Search results for "MA "
The Shape of Memories
Imported from Menticulture
A magician wrote about how the natural course of healing covers over the wound as spiders' webs ultimately smother the bric-a-brac on a table in the corner of a long-locked room; yet he wished to not allow the wound to heal over, but every day pick it open and keep his pain alive, rather than allow the web of forgetfulness to conceal the rawness of his experience.
A Cherry Tree and Memories
Imported from Menticulture
I went for a walk by Pond House and Horsepool Hill in search of a cherry tree and memories of my father.
Commonplace and Singular
Imported from Menticulture
The umber journey through bereavement reveals itself as the experience which levels everyone sooner or later. No-one is born who cannot expect to grieve a parent, except by reversing the calamity. Notwithstanding the silence we collectively smother over death in our discomfort and inability to handle one another's tragedies, grief and bereavement touch every but the most unlucky life. Mourning is a commonplace, a universal. And yet it is utterly singular, uniquely experienced and individually felt; an axis around which a life will eventually turn. Like love, it happens to us all, and when it does, we are the only lovers in the world.
Christmas, Grief and Shadowplay
Imported from Menticulture
Christmas is a hard time in my family. My father died eight years ago on Christmas day, after a few short months of living with a terminal diagnosis. It is still hard to summon words to trace the contours of the experience and its wake. Each thought rushes back; memories and meanings impossibly offer themselves for articulation; words flinch from the responsibility of bearing the burden.
Production - [Critical Media Concepts and Contexts]
"All that is solid melts into air" (Engels, F. & Marx, K., 1848. The Communist Manifesto) This lecture explored the notion of production, and found that every attempt to pin "production" down ended in the pursuit of something disappearing.
Evaporation du lac by FrancoisRoche on Flickr
Introduction
The ideas presented can be summarised in any one of the following ways:
- an examination of how creativity and production are actually forms of translation and transformation: not making something from nothing (creation) but reworking existing things into new forms (reproduction)
- deconstructing the common perception that human civilisation, with its industrial and manufacturing superstructures which underpin commercial production, represent a form of progress towards an ever better future.
- suggesting that the human production of knowledge is inseparable from the practices and motives which underpin it: it is instrumental, not objective
- tracing the shift away from the object and its aura, towards experience and its commodification
We occasionally looked at the practice of mapping in order to illustrate some of these ideas.
Production as creativity
- Poiesis - production as it is expressed by philosophers like Aristotle and Heidegger. The latter's notion of poiesis is a bringing-forth, like "the bursting of a blossom into bloom" (Heidegger, M., 1954. The Question Concerning Technology) - not the magical creation of things that did not exist before: rather, a liminal, threshold experience which facilitates transformation.
March 19, 2006: Apple tree blossoms by Matt McGee on Flickr
- Memetics and memes - the notion that thoughts, ideas and units of cultural information as they are expressed in our conscious thoughts are transferred and spread from mind to mind as genes are spread from body to body via reproduction. As such humans are merely vehicles - for both genes and memes. The idea was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976. The Selfish Gene) and has been taken up by other commentators on cultural ideas.
- Representation - the basic problems of philosophy revolve around various configurations of three components and their relationships: the world, the subject and representation. Representation might be thought of as the image of the world in our conscious thought. Various different philosophical traditions might argue about the relationship between the world and our image of the world (i.e. the relationship between world and representation). See Arthur C. Danto for a good introduction to the problems of philosophy, (1997. Connections to the World)
Shadow Play by Swamibu on Flickr
We can think then of representation as a reproduction of the world - the image of the world as it appears in human consciousness. A map, too, is a representation of the world. Does conscious human thought "map" accurately onto the world? For that matter, do maps accurately represent the world (consider the reductionism inherent in portraying the multi-dimensional earth in the two dimensions of a piece of paper or a screen)? Representation is a mediated and interpreted image of what is given: a copy of the world, which may be subject to distortion through our imperfect human sensory apparatus. As Shakespeare intimates - we see through a glass, darkly.
The images we work and rework - such as poetry (from the same etymological root as poiesis) are not inventions of language, but the reimplementation and translation of language. Of course language mutates and evolves through use. The introduction of "newness" - variety, diversity, heterogeneity might be comparable to the evolution of new species: iterative mutation induced through erroneous copying. The "meme" is the cultural manifestation of the biological gene.
Creativity, then might not be about a godlike ability to conjure things into existence from nothing, but part of the work of constant change and transformation that human beings enter into. There is no production, there is only reproduction, and - thankfully - reproduction is given to error?
translation by Swiv on Flickr
Production as the material and immaterial means of production and reproduction
- The parasite - the parasite is an organism which exploits a host without returning any benefit. Michael Serres' philosophical work (1984, The Parasite) provokes the thought that reproduction is a parasitical process. We might note that our industrial production processes viewed at the planetary level might be seen as rather parasitical.
- Complexity and reductionism - trying to understand either the material or immaterial systems which encompass contemporary culture requires getting to grips with prohibitively complex networks of interrelated factors, so we take short cuts (systems theory, marxism, discourse analysis, etc). Niklas Luhmann's development of systems theory - especially his application of it to the mass media (1996. The Reality of the Mass Media) is instructive here.
- Mechanical reproduction - understanding reproduction (and what it is we are reproducing) is one of the ways which people (especially marxists) have used to try to analyse the relationship between 'production' and culture.
No471701 by . SantiMB . on Flickr
- Marxism - a inescapably important thread of cultural analysis for over 150 years. You can find more about marxism here and ideology here. A marxist analysis of production might lead us to conclude that our acts of production and reproduction are aimed at little more than the continual reproduction of the means and conditions of our being able to engage in acts of production and reproduction. This might help us to understand everything from the resilience of capitalism to Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" (1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man).
- Aura - the important and influential writer Walter Benjamin, who emerged form the important and influential Frankfurt School (who criticised the capital-oriented culture industry), analysed mechanical reproduction as leading to the loss of 'aura' of the work of art: the 'authentic' unique object of pilgrimage becomes the disposable object of consumption (1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Wither, and whither, the aura?
- Aesthetics, politics and fascism - Benjamin's sometimes equivocal essay (sometimes appearing to celebrate processes of democratisation and rebellion against the authority of tradition) also suggests that mechanical reproduction opens art up to exploitation for political purposes (i.e. propaganda); essentially, the co-option of art by those seeking power helped to facilitate the rise of fascism. He suggests that the aestheticisation of politics (in contemporary terms, this might be seen in the triumph of PR in politics) should be combated by the politicisation of art.
- Technological determinism - the suggestion that human lives are shaped by the technologies they invent. This idea is often ridiculed, since it is taken, in extremis, to argue that human beings have no freedom or agency. It is nevertheless a useful concept when thinking about how, for example, the built environment determines human behaviour: think about how the architecture of spaces like supermarkets and airports 'funnel' your movements. The argument here might be how much this is influenced by technology (which after all, human beings "create") and how much our behaviour is socially learned and constructed. See Henri Lefebvre (1974. The Production of Space) or Marc Augé (1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity) on the way we make, and are made by, space.
Faculty of Chemical and Food Technology by gadl on Flickr
Imagine I create a web page with an interactive map. My act of production of this web-based product relies on a precariously constructed network of immaterial labour interacting with the material conditions which facilitate and shape it. I utilise APIs providing textually represented information to write codes implemented by browsers using interpreters based on formats produced by assemblages of people working commercially towards shareholder profit or in open source collectives for infinitely varied motives, using complex stacks of code layers whose material manifestations essentially consist of the configuration of magnetised atoms on slivers of semi-conductors, co-opted into the mediation and storage of binary digits.
labyrinthine circuit board lines by quapan on Flickr
As of November 2009, the internet weighs 498, 438,559,990 kg (2009. Slashdot, How Heavy is the Internet?). How does one begin to untangle the complex web of interactions which go into the production of something which has only existed for a few decades and yet has grown mind-bogglingly large? And what perspectives might we take on the partner to our exponential growth in material production and reproduction? The partner of production is consumption: what ways can we hope to make sense of the consumption of resources that our production necessitates? How many more internets' worth of plastic and metal waste do we dump in landfills every year?
Calgary NW Landfill - 3 by D'Arcy Norman on Flickr
The interactions between the many actors which constitute the material and immaterial nodes in the networks of production and reproduction which facilitate our work as makers of digital artefacts, writers of diegeses on paper, copiers of performances onto photographic film, are extraordinarily complex, and all mutually embedded in and amongst each other. To pull out nodes from the network is to inevitably foreground certain figures and to discount other grounds. Such disembeddings are reductive: they try to simplify and by doing so, exclude. Only with such caveats should we proceed.
Production as the narrative of human knowledge
- Instrumental reason - the idea that human knowledge strives towards ever greater objective truth is a problematic idea; we might wonder if human knowledge is much more instrumental - i.e. partially directed towards purposes and outcomes.
- Teleology - the idea of future purpose. Humans often behave teleologically - believing that we are making progress, that we are working towards purposes. Instrumental reason as described above is exemplary of telelogically directed activities. But we might also question whether 'progress' is inevitably towards better things.
![Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2787/4081543252_bf844a2e86.jpg)
Dividers [Project Blake] by joeflintham on Flickr
Consider maps and their relation to human perception and space and place to illustrate this. Early maps do not show aerial views, but human level perspectives. Naturalistic attempts at spatial and geographical "accuracy" (i.e. attempting to create spatially representative images of coastlines, cities and roads: "geography" literally means the drawing of the earth) is a late invention: earlier maps showed boundaries as perfectly circular, rivers as straight, important buildings as circles, etc. It is too simple to say that these early maps are "less accurate": actually they were trying to achieve something other than the naturalistic representation that we seek in maps.
Centro storico by zZeta on Flickr
Do maps get better as they get more naturalistically representative? Or, do they perhaps just serve different (rather than better) purposes? A contemporary geological map might be very useful to someone looking for minerals, but incomprehensible to most other people. Cook's mapping of the antipodes was as much a part of, and inseparable from, the practice of empire-building aided with ships and guns, as it was about charting navigable routes or creating disinterested representations of the natural world in order to have a more complete and objective understanding of it.
Some concluding remarks
- Simulacrum - Jean Baudrillard (1985. Simulacra and Simulation) imagined the world we inhabit as being a simulacrum - a 1:1 map of the world, rather than the world itself. The world of representation - that image world which humans construct around themselves, the world of mediation - is the world we inhabit. This world of experience is no longer "authentic" - its aura has withered as it has become an endlessly reproducible commodity. Experience has become the commodity produced for the purpose of consumption.
streetview by dq. on Flickr
Google Streetview is close to showing us the 1:1 map of the world - an external environment centred around the roads and commercial centres which structure our lives. Have we disappeared into that frozen mediated world in which nothing occurs but exchange, capital, and commerce? Are there no more geographies to explore or maps to produce, and are we now only left to consume the endlessly reproduced products of a culture industry? Have we disappeared into the map, or can we use the map to create authentic experiences? Perhaps we can escape the tyranny of consumption by becoming producers of our own experiences, using the resources of the given world: like the flâneur - the stroller and seeker of visions - of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin?
BlakeWalkers by joeflintham
DJ Spooky has likened DJs to contemporary "troubadours", and that the artistry of remixing "found" sounds and samples is part of a new digital folk culture. (Birringer, J. 2008. Performance, Technology and Science, New York: PAJ Publications). The direct comparison here is with oral cultures in which the same stories are used and retold, each telling generates new rhythms and themes, resonances and meanings. Traditional music lovers might long for "real" music - as though the sound produced by a bow on a cello is somehow more "authentic" than a sample of a sample of a sample. Where is originality, newness, creativity and authenticity?
Is the DJ a parasite on the creative work of artists nurtured by the culture industry? Or is industry capital a parasite on the productive work of the artist? Or are the works themselves, the audio ephemera, around which such praxis and commerce revolve: the memes - are these the real parasites?
Image - World - Image
Imported from Menticulture
The pinned stars in the sky are the reflections. The genuine stellar light shines and glints on the water.
Hey That's No Way To Say Goodbye - Leonard Cohen [Cover]
The Paradoxical Academic
Imported from Menticulture
The most impressive management skill is to be able to hold and argue in favour of two contrary, exclusive and irreconcilable positions at the same time.
Draft review notes #3
Imported from Menticulture
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
So the everyday is always written off: the mass produce trash culture without quality; they fail to rise up and revolt and against the elites; and they are deceived by machinations against which they have no real defence.
Draft review notes #3
Imported from Menticulture
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
Draft review notes #2
Imported from Menticulture
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
So much for the pressure to conserve industry interests: capital ensures 'quality' and disseminates self-perpetuating ideological discourses, while the vernacular and the demotic voices are marginalised and reminded of their powerlessness.
Draft review notes #2
Imported from Menticulture
[Some contextual notes for my PhD, regarding the status of participatory media in academia and industry]
Kidmapped!
Tim Wright's Kidmapped! journey has resumed and I've built a little mash-up of the mapped media he's made as he travels the route of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel. Check out Kidmapper's blog, youtube, flickr, audioboo, podcasts, twitter and of course, the mashup.
For anyone interested in technical stuff: php periodically talks to the APIs of YouTube, Flickr and AudioBoo to aggregate any geo-tagged content kidmapper creates; the webpage loads up a Gmap, and retrieves a RSS-like feed of all the content, and some Javascript classes add each item to the map, and display the media in their respective place-holders.
I did spend some time trying to make the mashup in Flash, but had so much trouble loading and unloading YouTube movies in AS3 that I nearly wept blood; afer that, building it in JS, which I often find knuckle-tearingly frustrating across browsers, was actually a comparatively joyful experience. Yay!
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-07-23T09:13:36Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Free our data: web developers working to make postcode data freely available | Technology | The Guardian
A simple command-line call to ernestmarples.com will provide a long/lat pair for any of the 1.7m full postcodes
Tags: geo-mapping geodecoding api
Being and Knowing: World as Diegesis
Imported from Menticulture
Another conversation, this time with Shaun, and more thinking through, thinking aloud, thinking thought. Shaun attended all the first year media theory lectures over the last academic year, including the six part series I delivered on narrative. So, he got to hear me rework and reiterate impressionistically over the same endless themes of diegesis and artifice, story and plot, world and representation which I surreptitiously pretended was an overview of narrative theory.
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-07-13T16:50:47Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- An Atlas of Cyberspaces
These maps of Cyberspaces - cybermaps - help us visualise and comprehend the new digital landscapes beyond our computer screen, in the wires of the global communications networks and vast online information resources. The cybermaps, like maps of the real-world, help us navigate the new information landscapes, as well being objects of aesthetic interest. They have been created by 'cyber-explorers' of many different disciplines, and from all corners of the world.
Tags: mapping cyberspace geography visualization
- iPhone Reference Library
iPhone programming documentation
Tags: iphone reference programming
- FMOD music & sound effects system
* FMOD Ex, the low-level sound engine
* FMOD Event System, more abstract, higher level application layer to simplify play back content created with FMOD Designer
* FMOD Designer, the sound designer tool used for authoring complex sound events and music for playback
Tags: sound audio api programming
- openFrameworks: about
a c++ library designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation.
Tags: programming framework library code design
stethoscope - fragment
Imported from Menticulture
In discussion with Fran - we were going through a box of old and antiquated medical instruments he'd collected, objects of curiosity, memory and history - we noted how the stethoscope serves not only to provide a 'virtual world' as Jonathan Sterne puts it (an acoustical representation), but acts as a sort of 'distantiation device' - a prop which helps the doctor to adopt a role and enter into the performance in which the human body is objectified.
Wounded research #2
Imported from Menticulture
The scrawl on the paper is a residue of a thought, and the reading of it now no more retrieves that thought than water restores dried up remains to their original vitality. I'm looking at the few notes I wrote in the phenomenology / depth psychology masterclass, and wondering if the handwriting itself might give me a clue as to the quality and taste of the thoughts and reflections that provoked them. Still, in the distillery they might briefly miss the port that has left the barrel but soon enough they look ahead to the flavour of the whisky. One of the other participants asked me at the time if I was enjoying the class, and I replied that while it was wonderful to be able to dwell for a couple of days on the place of my self in my work, when it was over I'd still have to return to the pressures of the institution and objectify, alienate and commodify my work and pretend I'd somehow contributed value to a knowledge economy. Actually I didn't quite say that: but that's a fancy way of retrospectively reworking the meaning I think I remember trying to put into brief, friendly, conversational words.
Wounded research #1
Imported from Menticulture
Last week I attended a two day masterclass with Robert Romanyshyn, two days of incredibly intense thinking about the role of the researcher in the research: the work of research - or better, since the word 'research' comes with such a lot of alienating baggage, simply - the work - as a vocation which forms a part of the life of the researcher. I thought I'd write some notes here which emerged from the class for me. There was such a lot in it that it's taking time to disentangle the many ideas and responses, aesthetic, intellectual, and emotional, that unlodged themselves from unnoticed peripheral places and swam into view briefly before yet other currents took hold and carried them away. I managed to write some of them on a piece of paper in front of me, but even then, the words are simply spidery shadows of thoughts that are now gone.
Imported from Menticulture
>> notes discrete combinatorial system of language plus 140 character limit implies calculable set of determinable possibilities with finitiude
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-02-17T13:45:52Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
- Rhizome | Wikipedia Art
they are deluded into thinking that they are achieving some sort of clinical objectivity via rational consensus (or that any such objectivity could ever be achieved).
Tags: wikipedia knowledge art epistemology net-art performance objectivity
- Creating Interactive Narrative Structures: The Potential for AI Approaches
Tags: narrative
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-02-16T19:32:52Z]
Systems and Units, Trees and Rhizomes
Imported from Menticulture
So I'm writing up the final lecture on narratives which revolves around the post-structuralist 'decentring' - the advocation, that is, of thinking of rhizomatic rather than arborescent structures.
Narratives: Endings, Meanings and Morals
[Cross-posted from CEMP]
Notes from the fifth keynote in the Narratives series. This lecture is about story-telling people who make sense of themselves, their past, their present and their future by telling stories. Previous lectures: Introduction, then Stories and Structures, then Familiarity and Strangeness, followed by Performers and Players. Good grief… TL;DR?
The Breakfast Club
We begin with the feel-good comfort movie, The Breakfast Club, released in 1985 when I’d just hit my teens. I considered coming in wearing snow-washed jeans and white sneakers and dancing along with Emilio Estevez, but in the end I spared you that ordeal. The point remains, though: the song, the faces, the sheer awesomeness of this film are tied up with who I am, in a way it is difficult to explain to anyone who wasn’t alive at the time and has no idea who Jim Kerr is.
Coming of age
The Breakfast Club belongs to the coming-of-age genre, a cultural phenomenon that appeals to anyone who is either a) coming of age or b) willing to admit they are nostalgic for the time they came of age.
Coming-of-age: a transformation; the transition from childhood to adulthood; maturing, growing up; a melancholy dispossession of childlike innocence; a challenging rite of passage; a joyful blossoming and flowering; the crossing of a ‘liminal’ threshold; a narrative experience.
Do we all somehow fit in the princess / brain / jock / basketcase / criminal categories? When we watch these kids learn to transcend the stereotypes imposed upon them, do we see ourselves in their place, and feel their liberation as our own? Do we simply see them as people we could be friends with, people we’d want to be around, even if we wouldn’t want to be them? Do we imagine ourselves telling Dick where he can stick it?
And doesn’t that model of the stereotype first imposed and then overthrown provide us with a nice image of the tension between the structures of society which socialise us and the agency we use to become textured individuals? The Breakfast Club is a cinema of sociology. Those who we knew utterly through their typology, become in the transcendence of stereotype, unique and unknown.
Transformative Story
The interesting element of The Breakfast Club I want to look at is the mechanism whereby this group of pigeonholed children become individual adults. They learn to tell their stories to each other, confess that the roles that they play have been imposed on them, and in the act of confession itself, they become new selves, in the confidentiality and intimacy of sudden new friendships. Even if their stories are cliched teen-angst stories of peer pressure and parental abuse, they bring their own textured experience to eternal, endlessly repeating narrative structures; every story is the same and yet entirely new and unique. An endlessly self-similar universe generating infinite possibilities.
At this point, the lecture looks as though it will roll on towards Erving Goffman’s performative theories and Michel Foucault’s conception of the confession. Instead we veer into psychotherapy – and again we avoid the obvious psychoanalytical biggies like Freud, Lacan, and Althusser, and instead turn to the chapter, “Narrative Knowing” in John McLeod’s book, Narrative and Psychotherapy.
Narrative Knowing
McLeod’s analysis helps us because it gives us a way of seeing story from ‘the other side’ – not as a way of buying and selling audiences in the media commodity market, but as tools for self-knowledge and therapy. And perhaps we’ll keep in mind both Brecht’s rebellion against catharsis, but also his desire for ‘performance as instruction’ for those playing the roles and enacting the stories – two aspects of Brecht’s thought which seem very much in tension with each other.
McLeod begins by contrasting what he calls narrative knowing vs paradigmatic knowing. Narrative knowing simply refers to the way people use story to understand the world – experientially, subjectively and phenomenologically.
Paradigmatic knowing is the scientific kind of knowledge which has come to dominate so much of the world we live in and how it is grasped, transformed and built around us. Scientific knowledge, as we’ve seen in earlier lectures, is interested in objectivity, repeatability, generalisability, universality, abstraction. McLeod argues that the history of psychotherapy has seen a decline (which he wishes to reverse) in narrative knowing – the profession has striven to be scientifically legitimate, and so has often privileged abstract propositional knowledge over narrative knowing which is seen as ambiguous, vague, illegitimate.
Recall our man in the tree. We can see the tree – it is an object we can comprehend, and we see how it is, in an abstract way, like other trees. But we are far from the tree, and it has lost much of its detail, its character. We do not feel the tree. The man in the tree cannot see the tree as an abstract object – he feels it, and sees it as utterly unique, it is the only tree in the world at that moment, its pressure on his hands, its strength under his feet and his buttocks, the only thing between him and the body-smashing world beneath him.
Structure vs texture, paradigmatic vs narrative knowing.
So let’s continue and see why McLeod thinks we should reclaim narrative knowing, by examining some of the characteristics of story-based knowledge.
The Individual and Story
McLeod gives us some hooks to think about how story helps us as individuals to understand experience.
- Narrative is a window onto the story-teller’s landscape of consciousness
The narratives we use when we understand and recount our experience are shaped by our individual subjective identities and ways of thinking.
- We all have a kind of personal myth
We all have a story with the power to provide our life with meaning. This self-narrative gives coherence to the often fragmented and episodic experiences we undergo, giving us an over-arching sense of purpose and meaning.
- We are made up of a community of selves
We can think of the variety of stories we use to understand our actions, experiences, relationships as multilinear and various, even though there are moments when we must force this discontinuity into a coherent ‘unitary’ narrative (such as job interviews).
Narrative and Identity
These suggestions of narratives as personal myths, helping us to draw the threads of our various personae into a continuous tapestry, allowing us to shape our lives and our identities, give us a way to think about story and self that looks very like Anthony Giddens’ conception of the ‘reflexive project of the self’, described in his 1991 book Modernity and Self-Identity.
Paulo, by Paulo Tonon
Giddens’ ‘reflexive project of the self’ captures an important aspect of how in contemporary Western society the old ‘narratives’ that we used to glue society together (religion, nationality, geography) have slipped away, forcing us to find other ways to think of ourselves and our place in relation to others. Whether it is through consumption (buying commodities) or through performance (getting out there and living), we are constantly constructing a personal sense of history and direction, which is endlessly being modified and re-understood.
Stories and Sense
We continue with McLeod’s analysis of the role of stories in our lives.
- Narrative has sequentiality which implies a future
We think of our life experiences as sequences which follow on from one another. So we carve experience up into discrete ‘chunks’ which succeed each other, and thus there are always implied future segments which go on to become further episodes in our sequences. (Recall Brecht’s episodic theatre versus Aristotle’s dramatic unities).
- Narratives help us to reconcile the ‘exceptional’ and the ‘expected’
Life constantly surprises us, and confounds our expectations, and we use stories to re-tell and re-author events and experiences, to make sense of the senseless, feel assured in the face of the lack of assurances, to comprehend the incomprehensible.
- The re-telling of stories is a problem-solving technique
Narratives are the mechanism whereby we solve the problems of experience – we recast chaotic experiences into causally related sequences, and thereby ‘manage’ them.
Narrative and Therapy
So, we can perhaps see how the occasional inability to enforce a coherence onto these narratives, these communities of selves, is the very dysfunction that ‘talking cures’ strive to therapeutically correct. But the use of story is not limited to the ‘therapeutic episode’ of needing a counsellor or therapist.
David wrote a blog about his cancer. The last entry was on 5 May, 2004. The comments seem no longer to be functional, but I remember that someone, I suppose from David’s family, wrote in the ever-growing list of sympathetic messages that David had died not long after writing that last post. The comments were a stream of good wishes, and thanks to David for sharing his story, and I thank David posthumously for writing his account so that we can learn from him. His words are not abstract, objectified propositions intended as the subject of analysis in a lecture; they are the textured words of a man’s experience.
Day six: The flight by Wolf_of_Deixais
Although David’s writing seems on the surface just to be an account of the progress of his disease, we can see in action many of the ideas McLeod has suggested. David is mastering the use of technical language, re-telling episodes of clinical detail which recast them as parts in a sequence, explaining what happened to cause his symptoms, and he re-authors events by talking about how he and his doctor are “not too surprised or concerned” about the sequence of events: they have been resolved, reconciled with expectations.
While these narratives have not halted the progress of the disease, we cannot understate the fact that David begins that last post with the words: “Hey, things are getting a little better”, and he uses words like “hopefully”, “routine”, “enjoy”, “boost of energy”, and so on. While the details of David’s condition must strike us as appalling, there is clearly a sense in which David’s outlook is positive even in the face of such physical distress, and that his act of narrativisation and authorship has perhaps contributed to that positive outlook. David is more than his condition, more than his body.
Ivan Noble, another man who wrote about the progress of his cancer before his death in 2005, in his last post, wrote:
“What I wanted to do with this column was try to prove that it was possible to survive and beat cancer and not to be crushed by it.
“Even though I have to take my leave now, I feel like I managed it.
“I have not been defeated.
“Thank you once again to everyone who helped me and came with me.
“The last phase now will, I know, not be easy but I know that I will be looked after as I always have been.
“I will end with a plea. I still have no idea why I ended up with a cancer, but plenty of other cancer patients know what made them ill.
“If two or three people stop smoking as a result of anything I have ever written then the one of them who would have got cancer will live and all my scribblings will have been worthwhile. “
Here again we see the same characteristics of making sense, managing, being worthwhile – assuming a future, a meaning, purpose. Those who die, it is said in a cliched sort of way, live on in the stories we tell about them. But then, aren’t those of us who live, only really alive in the stories we tell about ourselves and each other? Maybe the real secrets to eternal life and immortality lie in the narratives of living, rather than sciences of the body.
Story and Moral Order
Death is the ultimate in endings, and ensuring that death has meaning and purpose is a crucial part of telling stories with happy endings. These stories are unhappy in very real sense of course, and it can seem churlish to say we should look at the bright side. But we can see a sense in which story is used to bring order and meaning to events and experiences which seem to have no sense or purpose. McLeod picks up on this aspect of story too.
- Narratives have morals
Stories convey a moral order, a prescription for behaviour, categorisations of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, a moral landscape.
Blowup
Let’s leave the sad business of making sense of death and turn to the screening of the week and the business of making sense of death! Blowup (Antonioni, 1966) is another murder-mystery, albeit a rather oblique and unconventional murder mystery. We’re not even sure there is a murder! (And by the way, Rear Window and Memento are also murder mysteries – and I even concede that 2001: A Space Odyssey has a murder scene – and I swear I only noticed the heavy murder theme after I’d picked the films!)
Our hero Thomas takes photos of a couple in a park. The woman notices and want him to give her the film. He goes home and develops the film, and starts hanging the photos up around his studio. He moves them around, re-develops some of them, blows others of them up, and re-hangs them – you could even say he is editing them together. There’s a moment when Antonioni simply cuts from one photo to the next – a mise en abîme if ever there was one.
What is remarkable about this sequence is that it of course emerges that Thomas has just witnessed a murder, though he didn’t actually witness it until he had found it in his pictures, in the process of editing. It is as though he was unable to comprehend the ‘reality’ of events until he pieced the fragmentary records of those events together in later tranquillity. It takes him a long time to peer into his photos and produce the story he does, and even then he deciphers the story from blowups which have started to look very like the abstract paintings his friend Ron has created.
We cannot escape the possible hint in the film that Thomas is losing his mind. Indeed, the Soviet critic Juri Lotman saw this film as a damning indictment of the decadence of London in the ‘swinging sixties’. Did he really see a body? How could he have missed a murder? Does the mime tennis ball really make the sound a real tennis ball? Etc.
But we also might wonder if we are being asked to think about whether ‘living in the moment’ perhaps forces us to stop ‘perceiving the events’. We only understand events – maybe we even only perceive events – in retrospect, through reflection, memory, mental editing. We are perhaps as likely to find the ‘truth’ in an abstract work of art as we are likely to find it by living in the moment.
The Way of the World
This existential thought provokes us to question how we can possibly grasp reality at all, and we might consider the consequences of this idea: that we construct our own reality by imposing order onto it, rather than vice-versa. We are the authors of reality.
Historically, of course, many societies have considered that God was the author of reality, and the fact that we have usurped him is a sign of the heights to which human ambition can aspire. Small wonder that we have told stories of hubris since the dawn of time. All that has been in the power of gods – the gift of creation, the beginning of life, providence, giving and taking away, working in mysterious ways, the power of life and death – beginnings, middles and ends – is in the hands of the story-teller.
And what is this conception of providence? It’s a slippery idea which only makes sense if one considers that it is a superintendence over the ‘way of the world’ in the gift of the author – God, or the human mind, whichever you prefer. The author of the work is the equivalent of the God in His heaven. But if we are all authors of reality, how is there anything other than a cacophony?
Social Constructions
We’ll return to some more of McLeod’s observations, which will start to help us understand story as more socially constructed than we’ve seen so far in this essay, which has focussed thus far on the story as an individual’s tool for understanding the world.
- Narratives are always socially constructed
Story is always an act of communication, a action between a teller and an audience (even if that audience consists of nothing more than our own community of selves).
- Narratives are liminal
Stories provide liminality – thresholds between the autonomous bounded self and the social and interpersonal dimensions of our sense of who we are.
- Narratives are ambiguous
Stories consist of ambiguities which allow for creative spaces between the teller and the audience. No narrative is a complete telling and recounting, since such completeness would require exhaustive detail and infinite resources of time, perception and knowledge (godlike qualities?). Narratives are selective, and rely on ambiguity. Such ambiguities create dynamics and dialogues between the story-teller and the audience, spaces in which interpretation occurs.
- Narrative is cathartic
Catharsis is itself an ambiguous term. We’ve seen that Aristotle used it to describe a ‘release’ of emotion through pity or fear. Brecht wanted to do away with it, because it gave too much comfort where he wanted there to be challenge. Whatever it is though, it must rely on recognition, fellow-feeling, empathy, and perhaps even sympathy. Catharsis, then, is a social act.
- Our ongoing personal narratives are co-constructed
We tell each other stories as part of our social bonding, the way we connect to others. McLeod gives the example of ‘adventure stories’, in which people exchange tales of the big fish they have caught. The singing scene (“show me the way to go home”) in Jaws is the perfect example, in which Quint and Matt swap their scar stories and overcome their initial mutual mistrust.
- Narratives often arise around sites of social conflict
Story-telling is often used as a way of resolving tensions and conflicts and offering ‘mediation’ – the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission was just such a forum, in which victims and the aggrieved were given the opportunity to have their voices heard and their stories told, as part of a socal ‘healing’ process.
Social Trauma
911 used to be just the number to dial to phone the American emergency services. Now, it is something more – more than any exhaustive list I could write now. It is an event, a calamity, an attack, an act of terror, a cipher for history, and an aggregation of connotations ever-changing and ever-evolving. We know where we were – hence it becomes the site of a million stories. Gordon McDowell’s 911 Timeline shows how just a few of them unfolded on mainstream TV networks.
Away from the broadcast media, people were going online and recording the event in other ways. Metafilter still has the threads from the day, such as this one, complete with incorrect spelling intact – Plane crashes in to the word trade center: a narrative in which the events are inferred and indirectly described, with meanings, responses and reactions providing a many-voiced lens onto something which has become more than real.
If, as we’ve seen, story is a crucial part of personal therapy and social reconciliation, this might be a good moment to ask ourselves whether the mass media environment we live with provides the kind of story spaces which facilitate such reconciliation and therapeutic possibilities?
Apocalypse and After
Apocalypse is the last word in endings. Is it perhaps because we all sooner or later confront our own mortality that we collectively imagine the mortality of society, the species and the world we inhabit. Eschatologists could tell you whether all cultures and societies have eschaton myths. It is perhaps the ultimate moral message: your actions today will determine your fate for eternity, whether you will be swept into the arms of bliss or cast out in to endless torment. A singularity, if you like, around a dichotomy.
Other imaginings of future need not be so finite. There are countless recurring stories, particularly fertile in science fiction, in which dysfunctional futures are depicted – 1984 (Orwell, 1948), Brazil (Gilliam, 1985), We (Zamyatin, 1921), and Metropolis (Lang, 1927). In this scene from Metropolis, we see the worker caste of a future nightmare city. The men are an extension of the machine.
These post-apocalyptic visions are profoundly schizophrenic, torn as they always seem to be along a utopian / dystopian axis. Metropolis separates out society into the toiling underground workers who never see daylight, and the luxurious above-ground owners who are the planners and thinkers. (There’s a mental model right there.) More interestingly, though, these opposed yet mutually interdependent classes mirror the class conflicts and social upheavals which culminated, a decade later, in World War II.
In Zamyatin’s We, the utopian vision of a reasonable, mathematically precise society, in which all conflict has been smoothed away through calculated rational action is punctured by a dystopic underlying feral, inescapably animal human nature. This allegorises the rise of mechanisation, industrialisation, and rationalistic approaches to organising social order as exemplified in the practices and ideals of the new communist Russian society. His insistence on criticising the prevailing social orthodoxies eventually led to his exile from Stalin’s Russia, like so many other artists who were simply unable to reconcile their creative freedom with the totalitarianism of Soviet Russia, and paid the price of either death or exile.
Perhaps we can start to see these dystopic visions as imagined exaggerations of current problems, psychological fears and social tensions, projected into a future storyworld in which the issues can be repeatedly worked out, re-authored, re-cast and perhaps even reconciled in a social, fictional, therapeutic episode?
Apollo and Dionysius
In his 1872 work The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche outlines a dichotomy in the human condition which lies at the heart of all tragedy – whether it is brought about through hubris, calamity, dysfunction or self-destruction. He represents these opposing impulses by the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysius.
Apollo is the god of visual arts, Dionysius of the musical arts; Apollo represents reason and ration, Dionysius intoxication and rapture; Apollo represents individualism, Dionysius represents the mob; Apollo brings light and awe, Dionysius narcosis and carnality. This schism is the inescapable condition which works its way through the stories of individuals, societies and the species.
We need not look too far to find examples of places where our rational intentions fall prey to irrationalism: market-places are built around models of humans as rational actors, yet our lives are ruled by its paranoid, lunatic, chaotic fluctuations and catastrophes. The West likes to narrativise the clash with Islamic fundamentalism as a battle between Enlightenment-led, democratic values against archaic and atavistic fanaticism. Islam as a religion, as Jim Al-Khalili recently demonstrated in his series, Science and Islam (BBC, 2009), is based on reason and compassion, and we can imagine the same contemporary narrative as a story of a reasonable and compassionate devoutness being colonised by the venality and corruption of consumerism and global capital.
And in the technologically self-extending world depicted in Frank Theys’ documentary Technocalyps (2006), we see the same story retold as the competition to be the next step in evolution: we have the technological possibility to direct our own evolution as a species. Do we embrace genetic modification, artificial intelligence, body modification, and nano-technologies for the light-promising, rational future? Or do we fear that our fundamentally animal baseness will spell doom for any such endeavour?
In Zamyatin’s We, our narrator, D-503, stands in a street blanketed with fog. He is enveloped all around by the utterly white, the pure clean white of the opaque fog. A sudden blood red cut in the whiteness – there appears the lips of the woman, the object of his new irrational obsession, her lips appear as though cut from the white world with a sharp knife, “the sweet blood still dripping”.
Too Long Didn’t Read
These are some of the stories of individuals, societies and the species. We are authors who endlessly author and re-author. We narrativise our lives in order to make sense of experience. We use stories to ensure our mental well-being in the face of chaos and the blank face of the universe. We build societies through the social construction of stories, and we work to build our bridges through these stories. We imagine our futures, our deaths, and our destinies, both as individuals, but also as societies and as species, through the imaginative re-working of our recurring fears and hopes.
Narratives: Familiarity and Strangeness
[Cross-posted at CEMP]
Notes from the third keynote in the Narratives series. This lecture deals with rationality and inevitability, Aristotle and Brecht, structuralism and formalism, mimesis and alienation. Previous lectures: Introduction followed by Stories and Structures. Whoah… TL;DR? This week’s shoutometer (warning – may cause offence).
Doing it for effect
As I’ve pointed out above, the shoutometer for this lecture was a little offensive. I took that offence further. I told you all that you are pathetic, lazy and unimaginative. I accused you of having no ideas, and that all the work you submit is entirely derivative, unoriginal and, frankly, boring.
I don’t know how convincing you found my rant, but I did reveal my words were part of, in effect, a performance – one designed to alienate you. It was my intention to make you feel a little uncomfortable, to make you wonder why I was breaking the usual conventions of the lecture format and the traditional confidence and good humour of the teacher – student relationship.
I was doing it for effect, and ‘doing it for effect’ is the simplest way of thinking about the subject of this lecture.
Right to reply
I gave you the opportunity to tell me what was wrong with my introduction. You said:
- my words were demotivating
- I was being too general
- you also said I waste time at the start, and rush things at the end. This is quite true.
I had some prepared ideas about why my introduction was inappropriate:
- I was needlessly offensive
- I was over-generalising about individuals too much
- I broke the normal rules of the teaching situation, which require at least mutual respect
And it’s possible, (and this was my hope), that by ‘breaking the rules’ in this way, I was making you think about why I might be saying the words I was saying: whether what I was saying was true (do you contribute enough to your own learning, or do you expect teachers to inject knowledge into your heads?), but also I wanted you to think about the teaching situation. What should our situation be like? Why should it be like that? Why are things the way they are? And maybe, somewhat optimistically, I hoped that you might rise up against me, and rebel against my patronising rant – depose the tyrant teacher.
These questions are fundamental to the subjects of this lecture: the idea of alienation; Marxism and politically motivated thought in general; the agenda of artists and theorists interested (broadly-speaking, and at the risk of over-simplification) in formalism
Recap: science, structuralism and story
So let’s recap where we got to last time. We said that structuralists were interested in understanding the internal structure of story using what they thought of as a scientifically rigourous method. We can think of them laying out the entire diegetic story and looking synchronically at all of its components (diachronic and intertextual) as ranged around a set of binary oppositions such as good/bad, friend/foe, familiar/strange, etc. This analysis will surely tell us (so say the structuralists) what underlying logic ‘governs’ the story.
There are some very strong reasons for thinking that the structuralists’ approach is useful. Saussure’s analysis of language has bequeathed us with an entire discipline (semiotics) and a body of knowledge which looks in depth at how communication works, (though we should do well to remember that not everyone subscribes to the tenets of Saussurian semiology). But we can also note some problems with it. Structuralists have tended towards trying to ‘universalise’ their findings – this is a consequence of ‘scientistic’ thinking which can be criticised for its reductionism and positivism (recall last week’s man in the tree). Or, to put it another way, do we really want to risk going after one-truth-for-all ideas (structure), at the expense of forgetting to celebrate and explore the uniqueness of individual experience (texture)?
I’m just going to bang this point home a little harder: critics of adopting scientistic approaches to understanding human culture and human nature point out that things like eugenics, euthanasia, Nazi gas chambers, phrenology and anti-semitism have all found justification in science and rational thought. While scientists would argue that the knowledge they pursue is “value-free”, that doesn’t stop people with extreme values trying to co-opt scientific thought.
What story?
At a far more trivial level, we saw in the last lecture that the very subject which structuralists want to analyse disappears like mist dispelling before our eyes if we look at it too hard. Memento showed us that the diegesis is pure illusion. We begin the film, with Lenny, trying to piece together the puzzle of his revenge, and we assume that the story that we see, provided to us by the film camera, is reliable, and that at the very least, even if Lenny might be mistaken, we can still solve the puzzle. But the repetition of a scene in which we see, first, Lenny inject his wife’s leg with insulin, and then secondly, Lenny pinch his wife’s leg between his finger and thumbs, tell us that nothing we have seen is reliable. The entire ‘coherent diegesis’ of the storyworld we have seen may be nothing but hallucination. There is no ‘story’ independent of plot, available for structuralists to study.
Here’s another way of thinking about it. As viewers, we look for the ‘foundational’ diegesis. At first we think that maybe Lenny is a justified avenging killer. Then we suspect he may have been ‘played’ by somebody trying to persuade him to kill Teddy. Then we think that maybe he’s been fooling himself in order to give his own life meaning. Then we wonder if his wife really is dead and perhaps she survived? Then we wonder if Sammy Jankis really exists, and perhaps Lenny is actually Sammy Jankis? Then we wonder if, actually, maybe the whole film was a hallucination in an institutionalised man’s head.
This entire sequence of wonderings is a search for the foundational diegesis or ‘underlying’ truth. But even given the usual caveats that the film is supposed to be fiction, the storyworld presented by the film (a solitary hallucination) cannot possibly have any ‘foundational diegesis’ at all, since it can only be a contradiction (there was no hallucination for us to see in order to realise that it was all hallucination). There is no story!
There is no ‘story’ without ‘plot’.
Story is a function of plot.
Story is the product of plot.
We start with plot and we make story.
There is no ‘diegesis’ without ‘framing’.
Diegesis is a function of framing.
Diegesis is the product of framing.
We start with framing and we make ‘diegesis’.
To understand this problem more clearly we’ll try to use the idea of mimesis as a way to think about the storyworlds we experience. Mimesis is a key idea when considering what ‘story’ might do. In order for us to believe that a storyworld is possible, it must be believable – and mimesis capture this idea of believability.
Before we get to mimesis, though, we take a detour through this week’s screening, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A metaphor for what?
A mysterious monolith enters the diegesis at various times in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its first appearance occurs during the sequence called ‘The Dawn of Man’, in which we see ape-like creatures, whom we take to be the ancestor of homo sapiens, discovering this unfamiliar object. Immediately thereafter, we see one of the proto-human apes sitting and looking at a piles of bones. We see the outline of the monolith, and return to the ape, who continues to look at the bones, as the non-diegetic soundtrack of Strauss’ Thus Spake Zarathrustra plays, until eventually the ape grasps what looks like a femur and starts smashing the other bones with it like a hammer. Kubrick intercuts shots of a boar falling to the ground as the ape smashes the white bones and skull on the ground before him. Shortly afterwards, we see the first murder committed, as the apes who have learned to use bones as tools compete for the water resources with other apes. In a triumphant gesture, the victorious ape hurls his bone weapon into the air. As it falls back to earth, Kubrick makes one of the most famous cuts in film: from an image of the bone in mid air to a spacecraft drifting through space.
Of course, I would not wish to suggest that the interpretation I offer here is the only one, the best, or the right one. The only thing I will say about the interpretation I offer here is that it helps to illustrate some of our ideas in these lectures, and might help us to grasp some of the concepts.
The monolith is rather abstract in form. It seems entirely unnatural given its formal properties – rectangular, composed of sharp right angled corners, standing on its end as if painstakingly placed, indeed, as though it were man-made and carefully constructed. Given that the diegesis of the film tells us that we are observing the dawn of man, then clearly the monolith cannot be a man-made object. Alien then? Perhaps the monolith is an alien artefact, and Kubrick simply wants to tease us by not showing us the the aliens who placed it there as the apes slept. But in these sorts of assessments we are trying to assume that Kubrick’s story is figurative – that what we see on screen is supposed to be an accurate representation of some kind of coherent diegesis, when we might more profitably understand Kubrick’s story non-figuratively, abstractly – the very abstract nature of the monolith perhaps hints that it should be interpreted conceptually rather than naturalistically.
We might also read the monolith’s presence at the dawn of the apes’ use of a bone as a hammer and a weapon as being a causal factor. The figure of the monolith represents in this reading the evolutionary leap that has just occurred – from an ape which is prey to big cats and other apes, to an ape which has tools (and we should remind ourselves that, etymologically, the word ‘technology’ simply refers to the human acquisition of tools and crafts). The monolith is present at the dawn of man – when man ceases to be an animal, and becomes a reasoning, rational, thinking being. The ape’s intent staring down at the bones as he sits on the ground suggests precisely that these are the first moments in which what we could recognise as human thought occurs. The newly acquired ability to think leads directly to the killing of another ape, and then, in the cut from the bone-tool to the space-craft tool, perhaps we can read the utter inevitability of the technological future.
So if we grant that Kubrick is being free with the mixing of diegetic and non-diegetic material (the monolith is just as metaphorical and non-diegetic as the Strauss soundtrack), and we see the presence of the monolith as being causally related to the evolutionary development of rationality in man, then it seems reasonable to suggest that the monolith itself represents man’s newly acquired attribute: ration – the ability to engage in abstract reasoning, illustrated figuratively and metaphorically by the abstract form of the monolith. The advent of rationality in man leads immediately to murder (and by extension, war) and in the longer term, the inevitable and unavoidable technological extension of man into space. The dawn of ration in man sets in chain a sequence of events which inexorably propels mankind forward into his destiny.
Of course none of these interpretations necessarily discount other suggestions as to the meanings intended by the monolith – such as that it represents the cinema (having similar dimensions as a cinema screen turned on its side). Rather I just want to hold onto some thoughts about the problematic nature of looking for an internally coherent diegesis, and the notion of the apparent inevitability, the deterministic, technological inexorability of human ration. Meanwhile we return to our exploration of mimesis.
Mimesis
Let us consider notions of believability and mimesis. Traditionally, mimesis is what grants a story the ability to be believed – the audience agrees to suspend its disbelief in return for a few promises from the story:
- that there will be a faithfulness of representation, that the story will imitate real life in a believable fashion.
- this imitative contract demands that the diegesis should be coherent and self-consistent
- such coherence and self-consistence should be maintained by obeying the laws of a formal system (such as causality, chronological consistence, etc)
It is by adhering to these criteria that stories become susceptible to a rigorous structural analysis. Since structuralism assumes the fundamental explicability of narrative, so narratives must be coherent, rationalisable and explicable. Such assumptions can be said to flow naturally from an Aristotelian approach to describing narrative.
Aristotelian narrative
While much of the analysis of narrative (or narratology or narrative theory) that we encounter casts itself as a way of understanding the phenomenon of story-telling, there was a time when thinkers saw themselves as advising and prescribing the remit and practices of story-tellers, rather than simply analysing their products. Aristotle’s work makes sense if you consider that this ancient Greek philosopher saw his work as much more didactic than simply critical. Hence his writings on drama often read like rules for creating good drama, rather than just describing what dramatists produce.
Some of his key ideas include:
- unities of time, action and place: the drama should depict a single complete action, unfolding over a single time frame, usually of no more than 24 hours, occurring in one geographical location
- anagnorisis: recognition and identification of the audience with the characters, events and situations
- catharsis: literally, ‘purgation’ – pity and fear are aroused in the audience, tensions build up, and these emotional states are ‘released’ (or purged) by the resolution of the narrative
- mimesis: the imitative depiction of the unfolding storyworld is a key to Aristotle’s other criteria: the unities help to ensure the drama appears ‘realistic’; the audience identifies with characters and events precisely because they are ‘believable’; and catharsis occurs only if the audience can empathise and understand – project themselves onto and into the storyworld. Mimesis is thus the necessary verisimitude which enables the drama to work its purpose.
A key point Aristotle makes is that if the drama is not a complete unified whole, the work will be disjointed or ‘disturbed’.
Mimesis and diegesis
Clearly the Aristotelian view of the necessary unitary nature of diegesis relies on mimesis. So trying to think about a film like Memento in terms of mimesis may be illuminating.
Memento is an interesting case since on first viewing it is initially somewhat confusing – the opening scene disobeys the laws of gravity (it runs the recorded film in reverse), and the subsequent scenes undermine our generic expectations by overlapping and repeating, until we realise that the scenes are unfolding in reverse order, and the repetitions act as a formal part of the grammar of this particular narrative, signalling how we should be decoding its formal system.
Once we have worked out how the syntax of the film works, the story then becomes somewhat more transparent as we are able to piece together the narrative, and engage with the puzzles of the film. Once we’ve become familiar with the storyworld, though, confusion strikes again, since, as we’ve already seen, the diegesis disintegrates.
One way of thinking of these changes in the penetrability of the story of Memento could be to think in terms of mimesis: the mechanisms of the story are non-mimetic, anti-mimetic, non-imitative … whatever the opposite of mimesis is (and take a moment to think about what the opposite of mimesis might mean – is it ‘fantastic’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘non-sensical’, ‘illogical’, ‘unnatural’, or in the Aristotelian sense, ‘disturbing and distracting’?). Since we’ve already established that Memento‘s diegesis is unstable and logically incoherent, where does that leave us? Well, it tells us that at least in the case of Memento, focussing on the content of the diegesis in order to ‘comprehend’ the nature or meaning of narrative is counterproductive. The diegesis is an illusionary property of the act of story-telling – the plot.
Here we see an extremely good reason, then, to move our examination away from story and onto plot – the framing devices used to conjure and encircle the diegesis. This is exactly what formalism is all about.
Formalism
We’ve already encountered formalism in the shape (form?) of Vladimir Propp, who analysed folk tales and distilled them into their discrete essential and interchangeable components (or functions). Indeed, Propp, along with other influential thinkers like Saussure, are considered to be the ‘fore-fathers’ of structuralism, since the analytical approach to understanding story which structuralism adopts has inherited some of the methods of the formalists.
While formalism and structuralism sound as though they ought to be similar things (what is the difference between form and structure?), they are in fact focussed on different things. Historically, it is true that structuralist approaches to culture (language, story, the subconscious) followed from, grew out of, and owes a large debt to formalism which is precedes structuralism. The key difference (and remember that I’m simplifying and generalising here in order to make a point) is that formalism is interested in the mechanisms of representation (plot, sjuzet, framing, story-telling, practices and techniques) and how the content of representation (story, fabula, diegesis) is conjured, rather than the content of representation itself, and what the internal structure of that content tells us about universal truths.
In practice, of course, structuralists can very easily incorporate formalist ideas into their rationalised schematic analysis of stories, and formalists are often also concerned about the content of stories, which is precisely why they are keen to understand how those stories are told. The point for our purposes is simply to understand the different ways that these schools of thought have approached the understanding of story and narrative.
The tale and the telling
Let us remind ourselves of the distinction between what a diegesis ‘contains’ and how it is framed, through an example: in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a space hostess traverses a circular, cylindrical corridor in a space craft carrying a tray. She approaches the foreground as we view her, collects an extra tray from a dispenser, turns around and returns to the corridor entrance. Before she leaves the corridor by way of the entrance through which she entered, she turns to the side and starts to walk up the side of the corridor’s circular wall. The camera remains static throughout this sequence, such that the hostess eventually ends up upside-down as we view her.
In the next shot, we see the hostess reappear from the other side of the doorway. Just as we left her, she is upside-down as she enters the cabin to bring the contents of the trays to the pilots. As she enters, though, the camera itself spins around and ‘corrects’ itself so that the hostess appears to be standing upright on the floor, rather than walking upside-down on the ceiling.
We infer from this sequence of course that gravity in the space-craft is mutable enough that such bizarre contortions of space and shape can be connected together to form a liveable and apparently normal transport service. So far so good. What happens though is that our attention is drawn away from the diegesis to the presence of the camera. The divergence of the ‘gravity’ of the diegesis and the ‘gravity’ of the camera is the device through which Kubrick ‘tells’ us of the nature of the storyworld.
For just a moment the illusion is broken; the mimesis falls away; the diegesis is punctured. We are pushed away, distanced, estranged: alienated.
Formalism and anti-mimesis?
If, as we’ve seen from Aristotelian approaches to narrative, the believability and purpose of a story is best served through mimesis, then deliberately paying attention to the form (as formalist critics do) or experimenting with formal systems (as formalist artists do), must undermine mimesis, and believability. Why would we want to be suddenly pushed out of the storyworld? Let’s look at some examples from 20th century art history.
Cubism
Apollinaire said of cubism that “what distinguishes it from the former way of painting is that it is not an imitative but a conceptual art which aspires to raise itself to the level of creation”. What can he mean?
According to art C20 DVD (Hazan, 2005), cubism is a part of “the unending process of research by painters into space, perspective and the expression of volume on the two-dimensional picture surface”. In the act of pictorial representation, the three-dimensional world, moving inexorably through time, is fore-shortened and flattened into a snapshot in two dimensions. The cubist might argue that mimetic approaches to art which aim for ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ depictions of an external reality are actually attempts to disguise the manufactured nature and the actual process of artistic work – to encourage the suspension of disbelief, to make the spectator forget the artifice in the art. Such disguises and sleights of hand are literally and morally speaking – illusions.
Pablo Picasso, Trois Femmes, 1908
However, were a painter to attempt to capture something of the lost dimensions what might that painter depict? Multiple perspectives, and captured severally over different moments in time, forced together onto the same canvas? What jumble and confusion might arise? We would look at such depictions and wonder what they might mean, wonder what kind of creature could really look like that, perhaps even wonder what sort of lunatic might see and paint in such a way. Spectators entrenched in traditions, with interests in the status quo, and reputations built on the mainstream, might recoil and decry such works, proving themselves to be reactionary and conservative. More forward-looking progressives might think more about what such work might mean: their attention drawn to the form of the work, they question the nature of the work and the whole enterprise itself. Aren’t such people dangerous? The young thousands rising unremittingly from the fountain of youth with diamonds in their mouth, ready to throw over the old order?
Futurism
The futurist art movement which emerged mostly in Italy in the early 20th century was self-consciously forward-looking and overtly denounced tradition, prefering instead to celebrate modernity and the triumph of technology. According to art C20 DVD (Hazan, 2005), futurism reflected a “rejection of the past and the advent of a new aesthetic that suited the world of speed, machines and the modern city.” The anti-mimesis and formal experiments of the futurists was a conscious effort to capture modernity, with its speed and movement.
Fortunato Depero, Fulmine compositore, 1926
Once again, the avant-garde can be seen as politically oriented, but in the case of futurism the optimism and verve that came with embracing modernity, mechanisation and technology also had a nationalistic edge verging on supremacism. Some might say it was playing into the hands of fascist tendencies which became prominent in the ultimate clash of ideologies – the two world wars.
Surrealism
The surrealist trick was to experiment not so much with the signs of craft (as did cubism and futurism) but to push the suspension of disbelief in the opposite direction – rather than puncture illusion and estrange the spectator through drawing the attention to the artifice and mechanics of the work, they instead pushed realism to breaking point – to become, literally, more than real. Impossible and phantasmagoric dimensions not of space or time, but of imagination and hallucination, were depicted with the utmost verisimilitude – pseudo-photographs of the subconscious. This technique was designed “to liberate the mind by emphasising the unconscious mind and the attainment of a state different from, “more than”, and ultimately truer than everyday reality: the ‘sur/uber/super-real’.
Rene Magritte , The Double Secret, c1927
Ironically, given the surrealists’ revolutionist manifesto, their work is one of the avant-garde schools which has been most easily embraced by the mainstream, resulting in countless Dali prints adorning the walls of student accommodation, and Dali himself ending up as a pale caricature of the revolutionary vision which surrealism first embarked upon. Surrealism is quite normal, now – another indication of the way in which the mainstream of popular culture is as happy eating any challenges to it as capitalism is happy to co-opt any counter-cultural activist movement it encounters… embrace and extend, indeed.
Verfremdungseffekt
The idea of defamiliarisation, dehabitualisation, distantiation, ostranenie, estrangement and alienation – of seeing the world anew – can be traced back to Russian formalists such as Victor Shklovsky who wanted to ‘defamiliarise’ the products and techniques of art and culture. We could see Propp’s analysis of the folk tale as a way of making folk tales look unfamiliar: laying bare the device, because the device is ideological. The subject of ideology is explored in this online lecture.
Bertholt Brecht (1898 – 1956) was a profoundly influential German poet and playwright and a Marxist through and through. We might even see his entire body of work as directed, relentlessly, at furthering his political ideals. He’s particularly known for his theories of estrangement.
The German word “Verfremdungseffekt” is better than any of the English translations for it, which all carry negative connotations which aren’t necessarily appropriate: alienation or estrangement . It literally means: the effect of making something seem foreign or strange. Brecht used it in his theatrical discipline in a very specific way: to break the illusion of the diegesis, or draw the audience’s attention to the fact that they were watching a fiction.
Brecht’s biographer, Esslin, describes Verfremdungeffekt thus:
“the audience must be discouraged from losing its critical detachment by identification with one or more of the characters: the opposite of identification is the maintenance of a separate existence by being kept apart, alien, strange…” (Esslin, 1959, p115)
Brecht’s techniques to ‘make strange’ included informing the audience of the outcome or denouement at the start – thus shattering any chance of suspense; encouraging the actors not to act ‘naturalistically’; and structuring the play in an episodic fashion, rather than as one Aristotelian whole sweeping towards an inevitable climax:
“The construction of the plays […], which rejects the logically built, well-made play, is free from the need of creating suspense, loosely knit, and episodic, instead of mounting to a dynamic climax, the story unfolds in a number of separate situations, each rounded and complete in itself.” (Esslin, 1959, p118)
The normal, Aristotelian, emphasis normally placed on ideas of identification, catharsis, and mimesis, is repeatedly criticised by C20th Marxists like Brecht. Theodor Adorno was also critical of film for the same reasons: by immersing oneself in the illusion of fiction, and allowing oneself to be swept along in the diegesis of the story, one loses one’s critical faculty; one’s imagination is silenced; one is not able to question the actions and events that take place – they are inevitable. This is one of the key aspects of Brecht’s rebellion against the theatrical conventions that were traceable back to Aristotle: the rejection of inevitability.
Revolutionary Theatre
A key aspect of the kind of theatre that Aristotle described is the privileged position of the audience. Dramatic irony – when you know something a character in a narrative does not – depends on the audience’s ability to see all the action. The audience has the comfort of having a kind of omniscience – being informed of the disparate events that characters are not party to. Those events have causes and effects, which unfold as causes and effects do – and try as they might, the characters are unable to circumvent their fate: the outcome of the narrative is inevitable, inexorable – the way of the world or the will of the Gods.
So Brecht wanted his audience not to ‘immerse’ themselves in the diegesis of the story. Rather than avoiding ‘disturbance’ as Aristotle advised, Brecht wanted to encourage disturbance. He wanted his audience to retain their critical faculties, to retain their disbelief. This way, perhaps they might concentrate on why and how events unfolded before them, instead of blindly accepting them as the inevitable destinies of mankind. If destinies are not inevitable, then destinies can change; we need not look to the Gods or to fate to determine the future: we can act and make the future ourselves.
For a revolutionary socialist, these ideas are profoundly meaningful – Brecht, in short, wanted to make a kind of theatre that would foment revolution: by challenging preconceptions, complacency, ideology. More online lectures on Ideologies and Marxism, if you need them ….
Estrangement today
Of course, many of the techniques of estrangement end up being co-opted as normal dramatic techniques. The ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ in which characters address the audience directly are often used as another device in the story-tellers toolkit.
Tyler Durden looks straight at us, as the edges of the film quiver in and out of the scene behind him, and tells us we are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world. Indeed, Fight Club is full of classic estranging techniques, such as drawing attention to the ‘cigarette burn’ spot, showing us Ed Norton’s inner penguin, superimposing the Ikea catalogue onto the dream apartment. Hell, Fight Club even tells us a story about how we could destroy the entire vampiric capitalist machine without having to kill a single innocent human being. Clearly, though, despite being confronted with the possibility of changing the world, neither Brecht’s playgoers, nor the Fight Club audiences walk out of theatres and cinemas ready to start a revolution.
Understanding the world or changing the world?
I hope that what is starting to emerge here is a contrast between the goals of different kinds of theory. Structuralist theory, I have argued, assumes that human beings, culture, the subconscious, language, etc, are fundamentally explicable, and adopting a rational and scientific approach offers the promise of providing those explanations. Formalist thought, meanwhile, is concerned less with trying to explain the world, but more with trying to render it inexplicable or surprising, to demonstrate its malleability and ultimately to persuade us that we can affect and change it. Instead of a rational, deterministic universe in which outcomes are causally connected and inevitable, we are offered a world of potential, openness and possibility.
In the lecture I suggested that, for me at least, Brecht was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. I find his political approach to his craft inspiring. But I also think his intellectual ideas have a much broader relevance.
Puzzlement
If the politically committed artistic act of drawing attention to the artifice of representation might make us see the world anew, then perhaps one aspect of that process is puzzlement. When Brecht makes his audience think, when he pushes them out of the diegesis and forces them to wonder about the alternatives, he must puzzle them. “Why is this character breaking the fourth wall?” “What else might happen to avoid the inevitable tragedy of fate?” Why is the world the way it is?”
This act of ‘enpuzzlement’, the presenting of a puzzle*, is a nuance of narrative that provokes a host of new questions. Where does play fit into narrative?
‘Play’ will be the subject of the next lecture in this series.
- addle, amaze, bamboozle, beat, befog, befuddle, bemuse, bewilder, complicate, confound, discombobulate, disconcert, distract, disturb, dumbfound, flabbergast, floor, flummox, foil, frustrate, mystify, nonplus, obscure, perplex, pose, rattle, stir, stumble, stump, throw
Too Long Didn’t Read
Structuralists want to make the humanities into a science. Science deals quite well with material matters, but there are problems when it comes to imaginary things like minds, ideas and stories. Formalists want to understand the devices humans use to tell stories and communicate ideas about the world, and they often do this because they want to change the world. Aristotle prescribed techniques for story-telling that emphasise mimesis, verisimilitude and ‘suspension of disbelief’. Brecht prescribed techniques for story-telling that emphasise alienation, political action and suspension of the suspension of disbelief. Is being puzzled by a story a good thing or a bad thing? Tune in for the next installment to find out!!!!!
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-01-23T13:15:18Z]
Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-01-22T17:22:04Z]
imported from del.icio.us:joeflintham
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Linkage - [del.icio.us: 2009-01-19T12:18:07Z]
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