A couple of categories dominate mini-comics at SPX: the quick-and-dirty ones with simple drawings and simple or no text, usually photocopied, and the visual-artifacts-with-really-nice-art ones, which are beautifully drawn and decently- to well-printed, but often with “stories” that are rarely more than journal entries or slice-of-the-mundane or just random patter – hat racks for the high-quality art.
Exceptions to the hat rack problem are most often found in wordless mini-comics. The best example in my stash is Alexis Frederick-Frost’s simple but gorgeous “Voyage.” (I originally didn’t think this comic had a prose name: it’s not on the comic and I didn’t immediately locate it on his blog; I’ve been calling it “The Here Be Monsters Mini-Comic.” I was a little disappointed to discover that it did have a title!)
Visually referencing woodcuts and 18th-century maps and illustrations, the comic is an elegant flip-book that you flip through very slowly, so that instead of the animated motion of objects, you see the motion of time, through a simple but significant series of events that happens to the ship that’s the main character. You can read part of it online; the online version is incomplete and much smaller than the physical book, and this sense of a flipbook is lost.
(I’m especially fond of this tiki scene, which I scanned so you could see how it’s laid out in print: one panel per page, read longwise, with nothing on the top page. Click on all the images to enlarge.)
The comic has Big Themes of conflict and loneliness and isolation and adventure, but they’re just evoked, unforced, allowed to emerge, should you choose to pay attention to them, out of the images and that skeletal sequence of events. The sequence has an elusive meaningfulness, but the authorial voice that would give shape to that meaning has receded entirely, allowing us to just listen to the drawing’s voice. “Drawing’s voice” is, of course, a strange term, mixing image and textual elements. But these images do speak. They signify that things happen, yet those things are not exactly told. The story emerges out of the images with a heightened phenomenological immediacy compared to prose: Frederick-Frost’s ship is in the same place in every panel, locating you clearly, physically, on that ship as the setting changes around it. Physical, spatial continuity, something very immediate, replaces the more abstract and distant psycho-linguistic continuity characteristic of the range of conventional narrative voices in prose. This gives a nice extra level of resonance in this comic between the voice and the historical “adventure” setting: distance versus proximity is a formalist meta-theme. It’s an extremely satisfying work: playing Pound to Mazzucchelli’s Pynchon.
Because of that it feels both inadequate and overstated to call Frederick-Frost’s “story” a narrative. We rarely call poems narratives. “Narrative” is at root the noun form of “narration,” which is a type of speech act quite different from the speech act performed by these images. Narration is the “telling” part of story-telling, and this story is not told. The drawing’s voice is allowed to speak without any interruption from an authorial narrating voice. There is a difference between a true “image-narrative,” where the entire story emerges from the images without the necessity of processing into linguistic referents, even mentally – without the need to “read” – and a conventional narrative told in images, where you do read the images. We can cobble together the word “story-showing” to describe the work of an image-narrative, but there is no unique word to complete the analogy: narration : story-telling :: [insert neologism here] : story-showing. The lack of that word reminds us that the parameters for what distinguishes an emergent image-narrative from an enumerated word-narrative are just not well defined, let alone broadly intuitive, although my intuition is that those parameters will center around the different vantage point and continuity.
In typical “wordful” comics, the tension between the vantage points/voices native to language and image is part of what Jonathan Lethem described as a “baroque reading experience.” When a comic has both linguistic and imagistic voices, in order for those voices to blend into polyphony, the cartoonist has to harmonize their native but distinct vantage points and create balance. If the tension between them remains strong – and it can be a purposeful tension between two different but equally sophisticated voices – the experience is baroque (or to extend the metaphor, contrapuntal). But for gifted artists who are not trained or gifted in or even just extremely familiar with prose writing, balance can be extremely difficult, because the formal sophistication of the imagery so far surpasses the sophistication of the narrative structure, often both in concept and rendering. That experience is often like a concerto for woodwinds and toy piano.
Avoiding the linguistic voice altogether, as Frederick-Frost does, is an appealing alternative approach. His “story” is extremely simple, but that’s what allows it this clarity: the more complex an image-narrative becomes, the more language-narrative properties it tends to takes on, because language-narrative is in such common daily use that we are immensely comfortable with it and we gravitate toward its mechanisms as starting points. Because of that, there is likely an upper limit to the complexity possible through pure image-narratives without requiring language or becoming abstract. (Again, abstraction is a place where the inappropriateness of the word narrative is obvious.) But pure image-narratives are so under-theorized, however, and so relatively uncommon, that we really don’t know.
“narration : story-telling :: monstration : story-showing”
A term from narratology, primarily of the filmic variety, but I used it in a paper on comics and I think it works.
It sort of works — I mean, it definitely works for my analogy (I should have read your article!) but the problem is just as much with the “story-showing,” because there just really isn’t a story; it’s much more phenomenological. It seems like monstration still ultimately subordinates the image to language’s greater temporal distance. I was thinking about the literary present tense: it’s “present tense” but it’s not “now.” The present tense of an image is much closer to “now,” because it’s so much less abstract and more phenomenal, like the recognition in Lacan that our image-processing capacity exists prior to our language-processing capacity.
Ack! How do I get this? *grabby hands*
I don’t know! Maybe try his website: http://cartoonstudies.org/FrederickFrost/
Have you seen Owly, or Louis Trondheim’s Little Santa books Caro? Neither uses words…though they sound fairly different from this. They both have a strong narrative voice I think despite the lack of dialog…the Trondheim is kind of amazingly clever…but maybe less interesting for the issues you’re talking about for that reason….
Caro: How’s it not a story? I only read what was up at the site you linked to but, that’s a story to me. It’s a narrative, in the general sense of the word, not even in the most general sense. It has a character, time passes, things change. That would pass most definitions.
“It seems like monstration still ultimately subordinates the image to language’s greater temporal distance.”
Eh? What kind of temporal distance? Distance between what and what?
Derik: I’m going to give you a kind of oblique answer. I think there are two ways you can think about narrative here. You can do what literature has done, which is what you’re doing, and you can say that story is narrative and that narrative is this general thing (character, time passes, things change), and that no matter how simple or in what medium, as long as you get those basic units you have a story. But when you do that, you’re also accepting their fundamental assumption, which is that all semiotic content is linguistic, including image content, because you map the images onto mental semiotic constructs. You identify “ship” as “character” etc. To READ it as a “story,” you have to move it from images to language. Narrative is “owned” philosophically, at it’s most basic level, by the philosophy of language, not the philosophy of art.
But there’s a reason why images are, for example, separate from the symbolic order in Lacan. We CAN recognize an image without that linguisticizing step. In non-narrative fine art, this territory is fairly easy to navigate, because narrative is besides the point. But in comics, generally, narrative is not besides the point. That semiotic step is important.
Some cartoonists have given equal respect to the literary tradition and the art tradition and have approached comics as a hybrid that needs to incorporate and learn from the best of both. I tend to appreciate those comics the most.
But there are also strands of cartoonists who want comics to belong to art, to be primarily informed by the traditions of visual art and cartooning itself and to separate itself from the traditions of literary narrative. That might have worked easily in 1910, but it won’t work easily now, because literature has re-defined itself as a branch of a philosophy of language that pretty much subsumes semiotic expression no matter how simple and no matter what the medium. For the last 100 years, experimental literature has been a branch of philosophy. But the insights and techniques and narrative structures of those experiments have also been influential on genre fiction and program fiction and literary fiction and film writing and really every kind of writing except probably journalism — and comics.
Because comics has not had a period of serious, philosophically informed, formal experimentation, because comics did not participate in the mid-century experimentation in the other arts, what’s happened is you have this somewhat ad-hoc, common sense approach to catching up, to merging image content with narrative content. And much of that approach has also taken the form of “differentiating” comics from that linguistic movement by defining it as an art medium.
When cartoonists do try to do more sophisticated things with images they often tend to be far more informed and sophisticated and experimental about how art works than how language works. This means the linguistic pieces aren’t equivalently sophisticated, but it also means they ignore the difficulty of teasing apart the way images make meaning not from the way WORDS make meaning, but from the philosophy of language that has subsumed both words and images. Abstract comics is the exception, and it’s very philosophically sophisticated as a result. Andrei’s awareness of the difficulty of the philosophical terrain here is leaps and bounds beyond most other people working in experimental art cartooning (as opposed to experimental literary cartooning, of which there is some). But it’s non-narrative.
In the philosophy of narrative that’s emerged out of the linguistic turn, prose writing isn’t primary, as it was before the turn, but language is. There is a great philosophical rupture between, say, cave painting and modern advertising. That’s why Lacan puts images in their own order. (It’s also why film theory is so grounded in Lacan.)
So to me there’s two ways a hypothetical cartoonist could start to do sophisticated narrative experimentation in comics — and this is specifically about experimentation, not “writing good books”, because conventional narratives often make for good books, and some ambitious and extremely successful books have taken the hybrid approach.
First, get really adept and up-to-speed with linguistic narrative experimentation and figure out how to make images carry the semiotic sense of those existing narrative structures in a way that doesn’t revert the linguistic narrative structure to oversimplified and conventional “story” that isn’t really capable of carrying any formalist significance in the work of art. To do that you have to embrace those intensely complicated and often unappealing narrative structures, which are only available to you at this point in prose.
Or, take on the serious challenge of getting outside the philosophy of language while still working in a narrative medium — this involves figuring out what pure image-narrative is, and by pure image I mean image in the sense of the imaginary order. This latter is what a lot of proponents of art comics will say they’re doing: but they oppose themselves to “literature” rather than “language”, which to me is just a straw man. The interesting theoretical challenge is not by image fiction to prose fiction, but to the idea that narrative’s fundamental structures are linguistic ones.
My question is whether you can theorize, and more importantly whether people actually can parse, wordless comics — still representation, still a “story” — without any recourse to the understanding of story that makes reference to the philosophy of language. Or are the semioticians right that those images are always already, still contained within language (and in which case, what would be the point of rejecting comics’ relationship to literature or considering it part of the existing literary tradition?)
Noah, I have a thing about owls. I’ve been resisting with some degree of petulance buying the stuffed Owly at SPX for YEARS NOW.
I agree with you that Owly’s got a stronger narrative voice that’s more linguistic. But that Trondheim I have not seen and will do so…
Just to be clear, I LIKE wordless comics with strong linguistic voices: I don’t have any issue with prose at all. I’m intellectually very committed to the linguistic turn. But the idea of a sophisticated image narrative that is non-linguistic — or even meaningfully less linguistic — is fascinating.
The other thing I think about in this context is Japanese print series. They do use language, but the narratives are fractured and it’s as much about image rhyming and poetic links as about actual narrative ties.
Not sure if that speaks to the point you’re getting at or not. Trondheim has pieces in the abstract comics book which are actually somewhat narrative. They might point towards what you’re discussing…..
I’m not sure that Lacan adds anything but confusion to this kind of stuff. I’d suggest a better route would be cognitive science, which as a research discipline has demonstrated that perceptual distinctions, concept formations, perception of causality and motion all take place pre-linguistically. If anything, language links up to a child’s developing understanding of the world, not makes it. So any purely linguistic theory of image-based narratives (comics, films) isn’t going to get the whole picture.
Caro, when you characterise narrative as being essentially linguistic I suspect you of being ahistorical.
Dance and mime have supplied narrative for thousands of years. Are you stating they are subsumed by an implicit linguistic template?
On another topic– here’s Slate’s take on Lynd Ward, whose brilliant, wordless ‘woodcut novels’ have recently been gathered.
http://www.slate.com/id/2270953/
Caro:
“Because comics has not had a period of serious, philosophically informed, formal experimentation”
…implying that fiction or painting has?
No.
In what manner were the moderns ‘philosophically informed’? And by whom?
Visual art’s been very philosophically informed for some time. Dada, surrealism, and the rest of the early 20th century art movements were all massively influenced by surrealism and Freud. Stuff like Fluxus and feminist performance art has been heavily indebted to feminism…which is indebted to Freud and to Lacan and Foucault. In general, modern art is in a constant conversation with theory, I think.
Fiction has been pretty profoundly influenced by postmodernism and theory too, I think. People like Borges and Barth are obvious examples. Even someone like A.S. Byatt, who kind of hates that stuff, is in dialogue with it in order to reject it, in a way that doesn’t really happen in comics (or at least not in American ones; I don’t know that I can really speak to what goes on in Europe.)
I think Caro’s pretty much right on. Comics in the U.S. has been really late turning into a self-conscious art form; as such it hasn’t really engaged with theory or criticism in the way many other art forms have (not all — television still hasn’t, for example.)
Not to forget: Sartre and Camus (Existentialism); all kinds of Marxist art (Mexican Neo-Realist muralists; Soviet film, Italian Neo-Realism in film; Luigi Nono and Iannis Xenakis in contemporary music); Art & Language and Conceptual Art (Marxism & Semiotics). Contemporary music and mathematics… If we go further back in time we’ll find Michelangelo’s Neoplatonism. Romanticism and Rousseau’s ideas about Nature. Impressionism and scientific theories about color. Etc… etc… Comics are almost completely absent from these conversations.
Too busy today, I need to read that all again tomorrow. But, I still don’t see how any of that means this comic isn’t a story.
I”m not sure I’m entirely following Caro either…. But I don’t think she’s saying the comic isn’t a story. I think she’s saying it isn’t language, or seems like it’s pointing towards not being language. It seems to be telling a story without going through words, which (Caro is saying) is interesting theoretically because language theory basically says experience is language. (Lacan says the unconscious is structured like a language, and/or is a language.)
Domingos — yeah, those are all good calls. Another example in pop music of all places is Lady Gaga, who completely comes out of a performance art/queer theory tradition, and has almost certainly read Judith Butler or at least people who have read Judith Butler. And that’s not new, I don’t think — Andy Warhol through VU is a major influence on rock, and he was certainly interested in theory.
Comics is weird in the extent to which it isn’t engaged with that sort of theoretical discussion. I mean, there are people who are now I think (Dan Clowes is, and Alan Moore is too in his way.) And there were earlier examples (Marston was quite engaged with feminism and Freud.) But it’s unusually rare, and unusually recent in comics.
Which as Caro says isn’t entirely a bad thing. It means comics has something unusual to bring to those discussions, is the upside.
Alex, I’d say what Noah said, but to name specifics for modernism in particular: Freud, Mach, Bergson, Neitzsche, Wittgenstein, just to name contemporaries, but also Dedekind and Kant and Schopenhauer. And for mid-century modernism: Kirkegaard and existentialism, the Beats and Eastern philosophy, Lacan and the new wave. And those are the obvious ones, and it’s limited to influences who self-identified as philosophers, not counting artists who themselves engaged in theorizing like Sartre or Kandinsky or the teachers at Bauhaus.
Also to be clear: the idea that narrative is essentially linguistic is not me. That’s a fundamental axiom of the linguistic turn: as Noah says, all experience, all consciousness, everything, is language.
Mime I think is another good example that may illuminate these questions — but dance narrative has historically been extremely linguistic. Even Nijinsky’s Faun, with a story arc far more visual than the classical narrative ballets (which are visual ornaments to literary stories, like Don Quixote or Coppelia), is Debussy’s which was Mallarme’s…
I also agree with Noah’s encapsulation of my position in comment 17: yes, you could say it’s a story and you’d be right. But “story” is a packed-full term, and if you unpack it and ask in what sense that packed-full definition doesn’t quite fit, one thing it resists is the linguisticism of the theoretical understanding of “story” after the linguistic turn. That linguisticism was INTENDED to subsume examples like this one, and it largely succeeds. But the art nonetheless resists. Here, it resists.
I would not be surprised if ultimately the linguisticism is stronger; the philosophy of the linguistic turn is very compelling. Either way I am sure that it will be very difficult to craft a theory of “story” that is grounded in that resistance. But it’s nonetheless a critical theoretical problem for art comics as they’re often defined, “against” literature. That’s the point of the last bit in comment 8…
I missed Domingos’ comment, but I agree: all excellent examples.
Caro–thanks for the nod.
There are some assumptions in this discussion that I don’t fully agree with, but if I were to try to outline my disagreement in detail, I’d be here all night. So let me just give some hints… If any are of interest, we can develop them later.
Caro (to Derik): “You can do what literature has done, which is what you’re doing, and you can say that story is narrative and that narrative is this general thing (character, time passes, things change), and that no matter how simple or in what medium, as long as you get those basic units you have a story. But when you do that, you’re also accepting their fundamental assumption, which is that all semiotic content is linguistic, including image content, because you map the images onto mental semiotic constructs.”
I’m not sure how the second sentence follows from the first. Keep in mind that semiology, as first imagined by Saussure (and semiotics too, in Peirce’s formulation) was conceived as a larger science of signs that would include linguistics, but not be restricted to it. Now you are saying that every semiotic content is linguistic, which is exactly the opposite view. This is directly opposed by Peirce’s notion of an icon, an iconic sign, as opposed to a symbol (which is what language consists of). So I don’t think that semioticians are “right that those images are always already, still contained within language,” because I disagree that that is what many semioticians believe. (Think also of semiotic work with, for example, naturally made indexical signs such as fingerprints or paw prints in a forest. How are those contained within language?)
The further claim that “the idea that narrative is essentially linguistic is not me. That’s a fundamental axiom of the linguistic turn” is equally problematic to me. It’s equivalent to saying “the idea that narrative is essentially a nail is a fundamental axion of the hammer.” I mean, narrative may be ultimately linguistic, but to find support for this view in a philosophy that sees *everything* as ultimately linguistic and cannot envision anything outside language is a bit of a cop-out, isn’t it?*
(Personally, I would be actually sympathetic to some more involved version of the linguistic, or maybe one could call it semiotic, turn–to the extent to which, I would say, the Lacanian distinction of the symbolic and the imaginary seems to me overly simple–certainly overly simple in the post-Oedipal phase. It seems to me to define an image as something semiotically innocent, so to speak, pure, and therefore ripe for colonization by language. And I don’t think even the purest abstract painting, for example, is semiotically blank like that.)
The question, then, perhaps is, can a story be articulated through iconic or indexical signs as opposed to symbolic ones? Well, yes, look for example to Benoit Joly’s “Parcours” in the Abstract Comics anthology. It is a “formal” story. Is it just “formal”? Do we have to reduce, limit the notion of “formal” in the same way we reduce the notion of the image? Or perhaps is it a question of whether a story is predominantly made up of symbolic/linguistic signs, or can it function in a more complex way, braiding together symbolic, iconic and indexical significations, in such a way that it is irreducible to just its linguistic component?
—
* I should add, I have a similar problem with the following claim: “That might have worked easily in 1910, but it won’t work easily now, because literature has re-defined itself as a branch of a philosophy of language that pretty much subsumes semiotic expression no matter how simple and no matter what the medium.” Does that mean that anyone doing anything semiotic–i.e. creating signification, in any medium–should feel they are making, creating literature? That would be yet another example of this colonization of other media by the language arts, so to speak. And my problem with that is that most writers or literature scholars I know are not sophisticated enough to truly understand the complex functioning of images beyond their linguistic components. Again, the nail and hammer syndrome. In any case, it seems to me this hypertrophied definition of literature, rather than coming from a “pure” philosophical position, actually comes from an institutional crisis. There are too many English, French, literature PhDs, and to compete in the marketplace they have colonized visual studies, film studies, etc–and they needed a theory to justify this colonization.
Ok, time to hit post and switch to another comment.
In any case, I feel that from Caro’s more complex question, this thread turned into a series of claims that any avant-garde, experimental art is philosophically informed–or, rather, that in order to make avant-garde art, its creators must have read philosophy (and therefore, that comics can’t become sophisticated until all cartoonists, god help us, read philosophy.) And I find these claims seriously problematic. Counter-examples are easy to find: Manet, for example, or Picasso. (Yes, Manet may have known some recent scientific theories about color, but those could account for maybe only 1% of his achievement. And he really was not a great reader of philosophy. Neither was Picasso.) Others created important art based on very dubious philosophical sources–for example, Kandinsky and theosophy, and equally Mondrian and spiritualism.
Such claims ultimately imply a precedence of philosophy over the arts, or I should say a precedence of verbally-articulated, logocentric philosophy over them, and the claim seems to be that no experimental artwork worth its salt was created without that logocentric precedent. See the problem there? This is as much a linguistic “disenfranchisement of the arts” (to borrow a notion from Arthur Danto–I highly recommend his article on “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of the Arts”) as the claims of literature and the linguistic turn.
Avant-garde art can be philosophically potent without containing a pre-digested theoretical meaning. Indeed, I would argue that’s the only thing that actually guarantees its importance. Cubism was not a re-statement of Bergson or or the theory of relativity; it brought in a new conception of the interplay between figure and ground, and therefore, if you want to mine it philosophically, of the notion of identity, of the duality of the interior and the exterior–that entered into dialogue with Bergson or Einstein, but also with Heidegger or Husserl. But it was not subsumed to them in any way (not to mention it’s pretty clear that Picasso hadn’t read any of them; whatever he may have learned about Bergson from Kahnweiler, say, was used primarily as after-the-fact justification of the new style, not as its initial or primary content.)
(Some of the same attitude is visible in Noah’s claim that “Fiction has been pretty profoundly influenced by postmodernism and theory too, I think. People like Borges and Barth are obvious examples.” Borges influenced by postmodernism? Umm, isn’t it actually the other way around? Borges was writing long before such a thing as “postmodernism” came into existence, and his work is an important touchstone for the movement’s initial impetus and development.)
Caro, I’m afraid that sometimes your insistence on the theoretical lack of sophistication of comics comes off as resulting from the same kind of looking-down upon the medium from the standpoint of “higher” arts, such as literature, that led librarians to condemn comics, in the 1940s, as promoting illiteracy, or that leads them now to see “graphic novels” as step-ladders toward “real” reading; the same kind of looking-down upon the medium (that has a long social, institutional history) that still makes many people embarrassed to read comics in public.
That said, an important figure who has not popped up in this discussion is Martin Vaughn-James. For God’s sake, “The Cage” was created in Paris in the early ’70s, and it shows the direct influence of the nouveau roman, and even more of the “roman textuel” of the Tel Quel school. (I gave a talk on this subject at CAA a while ago.) Remember he published pieces in journals from Editions de Minuit; and the jacket copy of “The Cage” is perhaps the most important manifesto for what one might call “post-narrative” comics as influenced by Tel Quelian poststructuralism.
But there are plenty of profound, philosophically potent, narratively sophisticated avant-garde comics coming from people who have no background in theory. Off the top of my head, here is a brief list:
Kevin Huizenga’s story based on the adoption papers of a kid from Korea from SuperMonster no. 9 (it was reprinted in “Or Else,” I think, and maybe in “Curses.”) Nothing he has done since is as powerful, in my mind (perhaps “Gloriana”), but that piece is stunning.
John Hankiewicz’s “Tepid Summer 2001” and “Tepid Summer 2003.”
Uh, obviously, Gary Panter’s “Jimbo’s Inferno” and “Jimbo in Purgatory.”
“The Spirit World” I and II, minicomics by, umm, “conorstechschulte.”
Warren Craghead’s “Thickets,” “Jefferson Forest,” and “How to Be Everywhere,” not to mention his Peanuts versions.
Rachel Cattle’s “The Darkness” and a few other minicomics she made subsequently.
Richard Hahn’s “Lumakick.”
Niklaus Ruegg’s “Spuk.”
And more: David Lasky’s “Boom Boom” no. 2. Jesse Reklaw’s “Applicant.” Jerry Moriarty’s “Jack Survives.” Mat Brinkman’s “Teratoid Heights.” Mark LaLiberte’s “Brick Brick Brick.” Gary Sullivan’s “Elsewhere,” especially no. 1. etc etc etc. Really, there is a ton of important work out there; you just have to look for it.
Hey Andrei.
Borges: a lot of what he wrote was actually criticism…and even parodies of criticism. He certainly influenced postmodern theory, but he was also clearly influenced by theory. Two way street.
Also:
“Avant-garde art can be philosophically potent without containing a pre-digested theoretical meaning.”
Who said it couldn’t? The point is that in film, in visual art, in literature, avant-garde art has been engaged not with pre-digested theoretical meaning, but with theory. Often that theory was garbled (it certainly was for surrealism), and always it was approached from an aesthetic point of view — but the conversation existed and was vital and central.
Frankly, your counter examples seem to me to prove the point. I say, this kind of theoretical engagement hasn’t been important in comics until recently. And you reply by citing a creator from the 70s who is hardly a household name and a bunch of contemporary artists. I don’t see how that contradicts anything I said.
Reading over my last post, I should add: yes, I am aware that Kevin Huizenga has clearly read Heidegger (and maybe even was a philosophy major?); Richard Hahn studied literature, and probably theory too, at Columbia; and some of Rachel Cattle’s later comics (though not “The Darkness,” which is silent) quote directly from critical theory (though I think that comes from her co-author, who came onboard after “The Darkness,” and whose name I’m afraid I’m forgetting right now.) So scratch that “coming from people who have no background in theory” from the top of my list. It’s still, nevertheless, a retort (and, this way, perhaps an even stronger one?) to Caro’s point.
Noah–re: the examples I cited, I was replying more to Caro than to you.
As for Borges, you said originally that he was influenced by “postmodernism,” not by “theory,” which is something altogether different. Yes, Borges was very well read, and he clearly read a lot of philosophy–but he was not influenced by “postmodern theory” because there was not such a beast at the time.
Also, feel free to change your mind at any time–this is a conversation, after all–but you originally said nothing about a “conversation,” you used terms like “influenced” and “indebted.”
Andrei: first thank you so much for the recommendations. My bank balance is already irritated with you. ;) I really will look at all the books you suggest because the goal of complaining that comics don’t do what I want is specifically so that someone will prove me wrong and give me a great book! It’s happened a few times, like with Anke Feuchtenberger, so I hope there’ll be some in your list too…
I’m sure I missed some important things in what you wrote: it’s late and I’m picking the easy bits…The best source I can give you for that idea about the primacy of language is the first chapter of Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics; her summary says:
The first page of the chapter traces a path from Saussure through Levi-Strauss to Lacan, then to Benveniste, who is quoted: “Language is … the possibility of subjectivity.” Silverman cites this trajectory with the aim of articulating how post-Saussureanism indeed inverted Saussure’s notion of the sign that you accurately describe above to precisely its opposite: where language is constitutive of the subject that uses signs.
I think Silverman’s book is the standard introduction to the way literature and women’s studies understand semiotics and post-structuralism…
It’s not to say that there’s no disciplinary, institutional, professional role to how significant and powerful this discourse is, but it is a legitimate philosophical discourse with a legitimate philosophical history. It’s not a misunderstanding of some “pure” semiotics: it’s a specific semiotic tradition that’s dominant in literature, film, and women’s studies (if not elsewhere), with some currency in anthropology. The Peirce-inflected response you give is the one that generally comes from people more familiar with visual art, but that response is not any more informed about how this conversation happens in those disciplines than our conversation is about the one going on in art.
I would very much like it if there were more contributions by people grounded and trained in visual arts to the semiotic theory of subjectivity and all the related discourses. But there are very few. Art theory apparently really struggles to deal with this idea of linguistic primacy. But it’s not because the theory from women’s studies/literature/et al. isn’t solid. It’s because people in art learn and perceive something different. There’s a tremendous disciplinary chasm. And art is no more willing to step outside its boundaries to speak to the linguistic concerns than vice versa. And I think the result is that each set of theoretical approaches is too discrete.
I tend to agree with you there’s a disenfranchisement of the arts — but I don’t think it’s due to the dominance of philosophy through theory. I think it’s due to the impermeable disciplinization of the academy, the professionalization of the practice of the arts into either the academy or the commercial sector, and the difficulty, because of this professionalization and disciplinization, of forming communities like the Cubists or the Surrealists or the Beats where there were no disciplinary boundaries and philosophy was just dinner conversation.
From the books you recommend, for the ones I’ve seen — “narratively sophisticated” is just not what I would come up with to describe them. I love Jack Survives. I love Jerry Moriarty period — the talk he gave at SPX a couple of years ago was one of the most wonderful talks on art I’ve ever heard, and immensely sophisticated. But I wouldn’t call that book or the other work he showed then narratively sophisticated in the sense that I was using the term here. Of course it’s not unsophisticated by any means — it is extremely sophisticated representationally — but it is narratively simple compared to ambitious prose narrative like Lost in the Funhouse or Dhalgren or Naked Lunch. And those works are all ALSO representationally sophisticated.
The list you give is also made up of the exceptions — exceptions that I’m sure deserve more attention! But far more comics have dull, pedestrian, immensely conventional narratives that do not reflect any meaningful awareness of literary narrative at all. Sometimes not even Dickens, let alone Henry James. And yet, sometimes, those books get called “literary comics.” That makes me cringe. And then sometimes people say “no, really, they’re art comics.” But “art narrative” is just not a very mature concept, compared with literary narrative. So what does that mean as a response to a complaint about narrative sophistication? There are massive theoretical questions about what “art narrative” will look like when it grows up — many of which have a great deal to do with the assumptions outlined in Silverman’s first chapter.
A few years back, I heard a series of lectures by T.J. Clarke at the National Gallery about Picasso, and the first focused on Wittgenstein. He pointed out that despite there being no evidence Picasso had read Wittgenstein, the resonance between their perspectives was significant and informative for interpreting a particular group of Picasso paintings. (Unfortunately I can’t rehearse the details this far out without a refresher and I don’t think it’s online; all I found was this, which made me laugh as Kaja Silverman introduced the lecture I’m talking about when he gave it at Berkeley.)
Clarke pointed out that it’s unlikely Picasso hit upon these similarities by coincidence or in a naive way: he may not have read Wittgenstein, but he could not have been completely unaware of those questions and concerns. Saying that any meaningful avant-garde will understand and respond to the motivating theoretical and artistic questions of its time is not the same thing as saying that the avant-garde will be dictated by philosophy. Perhaps we do not know whether Wyndham Lewis read Confucius. But we definitely know he talked to Ezra Pound. So if someone sees resonance with Confucianism in his work, would that be a “colonization of Vorticism by philosophy”? Of course not. All it would mean is that Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound didn’t worry about the lines between disciplines as much as we do.
Andrei, on this:
Maybe not “should feel” but if you change it to “will be considered to be”, yes, I think probably so. But not “making literature”: just “using language” — which is what departments of literature now study, instead of “art writing.” The academic study of literature is the study of the uses of language, of which art writing is only one among many.
Not the language arts: the philosophy of language. This is not something that comes from “English departments”. I think it honestly comes first from Women’s Studies, as an articulated genealogy. Kaja Silverman is a professor of film and women’s studies.
I think it’s sort of the opposite of colonization: it’s trying to create a common philosophical ground for interdisciplinary work that doesn’t always come down to a struggle over which art’s history is the framework. If you make the fundamental framework “language,” you go a long way toward accomplishing that. But… apparently you exclude art.
If you want suggestions Caro don’t forget Martin tom Dieck: http://www.mtomdieck.net/ I’ll mention _Salut Deleuze_ and the wonderful _hundert Anzichten der Speicherstadt.
Thanks Domingos: Suat had just mentioned him to me fairly recently, actually, so he’s pretty much top of my list right now…I hadn’t googled him yet, though, and the website looks really cool…
Hey Andrei. I don’t think influence and conversation are exclusionary. But I’ll admit to probably readjusting my thinking in response to yours. As you say, that’s how conversations work!
I probably should clear something up here. i dont think that there are no comics that do experimental literary narrative well. Jason overby and austin english nail it like they got a nail-gun rather than a hammer. Feuchtenberger as i have said beats the prose experiments at their own game, narratively as well as representationally. David B isnt quite as original but is more than competent. And derik is right that i could have pulled it out of F-F’s minicomic here if i had been interested in those questions.
But the way voyage speaks to the resistence of art criticism and theory to semiotic subjectivity theory is more interesting to me. comics-as-art often claims a unique set of narrative parameters, but struggles to articulate those parameters within the understanding of semiotics that informs theorists like silverman. but that is a significant academic critical gap that could really stand to be filled…
Wow, Andrei just wrote more or less what I’ve been trying to express in here for a while much better than I could hope to. I still don’t see the salvation of comics right now — as if one were needed — in greater theoretical reflection on the part of the artists.
I have no problem with language being used as a framework for the understanding of comics, or anything else really — it’s obviously crucial to our experience, but positing it as an absolute is highly problematic and neuroscience and cognitive theory as it is developing is only making it more so, as far as I’ve been able to follow it.
And in any case, the problem is not so much its use as a framework, but rather the fact that the way that framework has been established primarily by literary theorists and scholars hasn’t worked all that well on visual art. I agree that more could certainly be done from a visual arts perspective, of course, and also that comics could contribute.
I don’t really understand your assertion that comics are not particularly narratively sophisticated. You may be right, but I’m not sure I understand your premises. When you say they not even at the stage Dickens or James? How would you rate Clowes, Ware or Mazzucchelli in terms of visual narrative — I think they’re pretty sophisticated, for example. And why isn’t David B. as original as Feuchtenberger? I don’t get your criteria.
I would add Panter’s Jimbo in Paradise to Andrei’s great list. I think that’s just a mindblowing book in terms of exploding traditional narrative in visual ways. Xavier Robel has done really promising things with Panter’s innovations — Elvis Road, done with his creative partner Helge Reumann, is an example and I thought his one page in Kramers 7 was quite inspiring.
Mat Brinkman has continued developing since the great Terratoid Heights — Multiforce was great. Brian Chippendale too did some really interesting temporal collapsing of narratives by way of worldbuilding in Ninja and his upcoming If an’ Oof could be a showstopper.
In Europe there’s also plenty going on: Jochen Gerner has been inventive in his deconstructions of traditional comics narrative for years; the Dernier Cri people have long been suggesting narrative visually through their trash excess; several of the contributors to the Glömp anthology have been challenging the format of comics narration pretty consistently, in unevenly: Jyrkki Heikkenen, Pauliina Mäkela, Rope Eeronen, Tommi Musturi, Reijo Karkkäinen, etc.
Then of course there’s Ruppert and Mulot, who merge traditional genre tropes, pictorial symbology and motion study to create something both playful and psychologically astute.
There’s just so much going on, with a lot of cross-pollination with other art forms, and — I’m sure — a healthy amount of theory in a lot of cases too. I don’t necessarily see much need for further stimulus.
Matthias — have you read Lost in the Funhouse or Dhalgren? Or, those are just the examples I used earlier, but what experimental fiction HAVE you read? I think the problem here is that I keep bringing up literary narratives in general, but we never actually talk about examples of literary narratives — we just run through a list of comics narratives and it turns into “they do! they don’t!”. So let’s find one we’ve both read and talk about it, so you can understand what I’m looking for.
In the meanwhile, how about this: I’m lookiing for the level and type of narrative complexity described, for example, in this essay about narrative complexity in Lost in the Funhouse.
Start there, and then look at what you said comics offers: “deconstructions of traditional comics narratives” and “suggesting narrative visually.” The narrative complexity described in that article is far more than suggestive — although it is suggestive. It’s also analytical. And it’s not just deconstructing other prior narratives, although it is doing that. It’s deconstructing the very idea of the consciousness of the literary narrator, and the ways in which conventional fiction narratives set expectations of readers with regards to that consciousness.
That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for if you’re going to call these books “literary comics.” And yes, there’s SOME of it in comics but there’s not very much that actually grapples with the issues and adds insight to them rather than just translating them into the visual form, suggestively. The L’Association work I have read tends to fall into that category. I haven’t read as much as you.
Now, if you want to invoke a disciplinary divide here and call these “art comics” I’m willing to step back and wait for the theory of the art-not-linguistic narrative — but I’m not willing to accept that comics doesn’t need to speak to that. When you say that comics offer not only something unique narratively, but also something equivalently complex that’s purely visual, I think you need to articulate what that something is in theoretical language and situate that something in relation to other theories, either as something oppositional, that acts as a corrective to the theory, or as something dialectical, or as a visual version of the same thing.
Saying it “doesn’t work for visual art” is a cop out. Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss and the vast majority of film studies seem to think that the subjectivity semiotics of the linguistic turn works quite well for visual art. Can you point me to an article that specifically responds to the genealogy that Silverman lays out, or to the approach that Krauss takes, or to Barthes, and spells out the reasons why their approach is fundamentally and philosophically problematic for visual art?
I mean, you can run down philosophical art criticism for the next decade by saying “it doesn’t work for visual art because it’s too linguistic” but when there are people working and producing satisfying theoretical work about visual art that does work, that leads to readings of art works that are considered insightful to both art historians AND literary scholars steeped in subjectivity semiotics, and that therefore bridges a disciplinary and epistemological divide that you seem deeply committed to, I’m just going to think that the disciplinary divide is more important to you than the ideas.
So far the reasons you’ve given me for not liking Rosalind Krauss boil down to her being too linguistic, which is the same complaint you make about me. I could be flattered, but I think you’re just dismissing BOTH of us. To which I refer you back to Kaja Silverman, the film scholar, and her reading of semiotics after Benveniste and ask you to please tell me, specifically, why her analysis applies to and works for film but not to and for visual art.
If you’re going to boil every argument down to “visual art isn’t linguistic,” then you need to deal with the fact that there is a large and significant and widely accepted tradition of film scholarship and a well-respected tradition of visual art scholarship that says the opposite.
Sorry to interrupt the flow of this discussion but I was wondering whether Andrei has written at length about the Korean adoption story from Supermonster 9 anywhere. I’m curious to know why he thinks that story is particularly “stunning” as far as Huizenga’s oeuvre is concerned.
I feel like in this discussion there’s a disconnect that I don’t quite know how to bridge. Basically, Caro says, comics aren’t often connecting with these issues that are important to theory heads, and Matthias and Andrei respond more or less by saying, (a) yes they are, and somewhat contradictorily, (b) they really shouldn’t have to.
Maybe…I don’t know — I think Caro’s point isn’t that nobody in comics ever addresses these issues, but rather that the general level of discussion and engagement with these issues among people who claim to have aesthetic ambitions is unusually low compared to other art forms, and also unusually marginalized. (I think Crumb’s Genesis and Asterios Polyp actually make this point; they’re probably two of the most lauded comics of the last couple of years, and neither, I would argue, is narratively sophisticated in the way Caro is talking about.)
The question would be then, why would you want to be sophisticated in that way? Why dive down the Barthesian metafictional rabbit hole? The answer I think is because it’s a way to engage with people like Caro. And who are people like Caro? Andrei offers one interpretation, characterizing Caro’s stance as similar to that of librarians who looked down at comics from the standpoint of “real” literature.
And that’s not wrong. My one caveat would be that, you know…librarians who thought that Superman and Batman comics and Spider-Man comics and Fantastic Four comics and even R. Crumb comics weren’t as good as Hemingway? They weren’t necessarily wrong…and I’m somebody who fucking hates Hemingway. When people who don’t consider themselves comics people look at comics and say, “this is why I have trouble engaging with this art form,” I think it’s worth thinking about where they’re coming from. I mean, maybe the right reaction is, philosophy and theory aren’t really all that relevant, artists in general and comics in particular shouldn’t be looking to theory and/or the academy, these standards are unwieldy and unnecessary. Maybe Caro’s an army of one and making more comics she likes really shouldn’t be a priority. I know I don’t really want more comics like Barth and Delany myself. On the other hand…are comics at the moment really as sophisticated as film, as literature, as visual art? I think, at the least, the question is sufficiently in doubt that it’s worth asking.
Not an interruption, Suat, an excellent tangent. I’m interested too…
Did anybody else read Craig Fischer’s excellent piece in Transatlantica? There’s a couple of passages I want to bring up in light of this conversation, because I want to step back and agree more with Andrei that a lot of what is at stake here is institutional, not entirely philosophical (although the philosophies become implicated in that after the fact). Here are the quotes:
and
I have two questions from this for the academics reading this:
1) This is a simple factual one about the “Saussure/Peirce->Levi-Strauss->Lacan->Benveniste” genealogy that Kaja Silverman outlines in the first chapter of her book discussed above. Is this a uniquely American theoretical genealogy, or is it as French as it looks? I was taught to think of the genealogy itself as Benvenistean, and — steeped in it as I am — I actually found Groensteen’s jargon very familiar. So it never occurred to me until I find myself really disagreeing with Andrei on the philosophical point here to question whether this is in fact, say, “Berkeley Semiotics” rather than “French Semiotics.” I didn’t attend Berkeley, but my dissertation advisor did his PhD there, so I’m a intellectual grandchild of that approach. I think of Kaja Silverman as really standard stuff in the US. Like, don’t get past the first year of any PhD program in literature, film, or women’s studies without reading it. But maybe that’s wrong? Is it just film and women’s studies, or is it just Berkeley, or is this really a “language” versus “visual” disciplinary breach? Anybody got a perspective on this?
2) Although I agree with Craig about the lack of institutional support for comics studies, I’m also wondering why American comics scholars haven’t simply adopted the French theoretical structure. Is it because you are resistant to it for the sorts of philosophical objections Andrei and Matthias seem to have? Or is it because it’s just too unfamiliar to pick up readily?
I have to say: Groensteen just seems like poststructuralist linguistic semiotics to me. It’s not really that dramatically different from the stuff published in Diacritics (and insofar as it is different, is less abstract and more accessible). It’s interesting to me, because I hear so much about the dominance of “English” in comics studies — but comics studies doesn’t do very much of what my Berkeley-in-the-midwest English department did, which was “French” semiotics a la women’s and film studies and Benveniste.
So can anybody situate this institutional history a little better for me, before we go further?
Caro,
To which I refer you back to Kaja Silverman, the film scholar, and her reading of semiotics after Benveniste and ask you to please tell me, specifically, why her analysis applies to and works for film but not to and for visual art.
There are plenty of film theorists who don’t accept a linguistic/structuralist theory of film. Bordwell and Carroll’s _Post-Theory_ is a good compilation that takes to task a good deal of what you seem to be arguing for. As an example of one of that book’s contributors, here’s a summary of Gregory Currie’s book from 1995, which begins to address what you’re asking for. There are competing views, in other words. I’m a bit confused, though, since I thought you were originally rejecting a linguistic determinist view of art/film/comics, but now you seem to be defending it.
Hey Charles — I’m defending the idea that it’s a sufficiently significant theoretical framework that comics scholarship really needs to speak directly to it, using its terms and allowing comics the chance to modulate the theory, not the idea that it’s inevitably the only way to think about comics.
But I’m also just too dialectical to be comfortable with the idea that a completely divergent strand of thinking will just replace the feminist psychoanalytic poststructuralism that I’ve been calling “subjectivity semiotics,” or that that tradition should just be dropped. There was a lot of very strong work done under the auspices of feminist psychoanalytic poststructuralism and related approaches and many of those insights are valuable. That’s not to say that I object to other approaches existing right alongside, but I do object to the fact that there’s not more feminist psychoanalytic poststructuralist criticism of comics, and that when problems squarely in that wheelhouse come up, comics scholars are so resistant to talking about them that way, preferring frameworks that occlude the types of insights that framework is best suited to provide.
So I think it’s worth asking whether you can start with Silverman’s framework in one hand and some non-linguistic understanding of how images work in the other and actually come up with something coherent when you consider them together.
I gotcha. Hmm. I suppose my main objection for calling for a psychoanalytic theory of comics is that psychoanalysis is pretty well debunked theory of the mind at this stage, so why bother? I don’t, however, disagree that any brilliant theorist (which Silverman certainly is) working within that model can still come up with great insights into whatever he or she is applying the theory to (I enjoy Zizek, after all). It just seems it would be better to leave out a model that only seems to appeal to shrinking segment of literary and film theorists these days. I’m betting Freud would’ve been a great cognitive scientist had he lived a century later. Similarly, as film theory has been moving away from a linguistic structuralist approach, why repeat that when it comes to comics? The linguistic turn is over, you know? Still, if that’s what a critic knows, then he or she should use it. But I don’t see it as a problem if comics theory were to skip it entirely.
Caro, I have not read Lost in the Funhouse or Dhalgren and from skimming that essay, I suspect my sense of joy in reading would diminish considerably were I to attempt it, but who knows? I have read some Borges, Calvino, and Burroughs, all of which I liked, I admire a book like Pale Fire, and Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest things I’ve read.
Certainly no comics I’ve read are as complex as that, but I don’t see this as a structural problem in how comics are operating these days. I never claimed comics were achieving things of comparable sophistication to those reached in literature, but comics have also undergone a completely different development and are only now expanding to fathom more fully that kind of thing. Comics clearly have a lot of room to evolve right now, and in contrast to literature, they’re actually promising to do so. I may be wrong, but it seems to me clear which of the two forms is in the most exciting evolutionary phase right now.
What I was asking about were your criteria — I honestly didn’t understand what you were talking about when you were saying comics hadn’t achieved the same narrative complexity as Dickens or James, and I’m not sure I do now. Obviously, there’s room for comparison, but they also work quite differently, given that they work with images as well as text, so your criticism just seemed a bit unclear.
As I mentioned I see plenty of sophistication in comics. You mention how Lost in the Funhouse “…deconstructs the very idea of the consciousness of the literary narrator, and the ways in which conventional fiction narratives set expectations of readers with regards to that consciousness.” I don’t know exactly what you mean and can’t read that article right now, and without knowing the text I won’t claim that comics are currently achieving the same thing. However, somebody like David B. does attempt an incredibly ambitious portrayal of a developing personal consciousness in his imagery, which he then dialectically critiques with his spartan, descriptive prose and thus creates something at least not alien to an analysis such as the one you quote.
As for my examples, Noah, they were not so much an attempt at proving that yes, indeed, comics are doing all this, but rather pointers to artists that are working with the kind of visual narrative Caro was asking about — just like Andrei’s were, if I’m not mistaken. They are not all equally great or sophisticated, but they exist and they’re pointing in interesting directions.
As for the linguistic turn, I have no antipathy towards it — I do find it a useful framework in many contexts, although as Charles says, compelling alternatives are out there and to posit it as some kind of absolute baseline is highly problematic.
As for its application to visual art, I can only say that it hasn’t been successful enough to permeate the discipline as it has in literary studies. In film studies, my sense is that the legacy of Metz, for example, is mostly as a formal diagnostician, and it has in any case been undermined by Deleuze, hasn’t it?
I admire Rosalind Krauss — I think she’s a great scholar and critic, even if some of her earlier writing today suffers from engaging with a critical discourse that is now less relevant — battles have been fought and won. My main problem is that her theoretical apparatus often gets in the way of communicating her truly excellent insights, which might have been elucidated more easily by other means.
As for her later writing, it turns somewhat mystical — almost like she’s writing literature in some ways. The same is characteristic of Griselda Pollock, who was really important for the feminist critique of art back in her heyday, but now is just unbearably pretentious and quite hermetic. Barthes? I think he’s great, but I’m skeptical of any attempt to posit his early semiotics of the image as much more than what it was: an opening. His later work on images, like Camera Lucida, is highly compelling and brilliant, but also hard to apply as theory.
So I’m not saying that the framework “doesn’t work for visual art”, more that it has tended not to in a way that has actually redefined the discipline the way it did in literary studies (for the record: I haven’t read Silverman; she never came up during my years of study). I’ve previously cited a couple of examples of very intelligent scholars whom I believe get carried away because of a framework borrowed from literary theory that unmoors them from their objects of analysis: Norman Bryson, who doesn’t seem actually to look at what he is analyzing and Jonathan Crary, who undermines the credibility of an otherwise very interesting analysis of visual culture by absurd “readings” of select works.
Anyone, I should think, who has attempted to write critically about visual art (or music!) will know that there are certain qualities that are simply impossibly fully to describe using language, and that one can only do one’s best to approximate them. Theoretical frameworks might help, but it is only one way among many, and it is often deadening to such qualities. The same applies, only much more acutely, to the *creation of art.
Look, I don’t want to perpetuate any “disciplinary divide”, and was really talking about comics, not comics scholarship or theory. By all means let’s have greater exchange in the latter — but as a prescription for some perceived problem in the former, I find it this line of argument dubious.
Charles, I think the death of Freud has been greatly exaggerated. He’s absolutely central to film studies and queer theory, both of which are important way beyond the academy. His scientific theory of mind is silliness, obviously — but as a poet and philosopher, he remains as important as Marx. Claiming we’ve somehow moved beyond him due to improved scientific research is a neat summary of the ways in which science so often pokes its eyes out with its own microscope.
Matthias, your insistence that theory deadens great art seems to me to fly in the face of the many great artists who have been engaged with theory, from dada and on beyond minimalism and fluxus, the Bauhaus, up to folks like (as just a single example) Cindy Sherman And it’s true in film as well…even slasher films have been in a two-way dialogue with theory to a greater extent than most comics. Saying theory and the linguistic turn haven’t defined visual art seems like it’s deliberately ignoring much of the most interesting visual art of the last century, which was steeped in theory, and still is. The argument kind of baffles me, actually. What artists are you thinking of who aren’t fairly obviously in a discussion with theory? Maybe if you were careful to pick and choose among only certain painters it would work….but performance art, video art, sculpture/installation, even photography…. Really, I think visual art is *more* engaged with theory than literature, just because visual art tends to be more baseline avant garde and have less of a connection to pulp. I mean, the pulp example of visual art is again someone like Lady Gaga, who is queer theory down to her fetish shoes.
Caro: I am one of those rare (I guess) people who love comics and have read almost every book written by both Barth (even LETTERS) and Delany. But, I don’t have the academic background to totally get what you are going on about.
I do think I’ve seen perhaps too much of the metafictional turn in comics, a la Lost in the Funhouse. It seems rather dated now.
In re institutional comic studies not taking up French comics theory: I wonder if it just a matter of language barrier? Perhaps many of these scholars learned other languages (German seems most common for art historians). There certainly (as we’ve noted before) not been much in the way of translating the work.
Derik first: There’s just too much packed in here is the problem. There’s (1) the essentially formalist question of whether comics has fully or even sufficiently explored the range of narrative flexibility that’s available to its practitioners. Matthias thinks they have done this already or are far enough along that it’s no worries. I think a number of cartoonists are in progress, but I also think there’s not enough support for it, the highest profile experiments are in too much of a vacuum, without enough attention to the comparable period of experimentation in literature, and that overall comics, influenced by Fiction but not literature, is falling victim to the story/abstraction divide within the Program (but without the history of abstraction that Fiction has). This gets to the point Noah made in comment 34 about whether comics overall really are as sophisticated right now as film and literature.
The original point of the post (2) was considering some of the ways in which more abstract questions about the formal properties of comics narratives could begin to bridge the disciplinary divide between literature and visual art, since visual art does not provide a theoretical ground for dealing with story and narrative and the actual literary aspects of comics but literature is not equipped to deal with the materiality of a comic. So that’s about the intersection of academia and practice.
Then, (3) there’s also the more fully academic, institutional and philosophical, question of how both of these issues are dealt with in academic comics theory. In mature disciplines in the humanities, you have work that’s pure theory, work that’s pure criticism, and work that’s at the intersection. Not all this work always happens at the same time. The linguistic turn was a period when writing and thinking about theory dominated criticism to an almost absurd degree. New Criticism was a period when theory was really stagnant. I think the current situation is more of a balance between criticism and theory, although the humanities are in crisis for other reasons.
This gets to Charles’ point: I agree with Noah that it’s not that the humanities have “left theory behind;” it’s that theory occupies an institutional place in the humanities that’s different from the one it’s occupied for most of our lives. But Bhabha and Spivak are there under a lot of postcolonialism as a set of framing assumptions. Jameson and Althusser still shape the way humanities scholars think about political forces. As Noah rightly points out, women’s studies and queer studies and performance studies are still very engaged with post-Lacanianism (and those are illustrative, not comprehensive, lists.) It’s just not on the surface – it’s not that the humanities are no longer interested in those issues; it’s that the humanities have matured beyond needing to deal with them directly all the time. Literature didn’t have some massive bonfire where we burned all the great theoretical works of the linguistic turn and decreed ourselves to be interested only in political discourse theory or something, and there is still much more straight “theory” being worked on in gender studies.
Humanities scholars have shelves of books and decades of academic journals with thoroughly well-worked-out groundwork about whatever theoretical perspective we want to use. Comics studies does not. Theoretical comics studies (i.e., not history) basically has two choices here: they can borrow from the other disciplines in the humanities, or they can use Groensteen or McCloud.
But comics studies seems to have some trouble with navigating this. Instead of deciding what they want the theoretical terrain to look like, you get a lot of resistance to theory period. Literary theory is “too literary.” Paying attention to the visual art is important, but you quickly get out of the existing theoretical terrain because of the narrative elements. The discussion of reception to Groensteen ties into this: I’d have thought it was the language barrier too, but Groensteen’s been translated, yet still not really used. Comparable works in literature spawned hundreds of articles and revisions and essays challenging the premises and applying them to different sitations, but that doesn’t seem to have happened in US comics studies. Groensteen just sort of sits there like an archaeological artifact — despite the fact that comics studies still is in a period where formal issues and narratology are unformed and forming.
So while it’s kind of distressing how comics studies has left Groensteen so uninterrogated, it’s not really surprising — comics theory has not made a sustained, comparative theoretical engagement with other theoretical perspectives either: the approach has been to apply theories to works rather than to apply works to theories. Nobody’s taken, say, Jameson’s analysis of architecture and painting in Postmodernism and asked what happens when the insights and conclusions are tested out in comics instead, and absolutely nobody has then tried to see how that affects the insights from Political Unconscious.
The project of testing and adapting the foundations of scholarship in the the rest of the humanities to comics has either been treated as an ad hoc project, happening in fits and spurts as people pull in a theory they like and understand to look at a specific work they’re interested in, or it’s been dismissed as either unimportant or actively a bad idea.
People in academic literature who did what Groensteen did became rock stars. US comics studies tends to act like his achievement is almost worthy of scorn, heaping praise instead on American journalists who manage to say something sort of smart in a way that’s lucid for the masses.
Honestly, even leaving behind the concerns about to what extent comics studies is a branch of literary studies, that just kind of looks like academic comics studies isn’t serious business. That stuff is what makes academia academia.
Matthias, what I said was:
That doesn’t say that there aren’t any examples of comics that have narratives as literary than Henry James or even more literary than Henry James. What it says is that even excluding pulp comics, there are more comics with narratives not as complex as even Dickens than there are comics which have complex narratives. This is a problem, although it may be worse in English-language comics. And the effects are not just on limited formal complexity: there is a lot of thematic repetition in comics narratives, and a lot of thematic material that is unexplored. There is a general hesitance in comics narratives to do more with the story than “narrate,” and that’s not the case in literature: a story that just “narrates” is going to either be pulp or YA.
An awful lot of the books at SPX were almost childish narratives, and some of that appeared to be intentional, a matter of style. Those are “not even narratively as interesting as Dickens”: a lot of indie cartoonists don’t feel any responsibility to make narratives that aren’t basically hat racks for their art or gags. And defending this on the grounds that the “gag narrative” is a comics tradition doesn’t make it any less boring when every story is that simple. They aren’t really interested in narrative: they’re interested in comics, or they’re interested in visual art, and they don’t tend to read a lot of prose to know what kind of options might come out of that tradition. If they do read fiction, it tends to also be “indie” fiction, which is currently caught in the Program and tends to be split into “story” and “abstraction.” And the influence of the story half of the Program on comics is stronger.
The point isn’t that there are no comics narratives that do more than narrate; it’s that it’s not an expectation for the art form that they will. Aspiring cartoonists don’t think it’s important to understand literary history and women’s studies as well as visual art and cartoon history. They don’t see the art form at an intersection of many histories; they see it as it’s own thing. There is not yet a well-articulated understanding of what it means specifically to do more than narrate in comics and it’s not considered an essential component of an art book. I think this is not good.
Does that mean there are no cartoonists who do pay attention to making more meaningful narratives? No. But I didn’t say that there weren’t. Overall, the problem with comics narratives is that the range of material and topics is too narrowly subcultural, a lot Indie, a little bit Program, a little bit Comics Geek. That’s a BIGGER problem in comics, but it wasn’t my specific concern HERE. Here the point was a more specific problem that formal experiments which are relatively unambitious are lauded as “formally sophisticated” rather than contextualized as steps in a process that needs a lot more work. Asterios Polyp and David Boring, like Groensteen’s System also sort of sit as interesting artifacts: they give the impression that there is a serious project to make more sophisticated comics, but there really isn’t a whole lot of energy for that project.
The thing was, no matter how miserable a slog any given reader might find Barth’s work, Barth had the opportunity to experiment without any pressure at all to make his art appealing. He wrote Lost in the Funhouse in a time when critics and other writers were very accepting of that elitist experimental formalism; they encouraged it and contributed to it and contextualized it and helped make it possible for experimental fiction to really explore narrative possiblities unimpeded by commercial pressures and general critical standards. And I think the tendency here to see experimental fiction as a dead end because people don’t write like that anymore fails to acknowledge how much we learned from it and how much those lessons filter into art that isn’t nearly as “academic.”
If there really is “comics narrative” that is entirely distinct from literary narrative, then a similar period of experimentation is important, and a similar critical support for it is important, and a sustained critical effort to articulate what that “comics narrative” looks like and how it works and how it signifies in culture and what it means is important. It’s the difference in treating comics like they are actually art, art that deserves the same kind of systematic attention and cultivation that literature and visual art have benefited from, as opposed to a mass medium that is well-enough served by the cultivation of a satisfied and stimulated target market.
On the subject of experimentation/narrative: Experimental comics fiction/narrative does exist but it is usually short, foreign and done on an ad hoc basis. No truly concerted movement has existed in American comics (not even in Raw). For all their much touted formal qualities, neither Asterios Polyp or David Boring qualify as truly experimental/avant garde works. I see them as bridging work works still beholden to commercial dictates, bending the knee frequently to the need to communicate clearly and with a minimum of comprehension skills on the part of the reader. So a perfect reflection of what exist in modern day literature and film.
Andrei and Domingos keep citing Martin Vaughn-James because of the chasm which exist between his comics and the darlings of contemporary comics as far as narrative sophistication is concerned. That kind of experimentation has always been deeply unpopular in American comics as it is in other art forms, hence the lack of desire to reprint anything by James. More importantly, this disaffection runs right through all the important indy publishers in America. The “art comics” movement and its progenitors have a far firmer base in the U.S. and this may reflect the educational backgrounds of the practitioners. So your complaints are justified but probably seem overly persistent to those who are satisfied with the visual inroads that comics are making.
Noah: “Maybe Caro’s an army of one and making more comics she likes really shouldn’t be a priority.”
I don’t think so. I’m no prophet, so, I bet that I’m completely wrong (I mean, we live in Barbarian times, after all…), but since we seem to agree that the future of comics lies in the survival of the “graphic novel” and the inclusion in “regular” bookstores, it’s important that comics artists play with the grownups instead of being constantly shielding themselves behind the excuse of comics exceptionalism. (And I don’t want to imply that some of them don’t do this already!)
On the other hand I understand Caro’s impression at SPX. I’ve never been there, but I also have the feeling (and, again, it’s just a feeling that can be easily contradicted by many counterexamples) that things are regressing, not progressing…
I agree and disagree with another of Caro’s points. This isn’t an images vs. text kind of problem. In comics images are the narrative too (when images are all there is the images *are* the narrative). So, if the narrative lacks sophistication the images can’t be sophisticated. The narrative has been the Achilles heel of comics as an art form since the very beginning. This is very strange if we think that comics (in the restrict field sense) have been primarily a narrative art form. I can certainly think of a few reasons to explain this, but I’ll let them for another occasion…
Suat, I think that’s probably accurate — there’s Fort Thunder and its progeny, but the experimental scene in the US is nowhere near as diverse as it is in Europe.
I also agree with most of what you’re saying in principle Caro, I just differ with you on the gravity of the situation, and don’t think theoretical awareness is a catch-all solution to any perceived problem. Though more comics of the kind you miss wouldn’t hurt.
Noah, when I was talking about the linguistic turn and its influence, I was referring to academia. It really isn’t that huge in art history, although it is of course more prevalent in the parts of it that deal with modern and especially contemporary art.
As for its influence on art — yes, of course there’s been a conversation going between theory and the arts, not the least in the 20th century, but I just don’t believe that all the great artists are theory wonks, or that the greatness of their art derives from some deep, involved knowledge of theory. Of course there is some, and I never claimed such awareness could never lead to great art, but my sense is definitely that we’re talking more about a general manifestation in a cultural and theoretical context and I don’t believe that more wonks would mean greater art.
That these works then are eminently interesting to, and useful for, scholars of a theoretical bent is a slightly different matter…
I don’t think Caro’s asking for more artists who are theory wonks, though. I don’t think Cindy Sherman or Lady Gaga could go toe to toe with Caro on Lacanian theory. But their work is informed by discussions of feminism and queer theory in a way that isn’t expert, but isn’t stupid either. There are a couple of comics artists who have a similar educated layperson connection with these issues — folks like Edie Fake and Ariel Schrag and arguably Julie Doucet (I don’t think Alison Bechdel so much actually.) But they end up being relatively marginal figures because there’s a critical and aesthetic disinterest in those issues. (Whereas central figures, like Crumb and Mazzucchelli are notably *not* sophisticated about gender theory. At all.)
“Overly persistent” LOL. I have a pet terrier; he clearly rubbed off on me!
I did order Martin Vaughn-James’ Chambres Noires (the only one that was going to set me back less than $25) after he came up this time. I’m aware that the situation in Europe is less dramatic than it is here.
But of course I agree with you, Suat, about AP and DB, and I was just thinking back to Matthias’ comment that theory deadens art which seems to be related to this same hesitance about the avant-garde.
I agree with Noah that, actually, this is less true in visual art than in literature. I think the experimental fiction movement in the ’60s was probably trying to do something more like what had happened in visual art in the first half of the century, the examples Noah gives. My insistence on bringing it up is entirely that it’s the avant-garde most concerned with narrative, and narrative is a weakness of comics, as Domingos just pointed out.
(I completely agree with Domingos’ last paragraph, btw. Any place where my phrasing implies otherwise should be considered corrected. Domingos, you should say more about your reasons!)
I understand that the dialectic’s pendulum within the academy is swinging back toward aesthetic concerns, but I do think the pendulum is dialectical and as it swings back will be remain fully informed by the correctives from feminist theory. Matthias’ comment reminded me of this passage from Laura Mulvey’s “Narrative Pleasure and Visual Cinema”:
That was written in 1975, and it was a manifesto for women working in and about film for a generation. It and the work that grew out of it is actually what replaced Metz. Not to exclude Deleuze who was very much in conversation with it, but what directly replaced Metz in film theory was feminism: Mulvey, Silverman, de Lauretis, Creed, and the French feminists Kristeva, Irigaray, and Cixous through whom film studies got their Lacanian semiotics.*
Feminist subjectivity semiotics set the cinematic avant-garde on fire in the 70s — and because it was feminist semiotics and subjectivity theory, not just “we need more women!,” it ended up ultimately being influential on films made by men, films that were not overtly “feminist” and even on films that are fairly mainstream — like David Lynch.
One of the things that SPX makes obvious is how much more energy there is for the “art comics” movement than for the idea of a comics avant-garde (even one responsive to the critiques/resituatings of the avant-garde from people like Krauss and Huyssens). I’m not advocating for an either/or — I love SPX and it has tremendous, great energy; there is always fantastic work there and there will always be a mix of great-to-mediocre work in any convention environment. That’s part of supporting young artists. But I want there to be more energy for an avant-garde too, and the avant-garde really needs the support of the academy and critics more than “art comics” does, because Suat’s right — art comics already has the support of indy publishers and doesn’t really need critics and the academy.
I think artists like Overby and English and Blaise Larmee are a kernel of an American art comics avant-garde, and I think there’s a lot of value in recognizing that they’re doing something entirely different from, say, Chris Ware, whose work I think is like Clowes and Mazzuchelli as a “bridging” work. But the commercial segment is so much more established than the avant-garde that it seems odd for us to already have a bridge…it’s a bridge that goes from a lavish marina out to a raft.
To Matthias’ point just made in comment 45, I don’t know that I think it’s so much Dire and Doom as just disappointing and kind of aggravating, although I guess I do sort of wonder how an avant-garde could really look and feel like an avant-garde without at least the kind of free-wheeling theoretical awareness that characterized, say, Dada and Pop Art? I’m with Noah on the colossal coolness of Lady Gaga, but I also think that, at least using the modern-era understanding of avant-garde, she’s also a bridge rather than an avant-garde comparable to Warhol himself, although time will tell which direction she evolves into. And Noah’s right too — I’m not asking for more artists who are theory wonks in the sense of academic theory wonks, although if comics produced an Umberto Eco that’d be pretty cool. But I definitely think there’s potential value in a comics avant-garde supported by an engaged academic critical community interested in the same critical problems.
I should say that I agree with Matthias entirely that really wonky theory wonks rarely make good artists. Great as he is, Umberto Eco’s novels leave something to be desired, and Noah would say the same thing about Barth. Both Barth and Eco write phenomenal essays though. I think Jeff Wall is an example from visual art of someone who makes amazing art but certainly has the chops to have been a pure theoretical academic had he wanted to.
But what Noah says is right, avant-garde artists just generally tend to be interested in and aware of big abstract theoretical questions in a way that mainstream artists aren’t. An exchange of ideas among critics and artists and philosophers is typical of avant-gardes. Domingos is right: because people in the US comics scene tend to be resistant to theory, it’s not a climate that’s awfully friendly to an artistic avant-garde.
Do I think this is worth egging Gary Groth’s house for not promoting avant-garde comics back in the day instead of “literary” comics? Absolutely not. Do I think it’s worth some vigorously expressed bits and bytes on the internet? Sure!
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* French feminism revised Lacan to the point that when poststructuralism in general refers to Lacan, what they’re really refering to is Lacan-through-feminism rather than to the original source material; sometimes I think this muddles what’s useful from “Lacan”, because it’s not just Lacan it’s this entire post-Lacanian tradition. I think that Andrei’s point about the limits of the strictly Lacanian Imaginary is somewhere where the feminist revision is helpful, since it specifically addresses this issue of the “innocence of the Imaginary,” but that’s for another post…perhaps even another post about Feuchtenberger…
I should say, my enthusiasm for Lady Gaga is only moderate. I actually prefer Ke$ha, believe it or not.
But yeah, she’s obviously not avant-garde — just someone who has connections to that world.
Caro:
“Aspiring cartoonists don’t think it’s important to understand literary history and women’s studies as well as visual art and cartoon history. They don’t see the art form at an intersection of many histories; they see it as it’s own thing.”
To which I can only append, THANK GOD. The last thing comics needs are self-conscious artists constantly peering over their shoulders.
And if they see it as its own thing, bravo. Comics are a young artform that needs to affirm its autonomy.
It’s as old as film. It’s not that young. It’s only young because of the attitude you express. And while young can mean vibrant sometimes, it can also mean infantile.
I’m really out of this discussion, but–“Chambres Noires,” Caro? No. I said “The Cage.” “Chambres Noires” is a totally different animal, made two decades after MVJ had dropped out of comics, when he came back to it for one last time, and it shows. You’ll just look at it and decide you were right after all.
Suat–I didn’t write on the Kevin H. piece, but I taught it in my comics class a few times.
By some metrics, comics may actually be slightly older than film!
But regardless, film’s earliest avant-gardes were in the 1920s, and film was about 30 years old then. So if we use film as the metric, you don’t need to be any older than 30 to support an avant-garde.
On the other hand, “autonomy” is a luxury that only mature art forms have. Babies are less autonomous than middle-aged folk. So this is backwards!
Andrei, unfortunately the only copy of The Cage I found on the quick search was both expensive and damaged, so I didn’t order it yet…
Oh, on Chambres Noires, another reason I went ahead and bought it is that in the excerpt online it says “text translated from the English by Fanny Soubiran.” Do you know what the English text was? The excerpt doesn’t include the credits, unless it’s the Harry Blake from the epigram?
Why did MVJ drop out of comics, and what did he do in the meanwhile?
Only about $27US: http://www.lesimpressionsnouvelles.com/cage2010.html
(the latest edition)
Plus how much shipping? The cheapest one at Abe ends up being $54 by the time I get it here.
Abe’s also got an issue of a Canadian Fiction magazine with an interview with MVJ: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=2043916869&searchurl=an%3DMartin%26kn%3DVaughn-James%26tn%3DThe%2BCage%26x%3D0%26y%3D0
Caro:
Martin was a painter. What’s funny is that, the last time I saw him (damn, it was fun, but I should have interviewed him, or something… don’t ask…) he gave me a repro of one of his paintings. It was a “comic” and I told him so… he didn’t deny it.
As for the reasons why the narrative is the Achilles heel of comics I’m sorry I can’t elaborate further (I have to go!) so I’ll say only this in a kind of telegraphic way: for at least half of the 20th century comics’ content has been mostly satire and childishness (that’s the mainstream tradition). Plus: fandom and the creation of a sub-culture (even people like Chris Ware can’t forget super-heroes). Plus: there’s not enough money in comics to attract great writers (TV and film pay a lot more, I guess…). Most people attracted to comics just like to draw (they’re not exactly great writers). Add anti-intellectualism as the cherry on top and… voilá: a (not so) great cocktail…
“*was* satire and childishness:” sorry!
I once told Mattotti how difficult it must be for a painter in Italy to feel the weight of tradition. It’s the same thing in North America for a comics artist: the weight of jokes (stupid or otherwise), Manichaean adventures, primary colors and India ink must be overwhelming.
I keep trying to think about how to respond to the substantive issues that came up in this thread: Derik’s confusion, and to Andrei’s refusal of linguistic primacy, and Alex’s point about the autonomy of art actually dovetails nicely with that. I was reading this essay by Joost de Bloois, and I think this passage is relevant:
The stance described here is consistent with the one I came into this conversation buying — the idea that the “concept” is paramount, over the physical media, and that what is most interesting about different artistic media is the way they illuminate engagement with the concept of art and the politics and cultural practices that enmesh and enshrine it. de Bloois goes on to quote:
But Matthias, and now Andrei (and I assume Alex too, although autonomy is a little different), both are fairly insistent that artistic practice must continue to privilege vision and resist this “emphasis on language as medium.”
Now, Andrei’s objection may simply be to the notion of philosophical “primacy,” and although I hear that in de Bloois’s language, coming as I do from the vantage point of Silverman and film theory, I can see there being philosophical nuances there. I’m not sure that the differences between de Bloois and Silverman matter that much, though.
But Matthias, you have definitely emphasized the importance of pushing against this kind of extreme linguisticizing of visual art. So, to get to Derik’s original question of what I’m looking for, what I’m wondering is whether it’s possible for conceptual art to achieve the ends that de Bloois and others attribute to it here, the engagement with concept and possibility and “autofiction” (meta-fiction, etc.), without taking language and linguistics and literary narrative as points of reference.
Also, it is interesting that conceptual art here sets the claiming of the textual subject position by the artist as a way of disempowering the traditional art critic and owning the structures of legitimation: cartoonists assert the same power dynamic vis-a-vis critics in the structure of legitimation, but for whatever reason, anti-intellectualism, the weakness of the academy, the lack of a powerful critical apparatus, textuality is irrelevant to it. Or is it? — This raises two questions: whether the limited power given to textuality in comics has anything to do with its lack of legitimacy (an position implicit perhaps in the belief that we need better comics criticism) and more importantly, what the inversion of these power dynamics tells us about the different sources of legitimacy and power for art and comics.
Perhaps it is just that a different kind of “textuality,” one that privileges the artist’s hand and voice, obtains in comics – and if that is the case, then are the legitimacy practices really non-textual, or just pre-post-structuralism? If it is the case that power-laden “images” of the cartoonist structure the power dynamics within comics culture, then are those images subject to the same critiques as critical textuality in fine art and, more importantly, to the critique of images from feminist film studies? And ultimately, how does the idea that the “image of the cartoonist” is power laden influence the “auto-fictional” representation of the artist in autobiographical cartooning.
Is it really possible to get to the same theoretical place that de Bloois gets via privileging language as medium, but while still privileging image, or is the critique of images from feminism and conceptual art too strong?
Derik, does that make any more sense that what I said originally?
Aargh, each time I try to break away they reel me back in… I should have know that claiming I’m out of this discussion was the perfect recipe to insure I will come back to it.
Unfortunately, I really don’t have the time to parse all your arguments, Caro, and point out the strands I disagree with. (And I was going to characterize my disagreement with them, but I just erased that sentence, I found that a single encapsulation did not do justice to your complex points.) So let me start from an off-side, so to speak. I generally dislike someone who makes an argument emphasizing their qualifications, but in this case I think I have to; you seem to have taken up a very entrenched position–you come from the philosophy of language, from literature, from film theory, and many of your comments seem to imply that those who disagree with you come from a different point of view, basically come from “art,” therefore not understanding the complexities of your position, etc; and therefore, implicitly, being “pre-post-structuralist” (so, uh, structuralist, then?). I, to begin with, disagree with this “pure cut,” as Derrida would say, between literature and art. But also, I feel obliged to point out: I come from the same perspective! My undergraduate degree was in studio and film theory! The theory of suture, psychoanalysis, and more post-structuralist literary studies are at the very basis of my make-up as theorist. So I often feel you are projecting a caricature of me to justify and explain away my disagreements.
In any case, I believe you are simplifying post-structuralism. You have made it all seem to correspond to this psychoanalytic philosophy of subjectivity, but that is just a strand in it. Based in Lacan, as this strand is, it is vulnerable, to begin with, to a Deleuzian critique (see “Anti-Oedipus.”) And Deleuze has written at length, as you surely know, about the image, especially in film. Secondly, it is also vulnerable to a Derridean critique. Some of what I wrote above, about the privileging of philosophy, and of language, in the interpretation of art, actually clearly echoes, now I realize, some points made by Derrida in “Parergon” (in “Truth in Painting”), and in his article, “Economimesis.” The very notion of subjectivity, as you use it, can be deconstructed from the same perspective.
So, yes, at some point I moved away from a primarily post-Lacanian position to briefly a Deleuzian one, but especially to a Derridean one. So please excuse me if I don’t recognize in my work the parody of comics scholarship that you imply when you say that the two theoretical choices are McCloud or Groensteen. I know I haven’t published as much on this as I could, but my teaching combines a variety of theoretical approaches: this semester, as I’m teaching the graphic novel, it’s especially Bakhtin, but also theories of suture, notions derived from reader-response criticism, from more traditional film and literary studies, and of course deconstruction.
So when you speak of my “refusal of linguistic primacy”–I, well, would rather phrase it as a refusal of a logocentrically-dominated interpretation. And that refusal can take place in the study of literature, itself (read “Dissemination”). It’s nowhere near as simple as literature vs. art, language vs. an image.
Furthermore, I should add that I’m confused when you make Kaja’s “Subject of Semiotics” into the bible of your philosophy of subjectivity. It’s not a bad book, by any means, but it has flaws, and some out-and-out errors. The chapter of it that I have studied at greatest length, the one on Suture, can be demonstrably shown to have misinterpreted some of the earlier theories of suture it discusses. If you abandoned constant reference to that single book, your argument might be stronger.
Given all this, I can’t grant any kind of objective validity, so to speak, to your demand for comics scholarship to follow more the path you have indicated for it (let alone, as I think you phrased it at least once, for “comics”–the artform as a whole?–to justify itself from that perspective, which makes little sense to me. Do we require, umm, painting to justify itself from, say, a Heideggerian perspective? What would that even mean?). The demand seems closer to your subjective preference. (And again, I use much of that kind of work, others in comics studies do too; it is to your view of “subjectivity philosophy” as dominant and irrevocable that I object.) It may be that an analysis of a comic, or of elements of the genre as a whole, from that perspective (and I hate the fact that, in phrasing this argument, I feel myself placed in the position of separating myself from that position, which, again, is one of the places from which I come myself)–that an analysis from that perspective could be enlightening, edifying, and could convince many scholars of the rightness of the approach you seek. Well, guess what? You are a comics scholar, whether you want it or not. Show us how it is done right. I would love to read it.
(I should add that I actually don’t see “subjectivity philosophy” as the best way to approach issues of narrativity–the best way to analyze “Lost in the Funhouse,” say. There are much more appropriate tools to do that in other parts of literary theory.)
As for the quote about Jeff Wall/conceptual art, I don’t think it applies here. It does not move away from the visual toward the literary, so to speak. It is a matter of choosing a conceptual approach over the more traditional approaches of visual art, which are either representational or formal. So, basically, Duchamp over Picasso, but also Duchamp over Raphael, or Duchamp over Pollock. Choosing the conceptual over the visual is different from choosing language over the visual; the latter is a factitious choice. The same divide can be found in literature itself, with the sole distinction that conceptual literature is a much smaller swatch of literature as a whole (it’s, what, Kenneth Goldsmith and his buddies?); literature (even all the figures you have mentioned) is still invested in either representation or formalism, and is therefore pre-conceptual, pre-Duchampian. To speak of story, of narrative itself, is to speak of representation. So I think your invocation of that quote was self-defeating.
Anyway; most of our discussion of comics is itself pre-conceptual (or, I should say, pre-conceptual art). And that’s fine. I can think of a conceptual comic by Mark Newgarden, maybe a couple of others, but little more. It’s worth investigating as a field, but the questions with which this discussion started, and the further ones that arose during it, are sited in a very different theoretical space.
Sorry for getting so intense about this, but I’ve been finding your characterization of the positions you disagree with highly problematic, and it’s just been bugging me.
In any case, since you asked for a list of the experimental literature to which we’re referring when we discuss this, here’s mine (I suppose you’re referring primarily to prose fiction; I can give a whole other list for poetry):
Joyce
Beckett (especially the trilogy and the later novels)
Raymond Queneau
Perec, Mathews, and the Oulipo
Borges
Julio Cortazar
David Markson
Philippe Sollers, Marcelin Pleynet, and the Tel Quel group (“textual novels”)
–and, even though it is poetry, I can’t help but mention Ashbery and the LANGUAGE school
And, I should add, if you think the comics I mentioned are “exceptions,” well, it might be argued that so is most avant-garde literature. Given the relative sizes of each field, I doubt that avant-garde comics represent a significantly smaller percentage of all comics than avant-garde literature of literature as a whole. Remember–if you’re going to include all superhero comics, then you’ll have to include also all Harlequin romances, all Star Wars and Star Trek novels, etc etc etc.
…
To answer your question, “Chambres Noires” was translated int French because MVJ wrote it in English but it was not published in English. And, yes, you can get “The Cage” in French but, sorry everybody, it’s a shadow of its former self, as published by Coach House in 1975. If you can, get the original (and so far only) English-language edition. Once you see it, you’ll thank me.
“Show us how it is done right. I would love to read it.”
What do you think she’s doing in this thread exactly?
In terms of conceptual and literary; I think your basic confusion is that you’re forgetting that theory is essentially prose. That is, yes, literature is less conceptual than art — as long as you separate theory from literature not just as genre but as medium, which I think doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
In any case, if I read the argument aright, Caro is saying, conceptual art built itself out of theory, which is language. You reply, conceptual art isn’t actually language and you can see that that’s the case because literature isn’t conceptual. It’s possible I’m missing something (I’m not nearly as versed in this stuff as you folks are) but I think your response is essentially a non sequitor.
Or to put it another way, you say this:
“Choosing the conceptual over the visual is different from choosing language over the visual; the latter is a factitious choice.”
Which is interesting, but you don’t actually provide any theory or argument to back it up, except to start talking about literature, which is really beside the point. That is, you’re asserting that the conceptual and language are two different things, but on what basis are you saying that? Caro provides a quote which argues that theory (which is language) is central to conceptual art, and also tries to explain how that works. If you disagree, that’s cool, but I think you need to do better than mere assertion.
And in fact, I think this is *exactly what Caro is calling for*. She’s asking comics to come up with a conceptual approach which isn’t based in language, right? I mean, she thinks to do that comics needs to be more engaged with theory, but the hope isn’t that it will be like conceptual art, or like literature, but that it’ll be more provocative than both. She wants comics to pick up the dialectic and run with it. (Which is what she think Feuchtenberger has done, I think.)
The irony here is that Caro has more starry dreams for comics than anybody else in this discussion. My sense is that Matthias and Andrei are happy with comics producing some good work and taking its place as a realtively respected art form. Caro wants comics to take the world of art, broadly defined, and shake it by the neck.
I think she’s kind of doomed to disappointment myself, but you have to admire the ambition.
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On a side note; the avant garde in comics may be of relatively the same size as the avant garde in literature, but (and this is Caro’s point) it doesn’t have as much influence or as much institutional support, or even as much market visibility. Especially in the U.S.
Not only in the U.S., obviously everywhere.
Speaking about Conceptual Art and autofiction… I bought Jean le Gac’s _Et le peintre. tout l’oeuvre roman, 1968-2003_. I can hardly wait to stumble upon it!
What I need now is a similar Jochen Gerz book! Is there such a thing already? If not, why the hell not?…
“What do you think she’s doing in this thread exactly?”
She’s asking for it to be done, she’s not doing it herself.
“My sense is that Matthias and Andrei are happy with comics producing some good work and taking its place as a realtively respected art form.”
Oh, and in that, you’re wrong. (It’s also funny that you’d say that after I published “Abstract Comics”–which, at the very least, showed impatience with the status quo of comics, including art comics, and attempted to change it.) I just don’t think that the approach she suggests is the most productive (resulting, I think, from the limited, entrenched position in which she casts herself), but in any case my reaction was more to her theoretical approach and demands.
In any case, I hope that the future of comics does not look like the work of Anke Feuchtenberger–on Caro’s recommendation I got “Die Hure H” and was seriously disappointed.
Gosh – don’t have time to wade through all the dense comments, but maybe I’ll say something nobody’s already stated. There’s something that is either rarely explored or rarely talked about in comics & that’s imagery that isn’t meant (or required, at least) to be parsed in a simply linguistic sense. So often, comics are dissected by theorists and academics through a linguistically-oriented prism, i.e, Chris Ware and such who make works where pictures become pictograms in service of the narrative or a point the artist is trying to make. There’s some desire to control the effect the symbols as symbols have on the audience. I would propose that there could be comics that engage on an intellectual level where imagery operates to deny a concrete derivation of meaning rather than force it. Hankiewicz I would cite as someone doing this. Warren Craghead, Blaise Larmee, and Austin English, too. More, I’m sure…
and w/r/t Wittgenstein, et. al, that language is a limiting agent – who is to decide amongst all the phenomenological data, what is signal and what is noise? I’ve experimented a lot, myself, with “pictureless” comics (influenced by Lasky, for sure), pondering what constitutes image and what is symbol. This type of work feels different from “literature,” but is it?
Andrei, thanks for taking the time to respond. You said:
True, but Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are both vulnerable to critique from post-Lacanian feminists like Irigaray and Braidotti. Deleuze and Guattari have also been critiqued by Badiou and Butler, who’ve critiqued each other, and so on and so forth. Everything is subject to a critique from a slightly different vantage point, the “master texts” are not scriptural, and the process of the humanities is productive misreading, sometimes by bringing together bits of arguments that are not entirely reconcilable. Irigaray and Zizek both misread Lacan from the strict Lacanian perspective, but their work is not intended to be an explicatory “reading of Lacan” – so I think you are overstating the fatality of that critique.
You’re of course correct that subjectivity theory is only a strand of poststructuralism. I tried to use modifiers…It’s one that’s immensely important to feminism, though, and it is extremely underrepresented in comics studies. I’d like to see it represented much more in comics studies. I think its connection to feminism in particular makes it even more vital that this happen. Saying so does not preclude either Derridean or Deleuzean models of poststructuralism from being in play, as long as you can accept the notion that there are no theoretical frameworks that are not subject to critique. But if you advocate Deleuze without Irigaray – and her Lacan, which is not Zizek’s Lacan or your Lacan – from where do you enable the feminist critique? This just does not seem like a place where an either/or helps us, and insofar as I gave the impression of advocating for an either/or rather than the addition of something that I think is underrepresented, then I want to retract that.
I didn’t intend for you to take this personally. What I meant is that there are no other sustained theoretical monographs that sketch out a coherent, usually singular approach to “comics theory,” with a specific orientation and critical program – the sort of monograph that, in literature or women’s studies, you’d get a cluster of spinoff movements and scholars identifying dissertation projects based around the critical problems of the monograph. This happened with books like The Political Unconscious and Tarrying with the Negative or Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure which established original synthetic critical positions and generated new branches of inquiry.
I don’t. I specifically credited her with articulating the genealogy, not for developing the philosophy. I think the genealogy was immensely influential, but mostly it’s an accessible book that happens to explicitly address the problem that I am having not just in this conversation but generally with the assertion that comics are too literary, that comics studies is practiced too much from the literary perspective, and that we need to pay more attention to the visual (which you’ve claimed nobody but a trained art historian is really equipped to do.) That’s a mix of assertions from several people, not just you, but it has, over the last several months, cohered into what feels like a general disciplinary problem I have vis-à-vis comics studies in general: if I speak to the issues I understand, someone makes the charge is that I am too literary and ignoring the visual. If I speak to the visual and the issues that aren’t literary, then I am subject to the charge that I don’t understand. I’m not sure why you would want to read anything by me! And yet, there are these whole swaths of theory and criticism that are unrepresented in comics studies, areas that are neither literary nor visual but conceptual, and those conceptual areas tend to be rejected because they’re perceived as literary, which is itself a failure to understand how much the literary/visual difference is irrelevant.
Andrei, you seem to consistently ignore how much that the intentional method of feminist critique is this kind of “misreading”. It’s queering. You can’t point to textual evidence from some original source material and say “this interpretation is an error” and then throw out everything they’ve said in preference for someone – like Deleuze and Derrida – who are more rigorous close readers, because to do so misses the point. The whole business is the opposition to logocentric reading – phallogocentric reading. At no point were any of these blog comments intended to be a formal argument from close readings of text — it’s an argument from ideas. The quotes are examples and references, not authorities…
You’re basically telling me that you reject logocentrically-determined interpretation while rejecting Lacanian feminism because it isn’t sufficiently logocentric. Look at something like “Marine Lover of Friedrich Neitzsche” and tell me again why arguments from textual evidence are the right way to establish authority in this particular context?
==================
Refusing logocentric interpretation isn’t the same thing as refusing the analysis that says that language is the primary ground of traditional concepts like self and identity, and of artistic representations of subjectivity. Irigaray refuses logocentric interpretation, in a way that is quite resonant with Deleuze. But she does so specifically because of the recognition that that logocentric interpretation can be decoupled from linguistic primacy.
Linguistic primacy is just the observation that there is no self until there is a concept of self, and the concept of self depends on the meanings of the words “I” and “you”. It’s a “fall into language.” Pre- and non-linguistic states are not quite “identity” or self or subjectivity in the sense that we understand them historically, the ones represented in conventional artistic representations (visual, literary, theatrical, et al.) Before that fall into language happens, there just isn’t a “self” in the conventional sense. If language and its social structures did not predate the production of full cognitive subjectivity in the individual, then the projects of Irigaray and Deleuze to re-imagine subjectivity formation in progressive ways wouldn’t make sense.
That doesn’t mean that there is no consciousness at all prior to language. My original question was how fully, if at all, visual narrative can function in that space of consciousness prior to language – a space that Lacan calls the Imaginary, what Deleuze refers to (I think) as the outside of the fold. Even cognitive science has a developmental framework for this space. I do not consider Deleuze to be the definitive last word on the scope of semiotic abilities in that space, nor do I think he allows for as much room as you are claiming, but maybe he does. The question was just asking for the space to be theorized wrt comics. For Lacan and the Lacanian feminists, the space is extremely limited. I think Silverman’s encapsulation of that is pithy which is why I quoted it: “it is only by means of linguistic signs that other signs become meaningful.”
You’re collapsing “language” and “literary” here: “it does not move from the visual toward the literary…choosing the conceptual over the visual is different from choosing language over the visual.”
Are you saying that choosing the conceptual over the visual is different from choosing the literary over the visual? Because I agree with that: choosing the conceptual over the visual is the same thing as choosing the conceptual over the literary, because the visual and the literary are both material manifestations of concept. That’s what’s at stake in conceptual art’s rejection of medium-specificity, according to deBloois. But literary and language are different.
You say in the passage below that representation is pre-Conceptual/pre-Duchampian. But look at the last sentence of the second quote from the deBloois: “By its emphasis on language as medium, conceptual art sets out to explore the potentialities of signification of different linguistic means and systems.” Do you disagree that the medium of conceptual art is language? I think that’s the rub…
But language: the “materiality” of concept itself is the abstraction of language. Arche-writing. When you say that you reject the primacy of language, to me you are saying that you deny arche-writing, and specifically the relationship between arche-writing and human subjectivity. But you’re Derridean, so that probably isn’t what you mean. But arche-writing is a language-form. I’m hearing you and Matthias saying that images operate semiotically in a space that exists outside of arche-writing, and that can be theorized with no reference whatsoever to any linguistic aspect, and that just baffles me. It’s fascinating, but baffling.
My initial question was whether comics narratives, which could possibly be Duchampian, open up possibilities for speaking of narrative WITHOUT speaking of representation. Your language is a very helpful way of putting it. But what’s at stake is the question of how much space there is between concept and language, and the range of possibilities for manipulating that space. I don’t think Deleuze or Derrida have answered that. But Noah did out my optimism: I think that a really well-situated, imaginative monograph on comics just might.
“She’s asking for it to be done, she’s not doing it herself.”
She’s doing both. I mean, she hasn’t written a book, but she’s pointed out various areas and done some theorizing, both in this post and others. And, yes, she’s trying to get other people to engage in this project — *which is what you do when you try to change a critical conversation*.
I liked Abstract Comics! I mean, you published my art — nobody else is lining up to do that. And beyond the purely personal, it certainly engages with traditions outside comics, often in ways I find interesting or pleasant. It’s also, at least to my mind, in many ways a work of advocacy, though — and advocacy is by its nature more a celebration of what’s happened than ambition for the future.
Jason, thank you for stopping by. The wordless comic you linked to is interesting. It does feel like Language school writing to some extent…though with the linguistic pyrotechnics turned way down. At least for me I think I’d say it definitely seems like literature, therefore…though there does seem like the use of comics tropes could do something there to pull the literariness apart if you fought with it a bit…? It reminds me of concrete poetry a bit too, of visual text art (which rarely gets brought up in discussions of comics, which is sort of too bad.)
Jason, I’m extremely partial to your pictureless comics…they make my heart race a little bit.
Like what Burroughs did in The Soft Machine, the abdication of authorial control to the free play of signifiers.
I think I’d consider work like that in comics to be “literature” because I consider conceptual art and conceptual literature to be the same thing…but I just don’t care if it’s literature. I’m happy to call it conceptual art, but only if I can call Burroughs conceptual art too. I’m apparently a very strong partisan for the post-medium condition!
Caro, you keep saying that I am against a “primacy of language” while you also quote me as saying, basically (I’m not going to look again for the exact wording) that “the choice of language over the visual is a factitious choice.” Now, maybe I didn’t express myself exactly enough, but I clearly meant that the either/or of language or visual is a factitious choice. Again, you keep saying that even after I wrote that I disagreed with your formulation of if it as my “refusal of linguistic primacy.” Doing a search just now on the page, I realize I never used the term “primacy” except as a quote of what you said. I don’t want to keep sounding like a nag, but please don’t recast my arguments as the arguments you are imagining are raised against your position.
(Similarly, when did I EVER claim that only a trained art historian is capable of interpreting images? Honestly…)
Thank you for the recap of the basic assumptions of what you call “linguistic primacy”–the fall into language and so forth. Not only am I aware of all this, but I also don’t in the least disagree with it (and I think I stated it earlier as such when I wrote: ‘Personally, I would be actually sympathetic to some more involved version of the linguistic, or maybe one could call it semiotic, turn’). Now, please, with this knowledge, go back and re-read what I wrote.
As for Silverman, there is a difference between queering, troping, misprision, and so forth, and getting things (unintentionally) wrong. (And, again, I am aware of this distinction–the thing that will most likely convince me to stop posting on this thread after all will most likely be having to repeat, “I am aware of that!” “I am aware of that!”) In the case I was discussing, it was a matter of simply getting things wrong.
Looking back through your answer, I find this retort from you even more salient:
“Refusing logocentric interpretation isn’t the same thing as refusing the analysis that says that language is the primary ground of traditional concepts like self and identity, and of artistic representations of subjectivity.”
Yes, I agree! That was *exactly* what I had said in the quote to which you respond. So why are you phrasing it as a criticism of that quote?
I mean, I don’t mean to be adolescent enough to end this comment with a “Zheesh!,” but, Zheesh!
And more:
“When you say that you reject the primacy of language…”
I never said that.
“to me you are saying that you deny arche-writing, and specifically the relationship between arche-writing and human subjectivity. But you’re Derridean, so that probably isn’t what you mean.”
Well, obviously I don’t deny arche-writing, but I also am not sure your use of the term is particularly close to Derrida’s, especially in your notion of the relationship between arche-writing and human subjectivity. If anything, the notion of “arche-writing” in that sentence should at the very least require for “human subjectivity” to be in quotation marks–or for each of the two terms to be so. (That’s the most concisely I can suggest a much more complex argument here.)
“But arche-writing is a language-form.”
Huh? I’m not sure that is correct. If anything, it helps constitute language, so it cannot be a form of it.
“I’m hearing you and Matthias saying that images operate semiotically in a space that exists outside of arche-writing, and that can be theorized with no reference whatsoever to any linguistic aspect, and that just baffles me.”
I’m sorry, but you are imagining it. I never said anything of the kind, and it is really depressing to try to respond to arguments against my points based on points I didn’t make. It’s especially confusing since you wrote that after several posts in which I though I had made it clear that was not what I meant.
Ha! I can’t leave it alone. Compare what you wrote:
“I’m hearing you and Matthias saying that images operate semiotically in a space that exists outside of arche-writing, and that can be theorized with no reference whatsoever to any linguistic aspect, and that just baffles me.”
To what I wrote (at # 20):
“…the Lacanian distinction of the symbolic and the imaginary seems to me overly simple-–certainly overly simple in the post-Oedipal phase. It seems to me to define an image as something semiotically innocent, so to speak, pure, and therefore ripe for colonization by language. And I don’t think even the purest abstract painting, for example, is semiotically blank like that.”
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear: in saying that the distinction of the symbolic and the imaginary is overly simple, I meant that there is always some of each in the other. Since “symbolic” refers to language, I clearly meant that there is always something linguistic in any image, at least post-Oedipally. That is exactly the opposite of what you have me say.
There are many other similar examples I can point out, but I’ll stop. I hope I’ve made my point.
As for the question, “Do you disagree that the medium of conceptual art is language?,” well, yes, I disagree with it. Language is a component of it, but only one component. In its widest, most theoretically-relevant sense, conceptual art goes back to Duchamp. Is “Fountain” in the medium of language? Is “In advance of the broken arm”? If anything, they are apparatuses for confronting, clashing together language with the obstinacy of matter. That is very different from saying “the medium of conceptual art is language.” (Unless you are going to use the notion of the primacy of language to claim that *everything* is language, at which point why would we even bother having this discussion any more?) The same remained true of the conceptual art of the sixties and seventies. Joseph Kosuth’s “One and three chairs,” for example, is not just text, not just a verbalizable notion, but the juxtaposition of text, image and object in an institutional setting. Part of its effect includes the obstinacy of matter to conceptualization; that’s what it’s about, and that’s what Duchamp’s ready-mades are partially about too. Paradoxically, perhaps, much of conceptual art is exactly about the impossibility of clear conceptualization (which makes it kind of deconstructive, doesn’t it?). It’s not as simple as saying that, because it’s conceptual, it’s only made up of concepts, and therefore it’s only made up of language.
BTW, Noah, you have a really bizarre notion of what “advocacy” is–not to mention that I specifically wrote in the introduction to the book that it was about opening up new possibilities, etc–exactly “ambition for the future.”
“there is a difference between queering, troping, misprision, and so forth, and getting things (unintentionally) wrong.”
There are differences of perspective and rhetorical formulation. Though one of the thing queering is about, as Caro was trying to say, is undermining the idea that, in arguments such as this, there is a single wrong or right — or, indeed, that the person speaking is the authority on what they have said. In this context, I don’t think anyone gets anything unintentionally wrong, or simply wrong, in parentheses or otherwise. There are readings and there are misreadings and the second are often preferable because they’re more provocative. Certainly, the effort to separate readings into clearly marked boxes where some are “queer” and some are “wrong” seems to pretty thoroughly miss the point that the boxes are the thing the queering is attempting to get out of or confuse.
That’s not to say that people can’t get things wrong. It’s that, from the perspective of a lot of queer theory (coming after respectively Foucault and Freud) saying “this is wrong” is (a) a rhetorical assertion of power, and (b) probably one of the least interesting things you can say about it.
Along those lines…if it’s depressing you to correct folks as you say it is, you could perhaps adopt another approach. For instance — do you agree with Caro that subjectivity studies, with its connection to feminism and queer theory, is underused in comics studies, and/or perhaps in comics themselves? If you agree, what do you think might be done with it, or what might comics studies or comics that were more informed by this perspective look like? If not, is it because you think that feminism/queer theory are already well represented in comics, or that those perspectives are uninteresting for comics?
Oh…just saw your last post. That’s a lovely explanation of the place of language in conceptual art.
Andrei, I’m sorry I’m not understanding you. I can try to tell you where I’m coming from… You said:
I associate the idea that “every semiotic content is linguistic” with Benveniste. I know that within poststructuralism, specifically Deleuze, there is a desire to open this up. But that does not mean that the statement is not “semiotics.”
So there are two ways to take your comment. One is the point that a lot of people working in semiotics aren’t this radical on this point, which I’ll accept. I didn’t give enough attention to the range of semiotic perspectives or make it clear enough that this was a specific strand of semiotics. Fair enough.
But Benveniste is definitely semiotics, and when you rebut the assertion by invoking Peirce and Saussure’s original formulation, you downplay the implications of Benveniste’s displacement of linguistic arbitrariness from the signifier and the signified to the sign and the reality to which it refers. Benveniste split Saussure/Peirce’s understanding of language into two parts: Their linguistics, which you say was meant to be as a subset of semiotics, is Benveniste’s Parole. But when we talk about the “fall into language” and “linguistic primacy,” we’re talking about Langue. Deep structure. The abstract language function that Beneveniste refers to when he says “it is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishes the concept of ego in reality.”
So when you invoked Peirce as evidence against the notion that “every semiotic content is linguistic,” I understood that as your advocating argument from Structuralist first principles and rejecting Benveniste’s distinction between langue and parole as a revision of Saussure. I can’t see why Saussure/Peirce are relevant after Benveniste if you don’t reject that distinction.
This sense was exacerbated by your question about the paw prints, which in their semiotic understanding are certainly contained within langue.
When you disagree with my saying that images are always already within language, I can’t tell whether you’re making the fairly obvious point that at the level of parole, parsing images doesn’t work the same way it works for words or whether you’re making the stronger point that images do signify but are outside langue.
So what I’m trying to engage is the implications of saying that images can “make reference” without being “in language.” Is this a very radical idea, that there is subjectivity before langue, which would entail a rejection of Benveniste’s coupling of langue and subjectivity? Or is the point that the “reference” at play when the signs are images is sufficiently distinct from the one at play when the signs are the familiar linguistic signs that it can make concrete reference without actually becoming part of what we generally think of as parole, which is just opening up the idea of reference between langue and parole?
The former is what I thought you were saying, and I would consider that a rejection of linguistic primacy…The latter is something I can’t easily accept but would like to read more about.
I think the notion of language in conceptual art described in the quotes I posted also presumes Benvenistean langue. So that is also informing my reading of your comments on that…it’s just not clear which aspect you mean when.
Being unable to parse much of that, I will add that I also never said that “images operate semiotically in a space that exists outside of arche-writing, and that can be theorized with no reference whatsoever to any linguistic aspect”. I was merely expressing my skepticism in the absolute epistemological primacy of language, and to the belief that theoretical awareness leads to better art. If the art of the future is going to look like Jeff Wall’s, I think I’ll just have to find another line of work.
Also, your use of the quote from Mulvey is a caricature of my position. I never said that analyzing beauty or pleasure is some kind of destructive transgression — it all depends what youøre trying to achieve obviously. Mulvey had a very good reason for doing so and we’re all the richer for it. I’m just saying that when works of art all start looking like nails for your theoretical hammer — to (ab)use Andrei’s initial metaphor — you’re in trouble and I’d rather not listen to you.
The question of avant-garde in contemporary comics is interesting. I would agree that there are American artists emerging right now — such as Craghead, Larmee, and some of the people in the abstract comics antho — that may be staking out such a thing, and again I’m pretty optimistic about what this may mean for comics. I’m not at all the contented, middle-of-the-road consumer Noah seems to want to paint me as, I’m just encouraged by what I see.
Strangely, in the Francophone countries, which obviously has a much stronger tradition in place for the formulation of a comics avant-garde, the inspirational structures of the 90s seem to be faltering. Amok and Fréon, which became Frémok, is explicitly operating in an avant-garde framework and produced some great work, but their output has dwindled to a trickle. A rather great trickle, but nonetheless. And I don’t see a lot to replace it — there are other groups, such as United Dead Artists, but their work doesn’t seem as focused.
Another central artist, Fabrice Neaud, who is strongly involved in gender and queer theory and sublimely mixed the personal and the political in his Journals, has almost stopped drawing comics. L’Association’s new direction is supposedly an avant-garde project, but publisher Jean-Christophe Menu understandably is simultaneously strongly committed largely to more traditional forms.
Ironically, this has happened just as the conversation with comics theory and criticism seems to be catching up, first and foremost in L’Asso’s Éprouvette a few years ago, and now in its theoretical pamphlet imprint of the same name, as well as in other places.
I’m not sure whether what we’re experiencing is just a lull, or of to what extent Menu’s and others’ analysis of the situation as a result of capitalist co-opting of the middle ground, which is squeezing out true avant-garde initiative, applies.
I guess what I’m saying is that efforts to combine theory and art along such lines have a hard time even in the home territories. Right now, I’m seeing more of it in Scandinavian, and especially Finnish comics/cartooning/contemporary art, but there much of it is created without much of a concerted theoretical substructure.
Matthias…I’d say you were just (somewhat) contented — not middle of the road!
“…but I just don’t care if it’s literature.”
Yes!
Caro:
“Andrei, you seem to consistently ignore how much that the intentional method of feminist critique is this kind of “misreading”. It’s queering. You can’t point to textual evidence from some original source material and say “this interpretation is an error” and then throw out everything they’ve said in preference for someone – like Deleuze and Derrida – who are more rigorous close readers, because to do so misses the point. The whole business is the opposition to logocentric reading – phallogocentric reading.”
I would say that this deliberate ‘misreading’ is a betrayal of scholarship, if not of reason itself. The outside world has its own quiddity, and works of art or of literature are in that world.
Yes, it’s possible to produce a queer reading of, say, ‘Don Quixote’. What would it correspond to in terms of the actual work? A ‘what if’ approach can only be fruitful if it leads to rigorous enquiry, such as historians practice with counterfactuals. But no historian would ever present a counterfactual as ‘true’ (as opposed to ‘valid’.)
Curiously, Harold Bloom — who is often thought of as a reactionary, with his call for a return to a canon — is one of the main advocates of strong misreadings. He once quipped that he’d be less interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare than in a Shakespearian reading of Freud. (Actually, I’m not sure ‘quipped’ is the right verb. He probably actually meant it.)
Theory makes strange bedfellows.
It’s not strange! It’s because they’re both so indebted to Freud!
“a betrayal of scholarship, if not of reason itself.”
Philosophy/theory since at least the 19th century has been consumed with the question of what reason is, whether it exists, how it can be studied, and what reverence is due it, if any. So you’re precisely right that the betrayal of reason is what’s at stake, though you’re sort of glossing over how contentious that issue is and how well aware of it the people you’re criticizing are.
But the consensus is that it does exist. See Auguste Comte, Russell, Whitehead.
Just been reading Comte! Who really seems like a fool, I have to say…but different strokes, I guess.
There’s not a consensus. I mean, Comte, Russell and Whitehead, yes, but Derrida thinks reason eats itself; Foucault thinks reason is a discourse of power; Freud thinks reason is a thin patina we use to paper over our true motivations, etc. etc. It remains quite contentious.
But none of them contest the actual existence of reason, they condemn its abuses.
“The sleep of reason produces monsters” — Goya
Hard to believe I tried to skim this whole thread…I’ve been ignoring it because busy.
As far as systematically complex comics narratives (and also indirectly philosophical, interesting formally, etc.), I’d say Watchmen is still the most complex, narratively and formally, that’s out there. It’s disguised as a genre, superhero action-adventure story–but for pure semiosis, it’s every bit as complex as something like Sound and the Fury (which I recently taught in the same class as Watchmen)–moreso, probably, than Borges, etc. One of comics’ neat tricks is that it can be formally complex without appearing so. Watchmen reads fine as a straight narrative (with linear plot, etc.) but that doesn’t mean it is. Some of Spiegelman’s “experiments” with time and space in Breakdowns (or Ware’s) draw attention to this kind of complexity–but they are often in the most pedestrian of comics. Anyway, I know superheroes isn’t exactly where this conversation is at…but as someone who teaches and digs experimental/complex prose, I don’t think we’re much beyond 1986–or if we can be, in terms of comics.
Borges actually wasn’t that heavy into theory or philosophy. He had a few favorites he trotted out over and over and in a variety of contexts. Schopenhauer was an especial favorite–and G. K. Chesterton.
I actually agree that there’s no special need for comics creators to be overtly engaged with philosophy/theory. It might be one interesting way to go…but certainly not exclusively. Lots of twentieth-century prose writers known for their experimental style aren’t especially engaged with philosophy/theory. Rushdie, for one–is always read in poststructuralist/posmodern/ postcolonial contexts, but there’s little evidence that he’s read or is reading much of the theoretical material. It’s “in the air,” to some degree, I guess…but that’s not exactly the same thing.
Anyway…thought I’d come in at the end, after only reading part of the conversation…and lengthen the thread.
Noah: “It reminds me of concrete poetry a bit too, of visual text art (which rarely gets brought up in discussions of comics, which is sort of too bad.)”
Short, I know!:
http://tinyurl.com/24mr374
http://tinyurl.com/27ob9jt
A coda to the coda:
http://tinyurl.com/29vad8s
Alex, I think you’re just wrong (or creatively misreading.) None of them say reason doesn’t exist…but many of them don’t think it’s a good thing which can be “abused”. For many of these thinkers, the abuse of reason is the use of reason…or else they argue that reason is such a slippery thing that determining the difference between use and abuse is effectively impossible.
They’re also all fascinated with the intertwining of language and reason, and the question of whether they can be separated, and whether that means reason is arbitrary, or social, or useful under certain circumstances, or entirely subjective, or any of a number of variations. This goes back to Kant, or maybe even Hume.
Matthias: If you can’t parse it, how do you know that you didn’t say it? My saying that “images operate semiotically in a space that exists outside of arche-writing, and that can be theorized with no reference whatsoever to any linguistic aspect” is just an effort to flesh out the topology of your “skepticism in the absolute epistemological primacy of language” with reference to arche-writing — which was my original question that everybody forgets!
I think if you’re going to be skeptical about language’s epistemological primacy, you kind of need to be able to talk about Benveniste. What do you think he gets wrong about the subject and language? Do you think the feminisms that derive from his assumptions perpetuate the error? If you can’t articulate that, your skepticism isn’t a theoretical position – it’s just your opinion.
Andrei says I’m wrong that arche-writing is a form of language (langue). I don’t think I am but I think his point is interesting. I base my opinion on the fact that arche-writing is used in the Grammatology to reverse the order of speech and writing, which I take as Derrida’s effort to superimpose Benveniste’s insight onto formal philosophy. Derrida is very concerned with Benveniste throughout his oeuvre, and I think the articulation of arche-writing marks the point where he transforms and synthesizes Benveniste’s most influential insight and sets up his subsequent responses, particularly the critique of Benveniste in the Supplement of Copula. Derrida says things like this in Of Grammatology:
The “pattern uniting form to substance” seems to me to describe langue pretty tidily. It’s a nominalization of the play of difference. So although I understand that Andrei’s point is that the right place to locate the origin of langue is after arche-writing, I’m not sure I buy that. Doing otherwise seems to “deny” the only sense in which arche-writing is “writing.” But it’s langue, not parole: it’s not “pre-language”; but it is also not the constellation of graphemes. It is just the question, again, of how semiotics works before or outside the establishment of parole, and how images become meaningful in that pre-parole space.
You can, Matthias, subordinate the study of theory to the study of art if you want — that’s what you do when you use the hammer/nail metaphor in the way you did here. (Andrei’s point is different, having to do with tautology.)
But the “works of art” that this question is interested in, ultimately, are the writings of Derrida and Lacan and Deleuze and Irigaray, etc., and my question is whether the functioning of comics poses any challenges to their various formulations of the semiotics of image, including exactly the kind of question raised by this disagreement Andrei and I have about where to locate arche-writing. The snag at the moment is that Andrei seems to think their semiotics of image already has a more flexible concept of langue than I do.
I don’t feel like my questions are answered by any means, but the conversation with Andrei — despite how frustrating it was for you, Andrei — definitely has clarified and focused the questions: I think comparing the topologies of Benveniste’s langue and Derrida’s arche-writing and Lacan’s Imaginary is critically important to understanding that space. I don’t think they’re significantly competing topologies but I think the differences among them are interesting.
I’m going to a conference on the Vorticists this weekend at Duke (when the exhibit next comes to the Tate you should go see it; it’s small but interesting), and the catalog talks about the intense animosity between Ezra Pound and the Futurist Marinetti, which were really over immensely subtle differences in interpretation and philosophy and approach. I think we are in the same type of situation.
Matthias, I didn’t mean to imply that I thought theory made it easy to support avant-gardes. Just that they’re worth supporting. An “avant-garde” without theory, though — that seems wrong. How is that not just an aesthetic style? Theory and philosophy are what tie the avant-gardes back to the culture they’re “avant” of…
Eric: I’ve actually heard Rushdie talk about Joan Copjec in response to a question someone asked him at a lecture many years ago, so I think he reads theory at least a little, although I doubt with intense fascination. But I also wouldn’t call him avant-garde: Barth surely read theory.
Alex: The rub is that criticism isn’t history. Literary criticism isn’t “scholarship” in the same sense as literary (or other) history.
One of the biggest differences is in the understanding of primary and secondary material. Secondary material in history tends to be more systematically “secondary” to the primary material, which is authoritative. That’s vital to the project of history.
But literature itself has sources in a way that raw historical primary material does not. So in literary criticism, the idea that material is “secondary” is less linear, more dialectical.
Take a literary work. You can look at it as a primary source, and treat it with the same kind of historical distance and respect that historians treat raw historical information, like census figures or the demographics of elections.
But you can also consider any literary work to be secondary material over some other literary work or cultural source material. Goethe’s Faust is secondary material “about” the legend of Faust, or Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, etc. Most literature is an “interpretation” of some source material.
Given that, it also then goes the other way. A piece of criticism — is it secondary to its source material? Yes, but all literature is secondary to some source material, so the criticism can also be primary material — the original ideas of the critic, in the same relationship to the source as Hamlet to the Historica Danica. That’s why it’s so easy for literary-minded people to consider criticism an art form.
It’s perfectly rational, considering the objective character of the primary literary object. But it’s completely different from the sense you get if you start from the character of historical objects. Of course, you can take this position vis-a-vis historical objects as well, but then you’re treating the historical object as literature and not writing proper “history.”
In literature there’s a spectrum: literature proper, which has no expectation of fidelity to anything, literary criticism, which has some expectation of fidelity but latitude for fecund misreading and imaginative interpretation, and literary history, which should be faithful and subject to the same tests as other histories.
At least, that’s the old-school position that I imagine would be something like Professor Bloom’s. I’m sure there’s representation theory in history that would knock the idea of “faithful history” all to hell.
“What do you think he gets wrong about the subject and language?”
Well, he gets the order of emergence wrong. Children as early as 15 months will recognize a mark on their nose in their reflection. They begin to use ‘I’ around the beginning of their 3rd year. (Other higher primates recognize their reflection around the same age, too, but don’t develop language.) The most reasonable interpretation is that the subject-object and self-other distinctions are needed to make sense of the grammatical distinctions of I-you, etc., rather than the other way around. Language, of course, shapes the self, refines it, etc. (separating from those other higher primates).
Noah,
“Claiming we’ve somehow moved beyond [Freud] due to improved scientific research is a neat summary of the ways in which science so often pokes its eyes out with its own microscope.”
Well, I’d reverse that and say literary theorists shouldn’t make claims about the cognitive development of humans if they’re only going to rely on old scientific theories. If these old theories help with literary analysis, fine, but stop making claims purporting to be objective about the determination of all cognition by language. I’d prefer a bit of Chomskyan humility here. When asked about how his linguistics research affects his political writing, he admits that he doesn’t know.
Charles, I disagree — not with what you said but with the idea that it’s irreconciable with Benveniste’s point.
Children at 15 months don’t have a sense of “self” that’s the same as an older child: their independence from their mother is limited and contingent. They’re not really part of the “culture” yet. That faculty you describe — is recognizing the mark meaningful in any way to the child or is it just pattern matching? I think you’re talking about the emergence of the ability to use concrete language (parole) at ~3 years, and Benveniste’s observation has more to do with the difference between consciousness and awareness, before the ability to manipulate concrete semiotic signs.
I said this, though, about this topic, which is pretty misleading:
What that leaves out is that while there isn’t a recognizable “self” prior to the concept of self, before there’s a concept of self, the consciousness is emerging under a set of conditions for forming a recognizable self that are meaningfully proto-linguistic.
I think this argument boils down to a question of how linguistic the proto-linguistic stuff actually is. I tend to feel like poststructuralist language of any ilk describes it in linguistic terms but that they’re generic and conceptual enough that it doesn’t entirely matter. But Matthias insists over and over that my language is too linguistic and that I need to think more visually. I don’t know how to do that without actually being at odds with the idea that this proto-linguistic space is “langue”, “arche-writing,” “structured like a language.”
Poststructuralist psychoanalysis makes no claims about the cognitive development of humans, only about the structural relationship of subjectivity to language. The theories are synchronic, not diachronic.
“Subjectivity” isn’t the same thing as “consciousness.” It’s related to consciousness, but it’s a particular aspect of consciousness that has to do with meaning, not awareness. For example, feral children never become subjects (except in Tarzan books). But they do develop cognitively.
Conventional oedipal psychoanalysis was very developmental, but between Lacan’s topologies and Deleuze, that’s entirely heuristic at this point. The only vague bit of “temporality” at this point has to do with the notion that individual subjects do have to “enter” the structure temporally, but that process is completely consistent with developmental psychology.
Only have time for this:
“That faculty you describe — is recognizing the mark meaningful in any way to the child or is it just pattern matching?”
The pattern being recognized is one’s own face, which younger infants don’t do. The point is that an 18-month old recognizes that what he’s looking at as his own face, now with a mark on it. Seeing the mark, he attempts to brush it off, not from the mirror, but from his face.
But that’s very semiotic, Charles. To make that work, the child has to already understand that the image is a representation, a signifier, that represents his face. So the logic of structuralist linguistics would already apply — langue, not parole, but still structuralist linguitsics.
I don’t see how that’s an error in the order of emergence: that sounds exactly like a proto-subject constituted through the play of difference to me. Not yet part of culture, but with the tools to parse meaning.
Caro: “Benveniste split Saussure/Peirce’s understanding of language into two parts: Their linguistics, which you say was meant to be as a subset of semiotics, is Benveniste’s Parole. But when we talk about the “fall into language” and “linguistic primacy,” we’re talking about Langue.”
The parole/langue distinction was formulated by Saussure in the “Cours de Linguistique Generale,” which is still the locus classicus for it. In case, I fail to follow your use of it in parsing what I said, so I really can’t help you there.
Noah: “Though one of the thing queering is about, as Caro was trying to say, is undermining the idea that, in arguments such as this, there is a single wrong or right — or, indeed, that the person speaking is the authority on what they have said. In this context, I don’t think anyone gets anything unintentionally wrong, or simply wrong, in parentheses or otherwise.”
Really? No one ever gets anything unintentionally wrong? No mistakes are ever made?
Caro used Derridean language in her defense of Silverman as “queering”: “The whole business is the opposition to logocentric reading – phallogocentric reading.” Now, if there is one thing that Derrida said over and over again–and here I think Alex would agree–is that interpretation can allow itself to stray only *after* exhausting all the resources of rigorous scholarship. If you engage in misprision before that, you are not creating a new, strong, liberating reading, or whatever; you are just getting things wrong. Irresponsibility can only come after the demands of responsibility have been met, and deconstruction cannot be used as an excuse for sloppy reading. It’s right there, in “The Exorbitant: Question of Method,” in “Of Grammatology,” and in numerous interviews.
“No one ever gets anything unintentionally wrong? No mistakes are ever made?”
Sure, Derrida’s a big old anal scholar. But he’s not doing queer readings either.
I didn’t say that no one ever gets anything wrong, by the by. I said they did. You need to go reread!
Noah: ‘For instance — do you agree with Caro that subjectivity studies, with its connection to feminism and queer theory, is underused in comics studies, and/or perhaps in comics themselves? If you agree, what do you think might be done with it, or what might comics studies or comics that were more informed by this perspective look like? If not, is it because you think that feminism/queer theory are already well represented in comics, or that those perspectives are uninteresting for comics?”
I disagree with the blanket demand that a specific theory be used to explain anything. I think that each work, in confronting each scholar/interpreter, should suggest (obviously based on the interpreter’s store of knowledge) the methods used to read it. As such, I’m sure that there are plenty of works that could invite feminist/queer theory, and hopefully the right interpreters will come along to provide those readings. But, in the absence of the pudding, calls for how it ought to be made are kind of empty. Just make the damn pudding.
“But, in the absence of the pudding, calls for how it ought to be made are kind of empty. Just make the damn pudding.”
So now you’re looking to Nike for your theory? Did Derrida wear sneakers or something?
You can put any two texts in conversation with each other. Sometimes what they’ll say is just (for example) this comic is unaware of queer theory, and has a naive view of gender. That’s not an illegitimate observation in itself though.
Caro’s thinking about how a whole range of theoretical texts might apply to comics…and the original post was in fact about a particular comic. And critical challenges to other critics or to art forms aren’t exactly rare or even vaguely unusual.
And, you know, Caro didn’t make a blanket demand for one theory to be used to explain everything. I doubt you’re wrong though — rather, you’re rhetorically exaggerating for effect, yes?
Caro:
“Alex, I think you’re just wrong (or creatively misreading.) None of them say reason doesn’t exist…but many of them don’t think it’s a good thing which can be “abused”. For many of these thinkers, the abuse of reason is the use of reason…or else they argue that reason is such a slippery thing that determining the difference between use and abuse is effectively impossible.
They’re also all fascinated with the intertwining of language and reason, and the question of whether they can be separated, and whether that means reason is arbitrary, or social, or useful under certain circumstances, or entirely subjective, or any of a number of variations. This goes back to Kant, or maybe even Hume.”
If they truly believe that, then they are obscurantist jerks.
Reason has always been the best way for humanity to apprehend the universe, despite the persistant claims of irrationalists and anti-rationalists.
I’ll take reason over mysticism or ideology (such as has seemingly taken over great swathes of literary academia) any day of the week.
Caro, you cite Hume; I am puzzled; surely one of the foremost champions of reason?
Kant defined the limits of reason, but did not invalidate it; it’s a common misperception that his ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ was an attack on reason itself. No: he was pointing out that reason– contrary to the affirmations of the Scholastics — could not in itself explicate such transcendent concepts as God or morality.
Anyway, to return to Noah’s list of anti-rationalists: it is paradoxical, and not a little ironic, that these chaps use reason to attack reason. To paraphrase Jesus:
“How can Reason be used to drive out Reason? A house divided cannot stand.”
Andrei – you’re right: it’s a change in the definition of the terms, not their introduction. I haven’t read the Saussure in a long time.
But the change in definitions is extremely significant — significant to the point that the terms mean different things: the Cambridge Dictionary of Literary Criticism describes it as “a return, in Saussure’s name, to a conception of language that he had resolutely rejected.”
Benveniste’s original critique of Saussure is online here.
The notion that Benveniste’s recasting of “langue” marks a different relationship between language and reality from that of Saussure, a fundamentally anti-realist one that makes language primary in a radical way, is not something I’m making up out of sloppy readings of Benveniste or Derrida. The implications of it for the status of concepts like arche-writing and the Imaginary are significant.
I can’t tell from what you’re posting here whether you are unfamiliar with it and trying to figure it out from my sloppy recitation of it in blog comments, whether you actually disagree with the well-stated formulation of it (as Deleuze does) and are just doing a terrible job of articulating your objections (or theirs) in response to my terrible job of articulating the position, or whether you’re just annoyed with the way I’m talking about it.
Andrei:
“Now, if there is one thing that Derrida said over and over again–and here I think Alex would agree–is that interpretation can allow itself to stray only *after* exhausting all the resources of rigorous scholarship. If you engage in misprision before that, you are not creating a new, strong, liberating reading, or whatever; you are just getting things wrong. Irresponsibility can only come after the demands of responsibility have been met, and deconstruction cannot be used as an excuse for sloppy reading.”
Yes, that’s exactly my point, better expressed.
I’m a bit appalled at the solipsism of current theory. Every man and woman a king or queen of a discourse controlled and defined by its author.
Alex; Kant was careful to leave reason room to be valid. His successors were not so kind.
The reason (as it were) that philosophy over the last 200+ years is so difficult, and causes such common sense resistance, is precisely because of the questioning of reason and the use of reason to undermine reason.
I’d point out that name-calling is not particularly rational, nor is dismissing most of the most significant thinkers of the last two centuries on the grounds that their ideas aren’t instantly accessible.
I could hardly be doing a terrible job of articulating my objections when I didn’t articulate any objections, could I? I just said I didn’t follow your use of it, but please don’t try to clarify any further, I must admit at this point I’m past the point of caring to follow it. I’m looking forward to your further criticism, and hopefully I will see there your own brief fulfilled in a satisfying fashion.
Just for the record, my “demand” — it’s a request, because I think it needs to be written and because it would greatly help my understanding and build an interesting bridge between women’s studies and art theory –is for someone to create an explication of this “thing” (which is far from everything, just the signifying logic of images) using the language of one theory which I think is somewhat at odds with the way that it’s currently discussed, in order to open up a set of issues that are being ignored.
I can do a version of it. But my understanding of the signifying logic of images is very linguistic, and the point of asking for someone else to do it was to get a less linguistic perspective. I’d hope that someone who was not a literary theorist first and foremost would see openings and spaces that I don’t see. I’m interested in the perspectives of theorists, not some authoritative interpretation of the source material.
It has nothing to do with some Transcendental Horizon of Theoretical Explanation where one theory explains everything. Some of these theories are totalizing, closed systems. They exist as a plurality of discrete and competing totalities. The imperative that any one be constantly deconstructed is political, not intellectual, and is itself a particular
totality.
As for when interpretation is allowed to stray from rigorous scholarship, I’ve asked you before, Andrei, to confront Marine Lover from that perspective, since that principle directly contradicts the political imperative of French feminism.
Andrei – I meant the objections from your previous comments: I can’t locate the root of our disagreement from the information I have here. Not our misunderstandings — that’s surely my own sloppy reading and writing — but there is a real grey area here about where the linguistic begins and ends. That’s what I can’t parse from what’s here.
I know MY position is Benvenistean (which, I imagine, is why I like Groensteen’s book so much more than everybody else around here) but I don’t know where to situate your position with regards to mine. I know where you situate your position, but I don’t know where you situate mine. So we’re stuck until we have a more useful set of texts to work with.
Alex, that two paragraph quote at the top that begins “Alex, I think you’re wrong, or creatively misreading…” I didn’t write that. I can’t explain the Hume…
You have? What are you talking about? I don’t remember having this conversation with you before. Also, by this point, I’m not even sure what “that perspective” and “that principle” refer to. Is “when interpretation is allowed to stray from rigorous scholarship” a *perspective*? “That principle”–i.e., what Derrida said? If you think that contradicts “the political imperative of French feminism,” well, maybe you’re right (though I think that French feminism does not speak with one voice), but maybe that’s the difference between philosophy and politics. I’m more interested in philosophy myself.
Caro:
“Alex, that two paragraph quote at the top that begins “Alex, I think you’re wrong, or creatively misreading…” I didn’t write that. I can’t explain the Hume…”
My abject apologies: it was that dastard Noah.
Eve Sedgwick’s “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” is something I’m sure Andrei’s read which is elliptically but certainly about the values and (semi-onanistic pleasures) of same.
Alex, my Hume is pretty shaky and old to boot…but to the best of my understanding, he essentially used reason to undermine the rational foundations of belief in God. That was the prototype of the use of reason to destroy reason, in that it relegated really important parts of the rationalist tradition (those involving faith) to the outer darkness. That’s where Kant picks things up, trying to salvage the links between reason and faith by contradictorily and rigorously separating them. And then you get people like Fichte moving into radical subjectivity, or Hegel essentially making reason a historical phenomena rather than an absolute, and Nietzsche moving the primacy to Will rather than reason and on and on. In short, Hume can be seen as both the arch-rationalist, and for that very reason as the beginning of the questioning/destruction of reason.
” maybe that’s the difference between philosophy and politics. I’m more interested in philosophy myself.”
Feminist and queer theory of course deny this distinction.
Andrei — I did! It’s in comment 66:
I brought it up again because you said Derrida says:
It seems to me still that Irigaray’s Marine Lover (which for anybody who hasn’t read it is a highly poetic and oblique criticism/interpretation of the central themes of Freidrich Neitzsche using the metaphor of fluid mechanics) is the most dramatic example of the rejection of this principle. I picked Marine Lover because it is a literary text and were were talking about reading primary texts rather than secondary sources. Cixous, though, in Laugh of the Medusa has a less performative statement of the idea that I also think is in conflict with Derrida’s position as you present it (although Cixous describes it as “deconstructive” and its debt to Derrida is palpable and direct):
Now I’m not saying it means you can be completely haphazard, and I don’t think I am being haphazard or arbitrary or ignorant of sources, but it very much does mean that readings are more laced through with desire and subjectivity than your emphasis on reason and “rigorous scholarship” implies.
Marine Lover is particularly interesting because of its refusal even to use the patterns of rational discourse, but Laugh of the Medusa also doesn’t take the pains you seem to be asking for that we start with rigor and then move to interpretation. I imagine Cixous would say that interpretation is writing and rigor is speech: the Name of the Father. So in light of that — whither Derrida’s exhortation to rigor a priori?
Andrei — you’re correct; “French feminism” is a US colloquialism. I think the term in favor now is “poststructuralist theoretical feminists.”
Marine Lover I think was a stylistic influence on Krauss’ Optical Unconscious, but maybe I’m just reading that in because I like them both so much.
Incidentally — that emphasis on desire and subjectivity — that’s why I think it matters that somebody other than me write this thing I’m calling for, someone whose “desire and subjectivity” is highly image-centric, rather than mine which is so powerfully invested in prose and in linguistic structures.
I basically defined the project as something I can’t do. I can do a version of it, but the desire and subjectivity of what I do won’t be the desire and subjectivity that I’m looking for…
=======================
Since much of this started out with a discussion of experimental prose: Cixous and Derrida were very close personal friends, and Cixous’ obituary for him is extraordinary: an immensely sensitive and careful reading of his work, but also a deeply personal and poetic conversation between his memory and her experience of loss. It is definitely experimental prose; it is one of the books I have lately turned to when facing grief.
It’s called “Insister of Jacques Derrida” (insist-er and in-sister) and there’s an excerpt on Google Books. They also wrote a book together a few years before he died, called “Veils” that is similar in structure.
Both are really superb reading.
Caro, you wrote: “If you can’t parse it, how do you know that you didn’t say it? My saying that “images operate semiotically in a space that exists outside of arche-writing, and that can be theorized with no reference whatsoever to any linguistic aspect” is just an effort to flesh out the topology of your “skepticism in the absolute epistemological primacy of language” with reference to arche-writing — which was my original question that everybody forgets!
I think if you’re going to be skeptical about language’s epistemological primacy, you kind of need to be able to talk about Benveniste. What do you think he gets wrong about the subject and language? Do you think the feminisms that derive from his assumptions perpetuate the error? If you can’t articulate that, your skepticism isn’t a theoretical position – it’s just your opinion.”
I can’t do that Caro, since I haven’t read Benveniste, am unfamiliar with most of the theory you’ve talked about, and the stuff I actually have read — like Derrida — I read about a decade ago and haven’t reread since. But relegating my position to what one senses is the entirely untenable field of mere “opinion” because I haven’t read the exact theoretical set you’re immersed in, and can’t offer some kind of counter to it, is, frankly, rather arrogant.
The sad thing is that you’re not exactly selling me on the idea of familiarizing myself with this nebulous discourse in the first place. I’d rather read some literature.
The reason I’m skeptical, if you still want me to state more clearly where I’m coming from, can be found along the same lines Charles brought up: it is obvious that babies experience the world prior to acquiring language; it’s not even that important whether they recognize themselves in a mirror at this stage, though they do — cognition clearly precedes language, and it seems strange to me to assume that all such experience evaporates once we do develop it. There are whole areas of neuroscience devoted to this level of cognition, as far as I’ve understood it.
OK, so you want to go with Derrida call it arche-writing and claim that well, it is in fact linguistic, but this is my least favorite thing about Derrida, I think, this somewhat chauvinistic notion that everything we do is “reading”. I guess you may describe our basic cognition as linguistic, but if so, it’s linguistic in a way that’s entirely different from the much more systematic construction Saussure talks about when he talks about langue. Plus it would make animal cognition linguistic too at some level, which to renders the term somewhat useless.
Beyond that, most of what I’ve been talking about when I’ve been “insisting” that you be less linguistic (which I don’t recall having done quite so vociferously as you seem to have perceived it), has less to do with this, and more to do with the practical reality of applying language — parole — to art. It only goes to far, and often a work of art calls for a kind that is not theoretical but poetic to be at all satisfying, and this is where insistence on theoretical rigor or even sophistication often becomes a stumbling block.
Anyway, that’s probably sophomoric opining too, but it’s the best I can do right now. I also tire of this endless parsing of theoretical fine points, especially since we appear actually to agree on most things, so like Andrei, I’ll just say that I’m looking forward to reading something compelling on comics, or literature, or whatever else, from you again.
Thanks, Matthias: it might have gotten buried but I did respond to Charles in comment 94: there’s nothing incommensurate between poststructuralist psychoanalysis and cognitive neuroscience, at least not at the broadest level that you’re representing cog sci here. (I think some of the AI stuff that cog sci people do bangs up against feminists like Donna Haraway, but I’m not sure about that.) The objects of study are just completely different, but they do easily intersect.
Poststructuralist psychoanalysis doesn’t study individual cognition and identity and development; it describes how a person becomes mentally part of a culture, how people internalize and identify with and are assimilated by notions of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, ideology, history. It’s essentially an anthropology. That’s why Claude Levi-Strauss is so important to the genealogy, and why it meshes so easily with, for example, Marxist theories of interpellation. It’s always been part of psychoanalysis: Freud did work on group psychology, although he was obviously much more psychological.
That’s why it’s so difficult for me to accept your subjectivism on these matters, why I seem to you to be taking it so over-seriously: in my discipline, and even more so in women’s studies, the responsive individualism of your approach is a tremendously political stance…but at the risk of infecting Suat’s thread, I’m actually going to move what I was going to say about that over to the art market discussion…
Caro,
“But that’s very semiotic, Charles. To make that work, the child has to already understand that the image is a representation, a signifier, that represents his face. So the logic of structuralist linguistics would already apply — langue, not parole, but still structuralist linguitsics.”
I don’t have a problem with calling image recognition semiotic, but to understand that the reflection represents the infant’s face, the infant has to already have a self-concept to make sense of the representation. Thus, the self-concept comes first. Semiotics isn’t just linguistic in nature. You’re defining langue in such a way that it’s now synonymous with cognition and perception, which only confuses matters it seems to me.
Andrei, I think Caro meant the extension of langue to include subjectivity was Beneveniste’s contribution, but it does read as if she was saying he came up with the parole/langue distinction.
Goddamnit, I didn’t notice a whole new page of comments. Gah!
Infants react to smiles at one month.