Pseudonyms

The penchant for politics is still peremptorily proclaimed a panacea more palatable than the paregorics of physicians.

Patience P. Paradox, The Monument, September 10, 1840

Before leaving pseudonymity, I had planned to mention also that, among the arts, the use of pseudonymity is limited basically to two domains: literature and, far behind, the theatre (names of actors), a realm that today encompasses the broader field of show business. Done.

I had also planned to be surprised at that limitation and to seek the reasons for the privileging of literature and the theatre: why have so few musicians, painters, or architects used pseudonyms? But at this point the surprise would be much to facetious: use of a pseudonym unites a taste for masks and mirrors, for indirect exhibitionism, and for controlled histrionics with a delight in invention, in borrowing, in verbal transformation, in onomastic fetishism.

Clearly, using a pseudonym is already a poetic activity, and the pseudonym is already somewhat like a work. If you can change your name, you can write.

Gerard Genette, Paratexts, 53-54

By the time my wife and I bought our house in 1953, Jersey Homesteads had given up its name. It was now called Roosevelt, New Jersey, after the father of the New Deal and the leader of the war against Hitler. The change was made, I gather, while the whole nation was in mourning. Even some of those who hated him grieved, since grief comes cheap after the book is closed and the man is dead.

Here in town, I believe, the sorrow was genuine: the change of name was accomplished simply and without show, by a unanimous action of the Borough Council. But I don’t really know. The act is in the minutes, but I can’t tell what the town felt like at the time, since I wasn’t here. And this, obviously, would mean a lot more than any item that can be written down in the records. That’s why I’m no scholar, probably, because I believe in the feel of things and in the stories people have to tell rather than the facts that are only bones.

As Ben Shahn used to say: “Most facts are lies; all stories are true.”

One fact, however, I can vouch for: No two people left over from the beginning (informants they are called, aren’t they?) agree on any fact more meaningful than the date when the town was founded.

Edwin Rosskam, Roosevelt, New Jersey (1972)

For more info on Roosevelt, see the Wikipedia entry which links to a great page on the original Jersey Homesteads, including an audio interview with Bernarda Shahn which explicates the Ben Shahn mural that lives there.

Nationalism

I don’t mean to challenge Giséle Freund, but . . .

Portrait photography had its origins in France, but photojournalism began in Germany, where the work of the first photoreporters truly deserving of the name gave the profession prestige.

After the First World War . . . (Photography and Society p. 115)

According to Robert Taft in Photography and the American Scene (441) the usage of photographs in newspapers in 1899 tells a different story:

It seems to me that the US was an early adopter of photojournalism, but I suppose it wasn’t worthy enough.

Paratext

A literary work consists, entirely or essentially, of a text, defined (very minimally) as a more or less long sequence of verbal statements that are more or less endowed with significance. But the text is rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions, such as an author’s name, a title, a preface, illustrations. And although we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround it and extend it, precisely in order to present it, make present, to ensure the texts presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book. These accompanying productions, which vary in extent and appearance, constitute what I have called elsewhere in the work’s paratext, keeping with the sometimes ambiguous meaning of this prefix in French.

Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1)

‘Para’ is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, . . . something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status but also secondary or subsidiary, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. A thing in ‘para,’ moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and out. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting the inside and outside. It confuses them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining them.

J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host” in Deconstruction and Criticism, cited by Genette ibid.

Walter Pater on the Separation of Media.

It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting—all the various products of art—as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting—of sound, in music—of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle—that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind—is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the “imaginative reason” through the senses, there are differences in kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and incommunicable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own responsibilities to its material.

The Renaissance (1901) 130-131

*noted not because I agree, but because it typifies the nineteenth century attitude towards artistic media.

Syntax

One difficulty of applying a general “science of signs” to mixed media rests in the impracticality of its labels. The labels of signifier and signified fit a restricted linguistic project, but are clearly too restrictive when applied to the polysemous text comprised of differing media. C.S. Peirce’s multitudinous labels (usually reduced to icon, index, and symbol) fail when presented as a static condition, separate from the dynamism he included in his semiotics. It is neither necessary, nor desirable, to fix the position of individual elements in a mixed media composition into fallible positions on a binary or even triadic grid. The interface between text and image, approached in this manner, always reduces to a subject/predicate relationship.

For example, in the case of an aesthetic photograph or painting, the caption becomes a comment which carries with it a parasitic relationship to the image as signified. Or, in the case of illustration, the caption is the signified—an image or sketch is the signifier of the word as signified. The relationship is purely contextual and usually unmarked in most mixed media compositions. Peirce’s categories are often used to discuss photographs that can be either iconic (in the loose sense, in that they are a “picture”) or indexical (in that they point at an object that exists) or even symbolic, when they are so widely circulated that they develop a sort of cultural currency—such as Dorothea Lange’s migrant mother, or pictures of the flaming towers of the World Trade Center.

The disposition of these labels is confusing at best. Even more problematic is the question of syntax. Under what circumstances does the image become a subject rather than a predicate? At what point does an image cross over from being an icon or index into being a fully developed symbol? On the surface, it appears that the syntax involved is related to the privilege afforded aesthetic experience. An aesthetic object is granted the status of signified, icon, or symbol, whereas a pragmatic juxtaposition is granted status as a signifier, icon, or index.

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Emulsion

W. J.T. Mitchell, one of the most prolific writers on the subject of image/text combinations, persists in referring to these works as a “composite art.” What happens when texts and images are combined in order to communicate? Does it form a composite? The concept of a composite is rests in the assumption that images and texts represent different modes of communication, separable and insoluble, a concept that Mitchell ultimately rejects. The distinctions between image and text are cultural, constructed, and solvent over time. However, the tension between these elements persists.

Analysis of this tension has often been hypothesized as a difference in semiotic modes. Texts are symbolic in nature, while images are sorted into overlapping categories of icon and index. However, the slippage between these characteristics renders the discussion of semiotic modes problematic. In the case of photographs, the discussion is sometimes assumed to be simpler. Photographs, because they have a specific “real world” referent, are taken to be “natural” signs, less arbitrary and contingent than their linguistic equivalents. Even allowing this gross oversimplification, the difficulty of melding images adjoining texts demonstrates their semantic difference.

Images, like words, are mediated by the conditions of their creation. Explorations of visual semantics are complicated by the lack of a consistency in syntactic markers. The most basic level of integration of image and text is the caption—a short text conjoined to the image that performs a semantic function. The syntax and semantic function of the caption have shifted over time, suggesting that there can be no synchronic inquiry into how captioning works. The exploration of their syntax, and of the implications of captioning in semantic function, can only be explained in cultural terms—it must be diachronic and historical.

However, such historical inquiries are often tinged with “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an overriding impulse to see image/text as conveying a hidden deeply coded semantic message of cultural imperialism. John Tagg, Maren Stange, and others have offered this type of reading of the documentary photography of the 1930s, while other inquiries into image/texts by Foucault and Ian Walker have looked at the surrealist use of realism to subvert such cultural imperialism. What seems lacking, at the practical level, is a pragmatics of the discourse of word and image that is not reliant on decoding a hidden message, but rather confronts the actual semantic (not semiotic) function, in context, of image/text combinations.

Are such works a division of semantic labor? Do they necessarily result in a stratification of signification, a composite comprised of two different ways of knowing? I am not so sure of this as W.J.T. Mitchell. If images and text are like oil and water (in cultural use, not essential character) have there not been some brief moments (such as the works of William Blake) where the combination has been “shaken up” to create an emulsion, which only stratifies as it stands still across time?

Drawing Distinctions

In Iconology (1986), W.J.T. Mitchell advances two interconnected theses:

1. There is no essential difference between poetry and painting, no difference, that is, given for all time by the inherent natures of the media, the objects they represent, or the laws of the human mind.

2. There are always a number of differences in effect in a culture which allows it to sort out the distinctive qualities of its ensemble of signs and symbols.

Mitchell goes on to expand this notion of “differences” in culture are riddled with antithetical values “which the culture wants to advance or repudiate” (49). In the several examples that follow in the book, he highlights the desire of critics to keep images and texts in their place, and performing their normative function. One of the difficulties that Mitchell highlights is our tendency to render images by linguistic rules—this continually reasserts the domination of language over image. Constant throughout the argument is his first principle: that images and texts are not inherently different. The distinctions are exclusively cultural in nature.

Continue reading “Drawing Distinctions” →

Constative Captions

Jacobson’s modes of realism can also be compared with J.L. Austin’s categories and levels of speech acts. In meaning A (the subjective view of the artist), realism is tied to the illocutionary force. In meaning B (the reception of the audience), realism is tied to the perlocutionary sequel. The locutionary act itself is the work (word, picture or both), which promises similitude with the real. In the naïve conception of history or documentary, this act is believed to be constative— realism describes, or better, constitutes an effort at truth. In meaning C (the adherence to a tradition) realism reconstitutes, thus reinforcing the persistence of cultural truth(s).

In Austin’s theory, statements are problematic. There seems no possibility of constative utterance. All utterances are performative. A statement is merely a performance where “we abstract from the illocutionary (let alone the perlocutionary) aspects of the speech act and concentrate on the locutionary” (74). Constative utterances are merely a special case of performance where we minimize the speaker’s role and the audience’s response in favor of the illusion of an utterance as a thing in itself. Documentary and/or realist approaches are ultimately performative: I promise that this is a simulation of the real.

In a sense, the modern critique of representative practice can be seen as an effort to recover the illocutionary force (psychological criticism) and the perlocutionary sequel (materialist and Marxist approaches) from normative (aesthetic and vernacular) histories and documentary artifacts. Structuralist approaches like Jacobson’s have been appropriated largely to these aims. Structuralism, and by extension semiotics, has failed to find a convincing general structure for discourse, and yet remain the best hope for a specific analysis of the locutionary level of representation. Jacobson’s “On Realism in Art” functions primarily by examining the creation and reception of representations rather than the exact nature of the representations themselves. In treating artistic practice as a mode of conversation, he uncovers some of its implications.

Continue reading “Constative Captions” →

“Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing”

Fine writing, according to Mr. Addison, consists of sentiments, which are natural, without being obvious. There cannot be a juster and more concise definition of fine writing.

. . .

First, I observe, That Tough excesses of both kinds [simplicity and refinement] are to be avoided, and though a proper medium ought to be studied in all productions; yet this medium likes not in a point, but consists of a considerable latitude.

. . .

My second observation on this head is, That it is very difficult, if not impossible, to explain by words, where the just medium lies between the excesses of simplicity and refinement, or to give any rule by
which we can know precisely the bounds between the fault and the beauty.

. . .

No criticism can be instructive, which descends not to particulars, and is not full of examples and illustrations. It is allowed on all hands, that beauty, as well as virtue, always lies in the medium: but where this medium is can never be sufficiently be explained by general reasonings.

I shall deliver it as a third observation on the subject, That we ought to be more on our guard against excess of refinement than that of simplicity: and that because the former excess is both less beautiful, and more dangerous than the latter.

It is a certain rule, that wit and passion are entirely incompatible. When the affections are moved, there is no place for the imagination. The mind of man being naturally limited, it is impossible that all the faculties can operate at once: And the more any one predominates, the less room there is for the others to assert their vigour. For this reason, a greater degree of simplicity is required in all compositions, where men, and actions, and passions are painted, than in such as consist of reflections and observations. And as the former species of writing is more engaging and beautiful, one may give the preference to the extreme of simplicity above that of refinement. (David Hume, Essay XX, 191-195)

*note that verbal pictures, “illustrations” are considered essential—this is opposed to the “painting” of the passions. Images play a dual role, with interesting metaphorical transference.
Images of passion are best when “simple”— Images of reflection are best when “refined.”