Reflection

Reflection – December 13, 2010

This course has been hugely beneficial. One of the reasons I came back to school was that I, as I was teaching Language Arts, found myself increasingly unsure about my own convictions with regards to art in general, including the arts both of teaching and of language. This course has given me a language with which to interrogate my understanding of art, and a language with which to teach it. It has also, along with the other courses I took this semester, effected an expansion of the concept of art beyond the realm of individual objects or production to include a broad complex of both ideas and behaviors.

It is perhaps telling of the influence of this course that those theorists who we studied early form a foundation for my understanding, and those we approached near the end of the course are the ones with which I feel and ongoing engagement. I am ever drawn back to Kant and Hegel for the theoretical underpinnings of modernity. It feels as though Kant offered an ideal rationalization for art, that Hegel grounded it in a method. The importance for both of these is necessarily ongoing, but there is a certain strain of the mythological in later theorists, a certain suggestion that some new turn in human consciousness is upon us, that I just can’t help being attracted by. Ironically, my ongoing interaction with these later theorists, my uncertainty and interrogation of their ideas at a level more immediate to my own interests, has translated into a relative dearth of address in these journals. Whether this is due more to the mounting responsibilities in other classes later in the semester, or to my ongoing uncertainty and curiosity with regards to these theories, I can’t say (though I’d be willing to bet it’s a bit of both). In this final journal entry, therefore, I’ll attempt to address some of these later theories briefly, and with an eye to the ongoing influence they are having on my own theories.

Kristeva looks below language for rhythm, and understands rhythm as a truly organic phenomenon. It is thus through the chora, the “discrete quantities of energy” which move through the pre-oedipal subject who is “always already involved in a semiotic process” that language arises (2071-2). The chora is the “essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral states” (2072). Kristeva’s theory effectively does away with the issues of “incitement” that arose in Freud and were preserved in Lacan. Kristeva understands that the subject needs no incitement because it is always already involved in meaning-formation, and that Saussure’s langue, vocal language systems, are just a product of the “various constraints imposed on this body…by family and social structures” (2072). Kristeva seems to suggest a potentially biological underpinning to notions of the self when she traces the development of our perceptive apparatus back to the mother, the biological well-spring of our very material existence. She follows systems of meaning all the way to the genetic level, suggesting that “genetic programmings are necessarily semiotic: they include the primary processes such as displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis” (2076). The place where these deep codes are communicated is “enigmatic and feminine,” “rhythmic, unfettered,…musical, anterior to judgment” (2076). It seems like Kristeva’s description of pre-linguistic meaning could be equally applied to pre-linguistic man. The poet who can channel the chora is one who communicates the depth of being, the mythical source of humanity.

Barthes makes no excuses for his Mythologies, which come to seem like a telling of the story we tell each other when we might not seem to be telling each other anything. In this way he relates to Bourdieu, who wants to demonstrate the power of these untold stories to shape our ideas about the world, and Michel de Certeau also suggests that the smallest actions constitute an entire mythological system which works below reason and intellectual action.

I was convinced, even after the short readings that were assigned in class, that I would find myself inevitably involved in an ongoing relationship with Frederic Jameson and Michel Foucault. I added their books to my Amazon wishlist even before I had decided on my courses for next semester. Jameson’s Marxism seems to offer a wonderful mode of ongoing historical interaction and politically conscious critique. And while Jameson himself criticizes Foucault for the ‘no-way-out’ paradox of his system of knowledge, I can’t help but agree with Jameson also that the post-structuralist project is a product of its own historical moment, and this moment seems crucial in the development of Western thought. If we can understand Kant in relationship to his ‘author-function’, that his philosophy was inevitably a product of his historical moment, little more than a vocalization of things which were, by the time he wrote, on the very tips of everyone’s tongues, We might understand Foucault’s work and that of the late Marxists (I’m thinking also of Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment which, though I have not read it, I understand to be negative in its treatment of Enlightenment philosophy since Kant) to be equally a product of some ‘new era’. The very fact that Foucault can put his theory into words, as Donna Haraway suggested, may signal its own obsolescence. I am inclined to take Jameson at his ‘word’: we are ‘post-modern’ also in the sense that many of the structures of human thought and social interaction, structures which presented themselves in the phantasmagoria of modernity as inevitable and timeless, have fractured under the weight of their own responsibility. This is perhaps the ‘awakening’ that Benjamin seemed so interested in effecting, and that it is an ongoing crisis in contemporary history surely might speak to his resurgence in critical interest. Foucault does seem to lock us into a mode, but he cannot account for the ways that just our knowledge of being locked in might suddenly burst the lock, in a lightning-flash insight. Nor does he seem, at least so far as what I have read, to realize the power-relationships moving in the opposite direction. I have been reading a little Michel de Certeau, who seems to understand that, although we may live within a system of power and discourse which is largely beyond our individual control, we do control it, even if at the most ‘negligible’ scale, with our very habitual existence. The ways in which individuals interact with the Foucault’s web invariably shifts the balances of power, if ever so slightly. In creating an inescapable web, Foucault also offers us the tools which we might use to shape the web more ideally.

Indeed, it seems at times when Foucault uses words like “discourse” and “power,” he is simply substituting more menacing-sounding terms for earlier notions of “language” and “culture”. He is interested in highlighting the ways that our ‘language’ plays into the established power-structures. In this way, his project would seem to accord with that of Jameson and other Marxists, since it demonstrates the ways in which our system is organized in order to perpetuate itself. We might understand language from a Saussurian perspective to be just such a system, and Hayles ideas about information are likewise structured. If we drew a line from N. Katherine Hayles to Julia Kristeva, we could conceive of the ways that, in a very strictly biological sense, communication has always been a matter of information systems. Kristeva’s chora derive from genetic and biological systems, which have the potential of quantification in the same terms of electric impulses that we use to describe computer systems. Of course, this is all beyond current science to demonstrate concretely, but it is within the capacity of the system itself. Perhaps the way out of the system, as Derrida might suggest, is to plumb its depths. Science seems in some ways to epitomize the system of knowledge that Foucault understands as our web of power and discourse.

Indeed, it might be from this perspective that we approach the work of Hayles and Haraway. It is through technology that science vocalizes itself in our everyday existence. Our interactions with technology create what Benjamin casts as our perceptive unconscious, the ever-changing mode of perception through which we evaluate our surroundings. To this end, science fiction contains a mythologizing impulse; it is a mythologizing of the future, but of a future which is also ever present.

I might even be inclined to argue for the presence of a mythology in Jameson’s concept of the ‘postmodern’. Could we conceive of pastiche as a mythology which has been driven by the increased speed of modern change to address ever more contemporary moments in social memory? When our entire mode of perception is being acted upon at an ever-increasing rate, the temporal depth of our relationship with the world around us must decrease, if only because we find ever fewer connections in times which seem increasingly far away. For pre-historic and classical man, lengths of time between significant change were long, and so epic myth attempted to encompass a global depth, explaining in its origin stories the existence of contemporary phenomenon. For post-modern man, our origin seems rooted ever more contemporaneously, and so when we look for our foundations, we can’t help but look not to ancient history but still to the earliest moment which seems to accord with our own. That these images of history don’t necessarily look anything like real historical circumstances speaks to their power as ‘myth’, even as it seems to call for their examination in light of dialectical history or the history of the seats of power.

As I hope is evident in this collection of journals, this course has given me both a theoretical framework in which to work and an (at least initial, if still rather vague) understanding of the ways my own ideas, about art as much as about contemporary existence generally, fit into and grow out of this broader framework. As far as a course with which to begin my graduate study, I can’t imagine one that would have been more helpful.

Derrida's Frame and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Derrida's concept of the frame, the perergon, which he uncovers in his deconstruction of Kant's 3rd Critique might bring into focus some of the issues regarding Midsummer that I have been struggling to put into words. (Strange, perhaps, that Derrida might bring anything into focus.)

Derrida constructs the frame as the middle ground which Kant gives us as a directional tool, pointing us in the direction of the true aesthetic object. The frame is perergon, it is outside the work, but it is essential in telling us that a work of art, in fact, exists (ostensibly, within the frame). However, Derrida exposes the empirical regression that such a dichotomy--of inside and outside, artwork and pererga--must necessarily introduce. We can never be sure that we have, in fact, set all extraneous details aside in our pursuit of the object, and so must eventually put the object of beauty itself aside in order to finally determine its beauty. Self-defeating, to say the least.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, however, this same concept of liminality is turned inside out. The play itself is structured so as to make the audience successively uncertain as to their position with regards to reality. Kant's aesthetic (for Derrida) suggests a continual movement inward toward the object, while at the same time necessitating a continual 'reframing' of the object in relation to those things external to it. Derrida's hypothetical artwork--a framed painting of a building surrounded by columns shaped like clothed statues--points up this continual reframing. Shakespeare's play also seems to point continually outward to a reality, while continually reframing that reality with regards to the 'art' which is theatrical performance.

One of the most ingenious aspects of the play's structure is that it must necessarily be in play before the play itself actually begins, and it extends itself outward again from the play's ending. In between, it plays all sorts of games with the concepts of interiority and exteriority. Here, very quickly, I'll breakdown how I see this being achieved.

The audience of the play has, upon entering a theater, set aside certain assumptions about 'real life'. There is a tacit understanding that 'entertainment', whatever else it may be, is a diversion from the real. While I am being entertained, there are no jobs to worry about, no familial concerns, no pressing external circumstances (the fact that I have come to the theater suggests that I have made arrangements for my work, my kids, etc.). In this respect, the theater itself acts as the first realm of unreality into which the audience is drawn. While this is true at the play's start, it is made explicit as the play ends, when Puck offers the audience the opportunity to cast the play itself off as nothing more than a dream. By vocalizing the option, however, Puck extends the plays action beyond that played on the stage, in order to incorporate, at the very least, the action of the audience as they leave the theater and return to the 'real.'

Within the action of the play itself, however, this same structure is preeminent. The play opens in Athens, which is at the start to be considered the realm of unreality, when compared with the perceived reality of the actual people in their actual seats in the actual theater. That Athens is being played before them on the stage offers the audience the opportunity to reframe their concept of the real: perhaps they had considered that entering the theater was a diversion from reality, perhaps not, but now they are clearly being asked to draw a frame around the artwork, and to place themselves, externally, in relation to it. I am real, Shakespearean Athens is fake, is fantasy, is artwork. It is key, however, that in this section of the play certain elements of the 'reality' of Athens are also established. Patriarchy is in full effect, gravity works, death is possible, social interactions are fraught with complications; things are not 'ideal.'

The escape from the city again brings into focus the dual nature of the Derridian frame: the lovers move outward from the city, away from civilization and toward nature (and thus, ostensibly, toward some deeper biological reality--for Freud and Lacan, the dreamworld is a little bit more 'real'); however, in doing so they draw the audience, once again, into a deeper sense of unreality. Now, the audience must conceive of Athens as 'real', insofar as it is opposed to the 'dream' of the forest. Thus far, the audience has stacked their frameworks: The world outside the theater is real, I in my seat am real, Athens is real, and it is the dream-forest that is the center of unreality. It is from this point that art springs. And yet, in the Mechanicals rehearsal, a further level of unreality is suggested. That a play could be performed in the dream world itself suggests that the dream world is not so much different than our own. We, after all, are watching a play right now (although the play itself seems intent on obscuring this very simple formulation). As Quince goes about the forest clearing pointing out the stage, the tiring-house, he is surely indicating the actual stage, and in the Elizabethan theater he might as easily indicate the actual tiring-house, which immediately collapses the framework thus far established. Indeed, the entire rehearsal, which takes place at the center of the audience's frame, is built around exposing the inner workings of the illusion of theater. Here, in the 'reality' of the dream-forest, the Mechanicals discuss stage lighting, prop difficulties, the writing of the play, the fact that characters are just actors in costumes. It seems as though, right in the center of its artifice (Act 3, Scene 1 is the center of the play, both by scene, and--more or less--by length), Midsummer performs a sort of deconstruction on itself, pointing out through characters at the center of the artifice that it works to sustain the 'mechanics' by which that artifice is sustained.

Bottom's dream, which we experience as the reality of the dream-forest, is indeed, the bottom of our dream as well. From the moment he goes to bed with Titania, the play moves increasingly back out of the frames which it has constructed. It seems interesting to note here, however, that the devices by which things are 'put right', in the play's interest to get the lovers back to Athens, to move back to reality, all seem to involve a 'putting to sleep' as well. This offers the opportunity for the image of awakening to reality--the lovers awaken to the reality of Athens, bottom awakens to the reality of the forest--but it also suggests that the move to that reality contains within it the same qualities of 'putting to sleep' that are associated with dream.

By ending with "Pyramus and Thisbe," the play repositions its audience to consider the framework in which they experience art and artifice. They have, along with the lovers, been reintegrated into the reality of Athens, but even this movement is one which must certainly recall the original, and more immediate, disintegration into the false world of Athens with which the play began. If this suggestion is missed by anyone the first time around, the play-within-the-play drives it home. The audience now is asked to respond to pure artifice (we saw it under construction in the forest, and we see it fall apart in "Pyramus and Thisbe"), but we are responding to this pure artifice alongside Theseus, Hippolyta, and the lovers, with whom we must both identify (we watch what they watch) while we are immediately distanced from them (we watch them watching). (Does Derrida's regressive frame not suggest itself further: who watches us watching them?)

Of course, as I have already suggested, Puck's final monologue points outward once again. If the implication was not taken up by watching the audience on stage, Puck leaves no doubt that the audience, too, has been complicit in this artifice. "That you have but slumbered here" suggests that you, too, must now wake up. However, as in the play, we may question what it is we are waking up to. No one in the play could quite shake off their dreams, and we might expect to have the same experience. Oberon's final speech, indeed his final existing in and presiding over the manor house at Athens, makes clear the role which fantasy plays in the propagation of reality.

All this very quickly.

On Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic theories seem to fail insofar as they forgo their obligation to accept themselves as subjective. Kant seems least to attempt to disguise this fact. Judgment as a word retains its true subjective uncertainty. As used in court (and at court, perhaps?) to judge is to weigh the basic facts and come to some conclusion, a conclusion which context gives the weight of some specific set of ethical standards. But if aesthetic judgment is to avoid populism (as it ever seems so determined to do), it must take on a belief in some true standard of objectivity while simultaneously and steadfastly refusing to subject its conclusions to testing.

Kant exposes this. He knows that no matter what conclusion is drawn by another regarding beauty, we are always inclined to a personal experience. The desire to test for ourselves. In this way, social conceptions of beauty, which characterize much of the interest in popular culture, act as aesthetic conduits. And so any totalizing aesthetic theory acts as nothing less or more, in any logical sense, than a preference for the movies of François Truffaut over those of Jean-Claude Vann Damme. It seems to me, then, that the denigration of the opposite opinion must necessarily be based on ethical grounds. According, that is, to some idea of the 'right' or 'just' way, to some act of judgment. To do so in the name of aesthetic theory, then, looks like just the type of political aestheticism which Benjamin warns us so vehemently against. From here my concern regarding Adorno arises. By drawing such a large part of human artistic production under a single net, and then condemning it outright, Adorno draws a most personal line between himself and any concept of mass. Mass is the medium with which Benjamin (and Marx) were so fascinated. Mass is the medium of the revolution, and yet for Adorno, the masses have been massively mislead, and his aesthetic theory attempts single-handedly to 'right' their course. I am lead by Benjamin to suspect such a presumption. For Benjamin, the masses which arose as a result of the industrial revolution will necessarily lead to their redemption. He mostly avoids any attempt to make judgments regarding the objects of consumption, except to acknowledge them as significant, and to acknowledge in technological change an infinite capacity to shock us. His love for movies stems for their capability to appropriate masses. He understands that mass reaction contains something qualitatively different than that found in individual contemplation. He may well lament the relative scarcity of human contemplation (many like him still exist, Adorno), but he understood the potential for change to reside not in an individual understanding, but as the result of mass (re)action.

Adorno's aesthetic, because it positions itself in opposition to the entire realm of popular arts, because it qualifies every potential artwork in relationship to its status as a commodity, leaves literally no object to judge but the viewers own mind. We might justify this in the music industry by some concept of 'selling out.' Such and such a band were so dope, man, until they sold out. Now they just make music for the masses. But not only does this justification seem to suggest its own two-dimensional quality, it also does not help us with regards to other artists, nor in the ever-growing complexity of other media. For example, what do we make of a film which gets maid by a major motion picture company, under a descent but not unreasonable budget, for an all but non-existent audience. If the film is sophisticated (say for example, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), it might merit Adorno's classification as art. Here it is, it has navigated (as it must) the evil, collusive complex of the culture industry, and it has retained some aspect of its resistance to commodification. It represents itself as a hero to the cause of the worker. It represents itself as art by denying itself. So far so good; until such a movie gains a wider audience. Friends tell friends, and in true Gladwellian style, the fashion tips, and suddenly everyone is watching it. Now the film seems to defy the nature of Adorno's aesthetic. It seems that it is not nearly so difficult as everyone supposed, and so perhaps does not resist in the way that we thought it might it's own easy consumption by the masses. What are we to make of this? Adorno's aesthetic again seems reduced to no more than some petty and conflicted notion of 'selling out'.

This tendency is seen on a broader (read: more massive) scale in the social tendency to deny the quality of a film that has been made based on a favorite book. While there my be a relatively small number of people who lament the fall of literature from Franz Kafka to Dan Brown, there are many more who might lament the shift from page to film for works such as The Lord of the Rings (or even more democratically, for Harry Potter). Here we have a much broader group of people making what is ostensibly the same judgment that Adorno makes, but in order to distinguish between a group of aesthetic objects all of which might be classified by him as pure commodity. I can hardly see Adorno granting Harry Potter the status of art object. (If he might perhaps for Sorcerer's Stone, than certainly not by the release of The Chamber of Secrets--obvious as the product of an industrial complex.) However, someone who decries the movie versions of these books invariably does so by recourse to some notion of difficulty as related to mass appeal. It doesn't allow for your imagination. It changed some of the best parts. The movie just got Voldemort all wrong. A fan of the book pre-film-adaptation qualifies himself as such through his reaction to the film as much as through his reaction to the book. To say nothing of the millions of new readers who flock to the book as a result of the movie. Adorno may well point to the conspiracy between J. K. Rowling, Scholastic, and Warner Brothers, it would be harder to explain away had the original book qualified for him as art. Suddenly, with a million new readers and a revived printing cycle, the book doesn't seem so steadfastly to refuse its commodity status.

Equally relevant to this problem might be the Oprah effect, which, while initially reserving for itself books that might fall well short of Adorno's critical gaze, more recently has adopted some titles which before might have found their way onto his list (2005: The Sound and the Fury; 2007: The Road, Love in the Time of Cholera). Adorno might only explain this extreme commodification by making some claim to his own 'correct' reading of the texts, as opposed to the message of subjugation which is inevitably inscribed upon the texts by the culture industry. But to do so is either to call into question any immanent critique which may have lay dormant in the work while it was still difficult and unpopular--while it still seemed to resist its own commodification--or to admit Oprah Winfrey (the culture industry might find no one better qualified for its own embodiment) as a potential disseminator of objects of true aesthetic quality. Either of these options seems to undermine Adorno's entire point of view.

Benjamin celebrates the transition from the primacy of the page to the seduction of the screen, not because he understands film to be in any way a better medium (I think he still might hold the opposite opinion), but because he understands in the transition to mass-media an entire revolution in the patterns of human thought. He glimpses the fact that, in a mass-media environment, recourse to any single medium, or the patterns of thought required in the processing of single media (of which he mentions contemplation) might seem antiquated, quaint, and tirelessly ideological.

This is the trap into which Adorno seems to fall. He fails to recognize, to inhabit, the shift in consciousness which is afforded--insisted upon--by the advent of mass-media. He insists upon a hierarchy of art which is grounded equally--and no more innocently--in ritual and its power structures as is the body of work which he casts aside with a grimace by employing his epithet, "the culture industry." And so he comes across sounding like a crotchety grandpa lamenting the music of 'kids these days!', with no more grounding for his disparagement of Weezer than they have in their distaste for Glen Miller.

However, I find myself to be sympathetic to Adorno, if only because I perceive as well as he the capacity for Capitalism to produce ever larger amounts of self-fulfilling, self-actualizing, internally-promotional bullshit. I might even be inclined to associate my own ethical views with his, had they not lead him to so undemocratic a conclusion. As an attempt to recuperate what seems useful in Adorno's theory, it might prove fruitful to consider artwork in general, even (perhaps especially) that class of artwork which seems most conducive to consumption, as containing within it something akin to Adorno's immanent critique. This, to me, seems more dialectical: to wonder how a multi-million dollar blockbuster might contain within it the suggestion of its own denial. To tease out the ways that Spiderman 2 expresses a refusal to allow an identity between the universal and the particular, and especially the ways that it does this without recourse to pre-mass patterns of thought, through a Benjaminian reception in distraction. Capitalism, according to Marx, contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. If we take him at his word, it seems unlikely that these seeds would not be germinating in the symbol-rich soil of the culture industry.

On the History of Consciousness

On the Origin of Species (1859)

Capital, Volume 1 (1867)

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

The General Theory of Relativity (1915)

Course in General Linguistics (1916) - Lectures 1906-1911

Quantum Uncertainty (Heisenberg) (1927)

Teaching Benjamin

"The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (reprinted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents my first exposure to the work of Walter Benjamin. Since I first read it over the summer, in preparation for Dr. Rasula's course on Metropolitan Modernity, I have read many more of his short essays as well as a large chunk of The Arcades Project. It was therefore exciting to revisit this essay in the context of teaching it to a group of students, many of whom may have been experiencing Benjamin for the first time.

It became clear to me as I reread the essay (my fourth reading, I think) just how it has become such a pivotal piece of writing in so many fields. Each reading, after time has passed and outside study undertaken, brings a whole new set of ideas to the fore, possibilities for understanding which had not exposed themselves until the current moment. In this sense, Benjamin achieves stylistically and rhetorically what he sets out to achieve historically, a series of discrete "dialectal images" which constitute "the relation of what-has-been to the now" (Arcades Project 462).

Benjamin begins the essay with an appeal to Marx's theory of political economy, stating that when Marx set out his ideas regarding base and superstructure, Capitalism was still in its infancy. Benjamin asserts that only now (in 1936, almost seventy years after the publication of the first volume of Capital) can we begin to analyze the effects of the base on the formations of the superstructure. Benjamin acknowledges that Marx was acting as a prognosticator, and that his own work must also "meet certain prognostic requirements" (1052). This is one of those places where I feel like Benjamin is talking to us. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that "history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state" (471). His interest in Paris in the nineteenth century (to which he dedicated a large amount of time and effort in compiling The Arcades Project) sprang from his understanding of a certain confluence between that time and his own, like a window into the past that might bring the present into clearer focus. This same window, I suspect, we sense when we approach much of Benjamin's work, and especially the "Artwork" essay. He looks back 70 years to Marx; we look back 70 years to him. And so much of what he is exploring in the "Artwork" essay has become, in true prognostic style, central to the modes of our everyday existence.

Lacanian Mathematics

Lacan asserts that language is a formulation only of "the correlations between signifier and signifier" with no recourse to any referent, either in the real world or at the core of our self, both of which are cut off from any true communicability (The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism, 2nd Ed., p. 1174). If we take him at his word, language is no more than an internally consistent system. This at first seems supremely ironic: the very system we employ to relate our ideas about our selves and the outside world is limited precisely in its ability to reference these two 'objects.' Language itself defines a 'no-man's-land' of physical existence between Self and Other. However, it seems to make sense insofar as language is a social phenomenon, and so must have meanings which are in constant flux according to their current status in the social construct.

Lacan's formulation effectively reduces almost every possible argument to a question of semantics. If we can make no reference to the real in our communication with other people, what we must essentially be arguing for is a specific set of relationships between words. That is to say, if I argue that a Jellyfish Sandwich from the Corner Cafe in Carrollton, GA is the best sandwich in the southeast, what I am really arguing for (as far as Lacan is concerned) is a certain relationship between the word (and conceptual utterances surrounding the word) "Jellyfish" and the word "best" and "sandwich" and "southeast" and "Corner Cafe" (along with their associated utterances--what Saussure might call the paradigmatic connections).

This fact might shed some light on Lacan's interest in mathematical formulas. After all, what theoretical construct illustrates relationships more specifically than math? Instead of attempting to justify, in any more conventional (and more traditionally rhetorical--read by Lacan as 'roundabout') way his ideas concerning desire, Lacan simply constructs the following mathematical relationship:

“...desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting” (1186).

Reduced in Lacanian fashion to mathematical symbols, this amounts to

D = d - a

Thus desire is by its nature unsatisfiable, if for no other reason than it is represented by the removal of our real appetite for its satisfaction. By this reduction, Lacan sidesteps the necessity to "argue" for his formulation, as well as all the difficulties which he perceives might necessarily result from trying to get us, the audience, to understand exactly what relationship between terms he is attempting to achieve. These mathematical formulas tend to come off as somewhat humorous, embedded as they are within pages of text, convoluted in its system of representation, ostensibly explaining the very complexities of language that they work ironically to undercut. However, what Lacan sacrifices in the these formulations in the way of 'straightforward' complexity, he more than gains back in 'straightforward' ambiguity.

Another benefit to Lacan's recourse to mathematical formulas in his discussion of language is to highlight language's status as an abstract system. From the time we experience complex algebra or Euclidean geometry, we grow comfortable with the idea that mathematics works only insofar as it depends on the rules of a system. Euclidean geometry does not need to correspond to the real world in order to be usefully applied. Part of its strength, in fact, stems from the regularizing effect that systematization has on the 'real' world of experience. By foregrounding mathematical formulations, Lacan is making the same argument for our ideas about language, which we are perhaps less inclined to think of as an abstract system if only because it is the system by which we must necessarily navigate our everyday lives.

That said, I think it might be fun to play around a little with Lacanian mathematics. By the application of the transitive property to the above formulation, Lacan also seems to set up a whole range of relationships which are achievable through simple mathematic maneuvering. Each term in the equation can be isolated:

d = D + a

a = d - D

What does it mean to suggest that our demand for love is simply our Desire added to our appetite for satisfaction? Perhaps in love we find our unquenchable Desire at least partially satiated? As interesting is the idea that our appetite for satisfaction is the difference between our demand for love and our unquenchable Desire to know directly, which suggests a familiar dichotomy between 'love' and 'lust', between 'need' and 'want'. However, rather than opposing them to one another (as the more traditional cliche might be inclined to do) Lacan suggests that they are intricately related through the same conduit of Desire which shapes our relationship to language, and thus both to our inner selves and the outside world.

Lacan also represents the relationship between signifier and signified in terms of the formulation S/s. While it seems that a primary reason for this visualization is that Lacan wishes us to see the Signifier as Over the Signified, in prominence and importance as well as in the role it plays in language (the signified 'reigns', so to speak), Lacan's obvious penchant for mathematics suggests that this might equally be read as "the sign = the Signifier divided by the signified," or perhaps better: "the sign = the signified divided into the Signifier." And Lacan's use of big and small letters is also employed with regards to the Other, which is opposed to an inner self that Lacan terms "objet petit autre", or the object of the little o. So we are left with a conception of the individual as represented by O/o, where O represents our outer self, the Other, which Lacan defines as “the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech” (1185). Once again we confront the bar, at which position Lacan locates the all-but-uncrossable gap between truth and symbol. It is all to tempting then, to set up an equivalency:

S/s ~ O/o

And a whole range of suggestions is evident from this formulation. First of all, the relationship of the Other to the Signifier is made clear, and the signified is consigned in the formula to a position equivalent to that of the inner self (o). This all seems to fit Lacan's own pronouncements very well. However, what happens when we play our little mathematics games with this formula and come up with:

S(o) ~ O(s)

or further

S ~ O(s) / o

Perhaps we might read the first formulation as "the Signifier is multiplied through the objet petit a as the Other is multiplied through the signified." If we take the two sides of the equation to be stating the same thing in different ways (in the same sense that 2+2=4 does not necessarily indicate an operation so much as a simple equivalency), we might achieve a clearer understanding of the relation of the signified as Saussurian "concept" to the multiplicity of things which each concept must reference. The multiple and fragmented Other from which all signifiers ultimately must spring is bound up by the seemingly singular signified concept. The inverse of this relationship is represented by the first half of the equation, where the signifying linguistic element becomes multiple and fractured as it attempts to enter the inner self.

The second equation manages to isolate the Signifier, which we can now usefully take to equal "the inner self divided into the Other as multiplied through the signified."

A Note on Lacan's Syntax

In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious" (excerpted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition), Lacan explores the ways in which the signifier takes its meaning solely as it relates to other signifiers. It does not make reference to the real (like Saussure, Lacan brackets the referent), nor does it identify directly with the signified (which Lacan considers off limits to the language center of the individual). As to how the signifier takes on meaning in utterance, Lacan says:

“...the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it.[...] 'I shall never...', 'All the same it is...', 'And yet there may be...'. Such sentences are not without meaning, a meaning all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it.[...] From which we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning 'insists' but that none of its elements 'consists' in the signification of which it is at the moment capable.” (1175)

Lacan's concept of the way that meaning unfolds has implications for our understanding of syntactical power. It suggests the power that we locate in Jamesian style. James's sentences often seem endlessly to postpone the completion of meaning that we long for. Indeed, often the entire structure of his stories is based on a continual unfolding and revealing. (This is the signifying chain on the level of narrative structure). The mysterious, oppressive atmosphere of so many of his stories might be traced to this quality of the signifier. The same quality of linguistic uncertainty is employed by Poe and other writers of mystery and detective fiction: they 'work' only insofar as they postpone final meaning at least until the end of the story. (James often seems to refuse it even then.)

The same set of tools which are employed by James and Poe in the interest of suspense, mystery, or negative tension are used by Steve Martin in the interest of comedy. In his memoir, Born Standing Up, Martin discusses his theory of comedy. To paraphrase, he recalls a realization that most comedy worked on the principle of a punchline, so that even those routines without an explicit punchline followed a pattern of build up and release. What concerned Martin was the fact that this often led to automatic laughter, a laughter which resulted from the release of tension. This seemed too contrived to be real, and in the interest of subverting the tendency, he developed his comedy routines so that they forever gave the impression of being on the cusp of a punchline. In this way, his routine was forever building toward a moment of release which never materialized. Audiences were not 'handed' there moments of release prepackaged in punchlines, and so were forced to carve out their own moments. The laughter that resulted, while at first more piecemeal and fraught with tension, seemed for Martin to be truer. People were not just laughing because that's what they were supposed to do. Indeed, they were laughing because they had to, because there was no other option for them to release the continually built-up tension of the comedic moment.

Lacan's Mirror, Letter

Through his synthesis of Saussurian linguistics and Freudian psychology, Lacan attempts to give us a more complete and nuanced picture of both systems of thought as well as of the nature of our own existence.

I think it is important to note, from the outset, that by applying (and to a great extent, also extending) the Saussurian model of language into the core of the human psyche (as it relates to our subconscious), Lacan necessarily pushes any theory of existence into a realm of uncertainty and relativity. In his essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," (excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed.), Lacan quickly does away with the possibility of discussing reality at all when he states that

“...this primordial distinction [between signifier (S) and signified (s)] goes well beyond...the bi-univocal correspondence between the word and the thing....[N]o signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." (1171).

The reason for this impossibility, Lacan posits, is the fact that there necessarily remains within us sections of ourselves that are untranslatable in any language. This quality of the incompleteness of language Lacan develops into a complete explanation of human existence as it manifests itself in human psychology.

In "The Mirror Stage as Formative..." (also excerpted in the Norton), Lacan sets about explaining what he conceives to be the moment of an initial separation of self from self-image. He locates this moment at the time that a baby first identifies itself in a mirror. (Thus, "Mirror Stage"). Before this moment, Lacan suggests, the baby is a bundle of "turbulent movements" that he can feel animating him (1165). We might find an analogy for this state in Nietzsche's Dionysiac, associated as it is with immediate sensory experience and fleeting sensation. Lacan's pre-Mirror baby has no sense of itself beyond the fragmented pieces of sensory data that it compiles from the world around it. It does not conceive of itself as a unified being. During this time, it might be inclined to consider its mother's breast as much a part of its existence as the feeling of hunger which the milk helps to subside. The sensation of warmth provided by blankets likewise is not conceived as separate from the self.

All of this changes, Lacan says, when the baby makes the "primary identification" of its self in the mirror (1164). In this identification, the baby conceives of itself as a unified whole for the first time. This has the effect of drawing forth the child's ego, as he conceives of a certain power and agency associated with a unified self. Lacan says that the idea of a unified self is primarily an aesthetic realization, based as it is on the form of unity presented in the mirror. However, the "agency of the ego," in order to establish it's self-image, must necessarily subject that pre-Mirror sensory data to a degree of repression, and so, Lacan says, the ego in this way is from the beginning situated "in a fictional direction" (1165). The mirror image, Lacan continues, "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination" (1165). This alienation occurs because at the same time that the child conceives of himself as a unified being, he must also recognize all of those things which are evidently not a part of that self, including (not least of all) his mother's breast.

We can see Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic at play in the interaction which Lacan conceives of between the child and his mirror image. Here, the child understands the image in the mirror to be Other than himself. It is not actually part of himself, but the child incorporates this "specular I" as Other into himself when he begins to interact with others. Thus Lacan's concept of "paranoiac alienation" occurs as the true self (the inner, inexpressible, and fragmented self that the child first knew) is subdued, enslaved and repressed by this "specular I" in its first attempts to interact socially.

From a scientific standpoint (one to which I, despite [because of?] my deep-seated romanticism, am ever inclined to resort), the question arises whether the mirror in this stage must be a literal mirror (in the sense that the identification taking place must be an actual literal reflection of the child), or if it might as easily be seen as a figurative mirror, in which the child’s individual mirror image comes together finally in his mind as he unifies the sensed anatomy of his own body and the perceived unity of other humans. It seems that if we are to consider the mirror to be literal (there is some suggestion that we are), Lacan’s theory has implications for our understanding of pre-industrial societies. For thousands of years the only mirrors available might have been the calm surfaces of bodies of water. Prehistoric babies would not likely encounter such a reflection until well into their lives. How much earlier today’s young children are surely exposed to any literal reflection of themselves. (The little musical swing that we bought for my son Will when he was born had a little mirror positioned just above his newborn head, for easy viewing.) Does this earlier exposure suggest that the mirror stage might be reached earlier in life for modern man? If, in order to avoid such a difficulty, we consider the latter to be true, and the mirror to be figurative, we are put in the position of asking what the immediate stimulus might be for the child to unify his self-image. Truthfully, this same issue arises in the literal-mirror model, since I think we can safely assume that Will did not unify his self-image the first time we laid him in the musical swing. In this sense, Lacan's theory lacks clarity as so many other developmental models seem to (my wife, in this connection, suggests Piaget's cognitive development model). Lacan goes farther than Freud in explaining the roots of the consciousness we experience, but he shirks the question of why it should be this moment, this stimulus, rather than any other which causes the necessary fracture.

In "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," Lacan attempts to trace out the implications of the fracture of self-consciousness which occurs in the Mirror Stage. He begins by positioning the individual, from the very start, in the context of society and culture through our relationship with language, to which he attributes the structure of the unconscious. Lacan observes:

“...language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it....[T]he ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a ternary conception of the human condition--nature, society, and culture--the last term of which would well be reduced to language...” (1169-70)

He perceptively downplays the traditional dichotomy between individual and society, between nature and nurture. Lacan sees these two elements as so intimately interwoven as to be ultimately indivisible. However, the real revolution is Lacan's assertion that the unconscious itself contains "the whole structure of language" (1169). Saussure was astute in his recognition that language is something complete which we enter into as we learn it. We do not have to create language anew because it already exists in the world separate us. Lacan goes a step further by stating that language is the structure by which our subconscious is organized. Language, in other words, at least in its structure is an inborn trait. By identifying himself with an image, the child has already undergone a shift in his consciousness from the 'real' (that state of immediate sensual interaction with the world) to the 'imaginary' (literally, associated with his image, his fractured ego self). When the child enters into language, he undergoes a second transition, into the realm of the 'symbolic.' Interactions at the level of society and culture, undergone through our employment of language, are therefore removed from reality by two degrees.

In explaining the structure of this Language itself, Lacan reproduces the formula put forward by Saussure, translating it in Lacanian fashion into an algorithm: S/s, where S represents the signifier and s the signified. Lacan here places a great deal of stress on the bar separating the two, a barrier which he says "initially...resist[s] signification" (1171). This bar takes on greater significance later, as he explore the signification of the phallus. For now, it is enough to say that this bar is largely uncrossable, and that any suggestion of a direct relationship between S and s is misleading. To demostrate this, Lacan reproduces the diagram employed by Saussure to explain the relationship between signifier and concept:

And couples it with his own, corrected and refined image:

It should be noted that, in reproducing Saussure's image, Lacan has flipped it, in order to make it match with his formulation S/s. (in Saussure's original, the concept is on top, the sound-image on bottom, which accords with his view that the sound-image flows from an attempt to represent, to signify, the concept). This change also has the effect of placing the primacy on the signifier, rather than the signified, which is key to Lacan's understanding of the final inaccessibility of the signified in any attempt at signification.

The difference between these two images lies in Lacan's conception of language as a power in identity formation. The second image presents two signifiers with seemingly identical signifieds. The speaker then is left with a choice which requires that he enter into one or the other, and in so doing, fit himself (or herself) to a notion of identity which is defined by language (as a system external to the self). While Lacan's example ostensibly deals with sexual identity (which he seems to consider as primary in identity formation), the same diagram might well serve in any number of cases, as far as it relates to Saussure's pardigmatic axis of signification. The choices we make with regards to language, what word we choose as signifier for any given signified, help to define our identity in relation to society.

Lacan here introduces what he terms "the signifying chain," which is the chain of signification by which we attempt communication, and which he characterizes as "rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings" (1174). The image is appropriately abstruse, and suggests in language the quality of a fractal, ever diverting from any specific connection to reality. The signifying chain is indicative in grammar of "the level of the unit immediately superior to the sentence," and in verbal utterance, "the level of the verbal locution" (1174). In other words, the signifying chain is active at the moment that a complete meaning is attempted in language. Lacan allows that this meaning is developed either by recourse to metonymy (the substitution of words based on partial signification) or by metaphor (the substitution of signifiers which cross the barrier of signification).

Mytonymy is basically a repetitive act, and does not require any creation, as it simply substitutes signifier for signifier based on similarity or relationship in meaning. This seems similar to Saussure's paradigmatic axis, which finds attached to any signifier other signifiers which have a related meaning. Indeed, Lacan echoes Saussure when he states that "[t]here is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts suspended 'vertically', as it were, from that point" (1175). This suggests that any utterance implies a substitution, some other chain which would work equally well to perform the intended meaning. It also suggests that any utterance might well imply its opposite, and that the implication of opposing meaning is equally as important in our attempts to understand the meanings of opposite. (This seems again to suggest language as a system of negative relations: we define any single concept not so much by what it is as by what it isn't).

Metaphor is more complicated, and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Lacan allows that metaphoric construction is "creative or poetic" in that it represents a "crossing of the bar" of signification which allows for the "passage of the signifier into the signified" (1179). This formulation is confusing, considering Lacan's insistence up until now (and later, in his discussion of the Phallus) of the inviolability of the bar, the essential inaccessibility of the signified in any attempt at signification. Perhaps we must understand this simply as stating that metaphor is creative in that it sets up new linguistic relationships between signifiers, new arrows pointing to new signifieds (which perhaps still remain essentially out of reach). If at one time 'love' and 'rose' were metonymically isolated, metaphor has since crossed the bar, so that the two words now are bound by associative meaning.

Lacan finishes his essay on "The Agency of the Letter" with a deconstruction of Descartes assertion that "I think, therefore I am." Lacan identifies the error in this assertion as the assumption that human thought represents the epitome of existence. Thought, Lacan has shown, is a determinate of language, which is necessarily symbolic and repressive of reality. To hold to Descartes' formula is to "deny oneself access to what might be called the Freudian universe," all that part of existence which eludes consciousness (1180). The reformulation of human consciousness around linguistic construction means that, henceforth, it is no longer "a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (1180). Because the true inner self, the 'real', is eternally cut off by our recourse to language, we must forever wonder whether what we are 'really' bares any relation to how we are represented in our speech. Lacan thus reformulates the saying, first as, "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think," and finally as, "I am not wherever I am the playing of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (1180). While these reformulations can be seen partially as a humorous Lacanian subversion, they suggest what is really at the core of his philosophy: that human 'reality' must necessarily lie forever beyond the scope of explanation.

Freud, Bakhin, and the Human Dream

The following represents a one-page tutorial I prepared for the graduate-level section of my Contemporary Literary Theory Course. I have reproduced it here as means of keeping the blog in continued conversation with itself. The issues addressed represent continuations of previous discussions, and also suggest topics which may find future voice in the blog.

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The Structuralist theory of Frye and Levi-Strauss suggests that novelistic form is a cultural displacement of mythic forms which modernity compels us to censor and repress (98-99, 126). However, as McKeon proposes, the novel might also be fruitfully seen, through the lens of Freud’s dream-work schema, not as the displaced object itself (that found in the dream-content), but as a type of long-form dream interpretation. To look at the novel in this way suggests that whatever displacement has happened (either for Freud’s individual dreamer or for the society as a whole) has done so before maturity (i.e., modernity, adulthood) arrives on the scene. We might take myth to represent a sort of dream-stage of humanity, in which the individual elements of our collective human dream-wish have been condensed and displaced--and significantly overdetermined--in the archetypes of the myth-mind. Modernity, then, can be conceived as mankind’s collective awakening and subsequent (ongoing) attempt at a “talking cure”: the various artistic and social forms (including the novel) represent our various attempts at a macro-level dream interpretation.

For the child Freud describes in “Family Romances,” fantasies allow the appropriate and necessary “freeing of [the] individual” which must occur as he grows up (156). These fantasies take some seemingly distorted forms, but Freud points to the fact that they “still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents” (158). By conceiving of himself as a changeling, the actual son of an Emperor and Empress, for example, the child projects into fantasy the ideal qualities he once placed within the parents themselves, but which have since become disillusioned in the child’s more mature and intelligent critique of his parents. A child who emerges successfully (into ‘normality’ as Freud conceives it) is one who can eventually reposition himself as an individual in relationship to the individuals represented by his parents (cf. Hegel).

So also, as Bakhtin points out, does the novel represent a human tendency to dislodge tradition, to “destroy this boundary” between the “valorized” (328) temporal space of myth and the “openendedness” of “still-evolving contemporary reality” (323). For his conviction that “[t]he epic past...lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present,” we might find an analogy both in the mindset of Freud’s child as well as in the content of the dream as received by the dreamer upon waking (323).

The parents of the small child in Freud’s “Family Romance” represent “the only authority and the source of all belief,” and are thus initially valorized and idealized in his mind. It is by a process of relativization – one that, similar to the relativizing force presented by Bakhtin, occurs through a process of increased intelligence and external comparison – that the child comes to be disillusioned of the valorized parents and thereby achieves his individuality.

Freud’s dream-content likewise lacks temporal continuity. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud explores the difficulty presented by attempts to narrate dream-content as a series of causes and effects, of beginnings and endings – in short, in terms of the same logical relationships modernity associates with ‘development’ – concluding that “dreams have no means at their disposal for representing these logical relations,” but rather “reproduce logical connection by simultaneity in time” (NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 821-22). That Freud leaves the task of (re)establishing these connections to the “interpretive process” is significant to Bakhtin’s understanding of “novelization,” which concerns itself directly with abolishing the “distance” associated with an atemporal worldview in the interest of understanding “contemporary reality” (328).

Further Questions:

1. How does the destruction of distance explored by Bakhtin in the first section of our reading (“Epic and Novel…”) inform or play-out in his discussion of Novelistic Discourse?
2. Bakhtin gives us a model of the novel “on the border between the completed, dominant literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia” (337). How might this model inform our reading of James and Jamesian style?
   

A Quick Look at (McKeon's) Structuralism

Walter Benjamin (in “The Storyteller”) laments the loss of reminiscence represented by Modernity. He relates this form of memory to the storyteller, who has his roots in oral tradition. These days, he argues, we are attracted by the verifiability of information, its capacity to give us a coherent story. This is reason at it’s best, Nietzsche’s Apolline, which claims that it can fit each piece into the puzzle. Thus, Benjamin argues, rememberence is “dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle” (Theory of the Novel, Micheal McKeon ed., p. 86).

Modernity’s information-driven consciousness lends itself to a linear (i.e., ultimate) conception of historical understanding, which Levi-Strauss juxtaposes with the repetitive nature of myths (which, like Freud’s dream-content, employ layers of overdetermined meaning). He positions an initial break from myth-mindedness at the moment man adopted writing (“From Tristes Tropique”, in NATC, 2nd Edition, p. 1282). As a contrast to Modernity, Levi-Strauss points to all ancient civilization and a few contemporary societies (dwindling in number) which continue to live outside of history, relying instead on repeated cycles (e.g., seasons, lifetimes) to pattern an existence which resists the idea of permanent and irrevocable change (“The Savage Mind”, in Theory of the Novel, Micheal McKeon ed., p. 98-99).

Frye attempts to mark our descent into historical time onto the development of fiction. He sees modern literary development as a displacement away from myths--which like Freud’s dream-wish, represent “the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire”--and toward the “verisimilitude” represented in realist and naturalist fiction (126). However, what Frye takes for realism, for the “plausibility” realized in modern fiction, is nothing more than that same ‘historical’ conception of our surroundings which Modernity has helped to develop in us. (Frye's definition of "real" is precisely opposite to Nietzsche's.) In an attempt to follow his analysis to its dialectical end, Frye usefully suggests that the most recent, ironic, mode of fiction might represent the beginning of a move backward along the axis.

Indeed, Marxist dialectic adopts the cyclical understanding of the myth-mind and applies it to swaths of time and space (i.e., to societal dream-content) which are possible only in their historical relationship to the linear, text- and information-driven history represented by Modernity. Marxism represents a post-historical, post-Enlightenment understanding which is also evident in post-modernism.

Nietzsche's Not-logic

How much of life is a battle between logic and not-logic. Whatever is the opposite of logic is what Nietzsche hopes to represent in the Dionysiac: logic’s dialectical antithesis. It is the same not-logic that dominates Freud’s conception of our unconscious. It is what ever is not-logical that compels people to believe in gods. Hegel praised the ascendancy of logic. Marx tended to lament it. How does capitalism (as we understand it) represent logical tendencies taken to extremes? In what way does Marxism or postmodernism, advocate a return to not-logic?

Every (major or minor) social revolution seems to begin in Dionysiac frenzy, a sudden, brief, but extreme restructuring of social and psychological ideas around not-logic, followed by a slow rehabilitation into a state of Apolline logic. This is easiest to see in war (especially simplified in revolutionary civil war, a physical changing of the guard). It is equally true for revolutions in thought. Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, all those theoretical arguments that align themselves with not-logic, whose theoretical implications rock our human understanding to its core, insodoing tend to stir up the Dionysiac embers embedded in each (and all) of us. However, all of these revolutionary ideas also end up incorporated into logical patterns of thought, given logical applications.

As Hegel and Marx seem unable (unwilling?) to do, Benjamin conceives of this cycle not as progress toward some final synthesis, but as an ongoing and continuous process of dialectical potentiality. The dialectic compels us to consider where we stand within this cycle.

But how does our hope that things get better drive us to act, and what is the consequence of a position which denies the concept of progress?

Oscar Wilde and "The Critic as Artist"

Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist (Excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents an interesting synthesis of many of the ideas I have heretofore been exploring.

In a strict sense, he seems to be interested in extending and refining the role of the critic put forward by Matthew Arnold in his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (also, conveniently anthologized in my Norton). Arnold holds that it is the function of criticism "to see the object as in itself it really is" (695), a notion with which Wilde assertively disagrees. As the title of the work suggests, he holds the critic in high regards as an artist in his own right, who uses the works of artists as they in turn have used the material world: as a point from which to jump in the creation of something wholly new. He seems to anticipate reader response criticism when he states that the artwork is not "expressive," but "impressive," and that Criticism is "in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another" (800). Criticism, for Wilde, has no interest in discovering the true intentions of the artist; that is a shallow endeavor. Rather, Criticism must use the artwork as a pallet upon which to read "the record of one's own soul" (799).

Arnold maintain that criticism lays the philosophical groundwork upon which art is built. Wilde suggests, "There have been critical ages that have not been creative, in the ordinary sense of the world, ages in which the spirit of man has sought to set in order the treasures of his treasure-house" (796). It is, in fact, to this effect that Arnold sets about writing his essay to begin with. He sees a certain deficiency in the age from which he writes, a deficiency which he believes makes the creation of any true art impossible; the absence in Arnold's England of the "national glow of life and thought" which makes epochs of great art possible, leaves contemporary art wanting "materials and a basis" which might allow it "a thorough interpretation of the world" (698). It is the function of Arnold's proposed turn to criticism to create such an era of inquiry. Wilde agrees, stating that "there has never been a creative age that has not also been a critical age" (796).

Arnold still holds the "free creative activity" found in great art to be the "highest function of man," and so seems to position criticism as a somewhat lesser, albeit equally necessary, pursuit (696). Wilde sees no such distinction. Indeed, the very title of his work suggests as much: the critic does not stand in relation to the artist, but rather becomes an artist himself as he experiences and interprets the art of others. For Wilde, Criticism in its highest form is "more creative than [artistic] creation" because it relates not to the world, but to one's soul; in this sense, Criticism becomes a more pure realization of Hegel's self-consciousness, which Wilde holds to be essential to the creation of true art (799). Wilde even goes so far, at times, as to (somewhat humorously) denigrate the artistic function. Of authors, for example, he says, "Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature" (797), and he attributes to the Mona Lisa the possibility that da Vinci was "merely the slave of an archaic smile" (800).

Wilde's concept of Beauty echoes and revises that of Kant. Kant asserts that "the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good" ("From Critique of the Power of Judgment," excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, p. 449). Wilde parallels the sentence of Kant's when he claims that "Beauty is the symbol of symbols" ("The Critic As Artist," p. 802). For Kant, establishing the subjective universality of Beauty was essential, and he went to great lengths to eliminate all interest from the aesthetic judgment of an artwork. In Kant's aesthetic, beauty must have no purpose, and all judgment of beauty lies within the person who is judging. Wilde takes in these concepts and states that "because it expresses nothing," Beauty offers the opportunity to the Critic to "put into it whatever one wishes" (802). Beauty, according to Wilde, "has as many meanings as man has moods," and Criticism of artwork offers the opportunity to bring to fuller light "a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely" (802). That the artwork is somehow incomplete for the artist is an idea first raised by Shelley, who saw in the works of Dante and Milton the possibility of interpretations that the artists themselves could not have anticipated. Wilde echoes this concept when assigns to his Critic the role of "always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age" (806).

There are aspects of Wilde's work which call to mind Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying" as well; foremost perhaps is Wilde's insistence that it is the primary aim of the writer to lie willfully. What Nietzsche asserts gravely, however--that we are blind to our reality because of our immersion in a lie--Wilde approaches playfully; he seems to register Nietzsche's concerns even as he acknowledges them as the components of the great play-thing that is human existence. In his exploration of the critic, in fact, Wilde builds an argument that echoes Nietzsche's at each step, while at each turn reversing the "tone of grim intensity" that pervades Nietzsche in favor of a certain frivolity (Editor's note, p. 78). Wilde first acknowledges indirectly Nietzsche's skepticism of language when he asserts that language "is the parent, and not the child, of thought" (797). Wilde maintains a certain level of pride in the human animal, who through language can "rise above" "lower" lifeforms (797). Where Nietzsche criticizes language for its roll in constructing a false sense of reality, Wilde praises this linguistic function in human existence:

...it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvellous [sic], more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon, and through which common natures seek to realize their perfection (798).

One can see that Wilde uses the word true just as Nietzsche would, to describe the constructed reality revealed through the employment of language. Language divides us from the crude rule of mere action, which Wilde points out any animal may achieve, calling action "a blind thing, dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious" (797). Wilde's man of action here begins to sound a bit like Nietzsche's intuitive man.

As Wilde describes the way in which the critic interacts with the artist, he does so in a way that hearkens the role that Nietzsche assigns to Science. For Nietzsche, science "works unceasingly" to fit the world of primary concepts, concepts more or less created as metaphors for reality, into a "columbarium," a great framework which imposes metaphors upon metaphors and thus removes humanity ever farther from the primary experience of reality (771). Similarly, Wilde's critic

occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought (798-99).

As Nietzsche's Science piles metaphor upon metaphor, so Wilde's criticism is "a creation within a creation," and just as Nietzsche condemns Science for this tendency, Wilde praises criticism as "the purest form of personal impression" because "it has least reference to any standard external to itself" (799).

Reading Wilde, I am struck by the way in which he constructs his arguments. As is evident in the above analysis, he is interesting not so much for the originality of his ideas, but for the wild (read, "Wilde") spin he puts on the ideas of others. He uses the dialogue format to highlight the ostensible absurdity of his theses, and then shows them to arise out of a certain point of view taken on past theoretical work. It is, of course, the subjective point of view which arrives as the champion of Wilde's Criticism, and employing just such a point of view serves to demonstrate the very theory he is positing.

Metadrama and Metacinema

Insofar as a play is metadramatic, it is a commentary on social conditions. By commenting on its own status--as play, as entertainment--it comments also on the status of the play as philosophy, i.e. it comments on its own performance in society. Metadrama might be called a commentary of the plays performative aspect: what does the play do to its audience as a performance? Any single performance which comments on its own artifice, calls into the mind the artifice of performance in general, and so casts the audience's gaze back on itself, in search of final meaning. In this regard, metadramatic performance is a true mirror held up to nature.

It might be that all performance is metadramatic in some sense. Does performance, which places in front of us an imitation of human action--be it "realistic" or stylized, do we not still understand it as imitated--naturally encourage its audience to reflect on human action in general, to wonder about its status as reality? The reflection that the metadramatic performance induces is political only in a sense: The play encourages its audience members to analyze the broader systems of performed action in which they are embedded.

With regards to films it seems that, as with most art in the mechanical age, this metadramatic quality becomes strictly more political. Certainly we also recognize the actions in a film as being imitations, but the spacial and temporal, as well as social, mediation that the film medium represents perhaps obscures for us the same capacity to recognize the imitated action as being human. That is not to say that plays are unmediated (I have explored the notion previously), but in performance, generally those responsible for all mediation and artistic interpretation are at hand, vis-a-vis the performers themselves (and, at the Globe theater and elsewhere, even often the playwright). Perhaps it is because in film we recognize the anonymity of these mediators (their anonymity glares in the metacinematic quality of the film itself) that film, rather than calling into question the audience's role as performer, instead calls into question its own status as qualified performer.

When an actor portrays a character on stage, or a musician plays and sings his song, or a politician comes before us to speak, we are aware to some extent of an ultimately accountable individual for this individual performance. In a film, such accountability is not immediately apparent. Indeed, it is part of the artifice of the film that any concrete accountability is continually obscured. Benjamin points out:

“The shooting of a film...presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to the spectator a single viewpoint which would exclude from his or her field of vision the equipment...unless the alighment of the spectator’s pupil coincided with that of the camera.” ("The Work of Art," Second Version, published in The Work of Art... (2008). Harvard UP, pp. 34-35)

The film, with its single point of view, its multiple cuts, its artificial lighting, its shifts in time and space, does not allow us to identify with any element of the human agency that is so crucial to live performance. We understand in the film that the actor is not performing the actions portrayed; these actions are performed rather in the lighting lab and the editing room. Just as we understand that is not, indeed, we who are watching the actor, but the camera itself. We are consigned to watch the machine. Our anxiety over this fact often makes us suspicious that the machine watches us in return (cf. Orwell, Clark & Kubrik, the Wachowskis).

The play reflects the audience only in its nature as a live performance. This immediate human interaction cannot be underestimated. By putting before us a human like us, the play participates in a reenactment of the Hegelian struggle for identity. If we leave the theater questioning the motives behind the performances of others, it is only because we have first reflected on the motives of our own performances. This is a philosophical reflection.

Because the film can reflect on itself without in doing so reflecting its audience as individuals, it does not tend immediately toward matters of philosophy. Rather, if the film calls for reflection at all, it calls for social and political reflection, in that it calls into mind man's relationship to the machine. It is likely, however, that film doesn't immediately call for reflection of any kind; its capacity for a distracted reception, as outlined by Benjamin, suggests that any natural tendency toward reflection that film inherits is is refracted by the immediacy of the film medium itself. Any attempt to interpret a film as metadramatic performance, to read its interaction with the audience, tends either to feel pressed and somewhat hollow, or else endlessly complicated by matters of Marxist materialism.

Nietzsche's Truth and Lying

In his essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Nietzsche paints a picture of humanity “deeply immersed in illusions and dream-images” (Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition, 765).

He calls into question language’s capacity to relate truths. Nietzsche’s “liar” is only lying insomuch as he is subverting the agreed-upon naming system of society. Nietzsche goes on to deconstruct this naming system, pointing to language’s tendency to generalize experiences and thus disconnect the language of them with the experiences themselves. He goes on the explain the genesis of language in terms of two metaphors.

The first metaphor occurs when “[t]he stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image” (767). It seems easiest to imagine this metaphor in terms of visual stimuli, where photons of light travel to our visual cortex, and our brain receives and interprets the stimuli as some set of images. We “see” a chair because our brain interprets the set of photon data as a specific image. This could apply equally to other senses, though we perhaps have to modify our understanding of the term “image.” Sound waves activate nerve sensors within our inner ear, and our brain resolves these waves into some semblance of order and intelligibility. This order would be the “image” of sound. Thus also for smell, taste, and touch.

Nietzsche’s second metaphor occurs when “[t]he image is then imitated by a sound” (767). This is the creation of language. The nervous receptors of the original stimuli transfer the image data to our verbal centers, which create a verbal representation of the image.

An interesting aspect of this process of language creation as described by Nietzsche is the necessary break between each step in the process. Translating nervous stimulus into image, and then image into sound, the human brain must encounter some very difficult choices. An analogy might be found in the difficulty translators have in capturing the essence of a passage in another language. Some data will be lost. Some amount of meaning will be distorted. Indeed, many hold that translation even between languages is impossible to accomplish effectively. And this between systems of thought designed to accomplish the same or similar tasks (i.e., the verbal representation of real experiences, of Nietzsche’s “nervous stimulation”). Nietzsche puts the difficulty thus: “...[E]ach time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere” (767). As humans, we tend to gloss over the difficulty that occurs when one type of stimulus is translated into an entirely different sort of data (by way of not one, as Nietzsche points out, but two leaps) so long as this translation is as familiar as that which accompanies language formation. We are more uncomfortable with other forms of the same phenomenon; for example, the experience of tasting colors, which has been attested to by many who have experienced LSD, seems entirely foreign to us. Perhaps a closer examination of such “nonstandard” data translations would help us become aware of just how much of reality is lost in translation.

Nietzsche goes on to discuss “concepts” as the uses of language for individual cases which “must fit countless other, more or less similar cases, i.e. cases which, strictly speaking, are never equivalent, and thus nothing other than non-equivalent cases” (767). He gives the example of “leaf” and “honesty”, which words do not designate a particular entity in reality, but only a generalized concept of reality which is “formed by dropping...individual differences arbitrarily” (767). Nietzsche asserts that, by way of these generalizations, we create for ourselves a concept of something which does not exist in nature, a prototypical leaf from which all other leaves are designed in our minds. It’s interesting to note that this generalization necessarily begins in (and may take place entirely within) the creation of the first metaphor. When our nerves in our eyes are stimulated by some photons, our translation of this data into image must necessarily draw on the image data already stored in our brains. It is a simplification, to be sure, but it seems as though this sense data may be compared with the experiences of past nervous sensation, and when an alignment is found (between this sensation and others which are associated with the image-concept of ‘leaf’) a generalizing concept is applied. Language, then--the second metaphor--has less work to do.

Nietzsche uses this classification of experience in order to call into question humanity's relationship with the concept of “truth,” which he calls

A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical and binding... (768)

He (somewhat humorously) returns to the liar with which he began the discussion, stating that humanity's obligation to “truth” is no more than “the obligation to lie in accordance with firmly established convention, to lie en masse and in a style that is binding for all” (768). This construct of humanity, which he acknowledges as “a mighty architectural genius,” nevertheless has no real connection to the world as it is, to Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and Nietzsche calls on man to again awaken to the knowledge of himself “as an artistically creative subject,” though this awakening necessarily means the loss of such “degree of peace, security, and consistency” as is achieved within the dream-image of constructed reality (770).

Nietzsche explains that humanity's continued employment of specific images to relate to specific neural activity, over many generations, has created in our minds a sense of causality, “as if it were the only necessary image” (770). He likens this experience to a dream from which one never wakes, and so takes the dream itself to be reality. The idea of dream-image is intimately taken up by Benjamin, whose phantasmagoria suggests that we are continually caught up in a false understanding of the continuity of reality. Benjamin, too, points to language's tendency to dissolve the concept of flux which is inherent in any concept of reality which attempts to exclude human consciousness. Things as they are do not have continuity, and only in the employment of language do I become an entity which is independent and unchanging.

By calling into question humanity’s access to universal truth, Nietzsche anticipates Postmodern relativism. It’s funny: it seems like I have, for most of my life, been aware of language’s limitations as Nietzsche outlines them, and I am attracted to his theory as foundational partially because it strikes me as somewhat odd that the concept of language’s constructedness could have ever been “new.” My feeling must necessarily stem from my own embeddedness in a set of cultural assumptions which has begun to internalize Nietzsche’s theory. This brings up a certain double paradox of the theory. First of all (and rather plainly), by making his claim that language does not relate to reality, that it distorts truth, Niezsche automatically undercuts his own argument (by virtue of the fact that it, too, is made using language). It’s the philosophical equivalent to saying “nothing I say is true.” But even more paradoxical to me is the idea that Nietzsche’s theory is embedded in a history of philosophy that makes him the inheritor of a great deal of ground work regarding our capacity for reason. It would seem, in other words, that Nietzsche’s own theory denouncing reason could only be reached through a superior employment of reason. Only through a superior self-consciousness can man become conscious of his own self-consciousness.

Nietzsche distinguishes between the man of concepts, regularity and reason, and the man of pretense, myth and immediacy. Modern, enlightened man, he says, will “no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions,” but must rather “generalize all these impressions first, turning them into cooler, less colorful concepts in order to harness the vehicle” of his life to them (768). Nietzsche blames science, which “works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts” for removing humanity into a world of metaphors based on metaphors, and so distancing us even further from any sense of reality. The drive to form metaphors, which Nietzsche acknowledges as a “fundamental human drive,” is not realized in a world structured by science, which hands down its own prepackaged metaphors and gives them the name Truth. This drive, however, might still be realized “in myth and in art generally” (771-72). He turns to pre-Socratic Greek society for an example of man for whom, “thanks to the constantly effective miracle assumed by myth...anything is possible at any time, as it is in a dream, and the whole of nature cavorts around men as if it were just a masquerade of the gods” (772). Modern man rarely considers just how much of his life and society functions based on the assumptions that trees will not talk and things, when dropped, will fall to the ground. By calling to mind a people for whom these assumptions did not hold, for whom at best trees usually didn’t talk, Nietzsche challenges us not to start looking for talking trees, but to recognize our position within the construct so that we might realize our own embeddedness in Nature (and thus, perhaps, gain perspective on ourselves as a species). He doesn’t seem to call so much for a total subversion of reason, but for a re-evaluation of reason in relation to its opposite: intuition.

Nietzsche’s hope for art and intuition as a force for revealing new metaphors, for subverting the normative framework of “reality” presented by science and reason, calls to mind Shelley’s assertion that poetry “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar” (From A Defence of Poetry, excerpted in my Norton, p. 596). When Nietzsche’s artist, his “man of intuition[,]...wields his weapons more mightily” than the man of reason, “a culture can take shape...and the rule of art over life can become established” bringing humanity “a constant stream of brightness, a lightening of the spirit, redemption, and release” (773). Unlike Schiller or Coleridge, who set the imaginative capacity of man over and against natural phenomenon, Nietzsche suggests that our imaginative capacity, our metaphor-drive, is most active when we are closest to nature. When we allow ourselves to abandon the distinction that reason creates between “man” and “nature”, we are most attuned to the magical possibilities that the mysteries of nature present.

Nietzsche is interested in reembedding man in the great family tree of the animal kingdom. He seems to say to humanity, “Get over yourself. You are just a big dumb animal who has distinguished yourself from all other animals only because you happen to be a little less dumb.” He sets his task at the beginning of the essay, when he claims that what is needed is

...a satisfactory illustration of just how pitiful, how insubstantial and transitory, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature; where were eternities during which it did not exist; and when it has disappeared again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that might extend beyond the bounds of human life. (764)

Nietzsche characterizes human intellect as nothing more than a Darwinian evolutionary tactic for “dissimulation”--for trickery, deceit, and cleverness--made necessary by our lack of “horns or the sharp fangs of a beast of prey with which to wage the struggle for existence” (765). From a scientific standpoint, this is probably a relatively accurate (if vastly oversimplified) portrayal. Again, Nietzsche himself must have seen the irony of the situation: His own theories about man’s over-reliance on Science are made possible and given “teeth” (so to speak) only through the advancement of Science. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, which deems to delineate all of life into an historical organizing apparatus, must represent for him a supreme example of Science’s propensity for the columbarium, and yet it is only Darwin’s theory which finally, and irrevocably, repositions mankind as nothing more than one possible outcome of a complicated natural phenomenon.

In describing man’s propensity for constructing metaphorical relationships, Nietzsche finds analogies in some of the more complex constructions found in nature (e.g., cobwebs, honeycombs). These analogies give rise to the question, how much of humanity’s “web” of metaphors results from our embeddedness in nature? Nietzsche would have us believe that our metaphorical tendencies, piling metaphor upon metaphor and building an “infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations...on flowing water” are in many ways subverting our natural tendency, dividing us from intuition and mystery (769). However, as he himself admits, “if we could communicate with a midge we would hear that it too floats through the air with the...feeling that it too contains within itself the flying centre of this world” (764). This seems to suggest that the tendency to center the universe around oneself is a natural tendency, which implies that a rejection of the constructed concept--a rejection in large part called for by Nietzsche--would represent more of a domination of man’s reason over nature than the original construction itself. Though it is our nature that we construct metaphors to dominate nature, Nietzsche seems to say, now we must begin the process of dominating (by abandoning) our natural tendencies to do so.

I am supremely interested in the limitations of language put forward by Nietzsche. I have been intrigued by the futility of the phrase, “do you know what I mean?” for some time, and I am excited to see where his theories lead. However, it seems essential to recognize Nietzsche’s suspicion of human intellect as an essentially intellectual suspicion, as well as to remember that, when all’s said and done, we are still left with language and action as our only recourse as unifying and organizing social forces.