Michel Foucault on Prediscursives and the Discursive
Similar to de Saussure’s concept of signs, Michel Foucault claims that there are things that exist in the world – IRL – there are objects, bod...
Month: July 2017
de Saussure on Signifier – Signified – Signs
Structural Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure posited that any sign – any thing that is meaningful, a word, an emoji, a picture, etc. – can be broken in...
Kenneth Burke on Terministic Screens: Reflections – Selections – Deflections
As I said in a previous post, we have to realize, along with Kenneth Burke, that any discourse, any story, description or set of terms (“woman,” ...
Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. b. 2. The Techniques of Conceptual Jokes – Absurdity
This is the ninth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reactio...
On Honest Personas, Signifieds, Truths and Spaces
Mo’Nique, in an interview with Blake Hannon of Kentucky.com (7/20/2017), had a few things to say about her past and present on-stage persona that are rele...
Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. b. 1. The Techniques of Conceptual Jokes – Displacement
This is the eighth of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the reacti...
Update to Persona
Added the following bit from an interview with John Sheehan. John Sheehan expresses the idea that who he is onstage is a heightened or more extreme version of h...
Rory Scovel on Connecting to Smart Audiences
In an interview with Oxford American’s Jacob Rosenberg (7/18/2017), Rory Scovel talks a bit about his relation to the audience in some ways that are impor...
Sigmund Freud’s Jokes part A. II. a. 4. The Techniques of Verbal Jokes – Final Thoughts
This is the seventh of several installments on Sigmund Freud’s Jokes [Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905; free eBook) – and the react...
Jim Breuer and Ali Lerman are Insensitive
I’ll be honest again: I’m not a Jim Breuer fan. He’s one of those comics who just rubs me the wrong way. A big part of it is his hyper-masculi...