Techne Writing - Persuasive Craft

Junaid breaks down the anticapitalism 🏭 that appears to be more present in Devil Wears Prada 2 than Devil Wears Prada 1. The sequel offers a greater awareness of our trash economy, the fickleness and irresponsibility of corporations doing mergers and acquisitions, and how it all trickles down to instability for everyday workers and employees 👩‍🏭👷‍♀️👨‍💼

At the same time, Devil Wears Prada 2 is not devoid of ideology; it still exists in the film in a way that the audience is… kinda cool with? 🤔

FIFA ⚽️ is happening and Maybelle is asking if it’s really a delusion machine 🪞🪩and if so, why do we keep going back to it?

She uses the theory of Jacques Lacan to understand Zinedine Zidane’s infamous headbutt in 2006—the attack that broke all the rules of the game—and which we still remember twenty years later. 

She be asking such questions as: how did the game stop making sense at that point? And why is it still lodged in our memory now? 🤔

Luckily Lacan is with us to help answer: Maybelle uses his concept of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real to argue that Zidane’s headbutt is a moment that reveals the Lacanian Real—the moment in which FIFA falls apart. Zidane’s headbutt shows how FIFA was always at the edge of this Real in the first place; the World Cup is just that great of a fantasy structure 😮‍💨

Readings:

Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” (in Écrits)
Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference”

After her Asian upbringing of numbered aunts and uncles, Maybelle realizes that Real Canadian Superstore gets customers with a similar “naming approach” 😅
Turns out Superstore’s act of hailing customers to buy their products (“if you’re Canadian, shop here”) is an example of French philosopher Louis Althusser’s concept of “interpellation:” a process in which one attains subjecthood by being hailed at by institutions (or as Althusser calls it, “ideological state apparatuses”.

Junaid attempts to explain neoliberal (and also just liberal) rage 😾 against Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek. Both philosophers criticize the Western world’s lack of concern for Gaza and the Palestinians, yet also come across as not strong enough on other issues (including LGBTQ2S+ rights, anti-semitism, the Ukraine war, Khmer Rouge atrocities).

The answer kind of comes down to ideology: Chomsky and Žižek are here to resist the ideology of state and capitalist systems, and therefore will be skeptical when neoliberals get excited about woke causes that seemingly support minorities and other underrepresented and underserved groups.

Sources:
Jacques Lacan, Écrits 1966, p. 827; Écrits, p. 324
Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
Slavoj Žižek, Debate with Jordan Peterson

Normally a dude so tied to leaders in the US, Israel, the gulf states and other big time capitalists wouldn’t befriend Noam Chomsky — an intellectual critical of ideology & American foreign policy, and a leader in leftist thought. So why’d Epstein try to be buds with Chomsky?

It’s pretty common knowledge now that donors and interest groups determine the policy directions and actions of both Democrats and Republicans in the United States — but this Epstein stuff is revealing just how removed elected officials are from serving those who voted them in. It’s also showing us the paradox of Western democracies: political candidates are anxious anxious about their public image (popularity contest) but are also super down to be influenced by ppl who give them 💵 The perfect conditions for a manipulator like Epstein.

This one’s for Dr. Thomas Loebel at York University, with whom Maybelle studied literary & cultural theory many moons ago. 👨🏼‍🏫 Dr. Loebel was a real one who understood the price of knowledge. His first words in class were: “Welcome to graduate school. You are all masochists.” 💔And the question of why suffering is pleasure has haunted Maybelle ever since.

It’s common ground that grad school has always been suffering… but why do we still do it, beyond wanting respect, beyond delaying adulthood? 🧸Is white liberalism (woke culture), common in academia, really just about finding pleasure in our own renunciation? Why is living like a medieval monk–poor, isolated–its own enjoyment? And what does grad school say about the way we understand pleasure and institution today? 📚🏟️

Readings:
Slavoj Žižek, Debate with Jordan Peterson
Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit