Month: October 2004

Passe-Partout

Jeff

Passe-Partout

The week before Derrida died, I was working on a position paper surveying several different theories of metaphor. The inquiry seems to arc towards translation problems; it abruptly stops because I ran out of time to work on it. I think it is the matter of intersemiotic translation that makes such inquiries seem inconclusive. My inquiry also halted because I was reading Wilson and Sperber’s Relevance Theory, and hit their claim that metaphor is a poorly defined mode of inquiry. Metaphor, for them, is simply one aspect of the normal inferential process rather than any sort of special case. The major challenge of speaking about metaphor at all is that it cannot be spoken of without recourse to metaphor—using the term as a tautology, in definition of itself.

Speaking of metaphor at all assumes that it exists. Metaphor, in its broadest sense, is a framing device—a juxtaposition which results in the shift in meaning of a reference, either a word-reference (metalanguage) or an object reference (catachresis). While I was writing about it, I couldn’t help but think about Derrida’s The Truth in Painting. The obvious reference is to the distinction between ergon (content) and parergon (frame). Max Black’s terminology defining the pairing of concepts in metaphor—focus and frame—at first suggested an optical metaphor to me. Actually, though, this is more of a spatial metaphor suggesting an inside surrounded by a border (context).

The context (border) shifts across time and space in usage—therefore meaning shifts and is indeterminate. We can only speak of contingent meanings in metaphor, or, as Derrida would have it, in general. To attach a “protocol” to two terms—such as subject and predicate, signifier and signified, focus and frame— we dictate in advance the range of possibilities for the explication. Understanding the relationship between things means hypothesizing that a relationship exists; broadening the relationship lessens its explanatory properties when applied to contingent situations. Metaphor, in Wilson and Sperber’s opinion, does not define a specific relationship: “Metaphor plays on the relationship between the propositional form of an utterance and the speaker’s thoughts” (243). All language does that—if we define language as the translation of thought into signs.

If all signs are polysemous and context-dependent, then how is metaphor different? The answer, from Aristotle forward, is to brand metaphor as a form of transgression. Classically, it is a word-level nominal transgression—the application of an improper name. In the twentieth-century, it seems to have expanded into a propositional idea—metaphor is the application of an absurd comparison. These transgressions require some concept of a normative meaning that the metaphor is measured against, otherwise there can be no transgression. These definitions require the application of a rigid and specific frame.

The opening section of The Truth in Painting, labeled “Passe-Partout” uses the polysemous nature of language to render the concept almost funny. The phrase literally means “passkey” but it also signifies the type of overlay one uses to frame a picture—a mat. As Derrida mentions in passing, mats are often beveled. Instead of a rigid frame of taxonomy (inside vs. outside), the transition between frame and focus (or concept) is filled with an odd sort of slippage which threatens to make either the object of study, or the frame, disappear.

This brought me, in my twisted mind, back to William Blake’s indictment of the “muses of memory”—Blake called for artists to work through the “daughters of inspiration” (which might be literally translated as the inhaling of the Holy Spirit, in his context) rather than being slaves to memory. It also made me remember August by Tom Verlaine, a song sadly unreleased to the modern marketplace:

But the final vision has
Grown at least a hundred-fold,
I see your disillusion gone
A quiet room, not long ago,
Beneath the silent room deliver me,
No metaphor, no memory,
Above the hours always shining through.

MP3 here for a limited time, as always, by clicking through this domain only.

Thought

Jeff

Thought

Several things came together for me when I woke up this morning. A central problem of considering photographs to be components of a “language” is that they are unique. A photograph can substitute for a thing, but it resists consideration as a representation of type of thing. The situation is analogous to proper names and generic names: a photograph, in conventional use, is generally treated as a proper name rather than a generic label. As a predicate, it is never necessary but rather posits a metonymic connection with the thing it identifies. Metonymy can only be broken by surrendering the photograph’s status as a “true” or “proper” representation of this thing—through its conversion into a metaphor. This conversion comes from the attribution of a metaphoric significance—an implicit cognitive comparison that stretches the boundary of the proper name.

Under this lens, photographs are nouns. However, the metaphoric attribution of “feelings” or “actions” to the lifeless images can transform them into verbs, or adjectives and adverbs, making propositions possible. Extracting “meaning” from images seems to be inextricably tied both to the process of metaphor and to the process of translation. The status of photographs as semic units is mired in a swamp of contentions about their ability to contain codes that can be processed and decoded: is there such a thing as photographic diction? Do images have a grammar, or at the very least a syntax? Are images nouns, phrases, clauses, or can they be propositions? Stepping up another level, can a photograph present an argument or proof?

Clearly, the translation of photographs to test this sort of assertion is a hermeneutic process which crosses the border from diction into thought. This is precisely the boundary that Aristotle chose not to cross in his discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric and the Poetics. Metaphor is discussed as a figure of diction, not of thought. At the level of diction, metaphor is defined as a transgressive attribution—the application of an “improper” name to a thing. For photographs to work as a language, such an attribution is essential. At the phrase or clause level, such a figure could also be labeled as catachresis.

Catachresis is the trope of absurd comparison: God is a fisherman, or if you’re familiar with Concrete Blonde, God is a Bullet. However, catachresis can also be used to invent terms that did not exist before. A catachresis is often used to productively refer to a “thing” that exists outside of language—something that has no “proper” name. Thus, catachresis is essentially untranslatable given the common frameworks of interlingual and intralingual translation. However, following I.A. Richard’s tantalizing suggestion that metaphor is an intersemiotic translation (appropriating the term from Roman Jakobson), untranslatable is actually a misnomer. What seems to be at work instead, is a transgression of boundaries between languages— in the verbal examples I’ve given, it is a transgression between the boundary between words and thoughts.

To translate a photograph into words (interlingually) or a metaphor into paraphrase (intralingually) represents only a limited glimpse into the possibilities of translation. To transgress the boundary between diction and thought does not necessarily assume that both are forms of language—this would be an interlingual (traditional translation) problem. It is equally possible that the translation which occurs when we “read” a photograph or conceptualize a metaphor happens between semic systems that are not necessarily compatible in features or transposable in their parts, except as an incredibly weak analogy.

Is thought a language? Perhaps, but perhaps not.

Not Usual

Jeff

Not Usual

What then was the vision of those demigods who aimed only at what is greatest in writing and scorned detailed accuracy? This above all: that Nature has judged man a creature of no mean or ignoble quality, but, as if she were inviting us to some great gathering, she has called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager competitors; and she has therefore from the first breathed into our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves. Thus the whole universe is not enough to satisfy the speculative intelligence of human thought; our ideas often pass beyond the limits that confine us.

Look at life from all sides and see how in all things the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful stand supreme, and you will soon realize that is what we are born for. So it is by some natural instinct that we admire, not the small streams, clear and useful as they are, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all the Ocean. The little fire we kindle for ourselves keeps clear and steady, yet we do not therefore regard it with more amazement than the fires of Heaven, which are often darkened, or think it more wonderful than the craters of Etna in eruption, hurling up rocks and whole hills from their depths and sometimes shooting forth rivers of that earthborn, spontaneous fire.

But on all such matters I would only say this, that what is useful or necessary is easily obtained by man; it is always the unusual that wins our wonder.

Longinus, On the Sublime 35

Proper

Jeff1 Comment

Proper

In an attempt to cut down on the labor involved in transferring LPs to mp3s or CD, I’ve been binging a bit on buying some old music. I received a copy of the remastered version of Concrete Blonde’s eponymous debut from 1986, and it set my senses askew. This was one of those records I listened to so repeatedly at the time that I nearly had it memorized; but when I put it on something wasn’t right. For several songs, I tried to convince myself that it was because I was listening to it on the computer’s speaker system while transferring it to iTunes. But that wasn’t it at all—the entire record has been remixed using different takes, and perhaps some overdubs. Somehow, this just didn’t seem proper.

My memories of record albums encode a complex cascade of images and experiences; they are close to the core of my soul. It isn’t the music alone, or any sort of idolatry towards the performers, but rather that they hold vast stores of experiences that get triggered in a sort of Proustian digression that can last for days. To change them is to rewrite history, decentering what I thought I had experienced into something entirely new. It tastes of a transgression, of a deviance which can be either a guilty pleasure (gosh, I don’t remember it sounding that good!) or a cruel trick where records mixed for maximum impact on narrow bandwidth equipment is stretched until it breaks the dynamic of experience (I don’t remember that damn finger-cymbal!).

As I review early material on metaphor (Aristotle and Demetrius in particular) it dawns on me that there can be no transgression without some normative concept of the proper. We don’t want our histories to be tread upon and rewritten, because to move away from their actuality is to reduce them to metaphor. While metaphor is powerful, it rests on the idea that there is a “proper” term that can be bent or shifted to create a new thought. History is composed of old thoughts, not new ones. That’s why remixing history seems so deviant to me, I guess. It is one thing to offer up a new interpretation, but yet another to label it as if it were the original, only new and improved. Improvement is a crooked road, in this case, rather than a straight one.

That’s one of the reasons why when I get the chance I want to transfer more music from LPs for convenience’s sake. The paradigm case for musical “improvements,” in my opinion, is Frank Zappa’s re-recordings of his early Verve records. The bass and drum tracks literally rotted away from the masters, so he was forced to rerecord them. I have the original records. They are completely different in feeling and intent than the re-releases, and in most cases I like the original versions better. However, some of them were reenergized in a unique way by the invasive process of creating new rhythms for them. Sometimes these rhythms match the spirit of the original, but they nearly always take the song in entirely new directions.

The core question is how far it is proper to deviate from an original and still label it as such. When does an analogy stop being a reference to its source, and start becoming a unique assertion all its own?

Weird Love

Jeff
no relation

Weird Love

One of the records I loved the most in the mid-80s was Weird Love by the Scientists. Alas, it isn’t out on CD it seems. I transferred it a few weeks ago, but I also ordered three more Scientists CDs. This transferring business gets expensive.

Weird Love is an album of re-recorded singles. Most of the original versions are on Blood Red River, but I actually like the reproduced (though some have said overproduced) versions better. Weird Love just seems somehow more emphatic to me.

Submitted for your perusal, what seems to me to be an appropriate tune for this time in my life: Swampland. It’s a big one, as per usual, available for a limited time only for those who click through from this domain.

Slack

Jeff

Slack

There are some boys who are slack, unless pressed on; others again are impatient of control: some are amenable to fear, while others are paralyzed by it: in some cases the mid requires constant application to form it, in others this result is best obtained by rapid concentration. Give me the boy who is spurred on by praise, delighted by success and ready to weep over failure. Such a one must be encouraged by appeals to his ambition; rebuke will bite him to the quick; honor will be a spur, and there is no fear of his proving indolent.

Still, all our pupils will require some relaxation, not merely because there is nothing in this world that can stand the constant strain and even unthinking and inanimate objects are unable to maintain their strength unless given intervals of rest, but because study depends on the good will of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion. Consequently if restored and refreshed by a holiday they will bring greater energy to their learning and approach their work with greater spirit of a kind that will not submit to be driven.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria Book I iii 6-10

Wrong Door

Jeff1 Comment

Wrong Door

I’ve got a long history of getting confused. One of the stories I’ve told and retold in different circumstances to different ends is a story from the early eighties about opening the wrong door.

A local Bakersfield “punk” band was playing at a place I’d never been before called Sam’s Pizza Boat. Since Bakersfield is in the middle of desert of sorts, the term “boat” should have been some clue to the difficulty of locating it. At first, it seemed really simple—they had a large sign on the street. But I had to park some distance away, and as I was walking up I saw what looked like an entry door on the same building, so I opened it.

The music stopped. Every head in the building turned to view my long haired person. I could see the shining belt buckles, and hear the twang of the steel guitars. It was a country bar. This was long before country became dominated by “outlaws” and my presence was enough to stop everyone in their tracks. It was like a scene from a bad western movie. I slowly backed out of the door without any sudden moves, the music resumed and the cowboys went back to their business.

I walked around the corner and went in the correct door to the pizza place, and the rest of the evening went pretty well. The interesting thing about Sam’s was the way the crowd surged in the tiny place. It became so jammed in the pit that people would literally pop-up in the middle and end up crowd surfing whether they liked it or not. At that point, the band would stop, and the management would put on heavy metal music like AC/DC to get people to calm down. The band would start again, and then the process would repeat usually after a single song. I found the whole enterprise quite amusing.

I walked in the wrong door last night, but it turned out better.

I wanted to see Mike Watt and the Secondmen. The club was called Seventh Street Entry, and so deducing that there would be an entry on Seventh Street I walked down that way. There was a line of people, and being a good lemming, I stood in it. The line wrapped around the street onto First Avenue. It turned out to be a line to see P.J. Harvey. The music didn’t stop when I walked in. I did find an entry to the other club on the inside (I really don’t know how their system works, both clubs are in the same building), but there didn’t seem to be much point in going any further. It was a great show anyway.