Techne Writing - Persuasive Craft

Maybelle asks what Slavoj Žižek (anti-capitalist philosopher) ⚡️ might say about Andy’s cerulean sweater in Devil Wears Prada 👠 Comparing fashion to “stuff” (and in a sense, garbage) reveals how ideology and belief systems shape our lives. 🚮 It’s this mix of high critique with low culture that exposes the workings of ideology🪞

Andy thinks she’s resisting the system by wearing a lumpy blue sweater that isn’t high fashion (and that she seems to genuinely enjoy), but Miranda reveals how Andy still participates in the pile of “stuff” that she ascribes to fashion 🗑️ and so at the moment Andy thinks she’s above fashion, she’s actually inside it.

And is there a relationship between the detritus of fashion and the detritus of Coca Cola (Žižek’s beloved drink)? 🥤

Junaid compares two cities that are deeply rooted in the Western collective consciousness: London and Paris. In his search for cities that come across as chill 🌬️rather than workaholic 🏭 he was immediately impressed by Paris and the aesthetic beauty of their buildings + lack of skyscrapers. London did have more of a workaholism feel (you can kind of sense that this was the place the industrial revolution was born 😮‍💨), but at the same time, London offered a sense of community, especially in the neighbourhood of Whitechapel where he stayed.
CONTEXT: I’m a North American from Toronto visiting London and Paris for the first time. Also, prior to travelling, ppl told me that Paris was kind of a dump and Parisians were snooty lol. Only other European countries visited: Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.

Maybelle returns to our boy Slavoj Žižek⚡️– to reflect on how the political left and the political right construct their enemies 👻👻 For instance, because the right idealizes property rights and individualism, its enemy is the excluded or marginal figure who “enjoys” what the everyday individual should enjoy instead.

Meanwhile, the left constructs another enemy that’s an inversion of the former… the capitalist who enjoys all, at the expense of the universal. 💸 And his is an issue because the universal is a pretty major form in which we exist and are subjects. Does Animal Farm ring a bell? 🐷🔁

Readings: 
Slavoj  Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology
G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Spirit (Jena Lectures 1805-6)

Maybelle watches Devil Wears Prada 2 👠 and feels compelled to share an irony that is inherent to capitalism: how, despite the mass consumption and plenitude of goods to sustain us many times over, we must embody a relentless drive that pits us in competition against others — in a system where wealth and success for one = possible poverty and failure for others 🏭

The movie actually reveals this to us in the decision Andy faces when she has the chance to make money at the expense of Miranda.

Junaid gets intercepted in the woods and has to quickly answer the question of who he is 🌲😫

He says he went to grad school to study Don DeLillo and humor philosophy, taught the Advanced Placement English Language and Composition course and finished writing a novel about the apocalypse, which is sort of about conspiracies and zombies, and sort of about ppl who maybe don’t mind the end times or the destruction of systems, but I guess we’ll learn more about that later.

Oh right, to survive in capitalism, he works as a technical writer to make his living 😅 he helps academics, scientists, engineers and other high complexity ppl communicate their work so that non-experts can understand them 🙂‍↕️

Junaid ends up at the Globe Theatre in London and thinks back to some anti-elitist talks he used to have with his students.

Much of what we can glean about Shakespeare comes from his audience, who consisted mainly of groundlings aka penny stinkers aka penny stinkards - these were people who worked menial, often smelly jobs (things like dock worker, refuse cleaner, etc.) and paid one penny (which was ⅓ or ¼ of their daily wage) and went to the theatre to cheer the hero, boo the villain, heckle, jeer, and generally be a hooligan 🤪

Rich people attending the theatre were in fact not really into the show. They were there to sit close to the stage so that they could show themselves off to everyone who had less money than them 💀

Hamnet, the movie about the death of Shakespeare’s son, featured a separate reconstruction of the Globe Theatre - they do a pretty good job of showcasing these class dynamics.

Maybelle realizes that the hotness of trad wives is fake 🛸 due to the impossible beauty standards they must fulfill (standards which are borne in the male psyche).

She cites Jacques Lacan’s theory of sexuation from Seminar XX: Encore. In this seminar, Lacan basically argues that women face the impossible task of having to be both a madonna and a w***e (which makes them “split” or “barred” or not whole) while their male provider counterparts get to enjoy the “wholeness” 🍩 that comes with being a heroic provider figure.

Also this means that Ballerina Farm is …. a wildly suggestive title for a trad wife account 😮‍💨

Catbus enthusiast Junaid goes to London and sees My Neighbour Totoro at the Gillian Lynn Theatre in the West End. He was overall impressed by how this play adaptation made him realize the film has a theatrical quality to begin with 🎭

The magic of the stage is a magic in itself, but what’s interesting is how movies, tv, anime, etc. that convey a strong sense of place — it might be holding multiple scenes in the same settings, or providing a wide/full view of settings, or having characters interact with the setting — do capture some of this magic, which therefore begs the question: should writers be striving to capture a sense of stage in their works?

Some examples of other media that conveys a strong sense of stage:

Breaking Bad, 1917, Mean Girls

After encountering an American style/acidic coffee ☕ at the Eiffel Tower (the only bad coffee he had in Paris), Junaid realizes that French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is… real

He references Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981) to explain why the Eiffel Tower may or may not be real 👽 He also comes up with a definition for Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal (of course, this is only a working definition due to the trippiness inherent to Baudrillard’s writing which is itself an experience to enjoy 😁)

Baudrillard drew from Marxist theory to explain how the global, capitalist, mass media system we’re stuck in keeps us in a state of illusion.

What is the system’s number one illusory strategy, you may ask? His answer: Disneyland 👸🏰

Junaid stumbles upon gothic medieval architecture in Montemartre, Paris 🏰 and answers the questions of whether the Romantic artistic movement (circa 1800-1850) was class conscious 🤔

Romantic writers like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Victor Hugo were from well-monied backgrounds, yet resisted industrialization through their works.

Btw the 12th century church in this post, Église Saint-Pierre de Montemartre, is typically overshadowed by the Basilique du Sacré Coeur de Montmartre, a much more Neoclassical style church — something the romantics might take issue with 😤

Sorry about the windy audio 😮‍💨