Technologizing the Tale[1]

Jason Wallin

Virtuality... gives you everything, but at the same time it subtly deprives you of everything. The subject is realized to perfection, but when realized to perfection, the subject automatically becomes object, and panic sets in. —Baudrillard, 2002, 180

“They are just there, like objects, for the hero to rescue from danger”

A fecund seduction of the wor(l)d unfolded from a conversation between myself and my students regarding the privileged and marginalized in fairy tales. Precipitated by a student's observation regarding the marginalized position of the feminine in a number of fairy tales that we “read” as a class, our conversation considered those images disclosed as “reserve” or “stock,” a Heideggerian notion referring to objects in the world disposed of alterity, commodified and integrated into the flattened surface of technology (Heidegger, 1977).

Our conversation turned to the positioning of the feminine in the narratives we studied, extending into the world in an embodied and (re)membered way. “Girls are always waiting to be saved,” Jenny blurted, continuing, “they are just there, like objects, for the hero to rescue from danger.” A chorus of affirmation erupted amongst her classmates. Kelly turned to meet her words, “In Cinderella,” she paused, “It  seems like her only goal is to get married to Prince Charming, it’s sad that she’s portrayed as being so shallow.”  “It’s like Cinderella is so helpless, but if you think about Snow White or Little Red Riding Hood, it’s the same,” Tommy interjected, extending the positioning of Cinderella into a wider narrative body. “Rapunzel too,” Mark erupted, “she gets trapped in the tower, and she just has to wait for the man.” “It’s even like Brittany Spears,” Jenny recounted, “saying that women should be looked at as puppets or slaves, as though we need to be saved and controlled.”

As a site of economic and ideological valuation, the fairy tale has today collapsed into a field of ambient consumerism, deployed virtually as a signification of social mobility and diffuseness. This article attempts to explore the virtual co-opting of fairy tale narrative as intimately tied to the tenets of capital accumulation, circulation and positive appearance. Against this, the rereading of subjectivities within fairy narrative explores the im(possibility) of radicalizing the sign in an era of technological immersion. 

Binary Opposition: The Metaphysics of Presence

Fraught with dis-ease, our conversation evoked the image of the feminine as “stock,” as a positioned present-at-hand commodity (Heidegger, 1977). Entering into a discursive space of metaphysical critique, our conversation bore resemblance to Derrida’s extension of Heideggerian Destruktion and Abbau, the double movement of destruction rebuilding; deconstruction.

Derrida’s critique of the Western metaphysical project pivots in part on the notion that Western thought is motivated by polarities or binary oppositions. Binary logic, according to Derrida, not only foregrounds the formulation of Western philosophical discourse, but plunders everyday thought, locating and motivating the coordinates of our experience (Derrida, 1972). The polarities good/evil, being/nothingness, first world/ third world, presence/absence, accumulation/lack, truth/error, identity/difference, mind/matter, man/woman, soul/body, life/death, fit/unfit, culture/nature, and speech/writing do not stand as symmetrical relations.

The terms of the binary, as opposed to merely functioning oppositionally, are arranged in hierarchical order, 'priorizing' the first term temporally and qualitatively (Derrida, 1972). The hierarchical structure of binary logic therefore privileges “unity, identity, temporal and spacial presence over distance, difference, dissimulation and deferment” (Derrida, 1972, viii).  As a sign, the feminine becomes possessed in its distance to the present (in this case, perhaps the presence of the phallus), wherein Derrida's notion of presence bears close relationship to Heideggerian Being; the revealing of the world as present-at-hand (Heidegger, 1962). Derrida reads the present-at-hand in the immediate, privileged term of the binary, hierarchically enframed against the marginal, and reproduced as cultural ‘reality’ (Derrida, 1972). 

With the in(filtration) of technology into all cultural spheres, the reproduction of the ideal by way of the model dominates the cultural technoscape (Postman, 1992). Cultural investment in the notions of identity and unity of meaning have increasingly been motivated by the media, or projected via mass polling. Along this line, McLuhan’s (1964) assertion that “the medium is the message” eerily alludes to the proliferation of code as a means of revealing the world and ‘enframing’ our discourses (7). The active privileging that seemed to emerge through our reading of fairy tales as the marginalization of the feminine proliferated everywhere, in media portrayals and on the internet. It also seemed to fit as a codified sign; “When they show girls in those fashion magazines, they are so skinny,” a student creating a collage commented to her peers. “Let me see,” her friends chimed in. “She’s not that skinny!” one of the girls scoffed.

The idealized signs of Western Culture which pass as ‘natural,’ as present-at-hand, have invaded all cultural spheres, constituting an immediately accessible ‘reality’; “a natural fact of the real world rather than something that we have learned to see as natural” (Davis, 1993, 7). From the journal entry of a student: “If you don’t wear certain clothes, like Gap and LaSenza Girl, if you don’t like [certain celebrities] like Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera or Hillary Duff, you’re not considered cool.”  As another student succinctly commented in a journal entry, “In the fairy tales we read, the princess had to look pretty for the prince, [she] had to wear the right gown, shoes and had to have her hair looking just right—the prince never seems to fall in love with the ugly girl.” In this reading, the ‘natural’ signs espoused via both fairy tale narrative and the media are shaken, opening the possibility for the question: “What’s going on?” In the case of our fairy tale conversation, the disruption of the familiar seemed to require attention to the absent, that which had prevailed not.

(I’m a) Slave 4 U

Some years ago I noticed how many false things I had accepted as true in my childhood, and how doubtful were the things that I subsequently built on them and therefor that, once in a lifetime, everything should be completely overturned (Descartes, 1993,18).

I filled the board with notes as my students fervently engaged in a discussion surrounding a troubling dialogue that occurred a week prior. Partly by student request, I shared the lyrics to Brittany Spears’ “(I’m a) Slave 4 U”(2002) to the class, reading them concomitantly with the audio version of the song. Reading the lyrics, not to extend vocabulary and not as a mini-lesson on punctuation, provided the opportunity to read its discursive terrain into our dialogue.

Students immediately pointed out lyrics such as “I’m a slave (It just feels right) for you. (It just feels good),” connecting them to Jenny’s comment a week earlier. The positioning of the female in the fairy tales we had read were a palimpsest to the “Slave 4 U” lyrics. “Brittany Spears sings as though all women are supposed to be passive objects,” Rebecca wrote in a later journal entry. Another student drew from her lived experience, “I have a friend named Kristen, she thinks that she’s fat, so she’s going to go on to her own little diet so she’ll be skinnier… and more beautiful.”

The fairy tales we read weeks earlier again appeared as a spectre in our conversation; emerging as if in a palimpsest: a manuscript written on more than once, bearing the traces of earlier writing. “When Britney Spears sings ‘I want to do what you tell me to,” a student recounts, “it reminds me of a helpless princess, waiting for her hero.” “When Britney Spears says that she is leaving behind her age and her name, I think that she must have [amnesia], sort of like Snow White,” another student avers. From the Greek palimpseston: scraped again, the palimpsest bears the trace of its absented other. “It may be depressing to discover how subtle, how invisible, how pervasive, and how much our own are the discursive mechanisms and structures through which we have learned to know our place and remain within it” (Davis, 1993, 8).

The ‘Liberation’ of the Narrative

Throughout sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, the fairy tale was produced for the consumption of the aristocratic elite, constructing a commentary on normative behavior and the exercise of power as governed by a seemingly unbreakable and reciprocal symbolic order, as in the Middle Ages. It was such that the play of power between fairy tale characters reflected a civilizing process devolving on notions of class and sex. During this period, fairy tales functioned to entertain the aristocracy, but in this same gesture, the fairy tale embodied subversive symbolic traits as “secular instructive narratives,” explicating potential abuses of power and authority (Zipes, 1997). Institutionalized as a genre, fairy tales throughout the seventeenth century proliferated into such cultural spheres as the ballet, opera and court festival (Zipes, 1997). Yet, as Baudrillard (1993) traces in Symbolic Exchange and Death, the period stemming from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution marked a significant shift away from the symbolic, instead becoming dominated by the counterfeit, manifest in the ‘false’ image. With the accretion of bourgeois order and the birth of fashion, the sign eclipsed its symbolic obligation, liberated into a field of connotation as the signifieds of production, status, wealth and eminency (Baudrillard, 1993). The Renaissance also marked the “destructuration of the feudal order,” in the “emergence of overt competition at the level of signs of distinction” (50). The counterfeit appears within the liberation of the sign, emancipated from symbolic duty, yet reproducing the image of the symbolic through falsification. The fairy tale in late eighteenth century Europe similarly became “freed... to expand its form and content” (Zipes, 1997, 65). With a shift in the means of production and a growing demographic of literate citizens, the fairy tale, once produced exclusively on behalf of the adult aristocracy, became available to all citizens, including children. Fairy tales continued to carry civilizing narratives, extending the vision of the aristocracy into broader society:

Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont’s Magasin des enfants (1756) used approximately ten fairy tales, including “Beauty and the Beast,” to instruct young girls in how to domesticate themselves and become respectable young women, attractive for the marriage department (Zipes, 1997, 65).

The early nineteenth century marked the autonomy of the fairy tale. In a developing free market system, the fairy tale increasingly came to be viewed and packaged as a household commodity. In this movement, access to the fairy tale, with its enunciations on gender behavior, the nature of the child, power and success became a connotation of status and integration into ‘high’ culture.

The symbolically bound fairy tale of the Middle Ages turns toward increasing commodification throughout the Renaissance, packaged and marketed as a household good, ‘liberated’ into the free market system as fashion—as a sign of social mobility and diffuseness (Zipes, 1997). “Under the sign of the commodity, all labor is exchanged and loses its specificity—under the sign of fashion, the signs of leisure and labor are exchanged” (Baudrillard, 1993, 88). The institutionalization of the fairy tale shifts again in the nineteenth century, amid the mass industrialization of European society under the sign of technological progress and serial differentiation; “the very possibility of two or n identical objects. The relation between them is no longer one of an original and its counterfeit, analogy or reflection, but instead one of equivalence and indifference” (55). The nineteenth to early twentieth century marks a period in which the free market supersedes social power—the accumulation of signs no longer directly correlates to social position, but instead to money and the commodification of objects in the world. Fairy tales throughout this period became inscribed within the rhetoric of the marketplace and subsequently, within the code of technology; as Postman (1993) elucidates, “the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is largely conducted by commercial enterprise” (165).

With the development of animation technologies, fairy tales turned cinematic, most notably so under the supervision of Disney Studios which, during the 1930’s, conservatively recast the fairy tale as a signifier of the Disney corporate logo(s):

What was important for Disney was not the immediate and personal contact of a storyteller with a particular audience to share wisdom and induce pleasure but the impact that he as a creator could have on as large an audience as possible in order to sell a commodity and endorse ideological images that would enhance his corporate power (Zipes, 1997, 87).

As during the Renaissance, a period in which the fairy tale was introduced to children, the corporate mindset of mid twentieth century industrial America came to view the child as a consumer, readily ‘absorbable’ into the free market system. The notion of the child as consumer during this period adopts a double meaning; not only is the child viewed as the consumer of the film, s/he is concomitantly viewed as a consumer of peripheral goods surrounding the film. The critical difference between the Renaissance and the Industrial model devolves in part on the ability of the technology of the latter era to disseminate ideologically laden images to mass market audiences. Whereas the Renaissance retained a notion of the original and the false (semblance and reality), industrial America no longer reflected an investment in the original per se, but instead, defined the sign in relationship to signs of the same mass produced series (Baudrillard, 1993).

With receding concern for the original, mass produced signs appeared repeatable, systematic and universally inscribed under the commercial law of value (Baudrillard, 1993). The decade between 1920 and 1930 observed the development of a market dedicated to the control of children’s aesthetic and consumer interests. Hollywood Associates, in collusion with the Modern Merchandising Bureau, sought to conceptualize the children’s film industry within the free market model, ‘producing’ story ideas and scripts in order to maximize the potential for “lucrative product tie-ins” (Zipes, 1997, 91).

Inception of the fairy tale into the cinematic frame ‘mutated’ the genre, ‘whitewashing’ its symbolic radicality under the commercial law of value. Not only does the cinematic frame dictate a divisive space between subject and object, it acts to commodify the sign by liberating it from reality and inserting it into a field of consumer exchange predicated upon the purely aesthetic valuation of the sign; “The movie appeared as a world of triumphant illusions and dreams that money could buy” (Mcluhan, 1964, 12). The reduction of the sign to its singularly aesthetic existence runs parallel to the evacuation of its conflicted meanings, the byproduct of which is the propagation of elevated models masking the presence of a basic reality (Baudrillard, 1993).

Disney’s animated features throughout the 1930’s (en)acted the fairy tale genre as a format inscribed within a cinematic code; “serial production gives way to generation through models... since all forms change from the moment that they are no longer mechanically reproduced, but conceived according to their very reproducibility, their diffraction from a... core called a model” (56).

There is... a structural rigidity about the Disney animated features that has grown increasingly obvious as the years have passed. The editing principals applied to Snow White were those of conventionally well-made commercial film of the time. There was nothing particularly daring about the way it was put together, its merit was based on other skills. In general, a scene would open with an establishing or master shot, then proceed to an intermediate shot, then to close-ups of the various participants, with conventional cut-aways to various details of scenery or decor as needed. (Schickel quoted in Zipes, 1997, 93)

Binary Logic and the Cinema    

In Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema (1975), film theorist Mulvey reads the binary oppositions narcissism/desire, looking/being looked at, active/passive, masculine/ feminine as central to the cinematic code. Mulvey (1975) suggests that popular cinema functions in collusion with the patriarchal unconscious, producing and (re)producing the male gaze fetishistically, combining the “spectacle and narrative.... The presence of woman [as] an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film" (383-384). As such, the spectator is compelled to identify with the patriarchal "fetishistic scopic drive" (Mulvey, 1990, 35): "Traditionally, woman displayed [cinematically] has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium" (Mulvey, 1990, 19).

Cinematic looking imposes scopic boundaries upon the spectator, establishing the forbidden and private—signs of lack, which are fetishistically appropriated as fantasy. Mulvey theorizes that the position of women as lack in popular cinema becomes resolved along two strategies; either the female character is investigated, excavated—demystified—or—through the disavowal of castration anxiety (lack), women become fetishized, resulting in sign overvaluation: hence the cult of the ‘beautiful female star’ (Mulvey, 1975). 

Fairy tales in the cinema, encoded within the metaphysics of the frame, ally the spectator with the male protagonist and connote the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of women (Mulvey, 1990, 19); “Snow White just lays there, poisoned, and all the dwarves can do is just look at her,” Jennifer points out. Amanda interjects, “In the movie Cinderella, well, she never looks at the camera, she is there for you to look at!” Arranged in accord with the optic drive, signs circulate not for the purpose of expounding meaning, but for their connotative and aesthetic play, marking the commercial value of the sign as spectacle.

Interlude

“It’s the stories themselves that are difficult,” Wendy offers. “If only the story was [different], if only they could change.” Our readings turn toward an ever-increasing awareness of idealized images in popular culture. A student who cut out and stapled a picture of Rapunzel Barbie to the wall instigated a conversation surrounding her body, her material worth and her commitment to “having fun and doing everything.” “How does she afford all of those things?” Dan asks. “I don’t know,” Becky responds sarcastically; “I think she’s a movie star, or is it rock star?” “She’s also a scientist and an astronaut and has her own ranch!” Maria adds.

Technologizing the Tale: Rapunzel Barbie

Figure 1.  Let down(load) your hair.

The following day several students urge me over to the computer to show me Mattel’s official Barbie website (www.barbie.com). On the barbie.com website (2002), Barbie is recast as a virtual actress into the role of Rapunzel. Prompts guide the user through an interactive story board. Upon loading, each frame of the story board appears cloaked in day-glo flowers which the computer’s operator has to cast-off with a mouse-correlated magic wand  (Figure 1). The story of Barbie Rapunzel unfolds with Rapunzel being introduced, inextricably being confined to a tower, rescued by Prince Stefan and finally, by marrying and having four designer children. At a mouse click, Rapunzel speaks, “Fairy Tales do come true” (www.barbie.com).

In an extermination of substance, Mattel, in collusion with the Disney corporation cast the virtual in the role of the virtual, synchronizing history and domesticating the fairy tale narrative by offering it up as a calculus of commodities, of objects liberated from reality, colonially redeploying the privileged fantasy of ageless bodies, nuclear families, limitless material acquisition and unhindered optimism.

Whereas cinema creates the conditions for both scene and spectator, the computer screen immerses the ‘subject’ in an “umbilical relation,” a sublime transmogrification predicated on the seemingly infinite ability to modify and manipulate computer images in real time (Baudrillard, 2002, 177). Interactive and ‘user-friendly’ media functions to abolish the distance between spectator and scene; integrating the ‘subject’ cybernetically into a code determined a priori. In this manner, it is the code which determines function, reducing the ‘user’ to a servomechanism, a reflex arc in a chain of programmed eventualities; “we become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” (Mcluhan 1964, xi-xii).  McLuhan alludes to a version of the ‘real’ inscribed under the sign of technology, and today, we see the proliferation of this radical assertion: The products of machines are machines; “padded out, face-lifted... stuffed with special effects,” the outgrowth of machinery marks the excavation of embodied symbolic relationship replaced with the cold mechanized violence of technology as a type of genetic code, controlling the image from the inside while perpetuating the illusion of “free mental space” (Baudrillard, 2002, 178-179).

The televisual medium is not regarded via “the cinematic gaze,” but rather, through the schizophrenic ‘zapping’ of perpetual, ecstatic exchange. “Zapping allows the viewer to construct a viewing experience of fragments, a postmodern collage of images”  (Fiske quoted in May, 2001, 71). In zapping, the television viewer surrounds her/himself with disparate images voided of symbolic radicalism, a postmodern bric-a-brac of consumable, present-at-hand images extending into other televisual mediums such as “personal computers, video games and automated machines”  (Fiske quoted in May, 2001, 71). “One could say that television is the base structure for the current state of visual culture. Its fragmented and repetitive design offers a viewing situation intended to be internalized by a series of disconnected ‘glances’ (May, 2001, 68). It is scarcely shocking to imagine pedagogy in similar terms of ‘zapping’ and ‘disconnected glances,’ for the work of schools has long been intimately tied to a register of technological precision and the clonal logic of repetition, perfection and immediacy.

Barbie.com collapses scene and spectator, integrating the two not only within Mattel’s orthodox capitalistic discourse, but also within the limits of the code. It is within this code that the disappearing subject identifies with a multiplicity of identities, enacting a version of ‘reality’ in which the individual is seemingly liberated from social constraint, ‘free’ to manipulate and modify ab extra; yet, the circumlocutionary logic of technology demands the immersion of the ‘subject’ in a ‘reality’ of objects evacuated of alterity. In this immersion, the ‘spectator’ realizes her/himself within an ambient code, amid objects ‘liberated’ from their symbolic function. “It’s just fun,” Susan asserts, “you can do whatever you want—decorate your room, dress Barbie different ways—you can even send a Barbie card to your friend.”  In this gesture, the ‘subject’ disappears into the cold technological genetic code, immersed concomitantly in a ‘reality’ of infinite possibility and total, zero-degree deprivation.

MyScene.com Barbie is recast, both aesthetically and technologically, redeployed as the cast-off skin of the corporate logo(s). Barbie is no longer enframed as a pink corvette driving princess (à la Disney), but the re(vamped) version of princess  (a catch-phase emblazoned across tee-shirts everywhere)—that cool and dejected adjunct of consumer royalty. Mattel’s MyScene.com Barbie has become a savvy, street smart cynic, replete with ‘chunked,’ Christina Aguilera styled hair, designer wardrobe and of course, flawless cyberflesh. Barbie’s scene includes her immersion within an ambient field of consumption, accessing the uber-trendy of contemporary consumer culture: yoga (because the instructor is cute), CD shopping (of course for Justin Timberlake’s newest release), meeting friends for Sushi and going for coffee (in the preferred ‘East Village’).

The persistent presence of cellular phones, make-up compacts and designer outfits constitute ‘the look’ of Barbie’s scene, ‘installing’ the ideal within the field of technological disclosure. In this manner, Barbie’s look has exceeded simulation via cosmetic surgery, leaving the silicon laden wandering in disbelief, anachronistically out of touch with technological models of perfection. As an ahistorical, instantly circulable form, cyberflesh has become the model; “and it is the body’s resemblance to the model which becomes a source of eroticism and unconsummated self-seduction” (Baudrillard, 2000, 55). The model as spectacle includes society, controlling it through the abstraction of the sign from reality, thereby offering it as a spectacle of mobility and social diffuseness. Situationist Debord theorizes the Society of the Spectacle as complicit in the proliferation of capitalism (Debord, 1999, 95-96):

Within capitalist-based societies all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation... a social relation among people, mediated by images. The spectacle... is a world vision, which has become objectified.... In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life (Debord, 1999, 95-96).

Hyperreal aesthetics have rewritten the human body into its most excessively idealized forms, playing upon an abstract code of plasticized Barbie-like sexuality. A similar metaphor can be applied to the work of many modern schools. Under black-line lessons, recast for no audience in particular, a binarized present reaches a fevered pitch. The worksheet becomes the real, part of a critical code that privileges correctness and the minimization of ambivalence. Yet, even in the face of undecidability, the will to epistemological certitude motivates a ‘fixing’ and naming. This naming, not only produced in self-referentiality, but consumed in sign appropriation, spares the subject from the void, the unknown.

Heideggerian Destruktion is reread in Derrida’s deconstructive project as the viral supplement to Dasien—Derrida’s sign—an a priori, and tyrannical therebeing. The destructive portend of symbolic exchange derails the production/consumption of presence as a “repetition which itself requires the labor of signs... but the thing itself, the world delivered by signs always hangs around... signs both mediate and block, refer and defer, and they do so in one tangled, textual operation, so that at one and the same time they skew our contact with things” (Caputo, 1987, 191). Herein lies the strange attractor of the logos. At the bottom of an illustration depicting Barbie’s image crossed out in favor of a ragged, sullen figure (demarcated with a check mark) one student writes:

If you try to count on Barbie or try to make yourself like her, that’s just dumb because Barbie is just a toy... she should not rule your life. If you want to look like Barbie, you would have to become anorexic, and that would be terribly unhealthy, you might even die. Never count on Barbie because if your mom was a toy she could not make you dinner or clean your room...that would not be good at all!

Another student, commenting on the image of Barbie as a role model, drew two figures at the bottom of his page. One was an image of a crossed-out doll, in gown and high heels, with the caption, “This is what Barbie thinks she looks like.” Beside it, a sullen figure with tattered clothing and snake filled matted hair, reading “This is what Barbie looks like.” The depiction of a stereotypical image of evil, “women which be commonly old, lame, bleary-eyed, pale, fowl, and full of wrinkles,” marks not only the privileged status of the ‘good,’ but the fallen status of its ragged, despised other (Barstow, 1999, 16). If Barbie is not Good (AisA), her identity is clear, she must be disclosed under the sign of evil—as a witch.

The forms of (dis)closure that have provided the coordinates of our reality are installed a priori, disseminated via the media and often perpetuated by the 'technologization' of public discourse. In education, the humanistic notions of male and female identity under the “traditional binary understandings of these and other related terms,” are often espoused indirectly, through both common talking and in the absention of alternative discourses (Davis, 1993, 10); “And is it not that today, we are approaching a homogeneous threshold” (Zikek, 2003, p.3)?

Interlude Two

Figure 2. Sleeping Beauty

Based on a trend in their journal entries, I invited students to consider reconceptualizing some of the fairy tales we had discussed by privileging what had previously been marginalized. The class became very excited at this prospect, throwing out ideas immediately. “The princess saves the prince from the dragon,” one student offered, while another suggested “no, no, the princess saves the dragon from the prince.” More story ideas are considered, “Little Red Riding Hood knows the trick that the Big Bad Wolf is playing,” and “Rapunzel doesn’t want to be saved from the tower, she’s playing a game of chess with her pet mouse!” Students laugh with joy at the mere idea of how the stories might be different, that the stories might be subject to a rebirth (?) (Figure 2).

Several weeks after students began the process of reconceptualizing the fairy tales, we had an opportunity to share our writing, and did so excitedly, not knowing where this foray into alterity might lead us. Students began to share their stories, and one by one, they were read. They were wonderful tales of adventure, monstrosities and triumph, and yet, they did not sit right with me. The initial critique that had driven the project was absent yet again. What we had seemingly grasped not three weeks ago had poured from our hands like quicksilver. The stories had fallen back into the very same categories and structures that we had sought to rework. Princes still saved princesses. The princess still sought to be married after all. The monster was ugly and unfriendly, waiting to be impaled upon the long sword of some fantastic (male) hero. Where had our troubling demon gone, the one that had seduced the wor(l)d, the one that had tempted us “beneath the surface of our cracking civilization” (Summers, 1992, 95)?

“What happened?” I ask my class. “Why did our stories turn out as they did, even after the conversation that we had?” “It’s always been that way,” one student states flatly. “It’s what we live every day,” another succinctly adds. It is the latter comment that haunts me, reminding me of the ever-present pull of the logos, the recognizable, the surface. That our project, which was conceived in earnest could be plundered by an implicit adherence to a model bespeaks a play of power, which not only functions at a metaphysical level, but as an existential reality as well.

References

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Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic Exchange and death. London: Sage Publications.

Baudrillard, J. (2002). Screened out. New York: Verso.

Caputo, J. (1987). Radical hermeneutics: Repetition, deconstruction and the hermeneutic project. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Davis, B. (1993). Shards of glass: Children reading and writing beyond gendered identities. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.

Debord, G. (1999). Separation perfected. In J. Evans and S. Hall (Eds.), Visual culture: The reader (95-98). London: Sage Publications.

Derrida, J. (1972). Dissemination. London: Athlone Press.

Descartes, R. (1998). Meditations and other metaphysical writings. New York: Penguin.

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Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology and other essays. New York: Garland.

May, H. (2001, Summer). Interrupting the program: Descrambling TV through video. Canadian Art, 18(2), 66-73.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 383-390.

Mulvey, L. (1990). Narrative pleasure and cinema. In P. Evans (Ed.), Issues in feminist film criticism (28-40). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Postman, N. (1992). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. New York: Vintage Books.

Summers, M. (1992). History of witchcraft and demonology. New York: Castle Books.

Zipes, J. (1997). Happily ever after: Fairy tales, children, and the culture industry. New York: Routledge.

Zizek, S. (2003). The cyberspace real. Retrieved October 22, 2003 from http://www.mii.karume-a.ca.jp/`leurers/zizek`cyberspacereal.htm.

Footnote

[1] Portions of student dialogue herein have been previously published in: Wallin, J. (2002). With Descartes: A meditation on pedagogical anxiety. Early Childhood Education, 35(1), 41-45.