The words of Firestone in her last article published in 1998 give a summary of the roles of women before the 1970s radical feminist movements. She elaborates how she could neither write nor read; at the time, the illiteracy rates were high among women as they were not given equal opportunities as men to pursue education. As such, the majority of women settled for menial work as well as housekeeping. This created a significant dependence on men for livelihood which made women susceptible to mistreatment and domestic violence. According to Faludi, the demise of Firestone marked the end of the feminists’ movements since the majority of active participant had passed away and the remaining ones were in their late age.

             Faludi narrates about the pre-feminist era of the 1960s and the sufferings that women endured including rape and domestic violence. Education was reserved for the male counterparts and leadership positions were unattainable for women. The 1960s was the second wave of feminism whose central theme was equality at the workplace; the first wave feminism took place in the 1920s and helped secure the voting rights of women in America (Faludi n.p). Firestone using street theatrics to protest against gender discrimination, she was one of the most active leaders of the 1960s feminist movement. In her work “the Dialectic of Sex” Firestone advocated for radical measures such as abortion and use of cybernetics; she argued that the physical characteristics of women, particularly the reproduction puts them at a disadvantage compared to men (Faludi n.p). Firestone disliked pregnancy and advocate widespread use of contraceptives to control birth. Her argument was that artificial reproduction would set women free from the physical and psychological pain of childbirth. The literary works of Firestone attracted both praises and criticisms in equal measures depending on the particular factions (Faludi n,p). For women, Firestone was regarded as a heroine and a revolutionary who helped change the prevailing social order.

              Faludi describes the Firestone’s childhood that compelled her to fight for women rights. Having being born in a family of six with three boys, Firestone recognized gender discrimination from an early age. In her family, her father was always proud of the boys, particularly their performance in school while anger was directed at the girls. Firestone was always opposing her father’s viewpoints and regularly wrestled her brothers.  Firestone was one of the most active feminists in the 1960s, but she did not receive the necessary recognition that she deserved during her late age. She was abandoned to grapple with economic constraints since she was even unable to settle her rent. To many, she remained an unsung heroine who helped create a new society but was denied the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of her efforts.

Posted for Manu Prasad

Precis for The Jet-man by Roland Barthes

The new religion of the inertia of technological motion, fueled by our infatuation with blind progress (the fiction of the race), with implacability, getting so fast that the movement becomes invisible, the momentum unquestioned, the realm forgotten, has more parallels with ancient religion than its aesthetic lets on at first. Only self-advancement is real, all else was thrown to the intangible wind, a classical silence and temperament left alone, unperturbable. The Jet-man is mastery of the self, ageless, shining, omniscient. He is a hero although there is no one around to make it known to him, he is still the summation of the dreams that come from shared human incapacity.

We couldn’t imagine him with furrows, pores or any organicity at all, he would have to be faceless, sleek, forever the same. Seeking no thrills, he is a kind of leader by example of never losing one’s cool, he’s amongst the stars, the ancients, in touch with his ancestry. Nothing that is instantanious, gratuitous or pleasurable allures him, only one deeper, more lugubrious quest, a wish to ascend, to transcend humanity.

Roland Barthes is calling out modernity for its derivativeness, its formation of supposed abandonments that is still a reification of an individual with many beads of Abrahamic values precipitating. The speed of early modernism is gone and instead we have a kind of saint, someone outstanding in their level of conformity, surrendered to something greater. The Jet-man’s path is a legendary pilgrimage, he’s chaste, honored for his lack of need for treats and rewards, his mission and his solace are his. The Jet-man is in uniform, his politics aren’t original either. He is fully indoctrinated. Whatever the new technology, we will still find a way to use it as a fastener, to cling to something we want to be sure of. “The paradox of excess motion becoming repose”, WE WILL temper it, hone it, tame it, make it something that speaks to our spiritual maintenance rather than our day-to-day physical lust and hunger.

Posted for Austin Schermerhorn

Precis on C.S. Lewis “Abolition of Man” 

C.S. Lewis begins his argument with an anecdote, about a man who is sure of Man’s power over nature, but he himself is dying of a natural illness. Lewis finds this man’s position darkly ironic, and the man’s argument that he is merely a casualty on the winning side. However, Lewis goes on to argue that with all the powerful inventions of Man that seem to the common person power over nature, are actually a select group of men’s power over all humans, and even future generations in the case of planned pregnancies. Lewis uses three examples for this argument: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. He states that if he relies on another person to carry him, he cannot say he is a strong man, and it is the same for technology: if a person is using a technology that relies on a material miner, assembler, factory owner, distributer, etc., he cannot say that he himself is the one with the technological power over nature as he must rely on others. He says that the exerting of power of humans over other humans is not intrinsically a fault due to corruption or a faulty political system, but says that it must always occur as it is not possible for all humans to be exactly equal, and some group will always have power over another group.  He says that through eugenics, each successive generation will be weaker and have less power to exert over others, because of their ancestors predispositions for them, that they have put “wonderful machines in their hands [but] we have pre-ordained how they are to use them”. Because a smaller generation will influence a larger generation so much, the power will fade exponentially. Lewis states the final aspect of nature we will overcome is human nature, after perfect pre-natal selection and careful psychological education.

            Lewis goes on to define nature based on what it is not: the artificial, the civil, the human, the spiritual, and the supernatural, and says that Nature is an idea of something without qualitative aspects, and cannot be “good” or “bad”. He says the more we define Nature and see the surrounding reality as Nature rather than Spirit, the more we exploit it and deep down we feel like it loses some of its meaning for us. He says in fact, we reduce things to “Nature” just so we can conquer them. We cannot conquer that which is internal to us, which has varying meaning to others and is subjective based on cultural and personal bias; but once something becomes solid, objective, and natural, can we presume to understand it and conquer it. If a plague was viewed as the vengeance of a wrathful God, who could presume to sway power over it? But once we reduce it to micro-organisms and study their spread, we can eradicate the plague entirely.  Lewis says this can only be sustained until our final match, ourselves, and once we assign ourselves to nature we are essentially the patsies in a raw deal: we will have given power over ourselves not to ourselves but instead to the Conditioners of the future. He says we cannot have it both ways, that if we presume ourselves to be the product of Nature, then we will resign power over ourselves to those who, presumably, are also just following their natural impulses. Lewis finally ends but saying that we are attempting too much, and he doesn’t want to seem like an obscurest, but our obsession with seeing through things and controlling them can eventually go to far, and he ends with the platitude: “If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To `see through' all things is the same as not to see.”

Posted for Jesse B. Sawyerr

The essence of “The Abolition of Man”

   The core questions that are presented to readers in C.S Lewis’ “Abolition of man” tap into some very visceral fears that humanity has about the future. Deep within the bulk of the essay is a question that people are still asking today.  Will we push the advances of technology so far to the point that we become less of ourselves? The caveat with this essay comes in the form of an anecdote about the author’s friend and his thoughts on mankind’s relationship to nature. The words, “Man has nature whacked”, came as a troubling observation to Lewis; a product of man’s quest to peal of a sense of humanity. Lewis noted that the words of his friend had a certain “tragic beauty”. The tragedy could come stem from his friend, a dying man, expressed how he thinks nature and mankind are competing for relevance, with mankind in the lead of the race. The philosophical problems that his friend’s comment was inspired by led Lewis to ask himself the following question in the essay; how is mankind developing increasing power over nature? Shortly after the first of the big questions in text is introduced, Lewis brings up planes, wireless devices, and contraceptives as examples of man kinds prowess of the forces of nature. One interesting reflection that Is made early in the text is the idea that if Lewis himself were to someone pay someone to carry him, he too could be considered strong. Within that hypothetical situation Lewis, having convinced and even manipulated someone into carrying him, has established sense of power over the strong through his class. Lewis convincing a strong man to carry him can relate metaphorically to the relationships between buyers and sellers in the capitalistic systems that we live in; a phenomenon that Lewis argued is a product of man’s escape from humanity. Lewis believed that through phenomena like the buyer seller relationship mankind is slowly creeping away from a deeper sense of humanity. When it comes to contraceptives, Lewis expressed how it seemed paradoxically problematic that people who already exist make large “devastating” decisions for people to don’t exist yet. The real question to ask according to C.S Lewis is whether or not life and death is our choice to make.  Lewis also noted how contraceptives could become a sort of selective breeding, one that would cut off impoverished communities from the gene pool. In the case of contraceptives, certain groups of people execute power over other groups of people with nature as the instrument.  Later, in the essay Lewis mentions how eugenics and scientific education will become a power under which generations in the future will become subject to. He goes further with this theme to say that “Each new power won by man is a power over man as well” (Lewis.2) which is to say that every advance in technology will be eventually used to control or terrorize the masses. At one point in the essay, Lewis explains that when mankind can control everything about itself human nature as we know it will be as risk. Humanity will be something that we can modify and control, which would easily open and fresh new can of ethical can of worms for us to deal with.  Lewis goes on to explain that “The battle will indeed be won, but who, precisely, will have won it?”(Lewis.3) as a way to say that the advances in technology and humanity keeps  on pushing isn’t necessarily  beneficial to humanity itself.  As a final note, one can find a fascinating quote at the end of the essay when Lewis explains that ..”To see through all things is the same as not to see”(Lewis.6) . The quote could be read as a way of saying that once all the unexplained things in life become explained, the meaning and value of life itself will dwindle into nothing.

Posted for Austin Schermerhorn

Pentacon Six (A Reading)

I have a medium format film camera called a “Pentacon Six” that has been at my side now for almost six years. Wikipedia says it is a camera made between 1956 and 1992 in Dresden, East Germany. A small nameplate at the bottom of the camera corroborates this: “Made in GDR” it says, of course referring to the German Democratic Republic. The camera is beautiful, if cautious about seeming decadent with its vinyl leather skin and slightly tarnished leather case with a dirty red felt interior. The rest of the camera is chrome, and currently I have a waist-level viewfinder on it that I crudely re-skinned with more luxurious leather. A tiny engraving on the viewfinder looks like some sort of small Orthodox church, and my other viewfinder, one you hold up to your eye, looks conspicuously like a the Russian onion of churches such as St. Peters in Moscow. The engraving of “Pentacon Six” is stylized “PENTACON six”, in a characteristic German grotesque, or sans-serif font. It is a quite utilitarian camera, not only used by myself fairly often for six years, but also by its previous owner who had it for an unknown amount of time. The grime between levers as well as the slight rusting of the metal serves as a testament to its staying power. Though fairly large, I have gotten used to bringing it along with me, and when out photographing it seems to bring some sort of interest or curiosity to those who see me using it. Through all these outward signifiers of age, history, politics, design, functionality, the camera performs as it did the day it was made. I find it interesting that the country that made the camera no longer exists, the person (or persons) who used it before me will forever be unknown, and their images made with the camera always unseen by me, but yet some small sign of use, of wear, of history can be seen on this camera.

Posted for Sophie Zlotnicki

Valentine de Saint-Point ends her Futurist Manifesto of Lust with “Lust is a force” in bold lettering. This ending of the manifesto really struck me, being raised in the church I grew up being told that lust was a sin and any efforts considering lust was wrong. Saint-Point begins her essay with ”when viewed without moral preconceptions and as an essential part of life’s dynamism, lust is truly a powerful source of energy.” I agree with this statement that Saint-Point claims, for us as physical living bodies we experience mundane acts of lust daily and not always for “sexual or evil” desires.

It is quite hilarious to think about the aspect of lust in a notion through Christianity and how it is categorized as inappropriate or a desire that is inappropriately strong, therefore morally wrong; all the while the emotion of “passion” for proper purposes is maintained as something God-given and moral. “Lust is the quest of the flesh for the unknown, just as Celebration is the spirit’s quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creating, it is Creation.” Saint-Point understands the power of the actions of lust and asserts them as forces of energy and creation. Lust is considered by Catholicism to be a disordered desire for "Sexual pleasure" where sexual pleasure is "sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes”. In most religions lust is looked upon as a vice, or forbidden, and even demonic and a “gateway to hell”. Yet in Judaism, lust is characterized by Yezter hara (the evil inclination) but this is not a demonic force, rather “mans misuse of things which the physical body needs to survive.” We can relate this to Saint-Points quote, “Christian morality alone, following on from pagan morality, was fatally drawn to consider lust as a weakness. Out of the healthy joy which is the flowering of the flesh in all its power it has made something shameful and to be hidden, a vice to be denied. It has covered it with hypocrisy, and this has made a sin of it."

precis: Societal Ills

Octavia Butler’s "The Evening and the Morning and the Night," is a short story of science fiction, which explores the implication of a modern society and it’s adverse advancements on the people. Butler’s story can also be read as a metaphor for how society copes with difference in particular its treatment of people of color, and specifically the black and brown women’s role in societies scientific research and development. Butler’s short story functions as a critique of scientific “progression” as a regression in respect to compassion and empathy. These issues are seen from an individual’s perspective and bring up subjects such as: racial superiority, social Darwinism, and divides in society on a number of different levels while also critiquing Modern medicine under this guise.

 Butler writes about this fictional experience through the lens of a 20 something year old girl, Lyn Mortimer, who is afflicted with a degenerative genetic disease imagined by Butler, which is a combination of the three existing conditions: Huntington's disease, phenylketonuria (PKU), and Lesch-Nyhan. The imagined disease is called Duryea-Gode Disease (DGD). DGD entails a short lifespan due to a victim’s obsessive desire to self-harm. The self- mutilation and psychosis are due to a delusion of being trapped in their skin or in a body of which they feel they don’t belong. To delay the onset of these symptoms, which are inevitable later in life, there is an enforced restrictive diet of nutritional biscuits. Needless to say those with DGD don’t have a very positive outlook due to the knowledge of their violent predetermined futures.

 DGD came about after the discovery of a cancer cure. After the cure was administered to a large number of people, the ineffective antidote mistakenly caused the genetic mutation DGD, found in the children of its consumers. The people put their trust in institutions time and again that have historically wronged many and believed in their supposed beneficial technologies that assume power over all our bodies.

 By law the DGDs were required to ware an emblem that signifies they have the disease, much like past historical events that used similar methods of identification. The emblem’s can be seen as a tool to further the prejudice and marginalization of these bodies by marking them as “other.” DGDs are considered a dangerous liability and are compared to delinquents, and as a result are controlled and denied the freedom of a healthy person.  The story has a very specific atmospheric quality in which you are able to feel the societies segregation and exclusionary tactics and the way in which those afflicted are alienated in the same ways ethnic and disabled bodies are historically discriminated against.

Lyn tells her story of having two parents both afflicted with DGD and how their life’s had a tragic ending. As Lyn put it, "So they had trusted God and the promises of modern medicine and had a child. But how could I look at what had happened to them and trust anything?"

 Because of these events, Lyn longs for agency, independence, and self-determination from an early age; fearful that she will just fade away. Facing a very grimly set future she attempts suicide, which is common among those afflicted by DGD. She describes the life of  an individual who is looked down upon in a society as a failed experiment and is treated as a danger to not only herself but also those around her. Through medical literature and horror stories DGDs loose trust in themselves and when they begin to enforce certain laws of nature upon their own bodies, eugenics and sterilization come into the story. Lyn was very aware of the traumatic nature of the illness as she was marked by visiting a DGD ward as a kid, still she did not want to be told that she could not have children. As a lady, She wanted to feel like she had autonomy over her body. As seen in her conversation with Alan a boyfriend also born to two DGD parents, ““Do you want someone else telling you what to do with your body?" I asked.
"No need," he said. "I had that taken care of as soon as I was old enough."
This left me staring. I'd thought about sterilization. What DGD hasn't? But I
didn't know anyone else our age who had actually gone through with it. That
would be like killing part of yourself? Even though it wasn't a part you
intended to use. Killing part of yourself when so much of you was already dead.””

Butler is concerned with time and how this plays into the psychology of someone with a degenerative disease a symptom of that being a drive and concentration on leaving a mark before their time is due. Lyn explains, “We probably wouldn't last very long, anyway. These days, most DGDs make it to forty, at least.”

Lyn struggles with the idea that all her hard work and focus is discredited and seen as a special gift or having the genetic predisposition for success. Lyn says, “Hell, I knew what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time.
Whatever I did was just marking time… I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at something that doesn't matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.”  When ones time is limited the way that they perceive human accomplishment is altered.