Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Ray Jackendoff

Jackendoff, Ray. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford, 2002.

Jackendoff deals extensively with aspects of linguistics that involve semantics and neuroscience. In this, he operates differently than most linguists, who generally emphasize issues of syntax rather than semantics.

The problems seem related somehow to those of materiality in written language.


ON COMBINATORIALITY (38-67)

"To sum up, a theory of how language is instantiated in the brain must grapple with four problems that arise from the combinatoriality of launguage: the massiveness of binding in linguistic structure, the problem of multiple instances of a known unit in a novel structure, the necessity forecoding and instantiating typed variables, and the relation between long-term and short-erm memory encodings of structure" (67).


One addresses all these (if not solving them outright) by considering linguistic and neural distinctions as fuzzy or incompletely discrete at each scale and level. That is, if we consider morpheme, phoneme, word, phrase, as not referring to an entity that is atomistic, discrete, and single. Here goes:

Massive Binding
"The binding problem is usually stated this way: we have found that the shape and the color of an object are encoded in different regions of the brain, and they can be differentially impaired by brain damage. How is it, then, that we sense a particular shape and color as attributes of the same object?" (59).

The problem here arises from the categorization "different regions of the brain." This construction is partly true and partly false; that is, it describes the stituation, but with a distortion. Being creatures with relatively discrete skin boundaries ourselves, we think of space and object in terms of such discrete things. Neuroelectric waves operate differently. We think of shape and size as being relatively fixed or related to identity, location or activity as being relatively changeable. Here the shape of the brain is relatively fixed, but the shapes and shifts of modality in neural firing are not. The relationships are not between a piece of coding here and a piece there, but more the code involves this area(s) as opposed to that area(s), or, better, this composition as opposed to that. Also, what we're describing involves temporal variation, too. And we know, for instance, that the skin contains various receptors for different kinds of sensations and that pain travels on separate or relatively separate neural pathways, so there's some degree of specialization between neurons. Consequently, any impression(s), including that-those provoked by parole, involve a composition of patterns -- a composition of compositions.

It may be easier to conceive of all this if we recall that we never do experience a one object. I experience the gentleman speaking at the next table here at Starbucks as a composition of my reception of the light bouncing off of him and hitting each of my two eyes, arranged in relation with the other light and dark areas of the room and triangulated so as to create an impression of depth; the sound-vibrations he produces, again triangulated between two ears, but also classified according to my aural and linguistic experience. The woman who leans across the table towards him may feed into her impressions the touch of his hand and perhaps the sampling of chemicals he exudes that we call his smell. None of these are the gentleman, none exactly components of him. But they are precisely components of the gentleman I know, and my experience of him is exactly a composition of these and related elements.

To look at this a different way, the composition does not occupy a point or a box, but something more like ripples on a lake, radio and TV and cell phone vibrations simultaneously passing through a room, light sound simultaneously passing through a space. Put another way, the location of electricity by its nature involves time and movement. Electricity refers to a movement; consequently, it's position is not fixed, though certainly the whole activity involves extensibility and space and duration in time. To use another metaphor, as a stream flows to sea, it simultaneously involves water in the mountains and in the sea. It also involves water that has seeped out of what people usually call the stream, seeped into the surrounding soil; that's why trees on an otherwise dry-ish plain follow each bank of the river that snakes through it. When we enjoy the cool air under a tree by its banks, we enjoy the moister feel of the air that leaves it. Regarding the stream as an object obscures these things.

Likewise, certainly certain perceptions will be lost when the brain receives physical damage in one or another location. A lost component of the larger pattern will change the pattern; the subject will not synthesize certain aspects of the surroundings that others may perceive. So we might say, "He doesn't hear the man talk." But it isn't the man that he doesn't perceive; it's that part of the pattern that would allow the identification of talk. It's not a no-pattern, it's a pattern without a component, in this case a major one. Now, nothing in this indicates that the impression of the gentleman was solely or primarily a question of localization any more than the nature of a stream or a tree is primarily a function of its geographical locale.

In all these phenomena, the region of an object or action are categorizations one makes, not characteristics proper to what one describes. If word is a pattern of patterns, aspects of these may live in the same place at the same time, or overlap spatially and temporally.

Apparently, they must.

Multiple Instances of a Known Unit in an Novel Structure
Consider yet again sentence (23), in which there are two occurences fo the word star [The little star's beside the big star]. If the first occurrence simply activates the lexical entry in long-term memory, what can the second occurrence do? It cannot just activate te word a second time, since . . . the word has to remain activated the first time in order for the sentence to receive full interpretation" (61).

Here, of course, if either or both activations form part of a larger pattern, distinctions in that pattern should not be more difficult than any other distinction just because a particular segment of pattern repeats, or, put differently, because the pattern involves similar elements at different places or times or in different movements. Just the fact that we may call these patterns should clue us that they're composite; being composite, they're neither discrete nor homogenous, but involve a continuum of distinction(s).

Encoding and Instantiating Typed Variables

The example Jackendoff examines is rhyme.
Consider the problem of encoding a two-place relation such as 'X rhymes with Y.' The breain cannot list all the rhymes in the language . . . . Nor can we figure out its rhymes by analogy, reasoning for example, 'Well, ling sounds sort of like the word link, and link rhymes with think, so maybe ling rhymes with think.

He goes on to mention that new rhymes can be invented and that rhyme can be distinguished in a language one does not understand.

This problem solely consists of the assumption that the units are discrete and self-identical units. Without this assumption, it's difficult to even understand the question that's placed.

Long and Short-Term Memory

If one treats a word or phrase as an associative constellation rather than an atomistic unit, it's not surprising that greater or lesser or variant associations get generated on the fly or have greater or lesser durability. As with the prior points, far more detail remains unresolved than resolved, but already one might posit that these are differences in a pattern that may be considered as global. For instance, when speaking of the gentleman early, I could speak of his touch or smell although I did not and have not experienced them because I made categorical generalizations based on memories and processing of memories. These associations are part of global patterns of patterns.

Part of what is necessary to understand in this is that the relation described as association is fuzzy, and may be partial. [See discussions of Chomsky and Deleuze].

Saul Bellow w/o Mole Men

Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler's Planet.NY: Fawcett, 1971.

Why do I feel like Samuel Beckett when I write about Saul Bellow? Maybe I'm getting jaded about this novel form. Bellow has Topics that are Relevant, Surges of Rhythmic Prose. He drops cool names, and in context. Perhaps worse, I just got done second-guessing Said and Achebe over their reactions to Conrad.

I agree with most of what Achebe and Said said about Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness: Conrad's racist, yes; it's not just Marlow. But when Marlow so carefully distances himself from Kurtz and the colonizers, when the narrator distances himself from Marlowe and Conrad from the narrator, leaving the accusation as though Conrad were simply racist does no more justice to the critics' ideas than to Conrad's.

But I have this fear that Mr. Sammler and Mr. Bellow are joined at the medulla oblongata or something.

Bellow makes gestures that at least suggest distance. He begins, with an epistemological credo that at least partly belongs to Mr. S.
Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Argur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of hiw West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. In a way it did not matter much to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleaues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, th reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the othe, the source of events the history, the structure, the reasons why. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.

These are fairly typical 20th Century post-Joycean conventions, right? -- 3rd person, occasionally, a Hemingway you but without the narrative voice in which he first met it. We wa a ander in and out of S's head, and B seems to think he owns it. S not only suspects, but "suspected strongly." Who's calling whom a crank here?

Saul Bellow seems to have set Mr. Sammler up to discuss certain ideas of Saul Bellow's. Now, I don't mean to pretend that I think that Bellow should not do such things, and I care to hold authors to the attempts at completely or near-completely hard language as in nouvelles romans like Robbe-Grillet's Le Voyeur or Jalousie. But I suspect Bellow isn't altogether sure whether he's in Sammler's head or out of it, and this leads me to wonder just where and when and to what extent Bellow or Sammler is the bigot, as prejudices fall in thick showers through the book. A few:

  • The black pickpocket -- bold, suave, exquisitely dressed, athletic, runs very rapidly, and intimidates Sammler -- get this -- by showing the elderly man his genitals, which strike Sammler as extremely large.

  • University students interrupt a lecture to not only disagree with Mr. Sammler's take on George Orwell, but swear at him and insult him. I went to school in the '60's, 70's, 90's, and recently; I teach at a community college now. I have heard students and instructors being pigheaded more than once, but I've never heard a student over 12 or 13 treat an instructor in that fashion. The youngsters who did -- and this was roughly contemporaneous with the publication of this book -- were ejected from class, usually with violence. When Sammler tells the teacher of the class, he dismisses it as normal, since some students dislike Orwell for his disenchantment with Stalin.

  • Women are crass when sensual, crazy or troubled when smart.

  • Sammler's younger relatives are nuts, yet this does not reflect in any way on Sammler's character or any actions current or prior by Sammler or his late spouse.

  • Sammler's terrible confrontation with Nazism informs his actions, but does not impair his perception by its trauma.

  • Sammler (or Bellow, or Sammler-Bellowo) can pontificate, at least in interior monolog, The "natural knowledge" of the "soul" above is one example, though one that Bellow assigns relatively cleanly to Sammler. He ends on another: "The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I know mine. As all know. FOr that is the turth of it -- that we all know, God, that we know, that we know we know, we know'".



Again, technically, this is given a character -- even quoted, for once. But these are also the last words of the novel.

We know we know we know, but we also try we try we try, and we fail we fail we fail, because we don't don't don't don't don't understand. And what the hell does that mean? Perhaps Sammler-Bellow's we feels but denies or has the impulse of feeling but refuses to fully feel, has a sort of affective vouloir-dire. But Bellow -- I'm leaving Sammler out of this one on purpose -- does not deign to investigate this further.

Any given book can investigate some things and must leave others alone, granted. But this book presents itself, beginning and end, as an investigation of knowledge. Bellow plays, as it were, in an epistemological key. And the error seems built right into his thesis: the soul has its own natural knowledge; explanation makes this knowledge, or perhaps its knower, uneasy.

So what? So Bellow confuses the legitimacy of the impression (or whatever he means by natural knowlege of the soul that may exist outside of or even opposed to superstructures of explanation; therefore, he refuses to put those impressions to comparison with said superstructures, or at least refrains from certain comparisons. That is, Bellow or Sammler takes care even to maintain that those impressions remain untroubled by structure. Since the impressions must in any literal sense be as completely structured as anything else, what this seems to mean is that Bellow-Sammler refuses to examine structure. Insofar as one considers this true, one would conclude that Bellows-Sammler's examination of the stereotypes of minorities, children, women, students, and popular resistance is severely compromised.

And indeed, that is not a conclusion that one must strain for. Sammler comes out in 1971, forgets the contextualizations of Vietnam, Civil Rights, and the Women's movement; more specifically, gender roles and student expression on Sammler's Planet exist for motives less human or appreciable than those of seasons or stars. Might such glaring omissions just be peripheral to the awareness of an educated character born around 1900? Perhaps, but older people do read newspapers. I have to wonder whether Mr. Sammler is not being stereotyped, too.

Now, as a final note, what does this tell me about Said and Achebe's willingness to ignore prominent structural elements in their response to Conrad? As relevant structural events are ignored and their messages contradicted, the social appraisal suffers correspondingly. Though one or another aspect of formal analysis might well be irrelevant to someone's project at some point, some formal analysis must always remain relevant, since ignoring form ignores not just a meaning, but an aspect of all meaning.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Tom Waits and WCWilliams - Sound and Syntax

Folks, if anyone's actually out there, I've got a question. Now, I have a lousy ear for pitch, and even if I didn't, I'd be hard put to chart the shifts in meaning Tom Waits puts into a song by hedging, pronouncing, and omitting words in iterative sequence. But I was listening to "Cold Water" in Mule Variations the other day, and I realized that something in his music signalled to me that he was about to move from present-tense literal description to philosophizing or reflecting or summarizing from memory or perhaps into sentences that operate as modification at a paragraph level.

Even after patching in the words that fill out Waits' measured omissions, I find nothing in the usual pattern of predication and modification that accounts for my foreknowledge. Neither do any clues exist in the parallelisms between stanzas.

Having gone over this about 30 times, all I hear is a change in the pitch pattern, a change of some sort in the guitar cords, and that he blows through what had previously been an end-stopped line, much in the manner that might be indicated by a caesura.

Here's an ad hoc transcription of the stanzas in question:
Cold Water

Well, I woke up this morning with the cold water
with the cold water
with the cold water --

woke up this morning with the cold water
with the cold water
with the cold.


Well the police at the station and they don't look friendly
well they don't look friendly
well they don't look friendly

the police at the station and they don't look friendly
Well they don't look friendly
Well they don't.

/the shift's here/

That [aint no?] cripple shove all door I'm reading in the bible by a '49[?] ford
What price freedom? Dirt is my rug
Well I sleep like a baby with the snakes and the bugs
Well the doors are open but I aint' got no money
I aint' got no money
I aint' got no money
well I aint


I once spent a long time with William Carlos Williams' "Wheelbarrow," from Spring and All, listening to Williams' reading over and over. Ginsberg always said that Williams read like plain speech, which was naturally enough what struck him, and probably the way WCW would have described himself, but if so, speech isn't any plainer than song. Williams organized his lines in two quite distinct and distinguishable ways. He paused, but not at the linestops; at the stanza ends. However, the linestops were clearly denoted by shifts in pitch. His speech was reserved and normal sounding enough, but not a note was neutral.

Apparently, part of what constitutes normal speech is a composition of pitch, stress, and tempo shifts.

We have changes in pitch and stress from syllable to syllable, as litfolks in English know from counting stresses mechanically when we heard about iambs. To leave stress aside for the moment, apparently pitch changes happen between individual notes-syllables and then between phrases at various hierarchical levels of segmentation.

If one imagines a sentence laid out with the diagrams like Chomsky uses inSyntactic Structures, the changes should relate meaningfully.

But I've never seen it done.

Spatialization and/of Language

Recognizing that semiotic association and division must be mediated spatially through a cerebral cortex, a few speculations begin to coalesce.

Given the relations between and the relations within them, words|concepts have to be moderated in part by patterns involving distance and proximity. What we experience as qualities or attributes or various neural paths along which qualities or attributes might be embodied must lie physically woven, with dendrites and dendrite-streams laced all through one another. Of course, we do know that brains are in part built this way, with areas of greater and lesser passage of electrical energy, and temporal variability of passage mediated quite delicately by constantly shifting chemical balances within and around synapses.

A consequence of all this is that certain metaphors of space-relations are most likely hard-wired -- although that does not mean that they correspond in any one-to-one way with what we see or exactly with each other. For instance, neurologists find that the visual cortex has an area about the size of a credit card in or on which visual images are staged. One has to wonder whether similar areas have not been seen for other spatial systems, for aural or kinetic processing. But it's quite likely that the trouble is simply that we have been looking, not listening or representing in mime. Scans create surfaces of virtual planes within a brain, allowing us view representations thereof. The brain's own representations that we experience as sound or motion might represent less understandably as surface, given that the initial soundings of nerves are not patterned on a single surface.

In any event, at least kinetics, touch, sight, and sound operate spatially in part, and must sharespace at at least some part of their processing. Now, space in this sense may not be totally contiguous and look like our concepts of the space we view or experience; but some interweaving and passage of neural information must happen for association to take place -- for firings in one place to excite firings in another place.

I don't mean that correspondences would always be obvious to visual inspection. For for instance, taking the sort of cellular-looking, sort of cauliflower-shaped layout of the apartment complexes where I live as a very rough model, apartment 3800 10B will predictably be in a certain position in relation to pool and parking lot as is 3700 10B and 3900 10B. There are certain differences; the layouts are not completely symmetrical.

Now, a very interesting aspect of all this is the perspective one gains on Deleuze's constant running visual representations, which I have persisted calling metaphors, and which hereby approach the status of diagrams.

Roman Jakobson Two Aspects of Language

Jakobson's 6 factors of language:

  CONTEXT
ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESSEE
CONTACT
CODE

He describes them like so:
The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (the 'referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), graspable by the ADDRESSEE, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and ADDRESSEE (or in other words, to the encoder and decorder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the ADDRESSER and the ADDRESSEE, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication (1260-1261).


Each verbal message includes all of these, but there may be difference of "hierarchical order" of functions -- which does not mean temporal order. J goes on to differentiate a new logical dimension of functions.


  • Referential -- denotative, cognitive

  • Emotive -- expressive

  • Conative -- Orientation toward the addressee , vocative, imperative,

  • Phatic -- like fingering online. To get a response to see if one's there.

  • Metalingual -- glossing, about the lexical code.

  • Poetic -- message itself (!?)


To continue ----

"The poetic function is not the sole functin of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, wheras in all otehr verbval activities it acts as a subsideariy, accessory constitutent" (1264).

: cola: Sections of a sentence or rhythmical period (plural of colon).
"What is the indespensible feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selction and combination. If 'child' is the topic, of the message, the speakers selects one among the extant, more or less similar nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all fo them equivalent in a certan respect, and them, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semanticaly cognate vebs, sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on teh basis of equvalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of he sequence, si based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the consititutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is wqualized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntacti pause equals syntactic puase, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into untits o measure, and so are morae or stresses.

It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentnece: A = A (Mare is the female of the horse). Poetry and metalonguage, however, are in diamtericla opposition to each other: in metalanguage theseqence is used to build an equation, whereas i poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. (1265).


This was all part of a summation Jakobson wrote in 1960, for Sebeok's journal.

Jakobson also divided speech acts into "verbal levels" morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological -- commenting that in these "either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity [metaphor or metonymy, he otherwise puts it]) can appear" (1266).

So that makes for another logical dimension to J's analysis. By his construction, we make more or less symmetrical recursive analyses based on factors including said contiguity or similarities happening at various segment-units of grammatical construction such as a poet might label morpheme | word | phrase | line | stanza | canto. I'm interested that J uses pretty much the same divisions I used for my analysis of complexity with John Heywood a couple of years back. A correspondence with Chomsky's branching constructions can also be drawn. Chomsky draws the recursions as moving from smaller constructions outward, which seems correct except that a running contextual factor is maintained, what Iser calls a "background" (Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.)

Jakobson's response to graphic art reveals something about his metonymic and metaphoric.
. . . the manifestly metonymical orientation of Cubism, where the object is transfomed into a set of synecdoches; the Surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the productions of D.W. Griffith, the art of cinema, with its highly developed capacityfor changing the angle, the perspective, and focus of shots, has broken with the tradition of the theater and ranged an unprecedented variety of synechdochic close-ups and metonymic set-ups in general. In such motion pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin and Esenstein, these devices in turn were overlaid by a novel, metaphoric montage with its lap dissolves -- the filmic similes" (1267).


Interestingly, he goes on to describe similarly structured observations in Freud's work with dreams (displacement or condensation metonymic, identification and symbolism metaphoric) -- also in Frazer's Golden Bough, in the classification of magic into homeopathic or imitative and contagious or, in Jakobson's terms, contiguous magic.

Now, to the extent that qualities were represented spatiotemporally, both would be spatially mediated by almost the same mechanisms. Hmn . . .

Wolfgang Iser

Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.

Iser has an interesting moment on page 1676, a few pages into the essay. He's describing something like what Schklovsky called defamiliarization, considering it as a basic factor in literature, quoting Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen, to support. He gives a statement that could fall right into Russian formalism except for its emphasis on the readers' position:
What is missing from the apparently trivial scenes [in Jane Austen's reserved prose], the gaps arising out of the dialogue -- this is what stimulates the reader into filling the blanks with projections" (1676).

No surprises here and none to follow, but he does articulate the situation admirably:
What is concealed spurs the reader into action, but this action is also controlled by what is revealed; the explicit in its turn is transformed when the implicit has been brought to light" (1676).

Now, what's really really big here is that there's a tendency for many late-formalists to priviledge the "gaps" or the "open" text in discussion, particularly discussion of hypertext and end-of-millenium American poetry.

Now, Iser's explicit deserves examination. This could be what the text signifies directly, but that's subject to the criticisms Derrida levelled at Searle over the issue of constative and performative language. But since that explicit must be a re-creation that the reader carries in mind on the fly during reading, the explicit or elements thereof must contain something like what Kristeva describes as chora in Revolution in Poetic Language. That is, the system here would seem to be that the reader approaches with ideas relatively fixed by experience, and re-interprets the text in accord with these. The text draws the reader into activities in which the reader projects his or her own ideas into unforseen situations, evaluates the results, and eventually revaluates the original ideas based on the results.

The essential insight here for formalists would be that discourse must be partially new, partially old; partially open, partially closed.

The convergence of many different semioticians and fellow travellers on this kind of point reinforces my confidence in it greatly. There is another aspect to integrate, however. All these folks seem to treat semantics and WORD atomistically, and that cannot work. There has to be a range of syntactic responsiveness or variability, a range of meaning, within semantics that corresponds to the need for flexibility presented by syntax.

The best model I have for that is the one that has come out here in discussions of Chomsky and Deleuze and Guattari. The word is not defined, but is a cluster of spatio-temporal and electro-physical associations that fire sympathetically with associations as created by syntax. Subjectively, this amounts to this: a word summons various "associations," but these are not cleanly distinct, and the summons is not at all digital. In other words, as the call-for-meaning firing happens, the general area fires sympathetically. Strength of association may be determined by physical proximity, or by some other factor of pattern similarity. Given the kinds of slips we make, probably both are true. The mix of association available to linguistic impulse must be extremely broad, since we talk about most anything, and we do so more easily than we represent, say, sights as sounds or smells as sights. (I should qualify this last because there is a strong correspondence between sight, sound, and kinetics that allows for very fluid transfer and re-representation; I suspect that this will be because each is rigged to represent spatiotemporal relations and our sort of personal GPS).

Continuing. His referential field is close to what I mean by frame, a term I in part took from Joe Byron's description of actual physical frames while discussing Apocalypse Now. But I mean the data grouped to combine for meaning. Ongoing consideration means re-grouping this in various ways recursively. There is also in some sense a group of groupings, but this is probably done in almost the same way.

So let's to Iser's discussion of this.
As the reader's wandering viewpoint travels between all these segments [POV's of narrators, characters/focalizers, plot, and fictitious reader], its constant switching during the time flow of reading intertwines them, thus bringing forth a network of perspectives, withi which each perspective opens a view not onoly of others, but also of the intended imaginary object" (1677-1678).

OK, let's call imagary object something like the old structuralist sujet, since it's clearly not the fabula or the language-object.

He grants the blank three functions:
The first structural quality of the blank, then, is that it makes possible the oganization of a referential field of interacting textual segments projecting themselves one upon another

Alright, we can tell that neither the blank nor any element of text does this. So Iser must mean that the reader does this in interaction with the text. However, that also means that the actual activity is not the spatial rearrangement described here, so Iser's indulging in a metaphor, consciously or not. What gives? This appears to resemble what Chomsky describes in his recursive structures, only he has chosen to focus on subsentence-level combinations. One might assume that the process, which every commentator describes as recursive, recurses at sentence, paragraph, and other narrative levels as well, and that the levels play into one another as Deleuze describes as well.

So the referential field is the combination of elements that shall be referred to one another, the parts of the assembled pattern. And in the recursion, the codified-abbreviated results of the previously assembled pattern become one element in the following pattern-field.

Unfortunately, Iser drops his parallel structure and does not straightforwardly describe a second function. However, in the cluster of metaphors that follow, he does leave some pretty good clues.
. . . the fact that they [segments present in the field] are brought together highlights their affinities and their differences.

This is still the first function, as the reader may observe. But Iser continues.
This relationship gives rise to a tension taht has to be resolved, for, as Arnheim has observed in a more general context: 'It is one of the functions of the third dimension to come to the rescue when things get uncomfortable on the second" [cites Toward a Psychology of Art. Berkeley, '67]. The third dimension comes about when the segents of the referential field are given a common framework, which allows the reader to relate affinities and differences and so to grasp the patterns underlying the connections" (1678).

Iser's dimensions are those of comparison, not of space, though human brains do seem to use spatial metaphors to describe these kinds of things, and there may be some biological basis for it. (If so, that probably involves streams of related neurons or dendrites selected from neurons, planes of related neural columns, then spaces. But this will be more complex than a 3d comparison will easily allow, since it has to involve proximities of firings, and presumably some crossing of data for comparison.

So what we have is an element that relies, in its nature, on a previous comparison; these elements are compared and combined on another level of comparison. Iser presents this as though the act retained all of the original data. It probably does not, but re-represents it in a more economical form, as a single pattern-unit, not completely discrete from associations.

This last qualifier, not completely discrete from associations is crucial and new to my thinking. There's a tendency to treat all of these things as discrete units, and it's inaccurate. The unit does not have crisp boundaries, but remains suggestive. So we have not completely lost the various components implicit in the assembled pattern-unit, but they are not all equally under attention in the abbreviated, assembled pattern unit; more precisely, they are not all summoned at once, not all firing at once.
Now we come to the third and most decisive function of the blank. Once the segments have been connected and determinate relationship established,a referential field i formed which constitutes a particular reading moment, and which in turn has a discernable structure. The grouping of segments within the referential field comes about, as we have seen , by making the viewpoint switch between teh persepective segments" (1678).

OK, again Iser insists that this kind of combination is only of POV's as opposed to universal for various pattern-units, but I think we can fairly ignore that and retain something very like Iser's superstructure.

I'd like to make some still unwarranted guesses about this process. First, that we would indeed have comparisons built of comparisons and patterns built of patterns. But also, we should beware of assuming that a new comparison means a new level of pattern as suggested by Iser's metaphor of dimension. Principles of biologial economy suggest that patterning devices will be re-used to the greatest extent consistent with processing, and that processing will even be compromised to some extent. After all, the human skull kills and cripples mothers and children in childbirth, makes adults slow, gives us back and neck injuries, and so forth. So a lot of times, the next "dimension" must be accomplished by iterating the comparison in ways somewhat analogous to the ways dimensions might be expressed in binary code. (That is, string gives one value, string gives another, string says how to assemble).

Now, I should note that later on he describes his second level of blank as a vacancy, and relates that "blanks refer to suspended connectability in the text, vacancies refer to nonthematic segments within the referential field of the wandering viewpoint" (1679). So he's trying to fix these cognitive events on aspects of the text, probably more than a little too categorically. After all, why would the reader not simply compare other things? Also, there is as yet no specific mention of the reader's experience, which of course is a constant feed of data in this, since it constitutes all semantic information, among other things.

Among other things of interest here, it's very clear in Iser's construction that the process he's talking about could not happen were the reader to determine story events. The process would be considerably different. I strongly suspect that an investigation of those differences (which I don't think I can manage right now!) would reveal something of the differences between a reading and a game.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Blau du Plessis

In Writing Beyond the Ending, Du Plessis concerns herself almost entirely with women's writing per se. Her term "beyond the ending" feeds on poststructural associations of ending with fixity and idee fixe. But she does not go into any of this, preferring instead to chat about social aspects of the writing using modes remniscient of Frederic Jameson.

She describes the project of 19th and 20th century women writers (and, by extension, one presumes, her own very interesting, though not always very accessible, verse) as a re-mythologizing. So, very coarsely, in this particular myth, Patriarchal Society has some very binding, closed, limiting set of myths for women. There are few roles, few viable options for female life. These are Marriage, Spinsterhood, Whoredom-and-Death.

To describe how these are re-mythologized and/or broken down -- and she seems to take these two activities for one and the same -- she gives several chapter headings that suggest formal analysis, but does not follow through with said analysis.

Chapters :

1. Endings and contradictions -- she really means disagreements, not contradictions; some would disagree with the way others would define their ends or stories. It's not a matter of aporia.

2. The Rupture of Story and The Story of an African Farm. Again, all she means is that the author attempts to recast women in a different light.

And so on.

She spends two chapters analyzing Woolf and says some interesting things. She sees Woolf as decentering first the romantic couple, and finally atomized-western-individual consciousness, and she does look at the weaving of POV's that make up much of W's narrative style to do that. W's handling does happen to be formally inventive, and formally inventive in ways that do seem to support what Du P does here: W really does re-shape the story to recontextualize actions, roles, and so forth to recenter or redefine femininity and humanity.

These are probably the best chapters of Du Plessis' book.

The analysis of HD's Trilogy bears some interest; HD's re-mantling of the Magdalene story makes for a pretty direct example of what Du Plessis is talking about, and the theory seems to work pretty directly on a key figure of what can really be seen as contemporary mythology in a literal sense -- though in part the comparison may be aided by HD's lifelong comfort with hellenic image and reference.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Ostriker

Ostriker, Alica. Stealing the Language: The emergence of women's poetry in America Boston: Beacon, 1986.

As I review my notes, I find my dispproval of most of the method here strong enough that I may offend. I agree that women should be free to determine and appraise themselves as thinking subjects, and that they should feel free to appraise men too, just as men appraise women. I agree that many women write wonderful things that should be canonical in whatever sense any canon should exist. I hope all of this may remain obvious.

Writing of women's gradual and partial triumph over stereotypes, Ostriker cites voluminously and makes interesting observations but analyzes little. This is by no means a habit unique to her or to feminists. It seems a broad assumption of many critics that taking formal characteristics of texts into consideration subverts or distracts from their polemical concerns. Reading many, including Ostriker, I find myself alternately agreeing and disagreeing with qualifications of various authors and incidents without feeling entirely certain as to the initial aesthetic assumptions.

With Ostriker, my disagreements usually come when she describes as characteristically female things that are not. For instance, the ambiguities of Dickinson are "duplicity" (38). The term may not hold for Ostriker all of its usual stigma, but she goes on to discuss it as a strategy that Dickinson follows because of primarily male prohibitions against full female feeling and expression. Dickinson, for example, "wrote that she was Nobody at approximately the same moment that Walt Whitman was claiming to be everybody" (39). Dickinson's response is taken as "what many women were feeling," and Ostriker does treat such responses, rather mysteriously given her straightforwardly positive evaluation of Dickinson as a poet, as lacking (40).

Further clues may come in the discussion of Adrienne Rich's early work.
"Throughout her early poems, Rich explains, 'Formalism was part of the strategy -- like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle material I couldn't pick up barehanded.'She was following, in other words, the intellectual line in women's poetry, which required distancing of personal feeling and cautiousness regarding public issues" (57).

Ostriker appears to assume that there are blanket prohibitions against feeling that apply to women and not to men, and that these are more extensive than those that apply to men, that men primarily enforce these while women may to varying degrees internalize them. Perhaps as a consequence, she seems to believe that women's art, and probably art in general, consists of the expression of the emotion of the artist, with more direct expression making for fuller or more satisfying art. I'm not sure how she would qualify the latter idea because she does not bother to state it, at least not here.

Again, there are a lot of responses against feminist ideas that I would take care to not resemble. I don't doubt that prohibitions against activity and against feeling inhibit women who are artists as well as other women and other artists, and I'm willing to engage the idea that this is a particular difficulty for people who are both women and artists. However, even leaving Ostriker's mischaracterization of WW's narrative persona aside as a glib moment she may not have intended seriously or rigorously, if prohibitions against women's feelings in general in the 1800's were stricter, more extensive, or less forgiving than those against those of male homosexuality, the observation requires support. Perhaps a homosexual male is not a good example, but her comparison is Walt Whitman. Is Whitman's "Calamus" less duplicitous, in any common sense, than the fascicles? Leaving aside comparisons with Ginsberg's "Howl" or Genet's Notre dame des fleurs, we probably agree that Whitman could not have written in the style of Elizabeth Barret Browning and named his lover without reprisals more severe than being dismissed as less than serious.

The restrictions that Ostriker discusses in relation to Rich and the various female poets of from about 1910-1970 or so appear to those formulated by T.S. Eliot as the framework of the New Critical school. The critics she quotes as dismissing women (and they do!) are of the later TS Eliot's camp. But neither Eliot nor his movement limited criticism of sentiment to female sentiment; Eliot took out after Shakespeare and Milton as well. Eliot's verses do seem squeamish about sex, touch, and affection; and his criticism seems squeamish about sentiment in ways that somewhat tar passion, as passionate as his verse remains. But I have seen no argument to join his aestheticism with his asceticism intellectually, even if they may be joined biographically. And not even Eliot asked us to take on his life.

The New Critics were worth revolting against. Many did so, mostly from the 1950's into the '60's; thus we have the Beats, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, Concrete poetry, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and various fellow-travellers, Not only has New Criticism now long fallen into disrepute, other formalisms have replaced it, so that by engaging TSE & the boys, Ostriker confines herself to anthropological observation that cannot simply be levelled against contemporary formal innovation. For decades in the US now, innovative verse has in terms of its poetics followed not Eliot, but a train through Saussure or Peirce via the Russian Formalists or French structuralists into one or another form of post-structuralism. In terms of antecedents, most follow Pound rather than Eliot and perhaps Williams more than Pound, and HD more than one seems to read anywhere (spare couplets as in her Trilogy have become extremely common). To engage formal elements in American poetry after 1950, Ostriker might do this -- thereby reaching after something of the theoretical base of American poets like Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, Lynn Hejinian, and Leslie Scalapino.

But Ostriker's progressive, as of 1986 at least, has to do with expression, so progress hails from beat-related Wakoski and Diane Di Prima (Jayne Cortez might be a nice addition); politically engagé Levertov, Rich, and Atwood; confessional fellow-travellers Plath, Bishop, and Sexton. It does not apparently progress from any of the more formally progressive authors.
"We have moved from from Dickinson's "Mirth is the Mail of Anguish," from Marianne Moore's humorous acceptance of a need for self-protection in her many poems on armored animals, and from the protective creatve images of shells and cocoons in Mariane Moore and HD.

Since such progress is clearly social, whether that means as opposed to poetic or and therefore, poetic, doesn't it require social rather than poetic or at least as well as poetic support? And if this social liberty is a matter for poetics, why doesn't its explication require an integration of poetics? My concern here, please note, is not to bar social considerations from analysis of poetry, but to mourn the lack of integration of formal aspects of poetry in its evaluation, whatever social or political agenda one may involve. After all, if understanding ourselves and our circumstances means narrating our mythology, then surely we all must engage in our own narrations, and our own appraisal of our own narrations must be part of the recursive refrain involved in that. But can proper criticism of these forms be accomplished in innocence of reflexive consideration of the act of consideration? If anything is to be gained besides the incidentals of one or another story, clearly not.

John Berger and Art History

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin & the BBC, 1976. (Apparently this is based on an old BBC show; I don't know where it might be available today, however).

Berger combines epistemology with recent media history and art criticism to make some interesting comments on the relation of form to media.

He takes seeing to "come before words" in a couple ways. "The child looks and recognizes before it can speak"; then, "It is seeing which establishes our place" (7). I am prone to suspect the cleanness of this hierarchy: when a stick enters the the top of a pool at a slant, I do not assume that it breaks sharply at the pool's surface. Likewise, listening to a telephone that relays the conversation of two friends at an office with a speakerphone, I can hear their relative position and the shape of the room, though I find it hard to know why.

It seems to me that vision's role as queen of the senses or whatever remains incomplete in something like the way Deleuze and Guattari describe such things in 1,000 plateaux. At the same time, Berger probably does have some point. Vision would seem to be substantive, whereas audition provides modification. What I see is, roughly, or I assume it to be, whereas I might say how I feel about it, and I might feel the tenor of your own commentary if I hear you. Like nouns, vision appears as self-identified, extensivle, relatively durable, Apollonian in Nietszche's sense. Sound operates more like verbs -- temporal, ephemeral, Dionysiac and so forth.

Well and good. Yet Berger also recognizes constructive and temporal aspects of seeing. "We only see what we look at" (8) of course. But the pattern of dark and light on Franz Hals' late portraits of the governers and governesses of an alms house constitute a rhythm, with implications for visual temporality, and, better yet, all this actually DOES relate to Hals' own relationships with these folks, and identifable social concerns, without for a second jettisoning formal considerations (12-13). Likewise, the relationship of the mythologies of art as these articulate between social classes is also analyzed (24). Such considerations allow Berger to conclude that "What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it -- or rather, to remove its images which tey reproduce -- from any preserve" (32) and "The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. It's authority is lost. In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose" (33).

Berger straightforwardly credits Benjamin for some of the ideas.

Dialectics: As Opposed to What?

Looking back at Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Frederic Jameson's The Political Unconscious (I'm working with the selection in Norton's Theory and Criticism) the issue of the utility of Marxist dialectic comes up.

Jameson argues that "the perspectives of Marxism as necessay preconditions for adequate literary comprehension" (Norton 1941). Since he does not qualify this, I must him to mean that the statement is true regardless of what the understanding may be adequate to, regardless of the historical context. He does not seem to have slipped, either: at the very beginning of his preface, one finds, "Always historicize! This slogan -- the one absolute and we may even say 'transhistorical' imperative of all dialectical thought -- will unsurprisingly turn out to be the moral of The Political Unconscious as well. So Jameseon would have us treat this as a bona fide universal.

Despite the rich history of Marxist analysis, this approach bears difficulties in its initial conception, in part because opposition in the sense that Hegel used the term does not happen between objects.

For one thing, the assembly of an opposition requires at least a third value, that of a normal "between" them. The dichotomy of opposition, therefore, not only can never be absolute, but can never properly be dichotomy. If we say that ice opposes fire because the one is cold, the other hot, and we decide that in some sense the ice is it's cold and the fire is its heat, we still must assume a third value, in this case a range of temperature we find normal. Were we to posit normal at zero degrees kelvin, both fire and the ice in my drink are hot.

Another difficulty, perhaps deeper, comes from the issue of materiality. Surely some sharp student was bound to stand old George Wilhelm Friedrich on his head, but we shouldn't have been surprised if a few things rolled out of the man's pockets. Marx and Fuerbach would have their dialectics material, but that might not be so simple as willing it so. Opposition itself requires a third value to define because it is ideal, not material.

This may not be self-explanatory. Opposition is opposition ofqualities, and qualities are not objects, not material. They may be qualities we apply to objects or understand of objects, but they are not objects themselves. Therefore heat may oppose cold, given a normal temperature in between, but a proletariat cannot oppose a bourgeoisie in the same way, even though they battle mightily over conflicting interests.

There's more than semantics here. A given proletariat or bourgeoisie of which I speak is a group of variant individuals whom I have grouped for characteristics I hold them to share, and for that matter, not all characteristics, but only those that appear to me relevant to a given issue. Of course, the characteristic is something I apply to them based on a standard I have abstracted from experience. The results of their interaction may involve active response between any distinctions that may happen, not just oppositions.

Again, the historicity introduced by dialect has tremendous value, as does Marx's insistence on founding action on human need. But the business of binary opposition as the basic movement of history runs an unfortunate streak of distortion through much otherwise useful analysis.

Linda Hutcheons

Hutcheons, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. NYC: Routledge, 1988.

Loose Notes --

For 6 chapters, Hutcheons approaches a description of the postmodern, avoiding definition. Chapter headings describe the arc of her approach: Theory, politics, difference from modernism, contexts, and history.

Like so:

Theory -- Hutcheons would mix semiotics with her politics.
" . . . what I want to call postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resulutely historical, and inescapably political. Its contradictions may well e those of late capitalist society, but whatever the cause, these contradicitons are certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of 'the presence of the past'" (4).

Politics -- The MO is reform thru parody.
" . . . most of these postmodernist contradictory texts are also specifically parodic . . . . When Eliot recalled Dante or Virgil in The Waste Land, one sensed a kind of wishful call to continuity beneath the fragmented echoing. It is precisely this that is contested in postmodern parody . . . " (11).

" . . . it is precisely parody -- that seemingly introverted formalism -- that paradoxically brings about a direct confrontation mwith the problem of the relationof the aesthetic to a world of significance external to itself, to a discursive world of socially defined meaning systems (past and presente) -- in other words, to the political and the historical" (22).

"In using parody in this way [ironically], postmodernist forms want to work toward a public discourse that would overtly eschew modernist aestheticism and hermeticism and its attendant political self-marginalization" (23).

VS the Modern -- She echoes an impression of modernism's "aestheticism," but avoids facile comparisons.


The literary and the historical are to be re-unified, per this. One does wonder when and how they might have been considered separate. Again, this seems to be glowering at the Newcrits. But then, what about all those allusions? Again, she distinguishes a PoMo method from modernism, which "attempts to separate literary language from reference" (142) -- an idea I have no way to resolve with Eliot, Joyce, Pound or even HD, really.

Histories will involve metafictions; the boundary between fiction and presumed nonfiction becomes problematized. Intertextuality obviously supplies various opportunity for parody and metafiction. Were this written later, the move onto the Net would have allowed for a ream of specultion that Hutcheon has little reason to perform in 1988.

Oh my, she's eventually showing her colors here. "This formalism is the defining expression of modernism, not postmodernism" (144). Then what comes after postmodernism? Clearly modernism, or another modernism -- since whatever it is will be, by definition, an innovation.

"Postmodernist reference, then, differs from modernist reference in its overt acknowledgement of the existence, if relative inaccessibilty, of the past real (except through discourse). It differs from realist reference in its -- again -- overt assertion of taht relative inacessibility of any reality that might exist objectively and prior ot our knowledge of it" (146).

Rather bizarre characterization. Pound, then, is postmodern, as are Eliot, Joyce, Williams, and almsot anyone writing before 1950. On the other hand, modernism returned later with people like Cage and Ashbery and movements like Oulipo. This is all just backwards. She's consistent to her idea, though. PoMo has moved past its "referential agnosticism," she quotes Norris for the term. So Bernstein and Silliman are modernists, and Pound and Joyce postmodern. Go figure.

Perhaps she means not history but the critical habit of treating the text in terms of the kinds of external information we call historical or political -- though, if so, she's answering the New Critics, and not the modernists. And, as nearly as I can figure, talking about different people than the ones that typically take the term postmodern.

Oddly, the subject remains in crisis, despite Hutcheons' assertion that form is no longer in crisis or in play. What can that mean, logically? I cannot define myself or know myself although all sensory information that said self possesses is owned by me as much as anyone. Do I just accept what others tell me I am? That seems like something that requires force. If "what novels like The White Hotel or Midnight's Children explicitly do is to undermine the ideological assumptions behind what has been accepted as universal and trans-historical in our culture" (177), then how can that possibly be done without formal innovation? Either I'm told a story that does or does not amuse me, and the structure of my ideas remains intact, or the story informs me, in which I see no reason it should be fictional. In fact, the more fictional is, teh less valid it can be in terms of accreting data in an already fixed system.

No, I don't see it. I don't think that the subject can ever be in crisis without some corresponding ripple in form. Can anybody run this by me a different way?

Hutcheon follows hard upon this with "In the postmodern 'history-like,' the ideological and the aesthetic have turned out to be inseparable" (178).

However, the postmodern for her has no particularly interesting formal concerns. Such formal concerns have left with modernist "aestheticism." Perhaps aesthetics and aestheticism are held to be opposite. As such, the crowd of conflicting politicizations are said to be postmodernism. Finally, she has to admit that "The art and theory I have been labelling as postmodernist are not, perhpas, as revolutionaryas either their own rhetoric or their supporters suggest" although she qualifies that they are not "as nostalgically neoconservative as their detractors would have it" (222).

Very well, let's not use the term neocon here; given 21st century context it has gone bitter. But this does not make sense at all. Obviously, if no important formal innovation exists, anything new has to be only the novel.

Modern Isms

As I continue reading responses to postmodernism by people who were never really on the fronts of it, I find there's a problem with the definitions of modernism used by people who have encountered it primarily in English. They seem to leave out aspects related to the futurisms in Italy and Russia; and Dada, Surrealism and Cubism in France, Spain, and Germany.

Americanists seem to have the greatest problem, perhaps since their attitudes seem colored by responses to TS Eliot's New Criticism. Eliot wrote some bold and beautiful poetry, but for all of his perception, the movement was retrogressive on several counts.

  • His near-fascist politics

  • He cast the issues of "hard language" and the "objective correlative" as an eschewing of emotion instead of a recognition of perspectivist dissonance between author and reader.

  • He incorporated the essentialist Anglican metaphysics and many aspects of 18th Century French symbolism as parts of modernism as it became institutionalized. In doing so, he marginalized in the US and Britain the anti-essentialist concepts that had been the heart of modernism in the teens and twenties, including the irrational, the unconscious in its various forms, zaum, decentering of the author.


These issues finally returned in various ways in the 50's and thereafter, but adherents of the various schools, critics perhaps more than artists, often miss the larger synthesis of the earlier movement that included the innovations on the continent.

For what it's worth, a good sampling of at least the poetry that they lack can be found in Rothenberg and Joris' Poems for the Millenium VOL I. The second volume is grand, too, but the first covers the area that most of us would call modernism.

Billy Budd

Billy Budd.

Impressions of Billy Budd as Melville's impressions of the impossibility of innocence.

Barbara Johnson does a wonderful job of tearing this apart. Billy is typically taken, one way or another, as Melville's innocent. But to be innocent, Billy must repress various perceptions as evil. Thus we find his remarkable absence of apparent resentment or criticism when he's pressed into service, insulted, plotted against and so forth. Johnson puts it so:
Fra from being simply and naturally pure, he is obsessed with maintaining his own irreproachability in the eyes of authority. After witnessing a flogging, he is so horrified that he resolves 'that never through remissness would he make himself liable to such a visitation or do or omit aught that might merit even verbal reproof'" (2326).

Now, clearly this is not edenic. Johnson further correlates this to Billy's stuttering, of course, and of course the stuttering's key incorporation in the story's critical act, Billy's murder of Claggard.

Now, is Billy innocent? A more significant question, given that this piece arrives to its readers as fiction, is what does innocent mean? And if one cannot arrive at an innocent, can one arrive at a guilty? Of course, justice fallas in sequence, but that does leave us with practical problems of administration.

Administration, and the administration of what's called justice in particular, involves applying a quality -- good or evil, innocent or guilty -- to an object, generally a person. As always, the quality does not pertain to its object of attribution, but bears the kind of contextual relationships we associate with semantics and linguistic systems. One consequence of this is that guilt must be read -- and read partially, as Johnson points out (2336). That is, a defendent will be found guilty with respect to and only with respect to a generalized context related to the perspectives of the judge, not the perpetrator or the victim.

Now, this is not the same as saying that judgment is as the judge prefers; the judge may dislike his verdict, as in Billy Budd yet see it as the will of law from his own perspective. Here's Johnson on issues of context in judgment:
Tje [p;otoca; cpmtext om Billy Budd is such that on all levels the differences within (mutiny on the warship, the French revolution as a threat to 'lasting institutions,' Billy's unconscious hostility) are subordinated to the differences between (the Bellipotent vs the Atheé, England vs France, murderer vs victim). This is why Melville's choice of historical setting is so significant: thewar between Frane and England at the time of the French Revolution is as striking example fo the simultaneous functioning of diffrerences within and between as is the confrontation between Billy and Claggart in relation to their own internal divisions" (2335).


Johnson, Barbara. "Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. (2316-2337).

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Framing the Margins, Blow-by-Blow

Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. NY: Oxford, 1994.

"My aim with this book is to substantiate such claims as [Bell] Hooks makes about socially marginalized groups' anticipatory experience of postmodern 'uncertainty,' but also -- and more importantly -- to suggest that marginalized groups' experience of decenteredness is itself a largely unacknowledged factor in the 'general' postmodern condition" (4).

So, one might hope here for a position that will unite formal and social interests, but Harper's aims appear otherwise.

. . . if formalist aestheticism appears to us as the dominant tendency of 'high modernism,' as it is currently apphrehended, then it must be acknowledged as well that this aestheticism derives its significance from the its status as a reaction against the apparent meaninglessness and absurdity of contemporary life, which was seen as reflected in the modernist works that thematized chaos and contingency. In other words, the dis-integrated, fragmentary nature of modern human existence is always a subtext of high modernist aestheticism, which is also precisely a defensive hedge against the former. Conversely, modernist explorations of discontinuity and disorder always funciton in the context of aesthetist endeavors that counterbalance them and keep them in cjeck.

Given this view of the matter, it becomes possible to see how postmodernism can constitute both a break from and a continuation of the modernist undertaking. Postmodernism breaks with the formalist aestheticism that functioned to suppress modernism's full playing out of the ramifications of experiential disjunctutre, and, this unrestrained exploration that postmodernism accedes to what I have identified as one of its prime characteristices, the thematization of subjective fragmentation, over the more modernist concern of subjective alientation, a distinction invoked by Jameson that we would do well to clarify a bit here (21).


We we have a quick binary opposition of "formal" modernism "restraining" by "aestheticism" a response to "meaningless." Further, "contingency" is somehow related to "chaos." The resulting field of categorization neatly cuts anything of formal interest from anything involving full and appropriate response to the human needs that Harper treats as "fragmentation" or "alienation," as opposed to, say, poverty, oppression, disempowerment, or social dysfunction.

Since art or thought can no more be "formless" than "pure," such divisions must be intended loosely. Does Harper fight the ghosts of Eliot's minions, actual experimentalists like the NY, Objectivist, or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school and fellow travellers, or is he even crass enough to try to mix them?

He gives Woof's Dalloway as immediate example, describing a "subjective dispersal" that "greatly resembles postmodern alienation" (22), finally concluding that Woolf's is a modern, not postmodern novel for its lack of "emphasis" on the fragmentation. But there's more. It's VW's "aestheticist hedge against experiential fragmentation that I have identified as a key component" (23). This is apparently so because Clarissa "resolves herself" in time for her party (23-24).

This really does not explain how Harper would deal with Dada, Khlebnikov, Marinetti, Breton, Artaud. It doesn't even describe what he might do with Pound, whose Cantos might reasonably considered fragmented. Is Oppen modern and Pound postmodern? Let's see if a suitably postmodern example is given.

Before this is resolved, I find another issue: "Nin and Barnes depict a psychic fragmentation that is unique to women and actually constituted in femininity" (25). So, women are PoMo, men modern? Let's keep Yin and Yang apart, they'll have little dialectics. But no, no explanation is forthcoming. Harper gives a quick catalog of following chapters, and jumps into individual studies.

WEST

So the next chapter deals with Nate West, author of Day of the Locust. H cites some dialog from Snell, two characters considering something vaguely like Zeno or Parmenides. Apparently we are to deduce from this that West's characters' quite coherent discussion is fragmented, whereas, say, Faulkner's Benjy is not.

Oh! He's on to Apollonaire! But he associates GA with "concrete poetry," something that the de Campos brothers or Pignatari would deny, since GA's shapes don't relate to syntax, whereas those in true concrete poetry do. He is onto something here, though, since he appears to be trying to describe a single sign, symbol, or icon (it's not clear which or whether the distinction is part of his appraisal) that means in two ways. So, yes, GA's calligrammes fit roughly if one doesn't want to really examine the mechanism (36-37).

"Linguistic signification can in no way be divorced from human physiology" (42).
'Nice.

Nin, Barnes, Critical Feminist Unconscious

"For women is man's creation, in the view of Nin's characters. . . "

It's been a while, but I don't recall anything special about that in Nin. Perhaps it's just that I do not share certain conventions about men and women being independent of each other. One survives; one is blue. How much suffering constitutes dependency? Nin's characters do produce several believable images of being "split" over love. But frankly, I don't see why one shouldn't react to Nin as a late Romantic humanist working in forms that date from Baudelaire or Rimbaud's old Foolish Virgin, What's-His-Name.

H does engage N's persistant freudian (we're really talking about Otto Rank here, N's analyst). The awkwardness of Freud's boys-only terminology runs through the discussion, but not in any way that Nin herself would find overwhelmingly strange. Nin's romantic personae are fruity and abundant, but why I should think the remove or discontinuity of the post-symboliste imagery and Freud-via-Rank-and-Artaud reflexive gestures constitute a more complete response to anything, I have no idea.

Barnes may be more interesting. Her women are, of course, incomplete (74). Of course, the paunchy guy she roasts in the opening pages can hardly be complete without his Hedwig, hein? Hedwig who thrusts her baby from her, hands it some ridiculous name, and dies. Who's complete? Female desire, or "incompleteness," if we must, occupies Barnes more than any corresponding male anything. All of which is fine, but doth not an ideology make. Harper's take:

. . . Barnes's work, along with Nin's, is informed by a feminist political unconscious that actually provides the narrative tension necessary to bind the work in a choherent whole. The suppression of that feminist content beneath the depiction of a generalized existential malaise reproduces the very disenfranchisement of women that the text simultaneously represents, in the form of psychic fragmentation (89).

All this seems pretty arbitrary. Social and sexual desires have always been as political as they have been anything else, since at least Simone de Beauvoir explicitly so. If all we mean is that the authors have unresolved desires that relate to politics, point granted. What is or is not "conscious" or "repressed" remains unclear. Nin certainly seems somewhat occulted behind the veils of symbol, and I for one would be more willing to call this "aesthetization" than I would use the term for a modernist, which Nin is not. Yet surely, Barnes' evocative, biting text should not be subject to the same criticism just because Nora and Robin don't ride off into the sunset.
A politically conscous criticism will entail the excavation of that feminist content through a reading designed to illuminate the various specific conditions that will become inscribed in the postmodern moment of the late twentieth century (89).


Gwendolyn Brooks.

Here we're establishing black female subjectivity. So in the poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon," we're to understand that the parallel sentences are not parallel. If I understand the intention, the personae are not in symmetrical situations, and H finds the latter sentence priviledged grammatically. The semiotics used to further describe this are strange.

"One reason for this lies in what Saussure has identified as the linear nature of linguistic signification" -- if indeed it is the signification that can be considered linear. Signification requires comparison of earlier and later grammatical elements, which requires recursion. A Saussurian system must involve a comparison of said elements with the entire system, so the recursion might be rather involved. H considers that ". . . what is under our consideration at any given moment must necessarily predominate . . ." (100). The reader may judge whether that is always so.

A Language Model

OK, folks, here's my 1,000-word-or-so synthesis of How Words Work. Someone please wise me up before the Transcendental Signifier doth smite or kabong me.

On.

Structuralist and post-structuralist poetics descending from Saussure treat semantic meaning as systemic. A familiar demonstration involves any attempt to define a single word, in which one inevitably involves other words.

However, the words we use we do not define.

True, the 26-volume OED fairly bursts with gorgeous definitions, and when I look up the 4 pages or so of entries for the or of, I'm startled to realize that the definitions actually do bear an unusually strong resemblance to my own understanding of these words.

Do I use these definitions to write or speak? No.

The OED's entries are more-than-usually admirable approximations, nothing more. Likewise, when colleagues in discussion refine terms to increase the rigor of a conversation, we may restrict, augment, amend, or disallow associations to one or another word or phrase, but probably few among us would attempt to rigorously defend the idea that we truly define terms.

So, what does happen?

Language seems to involve a dynamic interrelationship between processes described as semantic and syntactic. Neurologists observe that cerebral activity related to language seems to have a dual center, around Wernicke's and Broca's regions, so whatever flaws may exist in the descriptions, language would seem to be in some sense dual or bilateral, and the overall processing perhaps equally describable as an articulated process or related processes.

So, given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles that of other English speakers. This "Word" might as well be a morpheme or a short phrase, but either way, my mental tracing of that sound, along with the network-constellation of associated experiential traces thereby summoned, comprises what a saussurian or structuralist might describe as signifier and signified, respectively. It's probably worthwhile to explicitly deny that I intend by this any transcendant connection to any universal idea or to anyone else's thought. We humans are similar organisms, of a species, and we hang out together; to some extent we manage to work out what our confreres are thinking; we get by, but not too altogether awfully well.

Any definition of that Word is an entity separate from and disparate from the word itself, an attempt to represent the Word-object-process in language, the better to discuss it. We have wonderful motives to define words, but those definitions do not equal the words themselves any more than Magritte's "Celui n'est pas une pipe" was a pipe, no more than I can pronounce the word table and then brace my coffee on that word while I type.

That said, the ultimate circularity of definition pointed out by Jacques Derrida in his early critiques of structuralist linguistics holds problems for meaning in that it holds problems for definitive meaning, but only in that. This takes nothing away from deconstructive critiques of attempts to linguistically objectify and delimit, but describes differently the possibility of describing and the impossibility of defining, delimiting, or objectifying the world.

Also, much of the complexity of semiotic description comes from the difficulty of matching an understanding of semantics as largely synchronic and the meanings of words as relatively durable with the obviously temporal shifting of meanings within syntax. By eschewing the relevance of defined or definitive meaning, the following simple but admittedly rough description:

Given A Word, my mind summons association which somewhat resembles those of other English speakers. Such associations are material-energetic object-acts independent of whatever process may take place in anyone else's head; no transcendent eidos or anything terribly similar is involved.

Also, whether I describe what's summoned as association or as associations, my phrase is equally misleading, since the event could as rigorously be described as compound or articulated, as process or object.

As I maintain awareness of the Word, the composition of more or less prominent aspects of association remains provisional, pending the relative completion of syntactic and syntagmatic segments.

(I've found it useful to compare this to visual attention, in which I pay more attention to or devote more neural processing to and have more complete understanding about an arc within some degrees of a point central to my binocular focus than I do about events at the periphery of my vision. Similarly, the word dog by itself may summon a ready image, which I may freely alter when it's followed by another syllable, as in dogfish or dog days.)

As Words arrive, whether by speech or by my reading, I take cues internal to the discourse to indicate that segments of discourse have closed. In practice, I may do so because I take the speaker to intend such closure or because I find I can't retain more linguistic elements and must guess as to the speaker or author's drift (see Beckett's How It Is or certain sentences of Faulkner or Proust for different ways this may work). In any event, to whatever extent and in whatever ways I consider previous discourse-segments as closed, I may forget their independent parts or banish them from immediate attention. The process is in some manner intensively recursive.

At whatever point I do this, I make an assembled construct of meaning-up-to-now, and proceed to use that as interpretive context for whatever discourse follows.

A few observations, incompletely systematized ----

In these events, nothing comprises a full stop.

As I decide that segments of language have closed and I combine words, these combinations draw attention to mutually fitting or harmonious aspects of the word-string; aspects that can be mutually imagined or embodied or otherwise incorporated. I'm tempted to suppose that this involves the firing of mutually excitable neuron-patterns, and I do supose that specific spatio-temporal embodiment must be involved, but I'm just supposing.

In any event, nothing in the process seems to be actively delimiting in the sense of a definition, but poetically suggestive. Certain meanings get eliminated, but only in the way that enacting a decision to leave the room eliminates staying in the room.

In consequence, my appraisal of the language elements remains more or less provisional, contingent on the progressive and relative closure of linguistic units, and I willingly reappraise their meaning until I am hit by a blunt object, distracted, or otherwise forgetful.

For instance, certain non-assembled semantic units do cross the "full stop," the grand divide of predication and of sentence. These tend to relate to whatever we consider as noun or scene rather than to what we consider as verb or action. So, for instance, if I write "Jim studied. He passed the test," one assumes that He refers to Jim so that studied and passed relate in a way one might diagram like the two oxygen atoms in diagram of an H2O molecule.

Accordingly, no rigorous distinction between syntax and syntagma exists. Disconnection and connection are complex, partial, and distinctly articulated, like relations between movements of a symphony or sonata.

Accordingly too, lecturers in the academy aside, humans speak something far closer to verse than prose.

The music of speech, the prosody of verse, standard punctuation as prescribed by the MLA, advertising in glossy magazines, and visually sophisticated Websites all differently stylize the logic of segmentation in ways that change syntax, therefore meaning. We interpret each of these in ways that we little understand, with little or no explicit training. That is, one reading a Website aloud will tend to convert its visual cues to aural cues based on an implicit understanding of phrase boundaries. To some extent, this understanding follows lines of custom, but to some extent the reader may reinvent it upon encountering the text and guessing at "the author's intent" or at "what makes sense."

The cues that determine phrase boundaries have to be distinguishable from cues fixedly associated with semantic meaning. So, for instance, two enunciations of the word "father" must share much meaning regardless of, say, their pitch, but pitch that rises relatively towards the end of that word effectively makes the word a question.

Meaning fixedly associated with a Word or signifier may be arbitrary, iconic, or anything on a continuum in-between, but any meaning-relationships malleable by syntax and associated with that word must be arbitrary in something like Saussure's sense, as opposed to iconic or symbolic as Peirce used these.

Some difficulties remain in describing relations between what has been called sign and referent, between a composite Word and what's taken to be a solid and identifiable thing-in-itself. These may be alleviated with the realization that what's taken as a thing-in-itself is itself a neurologically constructed composite that may in some ways less resemble the circumstances of its extra-perceptual provocation than might the verbal rendering that synthesizes sensual elements with remembered and imagined categories and abstractions. For instance, I remain convinced that the chair across the room has weight although I cannot at the moment verify that sensorially.

Among other things, this suggests that discourse involves what might be called an inevitable materiality -- although, once again, materiality and ideality remains a difficult dichotomy to maintain; what this materiality amounts to is sensual palpability. The non-semantic and officially non-syntactic aspects of a material production of writing must and do signal syntax. The undifferentiated font of a book in standard typeface signals a sequential read as easily as the differentiated font-face and color of a Website or glossy magazine may signal distinct relationships of different bodies of text onscreen, and in turn a process of cherrypicking links. If early 21st-century commentators tend to neglect this, it may be because we remain accustomed to a world of uniform letters determined by movable type and typesetting. The technology has shifted, and practice is shifting although conventions and usage take time to adjust. Yet the possibilities -- the inevitability! -- of sensory and social inflection and contexting on rhetoric, narrative, and prosody incumbent on the enhanced plasticity of digital representation is boggling -- demonstrably so, given our partly generational difficulties in absorbing it. On the one hand, one grasps that new forms will be interpreted on-the-fly by global patterns; on the other hand, one must grasp that as-yet-nonexistent social customs will factor into every interpretation, so that the meanings of one's own words have not assembled yet, and leave one's control remaining radically incomplete.

Adorno

Adorno, Theodore. Aesthetic Theory. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Teidemann, Eds. Robert Hullot-Kentor Trans. Minneapolis: U Minn, 2006.

The Frankfurt School and related critics (very very loosely, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Jurgen Habermas) frustrate me by making very interesting but very broad assertions that they deign neither to support, qualify, or even really define. I am, admittedly, far from having read all of it, and if anyone finds any work that renders these ideas more systematic or rigorous, Let me know.

Meanwhile, the girth of Adorno's posthumous Aesthetic Theory helps. The writing shares the same strengths and weaknesses with his collaborations with Horkheimer, but the extent of the work allows one to contextualize it somewhat, to begin to approach an appreciation of the categories Adorno tosses around.

The following may give an idea of the problems:
"Ever since Attic classicism, the real barbarism of antiquity -- the slavery, genocide, and contempt for human life -- left few traces in art; just how chaste it kept itself, even in 'barbaric cultures,' does not redound to its credit" (161).

What a marvelous feat of misobservation! The entire history of art is constructed of counterexample; the closest thing to a nonviolent epic before Leaves of Grass is probably Paradise Lost. If one doesn't care for epics, let's turn to the mix of perversion and royalty that constitutes tragedy. We and the ancients just take the horror as somehow noble because the art itself is wonderful. But if the Iliad presents war as honorable, that may say something about the nature of ancient Greek and modern Western honor.

Here's another:
"Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning" (154).

This nifty aporia comes without the labor of any definition of meaning and how that one might "negate" it. In some contexts the anthropomorphosization of art makes little difference, but here in a discussion that purports to describe its operation, one should not indulge. The work does not will; the artist likely does. Is the art the artist or the artist-and-work or even the artist-and-work-and-consumer? Maybe, but that's the best I've got here. It seems likely that Adorno himself did not ask. Given these ambiguities, what does one make of negating meaning? Perhaps Adorno means something akin to Kristeva's analysis of chora, but if so, it's not obvious.

Or, on page 31, one finds various that "reality finds entry," there's an "annihiliation of reality," and that Beckett's plays unfold somehow "like forces in infinitesimal physics," by which Adorno may (or may not!) refer to Heisenberg's observations of indeterminate position-movement in certain of what get called "subatomic particles." If so, it's a cool reference except that it's utterly unhelpful. Does Adorno indicate that Beckett's plays function noncausally or that he finds himself unaware of their operation?

Some marvellous observations get tossed about in the same tone. Get this:
From the outset, aesthetic abstraction, which in Baudelaire was a still rudimentary and allegorical reaction to a world that had beocme abstract, was formeost a prohibition on graven images. This prohibition falls on what provincials ultimately hoped to salvage under the name 'message': appearance as meaningful; after the catastrophe of meaning, appearance becomes abstract. From Rimbaud to contemporary avant-garde art, the obstinacy of this prohibition is unflagging. It has changed no more than has the fundamental structure of society. The modern is abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconciliable with magic, it is unable to bespeak what has yet to be, and yet must seek it, protesting against the ignominy of the ever-same:This is why Baudelaire's cryptograms equate the new with the unknown, with the hidden telos, as well as with what is monstrous by virtue of its incommensurability with the ever-same and thus with the gout du néant" (22).

Whew! To untangle just part of this, let's for the moment set aside the undefined "abstraction" and the nonsense of what consitutes a "world" that has become "abstract" -- if one can. If so, the alignment of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Doc Williams, Robert Lowell and so forth with Luther and the Puritans is a real coup, and may account for the some of the distinctions in the modernisms and avant-gardes in the nonprotestant world. That is, Pound's imagism and vorticism and hard language, and Williams' "no ideas without things" show a concern with concepts aligned with what Austin called "constative" language, a concern not reflected in Dada or Surrealism or Martinelli or Apollonaire or Zaum.

Or again,
The processual character of artworks is nothing other than their temporal nucleus. If duration becomes their intention in such a fashion that they expel what they deem ephemeral and by their own hand eternalize themselves in pure impregnanble forms or, worse, by the ominious claim to the universally human, they cut short their lives and assimilate themselves inot the concept that -- as the fixed circumference of shifting contents -- by its form pursues precisely that temporal stasis against which the drawn tension of the artwork defends itself (177).

Again, let's not examine "temporal nucleus" too closely, since we're apt to wonder what would constitute the temporal cytoplasm. And again the "intention" of the works themselves remains unclear, here doubly so because Adorno can't be bothered to articulate whether said work would endure in its creation and/or consumption as a single iteration, physical reproduction and distribution under a given title, or its continued influence as a progeniter of memes. But if we can stomach that, there's something here, just that the attempt to fix inspiration in a form stills the "processual character" intrinsic to artistic experience. And he goes on to discuss Stockhausen and "electronic art," which by Adorno's death in 1969 must have referred to broadcast media.

Altogether, I still find myself looking for a theoretical construction that adequately incorporates formal elements -- semiotics, narratology, formalism, structuralism or poststructuralism -- with socioeconomic and technological factors. So far I have found Derrida and Foucault more useful than the Frankfurt School. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E folks like Charles Bernstein, Lynn Hejinian and Ron Silliman have been at least as useful as anyone, really, though we're only talking about a handful of essays.

Oh well, off to the Auction of the Mind of Man . . . . It would seem we should at least try to know how.

Poe Notes

The Adventure of Hans Pfaall

A strange balloon arrives at Rotterdam -- with a note from recently disappeared Hans Pfaall. Hans relates the construction of a balloon. He intends to go to the moon to escape his creditors. An explosion leaves him hanging beneath the balloon.

It's sci-fi, and some of the phrases are astonishingly familiar from various pop efforts, but it's got a lot of faux-technical detail, and qreminds one in some ways of magical realism, despite the extreme difference in tone from Garcia Marquez or Rulfo or Kafka. He does not appear to have checked the details in any depth, since much of his folderol could have been corrected by an astronomer of the time. He goes through a big highly imaginative spiel about fixing the pressure problem that's bursting his ears by bleeding himself, so he has less blood pushing out. The feathers, further from the ground, plummet rather than float.

Heavy reliance on figures to give a sense of precision.

I suppose at this time, his prior examples would have been narratives of exploration, Robinson Crusoe, and the like. His patient description of Pfaall's fanciful trials and his aping of a diary at one point.

Also perhaps some glance back at Washington Irving or somesuch -- he finishes by making it apparent it's presumably all a fib, and makes a big footnote about similar stories that probably puts the author in the same light as his focalizer-narrator.

Inflections

The articulations of inflection at some level involve cultural values and physical and kinetic metaphors. For instance, question has a rise in it, a cry and a making-precise of sound, an attempt at differentiation. Termination has a pause or a bass, a release or return or dropping of energy into resolution. Raising of energy by volume with a dropping of pitch becomes very visceral; lowering of volume and raising of pitch relatively etherial and cerebral.

Chomsky and Media

As I search for critics who analyze the relation of publication and distribution economics to written form, by far the most useful author I have found so far does not see himself as writing about literature per se at all.

In a series of books, Noam Chomsky analyzes socioeconomic strictures on publication and the flow of information. In both linguistic and political work, Chomsky sees literary formalisms as largely outside his authorial province, but he does give straightforward and well documented descriptions of patterns of ownership and commodification of media production and distribution, and the effect these have on what information may be expressed and communicated, where, and to an extent how.

Insofar as these filter in large part for profit, and profit

Particularly useful Chomsky on Media:

  • Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with David Barsamian

  • Media Control

  • Necessary Illusions

  • Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda

  • You Are Being Lied To

  • On Miseducation

  • Secrets, Lies, Democracy



These do include quite a bit of thematic repetition, since part of Chomsky's intents are polemical.

There is also a DVD on Zeitgeist called Necessary Illusions, and he makes considerable reference to these themes in lectures, interviews, and articles, all easily found on www.chomsky.info. It wanders between biographical anecdotes about Chomsky, quick clips of interviews,