4.15.2006
Women's Pictures (Film and Media Studies)
Title
Kuhn, Annette. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge, 1982.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
This book is about feminism and cinema - don't you love when books are about what their subtitle says they are about? Anyway, some terms. Cinema "is understood here in its broadest sense to embrace the various aspects of the institutions historically surrounding production, distribution and exhibition of films of different types...This definition also takes in the actual products of the institutions - the films themselves - and, very importantly, the conditions and character of the production and reception of films...I will define 'feminism' very broadly as a set of political practices founded in analyses of the social/historical position of women as subordinated, oppressed or exploited either within dominant modes of production...and/or by the social relations of patriarchy or male domination." (4) Kuhn describes the problems of authoriship and feminism - it calls into question authenticity, intentionality and how we defined a feminine film or a feminist film. Through a structuralist understanding of language Kuhn posits that feminine films do exist and do matter. "If signification and representation are seen as processes of meaning production, and if it is accepted that notions of femine language and feminine writing may describe a specific relationship to representation, then the feminine can be seen as a subject position, a place which the use - or the subject - of language can occupy in relation to language." (12) The feminine must challenge dominant structures of relationship between texts and recipients. Feminine texts become feminine through relationships, therefore they are not fixed - that relationship is reading. Feminist texts have preferred readings that challenge the dominant. But still: "if it is accepted that meaning does not reside purely within the text itself, that it is not something locked within the text waiting for a reader in order to be liberated, but is itself to some degree an independent product or outcome of reading, then it becomes impossible to consider feminism in terms of fixed textual attributes, whether they be of 'form' or of 'content', let alone in terms of whether or not producers intended to put them there."(16) Kuhn examines dominant cinema, the re-reading of dominant cinema towards feminist ends and the possibilities of alternative cinema. She looks at dominant cinema as a economic and social institution, shaped historically and not fixed. She looks at the formal analysis of films that move towards a particular understanding of women that must be put in their proper place for the proper movement/closure of the film - it does not always succeed, of course. The technology of cinema addresses the audience (this is why it is cinema) draws them into a belief of narrative coherence. Kuhn follows a Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis of cinema and holds the unconscious in a priviledged space as that which we must have in order to have subjectivity (and language) and that "it operates its own forms of rhetoric."(49) She discusses cinematic address and the difference between discours and histoire (tense and address). She also discusses suture and the role the subject-viewer plays in the process of continually supplying the text with a subject for enunciation.Kuhn uses this as a backdrop to discuss Mulvey's critique of apparatus theory (Metz and Baudry) and the centrality of the look and the masculinization of the unconscious. Kuhn starts the next section of her book on feminist critical interventions into dominant film with a short history of the field, affirming feminism's task to make the invisible visible and also validating the school of feminist textual analysis and feminist psychoanalytic film theory (with their drawbacks of course, the formalism of both is a problem but that can be rectified by careful historical/analytical work). Kuhn looks at films like Psycho and how male spectatorship is naturalized - of course looking at how things are naturalized (using textual (psycho)analysis) denaturalizes. Kuhn asserts that while these textual analyses are important, they must be coupled with material and historical analysis - she performs this through a discussion of pornography. Finally, Kuhn discusses possibilities for a feminist cinema and its relationship to realism. She discusses New Hollywood Cinema and women's films - "whatever positive identifications it offers to those who choose to make them, new women's cinema cannot in the final instance deal in any direct way with the questions which feminism poses for cinematic representation."(140) Kuhn discusses Socialist realism, which does allow for the representation of different kinds of women, but still is within the dominant paradigm. She has more positive outlook for direct cinema and documentary, but the apparent triumph of transparency and authenticity must not be taken without critique. Kuhn defines countercinema "as film practice which works against and challenges dominant cinema, usually at the levels of both signifiers and signifieds."(157) She discusses two types, deconstructive cinema which aims to unsettle the spectator through a departure from formal conventions and films that may also be read as deconstructive, but also specifically offer new and different kinds of representations of women through a concern with feminine language. "If deconstructive cinema sets up the possibility of an active spectator-text relation around a specific set of signifieds, and if feminine cinematic writing offers an openness of address in combination with matters of expression in relation to which spectators may situate themselves as women and/or as feminists, then clearly a feminist countercinema is not simply a matter of texts or 'form plus content'. In different ways and in varying degrees, the moment and conditions of reception of films are also crucial." (177) Finally, Kuhn addresses the production, distribution and exhibition of countercinema
Keyword
Representation, Tendency, Feminism, Cinema, Feminine, Relationship, Reading, Tendentiousness, Language
Other Notes
"Second, the notion of the subject in process consequently suggests that subjectivity is not always nor necessarily cohesive, unitary or final. There is in fact an argument that ideology is definable as exactly the process whereby human subjectivity takes on the outward appearance of wholeness and unity, and furthermore that-in relation to cinema-one of the central ideological operations of dominant cinema is precisely the positioning of the viewing subject as apparently unitary."(47)
Other QE Works Cited
Barthes, R. S/Z (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Narrative)
Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
Kuhn, Annette. Women's Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London: Routledge, 1982.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
This book is about feminism and cinema - don't you love when books are about what their subtitle says they are about? Anyway, some terms. Cinema "is understood here in its broadest sense to embrace the various aspects of the institutions historically surrounding production, distribution and exhibition of films of different types...This definition also takes in the actual products of the institutions - the films themselves - and, very importantly, the conditions and character of the production and reception of films...I will define 'feminism' very broadly as a set of political practices founded in analyses of the social/historical position of women as subordinated, oppressed or exploited either within dominant modes of production...and/or by the social relations of patriarchy or male domination." (4) Kuhn describes the problems of authoriship and feminism - it calls into question authenticity, intentionality and how we defined a feminine film or a feminist film. Through a structuralist understanding of language Kuhn posits that feminine films do exist and do matter. "If signification and representation are seen as processes of meaning production, and if it is accepted that notions of femine language and feminine writing may describe a specific relationship to representation, then the feminine can be seen as a subject position, a place which the use - or the subject - of language can occupy in relation to language." (12) The feminine must challenge dominant structures of relationship between texts and recipients. Feminine texts become feminine through relationships, therefore they are not fixed - that relationship is reading. Feminist texts have preferred readings that challenge the dominant. But still: "if it is accepted that meaning does not reside purely within the text itself, that it is not something locked within the text waiting for a reader in order to be liberated, but is itself to some degree an independent product or outcome of reading, then it becomes impossible to consider feminism in terms of fixed textual attributes, whether they be of 'form' or of 'content', let alone in terms of whether or not producers intended to put them there."(16) Kuhn examines dominant cinema, the re-reading of dominant cinema towards feminist ends and the possibilities of alternative cinema. She looks at dominant cinema as a economic and social institution, shaped historically and not fixed. She looks at the formal analysis of films that move towards a particular understanding of women that must be put in their proper place for the proper movement/closure of the film - it does not always succeed, of course. The technology of cinema addresses the audience (this is why it is cinema) draws them into a belief of narrative coherence. Kuhn follows a Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis of cinema and holds the unconscious in a priviledged space as that which we must have in order to have subjectivity (and language) and that "it operates its own forms of rhetoric."(49) She discusses cinematic address and the difference between discours and histoire (tense and address). She also discusses suture and the role the subject-viewer plays in the process of continually supplying the text with a subject for enunciation.Kuhn uses this as a backdrop to discuss Mulvey's critique of apparatus theory (Metz and Baudry) and the centrality of the look and the masculinization of the unconscious. Kuhn starts the next section of her book on feminist critical interventions into dominant film with a short history of the field, affirming feminism's task to make the invisible visible and also validating the school of feminist textual analysis and feminist psychoanalytic film theory (with their drawbacks of course, the formalism of both is a problem but that can be rectified by careful historical/analytical work). Kuhn looks at films like Psycho and how male spectatorship is naturalized - of course looking at how things are naturalized (using textual (psycho)analysis) denaturalizes. Kuhn asserts that while these textual analyses are important, they must be coupled with material and historical analysis - she performs this through a discussion of pornography. Finally, Kuhn discusses possibilities for a feminist cinema and its relationship to realism. She discusses New Hollywood Cinema and women's films - "whatever positive identifications it offers to those who choose to make them, new women's cinema cannot in the final instance deal in any direct way with the questions which feminism poses for cinematic representation."(140) Kuhn discusses Socialist realism, which does allow for the representation of different kinds of women, but still is within the dominant paradigm. She has more positive outlook for direct cinema and documentary, but the apparent triumph of transparency and authenticity must not be taken without critique. Kuhn defines countercinema "as film practice which works against and challenges dominant cinema, usually at the levels of both signifiers and signifieds."(157) She discusses two types, deconstructive cinema which aims to unsettle the spectator through a departure from formal conventions and films that may also be read as deconstructive, but also specifically offer new and different kinds of representations of women through a concern with feminine language. "If deconstructive cinema sets up the possibility of an active spectator-text relation around a specific set of signifieds, and if feminine cinematic writing offers an openness of address in combination with matters of expression in relation to which spectators may situate themselves as women and/or as feminists, then clearly a feminist countercinema is not simply a matter of texts or 'form plus content'. In different ways and in varying degrees, the moment and conditions of reception of films are also crucial." (177) Finally, Kuhn addresses the production, distribution and exhibition of countercinema
Keyword
Representation, Tendency, Feminism, Cinema, Feminine, Relationship, Reading, Tendentiousness, Language
Other Notes
"Second, the notion of the subject in process consequently suggests that subjectivity is not always nor necessarily cohesive, unitary or final. There is in fact an argument that ideology is definable as exactly the process whereby human subjectivity takes on the outward appearance of wholeness and unity, and furthermore that-in relation to cinema-one of the central ideological operations of dominant cinema is precisely the positioning of the viewing subject as apparently unitary."(47)
Other QE Works Cited
Barthes, R. S/Z (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Narrative)
Mulvey, L. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
4.14.2006
Narrative Fiction (Narrative)
Title
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.
Field
Narrative
Summary
This book is about narrative fiction. "By 'narrative fiction' I mean the narration of a succession of fictional events...the term narration suggests (1) a communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by addresser to addressee and (2) the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the message." (2) S-K uses Genette's tripartate division of narrative to order her book: story, text, and narration. Story is the abstraction of the narrated events from the text and restructering of those events into chronological order. Text is "a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their [the events] telling."(3) Narration is "the act or process of production" of the text..."narration can be considered as both real and fictional. In the empirical world, the author is the agent responsible for the production of the narrative and for its communication."(3) She begins with Story: Events. She contrasts deep structure to surface structure: "Wheras the surface structure of the story is syntagmatic, i.e. governed by temporal and causal principles, the deep structure is paradigmatic, based on static logical relations among the elements." (10) Narratives must have a story, but a narrative can have non-story elements in it. "An event...may be said to be a change from one state of affairs to another." (15) She contrasts Chatman here. Events make up micro-sequences which then make up macro-sequences, which make up a story-line, which makes up a story. Events are combined together based on time and causality. "Temporal sucession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story." (18) She discusses Propp, functions and fairytales. And Bremond who critiques Propp for the lack of freedom in the formalist functional analysis and adds in bifurcationary choice (at any point in the story, there is the possibility of success or failure, like a choose your own adventure). Then we have Story: Characters. Structuralists aren't too down with characters. They like actants. "Like any scientifically orientated discipline, formalist and structuralist poetics recognizes the methodological necessity of reduction, especially in preliminary phases of an inquiry. Since action seems more easily amenable to the construction of 'narrative grammars' (often baed on verb-centered grammars of natural languages), it is convenient to reduce character to action - at least in the first stage." (34) S-K says that instead of subordinating character to action or vice versa, it is better to look at them as interdependent. "Character can be seen as a tree-like hierarchical structure in which elements are assembled in categories of increasing integrative power." (37) Next she moves to Text: time. "Time in narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text." (44) Text-time has to be linear - that's how text works. You read it from right to left (or left to right) but in a progression. Time is viewed in three respects: order (When?), duration (How Long?), and frequency (How Often?). So discrepancies in order are analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward). Duration gets messed with in acceleration and deceleration, summary, ellipses, scene is when story-duration equals text-duration. Next: Text: Characterization. Characterization is the textual indication of character. there are two types: direct definition and indirect presentation. Analogy is used a a reinforcement of characterization. It is purely textual, it doesn't have anything to do with story-causality. Next, Text: Focalization. Again, drawing on Genette, focalization is the mediation of some textual "prism" that presents a particular "view" of the story. It's basically a more precise and better way of saying point-of-view. It also doesn't get all tangeld up with narration. Focalization implies a subject, the focalizer, and an object, the focalized. It can be internal (say, a character in the story) or external(closer to the narrator) to the story. This takes into account space and time because an internal focalizer will not have a total view and it will be simultaneous to the time of the story. THe opposite is the case for an external focalizer. Same goes for restricted and unrestricted knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity, and authoritative ideology. OK moving on to narration: levels and voices. S-K critiques Booth via Chatman's construct of implied authors and readers and basically just focues on Real Author/Reader and Narrator/Narratee. Narration must take into account time (is it simultaneus to the story time, anterior to it, etc.). Then there are levels: "Narration is always at a higher narrative level than the story it narrates. Thus the diegetic level is narrated by the extradiegetic narrator, the hypodiegetic level by a diegetic (intradiegetic) one." (92) Confused? Think Arabian Nights. A heterodiegetic narrator is absent from the story line, a homodiegetic narrator takes part in it. Reliability is also an issue with narration. "When an extradiegetic narrator becomes more overt, his chances or being fully reliable are diminished, since his interpretations, judgements, generalizations are not always compatible with the norms of the implied author. Intradiegetic narrators, especially when they are also homodiegetic, are on the whole more fallible than extradiegetic ones, because they are also characters in the fictional world. As such, they are subject to limited knowledge, personal involvement, and problematic value-schemes, often giving rise to the possibility of unreliability." (103) On Narratees: "the narratee is the agent addressed by the narrator, and all the criteria for classifying the latter also apply to the former...the same narrative may, of course, contain both an extradiegetic and an intradiegetic narratee, just as it may include both types of narrators." (104) Next! Narration: Speech Representation. What is this diegesis crap we've been talking about? Diegesis, according to Socrates, is when the poet himself speaks. Memesis is when the poet creates the illusion that someone else is speaking (not like, ventriloquism, just like, you know...) However, Aristotle in the poetics looks at it a little different. here, mimesis an imitation of action, thus it can contain diegesis. We can think of diegesis v. mimesis as showing v. telling. The other thing is that since narrative is verbal, there really is never any mimesis, you can never really show because you always have to use language, you always have to tell. S-K focuses a lot of Free Indirect Discourse (Did he love me?)
Then we get to a chapter on the text and reading - the phenomenology of reading. S-K discusses the use of frames "To use a frame, it seems to me, is to ground a hypothesis in a deja-vu model of coherence. The dynamics of reading can thus be seen not only as a formation, development and modification, and replacement of hypothesis, but also - simultaneously - a construction of frames, their transformation and dismantling." (124) She discusses suspense and the use of delay and gaps (125).
S-K concluded by wondering what deconstruction and new ways of looking at narrative means for poetics. Will it lead to the end of poetics or to exciting new places? "Because of their tendency to draw attention to their own rhetoricity and fictionality, literary narratives become a kind of paradigm, used to unearth narrative elements in texts where such consciousness is usually less explicit. Seen in this way, the study of narrative is no longer restricted to poetics but becomes an attempt to describe fundamental operations of any signyfying system."(131)
Other Thoughts
Teleology can be tautological (when Hermione and Ron and Harry are in a fight for most of PoA because if Hermione is around too much they'd totally figure out she was using a time turner but her absence pushes the story along even though her absence is neccesated by pushing the story along).
"How to make a bagel? First you take a hole...And how to make a narrative text? In exactly the same way." (127)
Other QE Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics (Narrative)
Bal, Mieke. Narratology (Narrative)
Barthes, R. S/Z (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero (Narrative)
Chatman, S. Story and Discourse (Narrative)
Cohn, D. Transparent Minds (Narrative)
Genette, G. Narrative Discourse (Narrative)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Matejka, L and Pomorska, K. Readings in Russian Poetics (Narrative)
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983.
Field
Narrative
Summary
This book is about narrative fiction. "By 'narrative fiction' I mean the narration of a succession of fictional events...the term narration suggests (1) a communication process in which the narrative as message is transmitted by addresser to addressee and (2) the verbal nature of the medium used to transmit the message." (2) S-K uses Genette's tripartate division of narrative to order her book: story, text, and narration. Story is the abstraction of the narrated events from the text and restructering of those events into chronological order. Text is "a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their [the events] telling."(3) Narration is "the act or process of production" of the text..."narration can be considered as both real and fictional. In the empirical world, the author is the agent responsible for the production of the narrative and for its communication."(3) She begins with Story: Events. She contrasts deep structure to surface structure: "Wheras the surface structure of the story is syntagmatic, i.e. governed by temporal and causal principles, the deep structure is paradigmatic, based on static logical relations among the elements." (10) Narratives must have a story, but a narrative can have non-story elements in it. "An event...may be said to be a change from one state of affairs to another." (15) She contrasts Chatman here. Events make up micro-sequences which then make up macro-sequences, which make up a story-line, which makes up a story. Events are combined together based on time and causality. "Temporal sucession is sufficient as a minimal requirement for a group of events to form a story." (18) She discusses Propp, functions and fairytales. And Bremond who critiques Propp for the lack of freedom in the formalist functional analysis and adds in bifurcationary choice (at any point in the story, there is the possibility of success or failure, like a choose your own adventure). Then we have Story: Characters. Structuralists aren't too down with characters. They like actants. "Like any scientifically orientated discipline, formalist and structuralist poetics recognizes the methodological necessity of reduction, especially in preliminary phases of an inquiry. Since action seems more easily amenable to the construction of 'narrative grammars' (often baed on verb-centered grammars of natural languages), it is convenient to reduce character to action - at least in the first stage." (34) S-K says that instead of subordinating character to action or vice versa, it is better to look at them as interdependent. "Character can be seen as a tree-like hierarchical structure in which elements are assembled in categories of increasing integrative power." (37) Next she moves to Text: time. "Time in narrative fiction can be defined as the relations of chronology between story and text." (44) Text-time has to be linear - that's how text works. You read it from right to left (or left to right) but in a progression. Time is viewed in three respects: order (When?), duration (How Long?), and frequency (How Often?). So discrepancies in order are analepsis (flashback) and prolepsis (flashforward). Duration gets messed with in acceleration and deceleration, summary, ellipses, scene is when story-duration equals text-duration. Next: Text: Characterization. Characterization is the textual indication of character. there are two types: direct definition and indirect presentation. Analogy is used a a reinforcement of characterization. It is purely textual, it doesn't have anything to do with story-causality. Next, Text: Focalization. Again, drawing on Genette, focalization is the mediation of some textual "prism" that presents a particular "view" of the story. It's basically a more precise and better way of saying point-of-view. It also doesn't get all tangeld up with narration. Focalization implies a subject, the focalizer, and an object, the focalized. It can be internal (say, a character in the story) or external(closer to the narrator) to the story. This takes into account space and time because an internal focalizer will not have a total view and it will be simultaneous to the time of the story. THe opposite is the case for an external focalizer. Same goes for restricted and unrestricted knowledge, objectivity and subjectivity, and authoritative ideology. OK moving on to narration: levels and voices. S-K critiques Booth via Chatman's construct of implied authors and readers and basically just focues on Real Author/Reader and Narrator/Narratee. Narration must take into account time (is it simultaneus to the story time, anterior to it, etc.). Then there are levels: "Narration is always at a higher narrative level than the story it narrates. Thus the diegetic level is narrated by the extradiegetic narrator, the hypodiegetic level by a diegetic (intradiegetic) one." (92) Confused? Think Arabian Nights. A heterodiegetic narrator is absent from the story line, a homodiegetic narrator takes part in it. Reliability is also an issue with narration. "When an extradiegetic narrator becomes more overt, his chances or being fully reliable are diminished, since his interpretations, judgements, generalizations are not always compatible with the norms of the implied author. Intradiegetic narrators, especially when they are also homodiegetic, are on the whole more fallible than extradiegetic ones, because they are also characters in the fictional world. As such, they are subject to limited knowledge, personal involvement, and problematic value-schemes, often giving rise to the possibility of unreliability." (103) On Narratees: "the narratee is the agent addressed by the narrator, and all the criteria for classifying the latter also apply to the former...the same narrative may, of course, contain both an extradiegetic and an intradiegetic narratee, just as it may include both types of narrators." (104) Next! Narration: Speech Representation. What is this diegesis crap we've been talking about? Diegesis, according to Socrates, is when the poet himself speaks. Memesis is when the poet creates the illusion that someone else is speaking (not like, ventriloquism, just like, you know...) However, Aristotle in the poetics looks at it a little different. here, mimesis an imitation of action, thus it can contain diegesis. We can think of diegesis v. mimesis as showing v. telling. The other thing is that since narrative is verbal, there really is never any mimesis, you can never really show because you always have to use language, you always have to tell. S-K focuses a lot of Free Indirect Discourse (Did he love me?)
Then we get to a chapter on the text and reading - the phenomenology of reading. S-K discusses the use of frames "To use a frame, it seems to me, is to ground a hypothesis in a deja-vu model of coherence. The dynamics of reading can thus be seen not only as a formation, development and modification, and replacement of hypothesis, but also - simultaneously - a construction of frames, their transformation and dismantling." (124) She discusses suspense and the use of delay and gaps (125).
S-K concluded by wondering what deconstruction and new ways of looking at narrative means for poetics. Will it lead to the end of poetics or to exciting new places? "Because of their tendency to draw attention to their own rhetoricity and fictionality, literary narratives become a kind of paradigm, used to unearth narrative elements in texts where such consciousness is usually less explicit. Seen in this way, the study of narrative is no longer restricted to poetics but becomes an attempt to describe fundamental operations of any signyfying system."(131)
Other Thoughts
Teleology can be tautological (when Hermione and Ron and Harry are in a fight for most of PoA because if Hermione is around too much they'd totally figure out she was using a time turner but her absence pushes the story along even though her absence is neccesated by pushing the story along).
"How to make a bagel? First you take a hole...And how to make a narrative text? In exactly the same way." (127)
Other QE Works Cited
Aristotle. Poetics (Narrative)
Bal, Mieke. Narratology (Narrative)
Barthes, R. S/Z (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Image Music Text (Narrative)
Barthes, R. Writing Degree Zero (Narrative)
Chatman, S. Story and Discourse (Narrative)
Cohn, D. Transparent Minds (Narrative)
Genette, G. Narrative Discourse (Narrative)
Lacan, J. Ecrits (History and Theory of the Body)
Matejka, L and Pomorska, K. Readings in Russian Poetics (Narrative)
Unthinking Eurocentrism, Excerpts (Film and Media Studies)
Title
Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
From Eurocentrism to Polycentrism:
This chapter maps colonialism's legacy on technologies of racism and discusses modes of representation in the Third World. "Colonialism is ethnocentrism armed, institutionalized, and gone global." (16) Neocolonialism is "a conjucture in which direct political and military control has given way to abstract, semi-indirect, largely economic forms of control whose linchpin is a close alliance between foreign capital and the indigenous elite." (17) Discourse is "a transindividual and multi-institutional archive of images and statements providing a common language for representing knowledge about a given theme." (18) (Foucault) "Racism invokes a double movement of aggression and narcissism; the insult to the accuses is doubled by a compliment to the accuser. Racist thinking is tautological and circular; we are powerful because we are right, and we are right because we are powerful." (19) "Racism, then, is both individual and systemic, interwoven into the fabric both of the psyche and of the social system, at once grindingly quotidian and maddeningly abstract. It is not a merely attitudinal issue, but a historically contingent intistitutional and discursive apparatus linked to the drastically unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, the undair apportioning of justice, wealth, pleasure and pain. It is less an error in logic than an abuse of power, less about 'attitudes' than about the deferring of hopes and the destruction of lives." (23) "Racism thus juggles two complementary procedures: the denial of difference and the denial of sameness." (24) The authors believe in the term Third World, a term that came about Post-Bandung and has to do with "protracted structural domination." (25) They mention Trinh T. Minh-ha's point about the third world within and state, even though it seems an unfashionable, militant relic, they will retain the use of TW: "to signal both the dumb inertia of neocolonialism and the energizing collectivity of radical critique, but with the caveat that the term obscures fundamental issues of race, class, gender and culture. At the same time, we would call for a more flexible conceptual framework to accomodate different and even contradictory dynamics in diverse world zones." (27) They then disucss Third World Cinema which emerged from the Cuban revolution, Peronism, and Cinema Novo in Brazil. Some take it to mean film produced by Third World countries (Roy Armes) others mark it by its political project (Willemen). The authors look at in overlapping circles, the core is by third world peoples for political purposes, then just stuff by third world peoples, then stuff about third world peoples with political purposes, and then diasporic hybrid films. They propose a way of decentering Eurocentrism/Hollywoodism by multiculturalizing the film studies curriculum with third world cinema. They comment on media imperialism: "Noe the central problem becomes one of tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization, in which hegemonic tendencies...are simultaneously 'indigenized' within a complex, disjunctive global economy. At the same time...discernable pattersn of domination channel the 'fluidities' even of a 'multipolar' world; the same hegemony that unifies the world through global networks of circulating goods and information also distributes them according to hierarchical structures of power, even if those hegemonies are now more subtle and dispersed." (31) They also discuss the Fourth world and its' cultural productions. The Fourth World is the indigenous world colonized within the 1st-3rd worlds (ok does this feel silly to you too?) They discuss the documentation of the Fourth World from without (anthropology) and from within (the native with the camera). They also critique the term and usage of "postcolonialism" and its celebration of hybridity. "Despite the dizzying multiplicities invoked by the term 'postcolonial,' postcolonial theory has curiously failed to addres the politics of location of the term 'postcolonial' itself." (38) "A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence...Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymetrical." (43) The authors propose a "ploycentric mulitculturalism." "the word 'multiculturalism' has no essense; it points to a debate. While aware of its ambiguities, we would hope to prod it in the direction of a radical critique of power relations, turning into a rallying cry for a more substantive and reciprocal intercommunalism." (47) "The notion of 'polycentrism' in our view, globalizes multiculturalism."
Tropes of Empire:
The chapter looks more at film and the ways others are troped in film representations. "The idea of race...can be seen as less a reality than a trope...of difference...Tropological operations thus form a kind of figurative substratum within the discourse of empire." (137) They discuss animalization, vegatalization, and naturalization: "Animalization forms part of the larger, more diffuse mechanism of naturalization: the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the tendency to associate the colonized with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural." (138) Infantalization: "The Third World toddler, even when the product of a thousand years of civilzation, is not yet in control of its body/psyche, and therefore needs the guiding hand of the more 'adult' and 'advanced' societies, gently pulling it into modern times." (140) They discuss the world of the other as viriginal, ready to be penetrated by colonizing Adams. Of course gendering and orientalization play in here. Penetration is linked with discovery. "Eurocentric cinema narrates penetration into the Third World through the figure of the 'discoverer.'" (145) They also discuss cinema's capacity to show the unknown of the dark places of the earth, exemplified in mummy films. "The films thus reproduce the colonialist mechanism by which the orient, rendered devoid of any active historical or narrative role, becomes...the object of study. Any possibility of representing dialogic interaction is excluded from the outset." (148) Rape and rescue also play a role colonial discourse and filmic representation. "When literalizaed through the rescue of a woman from a lascivious Arab, the rescue fantasy not only allegorizes the rescue of the orient from its own instinctual destructiveness but also addresses a didactic bildungsroman to women at home, perpetuating by contrast the myth of the sexual egalitarianism of the West." (170)
Other Thoughts
"Cinema has often used map imagery to plot the topographies touched by its adventurer heroes, implicitly celebrating its own technological superiority both to the novel's mere verbality and to the staic nature of drawings and still photography...Cinema thus represents itself as the contemporary heir of a more ancient visual medium: cartography." (147)
On the production code outlawing the portrayal of miscegenation: "This exclusionary ideology explains the Production Code's blanket cencorship of sexual violence and brutality, thus foreclosing any portrayal of racial and sexual violence towards African-Americans and implicitly wiping the memory of rape, castration, and lynching from the American record. The Production Code, in other words, forstalled the possibility of a denunciatory counter-narrative from the perspective of people of color, for whom sexual violence by Whites has often been a core historical experience." (160)
Other QE Works Cited
Bordwell et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Field
Film and Media Studies
Summary
From Eurocentrism to Polycentrism:
This chapter maps colonialism's legacy on technologies of racism and discusses modes of representation in the Third World. "Colonialism is ethnocentrism armed, institutionalized, and gone global." (16) Neocolonialism is "a conjucture in which direct political and military control has given way to abstract, semi-indirect, largely economic forms of control whose linchpin is a close alliance between foreign capital and the indigenous elite." (17) Discourse is "a transindividual and multi-institutional archive of images and statements providing a common language for representing knowledge about a given theme." (18) (Foucault) "Racism invokes a double movement of aggression and narcissism; the insult to the accuses is doubled by a compliment to the accuser. Racist thinking is tautological and circular; we are powerful because we are right, and we are right because we are powerful." (19) "Racism, then, is both individual and systemic, interwoven into the fabric both of the psyche and of the social system, at once grindingly quotidian and maddeningly abstract. It is not a merely attitudinal issue, but a historically contingent intistitutional and discursive apparatus linked to the drastically unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, the undair apportioning of justice, wealth, pleasure and pain. It is less an error in logic than an abuse of power, less about 'attitudes' than about the deferring of hopes and the destruction of lives." (23) "Racism thus juggles two complementary procedures: the denial of difference and the denial of sameness." (24) The authors believe in the term Third World, a term that came about Post-Bandung and has to do with "protracted structural domination." (25) They mention Trinh T. Minh-ha's point about the third world within and state, even though it seems an unfashionable, militant relic, they will retain the use of TW: "to signal both the dumb inertia of neocolonialism and the energizing collectivity of radical critique, but with the caveat that the term obscures fundamental issues of race, class, gender and culture. At the same time, we would call for a more flexible conceptual framework to accomodate different and even contradictory dynamics in diverse world zones." (27) They then disucss Third World Cinema which emerged from the Cuban revolution, Peronism, and Cinema Novo in Brazil. Some take it to mean film produced by Third World countries (Roy Armes) others mark it by its political project (Willemen). The authors look at in overlapping circles, the core is by third world peoples for political purposes, then just stuff by third world peoples, then stuff about third world peoples with political purposes, and then diasporic hybrid films. They propose a way of decentering Eurocentrism/Hollywoodism by multiculturalizing the film studies curriculum with third world cinema. They comment on media imperialism: "Noe the central problem becomes one of tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization, in which hegemonic tendencies...are simultaneously 'indigenized' within a complex, disjunctive global economy. At the same time...discernable pattersn of domination channel the 'fluidities' even of a 'multipolar' world; the same hegemony that unifies the world through global networks of circulating goods and information also distributes them according to hierarchical structures of power, even if those hegemonies are now more subtle and dispersed." (31) They also discuss the Fourth world and its' cultural productions. The Fourth World is the indigenous world colonized within the 1st-3rd worlds (ok does this feel silly to you too?) They discuss the documentation of the Fourth World from without (anthropology) and from within (the native with the camera). They also critique the term and usage of "postcolonialism" and its celebration of hybridity. "Despite the dizzying multiplicities invoked by the term 'postcolonial,' postcolonial theory has curiously failed to addres the politics of location of the term 'postcolonial' itself." (38) "A celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence...Hybridity, in other words, is power-laden and asymetrical." (43) The authors propose a "ploycentric mulitculturalism." "the word 'multiculturalism' has no essense; it points to a debate. While aware of its ambiguities, we would hope to prod it in the direction of a radical critique of power relations, turning into a rallying cry for a more substantive and reciprocal intercommunalism." (47) "The notion of 'polycentrism' in our view, globalizes multiculturalism."
Tropes of Empire:
The chapter looks more at film and the ways others are troped in film representations. "The idea of race...can be seen as less a reality than a trope...of difference...Tropological operations thus form a kind of figurative substratum within the discourse of empire." (137) They discuss animalization, vegatalization, and naturalization: "Animalization forms part of the larger, more diffuse mechanism of naturalization: the reduction of the cultural to the biological, the tendency to associate the colonized with the vegetative and the instinctual rather than with the learned and the cultural." (138) Infantalization: "The Third World toddler, even when the product of a thousand years of civilzation, is not yet in control of its body/psyche, and therefore needs the guiding hand of the more 'adult' and 'advanced' societies, gently pulling it into modern times." (140) They discuss the world of the other as viriginal, ready to be penetrated by colonizing Adams. Of course gendering and orientalization play in here. Penetration is linked with discovery. "Eurocentric cinema narrates penetration into the Third World through the figure of the 'discoverer.'" (145) They also discuss cinema's capacity to show the unknown of the dark places of the earth, exemplified in mummy films. "The films thus reproduce the colonialist mechanism by which the orient, rendered devoid of any active historical or narrative role, becomes...the object of study. Any possibility of representing dialogic interaction is excluded from the outset." (148) Rape and rescue also play a role colonial discourse and filmic representation. "When literalizaed through the rescue of a woman from a lascivious Arab, the rescue fantasy not only allegorizes the rescue of the orient from its own instinctual destructiveness but also addresses a didactic bildungsroman to women at home, perpetuating by contrast the myth of the sexual egalitarianism of the West." (170)
Other Thoughts
"Cinema has often used map imagery to plot the topographies touched by its adventurer heroes, implicitly celebrating its own technological superiority both to the novel's mere verbality and to the staic nature of drawings and still photography...Cinema thus represents itself as the contemporary heir of a more ancient visual medium: cartography." (147)
On the production code outlawing the portrayal of miscegenation: "This exclusionary ideology explains the Production Code's blanket cencorship of sexual violence and brutality, thus foreclosing any portrayal of racial and sexual violence towards African-Americans and implicitly wiping the memory of rape, castration, and lynching from the American record. The Production Code, in other words, forstalled the possibility of a denunciatory counter-narrative from the perspective of people of color, for whom sexual violence by Whites has often been a core historical experience." (160)
Other QE Works Cited
Bordwell et al. The Classical Hollywood Cinema (Film and Media Studies)
Said, E. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Modern Medicine and the "Uncertain Body" (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Williams, Simon J. Modern Medicine and the "Uncertain Body": From Corporeality to Hyperreality?
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This essay examines "the extent to which medical technology renders our bodies increasingly 'uncertain' ad the turn of the century...the analytical purchase which the notion of the (medical) cyborg provides regarding contemporary forms of human embodiment...at a broder level the issues this raises in relation to a (late) modernist or postmodernist reading of contemporary medical practice." (1041) "The body, in short, has become a 'project", one which is reflexively open to control amidst a puzzling diversity of imperative, choices and options. This, in turn, sets up something of a paradox, namely: the more control we have over our bodies, the less certain they become." (1041) "Medcine is still in fact, first and foremost, a modernist enterprise, steeped in a scientific tradition in which truth, order and progress are seen as paramount virtues. Seen in this light, current developments in medical technology represent a further extention of modernist imperatives centered on rational control and the domination of 'nature'." (1042) To this end the author looks at plastic surgeory, organ transplant, genetic engineering, and the use of robotics and other technological advances in surgery. "It is these very trends of rational control which, paradoxically, created the crisis of meaning and uncertain status of the body in late modernity. Modernity, in other words, as a reflexive social order, 'manufactures' its own (i.e. internally referential) risks and uncertainties. Medicine, as arch-modernity personified, reflects and reinforces these dilemmas in acute corporeal form. Perhaps on a more rhetorical note, it is also possible to argue that postmodernism is really only an option for the 'healthy' rather than the sick." (1048)
Other Thoughts
"the Foucauldian clinical gaze gives way to the Baudrillardian 'hyperreality of images without grounding". The upshot of this is that bodies become ever more elusive: instead of the patient's body being at the centre of contemporary medical practice and discourse, we find instead 'multiple images and codings' whereby the body is endlessly 'doubled and redoubled' through a self-referential chain of simulacra." (1047)
Other QE Works Cited
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Joralemon, D. Organ Wars (History and Theory of the Body)
Lupton, D. Medicine as Culture (History and Theory of the Body)
Martin, E. Flexible Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Sharp, L. Organ Transplatation as Transformative Experience (History and Theory of the Body)
Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. Birth of the Clinic (History and Theory of the Body)
Williams, Simon J. Modern Medicine and the "Uncertain Body": From Corporeality to Hyperreality?
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
This essay examines "the extent to which medical technology renders our bodies increasingly 'uncertain' ad the turn of the century...the analytical purchase which the notion of the (medical) cyborg provides regarding contemporary forms of human embodiment...at a broder level the issues this raises in relation to a (late) modernist or postmodernist reading of contemporary medical practice." (1041) "The body, in short, has become a 'project", one which is reflexively open to control amidst a puzzling diversity of imperative, choices and options. This, in turn, sets up something of a paradox, namely: the more control we have over our bodies, the less certain they become." (1041) "Medcine is still in fact, first and foremost, a modernist enterprise, steeped in a scientific tradition in which truth, order and progress are seen as paramount virtues. Seen in this light, current developments in medical technology represent a further extention of modernist imperatives centered on rational control and the domination of 'nature'." (1042) To this end the author looks at plastic surgeory, organ transplant, genetic engineering, and the use of robotics and other technological advances in surgery. "It is these very trends of rational control which, paradoxically, created the crisis of meaning and uncertain status of the body in late modernity. Modernity, in other words, as a reflexive social order, 'manufactures' its own (i.e. internally referential) risks and uncertainties. Medicine, as arch-modernity personified, reflects and reinforces these dilemmas in acute corporeal form. Perhaps on a more rhetorical note, it is also possible to argue that postmodernism is really only an option for the 'healthy' rather than the sick." (1048)
Other Thoughts
"the Foucauldian clinical gaze gives way to the Baudrillardian 'hyperreality of images without grounding". The upshot of this is that bodies become ever more elusive: instead of the patient's body being at the centre of contemporary medical practice and discourse, we find instead 'multiple images and codings' whereby the body is endlessly 'doubled and redoubled' through a self-referential chain of simulacra." (1047)
Other QE Works Cited
Haraway, D. Simians, Cyborgs and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Joralemon, D. Organ Wars (History and Theory of the Body)
Lupton, D. Medicine as Culture (History and Theory of the Body)
Martin, E. Flexible Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Sharp, L. Organ Transplatation as Transformative Experience (History and Theory of the Body)
Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation (History and Theory of the Body)
Foucault, M. Birth of the Clinic (History and Theory of the Body)
Organ Wars (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Joralemon, Donald. Organ Wars: The Battle for Body Parts. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3, (Sep., 1995), pp. 335-356.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Donald Joralemon suggests such a narrativizing in his analogizing of cyclosporine, the revolutionary immunosuppressant that increased the longevity of grafts by more effectively preventing the recipient’s immune system from rejecting the organ. In his article for Medical Anthropology, he attempts to show “an ideological equivalent to cyclosporine to inhibit cultural rejection of the surgery and the view of the body it promotes” – that view being “transplantation challenges traditional assumptions of self/body integrity by promoting a distinction between the brain as the center of consciousness and all other organs as replaceable parts.” (Joralemon, 1995)
Donald Joralemon describes the gift “ideology” as he calls it as being akin to “the sorts of acts Americans perform during disasters and accidents: caring responses to personal tragedies even when the individuals affected are strangers and there is no expectation of repayment.” (Joralemon, 1995) The argument for what Joralemon calls the “property rights” ideology maintains that such a shortage could be avoided if each individual were granted full property rights over their body and all its constitutive parts, thereby being allowed to sell organs at a fair market price to patients in organ failure
Other Thoughts
"What I am arguing is that, at least for the present and the future, the cultural sucess of transplantation will be measured by how effectively its supporting ideology suppresses, rather than replaces, traditional concepts of bodily integrity, including the idea that the social relevance of the body to the self does not evaporate with the declaration of brain death." (347)
Other QE Works Cited
Haraway, D. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Martin, E. Flexible Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Joralemon, Donald. Organ Wars: The Battle for Body Parts. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3, (Sep., 1995), pp. 335-356.
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Donald Joralemon suggests such a narrativizing in his analogizing of cyclosporine, the revolutionary immunosuppressant that increased the longevity of grafts by more effectively preventing the recipient’s immune system from rejecting the organ. In his article for Medical Anthropology, he attempts to show “an ideological equivalent to cyclosporine to inhibit cultural rejection of the surgery and the view of the body it promotes” – that view being “transplantation challenges traditional assumptions of self/body integrity by promoting a distinction between the brain as the center of consciousness and all other organs as replaceable parts.” (Joralemon, 1995)
Donald Joralemon describes the gift “ideology” as he calls it as being akin to “the sorts of acts Americans perform during disasters and accidents: caring responses to personal tragedies even when the individuals affected are strangers and there is no expectation of repayment.” (Joralemon, 1995) The argument for what Joralemon calls the “property rights” ideology maintains that such a shortage could be avoided if each individual were granted full property rights over their body and all its constitutive parts, thereby being allowed to sell organs at a fair market price to patients in organ failure
Other Thoughts
"What I am arguing is that, at least for the present and the future, the cultural sucess of transplantation will be measured by how effectively its supporting ideology suppresses, rather than replaces, traditional concepts of bodily integrity, including the idea that the social relevance of the body to the self does not evaporate with the declaration of brain death." (347)
Other QE Works Cited
Haraway, D. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Martin, E. Flexible Bodies (History and Theory of the Body)
Organ Transplantation as a Transformative Experience (History and Theory of the Body)
Title
Sharp, Lesley A. Organ Transplantation as a Transformative Experience: Anthropological Insights into the Restructuring of the Self. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3. (Sep., 199), pp. 357-389
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Lesley Sharp discusses the confusing of the two camps of Organ Donation ideologies, the gift ideology and the property rights ideology in her article in the same special issue on Cultural Perspectives on Organ Transplants. She argues that on one hand transplant donors are told the gift narrative to encourage donation in the belief that their bodies (or the bodies of their deceased loved ones) will live on in the recipient’s body, but recipients are encouraged to view the donor organ as a commodity that they now own to prevent a confusion or bifurcation of identity. (Sharp, 1995) According to Sharp’s ethnographic research of organ donors and recipients at Mercy Medical, a major transplant center in the Midwest, in the effort to reconstruct a sense of self post-transplant, due to these conflicting strategic narratives, the recipient “perceives the organ as an unusual object, one whose nature is rich and varied: it is perceived simultaneously as a thing and as an other…organs are simultaneously commoditized and personalized by professionals…[the organs] cultural value lies in their economic and their social worth: they are rare commodities in part because they are personalized objects.” (Ibid) Sharp argues that the post-transplant recipient is thrown into story that is confused by both of these ideologies, one that encourages personal identification and the other which demands objectification, causing the patient much anxiety on the road to an integrated conception of self. Sharp recounts an informant’s lament, “We’re told, ‘Return to work to pay back your debt to society,’ and ‘Productivity is important.’…You see, the doctors think we’re cured. But we’re not cured…we’re seen as unreliable employees, and health insurance companies redline transplant patients. If they hire you they may refuse to let you join the health plan.” (Sharp, 1995)
Other Thoughts
"In the United States, organ exchange may thus be viewed as occuring at the intersection of a host of competing biographies. Put another way, transplantation is a social act that generates new biographies or extends or enhances existing ones. The organ itself may be viewed as embodying a biography of its own." (378)
Other QE Works Cited
Harawy, D. Simian, Cyborgs, and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
Sharp, Lesley A. Organ Transplantation as a Transformative Experience: Anthropological Insights into the Restructuring of the Self. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3. (Sep., 199), pp. 357-389
Field
History and Theory of the Body
Summary
Lesley Sharp discusses the confusing of the two camps of Organ Donation ideologies, the gift ideology and the property rights ideology in her article in the same special issue on Cultural Perspectives on Organ Transplants. She argues that on one hand transplant donors are told the gift narrative to encourage donation in the belief that their bodies (or the bodies of their deceased loved ones) will live on in the recipient’s body, but recipients are encouraged to view the donor organ as a commodity that they now own to prevent a confusion or bifurcation of identity. (Sharp, 1995) According to Sharp’s ethnographic research of organ donors and recipients at Mercy Medical, a major transplant center in the Midwest, in the effort to reconstruct a sense of self post-transplant, due to these conflicting strategic narratives, the recipient “perceives the organ as an unusual object, one whose nature is rich and varied: it is perceived simultaneously as a thing and as an other…organs are simultaneously commoditized and personalized by professionals…[the organs] cultural value lies in their economic and their social worth: they are rare commodities in part because they are personalized objects.” (Ibid) Sharp argues that the post-transplant recipient is thrown into story that is confused by both of these ideologies, one that encourages personal identification and the other which demands objectification, causing the patient much anxiety on the road to an integrated conception of self. Sharp recounts an informant’s lament, “We’re told, ‘Return to work to pay back your debt to society,’ and ‘Productivity is important.’…You see, the doctors think we’re cured. But we’re not cured…we’re seen as unreliable employees, and health insurance companies redline transplant patients. If they hire you they may refuse to let you join the health plan.” (Sharp, 1995)
Other Thoughts
"In the United States, organ exchange may thus be viewed as occuring at the intersection of a host of competing biographies. Put another way, transplantation is a social act that generates new biographies or extends or enhances existing ones. The organ itself may be viewed as embodying a biography of its own." (378)
Other QE Works Cited
Harawy, D. Simian, Cyborgs, and Women (History and Theory of the Body)
The Theory of the Novel (Narrative)
Title
Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.
Field
Narrative
Summary
The Theory of the Novel and Lukacs is deeply influenced by Hegel (and it seems like Hegelian Aesthetics) so I took it that way. It starts out making an argument that the novel is fundamentally different from the epic based on historical conjecture and posits a hopeful return to the epic someday (he this Dostoyevsky will do it) or at least something of the unity promised by the epic? I think. In the Romantic period, the classical (Greek) epic was misunderstood because we don't get its adequacy (this is the Hegelian bit in my mind, yeah?). "the circle whose closed nature was the transcendental essence of their life has, for us, been broken; we cannot breath in a closed world. We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approcimation that is never fully accomplished. We have invested the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete. We have found the only true substance within ourselves: that is why we have to plac an unbridgeable chasm between cognition and action, between soul and created structure, between self and world, why all substantiality has to be dispersed in reflexivity on the far side of that chasm; that is why our essence had to become a postulate for ourselves and thus create a still depper, still more menacing abyss between us and our own selves."(34) - I think that would be the novel (the form). Form destroys totality, or the possibility for totality. With the loss immanence comes the loss of the epic. "But wheras the smallest disturbance of the transcendental correlations must cause the immanence of meaning in life to vanish beyond recovery, an essence that is divorced from life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violence upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether. That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel." (41) The epic is total and adequate. "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial - a matter of a mere artistic technicality - to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose." (56) "The epic gives form to totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life."(60) Ok this part is important here: "In a novel, totality can be systematised only in abstract terms, which is why any system that could be established in the novel - a system being, after the final disappearance of the organic, the only possible form of a rounded totality - had to be on of the abstract concepts and therefore not directly suitable for aesthetic form-giving. Such abstract systematisation is, it is true, the ultimate basis of the entire structure, but in the created reality of the novel all that becomes visible is the distance separating the systematisation from concrete life: a systematisation which emphasises the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one."(70) "The novel is the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel's world, if seen objectively, is an imperfection, and if subjectivey experienced, it amounts to resignation." (71) "The novel, in contrast to others genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in the process of becoming. That is why, from the artistic viewpoint, the novel is the most hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate being a problematic with being a problem." (73) "The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian, can be objectivised only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography." (77) "[the novel] needs certain imposed limits in order to become form; whereas the infinity of purely epic matter is an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it - only a consequence and, at most, a symptom." (81) "The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again. The relationships which create cohesion between the abstract components are abstractly pure and formal, and the ultimate unifying principle therefore has to be the ethic of the creative subjectivity, an ethic which the content reveals."(84) "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God."(88) "The abdonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incomennsurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure - in the absence of a transcendental 'place' alloted to human endeavour. There are, roughly speaking, two types of such incommensurability: either the world is narrower or it is broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions." (97) So one icommensurability is abstract idealism - the demonism of the narrowing of the soul. It forgets the distance between the ideal and the idea, imagines that it is perfect unity and then thinks reality is beset by demons which need to be conquered to redeem the unity. Or something. Then the other is dissillusionment - "the inadequacy that is due to the soul's being wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it." (112) "Whereas abstract idealism, in order to exist at all, had to translate itself into action, had to enter into conflict with the outside world, here the possibility of escape does not seem excluded from the start. A life which is capable of producing all its content out of itself can be rounded and perfect even if it never enters into contact with the alien realtiy outside. Whereas, therefore, an excessive, totally uninhibited activity towards the outside world was characterisitic of the psychological structure of abstract idealism, here the tendency is rather towards passivity, a tendency to avoid outside conflict and struggles rather than to engage in them, a tendency to deal inside the soul with everything that concerns the soul." (113)
Keywords
Epic, Novel, Immanence, Form, Totality, Rounded
Other Thoughts
"Philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determined the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed."(29)
"Every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonace of life which it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself; the mood of the resulting world, and the atmosphere in which the persons and event thus created have their being, are determined by the danger which arises from this incompletely resolved dissonance and which therefore threatens the form. The dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life, produced a problem of form whose formal nature is much less obvious than in other kinds of art, and which, because it looks like a problem of content, needs to be approached by both ethical and aesthetic arguments, even more than do problems which are obviously purely formal."(71)
"The overlapping of the novel form into the epic, such as we have discussed, is rooted in social life; it disrupts the immanence of form only to the extent that, at the crucial point, it imputes a substantiality to the world it describes which that world is in no way capable of sustaining and keeping in a state of balence. The artist's epic intention, his desire to arrive at a world beyond the problematic, is aimed only at an immenently utopian ideal of social forms and structures; therefore it does not transcencd these forms and structures generally but only their historically given concrete possibilities - and this is enough to detroy the immanence of form." (144)
Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971.
Field
Narrative
Summary
The Theory of the Novel and Lukacs is deeply influenced by Hegel (and it seems like Hegelian Aesthetics) so I took it that way. It starts out making an argument that the novel is fundamentally different from the epic based on historical conjecture and posits a hopeful return to the epic someday (he this Dostoyevsky will do it) or at least something of the unity promised by the epic? I think. In the Romantic period, the classical (Greek) epic was misunderstood because we don't get its adequacy (this is the Hegelian bit in my mind, yeah?). "the circle whose closed nature was the transcendental essence of their life has, for us, been broken; we cannot breath in a closed world. We have invented the productivity of the spirit: that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our thinking follows the endless path of an approcimation that is never fully accomplished. We have invested the creation of forms: and that is why everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete. We have found the only true substance within ourselves: that is why we have to plac an unbridgeable chasm between cognition and action, between soul and created structure, between self and world, why all substantiality has to be dispersed in reflexivity on the far side of that chasm; that is why our essence had to become a postulate for ourselves and thus create a still depper, still more menacing abyss between us and our own selves."(34) - I think that would be the novel (the form). Form destroys totality, or the possibility for totality. With the loss immanence comes the loss of the epic. "But wheras the smallest disturbance of the transcendental correlations must cause the immanence of meaning in life to vanish beyond recovery, an essence that is divorced from life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violence upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether. That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel." (41) The epic is total and adequate. "The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality. It would be superficial - a matter of a mere artistic technicality - to look for the only and decisive genre-defining criterion in the question of whether a work is written in verse or prose." (56) "The epic gives form to totality of life that is rounded from within; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life."(60) Ok this part is important here: "In a novel, totality can be systematised only in abstract terms, which is why any system that could be established in the novel - a system being, after the final disappearance of the organic, the only possible form of a rounded totality - had to be on of the abstract concepts and therefore not directly suitable for aesthetic form-giving. Such abstract systematisation is, it is true, the ultimate basis of the entire structure, but in the created reality of the novel all that becomes visible is the distance separating the systematisation from concrete life: a systematisation which emphasises the conventionality of the objective world and the interiority of the subjective one."(70) "The novel is the art-form of virile maturity: this means that the completeness of the novel's world, if seen objectively, is an imperfection, and if subjectivey experienced, it amounts to resignation." (71) "The novel, in contrast to others genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in the process of becoming. That is why, from the artistic viewpoint, the novel is the most hazardous genre, and why it has been described as only half an art by many who equate being a problematic with being a problem." (73) "The outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. The fluctuation between a conceptual system which can never completely capture life and a life complex which can never attain completeness because completeness is immanently utopian, can be objectivised only in that organic quality which is the aim of biography." (77) "[the novel] needs certain imposed limits in order to become form; whereas the infinity of purely epic matter is an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it - only a consequence and, at most, a symptom." (81) "The composition of the novel is the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and over again. The relationships which create cohesion between the abstract components are abstractly pure and formal, and the ultimate unifying principle therefore has to be the ethic of the creative subjectivity, an ethic which the content reveals."(84) "The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God."(88) "The abdonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incomennsurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure - in the absence of a transcendental 'place' alloted to human endeavour. There are, roughly speaking, two types of such incommensurability: either the world is narrower or it is broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions." (97) So one icommensurability is abstract idealism - the demonism of the narrowing of the soul. It forgets the distance between the ideal and the idea, imagines that it is perfect unity and then thinks reality is beset by demons which need to be conquered to redeem the unity. Or something. Then the other is dissillusionment - "the inadequacy that is due to the soul's being wider and larger than the destinies which life has to offer it." (112) "Whereas abstract idealism, in order to exist at all, had to translate itself into action, had to enter into conflict with the outside world, here the possibility of escape does not seem excluded from the start. A life which is capable of producing all its content out of itself can be rounded and perfect even if it never enters into contact with the alien realtiy outside. Whereas, therefore, an excessive, totally uninhibited activity towards the outside world was characterisitic of the psychological structure of abstract idealism, here the tendency is rather towards passivity, a tendency to avoid outside conflict and struggles rather than to engage in them, a tendency to deal inside the soul with everything that concerns the soul." (113)
Keywords
Epic, Novel, Immanence, Form, Totality, Rounded
Other Thoughts
"Philosophy, as a form of life or as that which determined the form and supplies the content of literary creation, is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside' and 'outside', a sign of the essential difference between the self and the world, the incongruence of soul and deed."(29)
"Every art form is defined by the metaphysical dissonace of life which it accepts and organises as the basis of a totality complete in itself; the mood of the resulting world, and the atmosphere in which the persons and event thus created have their being, are determined by the danger which arises from this incompletely resolved dissonance and which therefore threatens the form. The dissonance special to the novel, the refusal of the immanence of being to enter into empirical life, produced a problem of form whose formal nature is much less obvious than in other kinds of art, and which, because it looks like a problem of content, needs to be approached by both ethical and aesthetic arguments, even more than do problems which are obviously purely formal."(71)
"The overlapping of the novel form into the epic, such as we have discussed, is rooted in social life; it disrupts the immanence of form only to the extent that, at the crucial point, it imputes a substantiality to the world it describes which that world is in no way capable of sustaining and keeping in a state of balence. The artist's epic intention, his desire to arrive at a world beyond the problematic, is aimed only at an immenently utopian ideal of social forms and structures; therefore it does not transcencd these forms and structures generally but only their historically given concrete possibilities - and this is enough to detroy the immanence of form." (144)
4.12.2006
Rabelais and His World (Narrative)
Title
Bakhtin, Mikail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Field
Narrative
Summary
In this detailed study, Bakhtin explores the work of Rabelais and its relation to the carnivalesque (the popular, the humerous, the grotesque). "Rabelais' images have a certain undestroyable nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook."(3) "The basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play." (7)The parody staged by the carnival/folk cutlure is not merely a negative, it is an inside-outing of the non-carnivalesque. The carnival laughter is of the people (not the individual), it is universal and it is ambiguous. The feast and the carnival are linked (and linked in their relationship to time, but more on that later.) Humorous folk language is marked by abusive language and the concept of grotesque realism. "The material bodily principle in grotesque realism is offered in its all-popular festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social and bodily elements are given here as an indivisible whole. And this whole is gay and gracious...the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, beacuse it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable."(19) Part of grotesque realism is its power to degrade, bring down to earth, make fleshy. "Degredation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time...to degrade means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore related to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degredation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one."(21) "The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. THe other indispensible trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis." (24) The grotesque body is open to the world, it is contiguous with it, that is why it focuses so much upon the reproductive ograns, the anus, the mouth, the nose - the holes and the protrusions. All this humor and grotequerie finds its apex in the Renaissance, particularly in the work of Rabelais. In later periods (the Romantic), the grosteque is alienated from man and the body. "The bodily participation in the potentiality of another world, the bodily awareness of another world has an immense importance for the groteque."(48) New types of realism, as opposed to the grotesque, that came about in the later periods are static, the emphasize boundaries, it changed the notion of time housed in the grotesque. The chapters of the book deal with various ways that folk humor and the grotesque are represented in Rabelais' work and "to show the oneness and meaning of folk humor, its general ideological, philosophical and aesthetic essence." (58) The first chapter examines the history of laughter and the characteristics of laughter in the Renaissance (Rabelais' time). "For the Renaissance...the characteristic trait of laughter was precisely the recognition of its positive, regenerating, creative meaning."(71) Laughter emerged from folk culture and was essential in festivals and other gatherings of the folk. "Besides univeralism and freedom, the third important trait of laughter was its relation to the people's unofficial truth."(90)
"True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naivete and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality." (123) The second chapter deals with the language of the marketplace, the food (tripe) found there, the voices of the hawkers, the quacks who practised medicine there - "All of them, independently of their literal content, refer to the unofficial aspect of thhe world, unofficial in tonr (laughter) and in contents (the lower stratum). All of them relate to the world's gay matter, which is born, dies and gives birth, is devoured and devours; this is the world which continually grows and multiplies, becomes ever greater and better, ever more abundant. Gay matter is ambivalent, it is the grave and generating womb, the receding past and the advancing future, the becoming." (195) The next chapter examines the popular-festive forms in Rabelais - scenes of battle, thrashings, uncrownings, games and fortune telling, etc. "The exterior freedom of popular-festive forms was inseperable from their inner freedom, and from their positive outlook on the world. Together with this new positive outlook, they brought the right to express it with impugnity."(271) The next chapter looks at the banquet in Rabelais. "Eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body. The distinctive character of this body is its open, unfinished nature, its interaction with the world." (281) "In the act of eating...the confines between body and the world are overstepped by the body; it triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world's expense." (283) "The popular images of food and drink are active and triumphant, for the conclude the process of labor and struggle of the social man against the world."(302) Chapter five focuses on the grotesque body. "In the grotesque body...death brings nothing to an end, for it does not concern the ancestral body, which is renewed in the next generation." (322) Urine is the connection of the body with the sea, shit its connection with the earth. By integrating the cosmic into the body, the cosmic (that which is so vast that it can not be conquered and is thus, terrifying) is integrated into humor. Some sources for the grotesque body include folklore on giants and tales from India. "In the grotesqye concept of the body a new, concrete, and realistic historic awareness was born and took form: not abstract thought about the future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create history."(367) The 6th chapter focus on the "lower stratum" of the body. "The mighty thrust downward into the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the human body, is reflected in Rabelais' entire world from beginning to end."(370) "Death is an ambivalent image for Rabelais and for the popular sources from which he drew his material; therefore, death can be gay...Where death is, there also is birth, change, renewal. The image of birth is no less ambivalent; it represents the body that is born and at the same time shows a glimpse of the departing one...All these ambivalent images are dual-bodied, dual-faced, pregnant. They combine in various proportions negation and affirmation, the top and the bottom, abuse and praise."(409) The last chapter looks at Rabelais in terms of his time and the place of his writing in history. "we may say that in Rabelais' novel the cosmic breath of the muth is combined with the directness of a modern survey and the concrete precision of a realist novel. Beyond the images that may appear fantastic we find real events, living persons, and the author's own rich experience and sharp observation." (438) Rabelais work is like "an encyclopedia of a new world." (455) because it recorded so much of the folk humor, forms of language of the market place, ways of medical practice, etc. Finally, Bahktin talks about the historical moment of the breakdown of the church language and the ascendancy of the vernacular as particularly important for Rabelais and the grotesque. "Languages are philosophies - not abstract but concrete, social philosophies, penetrated by a system of values inseperable from living practice and class struggle. This is why every object, every concept, every point of view, as well as every intonation found their place at this intersection of linguistic philosophies and was drawn into an intense ideological struggle. In these exceptional conditions, linguistic dogmatism or naivety became impossible." (471) "In Rabelais freedom of laughter, consecrated by the tradition of popular-festive forms, was raised to a higher level of ideological consciousness, thanks to the victory over linguistic dogmatism. The defeat of this most obstinate and secret element was possible only through intense interorientation and mutual clarification of languages which took place at that time. Linguistic life enacted that same drama: simultaneous death and birth, the aging and renewal of separate forms and meanings as well as of entire philosophies."(473)
Keywords
Carnavalesque, Folk, Grotesque Realism, Humor, Play, Gay, Laughter,
Other Thoughts
pg 367: the idea that in the middle ages things were hierachy, veritcal, in the renaissance it is horizontal, all integrated.
"One of the essential traits of Rabelais' stle is that all proper nouns on the one hand, and on the other hand all the names of objects and phenomena, tend to extremes in abusive-laudatory nicknames. Thanks to this process, all objects and phenomena of Rabelais' world acquire a peculiar individuality of praise-abuse. In this individualizing torrent of abusive-laudatory words the dividing lines between persons and objects are weakened; all of them become participants in the carnival drama of the simultaneous death of the old world and birth of the new."(463)
Bakhtin, Mikail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Field
Narrative
Summary
In this detailed study, Bakhtin explores the work of Rabelais and its relation to the carnivalesque (the popular, the humerous, the grotesque). "Rabelais' images have a certain undestroyable nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook."(3) "The basic carnival nucleus of this culture is by no means a purely artistic form nor a spectacle and does not, generally speaking, belong to the sphere of art. It belongs to the borderline between art and life. In reality, it is life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play." (7)The parody staged by the carnival/folk cutlure is not merely a negative, it is an inside-outing of the non-carnivalesque. The carnival laughter is of the people (not the individual), it is universal and it is ambiguous. The feast and the carnival are linked (and linked in their relationship to time, but more on that later.) Humorous folk language is marked by abusive language and the concept of grotesque realism. "The material bodily principle in grotesque realism is offered in its all-popular festive and utopian aspect. The cosmic, social and bodily elements are given here as an indivisible whole. And this whole is gay and gracious...the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character; this is not the body and its physiology in the modern sense of these words, beacuse it is not individualized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed. This is why all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable."(19) Part of grotesque realism is its power to degrade, bring down to earth, make fleshy. "Degredation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time...to degrade means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore related to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degredation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one."(21) "The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. THe other indispensible trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis." (24) The grotesque body is open to the world, it is contiguous with it, that is why it focuses so much upon the reproductive ograns, the anus, the mouth, the nose - the holes and the protrusions. All this humor and grotequerie finds its apex in the Renaissance, particularly in the work of Rabelais. In later periods (the Romantic), the grosteque is alienated from man and the body. "The bodily participation in the potentiality of another world, the bodily awareness of another world has an immense importance for the groteque."(48) New types of realism, as opposed to the grotesque, that came about in the later periods are static, the emphasize boundaries, it changed the notion of time housed in the grotesque. The chapters of the book deal with various ways that folk humor and the grotesque are represented in Rabelais' work and "to show the oneness and meaning of folk humor, its general ideological, philosophical and aesthetic essence." (58) The first chapter examines the history of laughter and the characteristics of laughter in the Renaissance (Rabelais' time). "For the Renaissance...the characteristic trait of laughter was precisely the recognition of its positive, regenerating, creative meaning."(71) Laughter emerged from folk culture and was essential in festivals and other gatherings of the folk. "Besides univeralism and freedom, the third important trait of laughter was its relation to the people's unofficial truth."(90)
"True ambivalent and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naivete and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality." (123) The second chapter deals with the language of the marketplace, the food (tripe) found there, the voices of the hawkers, the quacks who practised medicine there - "All of them, independently of their literal content, refer to the unofficial aspect of thhe world, unofficial in tonr (laughter) and in contents (the lower stratum). All of them relate to the world's gay matter, which is born, dies and gives birth, is devoured and devours; this is the world which continually grows and multiplies, becomes ever greater and better, ever more abundant. Gay matter is ambivalent, it is the grave and generating womb, the receding past and the advancing future, the becoming." (195) The next chapter examines the popular-festive forms in Rabelais - scenes of battle, thrashings, uncrownings, games and fortune telling, etc. "The exterior freedom of popular-festive forms was inseperable from their inner freedom, and from their positive outlook on the world. Together with this new positive outlook, they brought the right to express it with impugnity."(271) The next chapter looks at the banquet in Rabelais. "Eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body. The distinctive character of this body is its open, unfinished nature, its interaction with the world." (281) "In the act of eating...the confines between body and the world are overstepped by the body; it triumphs over the world, over its enemy, celebrates its victory, grows at the world's expense." (283) "The popular images of food and drink are active and triumphant, for the conclude the process of labor and struggle of the social man against the world."(302) Chapter five focuses on the grotesque body. "In the grotesque body...death brings nothing to an end, for it does not concern the ancestral body, which is renewed in the next generation." (322) Urine is the connection of the body with the sea, shit its connection with the earth. By integrating the cosmic into the body, the cosmic (that which is so vast that it can not be conquered and is thus, terrifying) is integrated into humor. Some sources for the grotesque body include folklore on giants and tales from India. "In the grotesqye concept of the body a new, concrete, and realistic historic awareness was born and took form: not abstract thought about the future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people who create history."(367) The 6th chapter focus on the "lower stratum" of the body. "The mighty thrust downward into the bowels of the earth, into the depths of the human body, is reflected in Rabelais' entire world from beginning to end."(370) "Death is an ambivalent image for Rabelais and for the popular sources from which he drew his material; therefore, death can be gay...Where death is, there also is birth, change, renewal. The image of birth is no less ambivalent; it represents the body that is born and at the same time shows a glimpse of the departing one...All these ambivalent images are dual-bodied, dual-faced, pregnant. They combine in various proportions negation and affirmation, the top and the bottom, abuse and praise."(409) The last chapter looks at Rabelais in terms of his time and the place of his writing in history. "we may say that in Rabelais' novel the cosmic breath of the muth is combined with the directness of a modern survey and the concrete precision of a realist novel. Beyond the images that may appear fantastic we find real events, living persons, and the author's own rich experience and sharp observation." (438) Rabelais work is like "an encyclopedia of a new world." (455) because it recorded so much of the folk humor, forms of language of the market place, ways of medical practice, etc. Finally, Bahktin talks about the historical moment of the breakdown of the church language and the ascendancy of the vernacular as particularly important for Rabelais and the grotesque. "Languages are philosophies - not abstract but concrete, social philosophies, penetrated by a system of values inseperable from living practice and class struggle. This is why every object, every concept, every point of view, as well as every intonation found their place at this intersection of linguistic philosophies and was drawn into an intense ideological struggle. In these exceptional conditions, linguistic dogmatism or naivety became impossible." (471) "In Rabelais freedom of laughter, consecrated by the tradition of popular-festive forms, was raised to a higher level of ideological consciousness, thanks to the victory over linguistic dogmatism. The defeat of this most obstinate and secret element was possible only through intense interorientation and mutual clarification of languages which took place at that time. Linguistic life enacted that same drama: simultaneous death and birth, the aging and renewal of separate forms and meanings as well as of entire philosophies."(473)
Keywords
Carnavalesque, Folk, Grotesque Realism, Humor, Play, Gay, Laughter,
Other Thoughts
pg 367: the idea that in the middle ages things were hierachy, veritcal, in the renaissance it is horizontal, all integrated.
"One of the essential traits of Rabelais' stle is that all proper nouns on the one hand, and on the other hand all the names of objects and phenomena, tend to extremes in abusive-laudatory nicknames. Thanks to this process, all objects and phenomena of Rabelais' world acquire a peculiar individuality of praise-abuse. In this individualizing torrent of abusive-laudatory words the dividing lines between persons and objects are weakened; all of them become participants in the carnival drama of the simultaneous death of the old world and birth of the new."(463)
Immigrant Acts (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Ah, the old favorite. What do we think of hybridity these days? Strategic Essentialism? I picked this book as my favorite AAS book of all time when I was an undergrad - I'd say times have changed. Please find below the excellent notes of guest blogger, J.He.
Lisa Lowe. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Identity and the Subject:
How is the fluidity of identity and the subject and yet the necessity for fixed notions of the self addressed in Immigrant Acts? What does Lowe’s discussions of the subject and identity yield towards an understanding of the emergence of contemporary individuals, communities, and nations as they are mutually articulated? How have these emergent entities and the conditions of their existence marked changes in the global, national, and local scales? What, if any, are the possibilities for identity and subjectivity as offered by Lowe (particularly in conversation with José Muñoz’s work on disidentification).
How does Lowe’s acknowledgment of the utility of particular moments or forms of nationalisms complicate these understandings of subjectivity and identity? Consider Lowe’s formulations of this dynamic in tandem with Chela Sandoval’s work on differential consciousness. If nationalisms are understood as one of many registers within a repertoire of oppositional politics or methodologies how do we then engage in scholarship that attenuates to these shifting notions of the self and the collective?
Asian American:
Taking off from these models of the subject and identity, how does Lowe complicate understandings of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans? How do her definitions of this grouping speak to and complicate projects of a post-nationalist American Studies?
Hybridity and Heterogeneity:
Consider Lowe’s deployment of difference in thinking through and arguing for the utility of key terms, specifically her ideas on heterogeneous groupings, hybrid cultural forms, and multiple subject position(ing)s. How does Lowe’s work here enable us toward effectively analyzing and studying objects and subjects that always evade containment in discrete categories of knowledge? How does Lowe’s analysis interact with Gilroy’s concepts of the Black Atlantic, counterculture, and double consciousness?
Culture:
Focusing on the treatment of law, citizenship, and culture as sites of contradiction (often in convergence or a state of overdetermination), how does Lowe’s interrogation of the nation-state gesture towards a theory of the Americas and a reconceptualization of forms of belonging? What does the orientation of Immigrant Acts within the lexicons of historical materialism, feminism, and racial formation offer in terms of methodology?
Literature and History:
How does Lowe’s analysis of cultural texts and Western epistemologies relate with Walter Mignolo’s interrogation of writing, literature, language and colonialism?
Identity and the Subject
I argue that the subject that emerges out of Asian American cultural forms is one in excess of and in contradiction with the subjectivities proposed by national modern and postmodern modes of aesthetic representation. (32)
Rather than considering ‘Asian American identity’ as a fixed, established ‘given,’ perhaps we can consider instead ‘Asian American cultural practices’ that produce identity; the processes that produce such identity are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences. (64)
To the contrary, these differences [class and gender alongside race] represent greater opportunity to affiliate with other groups whose cohesions may be based on other valences of oppression rather than ‘identity.’ (74)
Interventions exist that refuse the static or binary conceptions of culture, replacing notions of ‘identity’ with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from culture ‘essence’ to material hybridity. (75)
In this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same time, I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences. (68)
The concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ suggests that it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of racialized ethnic identity, such as ‘Asian American,’ for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of ‘Asian American’ so as to insure that such essentialisms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses we seek to disempower. (82)
Hence, Asian American cultural nationalism that emerged in opposition to racial exclusion continues to address these modern institutions within transnational capitalism. Yet at the same time, the current global restructuring… constitutes a shift in the mode of production that now necessitates alternative forms of cultural practice that integrate yet move beyond those of cultural nationalism. (171)
This excess and differential places Asian American and other racialized women in critical, and dialectical, relationships to the subjects of feminism, Marxism, and ethnic nationalisms. In this sense, Asian immigrant and Asian American women may be said to constitute the dialectical sublation of these earlier models of political subjectivity. (163-4)
Singular narratives of consciousness aim at developing a subject position from which totalization becomes possible, whereas the cultural productions of racialized women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject. (164-5)
Rather than dictating that subjects be constituted through identification with the liberal citizen-formation of American national culture, Asian American cultural forms offer the possibility of subjects and practices constituted through dialectics of difference and disidentification. Rather than vertical determination by the state, these forms are suggestive of horizontal relations between subjects across national boundaries. (167)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, on that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominatnt ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 11. [in this excerpt he is quoting Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.]
I think of this activity of consciousness as the ‘differential,’ insofar as it enables movement ‘between and among’ ideological positionings (the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of oppositional consciousness) considered as variable, in order to disclose the distinctions among them. In this sense, the differential mode of consciousness functions like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power… When enacted in dialectical relation to one another and not as separated ideologies, each oppositional mode of consciousness, each ideology-praxis, is transformed into tactical weaponry for intervening in shifting currents of power.
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 58.
Asian American
What is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity. (65)
‘Decolonization,’ then, is the social formation that encompasses a multileveled and multicentered assault on those specific forms of colonial rule; that project of decolonization is carried forth in the ‘postcolonial’ site by may equally be deployed by immigrant and diasporic populations… In other words, if we understand ‘decolonization’ as an ongoing disruption of the colonial mode of production, then Asian American writing performs that displacement from a social formation marked by the uneven and unsynthetic encounters of colonial, neocolonial, and mass and elite indigenous cultures that characterize decolonization. (108)
Hybridity and Heterogeneity
By ‘heterogeneity,’ I mean to indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category… By ‘hybridity,’ I refer to the formation of cultural objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations… We might understand ‘multiplicity’ as designating the ways in which subjects located within social relations are determined by several different axes of power… (67)
The materialist argument for heterogeneity seeks to challenge the conception of difference as exclusively structure by a binary opposition between two terms, by proposing instead another notion of ‘difference’ that takes seriously the historically produced conditions of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and nonequivalence. (72)
The materialist concept of hybridity conveys that the histories of forced labor migrations, racial segregation, economic displacement and internment are left in the material traces of ‘hybrid’ cultural identities… Hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives. (82)
By ‘hybridity,’ I do not mean simply cultural or linguistic mixing or ‘ambivalence’ but rather a material form that expresses the sedimented traces of a complex history of violence, invasion, exploitation, deracination, and imposed rule by different colonial and neocolonial powers. (210 n28)
Culture
Culture is the terrain through which the individual speaks as a member of the contemporary national collectivity, but culture is also a mediation of history, the site through which the past returns and is remembered, however fragmented, imperfect, or disavowed. (x)
It is through the terrain of national culture that the individual subject is politically formed as the American citizen. (2)
Culture is the medium of the present – the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective – but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently. (2-3)
The racialization of Asian Americans in relation to the state locates Asian American culture as a site for the emergence of another kind of political subject, one who has a historically ‘alien-ated’ relation to the category of citizenship. (12)
Culture is the material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure. (22)
Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. (22)
Culture in and for the modern state is not in itself ‘political,’ but the contradictions through which immigration brings national institutions into crisis produces immigrant cultures as oppositional and contestatory, and these contradictions critically politicized in cultural forms and practices can be utilized in the formation of alternative social practices. (172)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultanesouly a social reality and a legal impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship and without rights… The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004. 4.
Literature and History
In other words, the cultural institution of the novel legitimates particular forms and subjects of history and subjugates or erases others… In both England and the United States, the novel as a form of print culture has constituted a privileged site for the unification of the citizen with the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, while the national literary canon functioned to unify aesthetic culture as a domain in which material differences and localities were resolved and reconciled. (98)
In This Book…
In this book, I have wished to make connections between Asian American cultural studies and the current range of ethnic cultural studies projects, between discussions of race in the United States and Marxist theories, and between literary study and feminist analyses of racialized women’s work. I am not positing an orthodoxy to be followed but connecting these discussions in order to open a space in which others, perhaps finding worthy gaps, errors, or elisions, will make use of and build on the work only begun here. (x)
Thus, the immigration of Asians to the United States has been the locus of meanings that are simultaneously legal, political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic. In this book I attempt to situate these meanings and to gather them into a coherent, contemporary formation that is both a record of the emergence of Asian American ‘culture’ within a U.S. national and an international context and a comprehension of the dialectical critique generated by that emergence. (6)
In this book, I have argued that the contradictions of the political and economic spheres are manifested in Asian American cultural production as a material site of struggle, and Asian American critique is the dialectical politicization of these contradictions. (156)
In this book, I have wished to situate racialized immigrant formation within the context of national state institutions and the international forces of global economy as one site of a contemporary ‘state of emergency.’ (174)
I have hoped to draw attention to how these conditions have dialectically produced the emergence of specific oppositional racial and cultural groupings and, perhaps more important, to how they give rise to the emergence of new subjects whose horizons of definition open up different possibilities for political practice and coalition. (175)
Lisa Lowe. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Identity and the Subject:
How is the fluidity of identity and the subject and yet the necessity for fixed notions of the self addressed in Immigrant Acts? What does Lowe’s discussions of the subject and identity yield towards an understanding of the emergence of contemporary individuals, communities, and nations as they are mutually articulated? How have these emergent entities and the conditions of their existence marked changes in the global, national, and local scales? What, if any, are the possibilities for identity and subjectivity as offered by Lowe (particularly in conversation with José Muñoz’s work on disidentification).
How does Lowe’s acknowledgment of the utility of particular moments or forms of nationalisms complicate these understandings of subjectivity and identity? Consider Lowe’s formulations of this dynamic in tandem with Chela Sandoval’s work on differential consciousness. If nationalisms are understood as one of many registers within a repertoire of oppositional politics or methodologies how do we then engage in scholarship that attenuates to these shifting notions of the self and the collective?
Asian American:
Taking off from these models of the subject and identity, how does Lowe complicate understandings of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans? How do her definitions of this grouping speak to and complicate projects of a post-nationalist American Studies?
Hybridity and Heterogeneity:
Consider Lowe’s deployment of difference in thinking through and arguing for the utility of key terms, specifically her ideas on heterogeneous groupings, hybrid cultural forms, and multiple subject position(ing)s. How does Lowe’s work here enable us toward effectively analyzing and studying objects and subjects that always evade containment in discrete categories of knowledge? How does Lowe’s analysis interact with Gilroy’s concepts of the Black Atlantic, counterculture, and double consciousness?
Culture:
Focusing on the treatment of law, citizenship, and culture as sites of contradiction (often in convergence or a state of overdetermination), how does Lowe’s interrogation of the nation-state gesture towards a theory of the Americas and a reconceptualization of forms of belonging? What does the orientation of Immigrant Acts within the lexicons of historical materialism, feminism, and racial formation offer in terms of methodology?
Literature and History:
How does Lowe’s analysis of cultural texts and Western epistemologies relate with Walter Mignolo’s interrogation of writing, literature, language and colonialism?
Identity and the Subject
I argue that the subject that emerges out of Asian American cultural forms is one in excess of and in contradiction with the subjectivities proposed by national modern and postmodern modes of aesthetic representation. (32)
Rather than considering ‘Asian American identity’ as a fixed, established ‘given,’ perhaps we can consider instead ‘Asian American cultural practices’ that produce identity; the processes that produce such identity are never complete and are always constituted in relation to historical and material differences. (64)
To the contrary, these differences [class and gender alongside race] represent greater opportunity to affiliate with other groups whose cohesions may be based on other valences of oppression rather than ‘identity.’ (74)
Interventions exist that refuse the static or binary conceptions of culture, replacing notions of ‘identity’ with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from culture ‘essence’ to material hybridity. (75)
In this sense, I argue for the Asian American necessity to organize, resist, and theorize as Asian Americans, but at the same time, I inscribe this necessity within a discussion of the risks of a cultural politics that relies on the construction of sameness and the exclusion of differences. (68)
The concept of ‘strategic essentialism’ suggests that it is possible to utilize specific signifiers of racialized ethnic identity, such as ‘Asian American,’ for the purpose of contesting and disrupting the discourses that exclude Asian Americans, while simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of ‘Asian American’ so as to insure that such essentialisms will not be reproduced and proliferated by the very apparatuses we seek to disempower. (82)
Hence, Asian American cultural nationalism that emerged in opposition to racial exclusion continues to address these modern institutions within transnational capitalism. Yet at the same time, the current global restructuring… constitutes a shift in the mode of production that now necessitates alternative forms of cultural practice that integrate yet move beyond those of cultural nationalism. (171)
This excess and differential places Asian American and other racialized women in critical, and dialectical, relationships to the subjects of feminism, Marxism, and ethnic nationalisms. In this sense, Asian immigrant and Asian American women may be said to constitute the dialectical sublation of these earlier models of political subjectivity. (163-4)
Singular narratives of consciousness aim at developing a subject position from which totalization becomes possible, whereas the cultural productions of racialized women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject. (164-5)
Rather than dictating that subjects be constituted through identification with the liberal citizen-formation of American national culture, Asian American cultural forms offer the possibility of subjects and practices constituted through dialectics of difference and disidentification. Rather than vertical determination by the state, these forms are suggestive of horizontal relations between subjects across national boundaries. (167)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, on that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominatnt ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this ‘working on and against’ is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 11. [in this excerpt he is quoting Michel Pêcheux, Language, Semantics and Ideology. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982.]
I think of this activity of consciousness as the ‘differential,’ insofar as it enables movement ‘between and among’ ideological positionings (the equal-rights, revolutionary, supremacist, and separatist modes of oppositional consciousness) considered as variable, in order to disclose the distinctions among them. In this sense, the differential mode of consciousness functions like the clutch of an automobile, the mechanism that permits the driver to select, engage, and disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power… When enacted in dialectical relation to one another and not as separated ideologies, each oppositional mode of consciousness, each ideology-praxis, is transformed into tactical weaponry for intervening in shifting currents of power.
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 58.
Asian American
What is referred to as ‘Asian America’ is clearly a heterogeneous entity. (65)
‘Decolonization,’ then, is the social formation that encompasses a multileveled and multicentered assault on those specific forms of colonial rule; that project of decolonization is carried forth in the ‘postcolonial’ site by may equally be deployed by immigrant and diasporic populations… In other words, if we understand ‘decolonization’ as an ongoing disruption of the colonial mode of production, then Asian American writing performs that displacement from a social formation marked by the uneven and unsynthetic encounters of colonial, neocolonial, and mass and elite indigenous cultures that characterize decolonization. (108)
Hybridity and Heterogeneity
By ‘heterogeneity,’ I mean to indicate the existence of differences and differential relationships within a bounded category… By ‘hybridity,’ I refer to the formation of cultural objects and practices that are produced by the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations… We might understand ‘multiplicity’ as designating the ways in which subjects located within social relations are determined by several different axes of power… (67)
The materialist argument for heterogeneity seeks to challenge the conception of difference as exclusively structure by a binary opposition between two terms, by proposing instead another notion of ‘difference’ that takes seriously the historically produced conditions of heterogeneity, multiplicity, and nonequivalence. (72)
The materialist concept of hybridity conveys that the histories of forced labor migrations, racial segregation, economic displacement and internment are left in the material traces of ‘hybrid’ cultural identities… Hybridization is not the ‘free’ oscillation between or among chosen identities. It is the uneven process through which immigrant communities encounter the violences of the U.S. state, and the capital imperatives served by the United States and by the Asian states from which they come, and the process through which they survive those violences by living, inventing, and reproducing different cultural alternatives. (82)
By ‘hybridity,’ I do not mean simply cultural or linguistic mixing or ‘ambivalence’ but rather a material form that expresses the sedimented traces of a complex history of violence, invasion, exploitation, deracination, and imposed rule by different colonial and neocolonial powers. (210 n28)
Culture
Culture is the terrain through which the individual speaks as a member of the contemporary national collectivity, but culture is also a mediation of history, the site through which the past returns and is remembered, however fragmented, imperfect, or disavowed. (x)
It is through the terrain of national culture that the individual subject is politically formed as the American citizen. (2)
Culture is the medium of the present – the imagined equivalences and identifications through which the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective – but it is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, as fragments, shocks, and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise in culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently. (2-3)
The racialization of Asian Americans in relation to the state locates Asian American culture as a site for the emergence of another kind of political subject, one who has a historically ‘alien-ated’ relation to the category of citizenship. (12)
Culture is the material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure. (22)
Because culture is the contemporary repository of memory, of history, it is through culture, rather than government, that alternative forms of subjectivity, collectivity, and public life are imagined. (22)
Culture in and for the modern state is not in itself ‘political,’ but the contradictions through which immigration brings national institutions into crisis produces immigrant cultures as oppositional and contestatory, and these contradictions critically politicized in cultural forms and practices can be utilized in the formation of alternative social practices. (172)
-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultanesouly a social reality and a legal impossibility – a subject barred from citizenship and without rights… The illegal alien is thus an ‘impossible subject,’ a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved.
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton University Press, 2004. 4.
Literature and History
In other words, the cultural institution of the novel legitimates particular forms and subjects of history and subjugates or erases others… In both England and the United States, the novel as a form of print culture has constituted a privileged site for the unification of the citizen with the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, while the national literary canon functioned to unify aesthetic culture as a domain in which material differences and localities were resolved and reconciled. (98)
In This Book…
In this book, I have wished to make connections between Asian American cultural studies and the current range of ethnic cultural studies projects, between discussions of race in the United States and Marxist theories, and between literary study and feminist analyses of racialized women’s work. I am not positing an orthodoxy to be followed but connecting these discussions in order to open a space in which others, perhaps finding worthy gaps, errors, or elisions, will make use of and build on the work only begun here. (x)
Thus, the immigration of Asians to the United States has been the locus of meanings that are simultaneously legal, political, economic, cultural, and aesthetic. In this book I attempt to situate these meanings and to gather them into a coherent, contemporary formation that is both a record of the emergence of Asian American ‘culture’ within a U.S. national and an international context and a comprehension of the dialectical critique generated by that emergence. (6)
In this book, I have argued that the contradictions of the political and economic spheres are manifested in Asian American cultural production as a material site of struggle, and Asian American critique is the dialectical politicization of these contradictions. (156)
In this book, I have wished to situate racialized immigrant formation within the context of national state institutions and the international forces of global economy as one site of a contemporary ‘state of emergency.’ (174)
I have hoped to draw attention to how these conditions have dialectically produced the emergence of specific oppositional racial and cultural groupings and, perhaps more important, to how they give rise to the emergence of new subjects whose horizons of definition open up different possibilities for political practice and coalition. (175)
Bombay London New York (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Kumar, Amitava. Bombay London New York. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
I am reading this book and thinking, shit.
How will I not natively inform? How can I not speak excitedly about what I recognize? But then, part of my joy of recognition, implicated by the burrs of writing in this netting, Bombay….London…New York, is about some sort of memory and attachment to what I never had, but things my parents talk about things like their obsession with pooping and farting but never sex. Or men on the street saying, “are, dekho, dekho, red rojjjj” to pretty women and how my aunt taught me to walk on the street with my elbows out so men wouldn’t accidently on purpose bump into me or
I will have been to all three of those places, Bombay London New York, before this year is out. I can’t wait to get back to London and I am going back to New York next weekend. But there is something of a fear in me about my return, after 8 years. There is something there about fathers just like this book was a little bit about fathers, good and bad. And something about violence and the pleasure in the mundane…I have no idea what this means, but it seemed important to get off my chest.
Here are some things I’ll show you…
The Photographs
The Title and maping
The Return
Literature and Reading
“This book is about recent Indian fiction in English, but it is also, I have found out, about how and why we read.” (1)
“Libraries are haunted by the marketplace – but, it can be hoped, the opposite is true as well. At the same time, there is the enormous tussle of memory and desire that cannot all be neatly or fully regulated by the market or, for that matter the rulers of nations and corporations. Writers bear witness to this unenven battle too: it is part of the reality of the writer’s work of struggling every day with the worldliness of the word. Writers are caught in the contradictory tasks of building imaginary worlds that are removed from the everyday life and, at the same time, establishing how the imagination is not detached from the quotidian world and wery much a vital part of it. To realize the truth of this condition is to know that books not only offer refuge from the world, they also return you to it. When I had understood this truth, I had stopped worshipping paper and became a reader.” (15)
“The old order is gone, the new one not yet born, and the human lives are caught in the distortions of the interregnum. And yet, it is in that troubled space that literature and reading plays a role – not by staging a rescue but more simply and movingly, by holding to the reader a strange and surprising mirror of recognition.” (64)
“I have tried to understand how Indian writing has populated the literary landscape familiar to Western readers with people who look and speak differently and who have histories in another part of the world.” (232)
Liberalism and Modernity
Pg 71
“Art cannot exist in a vacuum. For books to be written, and for them to be read, we need schools. We need an enlightened state.” (119)
pg 162
pg 217 – bollywood and backwardness
Shame and Failure
“I tell stories about Patna because they are part of my shame at having come from nowhere. And also my nostalgia because Patna is all I ever had.” (93)
pg 159
Naipal’s father
Translation
“Any translation is also an act of betrayal, a sharing of intimacy with another tongue.” (179)
Nostalgia and Memory
“The movement I am most conscious of now is the movement of memory, shutting between places. One place is home, the other is the world.” (9)
“I am not distrustful of my nostalgia – I think nostalgia can be a weapon in a cultural milieu where you are expected to feel only shame for what you have left behind – but I do want to know what it means to remember.” (30)
“This book has been written with the conviction that all the cities mention on our tickets actually hide secrets of other places, small towns and villages, and of people who are perpetually being lost to history. The story of that loss is the true subject here even if I do not have any illusions of out ever having enjoyed a wholeness or a move-set perfection that is now forever lost. Bombay-London-New York records a movement away from any pure, mythical orgin: what it takes even as its starting point is a place that is populated by a mass of shared memories and patterns of forgetting.” (32)
“The world was rich with experience. This knowledge had freed me. It also made me remember the unremarked intimacies of my childhood, its joys and sorrows. In what I wrote and read, I began to return to Patna. The habit has grown in my self-imposed exile from Patna: I still write about it as if I knew very little else.” (93)
Abjectivity – Poop
“I am not from a culture, although that seems the wrong word here for any number of reasons, where you rubbed paper on your arse.” (1)
“I disliked Patna when I lived there as a boy, but what I remember most clearly is how much I disliked myself.” (82)
“Life seemed caught in an endless cycle that promised cheap excitement but inevitably led to frustration.” (86)
“[what] represents the abstract and somewhat elusive quality of Indianess…it is the quality of the burlesque: the staidness of colonial English tickled, harassed, abused, and caressed by proper as well as improper Indians: this is the world where memories, with a shift in the accent, get easily transmuted into mammaries…it is the realization that Indians, with all the ambiquity that accompanies the following term, get fucked in English.” (158)
“This is the postcolonial Gandhi. And I like him because – I don’t know how to say this without irony – nothing seems foreign to his body.” (210)
hybridity and others and change and reproduction
pg 165 – 185 - lahiri
pg 197 – workers rights
pg 201 – adf
“Against generalities, we need individual stories.” (223)
“It is the not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.” (225)
“How far removed is the pathos of the stowaway from the rage of the hijacker?” (234)
“All the others who succeeded in this country did so only by changing. They became someone else. Shashtriji, for better or for worse, never changed.” (247)
Kumar, Amitava. Bombay London New York. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
I am reading this book and thinking, shit.
How will I not natively inform? How can I not speak excitedly about what I recognize? But then, part of my joy of recognition, implicated by the burrs of writing in this netting, Bombay….London…New York, is about some sort of memory and attachment to what I never had, but things my parents talk about things like their obsession with pooping and farting but never sex. Or men on the street saying, “are, dekho, dekho, red rojjjj” to pretty women and how my aunt taught me to walk on the street with my elbows out so men wouldn’t accidently on purpose bump into me or
I will have been to all three of those places, Bombay London New York, before this year is out. I can’t wait to get back to London and I am going back to New York next weekend. But there is something of a fear in me about my return, after 8 years. There is something there about fathers just like this book was a little bit about fathers, good and bad. And something about violence and the pleasure in the mundane…I have no idea what this means, but it seemed important to get off my chest.
Here are some things I’ll show you…
The Photographs
The Title and maping
The Return
Literature and Reading
“This book is about recent Indian fiction in English, but it is also, I have found out, about how and why we read.” (1)
“Libraries are haunted by the marketplace – but, it can be hoped, the opposite is true as well. At the same time, there is the enormous tussle of memory and desire that cannot all be neatly or fully regulated by the market or, for that matter the rulers of nations and corporations. Writers bear witness to this unenven battle too: it is part of the reality of the writer’s work of struggling every day with the worldliness of the word. Writers are caught in the contradictory tasks of building imaginary worlds that are removed from the everyday life and, at the same time, establishing how the imagination is not detached from the quotidian world and wery much a vital part of it. To realize the truth of this condition is to know that books not only offer refuge from the world, they also return you to it. When I had understood this truth, I had stopped worshipping paper and became a reader.” (15)
“The old order is gone, the new one not yet born, and the human lives are caught in the distortions of the interregnum. And yet, it is in that troubled space that literature and reading plays a role – not by staging a rescue but more simply and movingly, by holding to the reader a strange and surprising mirror of recognition.” (64)
“I have tried to understand how Indian writing has populated the literary landscape familiar to Western readers with people who look and speak differently and who have histories in another part of the world.” (232)
Liberalism and Modernity
Pg 71
“Art cannot exist in a vacuum. For books to be written, and for them to be read, we need schools. We need an enlightened state.” (119)
pg 162
pg 217 – bollywood and backwardness
Shame and Failure
“I tell stories about Patna because they are part of my shame at having come from nowhere. And also my nostalgia because Patna is all I ever had.” (93)
pg 159
Naipal’s father
Translation
“Any translation is also an act of betrayal, a sharing of intimacy with another tongue.” (179)
Nostalgia and Memory
“The movement I am most conscious of now is the movement of memory, shutting between places. One place is home, the other is the world.” (9)
“I am not distrustful of my nostalgia – I think nostalgia can be a weapon in a cultural milieu where you are expected to feel only shame for what you have left behind – but I do want to know what it means to remember.” (30)
“This book has been written with the conviction that all the cities mention on our tickets actually hide secrets of other places, small towns and villages, and of people who are perpetually being lost to history. The story of that loss is the true subject here even if I do not have any illusions of out ever having enjoyed a wholeness or a move-set perfection that is now forever lost. Bombay-London-New York records a movement away from any pure, mythical orgin: what it takes even as its starting point is a place that is populated by a mass of shared memories and patterns of forgetting.” (32)
“The world was rich with experience. This knowledge had freed me. It also made me remember the unremarked intimacies of my childhood, its joys and sorrows. In what I wrote and read, I began to return to Patna. The habit has grown in my self-imposed exile from Patna: I still write about it as if I knew very little else.” (93)
Abjectivity – Poop
“I am not from a culture, although that seems the wrong word here for any number of reasons, where you rubbed paper on your arse.” (1)
“I disliked Patna when I lived there as a boy, but what I remember most clearly is how much I disliked myself.” (82)
“Life seemed caught in an endless cycle that promised cheap excitement but inevitably led to frustration.” (86)
“[what] represents the abstract and somewhat elusive quality of Indianess…it is the quality of the burlesque: the staidness of colonial English tickled, harassed, abused, and caressed by proper as well as improper Indians: this is the world where memories, with a shift in the accent, get easily transmuted into mammaries…it is the realization that Indians, with all the ambiquity that accompanies the following term, get fucked in English.” (158)
“This is the postcolonial Gandhi. And I like him because – I don’t know how to say this without irony – nothing seems foreign to his body.” (210)
hybridity and others and change and reproduction
pg 165 – 185 - lahiri
pg 197 – workers rights
pg 201 – adf
“Against generalities, we need individual stories.” (223)
“It is the not the immigrant but the ones who stay behind who are the true unvanquished.” (225)
“How far removed is the pathos of the stowaway from the rage of the hijacker?” (234)
“All the others who succeeded in this country did so only by changing. They became someone else. Shashtriji, for better or for worse, never changed.” (247)
4.11.2006
Image Music Text (Narrative)
Title
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Let's do this one by essay, also. It is weird because some of this stuff fits better in the Film and Media Studies field than Narrative, but let's carry on.
The Photographic Message: This essay looks at the way that the photograph (in the newspaper) is denoted and connoted. "The press photograph is a message...formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission, and a point of reception."(15) The photograph, unlike other arts, is a message without a code - it denotes. It gives rise to connotation - "a coding of the photographic analogue." (20) However, we learn over the course of the essay that the purely denotive photograph is impossible. "If such a denotation [that is, pure denotation] exists, it is perhaps not at the level of what ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the objective, but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely traumatic images." (30) "Photographic connotation, like every well structered signification, is an institutional activity; in relation to society overall, its function is to integrate man, to reassure him. Every code is at once arbitrary and rational, recourse to a code is thus always an opportunity for a man to prove himself, to test himself through a reason and a liberty." (31)
Rhetoric of the Image: This essay deals with similar things as the previous one does. He looks at how meaning gets into the advertising image. "all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signified, the reader able to choose some and ignore others."(39) "the image is penetrated through and through by a system of meaning, in exactly the same way as man is articulated to the very depths of his being in distinct languages. The language of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted..., it is also the totality of uterances received: the language must include the 'suprises' of meaning."(47) "The rhetoric of the image...is specific to the extent that it is subject to the physical constraints of vision...but general to the extent that the 'figures' are never more than formal relations of elements." (48)
The Third Meaning: Here Barthes looks at some stills from Eisenstein's films. It seems very Camera Lucida, punctum before the punctum. Beyond information and symbol, Barthes gets something else from the image - a third meaning "evident, errative, obstinate." (53) It is not obvious meaning, it is obtuse meaning - "the thrid meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely." (55) "The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty naming it...what the obtuse disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism)."(61) "It is clear that the obstuse meaning is the epitome of a counter narrative; disseminated, reversable, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines...a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms...-an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'"(63) The third meaning is integral to film, it structures film differently without subverting the story (64) "The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins." (65)
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein: Here Barthes looks at the tableau in the work of these three "authors."
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative: Ok, here we go. Narratives are infinite and everywhere - does this mean that they are so diffuse as to have no meaning? "Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself." (79) No, we can do a structural analysis of them. We can do this by looking at narrative as if a sentence, with grammar, units and rules. So there are levels to narrative. The first is that of the function: "the essence of a function, is so to speak, the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later, either on the same lever or elsewhere, on another level."(89) There are two functional units - the distributional function and the integrational index. "function involve metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of doing, the latter to a functionality of being." (93) Functions can be further divided into cardinal (nuclei) functions (the important stuff) and catalysers (the not so important, complementary stuff). Indices themselves refer to the character of something in the narrative where as its subgroup, informants, simply identify, they are data, immediate - indices need deciphering. But what makes narrative narrative is confusion in temporality : "narrative institutes a confusion between consecution and consequence, temporality and logic."(98) A sequence is a bunch of nuclei bound together. "Sequnces move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued."(103) The next level is the level of actions, what we might think of as characters - but not characters understood psychologically, but rather on what they do (hence actants, level of actions). Finally, there is the level of narrative (which helps us makes sense of the level of actions) This brings confusion in terms of who is telling the story (point of view and all that stuff) Rather than getting caught up in that, Barthes asserts that there are only two kinds of narration, personal and apersonal, but they get all mixed together (even within the sentence). "The narrational level is thus occupied by the signs of narrativity, the set of operators which reintegrate functions and actions in the narrative communication articulated on its donor and addressee." (114) "the ultimate form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents and its strictly narrative forms...Narration can only receive its meaning from the wolrd which makes use of it: beyond the narrational level begins the world." (115) "'What takes place' in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; 'what happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming." (124)
The Stuggle with the Angel: A structural analysis of a passage from the book of Genesis. "Let me indicate in conclusion, however, that what interests me most in this famous passage is not the 'folkloristic' model but the abrasive frictions, the breaks, the discontinuities of readability, the juxtaposition of narrative entities which to some extent run free from an explicit logical articulation. One is dealing here...with a sort of metonymic montage: the themes...are combined, not 'developed'." (140)
Death of the Author: "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (142) The author is replaced by the modern scriptor, simultaneous to the text. "We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." (148)
Muscia Practica: About the change in musical performance, discusses Beethoven. "In short, there was first the actor of music, then the interpreter (the grand Romantic voice), then finally the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing." (150)
From Work to Text: Chronicles the move from Work to Text. "The work is a fragment of sustance, occupying a part of the space of books..., the Text is a methodological field."(156) The Text is experienced only in the activity of production. The Text is only approacted "in reaction to the sign...THe text...practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action." (158) The text is plural. The text is a network.The text requires the reader's collaboration. The text is approached through pleasure. "The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing."(164)
Change the Object Itself: A follow up, reflections on Mythologies.
Lesson in Writing: An essay on Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre and how it differes from the Western binaristic mode of thinking. "As in the modern text, the stressing of codes, references, discontinuous observations, anthological gestures, mutliplies the written line, and this not by virtue of some metaphysical appeal but by the play of a combinatory set which opens in the entire space of the theatre: what is started by the one is continued by the other, unendingly." (178)
The Grain of the Voice: On music and the texture of the voice in it. "The grain is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance."(182) "The 'grain' of the voice is not - or is not merely - its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message)."(185) "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as its sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs."(188)
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers: "Within the very limits of the teaching space as given, the need is to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating...; a floating which would not detroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the Law. The necessities of promotion, professional obligations..., imperatives of knowledge, prestige of method, ideological criticism - everything is there, but floating." (215)
Other Thoughts
"Thus is the body expressly introduced into the idea of the tableau, but it is the whole body that is so introduced - the organs, grouped together and as though held in cohesion by the magnetic power of the segmentation, function in the name of a transcendence, that of the figure, which receives the full fetishistic load and becomes the sublime sustitute of meaning: it is this meaning that is fetishized." (72)
"There is a donor of the narrative and a receiver of the narrative." (109)
"The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that signifiance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance." (183)
Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Let's do this one by essay, also. It is weird because some of this stuff fits better in the Film and Media Studies field than Narrative, but let's carry on.
The Photographic Message: This essay looks at the way that the photograph (in the newspaper) is denoted and connoted. "The press photograph is a message...formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission, and a point of reception."(15) The photograph, unlike other arts, is a message without a code - it denotes. It gives rise to connotation - "a coding of the photographic analogue." (20) However, we learn over the course of the essay that the purely denotive photograph is impossible. "If such a denotation [that is, pure denotation] exists, it is perhaps not at the level of what ordinary language calls the insignificant, the neutral, the objective, but, on the contrary, at the level of absolutely traumatic images." (30) "Photographic connotation, like every well structered signification, is an institutional activity; in relation to society overall, its function is to integrate man, to reassure him. Every code is at once arbitrary and rational, recourse to a code is thus always an opportunity for a man to prove himself, to test himself through a reason and a liberty." (31)
Rhetoric of the Image: This essay deals with similar things as the previous one does. He looks at how meaning gets into the advertising image. "all images are polysemous; they imply, underlying their signifiers, a 'floating chain' of signified, the reader able to choose some and ignore others."(39) "the image is penetrated through and through by a system of meaning, in exactly the same way as man is articulated to the very depths of his being in distinct languages. The language of the image is not merely the totality of utterances emitted..., it is also the totality of uterances received: the language must include the 'suprises' of meaning."(47) "The rhetoric of the image...is specific to the extent that it is subject to the physical constraints of vision...but general to the extent that the 'figures' are never more than formal relations of elements." (48)
The Third Meaning: Here Barthes looks at some stills from Eisenstein's films. It seems very Camera Lucida, punctum before the punctum. Beyond information and symbol, Barthes gets something else from the image - a third meaning "evident, errative, obstinate." (53) It is not obvious meaning, it is obtuse meaning - "the thrid meaning also seems to me greater than the pure, upright, secant, legal perpendicular of the narrative, it seems to open the field of meaning totally, that is infinitely." (55) "The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty naming it...what the obtuse disturbs, sterilizes, is metalanguage (criticism)."(61) "It is clear that the obstuse meaning is the epitome of a counter narrative; disseminated, reversable, set to its own temporality, it inevitably determines...a quite different analytical segmentation to that in shots, sequences, and syntagms...-an extraordinary segmentation: counter-logical and yet 'true.'"(63) The third meaning is integral to film, it structures film differently without subverting the story (64) "The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins." (65)
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein: Here Barthes looks at the tableau in the work of these three "authors."
Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative: Ok, here we go. Narratives are infinite and everywhere - does this mean that they are so diffuse as to have no meaning? "Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself." (79) No, we can do a structural analysis of them. We can do this by looking at narrative as if a sentence, with grammar, units and rules. So there are levels to narrative. The first is that of the function: "the essence of a function, is so to speak, the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition later, either on the same lever or elsewhere, on another level."(89) There are two functional units - the distributional function and the integrational index. "function involve metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former correspond to a functionality of doing, the latter to a functionality of being." (93) Functions can be further divided into cardinal (nuclei) functions (the important stuff) and catalysers (the not so important, complementary stuff). Indices themselves refer to the character of something in the narrative where as its subgroup, informants, simply identify, they are data, immediate - indices need deciphering. But what makes narrative narrative is confusion in temporality : "narrative institutes a confusion between consecution and consequence, temporality and logic."(98) A sequence is a bunch of nuclei bound together. "Sequnces move in counterpoint; functionally, the structure of narrative is fugued."(103) The next level is the level of actions, what we might think of as characters - but not characters understood psychologically, but rather on what they do (hence actants, level of actions). Finally, there is the level of narrative (which helps us makes sense of the level of actions) This brings confusion in terms of who is telling the story (point of view and all that stuff) Rather than getting caught up in that, Barthes asserts that there are only two kinds of narration, personal and apersonal, but they get all mixed together (even within the sentence). "The narrational level is thus occupied by the signs of narrativity, the set of operators which reintegrate functions and actions in the narrative communication articulated on its donor and addressee." (114) "the ultimate form of the narrative, as narrative, transcends its contents and its strictly narrative forms...Narration can only receive its meaning from the wolrd which makes use of it: beyond the narrational level begins the world." (115) "'What takes place' in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; 'what happens' is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming." (124)
The Stuggle with the Angel: A structural analysis of a passage from the book of Genesis. "Let me indicate in conclusion, however, that what interests me most in this famous passage is not the 'folkloristic' model but the abrasive frictions, the breaks, the discontinuities of readability, the juxtaposition of narrative entities which to some extent run free from an explicit logical articulation. One is dealing here...with a sort of metonymic montage: the themes...are combined, not 'developed'." (140)
Death of the Author: "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (142) The author is replaced by the modern scriptor, simultaneous to the text. "We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." (148)
Muscia Practica: About the change in musical performance, discusses Beethoven. "In short, there was first the actor of music, then the interpreter (the grand Romantic voice), then finally the technician, who relieves the listener of all activity, even by procuration, and abolishes in the sphere of music the very notion of doing." (150)
From Work to Text: Chronicles the move from Work to Text. "The work is a fragment of sustance, occupying a part of the space of books..., the Text is a methodological field."(156) The Text is experienced only in the activity of production. The Text is only approacted "in reaction to the sign...THe text...practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action." (158) The text is plural. The text is a network.The text requires the reader's collaboration. The text is approached through pleasure. "The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing."(164)
Change the Object Itself: A follow up, reflections on Mythologies.
Lesson in Writing: An essay on Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre and how it differes from the Western binaristic mode of thinking. "As in the modern text, the stressing of codes, references, discontinuous observations, anthological gestures, mutliplies the written line, and this not by virtue of some metaphysical appeal but by the play of a combinatory set which opens in the entire space of the theatre: what is started by the one is continued by the other, unendingly." (178)
The Grain of the Voice: On music and the texture of the voice in it. "The grain is that: the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue; perhaps the letter, almost certainly signifiance."(182) "The 'grain' of the voice is not - or is not merely - its timbre; the signifiance it opens cannot better be defined, indeed, than by the very friction between the music and something else, which something else is the particular language (and nowise the message)."(185) "The 'grain' is the body in the voice as its sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs."(188)
Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers: "Within the very limits of the teaching space as given, the need is to work at patiently tracing out a pure form, that of a floating...; a floating which would not detroy anything but would be content simply to disorientate the Law. The necessities of promotion, professional obligations..., imperatives of knowledge, prestige of method, ideological criticism - everything is there, but floating." (215)
Other Thoughts
"Thus is the body expressly introduced into the idea of the tableau, but it is the whole body that is so introduced - the organs, grouped together and as though held in cohesion by the magnetic power of the segmentation, function in the name of a transcendence, that of the figure, which receives the full fetishistic load and becomes the sublime sustitute of meaning: it is this meaning that is fetishized." (72)
"There is a donor of the narrative and a receiver of the narrative." (109)
"The lung, a stupid organ (lights for cats!), swells but gets no erection; it is in the throat, place where the phonic metal hardens and is segmented, in the mask that signifiance explodes, bringing not the soul but jouissance." (183)
4.10.2006
Michelet (Narrative)
Title
Barthes, Roland. Michelet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Barthes states that his goal in this totally weird book (way weirder than Electric Animal, by the way) is to "restore this man [Michelet] to his coherence...I have merely sought to describe a unity, not to explore its roots in history or in biography." (3) The way Barthes does this is by elaborating the themes of Michelet's writings - "In Michelet's work, there is a critical reality independent of the idea, of the influence, and of the image: it is the theme." (201) More on these themes later - and interdicts his own discussion with examples from Michelet's writing. It's all very much about materials, metaphors, eating and women. It is weird, I told you. Michelet suffered from migraines, really bad migraines, and this is important in understanding his work - he is a historian who is always dying. "Michelet afflicts himself with the most terrible historical diseases, he takes them on himself, he dies of History the way one dies - or rather the way one does not die - of love...At the same time this death survived and reapeated acts as a nutriment, for it is this death which constitutes Michelet as a historian, makes him into a pontiff who absorbs, sacrifices, bears witness, fulfills, glorifies."(19) Michelet eats history through the vertical style of the tableau: " Contrary to narrative, which reduces the historian's body to the rank of an object, the tableau (the overview) placed Michelet virtually in God's position." (22) The tableau allows for a "series of brief, frequent plunges...Michelet's [sentence] swallows itself - destroys itself."(24) Prose is important to Michelet (not poetry) as it is the "product of a fusion and not a collection." (28) Prose bring unity, not union, which is inferior since to unity which doesn't just bring constiutive parts together, but detroys them in making a "zone of absence, in which everything is once again possible, presented in the incubation of cordial warmth: this is freedom." (ibid) Michelet describes process - he is influenced by Lamark, as opposed to Darwin. He despises suspension, inaction, history is action. Michelet opposes Grace and Justice. Grace is feminine, it is about chance (linked to gambling) and phatasm. The Novel is of grace and deflects from History. History is linked with death: "The historian is not at all a 'reader' of the past, and if he reorganizes History, it is not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the level of each carnal death...The historian is an Oedipus (he retrospectively solves human enigmas)...The historian is precisely the magus who receives from the dead their actions, their sufferings, their sacrifices, and gives them a place in History's universal memory."(82) Michelet makes judgements on the body as a humor, immediately. Blood is really important to Michelet: "blood is not at all a sealed biological element, strictly belonging to this or that person who possesses his blood as he might possess eyes or legs. It is a cosmic element, a unique and homogenous substance which traverses all bodies, without losing, in this accidental individuation, anything of its universality. Itself a transformation of the earth (of bread and of the fruits that we eat [at least in the case of the exalted Frenchman]), it has the immensity of an element."(128) Blood is also really important as menstruation as the place of women in/for history for Michelet: "The circular flux is the very archetype of a beneficient fixity which can finally unite in itself movement and identity. Thus, Woman begins where History ends. History knows only a linear, two-phase dialectic, it is Grace or Justice, narcosis or combat, and its only movement is that of a kind of savage and jerky fecundation...Which means that Historic Time, straight as a wire, but thereby fugitive, irreplacable, is set in opposition to the Circular Time of stars, seas, and women, the time of rest and eternity." (149) Ok, so riffing of this gender stuff (see the note in Other Thoughts) Michelet believes the People to be also outside of History as Woman is: "the People is not a collection of determined classes, it is an element defined by its double sex, its power of incubation, i.e., ultimately, its potential of warmth." (186) The People is an element.Ok so I said I'd get back to theme. For Michelet, theme is iterative. "the theme resists History." (201) "The theme is in effect substantial, it brings into play an attitude of Michelet's with regard to certain qualities of matter: the historical object can always be reduced to the disgust, the attraction, or the bewildermint it produces."(202) The theme is a system. The theme is reducible. Finally, "it is not excessive to speak of a veritable hermenuetics of the Micheletist text. We cannot read Michelet in a linear fashion, we must restore to the text its strata and its network of themes: Michelet's discourse is a kind of cryptogram, we must make it into a grid, and this grid is the very structure of the work. It follows that no reading of Michelet is possible if it is not total: we must resolutely locate ourselves within the closure."(206)
Keywords
Dying, Theme, Tableau, Grace, Justice, History, Warmth
Other Thoughts
"the narrative is always conducted toward a display, an epiphany, and the tableau is never closed, its goal is an anxiety, the historian's reprise of a humbled incarnation." (23)
"For Michelet the historical mass is not a puzzle to reconstitute, it is a body to embrace. The historian exists only to recognize a warmth."(81)
"All history depends in the last instance upon the human body."(87)
"History is male, Syria is female. But in erotic terms, there is only a spectator and his spectacle; Michelet himself is no longer either man or woman, he is nothing but Gaze; his approach to woman compels him to have no specifically virile characteristic."(153)
Barthes, Roland. Michelet. New York: Hill and Wang, 1987.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Barthes states that his goal in this totally weird book (way weirder than Electric Animal, by the way) is to "restore this man [Michelet] to his coherence...I have merely sought to describe a unity, not to explore its roots in history or in biography." (3) The way Barthes does this is by elaborating the themes of Michelet's writings - "In Michelet's work, there is a critical reality independent of the idea, of the influence, and of the image: it is the theme." (201) More on these themes later - and interdicts his own discussion with examples from Michelet's writing. It's all very much about materials, metaphors, eating and women. It is weird, I told you. Michelet suffered from migraines, really bad migraines, and this is important in understanding his work - he is a historian who is always dying. "Michelet afflicts himself with the most terrible historical diseases, he takes them on himself, he dies of History the way one dies - or rather the way one does not die - of love...At the same time this death survived and reapeated acts as a nutriment, for it is this death which constitutes Michelet as a historian, makes him into a pontiff who absorbs, sacrifices, bears witness, fulfills, glorifies."(19) Michelet eats history through the vertical style of the tableau: " Contrary to narrative, which reduces the historian's body to the rank of an object, the tableau (the overview) placed Michelet virtually in God's position." (22) The tableau allows for a "series of brief, frequent plunges...Michelet's [sentence] swallows itself - destroys itself."(24) Prose is important to Michelet (not poetry) as it is the "product of a fusion and not a collection." (28) Prose bring unity, not union, which is inferior since to unity which doesn't just bring constiutive parts together, but detroys them in making a "zone of absence, in which everything is once again possible, presented in the incubation of cordial warmth: this is freedom." (ibid) Michelet describes process - he is influenced by Lamark, as opposed to Darwin. He despises suspension, inaction, history is action. Michelet opposes Grace and Justice. Grace is feminine, it is about chance (linked to gambling) and phatasm. The Novel is of grace and deflects from History. History is linked with death: "The historian is not at all a 'reader' of the past, and if he reorganizes History, it is not on the level of ideas, of forces, of causes or systems, but on the level of each carnal death...The historian is an Oedipus (he retrospectively solves human enigmas)...The historian is precisely the magus who receives from the dead their actions, their sufferings, their sacrifices, and gives them a place in History's universal memory."(82) Michelet makes judgements on the body as a humor, immediately. Blood is really important to Michelet: "blood is not at all a sealed biological element, strictly belonging to this or that person who possesses his blood as he might possess eyes or legs. It is a cosmic element, a unique and homogenous substance which traverses all bodies, without losing, in this accidental individuation, anything of its universality. Itself a transformation of the earth (of bread and of the fruits that we eat [at least in the case of the exalted Frenchman]), it has the immensity of an element."(128) Blood is also really important as menstruation as the place of women in/for history for Michelet: "The circular flux is the very archetype of a beneficient fixity which can finally unite in itself movement and identity. Thus, Woman begins where History ends. History knows only a linear, two-phase dialectic, it is Grace or Justice, narcosis or combat, and its only movement is that of a kind of savage and jerky fecundation...Which means that Historic Time, straight as a wire, but thereby fugitive, irreplacable, is set in opposition to the Circular Time of stars, seas, and women, the time of rest and eternity." (149) Ok, so riffing of this gender stuff (see the note in Other Thoughts) Michelet believes the People to be also outside of History as Woman is: "the People is not a collection of determined classes, it is an element defined by its double sex, its power of incubation, i.e., ultimately, its potential of warmth." (186) The People is an element.Ok so I said I'd get back to theme. For Michelet, theme is iterative. "the theme resists History." (201) "The theme is in effect substantial, it brings into play an attitude of Michelet's with regard to certain qualities of matter: the historical object can always be reduced to the disgust, the attraction, or the bewildermint it produces."(202) The theme is a system. The theme is reducible. Finally, "it is not excessive to speak of a veritable hermenuetics of the Micheletist text. We cannot read Michelet in a linear fashion, we must restore to the text its strata and its network of themes: Michelet's discourse is a kind of cryptogram, we must make it into a grid, and this grid is the very structure of the work. It follows that no reading of Michelet is possible if it is not total: we must resolutely locate ourselves within the closure."(206)
Keywords
Dying, Theme, Tableau, Grace, Justice, History, Warmth
Other Thoughts
"the narrative is always conducted toward a display, an epiphany, and the tableau is never closed, its goal is an anxiety, the historian's reprise of a humbled incarnation." (23)
"For Michelet the historical mass is not a puzzle to reconstitute, it is a body to embrace. The historian exists only to recognize a warmth."(81)
"All history depends in the last instance upon the human body."(87)
"History is male, Syria is female. But in erotic terms, there is only a spectator and his spectacle; Michelet himself is no longer either man or woman, he is nothing but Gaze; his approach to woman compels him to have no specifically virile characteristic."(153)
4.07.2006
Readings in Russian Poetics (Narrative)
Title
Matejka, Ladislav and Pomorska, Krystyna. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Readings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Let's do this one by Part and by essay, ok?
Part 1: This section of the book goes over the basic tenets of Russian Formalism, the reaction against Positivism and what is at stake in this method of literary analysis/history.
The Theory of the Formal Method: Boris M. Ejxenbaum: "The school of thought on the theory and history of literature known as the Formal method derived from efforts to secure autonomy and concreteness for the discipline of literary studies." (3) Formalism isn't a method, it is putting literature as the object of study first (as opposed to Positivism which allow for a sociologizing of literature) "Art had to be appreaciated at close range, and science had to be made concrete...Their [the Formalists] basic point was and still is, that the object of literary science, as literary science, ought to be the investigation of the specific properties of literary material, of the properties that distinguish such material from material of any other kind." (7) Formalism focused on the sounds of verse, that verse was not the same as prose, that rhythm is important (and meter secondary to rhythm). Further, in studying literature, we can say that form (as opposed to method) is important, but especially form as understood as device. "What is clearly at stake here is the endeavor to predicate a unity of device over a diversity of material."(16) We have to distinguish between plot and story. "Form conceived as content itself, incessantly changing shape in relation to previous models, naturally required our approaching it without abstract, hard-and-fast classificatory schemes, but instead our taking into account its concrete historical meaning and significance."(29) "What interests us is the very process of evolution, the very dynamics of literary forms in so far as it may be observed in the facts of the past. The central problem of literary history for us is the problem of evolution outside individual personality."(33)
On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson: On the problem of realism - realism for who? the author or the reader, who determines what is real and for whom is reality determined? "No one will call a 'key' a 'lock,' but this does not mean that the word 'lock' has only one meaning. We cannot equate with impugnity the various meanings of the word 'realism' just as we cannot, unless we wish to be called mad, equate a hair lock with a padlock. It is true that the various meanings of some words...are far more distinct from one another than they are in the case of the word 'realism,' whre we can imagine a set of facts about which we could simultaneously say, this is realism in the meaning C, B, A1, etc., of the word. Nevertheless, it is inexcusable to confuse C,B,A1, etc." (46)
Literature and Biography, Boris Tomasevskij: Do we need to know an author's biography to understand the text? Yes and no - if the biography is out there and created by the author himself, then yes. If we must create it ourselves, then no.
Literary Environment, Boris M. Ejxenbaum: "Literary-historical fact is a complex construct in which the fundamental role belongs to literariness - an element of such specificity that its study can be productive only in immanent-evolutionary terms."(62)
On Literary Evolution, Jurij Tynjanov: "the study of literary evolution is possible only in relation to literature as a system, interrelated with other systems and conditioned by them. Investigation must go from constructional function to literary function; from literary function to verbal function. It must clarify the problem of the evolutionary interaction of function and forms. The study of evolution must move from the literary system to the nearest correlated system, not the distant, even though major systems."(77)
Problems in the Study of Literature and Language, Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson: "Pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elements of the system." (79)
The Dominant, Roman Jakobson: "The shifting, the transformation, of the relationship between the individual artistic components became the central issue in Formalist investigations. This aspect of Formalist analysis in the field of poetic language had a pioneering significance for linguistic research in general, since it provided important impulses toward overcoming and bridging the gap between the diachronic historical method and the synchronic method of chronological cross section...The Formalist studies brought to light this simultaneous preservation of tradition and breaking away from tradition form the essence of every new work of art."(87)
As the rest of the parts are more like case studies of what is discussed above, I'll just give a few lines on each part as opposed to each essay.
Part II - This section looks at folklore and how it differs from literary production as it has its generatation and maintanence in collectivity, further, it has recognizable, but mutated (in a way) devices that get repeated in all its iterations (this is exemplary of synchrony that isn't static and evolution in literature).
Part III - This section is on verse, verse v. prose, poetry, rhythm and meter, etc.
Part IV - This section is on speech and dialogue, indirect and direct discourse, etc.
Part V - This section comprises three formalist readings of different genres/texts - Old Russian Literature, The Mystery, and the Short Story. The two latter essays are quite interesting in the ways that it ties in the stuff from section IV on dialogue and secondary voice that is present to mislead (the mystery) or to make a joke/satire (O Henry's satire).
Part VI - I will summarize one of the two essays in this section which offer a summary of the Formalist tradition and contemporary interpretations of it.
Russian Formalism in Retrospect, Krystyna Pomorska: "'Literariness,' or those features which make a work literature, was proclaimed the material for investigation. A concentration of 'literary fact' itself was carefully observed against the sociological fallacy of Positivism, with its offshoots of biography and psychologism." (274) "The decisive factor for the structure of a prose piece was found in its suject (plot), the element of construction, in contradistinction to the story itself, which was recognized as and equated with the subject matter."(275) Formalism rejected the genetic approach to literature, focusing on classification and typology. On Propp's work on folklore: "it incorporates the two operations to which a work of art is subjected: the synchronic (descriptive) and the diachronic (historical). Moreover, it shows that the synchronic procedure should precede the diachronic, and that synchrony is not static but dynamic."(276) "The theory of evolution, taken as changes of artistic forms according to their own immanent laws, largely refuted the question of 'progress' and showed the impossibility of applying it to art." (278)
Keywords
Literariness, Plot, Story, Synchronic, Diachronic, Evolutionary, Form, Device.
Matejka, Ladislav and Pomorska, Krystyna. Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Readings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.
Field
Narrative
Summary
Let's do this one by Part and by essay, ok?
Part 1: This section of the book goes over the basic tenets of Russian Formalism, the reaction against Positivism and what is at stake in this method of literary analysis/history.
The Theory of the Formal Method: Boris M. Ejxenbaum: "The school of thought on the theory and history of literature known as the Formal method derived from efforts to secure autonomy and concreteness for the discipline of literary studies." (3) Formalism isn't a method, it is putting literature as the object of study first (as opposed to Positivism which allow for a sociologizing of literature) "Art had to be appreaciated at close range, and science had to be made concrete...Their [the Formalists] basic point was and still is, that the object of literary science, as literary science, ought to be the investigation of the specific properties of literary material, of the properties that distinguish such material from material of any other kind." (7) Formalism focused on the sounds of verse, that verse was not the same as prose, that rhythm is important (and meter secondary to rhythm). Further, in studying literature, we can say that form (as opposed to method) is important, but especially form as understood as device. "What is clearly at stake here is the endeavor to predicate a unity of device over a diversity of material."(16) We have to distinguish between plot and story. "Form conceived as content itself, incessantly changing shape in relation to previous models, naturally required our approaching it without abstract, hard-and-fast classificatory schemes, but instead our taking into account its concrete historical meaning and significance."(29) "What interests us is the very process of evolution, the very dynamics of literary forms in so far as it may be observed in the facts of the past. The central problem of literary history for us is the problem of evolution outside individual personality."(33)
On Realism in Art, Roman Jakobson: On the problem of realism - realism for who? the author or the reader, who determines what is real and for whom is reality determined? "No one will call a 'key' a 'lock,' but this does not mean that the word 'lock' has only one meaning. We cannot equate with impugnity the various meanings of the word 'realism' just as we cannot, unless we wish to be called mad, equate a hair lock with a padlock. It is true that the various meanings of some words...are far more distinct from one another than they are in the case of the word 'realism,' whre we can imagine a set of facts about which we could simultaneously say, this is realism in the meaning C, B, A1, etc., of the word. Nevertheless, it is inexcusable to confuse C,B,A1, etc." (46)
Literature and Biography, Boris Tomasevskij: Do we need to know an author's biography to understand the text? Yes and no - if the biography is out there and created by the author himself, then yes. If we must create it ourselves, then no.
Literary Environment, Boris M. Ejxenbaum: "Literary-historical fact is a complex construct in which the fundamental role belongs to literariness - an element of such specificity that its study can be productive only in immanent-evolutionary terms."(62)
On Literary Evolution, Jurij Tynjanov: "the study of literary evolution is possible only in relation to literature as a system, interrelated with other systems and conditioned by them. Investigation must go from constructional function to literary function; from literary function to verbal function. It must clarify the problem of the evolutionary interaction of function and forms. The study of evolution must move from the literary system to the nearest correlated system, not the distant, even though major systems."(77)
Problems in the Study of Literature and Language, Jurij Tynjanov and Roman Jakobson: "Pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elements of the system." (79)
The Dominant, Roman Jakobson: "The shifting, the transformation, of the relationship between the individual artistic components became the central issue in Formalist investigations. This aspect of Formalist analysis in the field of poetic language had a pioneering significance for linguistic research in general, since it provided important impulses toward overcoming and bridging the gap between the diachronic historical method and the synchronic method of chronological cross section...The Formalist studies brought to light this simultaneous preservation of tradition and breaking away from tradition form the essence of every new work of art."(87)
As the rest of the parts are more like case studies of what is discussed above, I'll just give a few lines on each part as opposed to each essay.
Part II - This section looks at folklore and how it differs from literary production as it has its generatation and maintanence in collectivity, further, it has recognizable, but mutated (in a way) devices that get repeated in all its iterations (this is exemplary of synchrony that isn't static and evolution in literature).
Part III - This section is on verse, verse v. prose, poetry, rhythm and meter, etc.
Part IV - This section is on speech and dialogue, indirect and direct discourse, etc.
Part V - This section comprises three formalist readings of different genres/texts - Old Russian Literature, The Mystery, and the Short Story. The two latter essays are quite interesting in the ways that it ties in the stuff from section IV on dialogue and secondary voice that is present to mislead (the mystery) or to make a joke/satire (O Henry's satire).
Part VI - I will summarize one of the two essays in this section which offer a summary of the Formalist tradition and contemporary interpretations of it.
Russian Formalism in Retrospect, Krystyna Pomorska: "'Literariness,' or those features which make a work literature, was proclaimed the material for investigation. A concentration of 'literary fact' itself was carefully observed against the sociological fallacy of Positivism, with its offshoots of biography and psychologism." (274) "The decisive factor for the structure of a prose piece was found in its suject (plot), the element of construction, in contradistinction to the story itself, which was recognized as and equated with the subject matter."(275) Formalism rejected the genetic approach to literature, focusing on classification and typology. On Propp's work on folklore: "it incorporates the two operations to which a work of art is subjected: the synchronic (descriptive) and the diachronic (historical). Moreover, it shows that the synchronic procedure should precede the diachronic, and that synchrony is not static but dynamic."(276) "The theory of evolution, taken as changes of artistic forms according to their own immanent laws, largely refuted the question of 'progress' and showed the impossibility of applying it to art." (278)
Keywords
Literariness, Plot, Story, Synchronic, Diachronic, Evolutionary, Form, Device.
