Bloggrokker (Scott) 11/14

Sat inside a Cone of Silence, now I'm goin' to Disneyland!
Tickle Elmo hard enough and he just might agree with me.
Alright, I felt the oppression. Placed within what I silently referred to as a "game-environment" in the last class, an environment where I, as a male of the species, were asked not to speak, where only the female constituency were allowed to speak, yes, I felt oppressed. Even if I had nothing to say, still, the idea of the option removed for me if I did wish to add something, dare I say I felt the gravity of oppression keep me in a gendered lockdown. Dare I say I felt a reversal of Cixous's statement--"every man has known the torture of remaining in silence." Dare I say I felt the Althusseriahn ISAs plotting against me--the religious ISA (where is the long-fabled and unfortunately derogatorily termed "Popette?"), the educational ISA (one can't spell "principal" without "prince," can one?--would Dworkin or Paglia vehemently reject the term "princessipal?"), the family ISA (patriarchal suburban dictatorships; Ward Cleaver, I'm talkin' to you!), etc.--just as they've plotted against women for years.
And, y'know, this "game" kinda felt like an amusement park ride.
A specific ride, too; a ride straight from Eco's critical playground, Disneyland. A ride populated with mechanical armies of multicultural automatons, a ride known as "It's a Small World."
No, no, hang on, it's far, far from my intention to say that the cultural repression of women equates anything resembling a G-rated Disney attraction. It's the regulations and mandates and policies for anyone, male or female, to remain seated and silent and just let the mechanical armies of multiculturalism indoctrinate the masses through cacophony--and I hear the eternal refrain of "it's a small world, after all, it's a small world, after all" as Gayatri Spivak's definition of cacophony; yes, it's repetition, but it's a mass repetition in varying degrees of sync, and such out-of-sync tendencies resonate cacophonously--as said masses slip serenely past, well, there's my intent, my point, and my lead-in to a question.
Is laughter cacophonous?
We didn't read Donna Haraway this term, but according to her, from her book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, cyborgs, biotech fusings of flesh and machinery, will usher in a "post-gender future" (and, I'd like to further speculate, perhaps a "post-race future"--a multicultural singularity?). I see Disney's "It's a Small World," through Haraway's lens, as attempting to indoctrinate this idea through cacophonous repetition, this idea of a "post-gender future"; all the mechanical ethnicities lining the ride's banks are genderless machines with just enough anthropomorphic "imagineering" thrown in to simulate a utopian global village, a utopia of toylike and genderless machines.
Toylike and genderless machines? This brings things back to the question of laughter as cacophony. This brings things to Tickle Me Elmo--or, to keep things as current as possible, the new "Xtreme" Elmo, TMX Elmo.
I don't know what makes this latest Elmo "Xtreme"--perhaps it's got more errogenous zones to throw it into epilepsy or something, or maybe it's vocabulary's been stretched to include "rad" or "grody to the max." It doesn't matter--despite the box, Elmo, like all of its kin, is a genderless machine. I remember reading somewhere that Disney developed the technology permitting Elmo to do his thing. World without end. Amen.
And laughter is Elmo's thing. And laughter is cacophonous, as laughter isn't always simply understood. Laughter is a cacophony as it emanates singularly and imitates plurally.
And Elmo spawns one last question: is laughter indoctrination?
You tell me:
Roland Barthes claimed that toys represent a microcosm of the real world for children. Does Elmo do this?
Adorno and Horkheimer wrote that "to be entertained means to be in agreement." Does Elmo accomplish this for children?
Fredric Jameson wrote of "the frantic economic urge to produce fresh waves of ever-more novel-seeming goods." Does the TMX Elmo fit within this economic model?
And a Final Fearful Thought: ELMO CARRIES THE PLUSH MUG OF POSTMODERNISM.