so it takes brinkmanship to make you swerve in our little game. 

now what will it take to regain what's lost?  these wounds may heal but the scar is ever permanent.

forgiven. but not forgotten.

This is leaving me disillusioned with everything I've learned and believed. I am losing faith.  I lose faith in ohana, I lose faith in justice, I lose faith in morality, I lose faith in identity, in respect, in equality, in fidelity, in love. 

Coward.  How can we function if there is no trust and there is no truth?  I am willing to forgive with open arms because I am emotionally attached and bound to you in my past consciousness, my every present bones and the shaping of my future. Unconditionally, we are willing to absolve what you are not even willing to admit.  Yet all your arrogance can speak is empty denial; and it is so fucking pathetic.

The hell with Kingdon’s equality of opportunity.  What is an education worth if in the end we are still helpless to change how much we have a say.  What good is it to know about the ideologies of this new generation that no longer relies on a patriarchal stud duck?  I study about democracy, feminism, freedom and equality in the global context but within the realm of my reality, these ideals mean nothing.  

You can constrain those virtues just to continuously conceal your sins, but if fiat justitia ruat caelum is true, then eventually all will be broken.  Revolt like the proletariat, crushed into a million fragmented memories.  The ultimatum no one wants.

I hope you know how much we are sacrificing.  This pain will be branded and sealed, slithering in the depths of our veins, enduring beneath those falsifying submission to the greater good you are so accustomed to.  How ignorant you are.  That is what I will choose to believe.  Because I’d rather convince myself that you are oblivious than to think you are cruel enough to be unaffected by how much it hurts.  So I will assume you don’t know.  But I hope someday you will.

when you're left hurting for the pain of someone you love most, that's when you are left most alone.

monologue 1

if i would sit staring in front of the wide windows on the 16th floor, i would have noticed the whole city transforming. but i don't. not really. of course i know it is forever undergoing some sort of phenomenal metamorphosis. isn't the world changing an obvious statement. oh i see the bits, say the skies coloring, the waters flowing and the huge ad screen whirling; but they are the movement of details and although these contribute to the stand-back-and-admire picture, the end product is always a static one. to realize the whole city changing, i'd need to press the fast-forward button. and by the time i am satisfied with the portrayal of the prominent changes, it might be too late to grow and adapt myself in tune with the environment.  too late to decide and pinpoint where i fit in. too late to celebrate and lament the appropriate. too late to distinguish what's important and what isn't. no, i don't want to press that button. time already moves fast enough. i've got to be more observant to make better judgments during the present. but dive too deep and we're back to the details, missing the whole picture again.

so what is the balance in being the spectator yet being the participant as well. to be or not to be. or to choose the middle path like those who lack self esteem and confidence always do. then the majority of us would be drifters living in a moving yet static world. not that we refuse to accept it. we're too intelligent for feigning ignorance. perhaps we're simply too self contained, too stable seeking, too scarred from the conflicts and complications already demanded from our daily lives. perhaps none of this matters because i'm just over thinking my observations.

lit: marxism

Structure of Feeling: Characters in the Novel and the Reader

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy, the main character. Kathy and the students who attend Hailsham institution are clones whose futures are predetermined to become organ donors even though they are not explicitly informed about their fate. Kathy narrates her childhood events from hindsight in a zigzagging memoir as she is now thirty one years old and a carer for the donors. The novel is set in the 1990s in England and starts from events in Hailsham where they are encouraged by the guardians to use their creativity to produce art, to the Cottages where they shifted their focus to writing ‘essays’ and finally to when they are grown up and living in centres as donors. These settings are part of the system that they are destined to live in and have accepted. Throughout the novel, the Hailsham students seem to have a ‘structure of feeling’ in which they sometimes become aware of their futures but are not entirely conscious to the extent of resisting. As with the characters in the novel, our participation of the ideology in our world keeps the capitalist system continuing. However, unlike the characters in the novel, the ‘structure of feeling’ that the reader has can be further developed by the novel to suggest that there is a potential and a possibility to imagine an alternative and understand that power is not absolute in the reader’s world because his/her structure of feeling is still occurring in the present.

Louis Althusser argues in his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” that ideology is saturated in the system through the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA). These ISAs include institutions that are seemingly cast as free but are in fact a part of people’s private lives such as schools and churches which are most influential in shaping the dominant ideology. Althusser says that ideology is “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 162). The real conditions of life demonstrate that society needs to exploit labor to reproduce the status quo even though it creates inequality. It is an imaginary relationship as people do not see the inequality of the system because they are continually participating in it through daily practices and rituals that are considered as the objective norm. Through the practice and participation in the system of capitalism, ideology interpolates individuals as subjects, preventing people from gaining objectivity to expose its mechanisms in order to be able to view the system critically. Ideology then is a totalizing system that people are immediately born into as it is always in full operation, making it impossible to escape from its power. It alludes to reality in a way that ends up clouding reality, subjecting people’s mindset to believe in having freedom to choose their lives when instead they are actually participating in a pre-determined system.

The term ‘structure of feeling’ comes from Raymond Williams’ book, Marxism and Literature. He refutes Althusser’s argument that ideology through the ISA is absolute and decisive. Williams claims that culture and literature is not simply a strict ideology but it is more of a fluid relationship between material realities to human culture. He focuses on the recognition that the relationship is immediate, present, always moving and rejects the idea of thoughts being a fixed and finished form. Through the active process of reading, literature can become an existing and a living work that can be experienced and felt at a personal level. He describes the beginnings of consciousness as something the individual is not aware of. It is not articulate and not a fully formed structure. Rather, it is through an emergence in the change of the structure of feeling and thinking that is in the process of developing into something more significant than the individual realizes. These processes “are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (Williams 132). The structure of feeling is constantly in flux with the tensions of the individual’s own conflicting beliefs because it is continually interlocking with the internal relations of the dominant social experience to the private and personal sense of feeling. Instead of Althusser’s term ‘ideology’, Williams calls the conflicting tensions ‘hegemony’. William’s tone is more positive than Althusser because unlike Althusser’s claim that the ISA’s power is absolute and fixed to the extent that people are virtually trapped into ideology, Williams suggests that through the dynamic tensions, the structure of feeling allows the individual to find cracks in the system. This means that it creates a possibility for a formation of the individual’s capability to imagine an alternative to the dominant ideology.

In Ishiguro’s novel, the ideology of the system subjects the students of Hailsham to continue to participate in an unequal and unjust world without resisting the system. Through William’s structure of feeling, it appears that sometimes the students are beginning to gain consciousness of the inequality of their conditions but through the tensions between ideology and the emergence of their consciousness, the students are unable to fully break through the system because their mind is still subjected to the dominant ideology.

In chapter four of the novel, Kathy describes an episode during her time in Hailsham in which it reveals the students’ structure of feeling. The best artworks of the students are collected to Madame’s ‘Gallery’. Having their work taken to The Gallery is considered a huge honor even though the students do not know what the purpose of The Gallery is. Artworks that have not been chosen for the Gallery can be sold to other students for their own collections through the process of ‘The Exchanges’ using ‘Tokens’ as the currency. During this episode, Kathy describes the “Tokens Controversy” in which the students that had their artwork taken to the Gallery were “collided with a feeling that [they] were losing [their] most marketable stuff” (Ishiguro 39). It started with some students who came up with the idea to demand compensation for their artwork that was taken to The Gallery. This idea of making such a demand causes arguments between themselves as many of them did not support the idea. Eventually, a student called Roy went to make the “suicidal” demand to Miss Emily, the head guardian and somewhat succeeded in having Miss Emily compensate The Gallery artwork with a few tokens. This was unexpected because to make the demand with Miss Emily was a task that seemed impossible to the students as they are intimidated by her presence.

It can be argued that the Tokens Controversy is an emergent formation of the students’ consciousness. It is a structure of feeling that begins by a “muttering” (39) of a group of boys about compensation. Their seemingly insignificant action of muttering suggests that it was not intended as a revolutionary idea. However it develops and expands into something that causes a full discussion. By gradually realizing that it was unfair for Madame to simply exploit their labor and take away the artwork they produced shows that the students are gaining a structure of feeling that could lead to the potential of enabling them to eventually become conscious to the inequality of not just single events like the Tokens Controversy but their entire conditions of existence. For the moment, the structure of feeling that they have acquired are beneath their full consciousness. It passes through a series of tensions within themselves as not all of the students “agreed with this…others were outraged by the idea” (39). This is because it is an idea that they are not familiar with as it is not part of their predetermined system. According to Williams, this interlocking tension is part of the structure of feeling because although it is not a realization of their consciousness or the potential for change beyond consciousness yet, their ability to come up with the idea of questioning the system shows that the students are beginning to become more sensitive to their conditions. Their ability to think outside the norm suggests that they are capable of stretching out of the ideology. The suicidal mission of Roy can further be seen as a success in the potential of a resistance as gaining compensation is a new change that is not a part of the dominant ideology.

Despite this possibility for resistance from the students’ emerging consciousness, their demand for compensation in tokens consequently proves that in the novel’s world, the structure of feeling is not powerful enough to penetrate ideology. The compensation in tokens signifies a willingness to continue in the participation of The Exchange system. Similarly to the readers’ world of capitalism, the students perceive their artwork as a commodity and account their labor as a material relationship exchangeable to tokens. Therefore, although the Tokens Controversy shows the Hailsham students’ structure of feeling of a consciousness towards the inequality of their conditions, their demand ends up strengthening the ideology they are subjected to. Although Roy was able to take his structure of feeling to a further level than the others when he goes to Miss Emily, the demand itself is not a change in ideology; it is simply a different way of participating in the same system. Williams’ structure of feeling is a positive formation for coming into consciousness, but it can only go so far as is often limited by the dominant ideology. This episode depicts a perception into our own world of capitalism, and our consent to the system of commodity exchange.

Therefore Williams’ structure of feeling is depicted through the students of Hailsham as clones in the passage of the ‘Tokens Controversy’. Even though the narrative of the novel is set in the recent past, the novel itself as a literature and an art exists through the reader’s active process of reading as the present. The novel, set in the recent past becomes a dystopian world as there is no possibility for change. The reader is able to view the system in the novel as irrational because it is not part of our ideology. However, because the mechanism to the operation of the system in the novel is similar to that of the system we currently live in, it creates a structure of feeling for the reader. Like the characters in the novel, the reader may not realize his/her structure of feeling of the unfair system in the novel in relation to our world. But unlike the characters in the novel, the reader has the potential to develop his/her structure of feeling into a consciousness that can be used as a tool to analyze power in the capitalist system and become capable of imagining an alternative to the ideology because unlike the characters in the novel, the reader’s structure of feeling is still in process.

...and i'm back

among the advantages of staying indoors during winters and snow days is the opportunity to return to a forgotten blog. one which i've left so forlornly for almost a year.

i keep peering over the window, unsure if it's raining or snowing. it sounds like rain but i don't feel like going outside to find out.

it's weird, after living through the chicago blizzard, this snow doesn't head too far from simply being a baby fart. but i suppose the landscape difference complicates the circumstances a bit. besides, who doesn't like snow days?