Clare's post-analysis analysis

Note to Mindfield readers: this post is an assignment for one of my courses for my 2nd year undergraduate degree at SOAS. I, therefore, make no claim to know at all if i am correct and fully believe that collective education is more effective than struggling on my own! So, I would TOTALLY welcome disagreements and corrections. If you feel to do so, please comment below so all can see.

Read my initial Pennie does Pomegranate myth HERE

For me, the purpose of education is to enable us understand and, therefore, attempt to transform the material world around us which, from a classical Marxist approach, will have an impact upon the ideological superstructure. My story, then, aimed to challenge the way we are conditioned to see things to help us understand contradictions in life which prevent us from making these changes.

This was not so much an exercise in l'ecriture feminine but rather an attempt at applying a semi-post-structuralist-realist(!) technique of literary practice to an analysis that employs a non-universalising materialist conception of the world as its theory. Realism as a literary genre is not intended to be realistic per se: by removing any fanciful extras I sought to provide a truthful rendering of typical characters under (fairly) typical circumstances in order to explore the conflict ridden and contradictory nature of social relations—of production and also sexual—by overemphasising the relationship between the unconscious and those relations.

I aimed to demonstrate this through both form and content.

The form was deliberately confusing. In the first instance I wanted the aesthetic quality of my myth to urge the reader to question the way we are conditioned to see things. The story (does not) start(s) with the interwoven secret 'thoughts to self/reader' which I hoped would compel the reader to emphasise with Demeter. In a post-structuralist fashion I played with the order of these interjections: the opening one spoke about a drought which had not yet happened, in fact the next section spoke about watering plants and tending fields which was the binary opposite of a drought. But to also highlight that these oppositions are not equal;one is always valourised over the other and in fact sets the limits for the oppressed other. The first part of the final interjections could have been placed near the beginning after he (who was he?) cooked the meal. I did this to illuminate that the unconscious fills in gaps and makes concrete that which is not and to show how dialectical processes are at play in that the reader imparts their own experiences on a text. They were not intended to be the story proper but rather constantly referring to something else to show that language is not always so clear cut. I did this to demonstrate that, in the words of Derrida, 'there is no outside the text'... It is often what we don't say that speaks volumes and this absence is still present in the text. I also employed labels at the bottom of the post to reinforce this. Finally on form, the myth was set a-historically to prove Levi-Strauss' proposition that the mind attempts to make sense of, and control, nature in exactly the same way across time thereby dispelling the myth of the pensé sauvage.

Content. I aimed to demonstrated how when the means of production, in this case the fields, are controlled individually by an elite, as opposed to collectively by those who operate them, ideology serves to fill the gap between being alienated from the means of production and the unconscious representation of it. By appropriating the land the ruling class accordingly altered the forces of production and transformed the relations of production and, if we accept the premise that the ideas of every epoch are those of the ruling class, we see how the lies about the bare land were implemented to justify oppression and divisions in society. I played with tropes of class and class division to highlight how they have an impact upon constructions of gender formation and divisions, sexuality and heteronormativity and to challenge other socially accepted norms such as what constitutes a 'family': who exactly were the 'four of us' who went to the city? Who did Zeus find on Demeter's breast? Even the concept of, or signifier, 'mother' is not concrete. Ownership of women is also shown here as an effect of the concept of land-ownership. And, finally, Demeter referred to god as both a transcendental god but also as the self-image of man. This contradiction again shows how ideology, in this case religion, is a necessary product of unfree social conditions (alienation from means of production and unconscious acceptance of oppressive property relations) as explained before.

When in the story I wrote 'I'm not sure if it's seeing me in pain or the milk that he loves but none-the-less I wish he would return to just cooking for us in exchange for sex', I aimed to retrieve Freud's analysis of the object of desire and to confront Lacan when he says that 'desire' is merely a desire for the others desire. Desire is always culturally and historically relative and partly because for Lacan desire has no aim it leaves the analyist to concentrate their psychoanalytic techniques on only the adjustment of the individual whereas for Freud changing the individual rather than the world was a neurotic response.

Another contradiction in a conflict ridden world is when Demeter went on sex-strike. This was, of course, a metaphor for the resistance to patriarchal rule but also highlighted how individual actions do not in and of themselves endure any permanent change. The struggle for emancipation can only be enacted collectively which is why at the end they didn't live happily ever after. They only 'live' which was intended to be a dangling signifier to indicate that the story was not complete (with no full stop) and this analysis also ends with no full stop since I do not believe that Marxism is a complete, universalising finished product and never will be.

On my analysis itself. I appreciate that there are many other points that I could have picked up on and analysed. Certainly my analysis would have been different if I had written it at the time of writing my myth. My plan for the form and content was there from the beginning; but to what extent were these conscious intentions? Has my recent essay on Levi-Strauss and further readings on Freud enabled me to prove what they propose?

And finally; my authorial intention was to 'cut out' that which would make my myth appropriate to my political beliefs. And further the dialectic of intertextuality shows how we are all connected in this world whether we like it or not...