User:Emily/20151209

Thesis: making a start

-- gathering stuff together for thesis

1) gather research material

2) gather annotations

3) compile bibliography (choose five key texts from list)

4) thesis outline (abstract)

My thesis will be work on practices

Bibliography & Articles:

• Being—A MacGuffin: How to Preserve the Desire to Think

...The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Is this game forbidden? Hardly. The disappearance of MacGuffins from the world would bring its movement to a standstill. The means justify the end; the secrets revealed along the way justify the unrevealed remainder.

• Tom McCarthy on realism and the real

...the real remains hidden by being disguised as the copy of what it actually is.

• The cybernetic unconscious: rethinking Lancan, Poe, and French Theory

With cybernetics, the symbol is embodied in an appratus that supposedly ties the real to a syntax for Lacan; however, this syntax has nothing to do with ordinary grammar but rather is the combinatory logic of 0 and 1.

• The Sublime Object of Ideology
• "Instrumental relation to the world of objects"
• Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
• On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense by Friedrich Nietzsche

According to Paul F. Glenn, Nietzsche is arguing that "concepts are metaphors which do not correspond to reality." Although all concepts are human inventions (created by common agreement to facilitate ease of communication), human beings forget this fact after inventing them, and come to believe that they are "true" and do correspond to reality. Thus Nietzsche argues that "truth" is actually: A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Novels:

• The Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe. (deathwatch beetles)
• The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe.
• The Remaider by Tom McCarthy.
• Crash by JG Ballard.

"I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality."

Artworks & Films:

• MacGuffin Library
• Double Take (doppelgänger)

Some other ref:

• "weepers": women hired to cry instead of us. Through the medium of the other, we accomplish our duty of mourning
• "laughter in tv": the other - embodied in the TV-set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh.