Connected?

Well, here goes. As a whole, "Connected" has served to make me quite connected. Within class, my negative reaction provoked me to be more interactive in discussions, bringing up my questions and difficulties. After class, I talked about it with my husband on the way home. That can't be a bad thing, right? In fact, I like that a lot.

But it still doesn't make me agree with the work as a whole. Like Lauren, I can appreciate Shaviro's approach, but I just didn't find it to be convincing. One of my problems is the voices of authority that he refers to. Foucault and Baudrillard are both highly respected philosophers, but they are both philosophers of post modernism (or, some would argue, post structuralism). Spicer is a poet that echoes their philosophies. None of this is bad (to me) on its own, but I felt that there was no balance of reference.

For example, Shaviro uses Baudrillard to say that "...the technosphere, or the mediascape, is the only 'nature' we know." Not only do I disagree with this, but because Shaviro doesn't mention any other support for this point besides Baudillard's philosophy about reality, I'm not convinced.
Similarly, when Jack Spicer says that "poems following the dictation of language" is "nonsense," or that poetry is a message that does not concern us, I find myself disagreeing and not being persuaded otherwise.

Ultimately Shaviro chose to use single voices without other examples or reference when he made his points, and he chose to reference voices from a single philosophical and historical perspective. This one-sided (in my opinion) approach was where the connection broke down. Even though he chose many different topics to discuss, I felt as though they were all presented from the same perspective, with little recognition of other perspectives. This in turn made me disagree with all of his little points, which sacrificed the effectiveness of the work as a whole.

BUT it challenged me. And that's a good thing, no matter how you look at it.