To live in a world of measured construction is to build one's humanity out of the selfsame clay - that is to say, we have arrived at the age in which the human can only be constructed recursively as the constructor of the constructed (or, to make it more maddening, the constructor of the constructor.) This falls in line with what Derrida predicted nearly 40 years ago - it is an age in which the structure of structures has become the focal point of reality: the center is not the center and yet the concept of center abides. It is in this climate that Harold Bloom wrote a book of over 700 pages called Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. At first the concept seems ridiculous, but there is a definite science to it. The argument runs that before Shakespeare, characters were more or less flat in that they responded and changed to the external world. With Shakespeare comes the advent of the self-same listener or the self-same overhearer, characters with the psychological depth to manufacture thoughts fundamentally foreign to themselves (perhaps only because of the decay/movement of time) and to change because of overhearing their own thoughts. The redundancy that this model creates (replete with plays-in-plays and mirrors-in-mirrors) describes what Haraway calls "the cyborg [skipping] the step of original unity" (2192). It is a disunity, although a disunity of the fundamental self, that spontaneously overflows in selfsame interactions (like the grinding of plate tectonics) and creates new meaning, new worlds. The "fabricated hybrid of machine and organism" (2191) is a useful way of describing the modern condition in that we've isolated our ability to create identity from Nothing (the selfsame listener is also remarkably similar to the process of supplementarity) and thus we've arrived at "an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency" (2192). In place of this dependency comes fiercely intelligent pranksters who play with their self-invention: as Haraway says, "at the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg" (2190). The curious thing about the cyborg is that the reciprocity of its nature, the self-folding and self-faulting, allows for an extreme array of freedoms from everything except that very self-creating existence itself - this is much of the cause of the existential torment that wracks Hamlet until he finds peace in a sort of genius trickery of self-cancellation. There is much hope in the idea of discovering oneself at the interstices of 'self' rather than the hub however - the next frontier is unknown and yet we're incontestably headed there. I'll give the great poet Wallace Stevens and the good singer songwriter John Pine the final word.
Wallace Stevens - Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Stevens, Wallace. ""Tea at the Palaz of Hoon'."http://poetry.poetryx.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5322/>.
Haraway. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
“Rain” by Somerset Maugham occupies a murky place in 20th century literature which might be called the Postcolonial Novel as descended from the early modernist Joseph Conrad (although Achebe would argue that Conrad is reductive in his stock character natives.) The missionaries and settlers that the story follows are a small outpost of civilization against a vast wilderness that never ceases to encroach upon them (like the rain itself.) In fact, the rain is a metaphor which fires on multiple levels throughout the story: the muddiness which obliterates difference, the shelters built against chaos that are inevitably helmed by Strong Men, the cleansing instinct which is itself a wildness. The fundemental differences untamed in the Hawaiian wilderness become a perfect disorder for The Davidsons to cull and thus derive power from - in other words, the difference constituted by the natives is a heterogeneity or "a place of in-betweenness" (2118) that makes asserting power over them easier because there is no central organization to defend the natives "whose identity is [their] difference" (2119). The Davidsons speak of “the depravity of the natives” with a certain eagerness because their power is derived from the ability to “other-ize” – if there is nothing to tame, then The Davidson's quickly lose power and become irrelevant. This quickly factors into the story as Mr. Davidson seeks to make the flamboyant Miss Thompson into an ascetic believer by (as we learn at the end) defiling her. Mr. Macphail has come to offer medical support and undercut the danger of Mr. Davidson which is ideology: when people can be “made to wear a pair of trousers,” then they can be made to do just about anything. The narrator says of Mr. Davidson that “the most striking thing about him was the feeling he gave you of suppressed fire” which seems to suggest a false chastity; later the narrator says that “his sincerity was obvious in the fire of his gestures and in his deep, ringing voice” which undercuts the disparity between the gestures and the man. Mr. Davidson is a complex character who loses power when his ‘slave’ acknowledges his control, paradoxically breaking it by calling reference to its utter absence. The idea of confronting an Other and coming up against the inexorable wall of the Self is a thoroughly modern construct that peaks out of the best Victorian work and becomes isolated in a slew of 20th century literature. Miss Thompson, in becoming a clean slate, turns the rapacious Mr. Davidson back on himself until the "obliteration of the trace of [the] Other in its precarious Subjectivity" (2115) recoils on Davidson himself (because there is nothing left but his subjective position when Miss Thompson shockingly becomes the perfect, silent pupil.) Maugham's story "Rain" seeks to underscore what Spivak describes as the "explanation and narrative of reality [being] established as the normative one" (2115) by pinpointing the ordering instinct and tracing how devastating it can be not only in the matter of Others but when it is turned upon the fundamentally mysterious Self.
Or, in much simpler and more romantic terms, take it away Richie and Fela:
Spivak. "A Critique of Postcolonial Reason." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Maugham, Somerset. "Rain by W. Somerset Maugham: Rain." www.classicauthors.net. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://maugham.classicauthors.net/Rain/>
When in the mask of night there shone that cut,
we were riddled. A probe reached down
and stroked some nerve in us,
as if the glint from a wizard's eye, of silver,
slanted out of the mask of the unknown-
pit of riddles, the scratch-marked sky.
When, albino bowl on cloth of jet,
it spilled its virile rays,
our eyes enlarged, our blood reared with the waves.
We craved its secret, but unreachable
it held away from us, chilly and frail.
Distance kept it magnate. Enigma made it white.
When we learned to read it with our rod,
reflected light revealed
a lead mirror, a bruised shield
seamed with scars and shadow-soiled.
A half faced sycophant, its glitter borrowed,
rode around our throne.
On the moon there shines earth light
as moonlight shines upon the earth…
If on its obsidian we set our weightless foot,
and sniff no wind, and lick no rain
and feel no gauze between us and the Fire
will we trot its grassless skull, sick for the homelike shade?
Naked to the earth-beam we shall be,
who have arrived to map an apparition,
who walk upon the forehead of a myth.
Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?
May Swenson, a poetic predecessor of Marianne Moore, creates a poem that luxuriates in a full-bodied sensuality that really serves as a kind of displacement. The poem picks up from what Simone De Beauvoir called "a world where men compel [women] to assume the status of the Other" and it takes as its explicit subject the moon (which is often used as a symbol of the feminine and also occupies the 'weaker' end against its binary opposite sun.) An irony of the poem is that the moon first reaches down to "probe...some nerve in us" and is only then responded to by the male instinct which "reads it with our rod" - all we can glimpse in the moon is ourselves in a borrowed or "reflected light" and the "bruised shield" of the moon symbolizes the defense system which creates power through defining itself. Both the moon and the earth are lit by "glitter borrowed" and yet there is an independent exchange in which moon and earth bleed into each other, seek to define each other. When Swenson writes that "distance kept it magnate [and] enigma made it white" she is describing the fundamentally opaque nature of the distant Other which offers no solution in and of itself and so becomes the grounds (or scaffolding) for constructed and oppressive belief systems (even to translate the moon by the rod is to subject it to the dominant.) Butler talks of the paralyzing "unanticipated agency, of a female "object" who inexplicably returns the glance, reverses the gaze" (2540) and yet Swenson reverses this formula in having the moon first glint it's "wizard's eye" which destabilizes even the fixed position of the oppressors themselves. It is interesting how the sun is removed from the equation and an earth which is lit not only by the sun but by the enigma of the moon defines itself not by the certainty of that sunlight but by the mystery of the moon (which fundamentally is earth's own.) Butler says that "gender is a kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real" (2541) and sex seems to be all construction in Swenson's poem as well - the moon spills "virile rays" and yet "on the moon there shines earth light as moonlight shines upon the earth" which constitutes not a fixed sexuality but a sexual tension that is as difficult to pinpoint as myth itself. As far back as Zoroaster the western world has been defined by the fundamental split in its binaries and Beauvoir bemoans the very feminists who seek to define themselves against males instead of position themselves in an "indefinitely open future" of becoming: she says, "what we need is an angel - neither man nor woman - but where shall we find one"? Butler updates this formula by describing "the body as a construct of suspect generality" (2542) and it is also so in Swenson's poem where nothing remains in the end (of all the highly-sexualized symbolism) but the dream we might land upon. The eloquent conclusion clarifies the immense freedom inherit in the feminist project:
"Can flesh rub with symbol? If our ball
be iron, and not light, our earliest wish
eclipses. Dare we land upon a dream?"
... which might be another way of saying, "if everything is constructed, then our dreams are no further (and perhaps even closer) to us than the approximations we try to describe them with." It is an open philosophy which privileges life, change, and the freedom inherit in our "ball [of] iron" self-referential slavery. We're already the Moonmen (and Sunwomen.) Hit it Bessy -
Butler. "Gender Trouble." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Beauvoir, Simone de. "Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex, Woman as Other 1949." www.marxists.org. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm> Swenson, May. "Classical Poem: Landing on the Moon by May Swenson at All poetry." allpoetry.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://allpoetry.com/opoem/30779-May-Swenson-Landing-on-the-Moon>
This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.
His head is air. Beneath his tip at night
Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.
Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,
Another image at the end of the cave,
Another bodiless for the body's slough?
This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,
These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,
And the pines above and along and beside the sea.
This is form gulping after formlessness,
Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances
And the serpent body flashing without the skin.
This is the height emerging and its base
These lights may finally attain a pole
In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,
In another nest, the master of the maze
Of body and air and forms and images,
Relentlessly in possession of happiness.
This is his poison: that we should disbelieve
Even that. His meditations in the ferns,
When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,
Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,
Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,
The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.
This is the beginning of Wallace Stevens' long poem "The Auroras of Autumn" and it comes down from a long tradition of theological thought and poetry. In theology (as is now the case in real, hard science) it is a common tradition that Something should rise from Nothing (or, as Shakespeare puts it in King Lear, "Nothing will come of Nothing.") The lack of fixity (because symbols require a matrix of other symbols to mean and so bear no relation to The Real) is a fundamental tenant of Postmodernism that sends us spiraling away from the center like a radial spoke away from the hub. What Stevens gives us is a parable of life, death, and most importantly movement that centers itself in its own decay. When Stevens' talks about "form gulping after formlessness," he is also describing "the structural necessity of the absence" (1696) which returns to the Hegelian concept of Ideas that can never contain their content and so must perpetually change like "the skin flashing to wished-for disappearances." In the disparity between our ideas "the bodiless" emerges (and seems somehow more Real than the body which seems to become static, representing only the current state of things and not the force that occupies them.) When Derrida calls for "the departure from the closure of a self-evidence," (1695) he is calling for the end of structures which do not acknowledge themselves as structures and explaining how art is only made from other art - however, it is an irony of post-modernism that Derrida must state his claim in hard words although it is a theory centered around uncertainty. If you start with doubt, it is inevitable that you will end in certainty, and that is the thrust of much of Derrida's work and a clue into Stevens as well. When Derrida says that "the play of substitution fills and marks a determined lack" he sounds remarkably similar to the occultist W.B. Yeats with the prophetic “I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.” In Stevens' poem, Aurora represents both the Borealis and the God of Dawn, making the title of the poem representative of a kind of negatively charged creation. The "substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references" (1692) are like the "meditation in the ferns" which disallows the one-to-one relationship between signified and signifier although the play in the substitutions always express a desire that seems as real and tangible as the slough of skins or the image in Plato's cave.
Derrida. "Of Grammatology." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Stevens, Wallace. "The Auroras of Autumn by Wallace Stevens." www.questia.com. Knopf, n.d. Web. <http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=1878918> Shakespeare, William. "Shakespeare Quotes." www.enotes.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2011. <http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/nothing-can-come-nothing. Yeats, William . "Blue Hydrangeas." http://bluehydrangeas.wordpress.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://bluehydrangeas.wordpress.com/2006/05/10/william-butler-yeats/>
The myriad-mind of postmodernism is a smoke and mirrors trick that's here to stay. According to Lyotard, postmodernism situates the artist as "condemned to generate a multiplicity in the space it inherits, and to give up the project of a last rebuilding of the whole space occupied by humanity" (1466). There is a selfless nature to this kind of pursuit that is at odds with the steadying compass of morality, or as the Daedelus-like maze maker Jorge Luis Borges puts it: "There is nothing built on stone. Everything is built on sand, but it is our duty to edify as if the sand should be stone." In attempt to mimetically duplicate the "motricity" (1467) of the modern world, the "process of complexification" (1467) has often served to render postmodern works readable only by the elite few who can wade through the simulacra. Lyotard describes the difference of postmodernism from modernism as a "coming back or flashing back, feeding back, ana-lysing, ana-mnesing, of reflecting"(1467) - there is a self-awareness at work that announces itself as artist and so can build hybrid identity, grabbing from many sources to underscore the arbitrary nature of design - many postmodern works get bogged down though, creating artifacts eerily reminiscent of a Google search or Wikipedia article. Therefore Italo Calvino and his five memos for modern fiction become important (especially quickness which salvages the immediacy and pure entertainment of classical forms such as the fable.)
As Baudrillard puts it: "the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it" (1557) Therefore literature finds itself in a frightening situation where nothing 'fixed' is referred to except that very postulate of postmodern fluidity - in other words, postmodernism has become another construct which seeks to appease the others and become invisible. Peeking out from behind postmodernism are the agents of society that Foucault describes as "technicians of behavior" (1491). The "network of permanent observation" (1492) is a palpable absence that each of us carry like a Normative Handbook - perhaps the multiplicities we find ourselves drowning in today are only frightening because we hope to be justified by the same fragmented reality that is quaking beneath our feet (or, as Foucault says, power has "inculcated docility and produced deliquency by the same mechanisms") (1496).
When I was a kid I had a dream where I was falling back into a mirror image of myself pushing forwards - I was forever falling into a mirror image of myself pulling out of it - and in that suspended state, I noticed in my peripheries a single eye watching without blinking. That seems a suitable metaphor for how the panopticon intersects with the multiplicities of modern man.
Foucault. "Discipline and Punish." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Baudrillard. "The Precession of Simulacra." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Lyotard. "Defining the Postmodern." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
"That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery."
there are things we know are right, and good, and would be better for us to do, but constantly it's like, 'yeaahhh, but you know, it's so much funnier and nicer to go and do something else... who cares and it's all bullshit anyway..' the paradox is that that sort of tension and complication and conflict in people also makes them very easy to market to, because i can say to you 'feeling uneasy? feeling empty? .. here's something you can go buy or go do.' -
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace speaks of an America ruled by the Pale King of desire (where cash is only a facade, The Player King.) Wallace speaks from a modern Marxist approach in describing how the "constant opposition" (657) that breeds social hierarchy has palsied modern man with so many choices that he defers to but one, the ability to choose in the first place (which he assumes is natural.) In other words, when there is "left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,"
(659) an invisible organization is anchored against the seeming chaos of "constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation [which] distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones" (659). The arbitrary valuations of capitalism have become the last isthmus extended between people: they have "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation" (659). These calculations can be measured to the dollar in capital as social relations are mediated by commodities which then become surrogates for the very people that create them, representing"social relation[s], existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour" (664). It is from there that the dollar becomes a key into a world built of more dollars leading to the"common expression of all commodities in money that alone led to the establishment of their characters as value" (667) - it is as if the labor system were an international language.
Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
This poem by Wallace Stevens reflects a post-Marxian perspective in that it goes in fear of the abstract. Stevens follows Marx in writing a poem that "ascend[s] from earth to heaven" (656) and any spirituality culled from the lyrics is embedded in their very materiality (the poem is purposefully gaudy to achieve much of that immediate materiality.) As Marx puts it, "the phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process" (656) and Stevens is also rebelling against the idealism of Kant and Hegel when he describes the emperor of ice-cream, or the supremacy of the thing-in-itself. When he says "let be be finale of seem," Stevens posits a material reality that inherently contains all of the permutations the imagination can apprehend out of it while maintaining supremacy for the material (it is like Lacan's Real which is there but not to be touched although some of Stevens' work exhibits a sort of spirituality derived from always touching it, oblique as we may fashion ourselves.)
In terms of how the world might sound to Marx, I call upon the experimental composer Harry Partch and the materiality of a sound derived from self-invented instruments. Horrifying.
Marx. "The German Ideology." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Marx. "The Communist Manifesto." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Marx. "Capital." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Stevens, Wallace. "The Wondering Minstrels." Blogspot. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/1999/08/emperor-of-ice-cream-wallace-stevens.html>.
POETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for,
But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than be-
fore known,
Arouse! for you must justify me.
I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future,
I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a
casual look upon you and then averts his face,
Leaving it to you to prove and define it,
Expecting the main things from you.
Walt Whitman is the man. Nearly a decade before reader-response arose as a prominent literary theory, Walt Whitman not only predicts it, but demands it, as he will not accept quietism, no matter who wears it. A poem, a novel, any writing, is living and must change as it travels from bosom to bosom. Part of Walt Whitman's peculiar genius is his perpetual looking ahead in anticipation of the reader; in fact, waiting ahead is one of the fundamental motifs in his work. One gets the feeling that he's so forward-thinking, his imagination so proleptic, that he's very often leaving his own pages. They say that what's best in poetry is what's elliptical, that is, what's written between the lines; Whitman, and reader-response, slightly tweak this formulation by bringing to bear the reader who brings his/her fundamental personality into the fray, enlivening what is effectively scribbled markings on a dead leaf of, well, grass (or a dead screen these days.) If there is a poem about a freight train that really MOVES, in the sound or syntax or meaning, that movement is still as nothing until a reader comes to it and starts shoveling coal. This doesn't mean that the text loses its weight to the reader - what it means is that the poet leaves "indicative words," fundamental figures to twist around like the poem were a spool, something to ignite the cognitive conditions that Kant describes. In many ways, reading and writing, although fundamentally lonely activities, are built to make our own fundamentally lonely conditions more bearable; you are there to build on the poets promontory, and somebody will build on yours, even if your output is only criticism or a paper in college, and meaning keeps moving this way. If I were to talk to you in the street, I'd have to be polite and only speak for so long, many comments about the weather, and our conversation would be pierced with phenomena occurring around us, and our fundamental anxiety about each other. From afar, when you only have the skeleton of my idea, the language of it, you can make it fundamentally your own and become closer to me and yourself a) because of the amount and density of content, and b) because you fundamentally make that content your own, and so, if not become me, at least stand in my lettered shoes. Also, in a fascinating way, reader-response posits classic texts as timeless, or at least those that last a long while - if a person can't wade through a text tomorrow, it must've been too strictly confined to its own to-day that Whitman describes, and that text becomes what's known as a period piece. A text that interacts with its readers or characters in fundamentally elliptical ways (Barthes describes the hermeneutic code, that of enigma, to be the privileged code of fiction) will sustain their investigation, and their search will often spill over into their own efforts, which is how many schools of literature are created. If any thing is for certain, though, it is that Walt Whitman is the man.
And so is Toru Takemitsu. Translate away -
Works Cited:
Whitman, Walt.Leaves of Grass. New York, New York: The Heritage Press, 527. Print.
Sigmund Freud is an extremely influential explainer of the modern age. He is much despised now, but his writings still contain power, especially when considered through all those writers who've channeled him. Freud finds an analogue to his systems in psychoanalysis in Oedipus Rex because "the action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement." (Freud 815) In defining what most of us know as the fundamental tenant of Freud, he says "It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father." (Freud 816) The theory is still fascinating, despite all of its opposers, because it rests on fundamental conditions - human beings come inlaid with certain equipment, and learn how to operate that equipment in correspondence to their parents. Dreams of having sex with one's mother might be eerie, but Freud stresses them as a simulation, and the horror of encountering that simulation creates a slew of other difficulties. Harold Bloom talks about Freud as a great translator of Shakespeare, and Freud is fascinating in that regard as well, making the interesting comparison that hamlet is to children and parents as macbeth is to childlessness. Of Hamlet's repression, he says "we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences." (Freud 817) Hamlet, who is a rhetorical genius and extraordinarily capable, isn't prone to inaction as we see when he sends his two guards to die in his place. Therefore, Freud makes the statement that "Hamlet is able to do anything--except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother,' (Freud 817) this precondition carried from youth being the one thing that his mind cannot negate. The extraordinarily capable Hamlet hates this grand limitation, and fights against it: "the distaste for sexuality expressed by Hamlet in his conversation with Ophelia fits in very well with this." (Freud 818) Of Freud's literary probing, he only seeks to find the "deepest layers of impulse," (Freud 818) making Freud no more reductive than Frye, whose archetypes might be said to be consistent images or shapes of that impulse.
Of dreams and dream-thoughts, Freud stresses latent content, telling us that "the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression." (Freud 819) Dreams are a double work of condensation and displacement. Of condensation: "dreams are brief, meagre, and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts' (Freud 819) and "it is impossible to determine the amount of condensation." (Freud 819) Of Displacement, Freud tells us that "in the dream-work a psychical force is operating which on the one hand strips the elements which have a high psychical value of their intensity , and on the other hand, by means of over-determination, creates from elements of low psychical value new values, which afterwards find their way into the dream content...a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs." (Freud 820) Dream thoughts are of the subconscious and attempt to manifest its shape and so "must escape the censorship imposed by resistance." (Freud 821) The fundamental logic of dreams is either/or and
" 'No' seems not to exist as far as dreams are concerned." (Freud 824) In effect, dreams collapse binaries.
Lacan is a french psychoanalyst who is a great translator of Freud's but adds a weighted sense of language. He breaks down understanding into the imaginary, symbolic, and real - the real what we can never have access to, the imaginary arising from the mirror stage and constituting our love for form, and the symbolic being a structure of relations that translates us. His mirror stage is at odds with Descartes, and he describes "It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.' (Lacan 1164) Looking in the mirror seems to Lacan to exhibit "the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.' (Lacan 1164) The wholeness that is intuited there, and that movement of the mind that acknowledges that wholeness as ourselves yet still a separate entity, "situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone." (Lacan 1165) This wholeness is described as gestalt, which "symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination (Lacan 1165) Having deeply studied the paranoiac, Lacan sees all our desires and union-seeking impulses to be "the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality." (Lacan 1166) Thus, we are always only trying to find that other perfect half (illusion) of ourselves when we posit wholeness at all, because "the moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy, the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations. (Lacan 1167) This outlook strongly explains Lacan's skepticism about existentialism. However, Lacan, the ever romantic frenchman, cannot give in that easily and finds salvation in that instinct of preserving others as well as our selves, undercutting the kingship of the 'I' as "this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever." (Lacan 1169)
Lacan sees in the signifier a giant, well, phallus, noting that "the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. (Lacan 1184) The Other, or that which is fundamentally alien to us, can only be probed with our words, and the words we use to describe it become part and parcel of our own psycho-geographies: it is in the Other "that the subject, by means of a logic anterior to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place." (Lacan 1185) Language always constitutes another place, whichever is employing it, and so subjects are fundamentally split by language. Language is fundamentally ruled by demand, and "It is demand of a presence or of an absence--which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs that it can satisfy." (Lacan 1186) Our words are daggers that we cut up nature with, even to our own shame, when the signifier misses its mark and 'then becomes the bar which, at the hands of this demon, strikes the signified, marking it as the bastard offspring of this signifying concatenation.' (Lacan 1187) Making this conception even lonelier is the sentiment of individuality achieved simply by naming many things as Other, when "the subject designates his being only by barring everything he signifies.' (Lacan 1187) Tying it back to Freud's conception of the castrated woman, Lacan posits an impossible scenario: "here is signified the conjunction of desire, in that the phallic signifier is its mark, with the threat or nostalgia of lacking it.' (Lacan 1188)
Freud "The Interpretation of Dreams." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Lacan "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Lacan "The Signification of the Phallus." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Northrop Frye is a sort of Miltonic figure, a self-reliant iconoclast who writes beautifully without losing his critical edge. To him, "criticism deals with the arts and may well be something of an art itself, but it does not follow that it must be unsystematic," (Frye 1305) and he highlights the Henry James axiom of the only difference that matters is one that makes a difference when he says "for a systematic study can only progress: whatever dithers or vacillates or reacts is merely leisure-class conversation." (Frye 1306) Therefore, he looks not to take the right or lefthand path, but to steer a path between the two, nothing that 'antitheses are usually resolved, not by picking one side and refuting the other, or by making eclectic choices between them, but by trying to get past the antithetical way of stating the problem." (Frye 1306) If any criticism of Frye abounds, it is that his work can be too general, but that is the very space he sought to occupy in his systematic search. He is a little reactionary, as when he asserts that "the fact that revision is possible, that the poet makes changes not because he likes them better but because they are better, means that poems, like poets, are born and not made," (Frye 1307) which highlights a concept known as inevitability of language, which is the sense one gets when reading a classic work or passage and finding not one word superfluous, or capable of being removed while keeping that work or passage intact. Of the archetypes, those symbols and story arcs which reappear in works across too far a reach of culture and time to be a mistake, Frye notes that "there seems to be a general tendency on the part of great classics to revert to them." (Frye 1309) This might be why classics are accessible to so many more people than period pieces are, but the archetypes can hardly be thought of as transplanted in the works. They simply arise, especially when a work is viewed from afar. Speaking of completeness, Frye says that "properly used as critical terms, an author's narrative is his linear movement; his meaning is the integrity of his completed form." (Frye 1310) This is a most different image than the dialogical concept of Bakhtin, centering the strength of a work on the strength of the person composing it, which appears abstractly in the language. Frye connects narrative to ritual, commonplace activities that elude to those who have done them before and so a sort of timelessness, and notes the lightning bolt recognition of that timelessness (highly related to the archetypes) as "patterns of imagery, on the other hand, or fragments of significance, are oracular in origin, and derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time" (Frye 1311) Through a relationship of many works, Frye isolates certain common recurrences, which seems a sort of translated Poetics of Aristotelian narrative (1. dawn, spring, and birth phase.' 2. the zenith, summer, and marriage, or triumph phase. 3. the sunset, autumn, and death phase. 4. The darkness, winter, and dissolution phase.) To Frye, "art deals not with the real but with the conceivable," (Frye 1313) and the great work can conceive of new ideas in a kind of unbounded method-out-of-chaos. It is not about what IS but about the extent of desire and the artist can conceive of great orders to find a center in themselves, culminating in the master archetype: "this gives us our central pattern of archetypal images, the vision of innocence which sees the world in terms of total human intelligibility." (Frye 1314)
Frye. "The Archetypes in Literature." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
He rubbed the asymmetrical beak and chaos took form around him. "Ah," he thought. "They play the music of my mind." And as the chaos spread, men made their own symphony of it; after all, if you're falling into chaos, why not dive? And their misery increased and this greatly pleased the deity, who sent out hellish emissaries from his own heart to mingle in the forms of decay. Still, humanity beat on, and demons became intermingled with them, so that the deity's thoughts became a methodic madness, and still he was pleased. It was the demons who rebelled first, furious at being cast into order from out their fundamental chaos, and they ordered humanity into an amorphous mass of flesh to march upon the deity who sits upon the hole of the world. They sounded the war drums, and blew their flute, and still the deity was pleased; however, out of the flute came a primordial bubbling, a new humanity, and with it the fullness to finally stopper the hole that chaos sits upon.
Semiotic Breakdown: For Saussure, language 'exists only by virtue of a sort of contract signed by the members of a community.' (Saussure 850) The Hieronymous Bosch picture is a definite picture of community, and its very artistic style can be described as gusto or abundance, an over-saturation of image. Although the picture has some resonance of Dante, and a hell-driven proleptic imagination, it, like language, "must, to put it correctly, be studied in itself." (Saussure 851) It can be related to Shakespeare in that their is a kind of chaos that yields to a form, which seems to be the very subject matter of the piece - its "combination produces a form, not a substance." (Saussure 857) "Signs function...not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position," (Saussure 861) and all of the familiar human forms are tiny and cloistered around the uncannily strange hybrid figure on the throne. The human form is rendered somewhat realistically, but that realism is shattered by the strange shapes and backgrounds that weave throughout them, such that 'between them there is only opposition.' (Saussure 863) The strange shape on the throne sits above a hole, which symbolizes an absence, and chaos dances around him in a primordial state described only by its relation to that absence, presenting a world where 'there are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.' (Saussure 856) That presence, fundamentally hybrid and strange, is like the word in language, for 'a particular word is like the center of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite number of co-ordinated terms.' (Saussure 866)
Saussure. "Course in General Linguistics." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Shlovsky is a Russian Formalist who argues for roughening language, or accentuating in it what is fundamentally strange. He notes that "the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort" but sees this as a short hand logic which simplifies consciousness because "habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." Like Kant and Hegel, he is uninterested in the subject matter itself, but rather the construction of it, configuring art as "a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object." In a way somewhat similar to Pope, he advises to avoid identification with parts and describes Tolstoy as avoiding "the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects" when describing something. He also echoes Heidegger in describing language as creating its own reality, noting that "in life people are guided by words, not by deeds. It's not so much that they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is the possibility of speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various topics." He also prefigures Bakhtin in his acknowledgement that "ordinary speech and literary language have thereby changed places," but he sees this as fundamental because of its roughening of perception rather than its dialogic potentialities.
Bakhtin is a subversive writer who comes out of the age of revolution and he is keenly aware of himself as such. He is interested in the laughter that tears up all social orders, and the carnival world that promotes it. For Bakhtin, state and carnival are fundamentally at odds, and the carnival is a merger of realistic and utopian ideal. However, he doesn't see carnival or folk humor as essentially nihilistic. "Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time." Carnival works mostly through parody, even self-parody, and it is a fundamentally social construction: 'carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people.' Rather than state which consecrates symbols and fixes socioeconomic positions, carnival is concerned with 'the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being.' Therefore, carnival is not the gloomy grotesque, but a different kind - a hearkening back to a golden age of laughter and being, of joy and change. As a literary style, its primary characteristic is 'heteroglot, multi-voiced, multi-styled, and often multi-languaged elements' and a mishmash that is organized by 'social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions.' In "Discourse and the Novel," Bakhtin distinguishes the novel from poetry by saying that 'alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work.' (Bakhtin 1085) The novel is a place 'where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face' (Bakhtin 1086) which marks it as 'dialogically-agitated and tension filled environment of alien words.' (Bakhtin 1088) Poetry, on the other hand, is 'obliged to exhaust itself in its own single hermetic context' (Bakhtin 1087) and so is an aristocratic construction because'all rhetorical forms, monologic in their compositional structure, are oriented toward the listener and his answer.' (Bakhtin 1089) I would argue that poetry presents just as many linguistic potentials as a novel, even if it is less of a free form medium - the movement is just tiny rather than sweeping, but that tininess highlights language in a way that many novels cannot, and empties words of their etymologies in its specificity. That being said, Bakhtin's ideas that "all words and forms are populated by intention" (Bakhtin 1101) and that language is over populated with the intentions of others' (Bakhtin 1101) have been incredibly important in the last century, and. for every condition and time period of life, an idiosyncratic speaker exists.
Works Cited -
Shlovsky, Victor . "Art as a Technique ." Vahida's Official Website . N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.vahidnab.com/defam.htm>.
Bakhtin, Mikhail . "Rabelais and his World ." Google Books . Indiana University Press , 1984. Web. <http://books.google.com/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&lpg=PP1&dq=bakhtin%20rabelais%20and%20his%20world&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false>.
Bakhtin. Discourse of the Novel." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Our group presentation went reasonably well. "The sublime" turned out to be a rather polarizing subject, but we covered our ground well by providing various examples and having the class choose between them. The clip that I provided from Akira Kurosawa's "Dreams" went over alright but there was a student in class who found objection to it. He said that my scene wasn't sublime because there was nothing extraordinary about it - we've all seen mountains, we've all seen meadows, we've all seen children, and I suppose we've all seen beautifully rendered film. This struck me a little dumb, because the scene was without a doubt sublime in my mind, but therein lies the categories fundamental subjectivity. However, in reading Kant, I discovered that his definition of the sublime doesn't only describe fundamentally huge phenomenon, but relates to the feeling in the observer of a certain disparity between their logical faculties and that which they are viewing: 'sublime cannot be contained in any sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason, which, though no presentation adequate to them is possible, are provoked and called to mind precisely by this inadequacy, which does allow of sensible presentation." (Kant 432) Therefore, I still argue my scene as sublime, although I do not know if it could be seen as such outside of the context that brings the little boy to the mountain. However, there is a fundamental disparity and hugeness to the scene, the looming mountains and rainbow which we've been told has foxes living under it, the boy carrying the knife which he might have to kill himself with if the foxes refuse to forgive him, and the brevity of all that's conveyed in a minute of powerful footage.
Kant "Critique of the Power of Judgment." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Alexander Pope writes of an idiosyncratic criticism, noting "'tis with our judgments as with our watches, none go just alike," (Pope 349) and "both must alike from heav'n drive their light, these born to Judge, as well as those to Write." (349)
Therefore, the job of the critic is not merely to judge, but to assert the limitation which imagination shirks off: "be sure your self and your own Reach to know, how far your Genius, Taste, and learning go." (Pope 350) Therefore, the genuine source of criticism is the same as the genuine source of inspiration, nature: "First follow Nature, and your Judgement frame, by her just Standard, which is still the same." (Pope 351) Similarly, therefore 'learning' or formalizing can cap both critical and creative endeavors: 'a little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; drink deep, or taste not the pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the Brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.' (Pope 352) Thus criticism becomes an all-encompassing attitude, rather than a partisan effort: 'Most Criticks, fond of some subservient Art, still make the Whole depend upon a Part' (Pope 353) and 'Some praise at Morning what they blame at Night; But always think the last Opinion right. A Muse by these is like a Mistress us'd, This hour she's idoliz'd, the next abus'd' (Pope 357) which ultimately results in a selfish attitude: 'Fondly we think we honour Merit then, When we but praise Our selves in Other Men.' (Pope 357) Better is the open school of criticism which makes assertions but doesn't live and die by them: 'Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot.' (Pope 358) Therefore, a supreme critic exists somewhere between the poles, such as Longinus 'whose own Example strengthens all his Laws, And Is himself that great Sublime he draws.' (Pope 361.)
Kant teaches us an aesthetics that stresses 'suitability to the cognitive faculties that are in play in the reflecting power of judgement' (Kant 412) highlighting an objective/subjective union in that 'apprehension of forms in the imagination can never take place without the reflecting power of judgment.' (Kant 412) Beauty to Kant is a passive interest, or a benign disinterestedness sans a concept: 'someone who feels pleasure in mere reflection on the form of an object, without regard to a concept, rightly makes claim to the assent of everyone else, even though this judgement is empirical and is an individual judgment " (Kant 413) Kant describes the agreeable, or the faculty of sensation, as a matter of pure inclination rather than developed taste: 'Hence one says of the agreeable not merely that it pleases but that it gratifies. It is not mere approval that I give it, rather inclination is thereby aroused.' (Kant 416) Beauty is a matter of taste, but taste is not purely subjective because it does not rise merely from the agreeable, but from a space which sparks cognitive reflection: 'one solicits assent from everyone else because one has a ground for it that is common to all.' 429 Kant also grounds the sublime as that which is fundamentally different from the beautiful because it highlights the inadequacy of form rather than embodying it with disinterest: "But just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the infinite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality, as to a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things of the sensible world awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us. (Kant 433) Therefore, whether beautiful or sublime, the domain of art is always essentially formal, deriving its beauty not from content but from form: "the beauty of art is a beautiful representation of a thing." (Kant 446) Kant's idea of enlightenment is twofold: one, the enlightened person should strive to use their own understanding (in correspondence with their culture,) and 2, the enlightened person should leave an openness so that previous generations can expand upon their development.
Hegel puts a fine point on enlightenment by naming 'the self' as that construction which is not born, but made: "self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another." (Hegel 541) If a person were to grow in a vacuum, that person's sense of self would be greatly reduced. We think of selves as autonomous, but people are always existing in constant shifting relationships, prompting Hegel to write of inwardness and outwardness as fundamentally intwined: "self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself as an essential being.' (Hegel 541) The famous master-slave dialectic begins with the concept that 'each is indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth.' (Hegel 543) Therefore, the master limits his self-knowledge by fixing the other in a role, his "desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self. But that is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence. (Hegel 546) The slave, on the other hand, finds invariable flexibility in the master's construction of itself, and can reinvigorate its life through a manipulation of work (finding itself and its spirit incompatible to that material which it works within.) His material "has received the baptism of the spiritual." (Hegel 549) The artist's work, to Hegel, culminates in the 'transcendence of the Ideal as the true Idea of beauty,' (Hegel 555) such as in romantic art where the form and the substance are fundamentally incompatible.
Works Cited:
Pope. "An Essay on Criticism." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
Kant "Critique of the Power of Judgment." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Hegel. "Phenomenology of Spirt." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print. Hegel. "Lectures on Fine Art." ed. Leitch, Vincent B. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2010. Print.
