Studies @ MindSay



 

   
By best friend list

List of my best friends.... not in any order !!!

 

JOSEPHUS

ARRIAN

PHILO-JUDASEUS

PETRONIUS

SENECA

DION PRUSCEUS

PLINY THE ELDEER

PATERCULUS

SUETONIUS

APPIAN

JUVERNAL

THEON OF SMYRAN

MARIAL

PHLEGON

PERSIUS

POMPN MELA

PLUTARCH

QUINTIUS CURTIUS

JUSTUS OF TIBERIUS

LUCIAN

APOLLONIUS

PAUSARIIAS

PLINY THE YOUNGER

VALERIUS FLACCUS

TACITUS

FLORUS LUCIUS

QUINTILLIAN

FAVORINUS

LUCANUS

PHAEDRUS

EPICTETUS

DAMIS

SDIUS ITALICUS

AULUS GELLUS

STATIUS

COLUMELLA

PTOLEMY

DIO CHRYSOSTOM

HERMOGONES

LYSIS

VALERIOSM MAXIMUS

 

 
 
   
 

Off campus study

Ok so my TAFE eventually located my test that I did off campus and I've passed :).

 

So that's two subjects down in Cert IV Library studies and I have 14 subjects to go. Then there's the Diploma to go on with which will be another dozen subjects. You can see why it's meant to be a two year full-time course. I'm going to try and get enough Recognition of Prior Learning applications accepted so that I can finished it all in one year. After studying for three years, I really just want a Diploma that I can use to get a job in a library. Anything after that, a degree, is a bonus.

 

It's good to know that I can manage to work full-time and study off campus. Though I'm studying on campus next year because I want to finish quickly. I don't want to study part-time over four years, I've spent enough time studying. I do like studying, but I need to get a job too.

 
 
 

   
Passed

Yay :)

 

I passed my first Certificate IV Library/ Information Services assignment. I am waiting on grades for another subject and am going on an extension for the third assignment. It's just pass or fail and you need to get at least 70% to pass.

 

Very good, I wasn't sure how I'd go with correspondense study and it seems to be going quite well.

 

Now all I need to do is hope I can get a job on top of those good grades. :)

 
 
   
 

The Celluloid Fetish of Whiteness

The Celluloid Fetish of Whiteness

Antonio Garcia

Indiana University

 

Entering the celluloid 3rd world

Popular culture has provided entertainment and insight into the overt and covert practices and desires of society.  The cryptic celluloid captivates us and allows us to enter a third space, or world, of neither illusion nor reality but reality in the illusion (Žižek, The Perverts Guide to Cinema).  As we become trapped in the illusion of a celebrated “unreality” in the form of cinematic indulgence we are confronted with a delight in the pleasure of our own disavowing fetishes.  Movies like Crash (2005) resonate deeply and stir emotions while providing the needed, but easily forgettable, shock of the racial tensions that exists across all racial divides.  After becoming emotionally enchanted by the films cinematography and musical score, we depart from the captivity of the celluloid world with only a brief residue of how that cinematic universe is not an illusion masking reality, but a very true reality that we have masked as an illusion in our own subconscious.  One poignant example can be found in a scene from Hotel Rwanda (2005) that illustrates the disavowing fetish. The news cameraman (Joaquin Phoenix) returns with video footage of the machete butchering taking place on the streets of Kigali and replies to Raul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle)  who believes the footage will show the world of the terror: “people will see it say that’s horrible and then go back to their dinners.”  The advent of cinematography and the celluloid have allowed for a 3rd world to become the illusion of reality while actually creating a reality out of our illusion.  Within these celluloid 3rd worlds we can analyze the human, social, phenomenological, and psychological without harm to human subjects.  Thus, the celluloid becomes the pop culture sociologist’s fantasy of interplay between the real and the illusory real.

In grappling with the notion of whiteness, we can return to a similar disavowing fetish among whites.  Žižek (2008) provides an example of the disavowing fetish as “I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know…I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know” (p.52).  Whiteness operates among whites in a similar way.  Whether it is acknowledged or not whites participate in a world that they know, but do not have to acknowledge it because they are provided the hegemonic luxury of assuming an ignorant state of unknowing.  In short,  whites know that there is racial tension, but they don’t want to know so they pretend to not know and therefore it exist as some type of fantasy or illusion rather than a reality masked as fantasy.  Perhaps this is why the issue of whiteness has been so difficult to captivate.  Whiteness is seen as a fantasy to those who have the choice to make it a fantasy, but for those that are non-white whiteness is far any assumed illusory fantasy.  In order to significantly stake a claim as to whether whiteness is or is not we must first understand that it is something by its very proposal of existence.  As a subject and object, it is a discourse and discursive practice that crosses multiple disciplines and interests.  I find that there is often an autoerotic language game that takes place in the conversations on whiteness in which people are more concerned with fantasizing about the correct semantic styling rather than pursuing an engagement of activism and reconstruction of whiteness as anti-racist.  What becomes problematic is how to situate whiteness so that we do not try to trap it and confine to an operational discourse but rather allow a discourse to be just as adaptable and revolutionary in being able to reconstruct itself and its beliefs, theoretical presuppositions, and assumptions in order to maintain a critical perspective of the evolutionary and elusive nature of whiteness?

Whiteness is often talked about as an invisible social phenomenon, yet the term phenomenon alludes to the idea that whiteness can be observed.  I propose one step further in my own theoretical discourse in implicating whiteness as a social phenomenological enigma.  By proposing whiteness as a phenomenological enigma we can capture in a broad sense its observability while contemplating its mystery.   If we maintain that whiteness is not static but always in the process of transformation based on social, historical, and cultural dimensions then we can formulate our lens in accordance with such contextualization.  Whiteness as a phenomenological project implies a certain measure of consistency.  But again how do we measure a social construct that is oxymoronically absently present? 

Though the idea of whiteness being an observable mystery makes it difficult and complicated, we must understand that making whiteness evident as a visible social construct that is not easily identified by an objective marker, i.e. skin color or physical characteristic, is just as possible as describing the wind.  We cannot see the wind or the air we breathe, yet we feel and see its affect on the trees as they sway to and fro.  Whiteness is a clever phenomenological enigma that has created a reality masked in illusion by the hegemonic proprietors who created it for the purpose of their own social superiority and systemic privilege.

In order to examine whiteness in context we must provide a prospective lens through which to view it or make it theoretically evident.  For the purpose of this paper, I have chosen to focus on the critical pedagogy of whiteness as it penetrates the celluloid enigmatically through religious allocation in the movie Saved (2004).  This concept, the critical pedagogy of whiteness, is described by Kincheloe (1999) as follows:

In the multicultural context a critical pedagogy of whiteness theoretically grounds a form of teaching that engages students in an examination of the social, political, and psychological dimensions of membership in a racial group. The critical imperative demands that such an examination be considered in relation to power and the ideological dynamics of white supremacy. A critical pedagogy of whiteness is possible only if we understand in great specificity the multiple meanings of whiteness and their effects on the way white consciousness is historically structured and socially inscribed. Without such appreciations and the meta-consciousness they ground, awareness of the privilege and dominance of white Northern European vantage points are buried in the cemetery of power evasion. Neither our understanding that race is not biological but social or that racial classifications have inflicted pain and suffering on non-Whites should move us to reject the necessity of new forms of racial analysis.

Whiteness is not a biological organism, but a socially constructed enigma.  It is not the same as the racial category of “white” although the two share a historical kinship.  Whiteness is the subjectively interpreted, covert, elusive, invisible, non-questioned, and pervasive phenomenological enigma. The racial category “white” is an objective visible marker; however, this racial category often goes unquestioned as a constitutive culture, being questioned as a group, or falling into tokenism due to the act of an individual.  This phantasm of society that has become a significant hegemonic marker has been difficult to capture within a full operational and definitive ideal.  It moves and transforms according to its social, historical, and cultural context.  Regardless of how we attempt to examine it, many critical pedagogues approach the issue of whiteness as they would any other social phenomenon by intimately engaging and exploring “issues of power and power differences between white and non-white people” (Kincheloe, 1999, p. 162).  Power itself must be contextualized further within issues of ideology, epistemology, and hegemonic reproduction (Apple, Foucault, Gramsci).

 
 
 

   
5 months of my life in a short and fast sum up...
CashandZep.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack Cashemire1.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack Zeppizoo1.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack MeandCash.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack Cashemire2.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack Zeppizoo6.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack Zeppizoo5.jpg hosted for free by ImageShack


Wow!  It's been 5 months since I’ve posted here!!!

 

Well... What's happened? In chronological order:

 

- My Dad got married and my parents-in-law came over to attend the wedding.

- We got two new kittens, Zeppelin and Kashemere, they are adorable. Zeppizoo is very mischievious, hehe...

- I graded A-Level this year.

- I've started on a new baby quilt but it's not ready yet and I’m too busy to finish it as of now.

- I spent summer studying for aggregation which I’ll be taking next January.

- We went to Rock en Seine to see the concert of Rage Against The Machine and it was great!

- I got sent to work the whole year in Amplepuis, which is 2 and a half hours of train to go and the same back. I wonder how I’ll survive the year... really...

- I've started to attend courses for agregation, some of them are interesting, other not so much... I must say that Richard Ford's writing is not my favourite. However, we also have to study Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Shakespeare's King Lear, and those are good... so...

 

I'm not sure I thought of everything, but it's quite a sum up already... I'll try to keep this up as well as I can...

 

 
 
   
 

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