Ngai has an interesting perspective upon the analysis of humans and their feelings, particularly “ugly” feelings. Mentioning feelings in the grand tradition within literature, she prattles about how it’s prone to last forever and how they’re interchangeably embedded within us. Ngai expresses how we are grounded to it, and no matter the strength of that infatuation we feel more human and more fulfilled no matter the feeling, whether it be anger, envy, or essentially wrath which can’t sustain itself indefinitely. One might feel but also want to disembark from it. When you feel envy of someone you might feel jealous, and when jealousy arises one might hate that cycle of oppressed feelings. It builds up to irony, and being stuck in between two positions. Towards the end of her argument on “ugly” feelings she states an interesting theory on the relationship of irony and “ugly” feelings. We use irony when we want to express a critical distance, more so like pushing ourselves away from something. We have a rhetorical mode that we adopt to distance ourselves from something. Perhaps it could be a form of manipulation in one way, but it’s a hinging strategy to deny something in an evasive way. Ngai puts pressure on how these “ugly” feelings are the irony they swim in. One can’t help but to experience this mode of feelings. These “ugly” feelings tend to be phobic, and quite scary to experience internally. Taking a look at paranoia, it can be seen as an example of it locating and controlling everything within someone. 

Additionally within her study, she forms an interesting analysis towards the “aesthetic emotion” one can feel. She gives examples pertaining to how it’s quite “amoral” and “non cathartic” in a sense of interfering with what is originally meant to be displayed. It’s a changed occurrence that interchangeably changes the meaning of that specified feeling. When one feels a sense of anger, it could start to perhaps mean, a feeling of anxiety. With a positive connotation of “aesthetic” it’s more so meant to examine the work of “ugly” feelings/emotions. In particular, she highlights Aristotle, where he engages in tragedy within poems. Aristotle argues that as the audience, we should feel apathetic towards Oedipus as he killed his father and began a relationship with his mother. To feel this way, according to Ngai, is horrible. We shouldn’t feel sympathetic towards a concoction such as that.

When Grasmsci speaks on intellectuals he distinguishes it with the concept of reality, falling into the categories of a “social function”. He therefore initiates two kinds of “intellectuals” and breeds them as “traditional” and “organic.” With traditional intellectualism, Gramsci brings forth how it is more so associated with high class, and is institutionally based. Traditional organics shears off and is more likely to become organic. Examining organic intellectualism, he highlights how it’s associated with the social class, those who fight through the system of ideological struggles. With social class, its barriers are endless, stemming from race, identity, gender, and so on. “Organic” intellectually fits in with the metaphor of what organic means. What makes an intellectual organic is that they are growing out of a “class” situation. Gramsci paints this picture pertaining to being an intellectual, that it’s our social class that places us in which we define as, whether we’re intellectual or not. Diving deeper into that motive, Gramsci does not buy it. He believes it’s a veil that is placed over all of this and essentially is placed over the hegemony. We must preserve our autonomy. Gramsci goes beyond simplicity within an intellectual structure by infusing the demonstrations of how applicable it is towards distinguishing who benefits from it or not. But more in-depthly he yearns to grasp it and shiut down the motives of seeing “good” within any of it.

Growing into the topic of Gramsci and his assessment on education and its impact, he yields an argument that education has its necessary function of contributing to a new form of intellectuals. Its ability to ‘multiply and narrow the various specializations’ brings forth an abundance of understanding. With education, the more it spreads throughout communities, schools, the world, etc. the more complex the cultural world could become. The industrialization pertaining to society could be well acquainted with manufacturing, production, and much more accuracy towards innovations. With a mindset on education, I could say Gramsci would be quite fond of education and its system in todays society. Its purpose of imposing institutionalized based education upon thousands of students paves a way towards an upgraded world, with highly intellect minds. Stating, “the more extensive the area covered by education and more numerous vertical levels of schooling, the more cultural, the civilization, of a particular side.” Imagining a more institutionalized education amongst many people, society could move forward in terms of ways of a beneficial economy, as opposed to backwards where they were numerically declining in intellectual specializations. Gramsci understands that with education abundances of organizations could be formed in terms of providing defense of, “professions, unemployment, overproduction in the schools, emigration, etc.” and with that defense, much more beneficial gains could be tended towards providing a mechanism which adheres to the struggles faced.

Analyzing Karl Marx, he makes various remarks on the concept of ideology, where he views it as a form of peoples ideas, theories, statements etc. that are used to partner with the tactics of manipulation. Although it can be set in a way of a positive mainstream, Marx tackles this by shining the light on how it shatters the truth of what humans are naturally supposed to see. Everything has manipulated our interpretations of what should be easily understood as or portrayed and we form these presumptions and hypotheses to question and develop new meaning to what is naturally perceived. It’s said we start from the ground and come up. Making factories etc, forming teams and moving along the way, however it doesn’t do so in a clean linear way, more so without  a clear agenda. When Marx mentions the phrase, “camera obscura”, he highlights how when a camera takes a picture it doesn’t come out in the way we intentionally see it without the camera. When that picture is taken, it becomes inverted and that breeds a concept of confusion, sparking allegations that there is more to explore. It becomes a phenomenon that needs exploration and it’s no longer what it once was. With the mention of our consciousness as well it breeds an unfamiliarity and therefore we alter our mind to conform to the theories of our own instead of to reality. Marx goes on to state, “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”. With this statement, he seems to construct the idea that when we don’t acknowledge the reality of the situation, our mind can’t see any of the naturality and we just see what we fixated amongst our state of mind. We can change that altercation of submitting to the phenomena of an obscure ideology and focus on the state of the world.

All of what we think of as literature, and culture is a form of ideology. Its purpose is to form ourselves and give a map of how we can maneuver through that within society. Believing that the realms of ideas, literature, and everything that makes up the culture comes from human interactions, Marx maintains the idea that it’s our job to keep shining light on the naturality of the world. His relationship to culture is full where he says language and culture flow out of real relations, and we as humans transform things through the practice of our labor. He continues to let on the idea that we as people that are part of the economy should use our full vision of the world and not let the obstruction of manipulation influence how we showcase it to others.

Ferdinand de Saussure defies language as a social construct, that becomes debatable in terms of how humans maneuver and use it. He brings forth the ability of single handedly isolating the use of language from our inner monologues. Language is “the principle of the arbitrary nature of sign”, indicating the numerous thresholds that hold onto the many different languages throughout the world. Saussure goes on to form his perspective on the usage of La Langue, a concept derived from the external world in which it is theoretically pulled from a particular language. 

With language, we are deemed to assimilate ourselves to a world where we watch, interpret and adopt. With Sassures demonstration of signifier and signified, he speaks on how humans interchangeably associate themselves with this development. With our thoughts, he associated that with the term ‘signifier’, ultimately meaning ‘words that sound like what they mean’. In this context, it exists, it’s available but not to the extent of originality. It’s visible, it’s open, it’s the symbol towards a universal system that has been interpreted and structured bound by rules. Yet when we look at signified, it’s the concepts in which it’s been suppressed to our individualities. It’s associated with this ‘freeness’ that we lack externally. Internally, it’s the infliction of what we originally perceive,  a graphic version of how we perceive language. The huge value of language within our minds, are altered to fit what we generally yearn to compose. With the concept of forming a relationship of thought and language, he highlights the correlation in terms of how compelling one is externally to internally. With language it’s a sound-image being translated into a fixed visual image. With that being said, the words we utter, it’s the components of that sound-image that portrays features within our ‘thought’, giving glimpses to what could be tricky to explain. 

Composing Saussure’s intake on language and the relationships he forms with thought and language, our minds subject itself to what it wants and needs to see. With language, we pitch together an image that can be altered in any way and regard it as a notion of expression or ideas. Language is very elevating in terms of how it’s used and with Saussure, it’s the abstraction of language that we take in and add our interpretations of it, whether in mind or not. It’s the collaboration of anything that relates to language into a visual form permitting grammar to speak for the language we adopt.

Analyzing Nietzche’s essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense, he captures an interesting theory pertaining towards humans and their motives in a society that is subjected to the inexplicable sense of illusions. Questioning the meaning of truth, Nietzsche has sculpted how human existence is built on the ladder that goes up yet halts due to the analogy that we’ve conformed our minds to believe we are living in reality, only to lift our heads and see a world of metaphorical illusions. We are stuck in our minds and are unable to explore the truth. Truth is a figment of one’s own imagination, unknown at the center of one’s own mind. By setting this inflicting tone, it brings forth this impression, that our morals of reactions mold the abstractions of truth. Nietzche speaks on how it is our knowledge of certain things that are full of what could be figments and don’t originate to the ideal of what is real. But what does Nietchez mean by real? Possibly something that hasn’t been taunted by the ushering of society or what we consume by others. With that being said, he incorporates the usage of words that portray what could be elaborated as ‘truth’. With the example in Nietzsche’s essay, he speaks about a one claiming to be wealthy with the words ‘I am rich’, yet it brings forth deception, allowing “to make the unreal appear to be real”. It’s what we initially want to believe that we are countered by the reality of morals. Humans are tricked, by deception, greed, dreams, and ultimately our internal desires, that we lie to ourselves and try to shy away from the ‘truth’. The illusions we are so blinded by, enhance every time we trick ourselves into deception. It’s captivating how Neitchez’s theory of truth constructs an abundance of questionable thoughts. With his intention to stimulate his readers mind, it’s quite conflicting, feeling as if we’ve obliged to the understanding of ‘truth’, more so his theory in it. We’re subjected to what society has deemed to be real, true, and a fact, that we’re lied to. We ignore the defaults of what was once and now is not. But yet again, that could be the social construct of ‘truth’. Possibly the truth is what we can think it means. With Neitchz’s theory on this, it has definitely confronted the abilities towards what we can make ourselves and others believe and its how we go about it. Humans are very interesting and our perceptions of what we dare to challenge, inflict how others maneuver around it and try to adopt that theory.