Threshold

In order to be cognitively perceived, a stimulus must cross a threshold. Below this threshold, everything is noise that we must ignore in order to go on about our business. I was thinking about one of my persistent problems until late in the night—the inability of postmodern or even aesthetic thought to admit the importance of realism outside a Platonic universal of a shadow reality which presents itself as “natural” or essential. Indictments of resemblance have proliferated, and continue to proliferate. Nobody defends realism convincingly. Everyone indicts it, and yet realism always proliferates. It might be a class problem—the indictment of realism immediately sets up the critic in a superior position to interpret “reality” as they see fit.

Finally, last night, several figures coalesced. The modernist flight from resemblance can be seen as a reaction against the community perception of the real; in its iconoclasm, it seeks to remake the world as abstract. Alienation from the crowd reaches a threshold where perception is only registered as something new (irreal, not unreal). On the popular side, a similar trend provokes feeling only in reaction to trauma. War becomes the measuring stick for reality; its gruesome trauma breaks the chain of the day to day. But underneath this there is an unexamined threshold.

Trauma and novelty are extreme manifestations of the recognition of something outside ourselves that breaks a perceptual threshold. The initial threshold, however, is the threshold of resemblance. We see our image in the mirror, and we recognize that this perception is not us, but of us. I revisited Eco’s Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language and became even more convinced. Apart from the negative connotation of the “mirror stage” promoted by Lacan, there is a positive, generative quality to viewing our own reflection.

It is not just a sense of loss, but the knowledge of possible worlds that might resemble our inner image that drives us to explore. The perceptual threshold of resemblance need not be lost in endless chains of similitude. While not reflexive in the manner of similitude, resemblance is the threshold where we sense a new world. It is not a necessary condition, as most critics explore—but it is a threshold, a threshold that can be explored that does not insist on novelty or traumatic experience.

There are shades of resemblance; there is almost no gradation in the concepts of shock or trauma. They are by nature abrupt and discontinuous. In this way, they seem an unnecessary condition for the concept of realism. We have been too long conditioned to reach for the “flash of insight”— living and dying happens by degrees.

Realism(s)

In his 1921 essay “On Realism in Art” Roman Jacobson breaks down the concept of realism into increasing levels of ambiguity. Closely tied to realism are the concepts of truth, fidelity and similitude. Jacobson’s initial definition is “We call realistic those works which we feel accurately depict life by displaying verisimilitude” (20). This definition can be fractured into three cases:

Meaning A: Realism may refer to the intent of the author to display verisimilitude.

Meaning B: Realism may refer to the perception of the receiver of verisimilitude.

Meaning C: Realism “comprehends the sum total of the features characteristics of one specific artistic current of the nineteenth century [realism]” (20)

Meanings A and B are naïve readings of the concept which can only be stabilized by comparison with a “natural” object (in the Platonic sense). The third meaning is closer to representative practice, both vernacular and artistic. Representative practice, like communication in general, has strong ties to convention.

The contrast between these three nuances of realism is also an epistemological one. In the first two meanings, realism is tied to an epistemé which accepts devices such as single point perspective as a given, as true to nature. It is a stable tradition in the same way as the third, more artistic, definition implies. However, realism in the first two meanings is a concept with nearly imperceptible origins. Jacobson remarks concerning the third meaning: “As tradition accumulates, the painted [or represented] image becomes an ideogram, a formula, to which the object portrayed is linked by contiguity” (21). In this respect, these distinctions between realisms may be collapsed—the belief in images as transparent “natural signs” is a convention that carries “ideograms” as well.

The difference between an object and its representation can be characterized negatively—as the endless gulf or lack between signifier and signified. It can also be characterized positively—as a conversation, an endless multiplication of discourse. Realism is at its core an ethical concept. It represents to convey a form of truth. In meaning A, it is subjective. In meaning B, it is conventional. In meaning C, it is traditional, totemic, and ultimately mythic. Traditions emerge in an endless march, marked by ruptures and discontinuities with the previous traditions that become occluded in the mists of history. Realism(s) become history.

Errors

I was watching a PBS program on writing this morning, a first-year telecourse, which dealt with using online research. “Remember that any site which ends in .com is a commercial site and is always selling something . . .” Never mind that it is the most common web suffix, and that .com sites are often run by individuals which aren’t really selling much of anything. Determining what a site is about, or whether it is trustworthy is a lot more complicated than reading the suffix. These programs amuse me, because they usually perpetuate ideas of how things should be, rather than how they are.

The most famous hoax of all perpetuated by these programs on writing is the persistence of the topic sentence. “Always compose topic sentences and use them to organize your writing.” Of course it doesn’t matter that topic sentences are almost always understood rather than overtly stated in real world writing, and that if we all sat around trying to compose this “holy grail” of writing teaching, nothing would ever be said.

It’s always more convenient when you can smooth things over, and ignore the things which don’t fit your model. Unfortunately, these “errors” populate the world we live in. What bothers me more is when these sorts of simplifications begin to overwhelm supposedly “advanced” texts. A great example is the recent compilation from Routledge, the Photography reader edited by Liz Wells. It’s a great book, really, with a nice cross-section of essays. However, the introductory essay for the section on “Codes and Rhetoric” has one of those fingernails-on-a-chalkboard type errors which would really annoy the hell out of me if it were my book:

The idea of semiotics, the science of signs, was proposed in 1916 by Ferdinand de Saussure, but it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that theorists, including Roland Barthes (France) and C. S. Pierce (USA), set about examining the structure of non-verbal systems of communication. (110)

Concern over the system of signs began in ancient Greece, or perhaps before. The term semiotics was coined by Pierce circa 1867, long before Saussure’s famous lectures. To place Pierce in the 1950s or 60s is a really glaring boner. But to imply that people weren’t concerned with the functioning of non-verbal signs before 1950 is almost criminal.

It bothers me that I always seem to find errors in everything these days. I’m not sure when this started, but it is irritating. Sometimes, I suppose I blow them out of proportion— it’s a matter of your point of view. However, sometimes things are just plain wrong.

You Can Quote Me

Though I realize that comment spamming is an increasing problem (it has happened to me recently, like many other people), I find it incredibly frustrating not to be able to respond to a post either through e-mail, comment, or track-back.

Language Log doesn’t even seem to have permalinks that work. It’s an unnecessary amount of frustration over a simple point— People are taught peculiar rules in using direct quotes in journalism classes which lead to strange and twisted constructions.

While I realize a complicated, sinister explanation might be preferred to a simple one, I do think the resident linguists there would be better served by looking at even a single journalism textbook than devising scientific tests to find out why quotes in popular publications are often inverted.

For example, even a glancing search online reveals a nice page on attribution for K-12 journalists. A quick look at the BBC Style guide under Reported Speech (page 60) shows indirectly why the preferred placement for attribution is at the end of the sentence— it is thought to be less confusing. Or for another example, this PDF Style Guide from Jteacher.com clearly states on page 13: “11. Avoid beginning a one-sentence quotations with attribution. It is almost always better left at the end of the sentence.” This is not an unusual linguistic phenomenon, but rather the result of a dominant perception by editors that it is better to have an awkward construction than a confusing attribution.

Sheesh! I don’t understand why that would be an unconvincing hypothesis. After being hit over the head by a journalism teacher any time I deviated from their formulas for attribution, I am convinced that this simple form of negative reinforcement (an editor or teacher saying “That’s WRONG” anytime you use an attribution at the beginning of a sentence) is all there is to the prevalence of inverted quotes. Journalists actually think it is the right thing to do.

Deconstruction and Interpretation

One of the most insightful readings of the fate of structuralism in the aftermath of deconstruction is found in “Beyond Interpretation,” the lead essay in Jonathon Culler’s 1980 The Pursuit of Signs.

In the hands of its best practitioners, such as Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson, deconstruction is an interpretive method of unusual power and subtlety. [Culler footnotes this referring specifically to de Man’s Allegories of Reading and Johnson’s Défiguations du langage poetique]

In other hands there is always the danger that it will become a process of interpretation which seeks to identify particular themes, making undecidability, or the problem of writing, or the relationship between the performative and the constantive, privileged themes of literary works. [this seems to pretty much summarize about 90% of the literary criticism of the 1990s, as far as I’m concerned]

But there is a hopeful note in Culler’s appraisal of the use of other general methods. While I have little interest in Marxist criticism, what he has to say about the fate of structuralism engages me.

Continue reading “Deconstruction” →

Barthes’ Degree Zero

From an initial non-existence in which thought, by a happy miracle, seemed to stand out against the backcloth of words, writing thus passed through all the stages of a progressive solidification; it was first and object of gaze, then of creative action, finally of murder, and has reached in our time a last metamorphosis, absence: in those neutral modes of writing, called here the “zero degree of writing”, we can easily discern a negative momentum, and an inability to maintain it with times flow, as if Literature, having tended for a hundred years now to transmute its surface into a form with no antecedents, could no longer find purity anywhere but in the absence of all signs, finally proposing the realization of this Orphean dream: a writer without Literature. . . .

What we hope to do here is to sketch this connection; to affirm the existence of a formal reality independent of language and style; to try to show that this third dimension of Form equally, and not without an additional tragic implication, binds the writer to his society; finally to convey the fact that there is no Literature without an Ethic of language.

Roland Barthes, from the introduction to Writing Degree Zero (1953)

I have been reading this skinny little book for a long time—at least six months. It is so dense and lush that it becomes hard not to comment on the nuances of each of its sentences. It has become increasingly important to me as I explore Foucault’s thoughts on language.

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First Principles

314 Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters which they treat.

Giambattista Vico Scienza nuvoa (1725)

In his treatment of the history of social institutions, Vico begins with language. Language is the primary, or first principle of sociality. Central to Vico’s theory is the principle that language has poetic logic. It is an attractive hypothesis, which he carefully elaborates:

400 That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all forms of their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in all the forms in which they may be signified. Accordingly, as poetry has been considered by us above as a poetic metaphysics in which the theological poets imagined bodies to be for the most part divine substances, so now that same poetry is considered as poetic logic, by which it signifies them.

In Vico’s schema, the first articulation of language was driven by an imagined belief in divine substance. He continues to assert that “‘Logic’ comes from logos, whose first and proper meaning was fabula, fable, carried over into Italian as favella, speech.” He quickly contrasts this with the synonymy of mythos and fabula—these terms were used interchangeably by the Greeks, but also proposes that the Latin mutus, mute, descends from mythos. Hence, the articulation of logos is of a dual nature, breeding both speech and silence. The bifurcated nature of logos demonstrates a schism between thought and action.

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Naming Things

Attempting to find a set of possible relationships between things and words, I have come up some ideas. The first postulate (as per Saussure) is that names are arbitrary; however, this does not negate the possibility that names can be assigned which create relationships between the thing and the word that names it. Discounting purely arbitrary names for the moment, it seems likely that:

1. Names can be related to the names given to other things which bear a resemblance to the thing [substantive rather than phonetic homonymy— metonymy is a better term].

2. Names can be related to the names given to other things which bear a similarity to the thing [qualitative synonymy—metaphor is a better term].

By definition, homonymy and synonymy are mutually exclusive. However, in some literary and linguistic definitions, metonymy is not exclusive of metaphor—in fact, metonymy is thought to be a subset of metaphor. This relies on a broad definition of metaphor as “transfer of meaning.” However, if metaphor is defined as a rupture with standard usage—a rupture at the substantive level—then being contiguous with its subject, metonymy cannot be of the same genus as metaphor. Separating these two terms and casting aside that classical hypothesis there are unique “god given” proper names for things creates a new grid of possible names.

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Dangerous Equivocations

Here’s one for The Guinness Book of World Records. A Baltimore man recently broke a longtime mental record when a forty-year-long thought he was having came to an end. When asked what he had been thinking of he said he couldn’t remember but that it would probably come back to him. He added that possibly it had something to do with his hat.

George Carlin, Napalm and Silly Putty (22)

One reason why Aristotle might have begun Categories with a list of simple relationships between things is to avoid fallacies of equivocation. The major problem is that Aristotle’s explanation suffers from dangerous equivocations. Though he claims to be discussing the relations between things Aristotle uses the relationship between things and words to demonstrate his categories. This has been giving me fits, but I think I have figured it out in a reasonably plausible way. Why does this matter? Because so much of the critical writing on photography and language seems to equate the two, ultimately impoverishing both. The basic fallacies I see are:

• Things and words share equivalent modes of relationship.

• Things and images share equivalent modes of relationship.

• Words and images share equivalent modes of relationship.

• Words and propositions share equivalent modes of relationship.

• Propositions and texts share equivalent modes of relationship.

Continue reading “Categories” →

Paronyms

Aristotle’s third mode of simple relation in Categories makes an abrupt shift from things to words. While a homonym or synonym are defined and used as if they are relations between things, the only definition of paronym offered by Aristotle is that a paronym is a word for a thing defined by a change in ending (or termination, depending on the translation).

However, this might not be the only possibility. According the OED etymology, paronym is taken from a Greek word meaning “formed by a slight change of the word, derivative.” In fact, translator EM Edghill avoids using transliterations at all, calling a synonym equivocal, a homonym univocal, and a paronym derivative.

At the risk of rewriting Aristotle (not being skilled enough in Greek to know how accurate the translations really are), it seems to me that the idea that a thing can be derived from another thing is reasonably sensible. For example, corn (as in an ear of corn) is a product derived from corn or (maize, for non-Americans). They are homonyms in the sense that they sound the same but mean different things, and also paronyms because one is derived from the other. In another case (adjacent to Aristotle’s example) grammar and grammatical are derived from the same root, and hence are paronyms— but they can also be synonyms used in a sense like “the sentence is grammatical” and “the grammar of the sentence is good.” In this case, the affix does not effect the meaning of the term, only its syntactical position.

Hence, something may be a homonym and a paronym (same root, different meaning) or both a synonym and a paronym (same root, similar meaning). However, these aspects alone are not sufficient to establish a paronym as a unique category worthy of consideration—they suggest an overlapping zone between the two primary categories of synonymy and homonymy.

Continue reading “Paronymy” →