In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses the older practice of misspelling words to render their sounds in academic English, but one cannot regret the results. Her anthropological training must have forced her to think precisely about those sounds and about the sounds of academic English itself, but the precision of the shading and the consistent ingenuity of her characters' expression makes the novel sing.
Eyes launches en medias res with a view of a strong and attractive 40-year-old African-American woman rendered through the chatter of local gossips in a rural Southern setting. A woman, she's judged even by other women for her sexuality, and the backstory that constitutes the novel describes her romantic life from early adulthood. One might wonder about her more formative life, the earlier life within her family, but the focus of this narration remains incompletely internal. Once we enter this woman's thoughts, we remain with her throughout the 3rd-person narrative, but we are privy to only those thoughts that pertain to fairly public event. She does not philosophize or fantasize extensively; her reflections do not lean to revery, memory, or comparison, but responds to those situations that confront her. Thus, we experience in series the impacts of her men upon her.
One should not take impacts to mean that Hurston leaves her character helpless or passive. Eyes is no romanticization of independent womanhood, but it portrays that independence nonetheless. Every husband the protagonist has beats her at some point, but Hurston renders the whole of it matter-of-factly, so much so that the events remain largely incidental to the narrative, not only for Hurston, but for her protagonist. One is left feeling simply that there's little more to expect from men. No moral judgments pertain, though in every case but one each man loses what he fights for by his folly.
The one case in which a man beats his woman and retains her, Hurston bends over backward to provide him and her every excuse. He is herded into it by not only jealousy but genuine circumstance, though circumstance not of his wife's doing. He does not hit her hard enough to cause physical damage. She appears distraught more than anything by how badly he must feel to be driven to such an act, and so forth. The narrative focus retreats considerably from her throughout these events, reporting the opinions of co-workers and friends who cannot know exactly what understandings the couple might have reached. The event becomes a mutual misfortune to which both react with sympathy and understanding to correct.
A central fact of her life with Tea-Cake, the one good husband, is that she shares with him his pleasures and woes. They're his, not hers -- or they would not have been hers had she been alone. But they're also events native to a lower-class African American in the early 20th century rural American South. They work side by side in the fields. Tea Cake gambles -- winning, losing, and at one point coming home with knife wounds. In this she experiences with him the violence of both (some) African-American and (some) workingclass life. She need not do so. She could easily convince him to partake of some part of the fortune she's come to through her previous marriage to snooty and ambitious Jody. He refuses out of pride; because she approves of his pride and its motives she allows his refusal.
Retaining her own money and living from his becomes an act of generosity or liberality on her part. She may allow her money and property to not matter, so she can give Tea Cake the priviledge of his life with her, the life of relatively poor people in love being better than various classes of social pretension, even with authentic security. The couple does not treat wealth with contempt; they just never really find a way to include it in what they want to do, given that it seems always tainted by various people and their various expectations.
It's interesting the extent to which this is an African-American novel and these can be African-American decisions without the presence of a white person ever intruding. The shadow of white America exists only in the deeply assumed poverty of these people, the pretensions of one woman to whiteness, the persistent insecurity of the men, and formally trained Hurston's need to misspell words to render her characters' voices. I hesitate to write that Hurston even rejected the inclusion of a white community. The idea may have never occurred to her. But her decision or non-decision allows her characters to dispense with dealing with social circumstance and engage the more universal matter of humanity. I would like to write the same about matters of gender; here Hurston could not achieve the same apartheid so thoroughly. Yet her act of minimizing the response to male violence without ever denying it makes all the protagonist's emotions not only available to but assumable by male readers, just as many non-black readers can identify with a poverty established by some force established somewhere off the stage from the life we experience.
So Hurston manages a wonderfully particular, consumingly universal narrative of just the ideas with which she opens her piece. I wonder what would have become of this work had examined romantic choices against a more direct backdrop of racism and engineered poverty, had the flood that washed away the principle characters been the flood of noncaring and dullness that almost buried Hurston's work and forced her to work out her last years as a maid while another generation suffered for what she might have taught. I wonder what might have happened had the mad dog that gave Tea Cake rabies to end their romance and the book been the racist madness or insective corporate-ism that severs couples in the world we share. The book might have been more, but could not easily have been more complete.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Artaud
Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. NY: Grove, 1958.
Finally to confront Artaud as an intellect rather than as an event, rather than as an explosion in one's own mind -------
Let us regard "never kept a man from going hungry" as a rhetorical gesture, if an unfortunate one. The rest stands as a credo differing from most precisely in that it is sane: dreams and images matter from some relation to human need, or they do not matter to humans. While this may sound like tautology, those who spin around in debates over "art for art's sake" or art as sales manoevering routinely slight the obvious consequences. Artaud recognizes this as an error that one may as easily call social, psychological, or formal:
Or, later
Leaving aside for the moment the implicit social concerns, this statement attacks the concepts of semiotic reference that grow out of de Saussure and Jakobson, insisting on what elsewhere has been regarded as the contamination of the semiotic system by the referent, by materiality of the text, but also by the biology of the interpreter, of the organism that reads the sign. Note, for instance, how the following relates to other theories:
With Austin, Artaud situates meaning outside of the words or their enunciation, in the larger context. The perception Artaud describes here involves implied narrators and observers almost after the manner of Genette. He specifically mentions narrative later:
The parallel can hardly be seen as accidental. And one might follow this further afield. In the breakdown of the semiotic we have one vision of broad swath of Western aesthetics. The symbolic enters the semiotic, for example. But what's more interesting is that Artaud appears intent on a breakdown of the narrative perception itself.
He gets fairly specific. Take his idea of "The Theater and the Plague," topic of the performance-lecture that Nin describes somewhere in her Journals. In establishing a connection between theater and plague, Artaud tempts one to clinical diagnosis. I had to laugh when he followed it by a citing Augustine's City of God (26): where does one separate the pathological from the historical? But here at least he does seem to maintain a handle on at least his audience's probable disbelief:
He goes on to write of a spreading not by contagion per se, but by revelation, a revelation involving the disintegration of social and, if one may follow his patterns of extension elsewhere, of psychological and intellectual forms.
This spreading he describes as theater.
To serve this end he proposes a primacy of what he calls mise en scene, which seems to be "everything specifically theatrical, i.e., everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is not contained in the dialogue . . . " (37). This extralinguistic "language" requires sensual beauty -- "This language created for the senses must from the outset be concerned with satisfying them" (38) -- and allusion or reference. That is, this "language" is not private or merely concerned with abreacting or catharsis of personal issues, but with something that happens between people, something which can be, if not understood exactly, responded to and integrated. He spends some time on the Balinese shadow theater as an example:
..
A note --
The Balinese theater that Artaud talks about takes place under considerably different circumstances than do postindustrial performances. TThose conditions relate very specifically to the differences in presentations that Artaud writes of.
: Balinese audiences know the stories of the plays before they arrive at the theater. The point of performance is seldom to "tell the story" exactly, but to display a rendition. We experience something like this with a version of a popular song. The interest may come with variations from melody, inflection, or other aspects. These sing against the anticipated form much as variations on an iambic pentameter sing against the anticipated iamb.
Now,
Artaud would reduce the role of words and the specificity of time and place instituted by those words. There's a lot to be said for this. One thinks of the abnegation of a certain referentiality in Mallarme's late work, for instance. Both work for a universality, a generality, and at once a specificity. For the audience's troubles are not that Oedipus does or does not fuck his mother or that Hamlet is to be or to not be, but some abstract or universal pertinent to that and related to their own mothers, their own beings.
However, there remains some necessity for designation of elements, of time and place in some sense, albeit relative. Ancient playwrights had some advantage in this because characters and stories were known by all. Children would have known the stories of Achilles as oral legend, much as our children know of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Were Artaud's production in the Theater of Cruelty to work, it should therefore summon some similar incident. Notably he chose the Conquest of Mexico, a natural event for its visual wildness and violence, which might be susceptible to presentation as gesture.
'T'd seem, then, that this cruelty requires synthesis, that rigor cannot be absolute, or need not be. Nowadays an MTV video by personae who seem to want little more than fast women and pretty cars employ principles that sound radical in Artaud. But A's case isn't made so easily. A's careful to point out that linguistic language is to be decentered, not eliminated, and that it should function much like it does in a dream. But I would suggest that the "meaningfulness" or, in Artaud's words, "the psychology" inherent in referential language operates as a factor, not as an addend or accretion. I mean that it is an inseparable aspect of all that it touches, but an entirety of no thing. What we think of as a constative statement is a statement whose gestures indicate that one can take it as true in a certain way that may be traditional in one culture or another. This may function, in some ways, like the noun-verb head of a Chomskyan sentence -- as the entity that other elements modify and by which other elements might be interpreted. Perhaps it may not. But it seems central to human thought that there should be something like a thing or an action that does. Or perhaps a scene. Now, in theater, of course, these things might be established without being named: they can be embodied by actors or the mise en scene.
Now, for writers, an interesting aspect of all this nonverbality is that readers derive visual and aural pictures while reading, and these must play with the continuing text in somewhat similar ways. Jackendoff points out that visual signals are integrated before sentences are completed; by observation, they are included in the syntactic assembly of meaning. This would have to be true to accomodate anything like Austin's speech-acts in any form.
A conclusion? I don't know. But it appears that the various aspects that we think of as context may be combined in various ways and have almost any relation to the language applied to them. In such a case, it need not be the language that fixes feeling in the ways A objects to. Written word has a fixity, yes, but not through being language. Statement has fixity, yes, but that may be undercut by everything in context that may suggest that we not believe the statement.
Altogether, then, language and even written language could have most any place in this. The issue Artaud is really after here seems related to the matter of address. The audience must embody the feelings, the insights, the ideas of the performance -- embody them, live them, whatever: this as A said to Nin. I quote it from memory: "I want to give them the plague so they will ____, and awaken" -- not coincidentally, the lines quoted by Arthur Janov in his second book, The Anatomy of Mental Illness. Artaud searches for feeling in something like Janov's sense, though he doesn't seem to have altogether found it. But I don't want to be reductive in this way. Artaud clearly considers this a social act, which Janov does not, or not in the same sense. (Janov's Primals are intensely internal. They're often triggered by external events, but they're a matter of a person and his or her past, not an interaction with persons present. Artaud presumes something in which persons not only trigger other persons, but in which intellectual insight remains a large part. Also, he imagines this as something that would dissolve or decompose social repressions.
It's hard to work out just how much of Artaud amounts to metaphor, how much is delusion, and how much is literal statement so enormous that one does not immediately grasp it. [I can't get any further now.]
...
In The Theater and Its Double Artaud accomplished his most sustained comprehensible project. One may wish to judge or to experience Artaud in other metiers, but there is some use to grasping him theoretically. For all his enveighing against words and literature, for all his famous psychosis, most all of his writing adopts at least the form and gesture of constative declaration. And The Theater and Its Double is by itself a coherent statement of the position that occupied him from his "Letters to Riviere" to the last days at Rodez.
Finally to confront Artaud as an intellect rather than as an event, rather than as an explosion in one's own mind -------
Never before, when it is life itself that is in question, has there been so much talk of civilization and culture. And there is a curious parallel between this generalized collapse of life at the root of our present demoralization and our concern for a culture which has never been coincident with life, which in fact has been devised to tyrannize over life
. . . What is most important, it seems to me, is not so much to defend a culture whose existence has never kept a man from going hungry, as to extract, from what is called culture, ideas whose compelling force is identical with that of hunger (7).
Let us regard "never kept a man from going hungry" as a rhetorical gesture, if an unfortunate one. The rest stands as a credo differing from most precisely in that it is sane: dreams and images matter from some relation to human need, or they do not matter to humans. While this may sound like tautology, those who spin around in debates over "art for art's sake" or art as sales manoevering routinely slight the obvious consequences. Artaud recognizes this as an error that one may as easily call social, psychological, or formal:
"If confusion is a sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their representation" (7).
Or, later
". . . a cultivated 'civilized' man is regarded as a person instructed in systems, a person who thinks in forms, signs, representations--a monster whose faculty of deriving thoughts from acts, instead of identifying acts with thoughts, is developed to an absurdity" (8).
Leaving aside for the moment the implicit social concerns, this statement attacks the concepts of semiotic reference that grow out of de Saussure and Jakobson, insisting on what elsewhere has been regarded as the contamination of the semiotic system by the referent, by materiality of the text, but also by the biology of the interpreter, of the organism that reads the sign. Note, for instance, how the following relates to other theories:
"If our life lacks brimstone, i.e. a constant magic, it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in considerations of their imagined form instead of being impelled by their force" (8).
With Austin, Artaud situates meaning outside of the words or their enunciation, in the larger context. The perception Artaud describes here involves implied narrators and observers almost after the manner of Genette. He specifically mentions narrative later:
"It is because we have been accustomed for four hundred years, that is since the Renaissance, to a purely descriptive and narrative theater -- storytelling psychology; it is because every possible ingenuity has been exerted in bringing to life on the stage plausible but detached beings, with the spectacle on one side, the public on the other . . . " (76).
The parallel can hardly be seen as accidental. And one might follow this further afield. In the breakdown of the semiotic we have one vision of broad swath of Western aesthetics. The symbolic enters the semiotic, for example. But what's more interesting is that Artaud appears intent on a breakdown of the narrative perception itself.
He gets fairly specific. Take his idea of "The Theater and the Plague," topic of the performance-lecture that Nin describes somewhere in her Journals. In establishing a connection between theater and plague, Artaud tempts one to clinical diagnosis. I had to laugh when he followed it by a citing Augustine's City of God (26): where does one separate the pathological from the historical? But here at least he does seem to maintain a handle on at least his audience's probable disbelief:
"Whatever may be the errors of historians or physicians concerning the plague, I believe we can agree upon the idea of a malady that would be a kind of psychic entity and would not be carried by a virus" (18).
He goes on to write of a spreading not by contagion per se, but by revelation, a revelation involving the disintegration of social and, if one may follow his patterns of extension elsewhere, of psychological and intellectual forms.
This spreading he describes as theater.
To serve this end he proposes a primacy of what he calls mise en scene, which seems to be "everything specifically theatrical, i.e., everything that cannot be expressed in speech, in words, or, if you prefer, everything that is not contained in the dialogue . . . " (37). This extralinguistic "language" requires sensual beauty -- "This language created for the senses must from the outset be concerned with satisfying them" (38) -- and allusion or reference. That is, this "language" is not private or merely concerned with abreacting or catharsis of personal issues, but with something that happens between people, something which can be, if not understood exactly, responded to and integrated. He spends some time on the Balinese shadow theater as an example:
Here is a whole collection of ritual gestures to which we [westerners] do not have the key and which seem to obey extremely precise musical indications, with something more that does not generally belong to mkusic and seems intended to encircle thought, to hound it down and lead it into an inextricable and certain system . . . (57).
"What he sets in motion is the MANIFESTED . . . .
"All of which seems to be an exorcism to make our demons FLOW" (60).
..
A note --
The Balinese theater that Artaud talks about takes place under considerably different circumstances than do postindustrial performances. TThose conditions relate very specifically to the differences in presentations that Artaud writes of.
: Balinese audiences know the stories of the plays before they arrive at the theater. The point of performance is seldom to "tell the story" exactly, but to display a rendition. We experience something like this with a version of a popular song. The interest may come with variations from melody, inflection, or other aspects. These sing against the anticipated form much as variations on an iambic pentameter sing against the anticipated iamb.
Now,
Artaud would reduce the role of words and the specificity of time and place instituted by those words. There's a lot to be said for this. One thinks of the abnegation of a certain referentiality in Mallarme's late work, for instance. Both work for a universality, a generality, and at once a specificity. For the audience's troubles are not that Oedipus does or does not fuck his mother or that Hamlet is to be or to not be, but some abstract or universal pertinent to that and related to their own mothers, their own beings.
However, there remains some necessity for designation of elements, of time and place in some sense, albeit relative. Ancient playwrights had some advantage in this because characters and stories were known by all. Children would have known the stories of Achilles as oral legend, much as our children know of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Were Artaud's production in the Theater of Cruelty to work, it should therefore summon some similar incident. Notably he chose the Conquest of Mexico, a natural event for its visual wildness and violence, which might be susceptible to presentation as gesture.
'T'd seem, then, that this cruelty requires synthesis, that rigor cannot be absolute, or need not be. Nowadays an MTV video by personae who seem to want little more than fast women and pretty cars employ principles that sound radical in Artaud. But A's case isn't made so easily. A's careful to point out that linguistic language is to be decentered, not eliminated, and that it should function much like it does in a dream. But I would suggest that the "meaningfulness" or, in Artaud's words, "the psychology" inherent in referential language operates as a factor, not as an addend or accretion. I mean that it is an inseparable aspect of all that it touches, but an entirety of no thing. What we think of as a constative statement is a statement whose gestures indicate that one can take it as true in a certain way that may be traditional in one culture or another. This may function, in some ways, like the noun-verb head of a Chomskyan sentence -- as the entity that other elements modify and by which other elements might be interpreted. Perhaps it may not. But it seems central to human thought that there should be something like a thing or an action that does. Or perhaps a scene. Now, in theater, of course, these things might be established without being named: they can be embodied by actors or the mise en scene.
Now, for writers, an interesting aspect of all this nonverbality is that readers derive visual and aural pictures while reading, and these must play with the continuing text in somewhat similar ways. Jackendoff points out that visual signals are integrated before sentences are completed; by observation, they are included in the syntactic assembly of meaning. This would have to be true to accomodate anything like Austin's speech-acts in any form.
A conclusion? I don't know. But it appears that the various aspects that we think of as context may be combined in various ways and have almost any relation to the language applied to them. In such a case, it need not be the language that fixes feeling in the ways A objects to. Written word has a fixity, yes, but not through being language. Statement has fixity, yes, but that may be undercut by everything in context that may suggest that we not believe the statement.
Altogether, then, language and even written language could have most any place in this. The issue Artaud is really after here seems related to the matter of address. The audience must embody the feelings, the insights, the ideas of the performance -- embody them, live them, whatever: this as A said to Nin. I quote it from memory: "I want to give them the plague so they will ____, and awaken" -- not coincidentally, the lines quoted by Arthur Janov in his second book, The Anatomy of Mental Illness. Artaud searches for feeling in something like Janov's sense, though he doesn't seem to have altogether found it. But I don't want to be reductive in this way. Artaud clearly considers this a social act, which Janov does not, or not in the same sense. (Janov's Primals are intensely internal. They're often triggered by external events, but they're a matter of a person and his or her past, not an interaction with persons present. Artaud presumes something in which persons not only trigger other persons, but in which intellectual insight remains a large part. Also, he imagines this as something that would dissolve or decompose social repressions.
It's hard to work out just how much of Artaud amounts to metaphor, how much is delusion, and how much is literal statement so enormous that one does not immediately grasp it. [I can't get any further now.]
...
In The Theater and Its Double Artaud accomplished his most sustained comprehensible project. One may wish to judge or to experience Artaud in other metiers, but there is some use to grasping him theoretically. For all his enveighing against words and literature, for all his famous psychosis, most all of his writing adopts at least the form and gesture of constative declaration. And The Theater and Its Double is by itself a coherent statement of the position that occupied him from his "Letters to Riviere" to the last days at Rodez.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Michel Foucault
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 3 Vols. Vol I: An Introduction. NYC: Vintage, 1990.
One wants to quibble: this is apt, but a little loose. It's not apt to be the sodomite but sodomy that's the "temporary aberration." A major aspect of prejudice against homosexuals involves considering it unnatural; part of that involves considering it non-genetic--a rather absurd discussion, as most of the nature-nurture debate always was, but an interesting one: it's clearly designed to allow peer-groups to regard homosexuality as at once a moral choice freely and consciously taken, unnatural, and a state of being. One has to sympathize with Foucault's choice of species, inaccurate as it is, because it renders something of the habit families have of disowning their homosexual offspring.
Deserves examination -- the actions and institutions Foucault names are extensively involved in sadomasochistic games and fantasies he talks about, so it would be ridiculous to suppose the related feelings would not be regularly invoked during their administration. Furthermore, since the violence administered by such institutions is not pretend even when the motives may be, the institutions must propagate sadomasochism throughout any of the population directly impacted. But when he insists that "These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45), he denies the reality of castigation and ostracism. Oppression appears as only a game because repressors and oppressors game each other; oppression becomes hallucination because its victims become crazy.
There follows a rather amusing perspective on, among other things, Freudianism.
Foucault continues Freud's sexualization of children's desire for their parents, sadly. One can, of course, consider any most any desire sexual or not simply by redefining the area of human interaction that one calls sex<./em>. But tabus around heterosexual copulation have practical motives, so many will continue in some form. To call prepubescent sensuality sexual even though it does not constitute a desire for copulation or orgasm blurs important distinctions and invites the repression Foucault seems to speak against.
I find Arthur Janov's response to this set of ideas more useful: "The polymorphous is the infant's; the perverse is Freud's." With respect to infants, I'd say that the sexuality belongs strictly to Foucault. Freud may have only been able to conceive of the intensity of infantile sexuality and desire in ways that relate to sex, a word used to describe copulation, but this reflects more on the Dr. than the patient.
By the same token, Foucault's observation that the powerful project "forbidden desire" onto children describes rather neatly the psychoanalytic ideologies that have grown out of Freud's retreat from trauma theory.
Interesting, but most of us actually do want to copulate with the opposite sex and to do so in ways that actually do tend to relate to reproduction even when one tries to avoid that. A heterosexual male finds himself much more enslaved to entrenched social power because he creates children, but to presume he does so because the church discourages buggery and circle-jerks seems to follow a minority case.
The minority case does certainly exist, however, and this appraisal of the power relations may be worthy.
Foucault's working hypothesis (see 69), that 19th century Europe did not repress but objectify and examine sex, runs somewhat skew to positions Foucault has spent much of his introduction criticizing. The social insistence (of some) that we examine "our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness" (69) IS the repression: it replaces ,em>feel with to know about.
"Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed form the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (43).
One wants to quibble: this is apt, but a little loose. It's not apt to be the sodomite but sodomy that's the "temporary aberration." A major aspect of prejudice against homosexuals involves considering it unnatural; part of that involves considering it non-genetic--a rather absurd discussion, as most of the nature-nurture debate always was, but an interesting one: it's clearly designed to allow peer-groups to regard homosexuality as at once a moral choice freely and consciously taken, unnatural, and a state of being. One has to sympathize with Foucault's choice of species, inaccurate as it is, because it renders something of the habit families have of disowning their homosexual offspring.
"The medical examination, the psychiatric investigation, the pedagogical report, and family controls may have the overall and apparent objective of saying no to all wayward or unproductive sexualities, but the fact is that they function as mechanisms with a double impetus: pleasure and power. The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out, palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, a pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power . . . " (45).
Deserves examination -- the actions and institutions Foucault names are extensively involved in sadomasochistic games and fantasies he talks about, so it would be ridiculous to suppose the related feelings would not be regularly invoked during their administration. Furthermore, since the violence administered by such institutions is not pretend even when the motives may be, the institutions must propagate sadomasochism throughout any of the population directly impacted. But when he insists that "These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries not to be crossed but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45), he denies the reality of castigation and ostracism. Oppression appears as only a game because repressors and oppressors game each other; oppression becomes hallucination because its victims become crazy.
There follows a rather amusing perspective on, among other things, Freudianism.
" . . . the family, even when brought down ot its smallest dimension, a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities. To reduce them to the conjugal relationship, and then to project the latter, in the form of a forbidden desire, onto the children, cannot account for this apparatus which, in relation to these sensualities, was less a principle of inhibition than an inciting and multiplying mechanism" (46).
Foucault continues Freud's sexualization of children's desire for their parents, sadly. One can, of course, consider any most any desire sexual or not simply by redefining the area of human interaction that one calls sex<./em>. But tabus around heterosexual copulation have practical motives, so many will continue in some form. To call prepubescent sensuality sexual even though it does not constitute a desire for copulation or orgasm blurs important distinctions and invites the repression Foucault seems to speak against.
I find Arthur Janov's response to this set of ideas more useful: "The polymorphous is the infant's; the perverse is Freud's." With respect to infants, I'd say that the sexuality belongs strictly to Foucault. Freud may have only been able to conceive of the intensity of infantile sexuality and desire in ways that relate to sex, a word used to describe copulation, but this reflects more on the Dr. than the patient.
By the same token, Foucault's observation that the powerful project "forbidden desire" onto children describes rather neatly the psychoanalytic ideologies that have grown out of Freud's retreat from trauma theory.
" . . . it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated odes of conduct" (48).
Interesting, but most of us actually do want to copulate with the opposite sex and to do so in ways that actually do tend to relate to reproduction even when one tries to avoid that. A heterosexual male finds himself much more enslaved to entrenched social power because he creates children, but to presume he does so because the church discourages buggery and circle-jerks seems to follow a minority case.
The minority case does certainly exist, however, and this appraisal of the power relations may be worthy.
Foucault's working hypothesis (see 69), that 19th century Europe did not repress but objectify and examine sex, runs somewhat skew to positions Foucault has spent much of his introduction criticizing. The social insistence (of some) that we examine "our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness" (69) IS the repression: it replaces ,em>feel with to know about.
Julia Kristeva
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Margaret Waller, Trans. NYC: Columbia, 1984.
Part I: The Semiotic and the Symbolic.
In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva lays out a theory of articulations between semiotic | syntactic and semantic | extralinguistic operations related to language use. At the same time, she moves to conciliate formal and politically motivated theories, name-dropping a good chunk of the 20th Century. The result seems pretty coherent, given what she attempts, but one must be ready to let the borrowed words and phrases reform considerably to suit their new environment.
She begins by assaulting the sometimes-presumed disconnection between the linguistic or semiotic and the extralinguistic.
Writing in the 1970's, K's recent probably refers to discussions of Chomsky's explorations of surface structure and resulting intimations of UG. One notes the use of Chomsky's phrase "deep structures." She goes on to corral the various explanations into two camps:
The rough pair of groups seems more than pragmatic; language is subjectively and neurologically a connection between at least two nodes. Perhaps less inevitably, she bases descriptions of extralinguistic processes in the vocabulary of Freud and Lacan, getting therefrom a "facilitation" and a "structuring disposition of drives" and "so-called primary processes." Thus:
So she does turn the references to new ends. Chora is central here, and she goes on to describe it variously over several pages, as one does with things that defy definition.
So, while she traces the term chora to Plato's Timaeus, her descriptions draw on a broad range of 20th Century thought. It's worth noting that her "metonymy and metaphor" here is almost surely drawn from Roman Jakobson, whose metonymy is ideosyncratic.
In describing the symbolic, the language becomes heavily Freudian and Lacanian, and the observations more questionable:
"We shall distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the real of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions" (43).
So the semiotic becomes, perhaps, expression, a relative of the surrealists' unconscious or Grotowski's organic actions? But this seems inverted; it's unlikely the point of what has been a remarkably perceptive synthesis.
"Thus we veiw the thetic phase--the positing of the imago, castration, and the positing of semiotic motility--as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the precondition for the positing of language. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic" (48).
Of course, we're head-deep in Lacan here -- the imago from "The Mirror Phase, the castration which amounts to the discovery that Mama's got a mind of her own and cannot altogether be pleased, that one must be wise rather than whole. She is actually going somewhere here. By this break that separates the world into objects, subjects, and actions appreciable as various, one gets thesis and proposition, with the corresponding repression or suppression of alternate sensuality, alternate POV's and so forth.
Kristeva's partly borrowed construction needn't be rejected outright, but inherits problems from Freud and Lacan, who also conflate types of repression/suppression. Subjectively, at least two phenomena of repression need be explained. One is casual and fairly constant. The neurosystem passes impression along, but the process is lossy. That is, some of the impressions that our sensory equipment registers get left out of the dynamic worldview we call I. We drop part of each eye's processing to create a single seamless visual field; we forget the trailing shadow-hands behind a moving hand. When stimuli subside after such experience, subsystems seem to return to firing mildly in stochaic patterns (think of the impressions of white-noise that accompany silence, or the visual field after some time in near-absolute darkness, and the relation of such things to fuzz-tone on an electric bass or static on a TV station). The impressions dissipate without applying continued pressure on the system towards their processing or coherence. On the other hand, some experience does not integrate not because it is too faint, unexplanatory, or insignificant, but because it is intense and signicant or explanatory of something that HURTS.
The distinctions between these are more than casual. The construction is part of Freud's rejection of his original trauma-based theory of neurosis, and his acceptance of repression in general as normative. In practice, the newborn baby may just as easily recognize that Mother is a different being because she moves in a way that nothing in the womb did; she appears as alternately continuous and discontinuous with the rest of the visual field. It's surely one remarkable observation among many, but there's no reason one couldn't equally build a theory around the rush of oxygen into the lungs, and the infant's appreciation of that.
These points made, the essential basis she needs for her analysis of language still seems intact. One way or another one does break sense into category. Categories do misrepresent and do tend to become fixed as part of perceptive and thoughtful systems that work to defend themselves in ways vaguely conmensurate with social hierarchies. Ergo, ipso facto, and sin qua non, we get the following:
So, art follows out and exposes difficulties in les ideés fixés, including, probably uncoincidentally, notions of self and impressions of the perceptive processes. But for K, this all has implications for the forms of parole themselves:
The connections to Jakobson and Schklovski run deep here, but let's try to rephrase. We have categories that seem to reside, at least in part, in semantics or in metaphor and its appropriation and ordering of meta or extra-linguistic phenomena, including chora and self-concepts. Assembling the semantic in syntactic units may force re-evaluation of the semantic units themselves, with reverberations through the entire semantic system. And not that K has said this is "language which binds together the social unit," so the results are also ultimately political:
My primary interest in these passages has to do with the ways they relate to notions of closed and open forms in and around the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. My idea is that interacting with what Kristeva calls the thetic requires a certain antithetic closure, that what's primary and desirable is not the open form of the writing per se, but the open reading that may derive thereof. Now, in Kristeva's version, the challenge that opens the thetic requires specifically metonymic (in Jakobson's sense) or syntactic operations--involves syntax, structure, and continuity. Of course, since Kristeva is actually talking about discontinuities, it's hopefully clear that this does not mean a return to a closed form, but an examination of formations of challenge.
Now, let me sketch (hopefully quickly!) one way to use these ideas in a model of change in literary activity based on social and technological change:
Part I: The Semiotic and the Symbolic.
In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva lays out a theory of articulations between semiotic | syntactic and semantic | extralinguistic operations related to language use. At the same time, she moves to conciliate formal and politically motivated theories, name-dropping a good chunk of the 20th Century. The result seems pretty coherent, given what she attempts, but one must be ready to let the borrowed words and phrases reform considerably to suit their new environment.
She begins by assaulting the sometimes-presumed disconnection between the linguistic or semiotic and the extralinguistic.
"To the extent that it is assumed by a subject who 'means,' (bedeuten), language has 'deep structures' that articulate categories. These categories are semantic (as in the semantic fields introduced by recent developments in generative grammar), logical (modality relations, etc.), and intercommunicational (those which Searle called 'speech acts' seen as bestowers of meaning). But they may also be related to historical linguistic changes, thereby joining diachrony with synchrony. In tis way, through the subject wo 'means,' linguistics is opened to all popssible categories and thus to philosophy, which linguistics hadthought it would be able to escape" (23).
Writing in the 1970's, K's recent probably refers to discussions of Chomsky's explorations of surface structure and resulting intimations of UG. One notes the use of Chomsky's phrase "deep structures." She goes on to corral the various explanations into two camps:
. . . the two trends just mentioned designate two modalities of what is, for us, the same signifying process. We shall call the first "the semiotic" and the second "the symbolic."
The rough pair of groups seems more than pragmatic; language is subjectively and neurologically a connection between at least two nodes. Perhaps less inevitably, she bases descriptions of extralinguistic processes in the vocabulary of Freud and Lacan, getting therefrom a "facilitation" and a "structuring disposition of drives" and "so-called primary processes." Thus:
Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body--always already involved in a semiotic process--by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are 'energy'charges as well as 'psychical' marks, constitute what we all a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movementas it is regulated" (This & the above on 25).
So she does turn the references to new ends. Chora is central here, and she goes on to describe it variously over several pages, as one does with things that defy definition.
Our discourse--all discourse-- moves with and against the chora in te sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitelyposited: as a resulte, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can never give it an axiomatic form" (26)
"The chora is a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic" (26).
"The mother's body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora (27).
"Here we find the principles of metonymy and metaphor indissociable from the drive economy underlying them" (28).
So, while she traces the term chora to Plato's Timaeus, her descriptions draw on a broad range of 20th Century thought. It's worth noting that her "metonymy and metaphor" here is almost surely drawn from Roman Jakobson, whose metonymy is ideosyncratic.
In describing the symbolic, the language becomes heavily Freudian and Lacanian, and the observations more questionable:
"We shall distinguish the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the real of signification, which is always that of a proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions" (43).
So the semiotic becomes, perhaps, expression, a relative of the surrealists' unconscious or Grotowski's organic actions? But this seems inverted; it's unlikely the point of what has been a remarkably perceptive synthesis.
"Thus we veiw the thetic phase--the positing of the imago, castration, and the positing of semiotic motility--as the place of the Other, as the precondition for signification, i.e., the precondition for the positing of language. The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic" (48).
Of course, we're head-deep in Lacan here -- the imago from "The Mirror Phase, the castration which amounts to the discovery that Mama's got a mind of her own and cannot altogether be pleased, that one must be wise rather than whole. She is actually going somewhere here. By this break that separates the world into objects, subjects, and actions appreciable as various, one gets thesis and proposition, with the corresponding repression or suppression of alternate sensuality, alternate POV's and so forth.
Kristeva's partly borrowed construction needn't be rejected outright, but inherits problems from Freud and Lacan, who also conflate types of repression/suppression. Subjectively, at least two phenomena of repression need be explained. One is casual and fairly constant. The neurosystem passes impression along, but the process is lossy. That is, some of the impressions that our sensory equipment registers get left out of the dynamic worldview we call I. We drop part of each eye's processing to create a single seamless visual field; we forget the trailing shadow-hands behind a moving hand. When stimuli subside after such experience, subsystems seem to return to firing mildly in stochaic patterns (think of the impressions of white-noise that accompany silence, or the visual field after some time in near-absolute darkness, and the relation of such things to fuzz-tone on an electric bass or static on a TV station). The impressions dissipate without applying continued pressure on the system towards their processing or coherence. On the other hand, some experience does not integrate not because it is too faint, unexplanatory, or insignificant, but because it is intense and signicant or explanatory of something that HURTS.
The distinctions between these are more than casual. The construction is part of Freud's rejection of his original trauma-based theory of neurosis, and his acceptance of repression in general as normative. In practice, the newborn baby may just as easily recognize that Mother is a different being because she moves in a way that nothing in the womb did; she appears as alternately continuous and discontinuous with the rest of the visual field. It's surely one remarkable observation among many, but there's no reason one couldn't equally build a theory around the rush of oxygen into the lungs, and the infant's appreciation of that.
These points made, the essential basis she needs for her analysis of language still seems intact. One way or another one does break sense into category. Categories do misrepresent and do tend to become fixed as part of perceptive and thoughtful systems that work to defend themselves in ways vaguely conmensurate with social hierarchies. Ergo, ipso facto, and sin qua non, we get the following:
Poetic mimesis maintains and transgressses thetic unicity by making it undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing ito the thetic position the stream of semiotic drives and making it signify. This telescoping of the symbolic and the semiotic pluralizes signification or denotation: it pluralizes the theitic doxy. Mimesis and poetic language do not therefore disavow the thetic. Instead they go throu its truth (signification, denotation) to tell the 'truth' about it" (60).
So, art follows out and exposes difficulties in les ideés fixés, including, probably uncoincidentally, notions of self and impressions of the perceptive processes. But for K, this all has implications for the forms of parole themselves:
Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathematics, for example) or literature, what models the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic. This is particularly evident in poetic language since, for there to be a trasgression of the symbolic there must be and irruption of the drives in the universal signifying order, that of 'natural' language which binds together the social unit. . . . The semiotic's breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice can probably be ascribed to the very unstable yet forceful positing of the thetic" (62).
The connections to Jakobson and Schklovski run deep here, but let's try to rephrase. We have categories that seem to reside, at least in part, in semantics or in metaphor and its appropriation and ordering of meta or extra-linguistic phenomena, including chora and self-concepts. Assembling the semantic in syntactic units may force re-evaluation of the semantic units themselves, with reverberations through the entire semantic system. And not that K has said this is "language which binds together the social unit," so the results are also ultimately political:
To penetrate the era [of the French Revolution and Second Empire] poetry had to disturb the logic that dominated the social order and do so through that logic itself, but assuming and unraveling, its positions, its syntheses, and hence the ideologies it controls" (83).
My primary interest in these passages has to do with the ways they relate to notions of closed and open forms in and around the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. My idea is that interacting with what Kristeva calls the thetic requires a certain antithetic closure, that what's primary and desirable is not the open form of the writing per se, but the open reading that may derive thereof. Now, in Kristeva's version, the challenge that opens the thetic requires specifically metonymic (in Jakobson's sense) or syntactic operations--involves syntax, structure, and continuity. Of course, since Kristeva is actually talking about discontinuities, it's hopefully clear that this does not mean a return to a closed form, but an examination of formations of challenge.
Now, let me sketch (hopefully quickly!) one way to use these ideas in a model of change in literary activity based on social and technological change:
- Chora or vouloire-dire precipitates parole. That is, some drive to speak, express, communicate, or think happens irrespective of the form or the medium in which the expression may take place. This comes from something like the objections (in Toulmin's sense) that the speaking subject has with its perception of existent ideas or situations. Therefore, there's some sense of something like antithesis involved. But this state is relatively fixed, tightly related to the basic nature of the speaking subject, distinct primarily by virtue of the varying historical situation and context.
- The parole takes on a form, the form that the subject finds appropriate given the circumstances that it finds. These circumstances will include which language is spoken, in what medium the message will be delivered, the subject's appraisal of the listener, and so forth.
- If chora does not change, and the external media does -- from speech to writing, from scrolls to codices to radio to television and so on -- then the form must change in some corresponding way.
Maurice Blanchot and Spatiality of Language
Blanchot, Maurice. "The Book to Come" (141-159). The Book of the Book.
Wow. (Though let's call it depth and scale.)
Wow. What basis can he have had for this in that year?
. . . language is a system of highly complex spatial relations whose singularity neither ordinary geometrical space nor the space of everday life allows us to appreciate. Nothing is created and no discourse can be creative except through the preliminary exploration of the totally vacant region where language, before it is a set of given words, is a silent process of correspondences, or a rhythmic scansion of life. Words exists only to signify the area of correspondence, the space onto which they are projected and which, no sooner signified, furls and unfurls, never being where it is. Poetic space, the space and 'outcome' of language, never exists like an object but is spaced out and scattered . . . .
". . . Mallarmé restores depth to this space" (150).
Wow. (Though let's call it depth and scale.)
Wow. What basis can he have had for this in that year?
Jerome Rothenberg, King of Anthologizers
Rothenberg's anthologies show poetic composition in themselves. The Book of the Book, with its reflexive examination of this art that Rothenberg clearly knows so well, is no exception.
There follow responses to a few of the essays.
Karl Young. "Notation and the Art of Reading." pp25-49.
Young notes use of "painted books" for memorization in largely oral societies:
Here Young oddly retains a post-Gutenberg sense of knowledge while pointing out the difference in primarily oral culture. As book readers, we feel we either know of Tezcatlipoca or we do not, and Young assumes the same of the Azteca students. But any large illustrations of Tezcatlipoca would naturally enough reflect the written glyphs. In this way, their gods were their words, just as YHWH for the Hebrew scribes, built of aspect and characteristic, entities of spirit and abstraction, intracerebral.
Writing about England in 1620, Young describes the difference in literary form necessitated by different printing and distribution:
Another aspect of early typography may have cognitive implications:
Another aspect of this were interchangeable letters and variant punctuation:
Here 's meat for another interpretation, though. Clearly these ambiguities could be used and preserved when they did not signal aural changes. These constitute visual inflections, and by extension, the variant spellings might as easily be taken as visual inflections as well -- particularly since they are not literally aural. I wonder at the resistance of many critics to what seems like the obvious recognition that script one reads is at least as visual as aural. After all, human reception of oral language is also significantly inflected by the visual and, for the speaker, the kinetic. It's altogether typical that Young can go on to discuss Donne's "dramatic gestures" during sermons, apparently without any such relationship occurring to him. The first discussion I have seen of what seems like an obvious fact comes in Jackendoff's recent book (see previous comment here).
Michael Davidson, "The Material Page," (71-79).
Of course, an even bigger jump in this came in the 1980's, with photographic reproduction made relatively cheaply.
Blanchot, Maurice. "The Book to Come" (141-159).
Wow. (Though let's call it depth and scale.)
I wonder whether Blanchot can possibly gather the meaning of what he wrote in that year. I suppose otherwise I would have to consider it an accident that he would write it, though.
Tedlock, Dennis. "Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability."
Compare this with the comments on John Donne and variable letters in English printing circa Donne and Milton. The effect is similar but far more obvious and probably more extensive in the glyphs. There's a question of visual inflection. In the Mayan texts at the very least, the distinct visuality is clearly and quite specifically allusive, as Tedlock's article (257-277) discusses at length.
There follow responses to a few of the essays.
Karl Young. "Notation and the Art of Reading." pp25-49.
Young notes use of "painted books" for memorization in largely oral societies:
"As teaching tools the books were probably used to engrave myth and history, in a form that could be internally visualized . . . . Their purpose, then, was not to remind readers of things they might otherwise forget, but to help make those things unforgettable . . . . The image of the god Tezcatlipoca would not be in a book to tell students of his existence -- there all were absolutely sure of his presence -- but to fix a concrete image of him in their minds . . ." (27).
Here Young oddly retains a post-Gutenberg sense of knowledge while pointing out the difference in primarily oral culture. As book readers, we feel we either know of Tezcatlipoca or we do not, and Young assumes the same of the Azteca students. But any large illustrations of Tezcatlipoca would naturally enough reflect the written glyphs. In this way, their gods were their words, just as YHWH for the Hebrew scribes, built of aspect and characteristic, entities of spirit and abstraction, intracerebral.
Writing about England in 1620, Young describes the difference in literary form necessitated by different printing and distribution:
The Faerie Queene had become a classic by 1620, recalling an epoch that seemed glorious, however painful it may have been to those actively involved in its political events. The reader may well have heard a good deal of the book read or recited before he bought it and may have already committed some passages to memory -- he may even have used passages as maxims, things he turned over in his mind when making decisions or trying to make sense out of the world. The book he had purchased would probably not be read through and shelved (though some ostentatious buyers might keep a copy on their shelves just for show). It would be used as a script for reading to family and friends, as something to ponder over in private, or as something to commit, in part, to memory (which was still considered one of the basic arts of life). The text is admirably suited to these uses: the narrative allegory could be listened to with varying degrees of attentiveness, its regular rhythms and graceful phrases would be easy to read aloud; and the regular stanzas and rhymes would make passages relatively easy to memorize. Even its inconsistencies and obscurities -- unintentional results of composition in installments -- would make it something to reread many times. When reading the book in private, it would be more a script to declaim than a source os silent information, conveyed from page to brain by an easy activity of the eyes" (36).
Another aspect of early typography may have cognitive implications:
For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer's intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation" (37).
Another aspect of this were interchangeable letters and variant punctuation:
The use of the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and when Donne used a word like 'worlds' he may have primarily meant 'world's,' but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning: multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno's notion of infinite worlds). Letters like 'I' and 'J' or 'U' and 'V' were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious speech" (38).
Here 's meat for another interpretation, though. Clearly these ambiguities could be used and preserved when they did not signal aural changes. These constitute visual inflections, and by extension, the variant spellings might as easily be taken as visual inflections as well -- particularly since they are not literally aural. I wonder at the resistance of many critics to what seems like the obvious recognition that script one reads is at least as visual as aural. After all, human reception of oral language is also significantly inflected by the visual and, for the speaker, the kinetic. It's altogether typical that Young can go on to discuss Donne's "dramatic gestures" during sermons, apparently without any such relationship occurring to him. The first discussion I have seen of what seems like an obvious fact comes in Jackendoff's recent book (see previous comment here).
Michael Davidson, "The Material Page," (71-79).
"Much of the impetus for calligraphic and concretist experimentation was gained by the increased use of the typewriter and the flexibility of new forms of movable type. Modernist poets such as Pound, Williams, and cummings saw the advantages of this technology in gaining control over their medium. Prior to the modern period, poets had to rely on the skills (and whims) of copy editors and typesetters in interpreting their textual intentions. Modernists poets now could uses new print technologies to indicate exactly what values of spacing and word placement they intended" (74).
Of course, an even bigger jump in this came in the 1980's, with photographic reproduction made relatively cheaply.
Blanchot, Maurice. "The Book to Come" (141-159).
. . . language is a system of highly complex spatial relations whose singularity neither ordinary geometrical space nor the space of everyday life allows us to appreciate. Nothing is created and no discourse can be creative except through the preliminary exploration of the totally vacant region where language, before it is a set of given words, is a silent process of correspondences, or a rhythmic scansion of life. Words exists only to signify the area of correspondence, the space onto which they are projected and which, no sooner signified, furls and unfurls, never being where it is. Poetic space, the space and 'outcome' of language, never exists like an object but is spaced out and scattered . . . .
". . . Mallarmé restores depth to this space" (150).
Wow. (Though let's call it depth and scale.)
I wonder whether Blanchot can possibly gather the meaning of what he wrote in that year. I suppose otherwise I would have to consider it an accident that he would write it, though.
Tedlock, Dennis. "Towards a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatability."
Mayan signs (like Egyptian and Chinese signs) are abundant, providing multiple ways of spelling any given syllable or word. This kind of script is reader-friendly in its own particular ways, permitting the annotation of a word sign with a syllabic hint as to its pronunciation, or permitting a reader to recall a forgotten sign or learn a new one by comparing two different spellings in places where the text would seem to demand the same world . . . . Just as a Mayan poem reminds the hearer that different words can be sued with reference to the same object, so a Mayan text reminds the reader that different signs can be used for the same syllables or words" (268).
Compare this with the comments on John Donne and variable letters in English printing circa Donne and Milton. The effect is similar but far more obvious and probably more extensive in the glyphs. There's a question of visual inflection. In the Mayan texts at the very least, the distinct visuality is clearly and quite specifically allusive, as Tedlock's article (257-277) discusses at length.
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