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.

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.

Frege, Fragments, Fregments

Frege, Gottlieb. "On Sense and Meaning." Critical Theory Since 1965 Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: U Fla, 1986.

I get a different vision of the relation of sentence and fragment as I read Frege on "subordinate sentences or clauses," (630). For all I know, he may have intended to refer to subordinate clauses in both cases, but the sudden recognition that of course certain sentences are subordinate to others made me extend ideas about how syntax crosses the so-called full stop.

Comp students have troubles with sentences in part because sentences in print don't operate exactly like sentences in speech. Those of us who write fluently may presume binary oppositions for ideas less oppositionally represented in speech. For instance, take the absolute nature of the period. Comp profs speak as though no information were carried over between sentences, or perhaps as though nothing in one sentence should determine the interpretation or at least the predication of the next. Of course, on examination, this is not at all true. Since it is not, the "incompleteness" of a fragment has to be relative.

As an aside, check Samuel Beckett's Nohow On, particularly the central of the three narratives, for the use of fragments. It's interesting to see the evolution of Beckett's work from the early items from the standard punctuation of the early work through the famous so-called (but NOT by Beckett himself) Trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, wherein the comma seems to drop off SB's keyboard; to How It Is which is without punctuation; to Nohow On and the last narratives, which often isolate predicative units from modifiers that can apply to various predicative units. It's a study: he does almost the identical thing in slightly more refined and compressed ways as time goes on. And he keeps at it over 50 years or so.

Even in standard writing, pronoun and noun-related things cross over period ends; they more often stop at paragraph ends in exposition. As I continue my readings I find that they frequently do not in narratives, particularly long, fluid, flowing narratives with a high level of closure and complex modification of topic, like Henry James or Edith Wharton.

Many aural constructions, by contrast, function on a kind of apposition. Cormac McCarthy would have some examples in print -- the predicates will hang because the subject, most often the focalizing character, has been previously described. Likewise one sometimes finds noun phrases with verbs implied or appositive to a prior sentence-object. This does something interesting with the articulation of that phrase itself. Because it's apparently detached from adjacent forms, it becomes more attached to the larger flow of language around it. The reader must take cues from the paragraphing or presumed content and make decisions about how the modification-subordinations would be grouped.

Kristeva has written something similar of Lous Ferdinand Celine's Castle to Castle -- a still better or at least more flagrant example, now that I think of it. Granted, most of these can be described more appropriately by using different punctuation, typically colons or dashes, which get underused in Celine and in naive writing as well, at least by academic standards. Celine uses elipses frequently, in his later works almost constantly, to punctuate his narrative. In that way he designates some kind of phrase boundaries without commiting himself to a certain set of grammatical relations between phrases.

Another example of a very different character would be the continuum of so-called dashes in Dickinson.

I want to see how this happens in ASL -- American Sign Language as used by the deaf -- specifically, what constitutes the end of a sentence, and to what extent it resembles writing and to what extent it resembles speech.

Longinus

Longinus shrinks and shrink-wraps Aristotle. Where Aristotle attempts to describe living literature, pressing upon it form and category and not unmindful of the violation, Longinus prescribes. Those wishing a good critical review of Aristotle's strictures (something that bears quite directly upon any practical use of Longinus' theories) might check out J. Hillis Miller's Reading Narrative, which methodically pries apart Aristotle's readings of Homer and, particularly Sophocles. Miller doesn't answer all the questions he raises, but then, doing so may take some time.

Meanwhile, what we have at least thought we were doing writing fiction and drama has as much to do with Aristotle and Longinus as just about anybody.

Longinus grants five principles of sublime art, most of which are moderately self-explanatory as far as he investigates them:

1. Conception of "high" idea. He does conflate "high" both with selfless and with social status, though he seems most concerned with the requirement to see outside of one's POV. The gesture feels like Kant's more extensively articulated descriptions in A Critique of Judgment.
2. Passion.
3. Figure -- He divides these into figures of thought and figures of expression, apparently but not explicitly regarding these as separable even while granting thought a figure.
4. Diction
5. Elevation.
* ability to perceive beyond individual perspective
* even under duress
* amplification -- by which he seems to mean something like what writing primers call parallel structure. He gives Demosthenes' reliance on parallel structure as occurring most when listeners are to be "most enthralled" (83). I suspect if one thinks of MLK, that's a good comparison. He goes on about Cicero:

"The profusion of Cicero is in place where the hearer must be flooded with words, for it is appropriate to the treatment of commonplaces, and to perorations for the most part and digressions, and to all descriptive and declamatory passages, and to writings on history and natural science, and to many oher departments of literature" (83)

As the flood of words fits the common, so the channeled words with repetition, with alignment of sensual details, fits the exalted, the noble, the sublime -- a rather nifty observation, however one may want to play with dichotomies of high and low. And I think the analysis gains from his treating fictional and nonfictional, poetic and rhetorical discourse within the same rubric.

He holds amplification attainable in part by the implementation of various techniques:

EMULATION of previous poets. Attitudes about copying have changed vastly with the refinement of systems of production and distribution of texts. For a medieval person to criticize the copying of a text would be like somone criticizing Olivier for copying Shakespeare because he played Hamlet. For more on this, Ong, Walter, especially Orality and Literacy. Jerzy Grotowsky had related observations on the differences between performers from literate and pre-literate cultures, but I'm not certain he ever got them into writing. I intend to go back through the one collection I have seen of his work:

Grotwski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuan, -- I'm not sure what year.

IMAGES -- ". . . the design is enthrallment". He uses an example by Demosthenes to indicate that image must correspond to argument, an issue of qualifications in a sense almost like Stephen Toulmin's, although not articulated in detail.

WORDS WITHOUT CONNECTING LINKS. He gives an example from Xenophon, but misunderstands it, if I may judge by the translation: "'Locking their shields,' says Xenophon,'they thrust fought slew fell.'" He describes the urgency created by the rush of words, but neglects the logical distinction: these seem to become, in a sense, one action. They move a step closer to being hyphenate. There's a suggestion, then, not only of rush, but of a lack of intervening reflection. Altogether it's a fine observation, and deserves more attention.

For examples, see the following:

1) Nakell, Martin. Two Fields that Face and Mirror Each Other, which makes frequent successful use of the form. Nakell seems abundantly aware of both the effects on intensity and the warps of logic involved.

2) Kristeva, Julia. "From One Castle to the Other." I don't recall which collection this is in, but she considers L.F. Celine's obtrusive swearing and elipses as dissociating elements from sentence syntax, thereby, she claims, slamming them directly into the syntagma. There's a natural ground here for reflections on the shifts of syntax and signification within the sentence as controlled by factors outside the sentence itself.

3) The Objectivist poets, with their concern with the "little words." One has to dig for this, but I'd go through George Oppen and Louis Zukovsky particularly, and notice the play with (and without!) prepositions and articles.

4) Ginsberg does this and seems to do it more in his best work, although I'd argue that the effect seems different than that which Longinus describes. He seems to associate this with the "lengthening of the line in American Poetry" that he discusses frequently. In some interview, Ginsberg says he finds connection more interesting and powerful than disconnection. In his classes at Naropa (some are available on mp3, as are a lot of other wonderful things, on the Naropa Website) he seems extensively concerned with relations between this kind of diction and breath and Charles Olsen's "Projective Verse" and a relation to Buddhism.

INVERSIONS - Longinus claims that inversions make for intensity. Go figure. Perhaps Celine's interjections or Dickinson's repeated pauses might be construed as a positive example of this. But one can as easily posit the urbane inversions of John Milton or Henry James as counterexamples. On the other hand, one wonders whether Longinus is not taking a different view of intensity itself.

* REPETITIONS - He names this separately from the parallelism above, but gives little reason for the distinction
* DIALOG - cites the enhanced immediacy as opposed to narrative.
* 3RD PERSON NARRATOR ASSUMES 1ST PERSON, PAST BECOMES PRESENT.
* PERIPHRASIS = Contemporary "making strange"
* METAPHORS he treats separately from images. Says little of it, as though the question were whether to use them, not how they function or differences between them.
* HYPERBOLE - he doesn't really describe this.

ELEMENT 5 - ARRANGEMENT OF WORDS IN A CERTAIN ORDER -- In this he recognizes sublimity an effect of syntax or syntagm, of arrangement:

"So the constitutents of grandeur, when separated from one another, carry with them sublimity in distraction and when further encircled in a chain of harmony they become sonorous by their very rotundity; and in periods sublimity is, as it were, a contribution made by a multitude" (96 Hazard Adams).