Tuesday, May 29, 2007

A bare beginning -- on Locke

Human Understanding. Book III, Chapter ii. "Of the Signification of Words." Section 1. Page Numbers below are from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.

Locke underlies much if not most later thought in English, including the basis of the systemic assumptions of a mutually sensible reality, common sense and so forth that give us William James, Richard Rorty, truths that we hold to be self-evident, and an emphasis on so-called constative value in speech. But Locke recognizes the nuance and limits of his ideas better than many of his followers. Specifically, while he decides that people share some commonality of thought by having similar sensing equipment, and he casts his doubts of universality more on words than on thoughts themselves, he does not assume that matters of language can or should or had might as well be dispensed with while examining thought.

He does get into some pretty messes, like anyone, I suppose, who attempts to describe human understanding. The above dichotomy between words and ideas creates a hierarchy in which words describe thoughts, but thoughts do not (always) describe words. The thoughts and words, by virtue of being non-identical, are also discrete. Also, he ignores the shifts in the meaning of words based on syntax and system, so he can assume that people thinking to themselves can have perfect understanding of the words they use.

[A logical progression here would be to check in with Paul de Man's response to Locke in one of the essay collections]


"Words are sensible signs necessary for communication" (254).
Sect 2 "Words are the sensible signs of his ideas who uses them"

". . . when [man] represents to himself other men's ideas by some of his own, if he consent to give them the same names that other men do, it is stilll to his own ideas; to ideas that he has, and not to ideas that he has not.
Sect. 3. This is so nessarry in the use of language, that in this respect the knowling thd the ignorant, the leaned and the unlearned, use the words they speak (with an y meaning) all alike. They, in every man's mouth, stand for the ideas he has, and whic hhe would express by them. A child having taken notice of nothing in themetal he hears called gold, but the bright shining hellow color, he applies the word gold only to khis known idea of that colous, and nothing else; and therfore calls the same colour in a peackck's tail, gold. Another, that hath better observed, adds to shining yellow great weight; and hten the sound gold, when he uses it, stands for a complex idea of a shinging yellow, and a very weighty substance" (255).

He goes on at some length, reporting that men unreasonably take words to refer to other men's ideas and to referents.

There's more here.

Frank Norris

Norris, Frank. Octopus, McTeague.

I'm interested, reading Norris, what separates him from the great voices. At times it seems so fine a distinction that I find myself wishing he had lived into his fifties at least, to see what he might have done.

McTeague feels like Zola gone west, its confident positivism terse with Judgment and Morality determining all actions even when unspoken, its self-conscious abnegation of the aspects of human character deemed Romantic. Thus, while crushes his wife, his passion remains opaque to him. His dullness remains a central observation for Norris, who breaks narrative often to remind us of it and who seems to have invented McTeague's very size and features as signal of its nature as inevitable essence. We see poverty and greed for lucre as factors that drive McTeague and his wife, but the consequences require considerable dullness and unwillingess to speak that nowhere gets examined. McTeague's character in murder is described as animal, yet the animals that return after months or years to specifically rob their wives are human. We should experience McTeague excusing his behavior to himself; we should find him a mass of considerations muted, repressed, twisted. The plot requires a Dostoyevskian character, but none can be found. In the absence of such, we find the sorrows of the poor reduced from their baroque iteration to a blanket Poverty viewed by a blanket Realism that in denying them nobility goes far to deny them subjective status.

In The Octopus, Norris seems notably farther along. All the old forms remain, but Norris seems concerned to allow his characters some range of feeling. Readers still get descriptions of Presley and Annixter and Vanamee, but they are still viewed from without. None of the fresh relations between author and page -- not Whitman nor Joyce or Faulkner, who come later -- have arrived. Allusions are quite openly and naturally integrated in The Octopus: Norris' characters read Dickens and discuss Homer. But we see then Norris' models: a realism willing to confront oppression but unable to exorcise the ghosts of Romanticized Christianity, unwilling to release the preferential subjectivity of artistic Comment, still-confident of its supposed objectivity.

But, feeling Truth open to him, Norris twists violently against his limitations. Vanamee's bizarre powers represent a kind of subjectivity that Norris apparently cannot imagine without some metaphysic. Presley's misbegotten desire to write the West to hexameters must represent an ironically skewered self-appraisal of Norris' own efforts in this the first volume of a projected trilogy.

WIlliam Dean Howells

The Rise of Silas Lapham
A Hazard of Fortunes

The gist in Lapham seems to be a realism and representationism, a mimesis, but a mimesis of things that cannot be seen or heard or smelt. Howells appears overwhelmingly certain of his Categories. The effect seems unconsciously idealistic. The following statement of aesthetic comes from the mouths of his characters. One really feels that Howells hopes to "get at" the "good citizen" by an by.

"We non-combatants were notoriously reluctant to give up fighting," said Mr. Sewell, the minister; "but I incline to think Colonel Lapham and Mr. Bellingham may be right. I dare say we shall have the heroism again if we have the occasion. Till it comes, we must content ourselves with the every-day generosities and sacrifices. They make up in quantity what they lack in quality, perhaps." "They're not so picturesque," said Bromfield Corey. "You can paint a man dying for his country, but you can't express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen." "Perhaps the novelists will get at him by and by," suggested Charles Bellingham. "If I were one of these fellows, I shouldn't propose to myself anything short of that." "What? the commonplace?" asked his cousin. "Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they've never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to 'the riddle of the painful earth' on his tongue."


There have been also considerable reflections that have to do with the novel as a form, previously. Howells seems to consider it to be still in considerable doubt as haute couture. His very conservative Bahston society argues on about its validity in general.

Howells does excercise worldly observation of various socioeconomic classes. His people function primarily as vectors of class interest. He instantiates their character, but these remain clearly instantiations. In both novels, the comparison of the mores engendered by class interest carries most interest. The Rise of Silas Lapham gently pits 1800's yankee capitalism against euro-centered aristocracy, favoring the former, but not without nuance. The aristocrats' disapproval of "vulgar" Silas comes across as unexplained and fairly inexplicable; one wonders whether Howells didn't know better. The class-based aspirations of both are treated somehow as completely understandable, no matter how immaterial and vapid. But a failure to properly criticize his independent New Englanders appears in A Hazard of Fortunes as well. March's daughter Alma Leigh treats Beaton badly, yet Howells shows nothing but respect for her wisdom. Likewise, editor and papa March is presented as straightforwardly idealistic and, to use a terrible anachronism, "politically correct."

The most painful point in Howell's overappraisal of March comes with March's dismissal of the Lindau's radical politics before March's son. Howells gives Lindau enough text to show that Howells has some familiarity with Marx and Bakunin and so forth, but Lindau only gets to sputter and pontificate, although what POV he does express reads as far more logical than March's homilies. March's son appears in no other function throughout the novel, since he cannot function as a romantic interest for the male principals, as do everyone's daughters, and since he does little except join with March in an outwardly humane condemnation of Lindau, the left, and the working class.

March (and Howells) stand somewhat in protest to Dreyfoos' hiring Pinkerton's to kill strikers, but not much. March appears noble for standing up for Lindau, whereas Lindau only appears daft or wounded or tragic for standing up for himself. The policeman who kills him for speaking barely rates a couple lines; he's seen as doing his duty impassionately. Howells' use of the southern plantation owner is similar. We get reference that such ideas exist, the comparison with wage-slavery is in the air, but nowhere does the Colonel get to vie seriously with Dreyfoos or with Fulkerson or March, for that matter. Everyone's polite, but the old slave-owner is politely dismissed, patronized even by his daughter.

Altogether, Howells seems a petit-bourgeois New England boy, and he prefers folks of his own class. Dreyfoos is a rich idiot who has mysteriously put money ahead of his family, although he doesn't seem to know how he's earned the money. Silas Lapham is by far a more interesting and realistic character. The fairy-tale ending, with Dreyfoos inexplicably giving away his interest in the magazine, rings moralistic and false in part because his struggles against his children have been so hollow. This is a critical kind of error. We don't get the struggle within Dreyfoos when he drives her beloved Beaton away, ostensibly for her own good, or when he begs Beaton back, also misguidedly. The scene wherein he strikes his child needs a Dostoyevsky to handle, and Howell isn't up to it. Dreyfoos barely speaks, saying nothing of interest while the entire error of his life confronts him. Howells does not seem so much unaware of what the old man's inner struggle must have been (he repeats that it exists over an over again, but without giving it detail), but just uninterested in it. For Howells, it may be there to excuse poverty and the Pinkertons.

In this novel, with its persons who barely seem to work, and drift from drawing room to drawing room discussing an performing issues of politeness, poverty may be referred to, but does not even appear, even in the person of Lindau, who's a gentleman pauper at worst.

Howells employs a gentle humor throughout, and has a worldly touch with social classes and situations, including some apt observations. He provides an interesting picture of the times, not the least for what he cannot or would not show.

Hong-Kingston

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. NY: Vintage, 1989.

HK won the National Book Critics CIrcle Award for Nonfiction for this, but it appears about as fictional as Henry Miller, LF Celine, or Notes from the Underground. HK narrates 1st-person, but maintains narrative irony most of the time.

The narrator is not reliable. She lapses into various sentimentalisms, but it's difficult to weed out what one's intended to discard. As she eventually complains to her mother, "And I don't want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. Ey scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won't tell me a story and then say, 'This is a true story,' or 'This is just a story.' I can't tell the difference. I don't even know what your real names are. I can't tell what's real and what you make up Ha! You can't stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn't work" (202).

Many, many of the sentimentalisms involve severely defensive attitudes towards men. These seem naturally part of of the extreme misogyny attributed to the males in the story, a misogyny that appears. But then, the rather absurd racial observations and mythic observations are repeated verbatim the same way, and by the end one gets an overall impressoin that HK has an extreme commitment to the kind of Truth she was impressed with in anglo-american schools or from yanqui people. She seems to equate that with her escape from the woman-slave continuum. At the same time, that seems to have some relation to the earlier Woman Warrior fantasy that descends from mamma's bedtime stories.

One does feel for the characters in this book, although I find my sympathies often cut short by their bizarre ideation -- or the spooky mixture of hallucination and habitual casual lying. This is very much the point, though -- the combination of the lying and the whole "warrior woman" thing, an MO for responding to the terror of what must have amounted to an ongoing rejection. In some ways I felt that the rigor of the story and its commentary on the cultures suffered for HK's own unwillingness to call a line between truth and fiction.

HK seems fairly aware of all this, BTW, though this reads in many ways like an early work. If the list of things about which the narrator wishes to confront her mother is autobiographical, it may also have been an early outline for this book

Wharton question

I have a question, if someone can field this.

In Wharton's The House of Mirth, at the top of 125 in the Scribner's paperback, Miss Stepney gossips to Lily's aunt Miss Peniston about Lily's involvement with Gus Trenor and, indirectly, with Mr. Rosedale.

Trenor has been managing her finances, and does appear to expect some favors in return. Rosedale has been described as unpleasant in ways that suggest that Wharton disapproves of him, if not as clearly and finally as does her character Lily. Yet the only case against him has been that he's jewish, and vague impressions that he's socially ungraceful. Wharton preps Ms Stepney's decision to extend her tattling as follows:

[Ms Stepney] drew breath nervously. It was agreeable to shock Mrs. Peniston, but not to shock her to the verge of anger. Miss Stepney was not sufficiently familiar with the classic drama as to have recalled in advance how the bearers of bad tidings are proverbially received, but she now had a rapid vision of forfeited dinners and a reduced wardrobe as the possible consequences of her disinterestedness. To the honor of her sex, however, hatred of Lily prevailed over more personal considerations" (125).

Surely there's some irony in the counterpoint between anger and honor, but where does Wharton come down on it?

Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:
The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:
Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:


  • Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.

  • Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.

  • Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would

  • The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.

  • Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."



Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

  • "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  • We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.


The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.

Grimke & Form

Contemporary readers will acknowledge that Scripture condemns slavery without testing her patient explanation, so Grimke's Appeal to Christian Women of the South interests primarily for what it does not say. Here, for instance, slavery is condemned for its similarity to Catholicism:
The Catholics are universally condemned, for denying the
Bible to the common people, but, _slaveholders must not_ blame them,
for _they_ are doing the _very same thing_, and for the very same
reason, neither of these systems can bear the light which bursts
from the pages of that Holy Book.

Before we dismiss Grimke's obvious New England ethnocentrism, let's examine that part of this that is correct. The condition of most Catholics in Europe and the Americas during the 1800's might be described by the word serfs. One might say of serfs, "At least they were not owned," but that isn't rigorously true. One who owns something or someone is held to have certain rights over it, but not others. I own my car, but that does not give me the right to drive on the sidewalk, run red lights, or chase down pedestrians. I must provide for certain features of its upkeep; if the CHP officer decides I'm driving it in poor working condition, I may receive an injunction to fix the car or keep it off the road. Likewise, the owner of a propery may find that others have rights to certain parts of it -- that the city has rights to run a sidewalk across the front yard or that the electric company is entitled to dig for cables. European nobles had less ownership over serfs than did American slaveowners, but in some ways they had more power than did the Hebrew slaveholders that American apologists were fond of citing to defend slavery. Serfs married as they please, but they were serfs for life, as were their children.

If we treat ownership as something that may be nuanced, the group Grimke addresses, Christian Women in the South, is itself more owned than owning. Women are generally an odd group among the oppressed, for they're generally granted luxury (with stipulations), but with reduced sovereignty. That is, certain others, generally male, are seen as having rights over them: they're more owned than owning.

Grimke condemns slavery in part because it's similar to Catholicism. It's similar, she argues, because Catholic orthodoxy witholds information from its subjects. Since the Catholics don't, or didn't read the Vulgate, on which the Papacy has always based doctrine, Catholics have or had less sovereignty over whatever decisions they might make that involved scripture. Now, note, hte abolitionist Grimke considers this aspect of Catholocism sufficiently reprehensible that she may summon it to condemn slavery. But at the same time, the very women she addresses have trouble getting information:
Other books and papers might be a great help to you in this investigation, but they are not
necessary, and it is hardly probable that your Committees of Vigilance will allow you to have any other.

So Grimke finds use of the Vulgate constitutes a loss of sovereignty for the Catholics, a loss commensurate with at least some aspects of slavery, a slavery in itself of sorts. At the same time, these Committees of Vigilance will deny southern women any document except the Bible. Even if one agrees with Grimke that this is a lesser offense than denying the Bible itself, that's witholding a lot of information.

The condition of women in the 1800's, like the institution of slavery, is something from which contemporary Americans might feel we can distance ourselves with justice. But if we see ownership as something that can be nuanced, and knowledge as necessary for sovereignty, the points of similarity that arise can be downright scary:


  • Media ownership rules have been lifted, allowing few companies to own nearly all US media, thereby filtering news and culture for most of the population.

  • Monopoly media, since it need fear little contradiction, has little motive to risk offending large advertisers, who may have vested interests in political decisions.

  • Land-line and satellite-owning conglomerates have lobbied Congress to allow them to charge content-producers for passage of information over high-speed lines. This would

  • The above companies have managd to advertise on broadcast television the idea that allowing them to charge and thereby dictate Net content constitutes "Net Freedom." While the campaign failed in Congress (this time), the ads ran largely unopposed.

  • Many so-called educators feel that the "job" of education is to "pass on culture," to inculcate values or, more nefariously, to "prepare students for corporate positions."



Clearly, all these involve the same kind of piracy of sovereignty, though advancing media technology has made the media environment more heterogenous, at least for those privelidged to pay attention.

The modernity of the situation of Southern Women becomes even more disturbing when one sees how similar the defenses for modern political fiascos are to antebellum defenses for slavery. Grimke argues against slavery based on the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But this doctrine most are given simply in childhood becomes complex on application. We don't treat chickens as we would be treated, and we excuse that because they are differently other. Vegetarians may protest, perhaps justly, but we might as easily extend the analogy to carrots. I don't mean to minimize the major differences between applying a such a principle to people as opposed to chickens or even chickens as opposed to carrots, but the argument structurally resembles the argument an apologist might present for slaveholders: "The Golden Rule does not apply because the slaves are different."

To be clear, biological science and the slaveowners' well documented reproductive habits sharply contradict the apologists' argument in their behalf. But again the same form of argument comes into play repeatedly with regards to Amercan conflicts abroad. Note how the same form leads to bizarre ideation in each of the following arguments, which I suspect readers will find familiar:

  • "We entered Vietnam because they were communists." They already implies that an entire population -- and one engaged in civil war at that! -- uniformly espoused a single ideology. Then, the passive construction were implies no action, but a state of being. Thus, they don't necessarily do anything that makes them communists; but when they sip tea, they sip tea as communists, and when they walk or bend over or scratch, they must do each of these things as communists. We could take their self-determination, then, because they were different. We can take what belongs to them because, not being free people, they are less deserving than us.
  • We must remain in Iraq (Iran, Afghanistan, upi name it) because they are not ready for democracy.


The same rationale might have been used with equal justice by Edward Teach, for example, to justify his raids upon English and American shipping. The merchant and military crews had often been pressed into service or driven there by poverty; the profits would go to people who had not worked for them; and Teach's crew, by contrast, could vote on its course of action. Teach (AKA Blackbeard) held no slaves, in contrast to the Americans; he had no serfs and his workers voted, in contrast to the Spanish; he did not press people into service, in contrast to the English; he did not press sailors into service. His government may have been the most democratic in the English-speaking world in the 1800's.

Of course, that does no more for the ships he plundered than American voting rights do for Vietnamese, Iraqis, Argentines, Chilenos, Panamanians, Iranians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Philipinos, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or -- well, given Greg Palast's recent work on how many Indian votes are thrown out, I'm tempted to add native Americans. But even if that constitutes a separate case, the list could be many times longer.

Grimke criticizes a warp in logic that has transcended theology, nominative ideology, and economic system to remain an active force. Formally, she does this by pointing out inconsistencies between a particular position with a document on which its purveyors hold it to be based. This does seem dated, but it's not because either the mistake or the slavery have stopped. And it's not because the Bible has ceased to be perverted as an instrument of torture. Each American president since Jimmy Carter has used faith to excuse killing for profit.

Perhaps Grimke seems dated because of a couple aspects of language. First, she regards scriptural arguments seriously enough to incorporate scripture in her answer, whereas contemporary western theocracy claims literal authorization by a text that it takes figuratively and which its leaders may not have read systematically. The other may be simply because slavery has taken different names. So we can sit over a cup of chocolate and relax, having abolished it.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Chomsky and Visual Inflection

Feeding Chomsky's concepts of surface structure, deep structure, and universal grammar across formalist and structuralist ideas of discourse yields some interesting results. But to play with this, I've had to take a couple odd adjustments to theory, adjustments that I can only warrant from subjective experience.

Coming to Chomsky's model as presented in Aspects of Syntactic Theory or Language and Mind, may see syntax as dominating semantics, as does John Searle in a review of Chomsky's work for the NY Times. Chomsky pays most attention to relations at the level of phrases and sentences as opposed to semantic oppositions or distinctions as described in structuralist and poststructuralist works, or speech-act contextualization as described by Austin or narratologists like Gerard Genette. However, Chomsky himself seems to at least partly conflate notions of the significance of individual words and of syntax.

Now, one might find this warranted because of course, arrangement of words determines their meaning. But one might also find it warranted because the characteristics of individual words determine certain aspects of what's called syntax.

Searle further considers that Chomsky simply ignores various conditions imposed by speech-act theory: "". However, some overlap in POV may come from the complex nature of word. While Chomsky's visual models treat words as discrete entities, his discussions of them do not.

I suspect we all find the assignment of a meaning to a word to be a complex task. We may use a word easily, but we strain to define it. In making dictionary entries, lexicographers, I submit, do not "say what a word means" or even fairly describe it; rather, they make an attempt to reduce it to something Austin might conceive of as constative. In different ways, Derrida's notions of play and différance and Chomsky's positing of "[Chomsky on what constitutes a word]".

Searle's description of followers of Chomsky who insist on "semantics effects syntax" makes an amusing parallel to the divisions of American poetry from the mid-20th Century on, between objectivist or postmodern poets who, very roughly, approach language as material structures; and beat, confessional, and late-Romantic poets, who tend to conceive of the true poem as an essence or meaning at some remove from the physical text. In both cases, a resolution might involve aspects of each.



Subjectively, a word involves something far more and far different than a lexical entry. If, for ease of speaking, we borrow Saussure's vocabulary, the morphology of what constitutes a signifiier has to be taken as complex. We have a sound, but only certain aspects of that sound are taken to be semantically significant. That is, table means table whether loud or soft, high or low pitched, guttural or bell-tone. In English, a change in stress within a word may change the meaning in such a way that we call it a "different word." In Spanish, such changes in stress often define tense, in the preterit, for instance. Likewise, a change in volume carried over an entire word may change the meaning of the word in its context:
SHALL I compare thee to a summer's day?
Shall I compare THEE to a summer's day?
Shall I compare thee to a SUMMER's day?

We expect the relative stress between the syllables of summer to remain constant when the word is stressed. We see it as "the same word" even though music has altered its meaning in the sentence. If the reader will read Shakespeare's line above without changing the stress, but raising the pitch tor the sections in capitals, one will find the meaning changed similarly. Chomsky notes that there is some change in sound or "surface structure" at every phrase boundary that corresponds to what he calls "deep structure," which seems strongly related to sense.

At the same time, the signified seems spooky. Words seem more properly haunted by a host of associations that walk the earth unsettled at every reference. My table, then, contains the red and gold, metal-legged formica contraption I damaged when I spilled my chemistry set in 1964, whereas your table probably does not, or didn't up until now. At the same time, these associations may be called more or less strongly into play. The association seems to involve all the fuzziness typical to analog systems. I'm reminded of the way my mind treats the visual field before me. I take in information from close to a 180-degree field all around, but signal towards the center of binocular focus receives more attention and more cerebral processing. I can answer questions about what is in front of me with little trouble, but if asked about someting at the edge of my vision, I will turn or glance my eyes towards it to answer. Similarly, aspects or associations of each word seem to be foregrounded or backgrounded in mind, and the mind pays attention to various aspects depending on relevant context.

Given this range of action and attention, the meanings of words shimmer and change much like the visions called by music. Context changes the meanings of words; phrase boundaries change context; the materiality of individual words and morphemes changes phrase boundaries.

We tend to treat phrase boundaries as a question of pauses, but this really treats very little of articulation because said phrases are nested within each other. Indeed, they do not nest cleanly. To give just a simple example, we teach students that a period, which the English even call a full stop, ceases syntactic activity. Yet our relation of nouns and pronouns easily jumps the boundary of sentences. If I say, "John studied. He passed the test," no one questions that He is John. Even such outwardly simple acts display the some recursive parsing that Chomsky talks about. To a large extent, we do so by clues internal to the process.

Those cues that are used to determine words cannot be used to determine phrase boundaries. Otherwise, the system would suffer from unworkable ambiguities. Changes that cannot be reproduced by the great majority of the population cannot be used as traditional or common phrase markers, either: if one had to hit a very high C to end a sentence, those who could not reach the note could not speak clearly. A man whose voice is deep and grainy shows little by that, whereas a smooth-voiced woman who duplicated the sound would find that listeners interpreted her words differently, as might someone who pronounced a single roughly grained word in a smooth sentence. So pitch, volume, and the duration in which a note or syllable is held seem to serve for most changes.

How does this relate to written language? Presumably, visual aspects that do not articulate words may be used to inflect and to determine phrase boundaries. We can observe this in poetry, where line-breaks and spacing have long been used to make logical divisions that need not relate specifically or directly to sound. For instance, Elizabethan verse is not always end-stopped. Why, then, need there be an end-stop at all? Clearly, because phrase boundaries are signaled. When Dickinson refers to "inflections of the pen," she makes a distinction.

A few tangentially related observations should hold. We measure music against itself, reflexively and recursively, almost as Chomsky describes syntax. Thus a melody can be the same melody even if it is in a different key. A 3/4 rhythm may be played faster or slower and be none the less recognizable. But the relative relation of pitch and measure and stress must remain, or the melody becomes unrecognizable. Similarly, when we read Pope, we find ourselves quickly judging as significant minor deviations from the iambic that might be less noticeable in, say, Robert Lowell. We reset standards for such things quickly, on the fly, without much thought. If a poem starts as a sonnet, we expect it to end as a sonnet, but that does not necessarily mean that the poem on the next page cannot be something else. From this we also get "composition by the page" as in Pound's Cantos. That is, the visual layout of the page impacts the articulation of the verse.

This would seem to become a guiding principle for the design of web sites and online literature. Freed from the necessity of uniform linearity demanded until recently by linotype and typeset books, visual layout of Websites and blogs reflects the multiple possibilities. And the diction of the language must reflect that as well.

Frank Norris

I'm interested, reading Norris, what separates him from the great voices. At times it seems so fine a distinction that I find myself wishing he had lived into his fifties at least, to see what he might have done.

McTeague feels like Zola gone west, its confident positivism terse with Judgment and Morality determining all actions even when unspoken, its self-conscious abnegation of the aspects of human character deemed Romantic. Thus, while crushes his wife, his passion remains opaque to him. His dullness remains a central observation for Norris, who breaks narrative often to remind us of it and who seems to have invented McTeague's very size and features as signal of its nature as inevitable essence. We see poverty and greed for lucre as factors that drive McTeague and his wife, but the consequences require considerable dullness and unwillingess to speak that nowhere gets examined. McTeague's character in murder is described as animal, yet the animals that return after months or years to specifically rob their wives are human. We should experience McTeague excusing his behavior to himself; we should find him a mass of considerations muted, repressed, twisted. The plot requires a Dostoyevskian character, but none can be found. In the absence of such, we find the sorrows of the poor reduced from their baroque iteration to a blanket Poverty viewed by a blanket Realism that in denying them nobility goes far to deny them subjective status.

In The Octopus, Norris seems notably farther along. All the old forms remain, but Norris seems concerned to allow his characters some range of feeling. Readers still get descriptions of Presley and Annixter and Vanamee, but they are still viewed from without. None of the fresh relations between author and page -- not Whitman nor Joyce or Faulkner, who come later -- have arrived. Allusions are quite openly and naturally integrated in The Octopus: Norris' characters read Dickens and discuss Homer. But we see then Norris' models: a realism willing to confront oppression but unable to exorcise the ghosts of Romanticized Christianity, unwilling to release the preferential subjectivity of artistic Comment, still-confident of its supposed objectivity.

But, feeling Truth open to him, Norris twists violently against his limitations. Vanamee's bizarre powers represent a kind of subjectivity that Norris apparently cannot imagine without some metaphysic. Presley's misbegotten desire to write the West to hexameters must represent an ironically skewered self-appraisal of Norris' own efforts in this the first volume of a projected trilogy.

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Ignacio Pignatari

Pignatari, Décio. "The Contiguity Illusion." Sight, Sound, and Sense. Thomas A. Sebeok. Ed. Bloomington: Indiana, 1978.
"Why is contiguity endowed with such a privilege? The reason lies in a kind of logical illusion -- the contiguity illusion -- which we may also observe in the works of many contemporary linguists and semiologists. This illusion, in all appearances, was born directly from Western linguistic systems and has earned a droit de cité in the written notation of these systems, that is, teh alphabetic code (in this connection, the fact hat the unit letter was isolated many centuries before the unit phoneme cannot be dismissed). These linguistic systems favor association by contiguity. What we formerly called classical logic -- i.e., Aristotelian and linear -- is the logic embodied in the Greek idiom: it is a contiguity logic. The alphabetic code -- a most powerful logical machine -- is a highly abstract discrete source of signs with digital and metonymic characteristics. Words are formed by combinatory permutations, that is, syntagmatically, and fare linked together following the pattern of predicatio (especially when the verb to be is employed; "this is that"), articulated by linkage elements called conjunctions -- first-class connections when hierarchy is implied (hypotaxis, and second-class connections when 'non-hierarchy' is implied (parataxis). . . . Ergo, when we 'talk logic,' or 'talk science,' we mean that inferences have been drawn through contiguity. But is there no possibility of another kind of logic -- that is, a logic by similarity?
"The Western mind is contiguity-based through language (the verbal code), which itself is based on contiguity." . . . . When dealing with analogy, 'scientific' minds become very cautious: analogy is a dangerous path to follow -- it is almost . . . non-scientific' (84-85).

I don't agree. What's actually going on is that time and space do function at once, though DP describes it otherwise. The mind he talks about deals with similarity in contiguity. Of course, to deal with similarity, one is dealing in difference and presumably différance as well.

Now, much of this signal must be forcibly ignored in the act of interpreting language. I have a red and a blue copy of Ulysses, but no one cares what color it is. By book-era standards, font-face, font-size and so forth were generally dismissed as noncommunication, as simply part of the logistics of presenting the "real" novel, its "linguistic" or "intellectual" content or its "meaning," to the reader. The uniformity of all that allowed readers to pretend that the materiality of the text was unimportant.

Of course, were all this ever really neutral, one could publish Tolstoy in ransom-note fonts and nobody would be bothered.

Now, one corrollary of something here is that matters used for inflection must be matters not relevant to the predicative nature of the text.

No. That's not correct. Again:

The relation of inflection to predication is of one nature, so it cannot relate in another way; the signal cannot be usefully overloaded. If a comma were used to spell some words, it couldn't be used to indicate phrase bondaries as it is.

A few observations about inflection, in no particular order ---

It's not completely arbitrary: One shouts or prints bold to call attention to something, for instance. Space indicates separation. Line indicates sequence, and that metaphor of time appears to be pretty thoroughly universal. So in written work, one of the ways that sense and materiality infect the workings of logos is through inflection.

What else? Emphasis in a word may imply semantic distinction. Emphasis in a sentence implies grammatical activity:

SHOULD I compare thee to a summer's day? (or maybe I should not)
Should I compare THEE to a summer's day? (or maybe your sister)

and so forth. In either case the question as a whole pertains particularly to the stressed word, thereby altering its semantic and syntactic meaning without changing what we usually call grammar.

Note that the differences are relative. A voice that's louder throughout does not change connotation in the same way.

Since Pound, many poets have been vocal about the inadequacy of classical scansion to designate the rhythmic changes of poetry. It's not so much a matter of "different people read it differently," the usual students' complaint, but that "the inflections of the pen" are many, as Emily Dickinson pointed out. Hence Pound's "musical line and not the metronome" and so forth. Also, there's no designation for the emphasis of an entire phrase -- unless of course one writes out the musical notation.

What's the line, though? In Pound's case, it's quite visual. Read the Cantos with stops at line's end, and things work rather well. Try the same thing with Marlowe or most of Shakespeare, certainly most all the latter work, unless he's trying to sound childish, and it all sounds dorky.

Another point: stress as in LOUD or L O N G is clearly not the only variable. Pitch is another. Seldom is an entire sentence pronounced at the same pitch. In most spoken English, pitch falls at the end of a statement and rises at the end of a question. Check Tim Allen in Tool Time when he does his signature dumb male "Uh-eé?" groan. Accents where a statement rises in pitch sound "sing-song" or just weird. Check a Welsh accent or the famous 1980's California Val slang for a couple examples; the Val slang can be found on Moon-Unit Zappa's "Valley Girl," from somewhere around 1980.

Elsewhere I have analysed the relationship between pitch and line in William Carlos Williams' oft-anthologized Red Wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All. Williams does not pause at the end of the line, but one hears the line-endings very clearly in his subtle changes of pitch. He may "read like he speaks," as Ginsberg said of him, but it's not "just" speech: he sounds out what we're told good poets do with line: not all factors indicate a stop at the same point, so that we have an articulated, variable, organic, complex statement -- and vision and music, apparently. (Of course, Ginsberg would probably have responded: "That's all part of speech.")

Reuven Tsur is another good source, though one I need more time to integrate.

Another thing that must be noted is that there are clearly segments of segments, and differences that are significant within different phrase-units, including nested phrase-units. For instance, in English, stress falls on one or another syllable of a multisyllabic word. Some words even change meaning with changed syllabic stress. Therefore, if the word itself is stressed, the relative stress between syllables is generally maintained. We vary pitch and syllable length to help separate designations and map them to their proper phrases. Each gives us what amounts to an extra dimension of distinctions in performance.

I have seen no extensive mapping of such patterns, but clearly that there we routinely emphasize smaller units within larger units within larger units, at least out to groups of several sentences, and I would presume it's longer in formally sophisticated presentations like a soliloquoy or the presentation of an exceptional orator. Emphases can nest and partially overlap as well.

Now, I mentioned earlier that there exists a materiality to the business of inflection. That is, there is a continuum of pitch, not a boolean YES|NO distinction for high|low. A rise in pitch that involves a cry in the voice, for instance, will surely tend to be read differently. Yet on the other hand there appears to be some possible systematization and some analogy to diachronic syntax. I'd take Dickinson's system of punctuation as an example, with her many dashes. They are at once certainly not categorizable in any simple way, yet they just as certainly involve distinctions.

Now, to get back to Pignatari's issue of contiguity, there do seem to be some issues with language. For instance, when Chomsky in "Aspects of the Theory of Syntax" gives an example of what he calls grammatical but unacceptable language, the way he does it is to make less contiguous the elements that the reader must combine:

1) i) I called up the man who wrote the book that you told me about.
2) i) I called the man who wrote the book that you told me about up.

Now, before you classify this as a simple misplaced modifier, remember that we do quite typically separate these two-word verbs. "I called her up" is normal; "I called up her" sounds vaguely obscene and obscenely vague. Nonetheless, separating them as is done in 2i violates the reader's processes. Clearly, the phrase containging called has been assembled and must be broken and reassembled. It's not word-salad, but it is rather annoying.

Now, what this leads us to is rather interesting. It appears that not only do extra segments of information change the way we view previous information, a la Derrida and differance, but the semantic aspects and sensorial aspects of the information that we get clue us as to where to divide the segments, and what constitutes a working center.

It appears (this is out of order) that human minds re-frame and constitute a working frame and a working center and edges of a syntactic unit on the fly, deducing all this from internal information within the language-object or speech act.

This is obviously not a perfect situation, since interpretation of the smaller units must be held in abeyance, and the interpretation of the larger units must be determined by these smaller units and their arrangement. A clue is often needed, of course -- these are punctuation and the song and dance of speech.

What must be carried in the nonverbal or nonsemantic and nonsyntactic input are the kinds of things that Searle and Austin point out in discussions of speech act theory. It's probably worth pointing out again that these kind of things can attach to a particular word or morpheme within a sentence, or to the entire performance, including the nonverbal aspects. Thus, for instance, the special dress and manners of a wedding will be echoed in some ways in a wedding invitation or in a Website for a company that arranges weddings -- in ways altered by their special relations to the event itself. But visual layout in written language will designate the things that aspects of performance would have designated otherwise.

And it will do so best by doing so economically. That doesn't mean that some visual approaches might be bold, but these will still be governed by a strict economy of signification: anything that detracts from the signification blurs the sign.

Now, this is somewhat different from, say, Poe's insistence that all factors lead to one POV, one mood, in a story. We can compare Poe's insistence on the one hand with, say, Charles Bernstein's essay in Norton 20th Century American Poetry on the far end. Visual aspects might accomplish either closed or open forms, but specific continuities and discontinuities must be signaled clearly.

More Pignatari:

"A summary cannot be made of a form" (86).


Not so! But it's a sketch, not a string of words.


The work of Propp, for instance, has not been solely concerned with narrative functions, but also withthe fact hat narraive isbuilt upon the predication pattern, upon assocaitions by contiguity connected with cause/effect associations" (86).
"Prose is contiguity's natural kingdom, as it were: fictional prose is a sort of non-antagonic contradiction, and poetry, and antagonic contradicion" (87).

"The Brazilian linguist Myriam Lemle . . . has observed that parataxis previals in the speech construction of the lower classes" (94). [As opposed to hypotaxis]


Interesting to note how Pignatari's binary oppositions run skew to Nietzsche's division between Apollo and Dionysos. Here, as Pignatari gives them:

SIGN

Similarity | contiguity (similar position)
Analogic | logic
icon | symbol (I dont agree)
nonverbal | verbal
art | science
poetry | prose
parataxis | hypotaxis
east | west (not right either)
paronomasia/metaphor | metonymy
paramorphism | metaphor
first | third
model | concept
simultaneity | linearity
synchrony | diachrony
paradigm | syntagm
signifier signified
form content /this doesn't work/
synthesis analysis
unconscious conscious
right lobe left lobe

INTERPRETANT

Thursday, May 3, 2007

LOGO and the Transcendental Signfier

It turns out that the LOGO language my son used to program little cartoon critters is significant in terms of linguistic reckoning. Back in ye olde '60's, scientists building an OS for robots ran into a problem as to how to measure geography. Most OS's deal with space in terms of X-Y or X_Y-Z axes, like standard algebra problems (at least the elementary ones back in ye olde '60's).

The problem, of course, is that the poor little robot, just like most biocritters, has to negotiate an external world without a screen edge. He (or she!) therefore can't find a place to put zero, or a place from where to extend the axes. Programmers resolved the problem by using a sort of I AM HERE NOW as zero: the robot calculates space in terms of steps and turns from a point of origin.

Of course, all this corresponds to humans in a world with nary a transcendental signfier. Having left mine at home, in the womb, or whatever, I have to be egocentric about it, taking myself and my immediate positions and thoughts as center. (This does indeed resemble Lacan's idea of the not-so-phallic phallus as transcendental signifier, but appropriating the rather arbitrary freudian structure in this way seems unnecessarily arbitrary and recondite; one needs to be nearly as clever as Lacan to follow the concept. The logo robot, however, doesn't seem to have the problem.)

Now, when the OS is rebooted, it starts with a new point of zero. One must assume that periodically humans must restart from a new zero. Apparently we do so whenever we blink. Walter Murch's In the Blink of an Eye is a great piece of work that deals with this, coming from a completely different angle. Murch recounts a story wherein John Huston points out that he blinks when he wants to glance across a room. Apparently it's easier cognitively to just reset zero than to try to maintain the calculations. Murch -- and this reveals so much of human music crossing between the various sensorial and cognitive processes -- begins to look for when the actors blink to decide when to cut the scene.

One may see algebraic descriptions of axial dimension as necessarily human, since humans have invented the system (reputedly). But general functioning involves a different problem. In measuring movement by axes, the axes themselves do not move. In meta-analysis. one shifts the entire axial zero and moves it, over and over.

As much as possible, one makes the adjustments to new ideas and new literature by a kind of substitution or substitution-with-(amendment/qualification-modification). Then, at some point, one must blink and move the entire axis. Now, there must be small shifts and large shifts, and small and large shifts in major and minor levels of important and not-so-important reasonings. But this has something to do with what Kuhn called a new paradigm.

Fish

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Reading this selection from Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum," several problems appear.

Fish holds that the practices of "interpretive communities" predetermine readings.

For Fish, this is particularly powerful thing, because he considers the text to be what is read, not its object. Discussing a set of hypothetical readers with varying reactions to Lycidas, he comments, "A reader other than myself who, when presented with Lycidas (please keep in mind that the status of Lycidas is at issue), puts into execution a different set of interpretive strategies will perform a different succession of interpretive acts.) One of us might then be tempted to complain ot the other that we could not possibly be reading the same poem . . . and he would be right; for each of us would be reading the poem he made" (218).

Fish's wording rejects any difference made by the poem itself. Surely he would not deny that one reader using one consistent reading strategy will find Lycidas and Ashbery's "Skaters" different. But even this simple admission means that one cannot reasonably favor text or interpretation in an analysis, and that Fish misrepresents the activity he describes in claiming that "each of us would be reading the poem he made": the poem is as least as validly represented as an articulated entity that includes its readers and readings.

One might dismiss such distinctions as semantic equivocation, but Fish demonstrates the potential for error within a few pages as he good-naturedly noodges his reader towards his conclusion: "knowing full well that you will agree with me (that is, understand) only if you already agree with me" (221).

Here Fish baits his hook: as I start to disagree, I appear to demonstrate his point. But note here a couple assumptions in his particular writing strategy. He gives agree with me as equivalent to understand. He doesn't mean anything so unsubtle as that understanding consists in alliance with one Stanley Fish, but that understanding consists in sharing common assumptions. This statement differs sharply from asserting only that the judgment of understanding conferred by one interpretive community will depend on a convergence of reading strategies. Fish states that understanding itself amounts to this social relationship as opposed to, say, some correspondence to a physical text in a given set of contexts.

If one follows Fish's statements syllogistically, the text effectively disappears -- something Fish clearly does not intend, since he actually grants qualities to texts and distinguishes extensively between texts himself.

Another factor that gets lost is the effect of the text itself on interpretative strategy. Does one not form an interpretive strategy primarily by reading and interpreting texts? If this is so, it stands to reason that readers' interpretative strategies tend to be different at the end of a book than at the beginning. How often does Fish himself note that Milton plays against one's interpretive strategy? Does Fish suppose that Milton will frustrate my strategies every few lines, but that I won't wake up to that by Book X?

DeFreuded

Freud, Sigmund. "The Dream of the Botanical Monograph." The Interpretation of Dreams. In Rivkin & Ryan's Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd Edition.

Freud gives us a useful view of psychoanalytic methodology, giving first what one might call the fabula of the dream, then coursing through his associations with various aspects thereof. He describes his insight as follows:
"I then suddenly perceived that my dream was connected with the events of the previous evening. I had walked hom precisely with Dr. Konigstein and had got into conversation with him about a matter which never fails to excite my feeling whenever it is raised. WHile I was talking to him in the entrance-hall, Professor Gartner [Gardener] and his wife had joined us; and I could not help congratulating them both on their blooming looks. But Professor Gartner was one of the authors of the Festschrift I have just mentioned, and may well have reminded me of it. MOreover, th Frau L., whose disppointment on her birthday I described earlier, was mentioned -- though only, it is true, in another connection -- in my conversation with Dr. KOnigstein" (398).

As we follow Freud following the trace of association, his path feels as arcane as his resourcefulness seems admirable. We move along the peripheries, the side-roads, of a highway of thought. The royal road here is Freud's feeling, and for all the brilliance of his observation, he never manages to state (and likely never finds) how he feels. The analysis thereby must proceed in the dark because Freud remains stranger to himself.

We have been left two hints. "I then suddenly perceived" shows that the preceding recall and analysis, the scraping-through of details, has been done in partial blindness. The insight that occurs, then, requires all or at least multiple preceding details considered jointly, globally. Next, the matter that sparks his sudden insight is the detail that "never fails to excite" feelings.

What Freud must scrape for is what he does not feel. What he does not feel is his unconscious, we may be told; just this is Freud's great discovery or invention. He does not feel that because it is his unconscious; it's his unconscious because he does not feel it.

We're apparently not conscious of what-all lies or sits in the unconscious. Perhaps we can undestand that several things therein seem to get conflated. To handle the most mundane matters first, one seldom traces the course of somatic functions: one doesn't focus on one's beating heart, breathing lungs, or delicately weeping pancreas. Then, clearly, a certain, possibly variable threshold of neural firing in distal sensory nerves appears necessary to stimulate response in more central neural processing. The itch must gather intensity to excite our attention. Waving a hand before one's face, one habitually ignores the quite clear trail of visually apparent hands that follow it. Looking across a room, one recognizes a single 3-dimensional visual panorama although one knows full well that this is a composite fiction generated from the input of two practically 2-dimensional sets of receptors at the back of one's eyes.

All of this is unconscious, and in whatever sense that a the unconscious exists, these are components thereof. Yet this is not in any way the target, or at least the proper target, of psychoanalysis. It's not the target because it's not pathological. Were anyone fixedly attentive to his or her kidneys or pancreas, that would be pathological. Were cardiac activity to require waking attention, the condition would quickly become fatal.

Since we have no reason to believe such neural impulse attempts to become evident to waking consciousness, we have no reason to believe that such information gets repressed. Freud talks about "unconscious" and "instinctive" drives, but were such drives or desires simply and naturally unconscious, like kidney function, we would simply and naturally remain unaware of them in the same way.

The single class of event that quite clearly gets pared away from consciousness is trauma. We can verify this abundantly. The victims of social violence -- soldiers and their victims, slaves, unwanted children, the very poor, the victims of traffic accidents -- frequently suffer symptoms that suggest repression of information.

Freud would have better stayed with his early, trauma-related theory, rather than move to appraisals of repression of vague matters like "instinct" or "unconscious drive." Granted the two might be similar. One might call the species-wide desire that infants have for their mothers an "instinct." One might wish to so distinguish that from a "need," because babies do survive without their mothers, granted surrogate care and suffering. But whether we call the removal of the mother "nonfulfillment of instinctive drives" or unfulfillment of needs, the result pains and damages the infant, and what one represses is not simply an instinct -- a traumatized infant may be convinced to suck; a neurotic adult may love, if often poorly -- but the pain of the specific memory of wound or denial.

One thing this means for psychoanalytic terms is that only Sophocles had an Oedipus complex -- assuming that indeed he did. Shakespeare may have had a similar Hamlet Complex and T.S. Eliot might be accused of a suspiciously familar J. Alfred Prufrock Complex. On the one hand, the insight of dynamic psychology have much to tell us about literature. On the other, the glib way critics throw around abstract and derivative terms like "castration" is ridiculous. What gets repressed is not some inherited fear of loss of one's testicles, some abstracted and theoretical entity derived from genital sensation in one's sense of self, or even exactly a way to please one's mother or father. What gets repressed is traumatic experience and its associated agony.

Since trauma involves event, each neurotic must invent his or her neurosis in response to trauma, as a means of survival. We in the 21st century are indeed impacted by the Oedipus complex, but because we have read it as a literary reference.

Thus Freud jumps to conclude about his dream, he does indeed choose a feeling, a thing he wants to say, but he neglects the past component of what "always raises his emotion." With the emotion comes the insight.

Why not start with the feeling?

Hawthorne's Solid Time

As I read through Hawthorne's Marble Faun, I find myself humming that old Jim Croce song, "If I Could Have Time in a Bottle." NH's obsession with the past bothers me. I find him hard to place precisely on an ideological landscape. He conflates various things -- guilt and trauma; absolution and catharsis; time or Time and a kind of puritan eidos and memory -- yet he does so advisedly, and seems at best partially convinced of the veracity of his operations.

Let's take a moment in The Marble Faun. Here when Hilda breaks down and confesses to the priest (795 Notes and Tales NY: Modern Library 1937), we get a revealing passage:
"If she had heard her mother's voice from within the tabernacle, calling her, in her own mother-tongue, to come and lay her poor head in her lap, and sob out all her troubles, Helda could not have responded with a more inevitable obedience. She did nothting; she only felt. Within her heart was a great need. Close at hand, within the veil of the confessional, was the relief. She flung herself down in the penitent's place, and tremulouslyu, passionaltely, with sobs, tears, and the turbulent overflow of emotion too long represed, she poured out the dark story which had infused its poison in her innocent life.

   Hilda had not seen, nor could she now see the visage of the priest. But, at intervals, in the pauses of that strange confession, half choked by the struggle of her feelings toward an otlet, she heard a mild, calm voice, somewhat mellowed by age. It sppoke soothingly; it encouraged her; it led her on by apposite questions that seemed to be suggested by a great and tender interest, and acted like magnetism in attracting the girl's confidence to this unseen freind. The priest's share in the interview, indeed, resembled that of one who removes the stones, clustered branches, or whatever entanglements impede the current of a swollen stream. Hilda could ahve imagined -- so much to the purpose hwere his inquiries -- that he was already acquanted iwth some outline of what hse strove to tell him.
    Thus assisted, she revealed the whole of her terrible secret! The whole, except that no name escaped her lips.

This bears odd reflections. Hawthorne's describing what Freud might call an abreaction, catharsis, or (in a translation that I am told is unfortunate) hypercathexis. The incident bears examination in terms of symbol in the sense that the psychiatric profession uses that term; that is, the suggestion that she might confess Pro Anglica Lingua has released Hilda's defensiveness and allowed her to feel herself at home. That at home Hawthorne describes as "If she heard her mother's voice," so the image of parental support could hardly get more immediate. The priest, likewise, appears as transparently paternal: not only is he kindly and understanding; he's also quite conveniently from New England.

Perhaps notably, Hawthorne describes Hilda as pouring out "the dark story," which suggests that she may have narrated it. If so, this would not constitute a complete reliving of the event, since a narrator separates him or her self from the action, recounting what has happened instead of speaking, thinking, and feeling as though one were directly within the incident.

As another factor that must be active in this moment, Hawthorne has for the duration of the novel spent considerable time describing how each of his characters do or do not resemble one or another work of art. Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon all produce objets d'art; Donatello is allied with the production of a wine called sunshine which has something approaching magical properties.

Roland Barthes' Mythologies

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

. . . myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semeological system. That which is a sign (namely the associative total of a concep and an image) in the fidrst system, becomes a mere signifier in the second. We must here recall that the materials of mythical speech (the language itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc.), however different at the start, are reduced to a pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth . . . . Whether it deals with alphabetical or pictorial writing, myth wants to see in the only a sum of signs, a global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain. And it is precisely this final term which will become the first term of the greater system which it builds and of which it is only a part" (81).


Barthes gives a diagram that joins signfier and signfied as the sign, then joins that composite sign with MYTH as SIGN, to form a simplest instance of a hierarchy of nested signification.

Barthes describes with fair success the general weave of symbolic reasoning. For instance, if we substitute the signs of formal logic for the saussurian labels above, the overall shape of the argument becomes a + b --> c; c + d ---> e. If we think about this in terms of someone reading a paragraph in well-wrought freshman essay, the procedure follows our reading through Barthes' chart as easily:


  • Reader courses through the signs suspending judgment; comes to a period; "stops;" combines the predicative unit "sentence," "making sense;" largely jettisons the short-term memory of sentence elements for the assembled meaning.

  • Reader continues to the next sentence.

  • Of course, the reader retains in memory some elements of the now-read sentence. (The identity of subject and sometimes object nouns is retained, for instance, so that an author designates a previously named subject with a simple pronoun: in the sentences, "Jim awoke. He went to the beach," no one would ask to whom the pronoun He refers. There is some tendency that nouns, or "thingy" entities, remain more durably whereas verbs or actions pass. We retain this distinction profoundly in human thought even though no such noun|verb or thing|event distinction works rigorously in physics. To follow Yeats, one separates the dancer from the dance only as a convenience -- or inconvenience -- of predication.)

  • However, whereas the reader suspended the meanings of these in judgment in reading the first sentence, the meanings are fixed in the second sentence by the necessity to maintain consistency.


One might assume that corresponding actions of recombination happen between various subdivisions of the assembled synthesis one calls "a thought," however variously a thought might be described. In this, I would cross-reference Barthes with Jacques Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," in which he goes through a long discussion of parallelism not only of linguistic units but of images, not only of images but of non-imagined ideas. I'm reminded of the concept of "subject-rhyme" that I came across somewhere in relation to Pound's Cantos.

Meanwhile, in Barthes' discussion, he limits language to sentence-level interchange, and reserves a neologism metalanguage for the larger interactions which presumably include syntagmatic actions. One suspects that he wrote Mythologies before being influenced by Derrida's explosion in 1967. He rests quite content on the discrete nature of ante and post-defined objects within linguistic operations. He dismisses the kind of recursive interactions fundamental to Derridean analysis from "Structure, Sign, and Play" in a way that he will not do by the time he writes S/Z:
"When he [sic] reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only inasmuch as this term lends itself to myth" 82).

Here he's precisely wrong and precisely along the lines that Derrida pointed out in "Structure, Sign, and Play." The action of literature precisely uses what he's calling metalanguage to revise elements of what he's calling language-objects. Most particularly, what people like Pound called "new" and Bernstein calls "open" or "active" language revises elements of the formal relationships of semantic and category. We've had, by this point, various descriptions of this -- Kristeva's is notable, though I'm not sure at the moment in which work I noted it.

Yet there's something that remains to describe. For one may take it as clear that humans repeatedly reform semantic meaning by context throughout daily use without usually experiencing the unsettling that we associate with literature. For instance, I can easily suspend judgment about whether the sounds "greenhouse" in a friend's sentence refer to Missus Greene's residence, that building on the edge of the nursery, or a dangerous accumulation of gases, and do so without substantially re-arranging my ideas of any of the above. The fact that I may do so implies that I retain some conceptual categorization that is not identical to or coterminous with linguistic functions. The fact that language creates may at times create the havoc it does with such ideas suggests strongly that whatever these conceptual operations are, they are not discrete from language. but that the operations are somehow articulated in the greater conceptual-perceptive-neural process.

While neurological investigations have just begun to reflect on the nature of such things, their beginnings are already suggestive. Apparently, nervecell firing triggers nervecell firing as creatures associate. A certain mean concentration of neural firing is requisite to pass the impulse from so-called "lower," or more sensory consciousness or distal neural activity, to the so-called "higher," or more abstract, synthesized, cerebral processing. While much of cognitive neuroscience remais unexplored, researchers state quite clearly that what a literary critic might take as "directly sensed," or what Williams or even Robert Lowell might take as "things" are neurally synthized and composite structures even when they're sensory and not specifically linguistic. Adamic naming and Platonic or Aristotelian archetypes

One might confirm that this nears very closely to Barthes' concept of myth by his application of the idea to maps of The Blue Guide. Here he most specifically discusses the reduction of the complex and nuanced interlaced sets of visual constructs that constitute one's recall of a landscape to the glyphic marks of a map.

It would appear, then, that the actions of literature rake across this preverbal, averbal, or quasiverbal semantics, necessitating a reassemblage, restructuring, renegotiation of the relationships. When one takes this to create a more harmonious structure, "everything seems to just fall into place," so that one has "a sense of the sublime."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I found Gilman a mixed bag. Her story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is admirably trim. She uses the unreliable narrator to full effect, and the tracing of progressive insanity through the descriptions of the wallpaper pattern works wonderfully. Moreover, the so-called cure that the narrator's subjected to -- the so-called rest cure, what a horror! -- stands marvelously as metonym for the mistreatment and misappraisal of women in western society in general, and in the bourgeois classes from the victorian eras into the 1970's in particular. And also, actually, much of the mistreatment of other outwardly pampered and domesticated groups of society -- all the recipients of the mushroom treatment. In this story, Gilman leads the reader through the ideas non-didactically, one at a time, almost one clipped paragraph per idea. It's a masterwork.

Herland, sadly, does not approach the same level. The plot feels like a cross between kinky femdom and The Planet of the Apes. But to discuss Herland on its own terms is to ignore its flaws as fiction and discuss Gilman's ideas of women and men in society. This can better done in conjunction with her Women and Economics.

Gilman, like many reformers inflamed by new problems and opportunities afforded by industry, wanted to socialize the family unit. She confused the effects of democracy witht hose of industry and abjured any idea that women should naturally raise their own children. (The idea that men should raise their own children doesn't come up, but this is not likely Gilman's fault.) Her explanations are very broadly based on a Darwinist positivistic determinism that plays fast and loose with distinctions between "instinct" and "desire" and socially influenced traits.

She finds thus:

Women are dependent on men whereas men are not dependent on women. In this she confines herself to economic dependency, but traces its many effects, mostly the loss to society of healthy, hardy and productive women. Her analysis also deals primarily with proletarian and bourgeois gender economy, leaving other possibilities to analogy.

Women have no particular ability to raise their own children. She regards formal education as key, individual love as unreliable and inadequate. Sex is something that males are over-occupied with, to the detriment of all concerned. Women waste considerable time and suffering in seduction and barter that would be better avoided were they economically equipped to just ignore male desire. Proper understanding of the love of society or mankind or something like that is or will be better. Accordingly, childcare should be hired out to a few pros.

Her suicide note may be as personally revealing as anything she wrote. Obviously retaining her intellectual capacities and her faith in science and objectivity as a basis.
"when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."

Cleanth Brooks, New Critics

"The Formalist Critics." Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Cleanth Brooks was one of the "New Critics" that followed T.S. Eliot in ushering the wild WWI and '20's poetry back into political and aesthetic conservatism. He gives about as good a summation of New Critical dogma as one could ask:
That literary criticism is a description and an evaluation of its object.
That the primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity -- the kind of whole in which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up this whole.
That the formal relations in a work of literature may include, but certainly exceed, those of logic.
That in a successful work, form and content cannot be separated.
That form is meaning.
That literature is ultimately metaphorical and symbolic.
That the general and the universal are not seized upon by abstraction, but got at through the concrete and the particular.
That literature is not a surrogate for religion.
That, as Allen Tate says, "Specific moral problems" are the subject matter of literature; but that the purpose of literature is not to point a moral.
That the principles of criticism define the area relevant to literary criticism; they do not constitute a method for carrying out th e criticism" (22).


I find the explanation that follows the list bland, sadly, so I'd rather send people to T.S. Eliot, whose objective correlative more or less underlies all of the above.

It's interesting to compare these men with Russian formalism. Brooks' insistence on "symbolism" seems to favor Jakobson's "metaphoric" as opposed to "metonymic" operation of language. Mind you, Jakobson uses "metonymic" oddly enough that I wonder about translation issues. He seems to mean something like semantic for metaphoric and syntactic for metonymic.

This seems part of the sharp division between Eliot and William Carlos Williams, the more progressive wing of the imagist cum vorticist cum objectivist camp. In "The Language of Paradox," originally in A Well-Wrought Urn (1947), Brooks misses completely the idea behind Williams' "things," and lapses back into what amounts to a rehash of Hulme.

Williams' red wheelbarrow passage from Spring and All, to take a familiar example, touches the sublime because the verb depends throws the objects under description (the nouns) into sudden arrangement so that the issue of arrangement itself becomes highlighted, in part by the very lack of direct description of Williams' beloved things, and we catch the undescribed human in the act of arrangement that constitutes human perception. To see how ideal Williams' things are, crack a volume of Robert Lowell open to any page, and compare.

The Russian formalists, for whatever reason, had no such problems. Jakobson and Schklovsky and Eisenberg's theories included and accounted reasonably well for the most radical work of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, and for Mandelshtam thereafter.

Would that Trotsky and Stalin have been so comprehensive!

One can watch an odd interaction of Eliot's late symbolism crossed with Pound's truly modernist work in The Wasteland, particularly if one examines the facsimile edition. It's Eliot, T.S. The Wasteland: A facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. Valerie Eliot. Ed. London: Harvest, 1971, though Amazon has no listing. One can observe at length the extensive distinctions between mellifluous early work like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and quieter later work like The Quartets. The Wasteland, of course, was hewn and scraped by Pound, a very different compositor than Eliot, and one who extensively suits Jakobson's metonymic in ways that Eliot would not care to. Pound makes the elements tense against each other through juxtaposition of startling contrasts. Eliot, in all cases, retains a more transparently unified approach, laden with transitions and fundamentally predicative.

But the fact that I find myself talking about Williams, Pound, and Eliot in this entry says most of what I personally have to say about Cleanth Brooks.

Walter Benjamin

Benjamin the effect on art of the advent of photography:
" With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, the right reacted with the doctrine of l'art pourl'art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of 'pure' art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter. (In poetry, Mallarme was the first to take this position)" (1237).

Benjamin makes an interesting judgment in calling photos the first "means of reproduction" although printing had reproduced words and their written arrangement for centuries prior. Although he doesn't say so, surely the automation of print in the 1800's and even increased transport and distribution would have contributed to these same effects for similar reasons. Just as painting no longer had to photograph, the novel had less to do with journalism.

". . . for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the wo of art reproduced becomes example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics . . . .

With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunites for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statute of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. (1237).


Here he begs some questions, but the idea is interesting. Just how does reproduction release art from ritual? Does it remove the necessity of a priesthood to interpret or perform it? Would the term ritual be as meaningful if the statue of divinity were in a secular museum instead of a temple? I wonder whether Benjamin might not mean in part that art can be freed of certain socioeconomic trappings, that reproduction removes the objet d'art from social contextualization or from a contextualization.

If so, this seems opposed to the findings of Horkheimer and Adorno, who insist not many years later (Benjamin 1935, Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947) that capitalism and broadcast technology have rendered artistic production uniform.

Either way, publication in 1935 was rigidly linked to patterns of profit and distribution, broadcast even more so, at least in the US, where public airwaves had been given away to now-familiar broadcast corporations.

Perhaps more important to ritual than the physical mobility of the objet d'art is its social mobility, its usability by different classes. In that event, use must refer to consumption, production, and determining decisions over production and distribution.

There may be a general principle here. Contemporary readers may refer to current debates over intellectual property, .torrent files and filesharing networks. Some will remember how similar the dialog was in the early 1980's when the music industry momentarily crashed or played possum in response to the arrival of recordable cassette tapes. But I suspect that technology has impacted power over information for a long time. Papyrus would have also made writing easier to hide as well as transport. It would have made it possible to view writing without the authority of a temple. The early development of Western monotheism has survived more extensively and securely in the Hebrew texts than in the Egyptian record, not because the Egyptians had no paper or less paper, of course, but because the Hebrews may have known early on that their records had to be moved and stored. The religious texts include documents that are in some ways revolutionary; that may in part be because of the draw of the form.

Well, enough speculation in that quarter. Walter Ong has some interesting things to day on the subject, though, if anyone's interested. Benjamin, meanwhile, goes on with some appreciation of film:
"For the entire spectrum of optical, and now also acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception. It is only an obverse of this fact hat behavior items shown in a movie can be analyzed with much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage. As compared with painting, filmed behavior lends itself more readily to analysis because of its incompareably more precise statements of the situation. In comparison with the stage scene, the filmed behavior item lends itself more readily to analysis because it can be isolated more easily. This circumstance derives its chief importance from its tendency to promote the mutual penetration of art and science" (1238).

I find the tone here interesting because Benjamin himself has clearly lived through the change. There's something in it that reminds me of trying to convey to students what it felt like typing papers on an old underwood typwriter and swearing and running to the store for white-out. Awareness of the distinction is lost to the population very quickly.

Ten years ago I read in books that The Book was to come to and end. Now I read in blogs that the book will survive. We ain't in Kansas anymore -- though, for all I know, you might be.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." in Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.