Well, technically, it’s bliss. Pain is bliss.
Or, to put simply:
Because that’s what Jouissance is.
It’s a death-drive; a pain is bliss type of deal.
So, in terms of this picture–it’s not quite death itself, but the pain surrounding death.
And that’s exactly what I haven’t achieved yet. In actual Jouissance terms, I haven’t reached orgasm with my paper.
So, you could
But not as achieving orgasm.
(Also, side-note: I love how this is so innuendo it’s past actual innuendo. Reading is sex. Brilliant).
…
Anyway, I met with Amanda today.
And just like I predicted, I thought I had all my ducks in a row but she came in and removed some, tossed some aside, re-arranged others, and introduced new ones and said, “now, put them in a row again!”.
But, I actually understood a little more of which types of ducks she was introducing, thanks to my new friend (who might very well become my new enemy), Roland Barthes.
He’s the person I’m using for my Plaisir and Jouissance argument! He’s also French (they’re all French)! And he’s got a lot of books! Plus he’s more comp writing, so WHOOPEE, I GET TO TALK COMPOSISION WITH PEOPLE!
I say that because he’s done work on semiotics, which is (as Amanda put it) taking this stigma we have as a collective and digging underneath what the stigma is saying to discover what it’s really doing. In other words, removing the make-up to see what it actually looks like.
It also deals with this idea of a signifier and signified.
So, for example, if someone says “House”, Person A might picture a square with a triangle on top, some windows, and a chimney while Person B imagines the White House and Person C pictures Hugh Laurie. The root of the word is one thing, but what people imagine can be different. Because everyone has a different Repertoire.
And that’s what I’m also covering within my project.
Also, I should ask her for that comic book she showed me, it might help.
I should also order Barthes book Mythologies so I can highlight and write in it as well, instead of just getting it from the library, because that’s where a lot of the semiotics he talks about comes from.
But, back to the signified/signified and how my project fits.
So, what I’m doing is presenting these Magical Creatures as the signifier. So, for example, when I say “Fairies”, Person A thinks Disney’s Tinkerbell, Person B thinks of a fairy godmother from some Cinderella story, and Person C thinks of Cosmo and Wanda from The Fairly Oddparents. It’s then my job to take all of those signified things show how they line up in my project.
And that’s a rough outline of how that works for my proposal. I would explain more, but I talked with Amanda over 6 hours ago, so the lesson is starting to fade, but it’s still viable and useful to me!
I just hope this fits in with the CHL department as well (which is why, in the draft that I showed Amanda, I included Percy Jackson as an example. Even if it didn’t go well…
).
ANYWAY,
On to good news!
My ducks about the interactive narrative didn’t move! Their duck tape worked! Amanda even said that the part about Impositional and Expressive texts and finding balance in them made sense to her! I was so unbelievably happy that I didn’t have to rework that aspect of it, you have no idea! I mean, I still have to link those back to Jouissance and Plaisir (which will probably be hard), but to know that I’m on the right track with the “Book as Object” phase of my project is GREAT!
(And FYI, they lead back to J&P by the sense that people are familiar with a regular book with a straight forward front-to-back, typical narrative where they don’t have to do anything but read with it. But they gain Jouissance with this notion that it’s being messed with because suddenly they’re thrown into interactivity where they have to physically create a narrative for themselves. The “Pain is Bliss” in this sense is that they have to play detective, sort of, to get the full narrative. They don’t know what’s going to happen next or how it fits in and they must educate themselves; they have to work for the answer; for the bliss of the text. Freedom can be nice, but too much freedom in a story is painful. It’s confusing and discomforting. To not have a linear narration in a book can be incredibly painful and yet, because it is new, blissful. It also isn’t all text–some of it is disrupted by a picture; a physical object that they must decipher and determine how it fits in with the story. So, it can be physically painful and mental painful, but ultimately it brings on bliss because it is new and exciting and gives the reader control over what is happening. I hope that makes sense).
The other piece of good news is that my “deadline” of April 15th got moved, thank God! I’m not meeting with Amanda until 4/20 (at 4:20 p.m., because reasons), so I have more time to work on what I’m thinking. The only catch is that by then I do need to have not just a bullet-pointed outline of my proposal. I need to have an actual paper with my ideas clearly expressed in it. So:
And now, for the middle stuff:
My ideas for it being transmedia and multimodal were green-lit (which, incidentally, are also more composition based) but a little foggy on how they fit in with my over-all theme/lens of Jouissance.
I think it’s safe to say, in gif language, this is where I am with almost every part of my thesis and proposal:
We didn’t talk into too much detail about the T/M thing, but I made sure to touch on it. As with everything, she said, “but how Jouissance?”.
I have a feeling I’m going to hate Jouissance by December. Even if it’s bae right now.
But, yes. I have to think of how they exactly fit in my paper/piece as well, as even though the content works, does the context? (At least, it was something like that. A little fuzzy, but I do remember her saying that it was good, but not all there. Like, “is it really? How exactly does it fit in, specifically multimodal?” And I was all, “well, it is bringing together different mediums into one specific place, so there’s that, but as far as Jouissance goes, I need time”. And boy do I ever. I might have to email her about this again and ask her the details-which hopefully she remembers better, because my brain is grad-school fried).
I also got green-lit to which magical creatures I’m going to be talking about: Fairies and Spirits (Her and I both agreed not to do A) Witches because HUGE, B) Dragons because HUGE, C) Windegos because specific and can get into a bad multicultural interpretation, and D) Big Foot because how reliable is the information?). Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to be touching on whatever the flip-flop I want to in my project, I just won’t be able to go into very much detail or specifics. Which is A-OK by me.
And when I say “Fairies” I actually mean “little people” of all sorts, not just the ones with wings (so, sprites, pixies, brownies, “The Borrowers”, etc. in addition to the winged creatures known as fairies) and when I say “Spirits” I actually mean those beings that are associated with childhood (like Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, The Boogeyman, The Sandman, and to a lesser extent, Jack Frost, Mother Nature, Father Time, the Tooth fairy, etc.).
SO, yes. Get that squared away.
And now, onto what I actually wrote this post for:
My ideas for how I think Jouissance would work for the magical creatures part
AKA: reaching orgasm!
So, and I don’t know if this is what she’s looking for, I was thinking in the shower (cause let’s be honest, all bright ideas come from the shower. There’s actually evidence that proves this… maybe not scholarly evidence, but good practical theory evidence) and I came with this:
“Jouissance in a way from fairytales [magical creatures] as a way to pick ourselves up when we feel down; because they reflect an ideal life and escapism for when life gets bad. So, pain is life but the bliss is the creation of the modern fairytale [magical creature].
OR EVEN/IN ADDITION TO
“There is pain in not being able to physically immerse ourselves within a fictional world; we are not able to actively participate in it and change its outcomes. We can only learn with what we are provided–which is typically a unreliable narrator that doesn’t focus on the world itself, but rather with their own problems [within that world]. My project seeks to create bliss from this pain by providing interactive tools to dive into the world itself, rather than focus on a narrator that fleeting mentions the world around them. Instead, you become the narrator and you get to choose your own bliss from this pain; create your own Jouissance (from the aftermath of Harry Potter or Percy Jackson).”
And how this goes along with magical creatures is that, like HP or PJ, we see the creatures through different stories, but are not given an actual way to immerse ourselves within the magical world they come from. The pain is not being able to have complete Plaisir with it because it cannot be physically known, but with my project, I’m trying to create bliss from that by saying, “hey, what if they did exist in the real world and that all those stories you read where just a way to keep you from achieving the bliss of physically touching them?” Of course I can’t actually produce a nature-made winged magical creature that’s living and breathing, but I can write about it. So, essentially, I’m trying to create bliss from this pain while sorta creating more pain? I’m taking the Jouissance from the Plaisir to create Jouissance while in-turn creating more Jouissance in the form of Plaisir (aka we think there is pleasure in the familiar of magical creatures but it’s actually pain, but in my work I’m presenting a way to create bliss from this pain while simultaneously creating more pain because you can’t physically create the bliss you need to absolve the pain from magical creatures, but you can suspend it. OR, to keep with the sex analogies, achieving orgasm through masturbation). Does that make sense?
I don’t know. I’ll read Barthes book and email Amanda and find out. And, as always, report back my findings here.
So, wish me luck! And I have to remember: if Amanda doesn’t reply back within, say, 36 hours, email her again until she does 🙂
Good Luck me! We can do this!
Until Next Time,
Sami
(P.s. I’ve also got Annette’s paper shrunk down as well–I’m doing it on “why we feel the need to change/update Snow White, specifically looking from Disney’s 1937 version to ABC’s Once Upon A Time version. And this will also help with my thesis. Somehow. I know it will, but I just don’t know how yet).
A Plethora of Demiurgic Imagination 