Saturday, July 7, 2007
Inflections
The articulations of inflection at some level involve cultural values and physical and kinetic metaphors. For instance, question has a rise in it, a cry and a making-precise of sound, an attempt at differentiation. Termination has a pause or a bass, a release or return or dropping of energy into resolution. Raising of energy by volume with a dropping of pitch becomes very visceral; lowering of volume and raising of pitch relatively etherial and cerebral.
Chomsky and Media
As I search for critics who analyze the relation of publication and distribution economics to written form, by far the most useful author I have found so far does not see himself as writing about literature per se at all.
In a series of books, Noam Chomsky analyzes socioeconomic strictures on publication and the flow of information. In both linguistic and political work, Chomsky sees literary formalisms as largely outside his authorial province, but he does give straightforward and well documented descriptions of patterns of ownership and commodification of media production and distribution, and the effect these have on what information may be expressed and communicated, where, and to an extent how.
Insofar as these filter in large part for profit, and profit
Particularly useful Chomsky on Media:
These do include quite a bit of thematic repetition, since part of Chomsky's intents are polemical.
There is also a DVD on Zeitgeist called Necessary Illusions, and he makes considerable reference to these themes in lectures, interviews, and articles, all easily found on www.chomsky.info. It wanders between biographical anecdotes about Chomsky, quick clips of interviews,
In a series of books, Noam Chomsky analyzes socioeconomic strictures on publication and the flow of information. In both linguistic and political work, Chomsky sees literary formalisms as largely outside his authorial province, but he does give straightforward and well documented descriptions of patterns of ownership and commodification of media production and distribution, and the effect these have on what information may be expressed and communicated, where, and to an extent how.
Insofar as these filter in large part for profit, and profit
Particularly useful Chomsky on Media:
- Manufacturing Consent, co-authored with David Barsamian
- Media Control
- Necessary Illusions
- Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
- You Are Being Lied To
- On Miseducation
- Secrets, Lies, Democracy
These do include quite a bit of thematic repetition, since part of Chomsky's intents are polemical.
There is also a DVD on Zeitgeist called Necessary Illusions, and he makes considerable reference to these themes in lectures, interviews, and articles, all easily found on www.chomsky.info. It wanders between biographical anecdotes about Chomsky, quick clips of interviews,
Charles Saunders Peirce
I'm reading selections from Peirce from Peirce on Signs. Chapel Hill: UNC, 1991.
Peirce is the lesser known progeniture of semiotics. His sign is different than Saussure's. In one of many attempted definitions, he calls it "Anything which determines something else" and notes that
So we're not dealing with Saussure's arbitrary sign. Elsewhere Peirce discusses the
Peirce could not get further from Saussure on this, and those of us who entered semiotics and linguistics reading the Course may be tempted to dismiss Peirce out of hand. He's distinct from Husserl here as well. Husserl's The Origins of Geometry explicitly distinguishes between kinds of the signification of what Peirce might call indice and symbol, treating them as simply two different things.
The discussion, as usual, seems unsimple.
If we have no unmediated access to an Other -- or to Kantian noumena or what we might like to call or posit as a "real world" -- then what we're talking about when we talk about referent, then Peirce's "the thing it signifies" (not the Saussurian signified, but something more like the referent) remains ultimately semiotic, is sign itself -- an idea not at all foreign to Peirce.
Now, it would seem to make sense that when we speak of a sign for an idea or a sign for a signifier or a sign for a referent, we are in every case talking about a sign for a sign, and thus a sign for a sign for a sign. So Peirce's resemblances are resemblances between signs and perhaps sign systems.
These, I would observe, should resemble more in syntax of relations between signs and in the structure of semantic associations than in the semantic relations themselves or the semantic relations between systems.
Peirce is the lesser known progeniture of semiotics. His sign is different than Saussure's. In one of many attempted definitions, he calls it "Anything which determines something else" and notes that
"A sign is either an icon, an index, or a symbol. An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a gemetrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if therew were no interpretant. Such , for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. SUch is the utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification" (239-240).
So we're not dealing with Saussure's arbitrary sign. Elsewhere Peirce discusses the
"material quality" of signs, and posits that a sign must "have some real connection with the thing it signifies so taht when the object is present or is so as the sign signifies it to be, the sign shall so signify it and otherwise not. What I mean is best understood by illustration. A weathercock is a sign of the direction of the wind. It would not be so unless the wind made it turn round. There is to be such a physical connection betwen every sign and its object. Take a painted portrait. . . (141).
Peirce could not get further from Saussure on this, and those of us who entered semiotics and linguistics reading the Course may be tempted to dismiss Peirce out of hand. He's distinct from Husserl here as well. Husserl's The Origins of Geometry explicitly distinguishes between kinds of the signification of what Peirce might call indice and symbol, treating them as simply two different things.
The discussion, as usual, seems unsimple.
If we have no unmediated access to an Other -- or to Kantian noumena or what we might like to call or posit as a "real world" -- then what we're talking about when we talk about referent, then Peirce's "the thing it signifies" (not the Saussurian signified, but something more like the referent) remains ultimately semiotic, is sign itself -- an idea not at all foreign to Peirce.
Now, it would seem to make sense that when we speak of a sign for an idea or a sign for a signifier or a sign for a referent, we are in every case talking about a sign for a sign, and thus a sign for a sign for a sign. So Peirce's resemblances are resemblances between signs and perhaps sign systems.
These, I would observe, should resemble more in syntax of relations between signs and in the structure of semantic associations than in the semantic relations themselves or the semantic relations between systems.
Deleuze & Guattari
What a joy to get back to Deleuze & Guattari after all these years! -- & with more training in semiotics as well.
Let's begin with the infernal rhizome, a concept that D&G redefine and rework throughout 1000 Plateaus. Wikipedia describes a fairly standard botanical rhizome as follows:
So, plants that normally reproduce by shoots form rhizomes. The most familiar example might be the fungal mats that send up mushrooms or toadstools after a rain. D&G use both the synchronic form of the irregularly interwoven mat and the chronological process of the exploring radicle-tip to describe various linguistic, semiotic, artistic, social, and cognitive forms.They oppose rhizome to what they call not linear but arborial form, their prime example being Chomsky's branching analysis of sentences. Anti-Oedipus and particularly 1,000 Plateaus became popular in the USA in part as theorists scrabbled to adjust to the formal demands of epublication.
OUR STORY (in 1,000 Plateaus, assuming one reads the book in sequence, which D&G don't particularly recommend) starts as D&G, apparently leery of the sequentiality of their own hardcopy publication, launch an attack on certain assumptions of books.
D&G's destratification resembles other uses of image to qualify abstract distinctions; the authors mean to undercut certain hierarchical relations of ideas. Their deterritorialization is a little odder, but pertains to the destabilization of ideas by something rather like Derridean difféance. D&G, strangely and tellingly, don't mention Derrida anywhere even when their argument follows "Structure, Sign, and Play" point by point.
On time --
As one tries to put these ideas into practice in electronic literature, it becomes less obvious how Chomsky's analysis and its binary distinctions is arboreal or linear as opposed to rhizomatic or global. A rhizome itself is, in a sense, made of lines and intersections of lines, and the proceeding live radical proceeds teleologically. Since one must speak one word after another, natural language proceeds temporally. Consequently, most if not all language involves constant binary opposition at least in terms of temporal comparison of linguistic elements. Each word or sound must be before or after something else, and we find that significant. Also, as the various structuralisms and formalisms have pointed out in their various ways, semantics involves differentiation; for every a, one must understand a more-or-less articulated non-a. However, the very branching of Chomsky's system -- arboreal, if you will -- does provide for a synchronic differentiation and comparison of linguistic elements that ultimately involves synchronic interrelationships between more than two entities, and non-oppositional differentiations. That is, the binary differentiations must be ultimately taken as elements of a larger set of interrelationships, as a combinations of edges in a picture, in which every edge comprises a binary division, can be taken to describe events that are otherwise non-binary (take a diagram of a triangle as perhaps the simplest example).
One might be tempted to dismiss D&G's criticism of Chomsky on this point alone. This would be premature, however. Their criticism of Chomsky, after all, is not exactly that he might be incorrect. They describe his work at various points as a "tracing," as opposed to a "map." This word tracing, again, is not self-explanatory, but a simple image might be the kinds of mapping one gets from AAA when one asks them to map out a route. The initial map, which would correspond to what D&G call map, shows the layout of the land in general without respect to any particular voyage. The AAA counselor will "route you out" by taking a highlighter and marking along a convenient route from where the AAA member starts and finishes. The route is then complete, in a sense, in that one has a personalized plot or model of how one might proceed. It's not exactly linear, but contains a line of travel along with the surrounding areas that we might take as corresponding to immediate associations.
Following this out, one finds that D&G have a truly remarkable model here. What one gleans is that Chomsky's model corresponds significantly to linguistic structures, and renders significant information and questions -- all that Chomsky himself ever claimed for it or, one suspects, would allow any other theory -- but that it does not describe the entire event available for description; it only describes one abstractable operation.
Again, one might counter that this is fair enough without diminishing Syntactic Structures or what follows in the slightest. And, one might continue, the same criticism could be made of D&G's own argument, which equally follows a single logical chain, and that one's read through it is as temporal as any other linguistic process. Yet D&G do leave abundant evidence that they have indeed recognized these objections and have engaged themselves in response. 1,000 Plateaus itself is laid out in such a way that their own arborescent arguments intersect richly, creating complex parallelisms as one proceeds between chapters.
The metaphorical use of rhizome and the rhizomatic structure of the work vary in each tracing; the chapters thus inform one another.For instance, the critique of Chomsky returns in various guises:
This follows Derrida's politicization of what the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school folks (Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman and others) call closure. (The discussion of the pharmakoi in Of Grammatology is probably still the signal text here).
A discussion of the implications of Chomsky's diagrams on power politics seems odd without a discussion of Chomsky's own anarco-syndicalist politics, but D&G probably don't mean to question the sincerety of Chomsky's commitment, but the interrelation of his analysis to alternate models of language, including its viability for use with apparently contradictory models. Part of the clue for this comes down the page, and the form in which one compares illustrates the point D&G seem to be circling around.
This describes what Chomsky calls I-language. But on an individual or intra-personal level, one may see that sequences of sentences may apply to each other, in ways that change the realtime arrangement of syntactic and semantic elements. Since I've just gotten done reading DH Lawrence's piece on Classic American Literature, it's an example that comes freely to mind. In his usual high dudgeon, DHL syncopates sentences and paragraphs. He uses both fragments and one-sentence paragraphs freely, and does so when neither would meaningfully stand alone without the preceeding or succeeding discourse. Now, not only does his prose achieve a high degree of closure in terms of its sense, but he gets downright didactic. By contrast, D&G themselves hold fairly closely to long-line arborescent sentences with full and elegant predications; and these they nest, moreover, in full and elegant paragraphs with traditionally sequential, intra-referential and closed forms. The paragraphs have identifiable topic sentences which succeeding discourse qualifies and explicates, with reasonable conclusions and transitional elements woven from the repetition of key terms. Complexity aside, the structure does not violate the spirit of a freshman essay.
The structure of the book as a whole is another matter, but even within any given chapter, reading D&G gives a far more inquisitive and open-ended experience than reading Lawrence. In both cases, one may see that elements break across the syntactic line of predication to form other connections. Again and again, through various fragments and fragmentary paragraphs, Lawrence omits elements that readers may guess from his parallelism. In doing so, he accomplishes several things: readers reassemble something very like Lawrence's ideas as their own. Within this process, Lawrence manages to suggest that we ourselves find his constructions self-evident and natural, since they seem to spring from the self-evident music of his language. And of course in so doing his language embodies the mental leaps and lunges of a person in passionate argument.
In D&G's more temporally extended sentences a converse pattern occurs.Repeated but subtly differentiated parallel modifiers give an impression of undefined and undefinable retracings of reference that finally suggest a body of representation neither defined nor fully embodied by their text. In terms of paragraphing, this amounts to interpretive operations in which one clearly plays modifiers in succeeding sentences against one another to some degree independently of their relationships to their respective predicative units. This action, of course, relates quite directly to their complaints with the dominant S-trunk of Chomsky's trees, and their analysis of this as a tracing. The predicative function surely exists, if perhaps not exactly as described. Yet the very action that embodies that predicative activity, the recursion involved in parsing linguistic units, involves other comparisons and connections that may be equally or even more important or more active.
One consequence of all this is the recognition that any linguistic model that attempts to analyze syntactic activity apart from its dynamic interrelations with semantic shifts will in some measure run aground of its own limitations. Listeners (and, to a lesser extent, readers) determine phrase boundaries by information internal to the language they encounter. Some of this information is musical or prosodic, but some of it is semantic as well. At the same time, the meaning of semantic elements is regularly deferred pending syntactic or even syntagmatic closure. This leaves us in the neighborhood of Derrida's difféance again, but also with Dickinson's many "inflections of the pen" that she insisted could be simultaneously multiple while vocal inflections had to commit themselves. (This appears in the letters, but I'm still chasing the exact quote).
A large part of the value of D&L's work here comes in their appreciation of the intrinsic retention of sensorial and even sensual or substantially alinguistic or metalinguistic materia prima within linguistic and semiotic constructs. Their constructs, accordingly, become useful in evaluating textual materiality. For instance, the Derridean analysis of linguistic structure involves an eternally elusive definition. In D&G, words do not mean because they're defined. So, for instance, one might consider an isolated word, lonelier than a character without its play, as involving a web of associative aural, visual, kinetic, even olfactory experiential trace. One should not consider this as "direct" experience that might later be modified or organized, but as tracings of previous considerations traced, organized, compared, constructed in various ways -- "associations" we call it. These associations retain similar aspects, but may allow for direct contradictions as well. Thus, one understands a relationship between a kitchen table and other tables, yet one would not attempt to eat from a table of figures or a table of contents.
Chomsky and others have enabled useful analysis by limiting some analyses to the relationships of complete, atomistic or monadistic words at a predicative or sentence level. Yet in some ways words must also be understood as extensively and radically composite, as well as fuzzy in definition. So in response to a given text, one or another aspect of a word may be prominent in my attention, whereas another aspect may be receded. I may consider a table of contents as an abstractly flat entity upon or along which contents can be "laid out" in an otherwise undifferentiated or parallel context for comparison and examination. The of contents tells me what aspects of table should occupy my attention, but the other aspects of the table association-complex ride close, somehow.
I sorely feel the need for more extensive neurological descriptions of such phenomena. For present I will satisfy myself by saying that the process appears similar to that of visual attention, in which I am "thinking about" a particular region that appears to me as central to my gaze. And if someone asks me a question about something at the periphery of my vision, I quickly turn my eyes towards that point to gather it in binocular vision, but also to focus a greater portion of cerebral processing on the matter. Similarly, congruent associations reinforced by syntax seem to "bring to mind" aspects of words within the syntactic chain.
Of course, since each usage of this sort further informs future associations with each word, we have thereby the extension of derridean play. I would have welcomed D&G's specifically citing Derrida where they clearly responded to his work, but even without that the description is quite useful. Most of the backhanded reference to Derrida comes in the chapter-essay "On Several Regimes of Signs." Here's a slice:
OK, that's a mouthful, and not the least because D&G casually track Peirce's distinctions through a discussion traditionally based on the quite different distinctions proceeding from de Saussure. D&G insist on what amounts to an evocative significance of the sign beyond its existance in a system of words per se. Now, the implied criticism of Derrida is probably not altogether fair, since they don't discuss the distinctions or resemblances between spoken and written or even thought language and what has been translated as "arche-writing." Descriptions of arche-writing in Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing" clearly ground Derrida's conception of the play of signification as grounded outside of areas usually circumscribed by the words langage or parole. Derrida clearly wishes to deal with neural activity as semiotic or representational in some sense; as opposed to an "out-there," or some species of noumena.
In this sense, Derrida insists on describing the process as play of differences in a relatively continuous system of signification that must operate temporally, must change, and therefore can never stabilize. D&G describe the same activity as interplay between "regimes of signs" or "planes of signifiance" or "plateaux" or "planes" of a rhizome or "tracings" that are mutually dependent in interpretation. So they might call the special terminology of Saussurean linguistics as a "regime of signs" for instance, but they consider that this cannot isolate itself successfully from Peirce's sign-system or from one or another individual's daily French or even English.
More later, ye gods.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1,000 Plateaus Brian Massumi. Trans. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2003.
Let's begin with the infernal rhizome, a concept that D&G redefine and rework throughout 1000 Plateaus. Wikipedia describes a fairly standard botanical rhizome as follows:
In botany, a rhizome is a usually underground, horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes, though a number of species of plants have above ground rhizomes or rhizomes that sit at the soil surface including some Iris species. Rhizomes may also be referred to as creeping rootstalks, or rootstocks.
So, plants that normally reproduce by shoots form rhizomes. The most familiar example might be the fungal mats that send up mushrooms or toadstools after a rain. D&G use both the synchronic form of the irregularly interwoven mat and the chronological process of the exploring radicle-tip to describe various linguistic, semiotic, artistic, social, and cognitive forms.They oppose rhizome to what they call not linear but arborial form, their prime example being Chomsky's branching analysis of sentences. Anti-Oedipus and particularly 1,000 Plateaus became popular in the USA in part as theorists scrabbled to adjust to the formal demands of epublication.
OUR STORY (in 1,000 Plateaus, assuming one reads the book in sequence, which D&G don't particularly recommend) starts as D&G, apparently leery of the sequentiality of their own hardcopy publication, launch an attack on certain assumptions of books.
A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of amatters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficient God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulartion or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also linees of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification (3).
D&G's destratification resembles other uses of image to qualify abstract distinctions; the authors mean to undercut certain hierarchical relations of ideas. Their deterritorialization is a little odder, but pertains to the destabilization of ideas by something rather like Derridean difféance. D&G, strangely and tellingly, don't mention Derrida anywhere even when their argument follows "Structure, Sign, and Play" point by point.
On time --
Thought lags behind nature. Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four . . . . Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as 'advanced' as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection (for exapmple, Chomsky and his grammatical trees, which begin at point S and proceed by dichotomy (5).
As one tries to put these ideas into practice in electronic literature, it becomes less obvious how Chomsky's analysis and its binary distinctions is arboreal or linear as opposed to rhizomatic or global. A rhizome itself is, in a sense, made of lines and intersections of lines, and the proceeding live radical proceeds teleologically. Since one must speak one word after another, natural language proceeds temporally. Consequently, most if not all language involves constant binary opposition at least in terms of temporal comparison of linguistic elements. Each word or sound must be before or after something else, and we find that significant. Also, as the various structuralisms and formalisms have pointed out in their various ways, semantics involves differentiation; for every a, one must understand a more-or-less articulated non-a. However, the very branching of Chomsky's system -- arboreal, if you will -- does provide for a synchronic differentiation and comparison of linguistic elements that ultimately involves synchronic interrelationships between more than two entities, and non-oppositional differentiations. That is, the binary differentiations must be ultimately taken as elements of a larger set of interrelationships, as a combinations of edges in a picture, in which every edge comprises a binary division, can be taken to describe events that are otherwise non-binary (take a diagram of a triangle as perhaps the simplest example).
One might be tempted to dismiss D&G's criticism of Chomsky on this point alone. This would be premature, however. Their criticism of Chomsky, after all, is not exactly that he might be incorrect. They describe his work at various points as a "tracing," as opposed to a "map." This word tracing, again, is not self-explanatory, but a simple image might be the kinds of mapping one gets from AAA when one asks them to map out a route. The initial map, which would correspond to what D&G call map, shows the layout of the land in general without respect to any particular voyage. The AAA counselor will "route you out" by taking a highlighter and marking along a convenient route from where the AAA member starts and finishes. The route is then complete, in a sense, in that one has a personalized plot or model of how one might proceed. It's not exactly linear, but contains a line of travel along with the surrounding areas that we might take as corresponding to immediate associations.
Following this out, one finds that D&G have a truly remarkable model here. What one gleans is that Chomsky's model corresponds significantly to linguistic structures, and renders significant information and questions -- all that Chomsky himself ever claimed for it or, one suspects, would allow any other theory -- but that it does not describe the entire event available for description; it only describes one abstractable operation.
Again, one might counter that this is fair enough without diminishing Syntactic Structures or what follows in the slightest. And, one might continue, the same criticism could be made of D&G's own argument, which equally follows a single logical chain, and that one's read through it is as temporal as any other linguistic process. Yet D&G do leave abundant evidence that they have indeed recognized these objections and have engaged themselves in response. 1,000 Plateaus itself is laid out in such a way that their own arborescent arguments intersect richly, creating complex parallelisms as one proceeds between chapters.
The metaphorical use of rhizome and the rhizomatic structure of the work vary in each tracing; the chapters thus inform one another.For instance, the critique of Chomsky returns in various guises:
Chomsky's grammaticallity, the categorical S symbol that dominates every sentence, is more fundamentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker; you will construct grammatically correct sentences, you will divide each statement into a noun phrase and a verb phase (first dichotomy) (7).
This follows Derrida's politicization of what the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school folks (Bernstein, Hejinian, Silliman and others) call closure. (The discussion of the pharmakoi in Of Grammatology is probably still the signal text here).
A discussion of the implications of Chomsky's diagrams on power politics seems odd without a discussion of Chomsky's own anarco-syndicalist politics, but D&G probably don't mean to question the sincerety of Chomsky's commitment, but the interrelation of his analysis to alternate models of language, including its viability for use with apparently contradictory models. Part of the clue for this comes down the page, and the form in which one compares illustrates the point D&G seem to be circling around.
A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic gestural and cognitive; there is no language in itself, nor are there any linguistic universals, only a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages (7).
This describes what Chomsky calls I-language. But on an individual or intra-personal level, one may see that sequences of sentences may apply to each other, in ways that change the realtime arrangement of syntactic and semantic elements. Since I've just gotten done reading DH Lawrence's piece on Classic American Literature, it's an example that comes freely to mind. In his usual high dudgeon, DHL syncopates sentences and paragraphs. He uses both fragments and one-sentence paragraphs freely, and does so when neither would meaningfully stand alone without the preceeding or succeeding discourse. Now, not only does his prose achieve a high degree of closure in terms of its sense, but he gets downright didactic. By contrast, D&G themselves hold fairly closely to long-line arborescent sentences with full and elegant predications; and these they nest, moreover, in full and elegant paragraphs with traditionally sequential, intra-referential and closed forms. The paragraphs have identifiable topic sentences which succeeding discourse qualifies and explicates, with reasonable conclusions and transitional elements woven from the repetition of key terms. Complexity aside, the structure does not violate the spirit of a freshman essay.
The structure of the book as a whole is another matter, but even within any given chapter, reading D&G gives a far more inquisitive and open-ended experience than reading Lawrence. In both cases, one may see that elements break across the syntactic line of predication to form other connections. Again and again, through various fragments and fragmentary paragraphs, Lawrence omits elements that readers may guess from his parallelism. In doing so, he accomplishes several things: readers reassemble something very like Lawrence's ideas as their own. Within this process, Lawrence manages to suggest that we ourselves find his constructions self-evident and natural, since they seem to spring from the self-evident music of his language. And of course in so doing his language embodies the mental leaps and lunges of a person in passionate argument.
In D&G's more temporally extended sentences a converse pattern occurs.Repeated but subtly differentiated parallel modifiers give an impression of undefined and undefinable retracings of reference that finally suggest a body of representation neither defined nor fully embodied by their text. In terms of paragraphing, this amounts to interpretive operations in which one clearly plays modifiers in succeeding sentences against one another to some degree independently of their relationships to their respective predicative units. This action, of course, relates quite directly to their complaints with the dominant S-trunk of Chomsky's trees, and their analysis of this as a tracing. The predicative function surely exists, if perhaps not exactly as described. Yet the very action that embodies that predicative activity, the recursion involved in parsing linguistic units, involves other comparisons and connections that may be equally or even more important or more active.
One consequence of all this is the recognition that any linguistic model that attempts to analyze syntactic activity apart from its dynamic interrelations with semantic shifts will in some measure run aground of its own limitations. Listeners (and, to a lesser extent, readers) determine phrase boundaries by information internal to the language they encounter. Some of this information is musical or prosodic, but some of it is semantic as well. At the same time, the meaning of semantic elements is regularly deferred pending syntactic or even syntagmatic closure. This leaves us in the neighborhood of Derrida's difféance again, but also with Dickinson's many "inflections of the pen" that she insisted could be simultaneously multiple while vocal inflections had to commit themselves. (This appears in the letters, but I'm still chasing the exact quote).
A large part of the value of D&L's work here comes in their appreciation of the intrinsic retention of sensorial and even sensual or substantially alinguistic or metalinguistic materia prima within linguistic and semiotic constructs. Their constructs, accordingly, become useful in evaluating textual materiality. For instance, the Derridean analysis of linguistic structure involves an eternally elusive definition. In D&G, words do not mean because they're defined. So, for instance, one might consider an isolated word, lonelier than a character without its play, as involving a web of associative aural, visual, kinetic, even olfactory experiential trace. One should not consider this as "direct" experience that might later be modified or organized, but as tracings of previous considerations traced, organized, compared, constructed in various ways -- "associations" we call it. These associations retain similar aspects, but may allow for direct contradictions as well. Thus, one understands a relationship between a kitchen table and other tables, yet one would not attempt to eat from a table of figures or a table of contents.
Chomsky and others have enabled useful analysis by limiting some analyses to the relationships of complete, atomistic or monadistic words at a predicative or sentence level. Yet in some ways words must also be understood as extensively and radically composite, as well as fuzzy in definition. So in response to a given text, one or another aspect of a word may be prominent in my attention, whereas another aspect may be receded. I may consider a table of contents as an abstractly flat entity upon or along which contents can be "laid out" in an otherwise undifferentiated or parallel context for comparison and examination. The of contents tells me what aspects of table should occupy my attention, but the other aspects of the table association-complex ride close, somehow.
I sorely feel the need for more extensive neurological descriptions of such phenomena. For present I will satisfy myself by saying that the process appears similar to that of visual attention, in which I am "thinking about" a particular region that appears to me as central to my gaze. And if someone asks me a question about something at the periphery of my vision, I quickly turn my eyes towards that point to gather it in binocular vision, but also to focus a greater portion of cerebral processing on the matter. Similarly, congruent associations reinforced by syntax seem to "bring to mind" aspects of words within the syntactic chain.
Of course, since each usage of this sort further informs future associations with each word, we have thereby the extension of derridean play. I would have welcomed D&G's specifically citing Derrida where they clearly responded to his work, but even without that the description is quite useful. Most of the backhanded reference to Derrida comes in the chapter-essay "On Several Regimes of Signs." Here's a slice:
There is a simple general formula for the signifying regime of the sign (the signifying sigh): every sign refers to another sign, and only to another sign, ad infinitum. That is why, at the limit, one can forgo the notion of the sign, for what is retained is not principally the sign's relation to a state of things it designates, or to an entity itsignfifes, but only the formal relation fo sign to sign insofar as it defines a so-called signifying chain. The limitlessness of signifieance replaces the sign. When denotation (here, designation and signification taken together) is assumed to be part of connotation, one is wholly within this signfiying regime of the sign. Not much attention is paid to indexes, in other words, the territorial states of things constituting the designatable. Not much attention is paid to icons [for this, see Peirce] that is, operations of reterritorialization constituting the signifiable. Thus th sign has already attained a high degre of relative deterritorialization; it is thought of as a symbol [Peirce as opposed to Saussure again] in a constant moveement of referral from sign to sign.
OK, that's a mouthful, and not the least because D&G casually track Peirce's distinctions through a discussion traditionally based on the quite different distinctions proceeding from de Saussure. D&G insist on what amounts to an evocative significance of the sign beyond its existance in a system of words per se. Now, the implied criticism of Derrida is probably not altogether fair, since they don't discuss the distinctions or resemblances between spoken and written or even thought language and what has been translated as "arche-writing." Descriptions of arche-writing in Derrida's "Freud and the Scene of Writing" clearly ground Derrida's conception of the play of signification as grounded outside of areas usually circumscribed by the words langage or parole. Derrida clearly wishes to deal with neural activity as semiotic or representational in some sense; as opposed to an "out-there," or some species of noumena.
In this sense, Derrida insists on describing the process as play of differences in a relatively continuous system of signification that must operate temporally, must change, and therefore can never stabilize. D&G describe the same activity as interplay between "regimes of signs" or "planes of signifiance" or "plateaux" or "planes" of a rhizome or "tracings" that are mutually dependent in interpretation. So they might call the special terminology of Saussurean linguistics as a "regime of signs" for instance, but they consider that this cannot isolate itself successfully from Peirce's sign-system or from one or another individual's daily French or even English.
More later, ye gods.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1,000 Plateaus Brian Massumi. Trans. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2003.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
William Stokoe: Sign Language Structure
Those with a semiotic bent may find fresh perspectives in Sign Language and Structure, by WIlliam C. Stokoe.
Stokoe's analysis of ASL is straightforward and basic. An early entry in a still-sparse field, it presumes no prior knowledge of signs and only a basic grasp of semiotics. For me, it verifited a few things that maybe should have been obvious.
Those of us who study literature study language that endures visually. One may well imagine Paradise Lost as sounds, but we have lost Milton's sounds in a way that we have not lost those of Joni Mitchell or John Coltrane. The recorded objects themselves, to which we refer and against which we true our conceptions of those sounds, make no more noise than the flipping of pages.
As such, we work in a visual medium. Yet ASL and similar sign languages are the only native visual languages, the only languages that anyone learns somewhat in the way that most of us learn our respective mother tongues. Since most of the deaf are deaf from birth or near-birth, they use signs as a native language: informally and formally, for public address and for private conversation, for personal calculation and for internal revery. I looked up Stokoe to see how native visual speakers inflect language, to see what implications that might have for inherently but backhandedly visual forms, like verse.
A few observations --
Visual and aural media use time differently because visual signs tend to endure. This is to a certain extent true even for signing, in which the signs generally skip by as quickly as speech; by extension, it should be at least as true for electronic presentations in which writing appears and disappears in response to links. Stokoe's appraisal in 1978 is interesting:
But Stokoe complicates this observation by pointing out elsewhere that all signs for what we might consider words involve movement. Given that some signs will consist of a single morpheme, these must involve a certain temporality, however they might be considered.
Perhaps we hearing should not be surprised, since we take writing to move when it stays fairly still.
These signs must be temporal in two ways. They must be so first in the sense of taking up time in their own demonstration, given that the movement that defines the signing must not only take some time, but must pass slowly enough to register with a second party, another fluent signer; clearly, both signer and viewer take them as temporal in that way. Then, to whatever extent the signer cannot produce all the signs of a discourse at once, those signs must be interpreted as ordinal or sequential.
Stokoe may mean that each morpheme need be considered as a unit, as a kind of time-moment, but one might complain that this is just what we do with spoken language, the very process that he terms segmentation. Or he may refer to the simultaneous production of signs that arises when he discusses the utility of a signer's second hand:
This is something that cannot be done exclusively with a single voice. The parallels in speech-acts and in writing that one may consider make for some interesting consideration.
Of course there's no ending such a list conveniently. But I at least find it convenient to not think of interpretation of spoken language as breaking down into segments exactly, but into frames that include information external to what's accepted as linguistic or semantically active. For instance, the word fire means something different in a crowded theater than at an execution not because the syntax of the utterance has changed but because the most likely conclusion is different.
Some mechanism of this sort has to be operating fairly constantly to feed in the kinds of factors analyzed by Austin and others as speech acts. But this mechanism itself allows us to use aspects of discourse that we usually dismiss as nonlinguistic to create syntactic landscapes. It generally makes no syntactic difference to War and Peace that it be printed in 12-point or 10-point font, for example. But I take the larger print at the start of a chapter or on a page before the beginning of the novel to be a title. Further, I take it to name the work, and in doing so to modify without intermediary all the small print that accompanies it.
Again, one could go on about intonation and pitch and loudness and so forth, but short of explaining how these function, the point is probably too obvious: nonsemantic aspects of discourse mark phrase boundaries and other aspects of semantic elements and syntactic relations. These things may seem extraneous to literature or perhaps obtusely technical, but it seems something of this nature is needed to comprehend things like the continua of punctuation in Dickinson; Pound's "composition by the page"; the concrete poets or the "artists' books" from the 1980's; the dynamic relationship between layout, phrasing, paragraphing, and metanarrative in contemporary Website design; or, really, free verse.
Stokoe, WIlliam C. Sign Language and Structure: The first linguistic analysis of American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstock, 1978.
Stokoe's analysis of ASL is straightforward and basic. An early entry in a still-sparse field, it presumes no prior knowledge of signs and only a basic grasp of semiotics. For me, it verifited a few things that maybe should have been obvious.
Those of us who study literature study language that endures visually. One may well imagine Paradise Lost as sounds, but we have lost Milton's sounds in a way that we have not lost those of Joni Mitchell or John Coltrane. The recorded objects themselves, to which we refer and against which we true our conceptions of those sounds, make no more noise than the flipping of pages.
As such, we work in a visual medium. Yet ASL and similar sign languages are the only native visual languages, the only languages that anyone learns somewhat in the way that most of us learn our respective mother tongues. Since most of the deaf are deaf from birth or near-birth, they use signs as a native language: informally and formally, for public address and for private conversation, for personal calculation and for internal revery. I looked up Stokoe to see how native visual speakers inflect language, to see what implications that might have for inherently but backhandedly visual forms, like verse.
A few observations --
Visual and aural media use time differently because visual signs tend to endure. This is to a certain extent true even for signing, in which the signs generally skip by as quickly as speech; by extension, it should be at least as true for electronic presentations in which writing appears and disappears in response to links. Stokoe's appraisal in 1978 is interesting:
. . . significance rests not in the configuration, the position, or the movement, but in the unique composition of all three. The sign morpheme, however, unlike the morpheme or word of the spoken language, is seen as simultaneously not sequentially produced. Analysis of the sign morpheme then cannot be segmentation in time but must be aspectual (78).
But Stokoe complicates this observation by pointing out elsewhere that all signs for what we might consider words involve movement. Given that some signs will consist of a single morpheme, these must involve a certain temporality, however they might be considered.
Perhaps we hearing should not be surprised, since we take writing to move when it stays fairly still.
These signs must be temporal in two ways. They must be so first in the sense of taking up time in their own demonstration, given that the movement that defines the signing must not only take some time, but must pass slowly enough to register with a second party, another fluent signer; clearly, both signer and viewer take them as temporal in that way. Then, to whatever extent the signer cannot produce all the signs of a discourse at once, those signs must be interpreted as ordinal or sequential.
Stokoe may mean that each morpheme need be considered as a unit, as a kind of time-moment, but one might complain that this is just what we do with spoken language, the very process that he terms segmentation. Or he may refer to the simultaneous production of signs that arises when he discusses the utility of a signer's second hand:
. . . the signer may have a rhetorical use for the inactive hand. The left hand (of a right-handed signer) may hold a dez handshape [one that designates significance by its configuration] used in a sign for namign a person, while the right hand alone 'says something' perhaps about what another person did to the first (60).
This is something that cannot be done exclusively with a single voice. The parallels in speech-acts and in writing that one may consider make for some interesting consideration.
- A title hangs on a page and refers to all the within.
- An illustration, or, conversely, a caption
- Italics, in Faulkner, for instance
- A chord
- A quickly picked guitar riff over a bass line with fewer notes.
- A lecture with Powerpoint slides
- According to Kristeva, Celine's use of invective
- A navigational element in an HTML frameset or CSS layout.
- A facial expression deliberately held and emphasized to accompany discouse (cf Grotowski on "organic" gestures, BTW!)
Of course there's no ending such a list conveniently. But I at least find it convenient to not think of interpretation of spoken language as breaking down into segments exactly, but into frames that include information external to what's accepted as linguistic or semantically active. For instance, the word fire means something different in a crowded theater than at an execution not because the syntax of the utterance has changed but because the most likely conclusion is different.
Some mechanism of this sort has to be operating fairly constantly to feed in the kinds of factors analyzed by Austin and others as speech acts. But this mechanism itself allows us to use aspects of discourse that we usually dismiss as nonlinguistic to create syntactic landscapes. It generally makes no syntactic difference to War and Peace that it be printed in 12-point or 10-point font, for example. But I take the larger print at the start of a chapter or on a page before the beginning of the novel to be a title. Further, I take it to name the work, and in doing so to modify without intermediary all the small print that accompanies it.
Again, one could go on about intonation and pitch and loudness and so forth, but short of explaining how these function, the point is probably too obvious: nonsemantic aspects of discourse mark phrase boundaries and other aspects of semantic elements and syntactic relations. These things may seem extraneous to literature or perhaps obtusely technical, but it seems something of this nature is needed to comprehend things like the continua of punctuation in Dickinson; Pound's "composition by the page"; the concrete poets or the "artists' books" from the 1980's; the dynamic relationship between layout, phrasing, paragraphing, and metanarrative in contemporary Website design; or, really, free verse.
Hamlin Garland
Garland's constellation of stories sort of fits between Washington Irving and The Country of Pointed Firs. The tales are related and mutually informative, but not temporally ordered or causally linked in any tight way. Like a few early hypertexts (Victory Garden and Patchwork Girl, for instance), he uses a visual metaphor in attempt to link events without tight chronological relationship.
The text shares a sentimentality with Jewett and Irving. Unline a lot of Irving, the style remains level. Unlike Firs, the characters don't necessarily know each other, though they could.
Garland handles dialect sort of like Twain or Howells: he misspells words to render pronunciation, presumably according to some eastern seaboard accent that he would have considered standard. The characters' syntax appears fairly mainstream, though, even when their pronunciation does not, and I wonder whether he didn't clean it up a bit or whether the dialect wasn't just more standard than my grandmother's rural Pennsylvanian or my grandfather's Texas-Arizona guttersnipe patois.
A lot of the value here would seem to come with the sense of place and social class. He doesn't mask the poverty or approve of it backhandedly, though he romances the people a bit; the portrayal is sincere and goodhearted as are Steinbeck's depression scenes, even similar in a lot of ways.
The text shares a sentimentality with Jewett and Irving. Unline a lot of Irving, the style remains level. Unlike Firs, the characters don't necessarily know each other, though they could.
Garland handles dialect sort of like Twain or Howells: he misspells words to render pronunciation, presumably according to some eastern seaboard accent that he would have considered standard. The characters' syntax appears fairly mainstream, though, even when their pronunciation does not, and I wonder whether he didn't clean it up a bit or whether the dialect wasn't just more standard than my grandmother's rural Pennsylvanian or my grandfather's Texas-Arizona guttersnipe patois.
A lot of the value here would seem to come with the sense of place and social class. He doesn't mask the poverty or approve of it backhandedly, though he romances the people a bit; the portrayal is sincere and goodhearted as are Steinbeck's depression scenes, even similar in a lot of ways.
Saturday, June 2, 2007
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.
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