“Spinoza’s ethics has nothing to do with a morality; he conceives it as an ethology, that is, as a composition of fast and slow speeds, of capacities for affecting and being affected on this plane of [Nature]” (125).
–”you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of…what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination (125).
–Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
M 02-Nov Ceremony (through p.186 ) (Jessica Brousseau & Phil Cafaro)
W 04-Nov Ceremony (through end) (Eric Roe & Jake Jacob)
F 06-Nov No class (away at conference)
Due: Blog entry (Friday this week)
Resp 5: Myth and Experiential Narrative in Ceremony
500 words min., 10 points; due W 11-Nov (deadline TBA)
Review assignment criteria here — also remember extra credit opportunity…
note: read instructions closely — three main tasks/objectives.
-
“Languages are more or less thick; certain amongst them, the most social, the most mythical, present an unshakeable homogeneity..: woven with habits and repetitions, with stereotypes, obligatory final clauses and keywords, each constitutes an idiolect or more exactly a sociolect.”
— “the antidote of myth would be the extreme pole or rather the region—airy, light, spaced, open, uncentred, noble and free—where writing spreads itself against the idiolect, at its limit and fighting it” (168).
Roland Barthes, “Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today” (1971). Image-Music-Text
Prompt:
Choose one Laguna “story” (myth) that Silko includes—
- e.g. “Thought Woman,” Ceremony (frame); drought/rain; “Spider Woman” and “Gambler”; Fly & Hummingbird; Gallup Ceremonials; “Shush” / Bear; Coyote (Ck’o'yo magician) and Big Fly; Descheeny and captive girl; Witchery; Mountain Lion & T’seh; Sunrise offering.
— use this story to understand an historically specific experience in the novel’s diegesis/plot, not in mode of belief but expression (life). review: Apparatus
First, briefly discuss affect that you intuit (third mode) from reading the aesthetic figures and the myth together (novel expression); describe the objective experience/situation in particular and concrete terms, avoiding generalization and abstraction. What is this experience? (focus should be specific, within Tayo’s overall narrative/s)
- Tip: review your last Reading Response; likely need to describe experience in affective terms to greater extent (embodied exp., subjective, feeling but not “sentimental” or cliché emotion).
From this, address key question: how does this relation of myth and experience “negotiate” or “mediate” 1) {the past, culture, tradition} and 2) {historical situation or event, individual’s circumstances and identity}?
In contemporary terms, perhaps helpful to think of myth as “interface” for understanding subject’s (Tayo’s) “situation.”
- Tip: review notes on “loss,” beyond single individual; on nature (esp. “the land”) and Nature; on “good/bad” (ethics) over “Good and Evil” (morality); on memory/forgetting, presence/absence, and reconfiguring these binaries.
Also see additional quotes from Barthes, below.
Finally, consider in relation with other “storytelling”:
- either a form of narration within the novels
(e.g. Nick Carraway, metafictional Kurt Vonnegut, anonymous Jazz narrator)
or a story with which you are familiar, in “mode of belief” (from personal experience/knowledge):
e.g. parables/fables, religious/spiritual narratives, Greek mythology
Beyond compare/contrast (which is fine to limited extent), discuss the relation of narrative and experience, from this perspective — particularly what you’ve learned from Silko, in terms of expressing affect through aesthetic figures and “stories” (myths).
Speculate how we might apply your insight(s) in our experiment–not in the mode of belief (avoiding judgment), but concerning experience (Life).
After all, we are not passive receivers inheriting myths (and values) but active producers of culture and knowledge.
lesson from Deleuze:
“Ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers to transcendent values. Morality is the judgment of God, the system of Judgment. But Ethics overthrows the system of judgment. The opposition of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad)” (Spinoza 23)
This insight helps us escape the system of judgment, in favor of an affirmation of Life: third apparatus.
Helpful description of Tayo in Ceremony?
Blanchot: certain character in Kafka’s The Castle “is outside salvation, he belongs to exile, that region where not only is he away from home, but away from himself.
He is in the outside itself—a realm absolutely bereft of intimacy where beings seem absent and where
everything one thinks one grasps slips away” (77).
– Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Rilke’s concept of “the Open” is the immanence of nature, manifest within all beings: “Mightn’t
there be a point where space is at once intimacy and exteriority, a space which, outside, would in itself be spiritual intimacy which, in us, would be the reality of the outdoors, such that there we would be within ourselves outside in the intimacy and in the intimate vastness of that outside?” (136).
– Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Barthes on Myth (contrast for us):
“Myth, close to what Durkheimian sociology calls a ‘collective representation’, can be read in the anonymous utterances of the press, advertising, mass consumer goods; it is something socially determined, a ‘reflection’. (165)
“Contemporary myth is discontinuous. It is no longer expressed in long fixed narratives but only in ‘discourse’; at most, it is a phraseology, a corpus of phrases (of stereotypes); myth disappears, but leaving–so much the more insidious–the mythical.” (165)
“the mythical is present everywhere sentences are turned, stories are told (in all senses of the two expressions): from inner speech to conversation, from newspaper article to political sermon, from novel…to advertising image” (169).
“Change the Object Itself: Mythology Today” (1971). Image-Music-Text