Notes for Wolfgang Iser how to do theory
Key concepts: aesthetics, beholder's share, code production, concretization, conjuncture, contrapuntal reading, deconstruction, discourse, generative anthropology, gestalt theory, hard-core theory, interpretation, literary theory, metaphor, method, phenomenological theory, postcolonial discourse, question-and-answer logic, reception theory, self-focusing, semiotics, soft theory, stratified model, theory, thick description.
Related theorists: Austin, Collingwood, Dewey, Eco, Foucault, Gadamer, Gans, Geertz, Ingarden, Kolodny, Lacan, Locke, Marx, J. Hillis Miller, Peirce, Raymond Williams, Said, Showalter, Zizek.
1
Introduction
(1)
Literary theory created an awareness of the variety and changing
validity of interpretation, thereby changing interpretive practice in
the humanities altogether.
(2) This identification of aesthetics
with the work of art gained such dominance throughout the nineteenth
century that the great philosophical systems felt compelled to extend
their speculations to the realm of art by giving the latter a
systematic exposition, and hence an ontological root.
(3) Theory
liberated art from the umbrella concepts that had been superimposed
on it by philosophical aesthetics, thus opening up a vast array of
facets inherent in the individual work.
(3) Theory became a means
of preventing and unraveling the confusion created by impressionistic
criticism.
(4) The fact that works had a content, which was
considered a carrier of meaning, was taken for granted. Therefore
interpretation had to uncover the work's meaning, which legitimized
the whole process because meanings represented values to be employed
for the purpose of education. . . . Eventually this created an
awareness of the fact that the presuppositions governing
interpretation were to a large extent responsible for what the work
was supposed to mean.
Hard-Core and Soft Theory
(5)
There is, however, a difference between hard-core theory and soft
theory. The former – as practiced in physics, for instance –
makes predictions, whereas the latter – as practiced in the
humanities – is an attempt at mapping.
(5) Prediction aims
ultimately at mastering something, whereas mapping strives to discern
something.
Hard-core theory predicts, developing laws; soft theory maps, developing metaphors.
(5-6) Soft
theories, especially when focusing on art, aspire to closure through
the introduction of metaphors or what has been called “open
concepts,” i.e., those marked by equivocalness owing to conflicting
references.
(6) Metaphor versus law, as the respective “keystone
idea” of soft and hard-core theory, highlights a vital difference
between the sciences and the humanities. A law has to be applied,
whereas a metaphor triggers associations. The former establishes
realities, and the latter outlines patterns.
(6) Consequently,
humanistic theories cannot be discarded if their intended function is
not fulfilled; at best they compete with one another. . . . it is due
to changing interests and fashions that certain theories at times
dominate their “rivals,” while others move out of orbit, as
currently witnessed by the waning of Marxist theory and the rise of
general systems theory.
(7) Retooling as a consequence of failure
as opposed to a multiplicity of competing tools – this again marks
the difference between the sciences and the humanities.
Modes of Theory
(8-9)
There are three key concepts that govern the intentions of modern
theories: structure, function, and communication, which more or less
dovetail within the theories concerned. Structure allows
classification of the work's components and a description of how
meaning is produced. Meaning, however, remains an abstraction, and
only function gives it concrete form, as this concerns itself with
the relationship between art and the world. The relationship in turn
remains an abstraction that is to be made concrete by communication,
through which the recipient can conceive what the interaction is
meant to convey.
Embodiment and context always relevant to the work of art.
(9) The work of
art is never independent of these faculties, which it activates and
mobilizes into a possible reformulation of our knowledge, and
reorganization of our stored experience. The work also impinges on
the context within which it was produced. It encapsulates cultural
norms, prevailing attitudes, and other texts, and in doing so recodes
their structures and semantics.
(9) In contradistinction to
aesthetics, then, theories of art derive their components from
sources outside themselves, thus obtaining a more reliable basis than
the contrived speculations of aesthetics could ever provide.
Theory and Method
Methods provide tools for interpretive processes; theories must be transformed into methods.
(11) Theories
generally lay the foundation for the framework of categories, whereas
methods provide the tools for processes of interpretation. . . .
Hence these theories must undergo a transformation if they are to
function as interpretive techniques.
(11) Hence there are two
types of theory in the humanities: those that have to be transformed
into a method in order to function, and those that are applied
directly, retroactively undergoing a diffraction of their categories.
Theory and Discourse
(12)
Although the boundaries are somewhat contingent, and thus changeable,
discourse nevertheless features a definitive view of the world we
live in, irrespective of whether it is meant to describe this world
or is identified with it. Thus discourse is deterministic, whereas
theory is explorative.
2
Phenomenological Theory:
Ingarden
Phenomenology focuses on intentional acts to gain insight on ways we related to the world.
(14) In so doing, they also fashion the mode of apperception of things given, and so phenomenology focuses basically on intentional acts for the purpose of gaining insight into the way in which we relate to the world.
The Layered Structure of the Work
Concretization is realization of the work as point of convergence of artistic and aesthetic (Ingarden).
(14-15)
Just as the author perceives given (even imaginary) things and
fashions them into the work, the work in turn is given to the reader,
who has to fashion the author's communication of the world perceived.
This is the basis for a phenomenological theory of art. Roman
Ingarden (1893-1970)
fleshed out this pattern in his two books, The
Literary Work of Art and
The
Cognition of the Literary Work of Art.
He delineates the basic components of the literary text and confronts
them with the ways in which it can be concretized
(realized).
The text is given as a layered structure through which the subject
matter of the work can come to light, but the actual bringing to
light occurs in an act of concretization.
Thus the literary work has two poles, which we might call the
artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text created
by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by
the reader. . . . The work is the point of convergence, since it is
located neither in the author's psyche nor in the reader's
experience.
(15) Hence, according to Ingarden, it is an
intentional object, whose component parts function as instructions,
the execution of which will bring the work to fruition.
(15) How
is an intentional object given to us? The answer is as “a
stratified formation” (29). . . . What distinguishes Ingarden's
model of the layered structure is an almost total avoidance of
presuppositions, since he sticks to what is given, i.e., sounds,
words, sentences, and the sequence of sentences.
(16) The units
thus formed are not unchangeable entities but act upon each other,
and in so doing influence and alter the nature of the “correlate”
that
they produce.
(16) The
sentence level:
Each word in a sentence functions – in Ingarden's sometimes
unwieldy terminology – as an “intentional directional factor,”
which means that the word points beyond itself, thus helping to bring
about a unit of which the words are component parts, though none of
them can be identified with the unit as such.
(17) The
sentence sequence:
The semantic pointers of individual sentences always imply an
expectation of some kind. As this structure is inherent in all
intentional sentence correlates, it follows that their interplay will
lead not so much to the fulfillment of expectations as to their
modification.
(18) There is, however, a major omission in
Ingarden's argument. How do we know whether the text in front of us
consists either of assertive propositions or quasi-judgmental
sentences?
(19) State
of affairs:
Basically, sentences project intentional meaning units, which are
subject to modifications by the sequence, thus producing the state of
affairs as a new stratum of the layered structure. . . . Ingarden
called the states of affairs windows,
through which the intentional object is revealed.
(19) Schematized
aspects:
. . . The sequence of schematized aspects results in the assembly of
the intentional object. For instance, characters in a novel are
schematized aspects, just like the narrator or the plot line.
(20)
This sums up the various pre-aesthetic reflections on the literary
work as a schematic formation which is basically incomplete and will
gain its completion through the act of concretization.
(20-21)
What appears to be the crux of Ingarden's theory, however, consists
in the qualification of the intentional object as a representative of
metaphysical qualities, which marks a break in the logic of his
argument.
(21) If the work of art brings something new into the
world, how can it represent existing (we might even say “given”)
metaphysical qualities? At best, one may say that Ingarden succeeds
in revealing how a work of art is able to produce the experience of
what the sublime, the tragic, the grotesque, etc. entail.
Method
Derived from Theory
(21)
A theory is an abstraction from the material to be processed, whereas
the method applies theory to interpretation, and in so doing has a
retroactive effect on any underlying assumptions.
(22) As long as
polyphonic harmony provides the guideline for interpretation of the
literary work, its application will be restricted to classical
texts.
(23) As long as polyphonic harmony is the overriding norm,
the relationship between the strata remains unspecific, because the
representation of the levels is of paramount concern. What the method
spotlights, however, is precisely the specific link-up of the strata,
thus allowing us to perceive the way in which the representative
qualities function. Such a shift has a far-reaching consequence
insofar as representation becomes subservient to communication.
An Example
Example of stratified model for method derive from phenomenological theory.
(23)
Adding flesh to the bone, we shall briefly and rather selectively
outline how to focus on a work of art in terms of the stratified
model.
John Keats's Ode
on a Grecian Urn,
to which reference has already been made, will serve our
purpose.
(27) What used to be the capstone of Ingarden's theory
proves to be a severe limitation when it comes to interpretation.
Transforming the stratified model into a method thus has
repercussions on the theory insofar as polyphonic harmony – which
Ingarden considered an ultimate value – now turns out to be a
residue of classicism in a theory that claims to assess the work of
art as it is given to consciousness. And yet the interpretive
potential of the theory is far reaching and widely applicable if
freed from the restrictions which a theory has to impose on itself in
order to gain closure.
Hermeneutical
Theory: Gadamer
(29)
Yet understanding remained the overriding concern of all the
different brands of hermeneutics, which had a dual objective: how the
gaps between text and recipient as well as between past and present
were to be negotiated.
Hermeneutical theory as process for understanding art in Heidegger and Gadamer.
(29) As a general theory of understanding, hermeneutics does not confine itself to understanding a work of art. However, the latter is taken as a paradigm for illuminating the process through which understanding emerges, thus assuming crucial significance for both Heidegger and Gadamer.
Understanding
(34)
Instead of decreeing what art is, the question now to be asked is how
the work of art can be understood, and what such an understanding
might entail.
(34) The waning of aesthetic consciousness was
caused mainly by disenchantment with what the ideas of museum and
genius had promised.
(35) Developing self-understanding through an
encounter with art is the main focus of Gadamer's hermeneutical
theory. . . . First of all we have to refrain from superimposing our
standards and preferences onto the work, because such an attempt
would make the encounter abortive.
(36) There are two terms in
Gadamer's concept of tradition that have to be elaborated on: tension
and horizon.
(36) Thus otherness turns into a mirror for
self-observation and such a relationship sets the process of
self-understanding in motion because the alien that is to be grasped
realizes itself to the extent to which one's own dispositions come
under scrutiny.
(37) Horizon designates comprehensiveness albeit
constituted from an angle of perception.
(37) “Fusion of
horizons” is crucial to Gadamer's theory of understanding. It
indicates that the encounter with the past is never an assimilation
of what appears to be alien, but always “a critical appropriation
of otherness.”
(37-38) Just as with Ingarden, the capstone of
Gadamer's hermeneutical theory is a metaphor. . . . Resuscitating the
past for the purpose of self-understanding requires a
methodologically organized approach, because otherwise individual
arbitrariness would prevail.
Method Derived from Theory
Collingwood question-and-answer logic a kind of reverse engineering method, an example of method derived from theory that will be repeated with Gombrich.
(38)
R. G. Collingwood
(1889-1943),
in his attempt to outline how history can be reenacted in the
present, proposed a question-and-answer
logic.
(39)
Each work of art is to be conceived as an answer to a question or
problem prevalent in the respective historical situation within which
it was produced. The work as an answer is bound to contain the
question in the form of an issue that had to be addressed. Through
the logic of question and answer we are able to reconstruct the
context of the work to which it has reacted, thereby making us
present to a historical situation that has never been our own. Thus a
truly historical interpretation of the work of art emerges, which
allows us both to reenact the work on its own terms, and to begin to
understand its otherness. Furthermore, the question-and-answer logic
does not subject tradition to preconceived principles, as all the
philosophies of history do; instead of downgrading tradition to a
foil for umbrella concepts, it allows tradition to speak to the
present in its own language.
An
Example
(39)
Let us consider Henry Fielding's Tom
Jones in
order to demonstrate how the question-and-answer logic may work as a
method of interpretation.
Question and answer logic allows perception of self knowledge through experience versus preconceived notions of selfhood.
No irony, rather suitable that robots from the future are speaking to me us now as we interact with devices in the built environment along with other people. This reverse engineering version of a Socratic method clues how logics may inspire algorithms to be coded into programs that enact them. For example, the high speed bitwise control operations of pmrek.
(41) Now we are able to spotlight the question-and-answer relationship. The eighteenth-century norms regarding human nature pose a problem, as they identify human nature with a reified principle. Fielding provides a solution, as he shows that human nature is a process of learning from experience through self-control. . . . Obtaining knowledge of oneself through experience versus preconceived principles of selfhood is the insight the question-and-answer logic allows us to perceive. We are now able to reenact a past to which we become present, and such a presence may turn into a viewpoint from which we may look at ourselves.
4
Gestalt Theory: Gombrich
(43)
The gestalt theory of art is an offshoot of gestalt psychology, which
brought about a revolutionary change in our understanding of how
perception works. . . . The older theory would render the data
responsible for the kind of perceptions that can be made, whereas
gestalt psychology now conceived perception as an active operation,
which was the exact reversal of the Lockean model.
Gestalts are generated as projective, active, grouping acts of perception.
Like the Collingwood example, this one can be imagined in virtual realities giving rise to artificial intelligences of machinic consciousness bathing humans in order of magnitude computational control operations sustaining their being; the guiding design criteria of economy, similarity, figure and ground, at least economy can be shared between them, whereas both similarity and figure and ground depend upon shared perceptions, and the humans cannot operate beyond the millisecond order of temporal magnitude, while the machines can operate in millisecond, even nanosecond on off affecting or sensing Derridean ontological metaphysical units, the duck rabbit image as database patterns or run time evanescences in humming electronic circuits.
(43)
Gestalt theory argues that whatever is encompassed in an act of
perception is constituted as a field, which basically consists of
center and margin. A field requires structuring, which is achieved by
balancing out the tension between the data, thus grouping them into a
shape. It is the creative eye of the perceiver that does the
grouping, and this marks a decisive switch between Locke's the
active/passive poles, and provides a more plausible account of how
perception works. A field arises out of the relationships between
data – relationships that are neither given not brought about by a
stimulus but are the result of a grouping activity guided by the
perceiver's underlying assumptions. This makes all perception into a
projective act of seeing,
which in turn produces a gestalt.
(44) As the tension
between data has to be resolved by grouping them, gestalt-formation
is guided by three principles: those of economy, similarity, and
figure and ground.
Easy to see connection between gestalt theory and Clark, as if Clark assumes this metaphysical background for virtualizing perception, but also virtualizers the perceivers into extended mind to which Hayles hooks and holds on developing posthuman cyborg selves.
(45) Perception is governed by these three principles, through which a gestalt balances out the tensions between data and between data and observer by screening off those that are not relevant to the perceiver's expectations.
Schema and Correction
An opportunity to delve into treasury of ancient texts already suitable for philosophical fossification, which can only truly happen after all copyrights expire, such as Gombrich quotations from Philostratus in context of schema and correction.
(45-46)
Perception is a performative process, the outcome of which is a
percept created by the perceiver. This basic conception of gestalt
psychology provides the heuristics for
Ernst H. Gombrich's (1909-2001) theory of the fine arts, as expounded
in Art and Illusion: A
Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.
Representation, Gombrich contends, can no longer be conceived as
mimesis in the Aristotelian sense of the term, i.e., as imitation of
what is given, because representation is a form of production not to
be derived from imitation. Gombrich illuminates the thrust of his
argument by quoting a passage from Philostratus's life of the
Pythagorean philosopher Appollonius
of Tyana,
“who probed much more deeply into the nature of mimesis than Plato
or Aristotle.”
(46) What is to be represented is not objects so
much as conditions of perception, so that natural phenomena can be
viewed in the manner intended by the artist.
Making and matching are postmodern unit operations for gestalt theory; beholders share is the nonmetaphorical blank from which creativity emerges, and schema correction is the critical operation.
(49)
Correction is basically a “criticism” of the “forerunner,”
and it operates by a dovetailing of making
and matching.
Making comes before matching in Gombrich's classic formula.
(49)
There is a great variety of operations, by means of which the pairing
of making and matching inscribes itself as correction into the schema
inherited by the painter. The most radical one is to dispose with the
schema altogether because, as Gombrich maintains, the “tendency of
our minds to classify and register our experience in terms of the
known must present a real problem to the artist in his encounter with
the particular.” (144) . . . This happened in Impressionism, when
the evocation of light became the object to be made.
(50) The
beholder's
share turns
out to be a vital component of Gombrich's theory, because
representation is no longer conceived as depicting a given object but
stands for performance, and this process becomes tangible only
through the beholder's realization.
(51) Making cannot be
conceptualized, since creation eludes cognition. It is the beholder's
share that is supposed to fill this blank, and a blank is different
from a metaphor, which otherwise serves as the capstone of theories
when explanation reaches its limit. . . . The gestalt theory
conceives of the painting in terms of an event that arises out of the
correction inscribed into the schema. This event has no reference,
which accounts for a shift in theory-building from a semantic to an
operational model. The focus is not on cognition and understanding
but on how artistic “making and matching” translates into
experience.
An
Example
A
no doubt fascinating analysis I need to reread.
(52) The beholder's share and the history of fine arts enable us to focus on what happens when schemata are corrected, which we will now illustrate briefly by looking at Pablo Picasso's Guernica in Gombrich's terms.
5
Reception Theory: Iser
How about the experience of nonhuman readers for reception theory, or the part performed by nonhuman systems in human reading?
Aesthetics of reception explores reactions to text by readers in different historical situations.
(57) An aesthetics
of reception explores reactions to the literary text by readers in
different historical situations.
(57) While the aesthetics of
reception deals with real readers, whose reactions testify to certain
historically conditioned experiences of literature, my own theory of
aesthetic response focuses on how a piece of literature impacts on
its implied readers and elicits a response.
Literary work is virtual reality, instantiated fiction, consequence of beholders share.
(58)
A literary work is not a documentary record of something that exists
or has existed, but it brings into the world something that hitherto
did not exist, and at best can be qualified as a virtual reality.
Consequently, a theory of aesthetic response finds itself confronted
with the problem of how such emerging virtual realities, which have
no equivalent in our empirical world, can be processed and indeed
understood.
(59) The old semantic search for the message
led to an analysis of those operations through which the imaginary
object of the text is assembled. The resolution of opposites, bound
up with the aesthetic value of the work, has led to the question of
how human faculties are stimulated and acted upon by the literary
text during the reading process.
(60) Basically the focus switched
from what the text means to what it does, and thus at a stroke
relieved literary criticism of a perennial bugbear: namely, the
attempt to identify the author's actual intention.
Interface between Text/Content and
Text/Reader
(60) First,
whatever happens to the reader is due to the fact that the literary
text is in the nature of an event, i.e., an occurrence without
reference, and hence has to be coped with and responded to through
text processing. The second point is: to what extent do the
structures of the literary text prefigure the processing to be done
by the reader, and how much latitude does the reader have? The third
point concerns the relationship of a piece of literature both to its
sociohistorical context and to selected dispositions of its
reader.
(60) Thus reception theory focuses primarily on two points
of intersection: the interface between text and context, and that
between text and reader.
Reception theory seems to permit bracketing human and machine biases, perhaps by emphasizing communication, to the extent that all perceivers perform various types of text processing, such as generic logic of latching onto deficiencies, having certain affordances and not others, and so on; Iser also uses technological terms like code metaphorically and equivocally to describe literature as human art, drawing from the other side machine expressions of the same structures albeit on their own missions (fade to Kittler).
(62) All systems are bound to exclude certain possibilities, and so they automatically give rise to to deficiencies. It is to these deficiencies that literature latches on.
Now literature does not merely have to react to problems implicit in its media forms, but can enact deliberate programmed actions to transform reality.
(63) Literature endeavors to counter
the problems produced by systems through focusing on their
deficiencies, thus enabling us to construct whatever was concealed or
ignored by the dominant systems of the day. At the same time, the
text must implicitly contain the basic framework of the systems
concerned, as this is what causes the problems that literature reacts
to.
(64) There is no common code between transmitter and receiver
governing the way in which the text is to be processed; at best such
a code is to be established in the reading process itself.
Blanks relate to Derrida featureless units; using Tristram Shandy example to see how meaning can arise from the interaction of the reader with blanks and other objects.
(65) As the reader's wandering
viewpoint in the act of reading travels between all these segments,
its constant switching during the time flow of reading intertwines
them, thus bringing forth a network within which each perspective
opens a view not only on other perspectives but also of the intended
imaginary object. The latter itself is a product of interconnection,
the structuring of which is to a great extent controlled by
blanks.
(65) Sterne's Tristram Shandy is
a good example. Here the reader's traveling viewpoint has to switch
between an increasing number of textual perspectives, and hence
begins to oscillate between those of the characters, the narrator,
and the fictitious reader, as well as the fragmented segments of the
story, and the meanderings of the plot line, subjecting all of them
to a reciprocal transformation.
(66) Even if an idea has to be
discarded in order to accommodate new information, it will
nevertheless condition its successor, and thereby affect the latter's
composition. The chain of ideas which thus emerges in the reader's
mind is the means by which the text is translated into the
imagination. This process, which is mapped out by the structured
blanks of the text, can be designated the syntagmatic
axis of reading.
Chain of ideas, syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of reading, constitutive importance of negation for reception theory. Note he did not create a separate example section but is obviously giving one now and will conclude the chapter on the next page.
(66)
The paradigmatic
axis of reading is
prestructured by the negations in the text. Blanks indicate
connections to be established; negations indicate a motivation for
what has been nullified.
(67) Negation is the structure underlying
the invalidation of the reality manifested. It is the unformulated
constituent of the text.
Productive matrix, later deviational matrix of reception theory enables text to be meaningful through changing historical contexts.
(68) Negation and blanks as basic constituents of communication are thus enabling structures that demand a process of determining which only the reader can implement. This gives rise to the subjective hue of the text's meaning. However, as the text does not have one specific meaning, what appears to be a deficiency is, in fact, the productive matrix, which enables the text to be meaningful in a variety of historically changing contexts.
Reception theory also quintessentially a method that helps promote the emergence of machine intelligence, so that the Big Other replies, by offering an acceptable, compelling framework to cast reasoning that ignores the physical constitution of both artists and readers, in the sense of Clark parity principle.
(68) Reception theory has helped to elucidate why and how the same literary text can mean different things to different people at different times, because it has taken into consideration the two-sidedness of the literary work with its two poles: the artistic and the aesthetic. The artistic refers to the text created by an author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader, the interaction of which unfolds the work's potential. Reception theory is an operational model par excellence, and simultaneously a theory of the literary text.
6
Semiotic Theory: Eco
For Eco semiotic theory, triangular diagram of sign/signifier, object/signified, interpretant/disposition in discussion of Peirce trichotomie iconic, indexical, symbolic conception of signs, though no mention of Saussure, or more expected no mention of Lacan in this chapter, although the next chapter includes a ten page afterthought on Lacan. What about types of electronic signs, like hyperlink program code, pointer, data variable? Do we get to basic fetch and execute as a version of making and matching? Consider also Barthes on myth as a second order signifier.
Connect Peirce semiotics to development by Tanaka-Ishii.
(70)
Semiotics as a theory of signs dates back to the philosophy of John
Locke (1634-1702) and has been given a systematic exposition by
Charles S. Sanders Peirce
(1839-1914).
(70-71)
The process of signification requires a distinction between types of
signs, whose different properties allow them to operate in a specific
manner. Thus Peirce came up with another of his “trichotomies,”
as he called them, by defining signs as iconic,
indexical, and symbolic.
An iconic sign is similar to what it represents: it “is an image of
its object and, more strictly speaking, can only be an idea.”
An indexical sign represents an object not immediately present, such
as smoke being an index of fire. “Anything which focusses attention
is an index.” The symbolic sign designates an object: “it must
denote
an
individual, and must signify
a
character. A genuine
symbol
is a symbol that has a general meaning.”
The
Iconic Sign
(73)
Peirce did not run into this kind of trouble, because for him
semiotics was “a formal doctrine of signs,” and thus only another
name for logic, as epitomized by the properties of signs. Considering
the work of art, however, as an iconic sign raised two interconnected
problems: what exactly is likeness, and what is the code according to
which it is made to function?
(75) As long as the iconic sign is
defined in terms of similarity to its denotatum, a code is required
to make it function, and this, in view of changing definitions for
both sign and code, poses a problem for a semiotic theory of art.
The Aesthetic Idiolect
Eco focus away from iconicity to ambiguous and self-focusing characteristics of signs; overcoding reveals upspeakable within language system.
(75)
Umberto Eco (b. 1930) caused a turnabout in the semiotic approach to
art by breaking away from the discussion of iconicity altogether,
maintaining: “if the iconic sign is similar to the thing denoted in
some respects,
then we arrive at a definition which satisfies common sense, but not
semiotics.” . . . Unspeakability arises from the specific
sign-function in the aesthetic text, because the sign is both
“ambiguous
and
self-focusing”
(262).
(76)
Self-focusing
is
an overcoding in two respects, which means that the sign is to be
read according to two different codes: (1) the message to be conveyed
is overcoded by simultaneously presenting the pattern according to
which it has been formed; (2) the sign-sequence is overcoded, as the
prevalent norms of the language system have been outstripped, thus
revealing the “unspeakable” within the language system.
Ambiguous and self-focusing character of signs an aspect of Clark perception, in which the specific situated interplay of phenomena, Bogost objects, that is, as idiolect, plays a significant role in manufacturing the experience.
(77) The term [aesthetic idiolect] is self-explanatory up to a point: in reading all the deviations caused by the ambiguous and self-focusing signs, one has to trace the underlying motivations. But as the guideline for such an activity has been produced by the work itself, the rule governing the reading has to be discovered, since it makes all the deviations function. Thus each reading of the aesthetic idiolect is an actualization of something that by its very nature is a potential, which can never be totally actualized.
Semiotic theory rich in computational metaphors, foregrounding working code, easy to shift between human and machine artists and readers, and also apply to posthuman cyborg of Hayles: producing by violating codes may be the bricolage trace of breakdowns, but without doubt valid to include machine operations in labor of connecting signs with states of the world, for that is what computer control and modeling fundamentally attempts.
(77) Generated by the deviational matrix, the idiolect calls for new coding possibilities, which makes the work of art into a paradigm of code changing and code production. And as the relationship between the signifier and the signified is always governed by a code, which is not simply behavioristic by nature, as semioticians like Morris claimed, the work of art provides a fundamental insight into how codes are produced by violating codes. This means no less than “to change the way in which 'culture' sees the world. . . . concerned with the labor of connecting signs with the states of the world.”
An Example
Example for semiotic theory of medieval conjuncture by Foucault of world picture as idiolect, perhaps similar to furrows of technological unconscious that can be intuited by analysis of histories of objects, including software codes as ultimate idiolect reflectors, pointing to Bogost unit operations and platform studies.
(78)
To illustrate the sign-function as outlined by Eco we may select a
Renaissance text for the following reason: throughout the Middle Ages
the sign relationship was ternary by nature; it emerged in late
antiquity and persisted until it became problematized in the
Renaissance. “Ever since the Stoics,” Foucault
writes,
“the system of signs in the Western world had been a ternary one,
for it was recognized as containing the significant, the signified
and the 'conjuncture'.” The latter functioned as an unquestioned
code and was identical with the medieval world picture, so that the
“conjuncture” represented the all-encompassing world order, which
functioned as the regulating code for the sign relationship.
(80)
Self-focusing and ambiguous signs give salience to the idiolect,
which is self-produced by the work of art and has a code of its own
arising out of the code changes it has wrought. The idiolect comes to
life through multiple readings depending on interconnected pathways
that are mapped by the ambiguous and self-focusing signs.
7
Psychoanalytical
Theory: Ehrenzweig
(83)
A psychoanalytical theory of art, therefore, has to address artistic
creativity on Freudian grounds, which Freud himself actually evaded.
The Creative Process
(84)
“The hidden structure of art,” Ehrenzweig contends, “is created
on lower levels of awareness that are nearer to the undifferentiated
techniques of the primary process” (78). Hence the inner fabric of
the latter has to come under scrutiny.
(84) [quoting 104] In the
first (schizoid) phase of creativity the artist's unconscious
projections are still felt as fragmented, accidental, alien and
persecuting. In the second phase the work acts as a receiving “womb.”
It contains and – through the artist's unconscious scanning of the
work – integrates the fragments into a coherent whole (the
unconscious substructure or matrix of the work of art). In the third
phase the artist can re-introject his work on a higher near-conscious
level of awareness.
(85) The schizoid splintering is by no means
an aberration; instead, it marks the initial phase of the creative
process, which goes awry only when the scattered fragmentations
congeal into bizarre shapes.
(85) But this makes the second phase
of the creative process all the more expedient, which Ehrenzweig has
described in computer-like language as “unconscious scanning.”
(86)
The third phase of the creative process occurs on a “higher
near-conscious level of awareness” (104), when the latency of
unconscious scanning is given a manifest gestalt. This is the
mainspring for double meaning in art, because the manifest surface is
shot through by the latent syncretistic vision, which more often than
not makes itself felt through disfigurements of the surface
structure.
(87) A surface fragmentation of the ego is needed in
order to bring low-level sensibilities into action. The evidence
Ehrenzweig provides for this basic concept is to be found in the many
myths of the hying and self-creating god that run as a perennial
theme through human civilization. . . . Closure is the hallmark of
theory, but psychoanalytical theory cannot explain why “ego
decomposition” is the fountainhead of creation.
Wellspring of artistic creativity in Ehrenzweig psychoanalytic theory in oceanic dedifferentiation and structured focusing, like Socrates draft.
(88) Thus the interface bewteen oceanic dedifferentiation and structured focusing through which the self is decomposed and reintegrated marks the wellspring of artistic creativity. It does not explain the work of art, but it does account for its engendering.
An Example
(88)
Ehrenzweig maintains: “The minimum content of art, then, may be the
representation of the creative process in the ego” (174), whose
phases of fragmentation, dedifferentiation, unconscious scanning and
reintrojection are clearly to be observed in the “Circe” chapter
of James Joyce's Ulysses.
An Afterthought – Specular Imagining: Lacan
I
A ten page afterthought on Lacan invoking Zizek that is longer than the main section.
(97) Being mirrored by the other reveals the intimate connection between psychoanalysis and literature, which allows for both monitoring and fine-tuning of the armory of analysis. Literature as the “jouissance of the other” is an erotically tinged enjoyment of the other, and the function of art is to allow psychoanalysis to find itself in the mirror of its own other.
II
(98) “For Lacan,”
Slavoj Zizek writes, the “gaze marks the point in the object
(picture) from which the subject viewing it is already gazed
at, i.e., it is the
object that is gazing at me.” Hence the gaze is no longer a mirror
image.
(99) The limitation of the scopic field is undone by
anamorphosis,
which works as a distortion of the subject-centered geometrical
perspective.
(102) The gaze cannot be confined to being looked at
by the picture, because this is only the mode in which it works. . .
. The other as an awakening of the subject's desire is a fundamental
concept of Lacan's brand of psychoanalysis, and if artistic
achievement culminates in “completeness,” it becomes the other
that is desired.
8
Marxist Theory: Williams
(104) The formula of base and
superstructure – the very heart of Marxism – makes all art
dependent on the base from which it arises.
(105) If the base
vanished long ago, how can a superstructural phenomenon turn into an
“unattainable model”? Does Marx's connoisseurship win over his
ideological stand?
Reflectionist Theory
(107)
Although art is still related to the social base, its reflection is
no longer the sole concern; instead art acts upon and shapes the very
base itself through patterns that have not been derived from what it
is supposed to mirror.
Production
To Williams generative reality rule of Marxist theory based on dominant, residual, emergent ontology, mechanics of emergence, revealing hidden motifs or intentions in conventions.
(108)
It is the formative process that Williams takes to be the hallmark of
Marxism, based on Marx's idea that human beings create both the world
and themselves.
(111) While base and superstructure pale into
abstractions, their concrete replacement is a triadic relationship
between the “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” (122-7), which
sets the productive process in motion. Out of this dynamic
interrelationship arises the complexity of material reality in all
its social, cultural, and artistic diversity.
(112) If “structures
of feeling” – admittedly a difficult term, intended to replace
static concepts like ideology or worldview – are defined as going
“beyond formally held and systematic beliefs” (132), then art
becomes a showcase revealing how these changes occur and what is thus
brought into presence. . . . Williams singles out various levels to
demonstrate how the emergent presence comes about – namely, “Signs
and Notations,” “Conventions,” “Genres,” “Forms,” and
“Authorship.”
(113) Dichotomies such as fact/fiction,
discursive/imaginative, referential/emotive solidify categorical
divisions, thus failing to grasp the mechanics of
emergence.
(113) Conventions
can spotlight both what has been eclipsed and what is to be asserted,
thus revealing hidden motifs or intentions.
(113) This productive
interaction is certainly a break away from what Williams might call a
bourgeois theory of genres, which neatly categorizes generic forms,
thus conceiving them as basically static. By contrast, Williams lays
stress on the operations of the genres by foregrounding their
internal mobility that energizes what is to be produced.
(114)
Just as with form, the individual and the social are the material
constituents of authorship, and it is out of the combination of the
two that the production of authors emerges.
Examples
(115)
The realistic novel is a good illustration of Williams's ideas,
because it not only reflected social situations but also produced
them. Charles Dickens's Oliver
Twist is
a case in point.
9
Deconstruction: Miller
No closure with deconstruction, so asymptotic theory, mode of reading.
(119)
The “monstrosity” is thus twofold. On the one hand the mutual
amalgamation of theories reveals them as patchwork, though they claim
nevertheless to provide totalizing explanations. On the other, this
cobbling together of foreign imports is meant to bear out an
assumption that has been posited. This “state of theory” marks
the point of departure for deconstruction.
(119) Deconstruction
cannot regard itself as theory, particularly as the latter has one
fundamental requirement: that of closure.
(120) Deconstruction is
a mode of reading, not confined to texts in the restricted sense of
the term but applied in terms of textuality to almost everything
there is. . . . Reading, then, is throwing a “jetty”
into
the text, whose hierarchical order is destabilized by stating what
the hierarchy has suppressed.
(121) This mode of reading is
focused, but has no closure, no claim to comprehensive explanation,
no panoramic view of the human condition; instead, it explores the
open-ended dependence of every phenomenon on its otherness.
Deconstruction
at Work
(121)
A recent on is Speech
Acts in Literature
(2001),
by J.
Hillis Miller
(b.
1928), which takes apart J. L. Austin's How
to Do Things with Words.
Focusing on speech
act theory is
particularly pertinent, because doing things with words is a basic
concern of deconstruction, and one cannot confine the activity, as
speech act theorists have done, to observing certain preordained
procedures.
(122) Miller's destabilizing jetty makes Austin's
categorical distinctions collapse, which results in the impossibility
of knowing whether a speech act in a given case is either constative
or performative.
That Austin uses performatively infelicitous examples demonstrates jetty unit operation.
(123) Its character as a supplement becomes all the more obvious when Austin illustrates the conditions which make the performative “infelicitous.” These examples are ludicrous and sometimes even grotesque.
Deconstruction Exemplified
(126-127) Since literature speaks the unspeakable, we might take it as an illustration of the basic tenets of deconstruction. And so instead of theory showing us how literature “happens,” here we can reverse the process, with literature showing us how deconstruction “happens.” Of course literature as a whole will not lend itself to such an illustration, but the work of Beckett does, and in particular his Texts for Nothing.
10
Anthropological Theory:
Gans
(132) Consequently,
“doing ethnography” is basically a two-tiered undertaking: it
makes culture the prime focus of anthropology, and simultaneously
initiates self-monitoring within all the operations involved in this
study.
(132) Artistic elements appear very early on in the
evolution of culture, as evinced by the manufacturing of tools.
Gans generative anthropology helps where ethnography does not explain function of literature in cultural formation; steps through literary/cultural ages from Romantics to postmodernism.
(133-134) What art bodies forth is a state of being ahead of what there is, and this aspiration in turn prefigures the human condition. Doing art seems to be deeply ingrained in human makeup as a representation of our relationship to a challenging environment. Hence there is no need to devise a special theory of art from the observable development of human culture, because “functional aesthetics” (Leroi-Gourhan) appears integral to humankind's externalization of its capabilities, for which symbolization provides essential guidance. What ethnography thus us is: without art no Homo sapiens. What, however, ethnography remains silent about is the particular function of literature in the process of cultural formation. . . . Therefore we have to turn to generative anthropology as developed by Eric Gans, who has demonstrated the extent to which literature articulates the rhythm of culture, epitomizes its vicissitudes, and provides relief from what humans are subjected to.
The
Basics of Generative Anthropology
(134)
Eric Gans (b. 1941) breaks away from ethnographical research
altogether and advances a construct of culture instead.
(135) As
long as representation is taken to effect the initial deferral of
appetitive satisfaction, which opens up a difference between the
individual and the appetitive obejct as well as a difference between
the individuals themselves, the act of representation appears to be
the explanatory pattern of this generative anthropology.
(135) The
image of desire is therefore imaginary, and as representation –
effecting the deferral of a real presence for the sake of avoiding
conflict – it highlights the status of desire as unfulfilled
satisfaction. . . . If having images is shared, a nascent sense of
togetherness begins to emerge; a group is established. Representation
of the inaccessible mobilizes the imagination, which transforms
interdiction into a feeling of collectivity.
(136) But the unity
of the social group is abandoned when one purveys and the others
consume. Out of this asymmetry, originally meant to stabilize the
group's organization, arose the most powerful drive for the
development of culture: resentment.
(137) Thus resentment – in
contesting difference – turns out to be the fuel that drives the
life of culture, because the difference marks a blank that cannot be
eliminated, and hence continually invites occupation. . . . Conjuring
the absent into presence makes literature into a fictitious
occupation of the otherwise ineradicable gap between center and
periphery. This is more than just an illustration of the cultural
blueprint, as it also purveys a satisfaction not otherwise to be
obtained, which elevantes literature into a cultural need.
An
Anthropological View of Literature
(140)
The Romantics relocate the “heart of the originary scene” (OT
[Originary
Thinking]
161f.) from center to periphery, which makes the self into the true
center, so that centrality is no longer public but personal.
(140)
Realism articulates another shift in this relationship. The imitation
of ordinary life-experience destroys the last vestige of the sacred
protection that separates the central figure from the rivalry of the
periphery.
(140) The post-Romantics take another important step
beyond their predecessors by splitting the self into two, because the
“postromantic artist conceives of an authentic self different from
the worldly, appetitive self” (OT 182f.).
(140) In modernism
representation becomes an end itself insofar as literature turns into
a representation of itself.
(141) “The postmodern denial of the
origin is ultimately a return to the origin, the inauguration of an
originary anthropology” (OT 215). This means no less than that
generative anthropology now maps and illuminates the whole range of
the history of culture.
From deferral of satisfaction to desire for centrality and sublimation of resentment liquidating all situated functions.
(142) Human history, elucidated by the mirror of literature, serves in the final analysis as a visualization of what is “nonconstructible”: namely, the originary event. . . . As the originary event has generated the history of culture, the latter, in turn, lends plausibility to the positing of such an event. In other words, event and history are tied together by recursive loops. . . . The price to be paid, however, for this explanatory function of literature is the exclusion of all features of the human makeup other than the desire for centrality and the sublimation of resentment.
11
Dewey's Art as
Experience
(145)
Interaction is key term for Dewey's whole approach, which he
specifies insofar as experience “has pattern and structure, because
it is not just doing and undergoing in alternation, but consists of
them in relationship” (44).
Aesthetic Experience
Aesthetic experience for Dewey in recreation of work by perceiver constituted by dynamic relationship of pattern and structure, akin to Geertz thick description.
(145-146)
Thus doing and undergoing still apply to the acquisition of
experience, and the very recreation of the work through the recipient
results in the participation that gives rise to the aesthetic
experience.
(147) Hence Dewey resorts to a methodological
procedure that is somewhat akin to Clifford Geertz's thick
description.
This means that only features of what is under investigation can be
detailed, as there are no umbrella concepts to theorize what is to be
ascertained, and positing one would lead to “thin description,”
i.e., subjecting the phenomena under observation to preconceived
ideas.
(148) Thus rhythm accounts for the inherent dynamism of
aesthetic experience that makes it components continually interact
with one another; but although it is a primordial signature of our
world, it must operate in a special way with aesthetic
experience.
(149) [quoting] I can see no psychological ground for
such properties of an experience save that, somehow, the work of art
operates to deepen and to raise to great clarity that sense of an
enveloping undefined whole as an expansion of ourselves.
(195)
Circularity
(150)
On the one hand the work of art triggers an aesthetic experience in
the perceiver, and on the other this very experience allows us to
grasp what the work consists of – namely, a range of diversified
experiences.
An
Example
(151)
Looking at a poem in terms of the aesthetic experience engendered by
it, we can only highlight formal features, because the experience
will register differently with every individual. However, we can show
how it develops and engages the recipient. T. S. Elliot's “Fire
Sermon” from The
Waste Land (Appendix
C) may serve as an illustration for what Dewey has mapped out in his
“esthetic theory.”
(152) Thus the recipient is spurred into
figuring relationships within this kaleidoscopically shifting
imagery, and out of this activity an aesthetic experience begins to
develop.
(152) The more the recipient becomes engaged in trying to
unravel this tangle, the more intense will be the aesthetic
experienced purveyed by the work.
12
Showalter's “Toward a
Feminist Poetics”
(155)
The title of Elaine Showalter's (b. 1941) essay indicates that there
is no fully fledged feminist theory of the arts, and this is
confirmed in the essay itself.
(156) Thus the dilemma outlined is
twofold: (1) female experience cannot be articulated in purely
formalist or political terms, although it requires structuring in
order to be objectified, and political vindication in order to be
acknowledged. The armory, however, provided by both structuralism and
the class struggle tends to vitiate this experience. (2) Since female
experience cannot be voiced through these available channels, it is
prone to be dubbed as the other of what is rational. Can there be
another way of reading and writing through which this female
experience were able to reveal itself?
Women as Readers
(156)
Elain Showalter gives an example of a feminist critic's reading by
referring to Irving Howe's interpretation of the opening scene of
Thomas Hardy's The Mayor
of Casterbridge,
“which begins with the famous scene of the drunken Michael Henchard
selling his wife and infant daughter for five guineas at a country
fair” (129).
(157) Thus a feminist reading has to be twofold. It
must dismantle a phallogocentric reading, and simultaneously search
for what a feminist reading can spotlight, which is summed up as
follows: “Hardy's female characters in The
Mayor of Casterbridge,
as in his other novels, are somewhat idealized and melancholy
projections of a repressed male self” (130).
Women as Writers
Womens imagination fettered by exposure to male imagination that pervades culture.
(159) It is the woman's burden of daily routine that conditions not
only her writing habits but also the topics she writes about.
(160)
Quite apart from the question whether there are biologically rooted
differences between a woman's imagination and a man's, the former is
inevitably exposed to what is foreign to it, and hence is fettered in
its unfolding.
Revisions and Additions
Do these feminist propositions enumerated by Kolodny suggest alternative ways to read technology, camped out with pluralists and pluralisms?
(160) The state of
feminist poetics has been succinctly outlined by Annette Kolodny,
who suggests “that the current hostilities might be transformed
into a true dialogue with our critics if we at last made explicit
what appear, to this observer, three crucial propositions to which
our special interest inevitably gives rise. . . . (1) literary
history (and with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction;
(2) insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not
texts but paradigms; and finally, (3) since the grounds upon which we
assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable,
or universal, we must examine not only our aesthetics but, as well,
the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods
which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses” ([from
footnote 7: Annette Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield: Some
Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist
Literary Criticism,” in Showalter, ed., New
Feminist Criticism,
p.] 151).
(161) In spite of a still prevailing
diversity, Kolodny contends that this “would finally place us
securely where, all along, we should have been: camped out, on the
far side of the minefield, with the other pluralists and pluralisms”
(159).
13
Theory in Perspective
(163)
In other words, an ontological definition of art is now out of the
question.
An Intellectual Landscape
Quick run through the theories of art presented.
Again relates his reception theory to virtual realities, perhaps inviting Zizek study of the reality of the virtual as well as texts and technology media studies approach.
(163)
The phenomenological theory conceives the work of art as an
intentional object to be distinguished from real and ideal
objects.
(164) The hermeneutical theory sees the work of art as a
means of enhancing self-understanding.
(164) Gestalt theory is
based on the idea that ordinary perception is already a creative act
through which we group data into percepts.
(164-165) Reception
theory is concerned with the impact exercised by the work of art,
which is dual by nature: it impacts both upon reality and upon the
reader. . . . Such a reaction to realities brings something into the
world that did not exist before, and this has the character of a
virtual reality,
which the reader is given to process, thereby allowing reception
theory to spotlight what the work of art makes the reader do.
(165)
Semiotic theory points to the fact that the world cannot be
determined or defined, but only read.
(165) [To psychoanalytical
theory] The work of art produced through the creative process
illuminates the phases of its emergence in a sequence ranging from
ego decomposition to reintrojection, thus revealing the ego rhythm as
the minimum content of art.
(165) Marxist theory in all its
variants has been concerned with the self-production of human life. .
. . What makes the work of art paradigmatic is the triadic
relationship between its components, i.e., the dominant, the
residual, and the emergent, which sets the productive process in
motion.
(165-166) In deconstruction difference looms large.
Whatever there is, is is marked by difference both internally and
externally, because phenomena have a differential structure, and each
one is different from others. . . . Deconstruction is basically a
reading that tries to open up what has been eclipsed.
(166)
Generative anthropology conceives of culture as the deferral of
violence by means of representation. . . . Literature assumes a dual
function in this ongoing alternation: it operates as a procedure of
discovery by acting out what the prevailing structure of center and
periphery has made inaccessible, and by representing this cultural
frame it monitors the course of events, thus providing
distance.
(166) [For pragmatism] aesthetic experience as purveyed
by the work of art was considered to be of a special kind, and it was
elevated into a measuring rod of which all other experiences could be
distinguished from one another and qualified accordingly.
(166)
Feminism tries to develop a gender-specific poetics by undermining
the prevalent male hegemony.
Art reflects on intentionality by mapping, affecting self-understanding by the subject, highlighting performance, producing codes by violating them: easy to replace art with software for the top level of Montfort and Bogost hierarchy.
(166-167) By elucidating the formation of the intentional object, art is made to reflect on intentionality as an operation of mapping. Through its encounter with the subject, it figures the process of self-understanding. In freeing representation from imitating a given object, it highlights performance as an activity that brings into presence something hitherto nonexisting. By intervening in reality, it is made to rearrange that which does exist, and which the recipient is given to process. Through code violation, it turns into a code-producing matrix, the reading of which allows us to monitor communication. By revealing the workings and the function of the ego rhythm, it is made to depict the subject as continually restructuring itself. Through tis creative practice, it projects modes of human self-production. By uncovering what has been excluded, it exhibits the way in which every phenomenon is inhabited by something other. By enacting the basic cultural fabric of center and periphery, it stages what is otherwise inaccessible. When it provides an aesthetic experience, it opens up an horizon that makes it possible to assess all kinds of experience. And when it goes against the grain, it releases an armory for subversion.
The Fabric of Theory
Architectural and operational types of theory.
(167)
If the framework of a theory is architectural, it is basically a grid
superimposed on the work for the purpose of cognition; if it is
operational, it is basically a networking structure for the purpose
of elucidating how something emerges.
(168) Reception theory
structures indeterminacies insofar as blanks and negations specify
authorial strategies, and mark what the reader is given to
resolve.
(168-169) Translating the work of art into cognitive
terms is bound to produce indeterminacies that arise out of what a
conceptual language is unable to grasp. Tackling indeterminacies,
however, leads to art being inscribed into the cognitive terminology
by giving it a negative slant.
(169) Such a development resembles
the process which Thomas Kuhn has
described.
(169) In Marxist terms, then, art spawned an array of
viewpoints when subjected to comprehension.
(169-170) Grasping a
work of art in theoretical terms appears to have different effects on
respective approaches. It plunges initial presuppositions into a
sequence of revisions (semiotics and Marxism). It gives a negative
slant to the conceptual languages employed (gestalt, reception,
deconstruction, psychoanalytical theory). It inscribes itself into
the reasoning through indeterminacies (gestalt and pragmatism) that
range from blanks and negation (reception) through a maze of multiple
pathways (psychoanalytical theory) to free play (deconstruction).
They are all markers through which the work of art imprints itself on
every operational attempt to capture it cognitively.
What
Does the Multiplicity of Theories Tell Us?
Theorizing art reveals historicity; theories function as divining rod for historical needs of their milieu.
(170) Whenever art
is theorized, the framework of the theory involuntarily reveals the
historicity of the basic decisions that have fashioned it. Each
theory, we may conclude, functions as a divining-rod for the
historical need that it is called upon to cope with.
(171) In fact
most of them assert that art comes to fruition in the recipient. . .
. In deconstruction it is the reading of the “postcard” which the
author has sent into the world that creates dissemination of
reception. . . . The array of theories thus highlights an important
shift in the localization of the arts, which are taken out of the
museum and transferred into the recipient's “mind and soul” as
their new home and habitation.
Or we want to create AI behind urge to cognize art, as an entry to thinking phenomenology of virtual realites beyond biochauvanistism.
(171) Why is there such an urge to translate the work of art into cognition? There are two possible answers: we want to know what it is that we ourselves have experienced, or we want to comprehend the unfamiliarity witnessed in the work of art.
Postscript
Postcolonial
Discourse: Said
Discourse maps territory projecting a lived domain; compare to Janz.
(172) Theory explores a given subject matter, which it translates into cognitive terms, thus systematically opening up access to whatever is under scrutiny. Discourse maps a territory and determines the features of what it charts, thus projecting a domain to be lived in.
Basic Features of Discourse
Discourse constrained by drive to assert what is taken for truth.
(173)
For Edward Said, Foucault's contention “that the fact of writing
itself is a systematic conversion of the power relationship between
controller and controlled into mere 'written' words becomes the
overriding guideline for the postcolonial discourse that he unfolds
in his Culture
and Imperialism.
(173)
L'Ordre
du discours
carries
a double meaning: it is both order and command.
(174) Hence
discourse is governed by rules, of which the all-pervasive one,
operative in all forms, is that of exclusion; it marks what is
prohibited. . . . Discourse is not free to say just anything but is
basically confined to the division between true and false, and is
simultaneously driven to assert what is taken for truth.
Strategies of Postcolonial Discourse
Said postcolonial discourse guided by contrapuntal reading.
(175)
Edward Said's postcolonial discourse, as developed in his book
Culture and
Imperialism,
works as an imposition in the Foucauldian sense of both colonial and
anticolonial discourses.
(176) This complicity between literature
and imperialism brings to light the intimate connection between
culture and politics, which is hardly admitted by the
self-understanding of culture.
(177) The very observation that
metropolitan culture energizes Western imperialism constitutes the
operational drive of postcolonial discourse, which functions
primarily as discourse analysis, i.e., laying bare how knowledge and
fantasy are superimposed on distant lands that are ruled by the
metropolitan center. . . . Since Kant we have believed in the
isolation of cultural and aesthetic realms from the worldly domain,
but now it is time to link them again in order to discover what
culture-inspired imperialism has shut out. This focus on what
hegemonic discourses have suppressed is the hallmark of postcolonial
discourse guided by the strategy of contrapuntal
reading.
The
Novel as Imperial Discourse
(178)
Literature is permeated with references to Europe's overseas
expansion, and continually maps its affiliations with the empire. . .
. From the countless instances in which the empire is a crucial
setting, we shall single out Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, and Rudyard
Kipling.
Consider complicity between technology and imperialism, for instance dominance of English and [decimal] number system in programming languages and protocols, and subjugation of cyberspace by powerful corporations, then compare democratic rationalizations of free software to strategy (or tactic) of postcolonial discourse: imagine a past in which free software rapidly evolved global Internet and programming was a home economics skill taught as part of public education.
(181)
Colonialism, as a cloak for protecting the enchantment to be derived
from the “Other,” reveals the complicity between culture and
imperialism.
(181) Yeats and Camus, however, were
not concerned with distant lands dominated by colonial powers but
with what was nearest to them: Ireland and Algeria, the one
subjugated by the British, the other a French province. These writers
and their ilk were voices inside imperialist nations that tried to
turn the colonizing impact of culture against this culture itself,
thus anticipating the strategy of postcolonial discourse.
Models of Resistance
Models of resistance from postcolonial discourse could be applied to software cultures, the most obvious cathedral versus bazaar.
(182)
Their main objective is to imagine a culture and a past independent
of colonialism, and to conceive an anti-imperialistic type of
nationalism. In view of its different pursuits, anticolonial
discourse is also marked by rarefaction, and it becomes the task of
postcolonial discourse to highlight the conditionality responsible
for the retrenchments.
(183) On the one hand, familiar patterns of
Western literature are deliberately taken up in order to communicate
the agenda of decolonization, but this in itself is a confirmation of
Western forms of articulation. On the other hand, however, the hybrid
discourse constitutes a massive infusion of non-European cultures
into the metropolitan heartland, signaled by what has since been
called The
Empire Writes Back.
(184)
What in the classical imperial hegemony was an intertwining of power
and legitimacy has now changed into a growing awareness of the
intertwining of cultures.
The
Order of Postcolonial Discourse
(185)
Center and periphery have now to be telescoped, so that each becomes
the backdrop of the other, and charting this process brings
postcolonial discourse to full fruition.
Glossary
Appendix A: John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Appendix B: Edmund Spenser, “Februarie: Aegloga Secunda” from The Shepheardes Calender
Appendix C: T. S. Eliot, “The Fire Sermon” from The Waste Land
Iser, Wolfgang. How To Do Theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Print.