Venus Emerging From Herself: A Postmodern Interpretation

Yesterday's group presentation was on Postmodern Theory. The class was given construction paper and chalk to create a modern interpretation of Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" (See painting below).

Ancient Mythology teaches that Venus was born from the Sky and Sea. The angel-like figures on either side of the goddess represent those two elements as she emerges into the world. Venus is said to represent motherhood.
In my modernized drawing (see below), I have depicted Venus's birth on a hospital bed. I have depicted Venus to be born by a human-like figure. The ruching sheets by her feet resemble the pearl shell she stands upon in the painting. The newborn baby flies out of her mother's womb and cries in an unfamiliar realm.

With doctors on either side of her, perhaps the mother birthing on the bed is self-reflective (a postmodern quality) and Venus is birthed from herself, or emerging from the Sky and Sea.

The Principle of his own Subjection: Michel Foucault and Panopticism

Twentieth Century French historian Michel Foucault introduces his power theory of Panopticism in his book Discipline and Punish by using the leper plague as an example of its development. Because the leper was terribly contagious, each member in the plagued town was quarantined and required to, on a daily basis, reveal her face in the window as a means of surveillance: a mechanism confirming those who fell victim to the disease and those who survived. Simultaneously, the separation confined each individual to her own space and established a regulating order to the controversy within the society.

Foucault's theory of Panapticism is based on the Panopticon: a prison building designed by English theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The building was designed in order for an omniscient viewer to be able to see the entirety of the happenings within the building while simultaneously be entirely unseen.

Foucault writes, “The major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (554). Power relations are implemented in Panopticsm by imposing absolute and "understood" rules.

In John Hughes's 1985 cult classic The Breakfast Club, five high school students are forced to spend an entire Saturday in the library serving detention. Detention is a form of punishment where students contemplate the fallacies they have committed without misbehaving further. Foucault would consider detention as one of the "tactics of individualizing disciplines [that] are imposed on the excluded" (553). The students are assigned to sit in the library on a day when there are no other students or teachers present. Principal Richard "Dick" Vernon serves as physical surveillance, but in actuality, he has little power over the students.

In this brief clip, each student sits unsupervised, each occupying himself until falling asleep from boredom. When the Principle discovers the students sleeping, he attempts to use verbal authority by screaming, "WAKE UP!" The students ignore him until he calmly offers a trip the “lavatory.” If the hired authority has no control, then why do the students stay for detention the remainder of the day?

Though they show little respect to the principle, the students adhere to the role of the school as an institution itself. Through their actions throughout the movie, the students reveal their awareness of ideological rules. Regardless, the students break free from the library at various moments to run around the school rebelling against the principle. Although they do not remain seated in their original library seat for eight hours, it is significant to note that the students are submissive to Panopticsm theory. The five students remain within the walls of the school for the entirety of the day confirming the power of the school itself and thus reaffirming Foucault’s idea that, “A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior” (555).

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “Discipline and Punish.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 549-565. Print.

Death is Bliss: On the Road, a Freudian reading

In Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, the narrator Sal shows symptoms of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. In the middle of his journey to Western America, Sal wakes up in a motel and says, “I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel…I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (Kerouac 15). Sal reaches his desired destination to California. To his dismay, “the end of America,” does not fulfill his expectations of the West. Thus, he ironically journeys back to where he began: New York. While in New York, Sal is overcome by a familiar feeling of disorientation. He says, “Just about then a strange thing began to haunt me. It was this: I had forgotten something. There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear out of my mind but still hung on the tip of my mind’s tongue” (Kerouac 124). In the motel, Sal becomes forgetful of important matters. In Freud’s essay, The Interpretation of Dreams he offers an explanation for similar behavior. He says, “Forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and that it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets” (Freud, 397). Perhaps Sal’s forgetfulness is representative of something that he is not fully aware of. Sal continues, “I couldn’t even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I had forgotten. It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad” (Kerouac 124). Sal has an intense array of emotions caused by something he cannot remember. It is his unconscious that is causing the familiar, yet unidentifiable feelings. Sal searches his memory for the decision he must make. He reveals, “It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler: a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City” (Kerouac 124). It is strange that Sal looks to his dream, filled with the unfamiliar, in order to understand what he consciously cannot remember. Freud would describe Sal’s dream as “the uncanny,” or, when “one does not know where one is” and what is “frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (Freud 418). Sal concludes, “The one thing we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death” (Kerouac 124). In a cyclical repetition, Sal undergoes mental instability caused by his unconscious. Sal conforms to Freud’s concept of the phallic stage in childhood: “A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere” (Freud 438). Because Sal's father is no longer living, it is no wonder that Sal’s journey around America is unfulfilling and unsettling. Sal’s bliss can only be found where his father is: “in death.”

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 438-440. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 397-414. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 418-430. Print.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Print.