Philosophers: Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Nietzsche, Derrida
Writers: Lazarillo, The Masterpiece, "Elegiac Stanzas," The Horla,
Films: Roger and Me, Blowup
Public TV program: "Consuming Images"
Painting:
Photography:

Critical Essays: Theories of Japanese poetry, "Orientalism" (Said), "Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination" (hooks), "The Science Wars" (Nanda),

I Constructing a Realist Illusion of an unmediated representation of an object: the illusion one is perceiving it (conscious of it) as it is in reality.

A. illusion of "objectivity"

2. illusion of "unmediated representation"
1. the self-referentiality and paranoid structure of conscious representation of object.

II Putting into Question Realist Illusion ("objectivity")

A. Constructing the Illusion of a Subject ("subjectivity")

B. The Subject and Object of a gaze or act

III Japanese (non-western) poetry: harmony subject and object

1. Tanka (emotion harmonizes subject and object)
2. Haiku (impersonality harmonizes subject and object)
3. Ritual as constructing and defining Subject and Object.

 IV Reality as a product of language/discourse: Nietzsche, modernism

1. Subject and Object as discursive constructs (rather than a world that precedes or discursive representations)
2. Language=signs (signifier/signified), all signifiers -- written, spoken, visual, physical, auditory, etc -- construct a world and a self, an object and a subject.
3. Language as Power rather than Knowledge (persuasion, manipulation, propaganda)

 V Consciousness as a (less than conscious) product of cultural discourse.

1. Constructing culture – the relation between individuals and society (master/servant, colonizer/colonized, white/black, male/female, Western/non-western) -- by means of the binary, hierarchical oppositions of a dominant and subordinate discourse: reason>emotion, power>knowledge, culture>nature, active>passive, human>non-human (or animal).

2. Counter-discourses: Question and/or reverse hierarchy of dominant discourse:

1. Reverse: emotion>reason, nature>culture, etc.
2. Question: no priority of reason or emotion, culture or nature.

3. Counter-discourses transforms reality into a struggle for power between discourses, one dominant.

1. Dominant discourse tries to co-opt words of counter-discourse (reverse "discrimination")
2. Counter-discourse tries to appropriate words of dominant discourse ("The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know" (Pascal)).

4. Hybridity and irony: We are a hybrid of many discourses (roles), none of which can be taken literally (as equally the truth), which involve a certain ironical distance.

1. Derrida. We alternate between:

1. treating discourses as pure games, playing roles;
2. acting as if we are getting closer and closer to the truth (science).

1. Hybridity: Individual identity is a hybrid between identities determined by different discourses (dominant and subordinate). A counter-discourse must treat each of these different identities with a certain irony. A member of a subordinated or marginalized group must forge a new, different identity from the two (black and white; western and non-western; male and female; consumer and producer).

5. Media as dominant discourse of capitalism

1. As consumers of media images and of the products they serve to sell, we passively mouth a deceptive subordinate discourse: capitalism, we imagine, offers us the commodities that satisfy our individual desires and increase our individual choices.
2. As consumers of images, our desires (and our illusion of individual freedom and choice) are in fact produced (determined) by capitalism, by its drive to expand its markets. We – our desires, our identities -- are in fact increasingly homogeneous products of capitalism. Our (heterogeneous) individual identities are thus "consumed" (destroyed) by the circulation of goods.

1. Capitalist discourse on growth in consumption (necessity of always increasing productivity, consumption) vs. consumption of limited resources (entropy).