Reviews for College arithmetic

The average rating for College arithmetic based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-06-28 00:00:00 Ana Castillo The best thing about this book is that it really is what it says it is - key works on media and cultural studies. This is a remarkable collection. Many of the things you would expect to be here are here. For example, there is Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - probably the most important twenty pages ever written on the subject. This is the second time I've read it over the last wee while and it is a remarkable piece of writing. It is the theoretical background for Berger's Ways of Seeing - something else to go onto your to read list, if it isn't there already. There is also Habermas's The Public Sphere - although, not Nancy Fraser's critique of it, which would have been worth adding if this book wasn't already over 700 pages long. There is some Adorno on The Culture Industry, McLuhan on the medium being the message, a wee bit of Barthes from Mythologies, a very little Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall - two people I really do need to read more of, some Chomsky on his propaganda model and some Bourdieu on television - a book I've reviewed elsewhere. There is even a really lovely piece by bell hooks on 'eating the other'. BUT, and as I think you can see already, it would be insane to try to review this book. There is just too much, far too much. All the same, I'm going to talk about Baudrillard and his idea of the Simulacra. This is one of those ideas that you hear all of the time but rarely have it explained in a way that makes sense. Baudrillard is the philosopher who is somewhat famous - as much as philosophers ever get to be famous, for having said that the Gulf War never happened. His most famous book also appears in an early scene in first Matrix movie, one that literally owes quite a debt to Baudrillard. Okay, so, simulacra? Basically, it is a copy of a copy - to which there was never an original - and that this is one of the main ways that we should come to understand our post-modern world. Yep, I know, sounds like nonsense, but this is actually a really important idea and one you kind of do need to get a handle on. There are lovely introductions to the various parts of this book and the introduction to the bit on postmodernism explains simulacra with both a kind of quote from Baudrillard about Nixon and Disneyland, but also with what I think is a stunningly clear explanation using plastic surgery. The introduction says that today we have lots of women who go to plastic surgeons asking to be made to look like someone from a magazine photograph - but the person in the magazine has been photoshopped. That is, there was no original, just a hyper-real image and it is this hyper-real image that we seek to emulate. When Plato spoke about the problems of art being involved in art being a copy of a copy, I suspect he had no idea of just how far down that particular road we might find ourselves. Now, it is really important to think this through. What he is not saying is that the world doesn't exist, in the way Plato does. That, clearly, would be nuts. He is not a solipsist. The point is that the world really does exist and so do the representations of the world that we create. The photoshopped image has an all-too-real existence - so real that we are prepared to suffer agonies to become that image. That is 'real', that is hyper-real. In much the same way that Disneyland is also real - I mean, people pay a fortune to go there and the place is designed as a kind of hyper-real fantasy of small town America. A fantasy land where dreams come true. But this is also true of not just the ways in which we seek to realise our fantasies - but also of the realisations of our nightmares. What can it mean that the Gulf War didn't exist? Surely we saw it night after night on our TV screens, we've seen the parades of coffins come home draped in flags. If that isn't real, what the hell is reality? Like I said, he isn't saying it isn't real, he is saying it never happened. The Gulf War isn't really any of those things - at least, not the Gulf War we got to witness on our television sets. That Gulf War certainly never happened. That Gulf War was a mission accomplished, one that was fought because Saddam Hussein wanted to kill George Bush's daddy. It was a war fought with pin point accuracy that limited Iraqi deaths because we are so damn humane - that war never happened - even while we were watching it night after night on our television sets it never happened. And the problem is that now the hyper-reality of that war means that the fundamental unreality of the narrative we have been spun can't keep up, can't make sense, of what is going on in the country itself. I mean, the narrative that was spun to justify going to war with Hussein in the first place was that Al Qaeda, the guys that brought you 9/11, had been supported in some secret, off-hand way by Hussein, so that to crush Al Qaeda we needed to crush Hussein first. Except now we have photographs of John McCain shaking hands with ISIS crazies. And it seems that ISIS was kicked out of Al Qaeda because they were too nuts. And, just to prove you really couldn't make this shit up, after spending a trillion dollars or so in blasting the bejesus out of Iraq to save the world from Al Qaeda, it looks like the looniest fringe group of Al Qaeda is going to literally take over large swags of Iraq - machine gunning people along the way with abandon. There was no 'patriotism' involved in this war, just a hyper-real, Hollywood version of a Clint Eastwood film enacted on TV, even containing a scene where the US President lands a plane on a battle ship. Killing 100,000 odd Iraqi civilians, using depleted uranium casing to give them ongoing cancers, smashing up their infrastructure, bombing power and water plants - and all while believing (and I don't for a moment doubt they really did believe) we would be welcomed as liberators show how far reality and Reality have moved apart from each other. And we will do it all again. While we believe in the simulacrum, the world will just have to conform to that. Simulacra are beautiful lies that become true because we force the world to fit to them. Like the woman getting the facelift - the knives are real, the Botox is real, the money she hands over is real, it is just that the photo of the blonde 50 year old woman that looks twenty-something isn't real in the way the women under the knife wants to believe she is. The bombs, too, were real, the shattered lives were real, the torture in the gaols we set up was real, but the dream of a democratic Iraq, that was a bizarre fantasy based on wishful thinking and worse. A simulacrum we used to stoke the fantasy that we are the good guys, that we always do what is right, that our motives are pure and are dreams are true. Like I said, there is too much to this book to even begin to really review it properly. All the same, it provides a wonderful introduction to what are many key texts in an area that has incredibly interesting things to say to us about the world we live in.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-07 00:00:00 Bernd Loeffler Fantastic book and a fantastic class! Media studies will more likely than not be my major here!