I didn’t know Colbert read Lacan!

America used to live by the motto “Father Knows Best.” Now we’re lucky if “Father Knows He Has Children.” We’ve become a nation of sperm donors and baby daddies. But there’s more to being a father than taking kids to Chuck E. Cheese and supplying the occasional Y-chromosome. A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?
- I am America (And So Can You!) – Stephen Colbert

Here is some theory for you: Zizek on how to read Lacan:

The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious

In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. These two dispersed statements should be treated as the pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection (plus the reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn’t know that he is dead) that enables us to deploy Lacan’s basic thesis in its entirety:

As you know, the father Karamazov’s son Ivan leads the latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist… – If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naïve notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

Mashups

A mashup  is a song or composition created from the combination of the music from one song with the a cappella from another…In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mash ups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” and “display an analytical impulse…we actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another…in a way, the music speaks for itself”.

I know Kanye’s “Stronger” became popular. He spliced his song with Daft Punk’s “Technologic”–also an awesome song on it’s own that was used for an Ipod commercial.

Eminem also did a mashup with one of Enya’s songs:

Girl Talk is a great example of mashups. He’s actually really famous. Although he is in a good heap of lawsuits. Listen to the song and let me know how many songs/rifts/etc you can identity.

“Ultimate post-modern pop songs,” was a line from the above paragraph from Wikipedia. I think that is a beautiful description for this. Girl Talk grabs snippets of songs, lyrics, rifts, beats from other songs in order to create a “new” song. Mashups are the music for the tl;dr generation. There is overarching melody or theme. Only punctuated moments of enjoyment. That after we have them, we don’t remember them, because suddenly we blend into another snippet of enjoyment. We don’t seem to savor the enjoyment, but consume it and quickly move onto another one. Well, in a way then, we don’t actually enjoy. We don’t like things that are too long. We like our headlines. We like our quick sentences. We enjoy our information to be fast and concise. We want to consume it quickly and move onto something else. It seems to be the same style with our contemporary music.

You cannot tell when one song blends into the other. The entire album could have been one track. I’m not saying the music or the process of creating it isn’t complex. The way we experience music, at least mashups, has changed. This is nothing like the long, drawn-out (albeit beautiful) Baroque music, where different parts of the piece will refer back to the larger theme..nor anything like the predictable pop songs where we have the chorus 2 or 3 times, a zenith, and then a fade out, where we know the structure and the length of the song, and we come to expect all of these parts to occur. The Girl Talk songs just do. No theme, just snippets. Sweet, enjoyable snippets. In a way, we can hear many, many songs all at once. We do not have to choose which song to listen to first. “Do I want to hear this…or this…how will I ever decide?” No need to! I think this feeds into our society of enjoyment rather well. Our satisfaction is instant, but not permanent. We don’t really enjoy it, because we keep craving.

I believe we get a delight from (not only the snippets) but also the fact that we have the knowledge of all of these various snippets. That we can identity all the songs that are being spliced and used inside this one song. A type of cultural elite, per say. In order to really appreciate the mashup we need to know what the musician is making references to. So we must amass a large body of knowledge, musical and general pop culture. Sucks for those who don’t.

Lost on the Market

Thinking back to my post on the lack of a defining overall movement or characteristic of my generation, except disappointment at our political system and economy, I wonder if this lack of a concrete label, except something as amorphous as the “Dot Com Generation,” is the reason we are so obsessed with labels?

In other words, are we so label-orientated because we don’t have one? I suppose this is a basic summary of a postmodern identity, and maybe all my years of theory finally hit home, because unlike anyone older than me, I feel that being born in the late 80’s made me lost. I didn’t even have a time of identity illusion.

This isn’t just another lost puppy “who am I?” question, but more of a, “i?”

I wonder if the lowercase i means anything. It is that “i” that defines my generation. The one where the self isn’t prime. Maybe that’s a good thing, the “I” begins to take less precedence. Yet I don’t see us becoming any less selfish. Narcissism seems to be frolicking with all of our “i”-pliances, our technological prosthesis. It makes me think of Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, where she discusses how Stephen Hawking and his machine that allows him to communicate are not separate from one another. I can walk away from my computer and still be “me,” but for him, without it he is silent.

I wonder if it is becoming so hard to market ourselves. There are no easy categories to cling to. Yet we haven’t escaped the need of them. Do we need labels of every other product out there because we don’t have labels ourselves?

So are we lost or have we transcended? Have we become meat? Have we escaped our meat status with our communicative technologies?

What grade meat would you be?

I think since I’m free range, I get lots of exercise and good, clean, organic vegetarian food (so no worries about diseases), perfect vision, no allergies, no high fructose corn syrup..Advanced education, multicultural background, bilingual, great at cooking Asian and Southeast Asian food, no hormones, marketable skills, high resistance to heat, Expert in Microsoft Office Programs on Macs and PC’s, graphic design skills, research capabilities, debate skills..strong teeth, good back, lots of energy, good sense of humor… Yeah I’d be pretty good on the market.

What are we? “We” meaning my generation.

Last class we were all silent. It’s not that I haven’t done the reading, I didn’t know how to respond. Defintions have become so difficult because we grow up aware of so many circumstances that we cannot make choices anymore because we are constantly walking on eggshells. I suppose I can highlight aspects of my identity, my personality, but which ones? I have a really hard time answering questions as to my generation. I feel we are all so fractered. We have no cause to rally around. We have all this wonderful technology to bring us together but it’s hard to make a community. We create online communities around random things like lolcats…yet, what actually happens is that the lolcats creates the community and defines us. We are defined by our interests, our facebook profiles, our black and white artistic myspace photos. They are not are reflection of us, but are our prosthesis. Without our Blackberries we are very silent Hawkings. Without our easily defined boxes of name/age/location/favorite movies (because none of can ever name one)/artists, quotes, mottos…nice clear boxes…We’re not a ‘we’. Perhaps because without all of that we cannot connect to others. It’s like saying “Oh, hi! I am a real person. Here is my business card. You decide if you want to associate with me.”

What’s real anymore?