Narcissism as Liberation

Here are some advertisements featuring women in a non-sexual manner. No round rumps or toned thighs here, just real women. I’m not gonna lie, this assignment was way harder than I initially expected it would be. It kind of makes me sick.

The Reynold’s Wrap ladies look like the normal, next-door-neighbor types. They are fully dressed and are over the age of thirty. Though this isn’t a close-up, I can put money on the fact that they have wrinkles on their faces and have never had plastic surgery.

courtesy of www.alcoa.com

This pro-choice political ad features a “real” looking woman with short hair and casual clothes on. Notice the lack of a toned tummy, thing, buttocks area in this ad. It’s not saying, “only sexy women get abortions” but rather, “hey, I’m a normal women and I’m pro choice.”

Courtesy of www.rochesternow.org

I had to go back in time for the next two ads. They feature women not just in the workplace, but succeeding in the work place. Though they are attractive women, they are not being advertised as sex objects. Their boobs and thighs and butts are behind layers of clothing. These advertise liberation through success rather than liberation through beauty.

Courtesy of www.hilltoptimes.com

This is a classic.

Courtesy of www.486th.org

Ways of Seeing

1.) Berger often refers to the past and history in his essay “Ways of Seeing”, he describes history as something that belongs to us as human beings that acts as a “well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.” This references the age-old theory of learning from past mistakes; change, which is necessary for the human condition, is impossible without knowledge of the past. Each painting is fixed in a point in history, each with its own background story and relevance. Works of art are capable of telling us what words can’t tell us. Words are limited and always lacking in emotion, descriptiveness, relevance, etc.; a text book can tell you about how bloody the Battle of Antietam was, but that knowledge would be consumed blindly as a historical fact. However, a painting that depicts the carnage of Antietam would effectively convey the sights and emotions of that static moment in time. Reproductions of paintings negate the uniqueness of this one-moment-in-time image. All the sudden, images are not rare captures of an instant but merely a nice thing to look at. This loss of authenticity changes the meaning of the image as well as its unique place in history. Berger resents any sort of “twisting” of the past, he portrays history as a constant element; the Battle of Antietam happened in 1862 and no other year besides 1862. Though the present world is in a constant state of change, it is still rooted in the invariable bed of the past. So the fact that Berger vehemently detests the mystifying of art (and therefore history) is not surprising considering how important he believes the past to be.

2.) The term “mystification” basically means bullshit (excuse the profanity). When an art history scholar analyzes the brush strokes of Rembrandt or Hals painting and describes their use of shading as “peaks of breadth and strength”, that is bullshit– or for the purpose of this essay, “mystification”. Berger views each image as unique and anchored in a specific moment in history. The over-explanation of art by “experts” nullifies the uniqueness of an image. For example, there is a lot of hype around the Mona Lisa. It is revered and heavily guarded in the Louvre. Art historians have analyzed it over and over again. However, someone uniformed of all the theories and analysis of the Mona Lisa might walk up to it and say “eh, no big deal” and walk away. This uninterested person actually has a more genuine experience than the scholar who has been exposed to mystification of the famous painting. The academically privileged think they have better understanding of art; they can distinguish good art from bad art, and bad art from something that is not art at all. However, these “experts” have eyes just like Joe Schmoe does. Any set of eyes, whether they belong to an educated or an uneducated person, can respect a painting for its emotion, its place in history, its revolutionary concept, its beauty, its strangeness, its undeniable uniqueness. Mystification, hype, hyper-analysis, bullshit– whatever you want to call it– obstruct the uniqueness of art, stripping both the art and the viewer of their sovereignty.

Question #3.

Walker Percy is a smart guy and he probably knows better than to include personal bias into his essays. He didn’t include his own anecdotes or interviews because that would skew and narrow the point of view of his essay. By making a statement about “a couple” or “tourists” or “a family” Percy separates himself from opinion and includes a larger group.
For example, lets say the couple who took the trip to Mexico are friends of his. All Percy is going to hear from them is their opinion of the trip, how wonderful and beautiful it was. If Percy only knows how wonderful and beautiful Mexico was, he’d be writing a brochure. Percy instead draws information from hypothetical, but common and plausible, situations. It is common knowledge that people show up to the Grand Canyon and take pictures, but by avoiding personal stories, Percy makes a more intellectual statement.
This is not an essay that required research, except for maybe finding out who first discovered the Grand Canyon. Percy takes commonly known information, such as the benefits of learning outside the classroom, and analyzes them. It’s his different take on these ordinances that make this essay worth reading, not his research and interviews with tourists.

Question #2.

Walker Percy assigns the term “value P” to Garcia Lopez de Cardenas’ discovery of the Grand Canyon. His initial wonder of the sight, a virgin experience, his further curiosity in discovering new things about the canyon, has been assigned the value P. Percy speaks throughout the essay about the loss of sovereignty and (of course) the loss of the creature. This “loss” is essentially the loss of value P.
When the couple surrenders their unique experience in the Mexican Indian village to be re-affirmed by the ethnologist, Percy describes this situation as a loss of sovereignty. The couple has given up the value P of their experience; it is no longer rare and beautiful and new, but is serving as a form of bragging and assertion of authenticity. Education, Percy claims, can also serve as a loss of sovereignty. He states that those who teach themselves outside a school building, i.e. poking at a dead dogfish with a safety pin, actually know and learn more. Schools are full of facilities, distractions, methods, and standards that serve as a loss of sovereignty; the lesson about dogfish has stripped the creature of its life and individuality, and therefore losing its value P.
The loss of the creature, which gives the essay its title, is ironically discussed with the most brevity. Percy says that science is important and one should know how the world works, but as a sovereign person. The beauty of a flower should never be clouded by the analysis of photosynthesis and the Krebs Cycle. A rose should never be a “specimen” but should always maintain its sovereignty as a flower. Basically, science should not obstruct value P.

Question # 1.

By giving a series of examples about tourists visiting the Grand Canyon, Walker Percy presents some “remedies” to the ever-wicked cliché—the basic problem-and-solution thought process. He begins with the likely example of the common tourist / sightseer who takes pictures upon arriving at the canyon. This is the “preformed symbolic complex” that Percy wants to remedy. This Boston tourist does not see the Grand Canyon; his camera and preconceived notions about the canyon prevent him from actually seeing it. Percy then suggests getting off the beaten path, away from all the tourists and facilities, to rid oneself of the preformed complex. Or perhaps one could embrace the “beaten path” and take the common tour, but take a step above the tourists; experience the tourists experiencing the canyon. Maybe if there were some sort of disaster, such as an outbreak of typhus, the experience would be more memorable.
All of these are possible “cures” for the preformed symbolic complex, though they all have their flaws. He states that if someone goes off the beaten path, the park service would put up a sign advertising “getting off the beaten path”; if you take the common tour but not as a common tourist, you are, more or less, being pretentious; and though a disaster of some sort would make the experience more memorable or special, who really wishes a disaster would occur? This series of examples, however thorough and clever, do not present a 100% solution to the problem. Percy realizes this and changes the subject to a couple going to Mexico.

The Lost of the Creature

Overall, I understood what Percy was trying to say in this essay. However, there were certain parts that were confusing. For example, when he is discussing sonnets and dogfish he brings up the beauty and effectiveness of learning outside the classroom. I get that. It’s his emphasis on “specimen” that’s unclear to me. “The phrase ’specimen of’ expresses in the most succinct way imaginable the radical character of the loss of being which has occurred under his very nose.” Is he trying to say that one dogfish can’t represent the entire population of dogfishes, or rather that “specimen” negates uniqueness? However, when he brings up the example of someone poking at a dead dogfish as being a more effective learning experience, isn’t that dead dogfish a “specimen”?

In addition to this “specimen” madness, the “sovereignty” extravaganza also confuses me. Percy describes a couple bringing a friend (an ethnologist) to an Indian village that they had visited earlier. The reasoning behind bringing their friend to the village was not to share the experience with the ethnologist but to prove their experience was real and genuine. So in other words, to sort of rub it in their friend’s face. Percy describes this happening as a, “radical loss of sovereignty”. I really see the situation more as a pretentious couple that is trying to brag to their friend, they have not lost any prerogative to their original Indian village experience. Sure, they are nullifying their unique experience by making the ethnologist re-live it, is that what Percy means by a “radical loss of sovereignty”?

Later, Percy describes the loss of sovereignty as, “a generalized surrender of the horizon to those experts within whose competence a particular segment of the horizon is thought to lie.”
Honestly, I don’t even know what any of that means.

Percy brings up some unorthodox clichés that I would’ve never thought of before. His example of taking a Greyhound tour to the Grand Canyon and taking pictures is SO cliché. I can imagine the family stepping off the Greyhound bus wearing matching orange tee-shirts that say “The Johnsons” on the back; the mother is wearing a fanny pack; the father has his socks pulled up to his knees; the kids are running around, creating further chaos. No one in the family is absorbing the beauty of the Grand Canyon. Percy suggests that a possible remedy for this situation would be to get off the beaten path and camp out. However, he states with much accuracy that the moment someone got off the beaten path, the park service would put up signs that say, “consult ranger for information on getting off the beaten path”. The cliché is a vicious cycle, it seems.

Liberal Arts Education

Photo courtesy of flickr.com, user: zoharb.

A liberal arts education is all about diversity. I’m not talking about the boxes you check off on your SATs that ask if your Alaskan or Native American, I’m talking about diversifying knowledge. A liberal arts institution is a buffet of knowledge and everyone is required to sample a little of everything. This sampling is important for a few reasons. For one, it helps those who are undecided to figure out what they want to do with their lives. More importantly, however, it creates a well rounded person. The world is beautiful and awful and ever changing and tremendous, it would be a shame to only know about one small facet of it. No one can deny the importance of being cultured and well rounded; therefore no one should deny the delicious knowledge buffet offered by a liberal arts institution.

Photo courtesy of flickr.com, user: kulkarin.

Anyone can teach 1+1=2. It’s simple memorization, really. However, it takes skill and patience to teach addition. There’s something more important than knowing random facts, and that is the ability to think. A liberal arts education nurtures the great art of thought. Through class discussions, essays, creative teaching methods, and reading some novels instead of strictly text books, students are taught how to think. No business is going to want to hire someone who has a mental filing cabinet full of facts, however people who can problem solve and have clever ideas are always in demand. Apart from getting a job, thought is important to maintain our own humanity and sanity. Emerson once said that a man is made of what he thinks about, and that each action we make is merely a product of thought. Essentially, without thought, we’d still be living in caves and chasing after our food with branches. So learn to think!

Photo courtesy of flickr.com, user: Susan NYC.

Liberal arts institutions tend to be smaller and offer a feeling of community. Class discussions and study groups are prevalent, and everyone says hello to each other while walking about campus. Due to the smaller class sizes, professors can be more available to help students outside of class. They also have more freedom to engage in class discussions, field trips, films, debates, and group presentations. It’s important to spice up the learning process. Besides being the spice of life, variety in class piques students’ curiosity and aids them in staying awake. The feeling of community also provides for a more positive college experience and personal well being. It warms you heart and soul like a bowl of Quaker oats.

Photo courtesy of flickr.com, user: the monk.

These previously listed attributes of a liberal arts education all work together in creating tolerance within its student body. This doesn’t mean everyone graduates college as a liberal democrat. By teaching students about other cultures and diversifying their knowledge, professors have instilled tolerance into their students. When students are able to think for themselves and create their own ideas, their previous uninformed prejudices will begin to melt away. As students discuss issues in class and have to work together with complete strangers, they are learning to be tolerant of those people. Living and working together in a diverse group of strangers is the world’s greatest lesson in tolerance. A liberal arts education forces students out of their comfort zone, it requires them to do something different and learn something new.