I enjoyed rereading Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. I’m not the argumentative type, I don’t have any real objections to the book. I primarily feel a certain sense of distance from many of its chapters.
The first chapter offers a historical overview of the “Rise of Alternative Comics.” I’m not a history buff, or even a comics history buff, so I have no idea how Charles’ (I’m going to call him Charles since we’ve met a few times) history compares with others on the subject, if there even are others on the topic. The first time I read it, it was quite the eye-opener, getting that background understanding of the underground comics, the direct market, and alternative comics. By the time I started reading comics, the direct market was well settled into its boom years as was the glut of self-published (or small publisher published) black and white alternative comics. Having never warmed to any of the underground “comix” (I still recall the sign above the front of my local comic store, which read “COMIX” in the stark lines of electrical tape), this mapping of the historical context provided some much needed perspective for me.
The latter chapters of the book focus on a number of comics artists and works which, I have to say, I have no real affection for (Gilbert Hernandez, Pekar, Crumb), have never read (Green), or haven’t read in a decade or more (Spiegelman/Maus). I’ve always found it hard to really engage with criticism that doesn’t use texts which I have read or appreciate, the insights seem less incisive, less powerful, the readings less able to expand through one’s own context/memory of the original. It’s rare that I get past that point (Genette’s Narrative Discourse, which primarily deals with Proust, a writer I do not enjoy, being a notable example where I have gotten past this issue).
So it is to Charles’ credit that I have read those chapters twice now. I have long been the reader who bought and read Love & Rockets exclusively for Jaime’s material (those days when the brothers had separate books were my favorite), I find Gilbert’s work not to my taste on a number of levels. Charles’ writing was one of the pieces of criticism that finally did get me to go back and read all of Gilbert’s work from volume 1 of L&R (the Palomar book and the Poison River book). (The others being Douglas Wolk’s reading of Love & Rockets X in his Reading Comics (that book being the one Gilbert Hernandez volume I do own and have read a few times), and a piece by sometimes commenter David Turgeon that I translated for du9 about ellipses in Poison River.) And while comments on earlier posts in this roundtable have focused on the political over the formal in Hernandez’s work, it was the formalistic reading that Charles brought to the examples that drew me in.
It is on this reading that Charles has tempted me to re-engage with Harvey Pekar’s work, in particular, Our Cancer Year, though perhaps that is more an element of coincidental connections with my personal life than anything else (my father was diagnosed with lymphoma this past year). After reading that book, I’ll probably dip back into Alternative Comics and reread that chapter to see how my impressions change.
I’d be interested to hear how Charles’ looks at his last chapter of the book (“Whither the graphic novel”) considering the changes that have occurred over the past 5+ years since the books publication. His focus on serialization starts to seem a little out of date now, with the quick decline of serialized comics and the rise of all-at-once publication of longer works, as does his “discouraging outlook” for such books. I’m tempted to read a certain nostalgia for the floppy pamphlet in this last chapter, a nostalgia so many comics readers have but which I don’t share. His analysis of the effects serialization has on a larger work is quite astute. When we read serialized works as a single total, some of the seams start to show and certain aspects of readerly time are lost. You can feel this effect almost immediately by reading most collections of comic strips, particularly the serials. The instant gratification of knowing what happens next seems to undermine the efforts of the creators to build suspense and mystery. He notes that “serialization seems essential” (161) and I have to wonder if the recent/current years might make that statement look false now but in time prove it true. I expect we’ll see more digital serialization (both online and as e-books) as time goes on, monetization options increase, and reading devices become more suitable for comics work (the new color Nook anyone?).
Chapter two, the formal chapter, is naturally where my attention fails the most, as it, more than history or autobiographical issues of authenticity, is where my primary interests lie. Charles’ framework for addressing comics as a series of tensions is such an apt description. It works on many levels (even beyond what he addresses here, I think) and opens up a number of potential areas of investigation. But what most struck me on this latest reading is how focused the formal readings are addressed to a rather traditional narrative comic. While many of the comics discussed in the book are autobiographical, they primarily still maintain a certain novelistic narrative structure. A story told, characters, settings, plot.
How then can we apply the series of tensions to comics that do not fit this narrative model? If the comic has no “text” to read as a code against the image, does a large part of the chapter become useless? If the comic is abstract or non-narrative or starkly experimental do the notions of time and space become unnecessary? I had the idea to try to apply all these tensions to a work that falls as far outside a conventionally representationally drawn narrative as I could find, but alas, I haven’t had the time to work up such a reading (perhaps another time). But here a few thoughts on the subject…
Code vs. Code here is primarily an image versus word division. A brief section address wordless comics that use pictographic signs as a replacement for language, but this won’t apply to all (or even most) wordless comics. I wonder if we might also apply the idea of “code vs. code” to the images themselves. Images are not uniform. While most comics stick to a consistent representational style, many comics put the image itself into tension through stylistic variations or variations in the level of representation (i.e. from completely abstract through photorealist (or photography)). This tension could provide fruitful readings of many unconventional works or even conventional works, a case in point being the section later in the book on the use of photographic reproductions in Maus. One might also approach Tintin in this sense, looking at the tension between the caricatured characters in a detailed, realistic world and how the clear line attempts to smooth that tension.
The tension between single image and sequence is very much in line with the writings of Thierry Groensteen (it is what he bases his iconic solidarity on) and Benoit Peeters (on which more here) and is, to my mind, the closest to defining characteristic that comics have.
The section on “Text as Experience vs. Text as Object” is problematic to me. The discussion of stylistics seems here much less about “Text as object.” For most comics, no matter the media of the art or its style, the final material object is a printed book, yet no discussion of the actual book as object takes place. While I think stylistics and the media of the image is an important element of comics, I don’t see the connection there to experience and object. To say that the “Clear Line seems to deny the materiality of the comics page” (60) is, I think, a misnomer. If anything the clear line embraces the flat printed materiality of the comic. The origin of that style goes back to the technical and economic limits of the original printing (done first in black and white for the serialization, with an eye towards clear reproduction, then later filled in with color for the albums). And I’ve never bought the oft-discussed readings of said style as creating an equality between figure and ground through the “evenness of line.” Rather, I see the evenness of line as a way to better assimilate the abstracted and caricatured figures into a realistic world. (Or perhaps that is saying the same thing? I wonder.) In this reading I had some kind of revelatory understanding of the mark making of Gary Panter as discussed in this section (perhaps another coincidental confluence of reading and my current drawing practice looking at Chinese ink painting and its mark making).
Though it is rather outside the purview of the book, it would have been interesting to see a discussion of the printed materiality of the comic in its various forms (pamphlet, book, minicomic, etc.) and how that materiality effects the reading experience (some of which, Charles’ does discuss later in the book in regards to serialization).
In the end, I will be thinking about these tensions when I next sit down to write about a comic, and over time, we’ll see how useful they are in critical practice.
_____
Update by Noah: The entire roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s book is here.
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@Derik:
“I’d be interested to hear how Charles’ looks at his last chapter of the book (‘Whither the graphic novel’) considering the changes that have occurred over the past 5+ years since the books publication. His focus on serialization starts to seem a little out of date now, with the quick decline of serialized comics and the rise of all-at-once publication of longer works, as does his ‘discouraging outlook’ for such books.”
A very important point here, and indeed I share the POV that this chapter is dated. I remember drafting the kernel of the chapter for the 1998 “Graphic Novels” conference at UMass Amherst, without intending, at first, to include it in my dissertation/book. At that time–not so very long ago, really–the prospects for non-serialized novel-length comics did intend seem pretty shaky to me. Derik, you’re right that the landscape has changed in that regard, and significantly. I’ll be addressing this at greater length in my response next week, but…yes, well observed. In some ways my book is an artifact of a specific era, and has been caught in the gears of change.
“I’m tempted to read a certain nostalgia for the floppy pamphlet in this last chapter, a nostalgia so many comics readers have but which I don’t share.”
Probably guilty as charged. When one spends so much time in and around a given cultural form, its evanescence comes to seem poignant even if it is replaced by other, in some ways better or more flexible, forms. I wouldn’t have described my perspective as nostalgic back in 2005, mind you, and in fact I’ve often disclaimed nostalgia, but I do see some support for that reading in the text.
Again, I look forward to discussing some of these changes next week!
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Derik: “Proust, a writer I do not enjoy”
I didn’t think that this was even possible! I’m baffled!…
OT (sorry!): http://www.ego-comme-x.com/spip.php?article482
I think the question of what happens to comics when there’s no narrative/time element is pretty interesting. Do they collapse into visual art? Is the time element really still there in some sense as an abstracted shadow of some sort? Is it still an art of tensions, or is there what your title says? It definitely moves them away from being an “emerging literature” and towards being perhaps a collapsing something else….
@Derik:
But what most struck me on this latest reading is how focused the formal readings are addressed to a rather traditional narrative comic.
It is true that the comics I analyze at length in the book mostly observe a conventional narrative structure.
However, the examples in Ch. 2, the chapter on form, are diverse (I’m very proud of that diversity), and the overarching concept of “tensions” does not, I believe, require traditional narrative to work.
The tensions discussed (among codes, between image and series, and so on) are not described in terms of the traditional elements of narrative: plot, character, etc. Yes, I do describe narrative actions and do refer to characters, in some cases even to themes, but I do not describe these things in terms of narrative theory. Indeed that might be a failing.
“If the comic is abstract or non-narrative or starkly experimental do the notions of time and space become unnecessary?”
Well, I note that Ch. 2 discusses, briefly, Spiegelman’s “drawn over two weeks while on the phone” (43), though I don’t go into it very much, since, for reasons of thrift, I chose not to try reprinting the strip in the book and therefore kept the discussion brief. It might be said that “drawn over two weeks” is in some ways conventional: the drawings are all representational, and they map a series of what seem like evolving relationships over a tight sequence of panels that may represent passing “time.” On the other hand, the radically disjointed (and wordless) nature of the strip makes any narrative reading of it conjectural at best, as is the case with other comics whose constituent images are in familiar mimetic form but whose sequences do not gather into conventional narratives, say Crumb’s “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super Modernistic Comics” strip reprinted in Abstract Comics.
I think the reigning concept of “tension” holds up rather well in that comic…and indeed I think it would hold up well for the majority of examples in Abstract Comics, which, I think, still have implied temporal sequences even if they defy paraphrase.
Derik, cue our Madinkbeard/Thought Balloonists roundtable on Abstract Comics here!
@Noah:
I think the question of what happens to comics when there’s no narrative/time element is pretty interesting. Do they collapse into visual art? Is the time element really still there in some sense as an abstracted shadow of some sort?
I’d be tempted to say the latter, simply because I see some sense of progression, or meaningful sequence, as fundamental to my reading of comics. Even in abstract comics that seem primarily concerned with formal metamorphosis, that is, with shifts in plastic form sans narrative rationale, I tend to read some things as coming “first” and other things as coming “after”; that is, I tend to read them as “happening” in time. Without that temporal element, that appeal to the idea of “happening,” I don’t know if I can read something as “a comic.” That doesn’t mean I can’t gaze at it and dig it, of course.
BTW, this does not mean that I buy into McCloud’s exclusion of single-panel images from “comics.” I don’t. But I’d argue that cartooning often implies time, or narrative, even in single images (a point related to Carrier’s reading of caricature in The Aesthetics of Comics). In any case, I think I have to see a sequence, or have to be able to infer a sequence, in order to bring my knowledge of “comics” to bear on a work.
Domingos: “I didn’t think that this was even possible! I’m baffled!…”
Some authors just don’t appeal to me. I like a lot of the big modernists (Joyce, Woolf, Musil, Lowry, etc.) but really can’t read some of them (Mann, Proust, Lawrence).
Charles: “I think the reigning concept of “tension” holds up rather well in that comic…and indeed I think it would hold up well for the majority of examples in Abstract Comics, which, I think, still have implied temporal sequences even if they defy paraphrase.”
Oh, I agree. I framed that part as a question because it was something I was questioning as I read. Mostly because I wanted to try applying the framework of tensions to a non-narrative work to see how it holds up and what new insights we might gain (if any). But, as I think I noted in there, I kind of ran out of time, I barely got what I wrote done in time (too many projects going on lately).
” I tend to read them as “happening” in time. Without that temporal element, that appeal to the idea of “happening,” I don’t know if I can read something as “a comic.” “
I wonder how much this element of assumed time plays in people’s understanding of comics. I wrote about a comic by Pascal Matthey awhile back ( http://madinkbeard.com/blog/archives/pascal-mattheys-scenic-descriptions ) and I don’t see it as happening over time, but I don’t think anyone would argue it’s not a comic.
Similarly I read something like Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross as a comic (where the planche/multi-frame is the room). But the only real “time” going on there is the reader/viewer’s viewing time and the time one must spend moving from image to image (since you can’t really scan them like panels on a book.
Charles, re implied time in abstract comics: I think that’s right, and it’s interesting since in some ways (vis a vis film) the defining feature of comics could be seen as the fact that they’re not actually occurring in time. As you get at to some extent in your book, time in comics is always abstracted…..
i also think the element of time in comics might not be as fundamental as most critics make it.
it’s just too bad i don’t have time to go through this thought (or maybe it’s for the best, who knows). but essentially, since time in comics has to be abstracted (or constructed by the reader), it is actually trivial to build your narrative exclusively around a spatial organization. i’m pretty sure there’s some chris ware pages that could serve as examples of this (but i’m at the office & have no access to his books right now).
but (perhaps more importantly), the fact that you can read a comic in “braiding” mode (re: groensteen) means that some of the effects in comics reading come from ignoring the time construct altogeter.
OK, back to office work… ah, if only i had my whole day to chat about comics theory…
Derik, the Matthey examples are fascinating.
For the record, our Madinkbeard/Thought Balloonists roundtable on Abstract Comics can be found here:
http://madinkbeard.com/blog/archives/abstract-comics-the-discussion
And here:
http://www.thoughtballoonists.com/2010/02/abstractcomics.html
Derik says:
That’s interesting, in a Derik-and-Caro-chat-over-beers sort of way. I like Woolf, Proust, and Lawrence, but generally suffer through Joyce, Mann, Musil, Lowry, etc. Wonder what it is about Woolf that breaks whatever our categorizing schemes are?
Charles: “I think the reigning concept of “tension” holds up rather well in that comic…and indeed I think it would hold up well for the majority of examples in Abstract Comics, which, I think, still have implied temporal sequences even if they defy paraphrase.”
Well, they have implied *sequences*, I don’t know about temporal ones. “Temporal sequences” I would take to refer to diegetic (or represented) time, which is hard to have if you don’t have a represented diegesis. If by “temporal” you mean the time of reading, then, well, all sequences take time to read or otherwise experience (that’s what makes them sequences as opposed to single images, or single instances)–and we’re back to the same place.
That is to say–sorry, I guess I pressed “submit” too quickly–if you just mean the time of reading (as opposed to represented time), then there’s no need to qualify a sequence as temporal, since that’s part of its very definition.
Look again at the Crumb. The temporal feeling in it comes out of the time of reading, and how that time of reading is inflected by the comic’s visual, graphic rhythms (including the alternation of imagery). There is no diegetic time in it, since there is no unitary diegesis that is represented.
It seems like there’s a question of whether the comics form itself includes time as a diegetic trace, though, isn’t there? Charles is interested in the expertise needed to read a comics page; with the way familiarity with the form shapes the use of the form by readers and creators. From that perspective, diegesis is not just a story the creator tells, but a collaboration based on a shared knowledge. Therefore, the familiarity with comics form, the fact that panel-to-panel or image-to-image is typically diegetic, means the passage of time can exist in abstract comics not as strict diegesis, but as a diegetic expectation or analogy. Abstract comics would be pushing very hard against the time/space tension Charles talks about, but the tension would still be there.
This would mean that an abstract comic viewed in one cultural milieu (where narrative comics are very familiar) might be quite different from the same abstract comic viewed in a cultural milieu where narrative comics aren’t common. Which seems right to me.
Yet, that expectation is defeated by (most) abstract comics. The diegesis (by definition, as used in film studies and by extension in comics studies–I’m not referring to Aristotle here) is the world of the story, a world defined by a spatial-temporal continuum. So the diegesis cannot be “a collaboration based on a shared knowledge,” though it can be formed based on that collaboration, which I what I imagine you meant. However, when attempting to engage in that collaboration to form the diegesis, the reader is defeated–for example, in the Crumb–in his or her ability to establish that continuum. Images are being shown, but there is no way to establish set temporal relationships between them. Therefore, as I said, there is no diegetic time. Maybe that negative is important (not so much to me, actually, but maybe to a reader whose primary reference point is comics)–but important in that it specifically counters the expectation, the collaboration to which you are referring. If you want to see that negative as a “diegetic trace,” fine.
But let me just add that there is no need to see abstract comics (the genre or the book) only through the cultural milieu of a comics reader. I have received some of the best responses to it from people very little familiar with comics, who then approached the work in the book with much fresher eyes–and, for purposes of this context, with no expectation of that diegesis. This would have been even clearer if, as I first intended, I had included in the book more examples coming from outside of comics (from Alechinsky, Kandinsky, Pollock, etc.) For financial reasons, and due to the fact that Fanta is more comfortable dealing with cartoonists, we could not do that, though I tried to include a number of them in the introduction.
In any case, even within comics I would dispute the validity of that narrative expectation. Presumably you could make the same point about Brakhage; since most film viewers expect film to be narrative, there is a “narrative trace” in his abstract films. Yet I think it’s self-defeating to begin from this majority expectation. Brakhage, for example, repeatedly said that his greatest idol was Pollock, and if you approach his films from the point of view of Abstract Expressionism, there is no narrative expectation whatsoever. Similarly for abstract comics.
OK, that last point wasn’t very clearly made. What I should have said was, even within film, a lover of the avant-garde could have as their major reference points Fischinger, Ruttmann, Harry Smith, etc etc, in which case they would bring no expectation of narrative to Brakhage. (Obviously, I still believe what I wrote about Pollock, but that’s not staying within the same medium.)
In any case, I think of abstract comics as really bridging the worlds of comics and, umm, “fine art” (I don’t like that term but I don’t know a better one), so the expectations of the comics reader are not the only ones in play.
“a world defined by a spatial-temporal continuum.”
But the position of subjectivity in defining the boundaries of the actual, real-life spatial-temporal continuum isn’t as clear as all that. I don’t see why it should be clearer in a fictional world than in the real one.
I think I’ve said this before, but to me if there isn’t a comics reference point for abstract comics, it starts to become very unclear why they’re comics. In any case, the tension between the temporal trace and the resistance to it is definitely one of the main ways I enjoyed the work in Abstract Comics.
“But the position of subjectivity in defining the boundaries of the actual, real-life spatial-temporal continuum isn’t as clear as all that. I don’t see why it should be clearer in a fictional world than in the real one.”
Because a fictional world is finite?
You don’t need a diegesis for time. Quite a few of those abstract comics feature a represented motion, which connects them in a flowing sequence. Time (not just reading time, but time within the representation) is necessary for that.
Hah! Good answer!
I don’t buy it though. You’re presuming the thing you’re attempting to conclude. That is, you’re saying it’s boundaries are well-defined because it’s boundaries are well-defined. If the fictional world is actually not just on the paper but in the subjectivity of the viewer, then it’s unclear where it starts and where it ends, which means that declaring it finite is actually not as easy as all that. Desire isn’t the universe, but it’s not necessarily finite either.
Whoops; the “good answer” is for Andrei, not Charles (who makes a nice point.)
Andrei: Well, they have implied *sequences*, I don’t know about temporal ones. “Temporal sequences” I would take to refer to diegetic (or represented) time, which is hard to have if you don’t have a represented diegesis.
But even with a diegesis, we could put images together that are not temporal, at least not without the reader making that leap on their own to seeing “time”, which is what makes the Matthey comics (linked above) so interesting. Even with a clearly represented diegetic space there isn’t a clearly represented diegetic time.
But maybe comics reader (as mentioned in some of the other comments) will just naturally assume panel-to-panel is a movement of Time-to-Time+1. Which then brings up the question, who does the artist create a sense of time not passing…
Noah: I think I’ve said this before, but to me if there isn’t a comics reference point for abstract comics, it starts to become very unclear why they’re comics.
I don’t get this at all. Can you clarify?
Do you mean, if the read doesn’t have a comics reference point? Does the work only exist as “comics” if the reader thinks it is comics?
Hey Derik. Yeah, basically you’ve got it. As Andre says, there’s a strong fine art reference in abstract comics. Visual art is very broad and open; if the reader doesn’t have a context for making abstract comics comics, I think they pretty naturally can be seen as visual art.
if the reader doesn’t have a context for making abstract comics comics, I think they pretty naturally can be seen as visual art.
Well comics are visual art. To me at least, they are a form of visual art (they are a form of literature too, I think). There are plenty of painters/printmakers that one can read as comics too (Newman (mentioned above), Alechinsky (ditto), some of Twombly’s work (like the beautiful and amazing piece in the Philly Museum), Bacon’s triptychs (cue Domingos), etc.).
Andrei, I’m still not really understanding the point you’re making in comment 15. I think it’s because you’re trying to define it in terms of what it’s not, maybe? I mean, what exactly is a non-diegetic, non-temporal sequence? What exactly makes such a sequence sequential?
Noah said:
The archetype of this is Burroughs, especially in The Soft Machine, although I think what Burroughs does resonates with Brakhage too.
Caro: “I mean, what exactly is a non-diegetic, non-temporal sequence? What exactly makes such a sequence sequential?”
I hate to go there, but my dictionary says: “a set of related events, movements, or things that follow each other in a particular order”
The key point is that there is an ordering, a particular ordering.
An artist could make 50 drawings. And they could be considered as part of a larger whole (I think “suite” is the word here”), but if they have a particular order, then it’s a sequence. For instance, Zak Smith made a huge series of drawings, one for each page of Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a sequence because they do have an order (page number).
I keep going back to this, but… Barnet Newman’s Stations of the Cross are a sequence of paintings, they have a particular order (they are numbered). There is not explicit temporal or diegetic element that creates the order, but there is an order.
A lot of artists do suites of prints that go together, but are not ordered in any way. Then they aren’t a sequence.
What Derik said. Sorry I didn’t explain it, but I thought it was pretty obvious. The alphabet, as we learn to recite it in pre-school, is a sequence that is non-diegetic and non-temporal. Goya’s “Caprichos” is a sequence that is mostly non-temporal (they are numbered and bound in order, you are supposed to read them from beginning to end, but there are no continuing characters, events, etc., except within a couple of prints.
In any case, I tried last night several times to respond to the following quote, and I ended up losing what I wrote twice. I’ll try it one last time:
Charles R.: “You don’t need a diegesis for time. Quite a few of those abstract comics feature a represented motion, which connects them in a flowing sequence. Time (not just reading time, but time within the representation) is necessary for that.”
Yes, there are some abstract comics in which a shape moves or is transformed from panel to panel. In that case, that shape becomes a rudimentary “character,” its environment is seen to recur from panel to panel too, and we have a very simple diegesis. So, I would argue, there is still a connection between the passage of time and diegesis. Also, such a basic sequence can only show that passage, it cannot give you the measure of that time, or even suggest the notion that “measure” applies to it: for the temporality of a triangle turning into a square, we have no outside reference, only the time of reading. So temporality as suggested in these sequences is as abstract as they come.
In any case, I find those kind of abstract comics generally less interesting than those that do not feature such “characters”–including those by Derik and Noah.
That’s interesting. So you’re not that into the Trondheim, for example?
Andrei, I don’t think motion implies a diegesis at all. But if it does, then you can’t be correct here:
“Brakhage, for example, repeatedly said that his greatest idol was Pollock, and if you approach his films from the point of view of Abstract Expressionism, there is no narrative expectation whatsoever. “
I should add: there’s a common space implied, otherwise the shapes wouldn’t be connected from drawing to drawing (or frame to frame), but diegesis is narrative-based, not just any old space.
But if you have the same space twice, it seems that that implies time — and if you have two spaces at different times, that points to diagesis of a sort — especially if you’re familiar with the workings of comics.
But most comics are narrative. Are all spaces diegetic? Or maybe I should ask are all temporal(-ized) spaces diegetic? Since Brakhage was brought up, would you really call this diegetic? It looks like things moving though a space, but what’s narrative about it?
Thanks! I’d never seen any Brakhage; I should have realized I could find it on the web.
That’s a really interesting example. At first I was like, yeah, this is totally a epileptic flashing light experience; I can’t see diegesis in that. But going through the second time I realized that part of my experience of it was thinking about the creator putting stuff in front of the camera lens, setting up the shots, etc. Like a lot of avante garde work, it strongly points to its creation…and so the narrative becomes the narrative of that creation; the objects/images arranged so that we can see them over a period of time.
Of course, that’s a subjective reaction…but I was arguing that diegesis is partially subjective in any case. I can’t say categorically, there is diegesis there, but I can say that for me there’s a diegetic trace, and that that was a fairly important part of what I enjoyed about the film.
heres what i dont understand though: two things really: the stations of the cross are very specifically temporal, both in terms of their narrative and in the sense that they are read/parsed properly only in that sequence. i dont understand how anything that makes reference to that narrative, even if it is associative, can be non temporal.
also, when you use words like ‘follow’ and ‘beginning and end’, that seems temporal to me, even though the motion through time isnt necessarily being depicted directly. the governing logic of the sequence’s order is embedded in temporality.
i guess it is that order is temporal to me. the only things non- tempora to me are when there is NO order; like lacan’s topology, or an algebraic equation that can be shuffled around, or something that is not sequential at all.
Caro,
The alphabetic arrangement of 20 kids in a classroom isn’t temporal.
Noah,
I empathize with/see/whatever your subjective reaction, can even come up with it on my own. And you could call anything narrative where something moves through space, but then that kind of makes it difficult to name what is a major difference between the art of Brakhage and classic Hollywood. Yeah, Brakhage has “characters,” “plots,” etc. just like Hollywood has characters, plots, etc., but I’d suggest a better way of signaling the difference is to say the latter is narrative, whereas the former is not.
I’d agree that narrative vs. non-narrative is a useful shorthand to distinguish between experimental and Hollywood films. And it obviously captures an important part of what is different in those films. But I’m still intrigued by the idea that even non-narrative comics or films are touched by a narrative trace.
But the order of the children in the classroom – well, in one sense it is unidirectional, but it is also mapped to something non-arbitrary so that it is just as sensible when reversed. NEITHER is the case with the stations of the cross, or anything that has a set beginning.
I mean, if the point is that you want to separate ‘directional’ from ‘temporal’, ok. But then what is the status of direction?
It’s mostly that there is more than one way to divide the pieces up here: you can oppose time to space, but you can also oppose spatio-temporal to logico-mathematical, where the operative divider is direction and all direction is temporal, practically. Logico-mathematical is radically non-temporal, but that doesnt seem to be what you guys mean when you say non-temporal. Is that right?
Charles–no, I would not call “Mothlight” diegetic. Re-read what I said–I was referring specifically to “motion” by an object (in an abstract comic) that recurs from panel to panel, therefore becoming a “character,” etc. If an abstract film had a triangle bouncing around, transforming into a circle, etc., then that triangle, again, would (probably; I can imagine ways in which it wouldn’t) become something like a character, a protagonist. In Brakhage’s abstract films there is motion, but not that kind of character continuity.
Noah–correct. I mean, I’m into all of them, but some more than others.
Caro–re-read what I wrote about represented/diegetic time vs. time of reading. In your objections you seem to be confusing the two. I’m not going to continue commenting on this issue, what I wrote is pretty self-explanatory.
Andrei — I’m not confused about the difference you describe. It’s just such a simplistic and incomplete understanding of representational temporality that I’m questioning whether I’m really understanding you.
The notion that estrangement in space and estrangement in time imply each other, and even that estrangement in space is the enabling equivalent of time — the necessary representational mechanism for depicting time (psychically and artistically) — dates back to Freud. Lacan further complicated the notion in “Logical Time.” In his work on Husserl and the phenomenology of time consciousness, Derrida rejects Lacan and follows Freud, updating him to de-biologize him: “space’s becoming-temporal and time’s becoming-spatial.”
The notion that the alphabet is non-temporal is counter to that. It’s demonstrably both directional and estranged. You’re asking me to take it as an archetype of a “non-temporal” thing — but that’s not nearly as self-evident as you act like it is, and I assumed you were aware of that.
Now, I’m more than happy to bracket the semantics and let “temporal” mean the obvious thing. I did that, in fact, and asked just about direction instead. But I’m not willing to let you pretend that I can’t read in order to avoid answering what is an actual theoretical question. You say “The alphabet, as we learn to recite it in pre-school, is a sequence that is non-diegetic and non-temporal,” and I say, it’s not non-temporal, because, within representation, sequence in space is not distinct from sequence in time in any meaningful way.
I admit it would have been clearer to ask about the status of a non-directional sequence. But in what sense is such a sequence a sequence at all? At that point it’s just estrangement, and if that’s all that’s required, it largely erases the difference between an abstract comic and a great deal of other abstract art, including some which doesn’t seem to fit your criteria otherwise.
This comments thread, as written, suggests the conclusion that the idea of abstract comics depends on an absolute distinction between narrative/diegetic temporality and spatial estrangement, and is thus incompatible with both the psychoanalytic and Derridean notions of time, in which (broadly speaking) spatial estrangement is implicated by and serves as the logical/psychic foundation of time.
That conclusion is pretty gregarious, and it seems unlikely to be true but rather an issue of clarity and rhetorical framing. Even if it seemed right, though, I don’t think should be posited lightly on the basis of an unquestioned “self-evident” understanding of something said in a blog comment, without further exploration.
But the exploration won’t have anything to do with your distinction between diegetic time and time of reading, because the problem is more spatial than that — and far more abstract.
Here is the relevant passage from Derrida.
I’m sure you read it differently than I do, Andrei, but I can’t see how the alphabet — or any sequence — can be considered meaningfully non-temporal in light of this.
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
I hate these threads that go on and on and on! Admittedly, you have a way of getting under my skin that makes it impossible to keep my word not to comment anymore. So, briefly:
That quote you give from Derrida is at the very basis of my understanding of sequentiality/temporality in abstract comics. As a matter of fact, I am writing an article currently on this very subject for an anthology that solicited it, but that doesn’t have a publisher yet–I hope it will. To pick up on the Derrida, that becoming-time of space connects directly to the notion of differance: species difference (in this case difference in space between two panels) becoming deferral. But the temporality created there is not represented diegetic temporality; it is, rather, *constitutive* of represented diegetic temporality, which, once hypostatized, represses the spatial difference. (In a way, this is a reversal of the hypostatization of differance into difference in language–which is better formulated as the becoming-space of time–but they are two sides of the same coin.)
That impulse, the movement of space-becoming-time, is also that which prompts the parsing of the sequence, setting off reading in *its* temporality. There is a connection, clearly, between spatial differentiation and represented temporality–in a simplified schema, spatial differentiation leads to temporization which is constitutive of represented temporality–but spatial differentiation does not automatically become *represented* temporality outside the presence of a diegesis. Rather, it is a temporization, an impulse in the sequence that forms it *as sequence* and that therefore also is an impulse toward sequential reading, and constitutive of the time of reading. Therefore I don’t agree with your paragraph here:
“This comments thread, as written, suggests the conclusion that the idea of abstract comics depends on an absolute distinction between narrative/diegetic temporality and spatial estrangement, and is thus incompatible with both the psychoanalytic and Derridean notions of time, in which (broadly speaking) spatial estrangement is implicated by and serves as the logical/psychic foundation of time.”
I do agree with the last half of it fully, but that notion of time (in Derrida/psychoanalysis) is not what I call “representational/diegetic” time. Maybe I can rephrase it by calling it represented *fictional* time, which, once again, is a hypostatization, a reification, if you want, of the movement of temporization. I haven’t read Derrida on Freud (or Freud, for that matter) for ages, but if I remember correctly, the notion of “frayage,” “blazing,” as well as the way Freud would use the term “representation” in the unconscious is closer to that temporization I am referring to, rather than to fictional-represented time.
Maybe we’re using different meanings of “representation” here?
In any case, I would argue that abstract comics play with that impulse of temporization, some going more in the direction of the hypostatization (e.g. Trondheim, Ibn al Rabin, Henrik Rehr), some going so far in the other direction that spatial differentiation seems to be *almost* all there is, with the temporal impulse left as just a barely distinguishable wisp (Tim Gaze, Billy Mavreas), most others being somewhere in between. But the point is that they play in, investigate, that area before the hypostatization–maybe a better word is the instauration–of fictional temporality.
I should add, many (on the surface) representational comics equally play in that area. I’m not saying this is the exclusive domain of abstract comics.
Missed your second post while I was writing. Again, the alphabet does not have the representational/diegetic/fictional temporality, which is all I was saying from the very beginning. It does have differentiation, yes, it has the resulting temporization of sequence, yes–but no diegesis, therefore no *represented* time!
I really think we ultimately all agree here. Honestly, I don’t have the time–the life!!!!–for all this detailed parsing. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t help but feel that if you had given me the benefit of the doubt you would have understood what I mean from the beginning.
“I can’t help but feel that if you had given me the benefit of the doubt you would have understood what I mean from the beginning.”
For an avowed Derridean (presuming I’ve understood your theoretical interests correctly), you have a remarkable faith in the transparency of language!
Anyway, I found your response very helpful.
“with the temporal impulse left as just a barely distinguishable wisp”
That’s exactly what I was trying to get at, I think. I need to think more about whether I agree that the temporal impulse should be separated, or seen as preceding, diegesis or narrative…but I definitely appreciate having them separated out like that for me. So I’m sorry this is such a frustrating experience…but thanks for taking the time to talk about it.
I did give you the benefit of the doubt, Andrei. I’m sorry you felt like I wasn’t. I was just trying to get at a concept that requires the detailed parsing without actually doing the detailed parsing, which is a problem for both of us. We can’t talk about this stuff in general terms because we are so very close to the same page on this, but — as I tried to indicate last week — we’re not exactly in the same place, so the tensions don’t come across except in the very specific language.
The reason I went and tracked down the second quote is because the way you’re talking about this, even in comment 42, still implies a more diachronic sequence for “space-becoming-time” than I think is proper to Derrida: you call it a “movement” that “prompts” parsing, “setting off” reading. That’s sequential. That’s temporal.
But that time, that “movement,” that becoming, is a metaphor (quote below). You’re not emphasizing in your rhetoric here the extent to which the “time” implied in the notion of “becoming” is not an event, not a process, but a metaphor for something that is ultimately not temporal, but spatial.
The time of “becoming” is representational time. It is not representational diegetic time or representational fictional time, but it is the location of the limit of phenomenology in the horizon of representation. (This is exactly what I was trying to get you and Matthias to speak to last week.) Derrida warns us against deploying that metaphor without acknowledging its metaphoricity. He says (same link as above, next couple of pages):
The fundamental metaphoricity of all time, not just diegetic time, is not coming through from your account, nor is that dissimulation against the “movement”, because your account uses the language of emergence, of impulse, of movement, rather than depicting time and space as in a fully structural, spatial, logical relationship — one in which the representation comes before the temporality. Lived time is a representation first. Diegetic time is a representation of a representation. It’s turtles all the way down.
Because you use directional rhetoric in your formulation of this, it doesn’t sound poststructural. You talk about differentiation as if it is temporal, when it’s not. Time is a metaphor, all the way down. Differentiality is a fully spatial relationship. Emergence is a non-temporal property of the structure. Representation is the ontic limit.
So I think we’re probably using an IMMENSELY different understanding of representation, but at least, I can’t tell from what you wrote — even in comment 42 — whether you’re just not at pains to qualify the metaphor but accept that direction is a form of the fundamental temporal metaphor, or whether you think abstract comics pushes back against that notion of fundamental metaphoricity, serving as a correction to this most radical postulate of Derrida’s, the one that makes possible the notion that there is nothing outside of language.
You don’t have to engage that question if you don’t want to. But I can’t see how asking it is failing to give you the benefit of the doubt. It’s simply giving you a serious read.
Even Derrida wasn’t a true Derridean when it came to the reception his own writing.
Andrei,
In generalities, I think you’re right, but I still don’t agree that diegesis is entailed by time. We kind of got wrapped up in one object remaining constantly in a space, but just having a continuing of space where motion is taking place, regardless of whether the motion is caused by the cine-eye or by a particular object, time is part of that space. I think that’s the case with Mothlight, but there are definitely animated objects (hundreds of them) moving across the screen in Dog Star Man. Maybe you’d call the sections with clouds diegetic, but what about all those scratches? I wouldn’t. Still, time passes.
Caro,
The example of an alphabetical order to kids in a classroom was in response to: “i guess it is that order is temporal to me. the only things non- tempora to me are when there is NO order.” I don’t think it matters whether you begin with the beginning or end of the alphabet, there’s a clear order, and no temporality.
Charles, you got swept up in my trying to ask a very specific theoretical point without actually doing the work to express it precisely. I stand chastened by the both of you. I hope the question’s clearer now.
I don’t mean to imply that all that I think Andrei has to be a rigorous Derridean at all, let alone more rigorous than Derrida himself. I just think the question about the relationship of abstract comics to Derrida’s formulation of the ontic limit is fascinating, very difficult to theorize, and suggested but not worked out in Andrei’s formulations here and elsewhere. And the use of the directional metaphors are getting in the way of my understanding of his stance on that question.
That’s all I’m saying! I’m sorry it took me so long to say it so people could understand it! I haven’t been an academic for almost 15 years, so my chops are creaky.
Heehee, I think Derrida’s getting in the way of my understanding the directional metaphors.
Poor Andrei, we’re coming at him from both sides. His chocolate’s all covered in peanut butter. That’s what he gets for coming up with something so damn provocative and important.
For example:
A time slice can be represented by parallel editing, switching back and forth between two sequences. Or by a split screen. That’s clearly representational, maybe you’d call it linguistic (I wouldn’t). But that’s not the same as my lived experience in the same room as my cats fighting. Time flow isn’t mere representation there.
Not mere representation, but constitutive representation. It’s not a depiction, but it is a metaphor — at least phenomenologically, as you perceive it. According to Derrida.
I’m not denying Derrida is both radical and counterintuitive on this issue…but that’s why I was pushing Andrei to articulate his position vis-a-vis that most radical postulate.
Charles, is diegesis in your mind linked to narrative convention or tradition? I could see that as a way to get me to the place where you’re at, where time passing doesn’t imply diegesis. (In that case, even clouds moving wouldn’t really be diegetic — you don’t tell stories about clouds moving.)
Caro — it’s like reading Wallace Stevens! I read it, I reread it, and I still don’t know what you’re talking about!
Is the point that for Derrida, space is real, or at least the real referent for movement? So that discussions of moving through time are always metaphors, analogizing the experience of time to that of space?
I’m pretty sure that’s right…though why that would allow for everything to be language is less clear — (maybe because there can be no experience without time, so if time is metaphor, then experience is metaphor? That makes sense, and so is probably wrong.)
It’s interesting to think about in terms of comics, though. If time is a language convention, then sequence in comics is a representation of a language convention — which would, on the one hand, make comics sequence always linguistic, if not literary. On the other hand, if time is actually metaphor, and the metaphor is space, the way comics makes time into space could be seen as a more direct representation of time than language; sort of like Charles’ point about irony, it is more true because it embodies the fictionality of the metaphor. Comics representation of time is derivative, but the derivativeness is truth.
You could see abstract comics as a project of squishing or pursuing the metaphor of time into or off the page, so that the metaphor of time becomes variably more tenuous and therefore more accurate….
Yeah, Noah.
And I’m kind of wondering the same as you about Derrida’s metaphorical time: what’s literal time? As Caro says it’s counterintuitive, but his view doesn’t seem any more radical than what Bergson used to argue against, time reduced to enumeration (point by point).
Noah, I think you’ve basically got it. I haven’t thought about it at this level of detail in a loong time, so I need to think about it — but on first impression, the idea that “experience is metaphor” maybe wouldn’t be the most fully fleshed out articulation of it, something that would be axiomatic and “always true,” but I think it’s consistent.
I think your statement following “if time is a language convention” is a good statement of the problem I’ve been trying to get Matthias (and lately Andrei) to address for months, and I think it’s implicated in Charles’ comment that Matthias underestimates the scope of “literary studies.” It’s a fair encapsulation of what I think of the most radical Derridean stance is. I think the challenge you start to articulate in the penultimate paragraph is going to be much more complicated, because Derrida is more radically suspicious of the ways in which representation can get at truth than Lacan. To me, your formulation (like my essay to Charles) feels more Lacanian than Derridean. But you’re definitely gesturing in the right general direction of what I think needs to be worked out.
Charles, it is Bergsonian. I’m not 100% clear where the lines between Derrida and Bergson are but they’re nuances and internal ruptures, not radical differences. But I think Derrida’s formulation is more insistent than Bergson’s.
Derrida was engaged with Koyre’s work, and Koyre was a student of both Husserl (who rejected his dissertation) and Bergson (who did not.) It’s all the same tradition.
Derrida spun off his own tradition out of that, but that’s the line I can’t trace clearly, because my knowledge of Husserl and Bergson is so inflected by Derrida I can’t separate them off the top of my head without research. (They be speech; he be writing. )
Charles, by literal time, do you mean experienced time or empirical, scientific time? They’re separate concepts in Derrida: that’s key to his phenomenology, before he even starts engaging with representation.
I’ll give a try on summarizing this but this is from memory:
There is no non-metaphorical time in Derrida. Scientific time is epistemologically inaccessible to human beings except by going through that metaphorical concept — and that epistemological inaccessibility of empirical time is an ontological ground of human being (as in, “being-in-time” becomes being-in-not-time).
Subjectivity, constituted through the logic of difference, takes as its fundamental difference the separation of “consciousness” (there’s probably a better word) from the objectivity of the universe. Because representation exists through difference, and thought (not biological brain activity but culturally meaningful thought) is a representation of the universe’s objectivity, thought is fundamentally different to objectivity, thus the subject is radically alienated from the object and representation-as-difference is the ontological ground of the thinking thing.
apropos
Caro – I think I’m on your wavelength – been thinking a lot lately that time is only a perspective, that events “unfold” only in the eye of the perceiver while in actuality there is both a beginning and an ending (or possibly a loop) to “time” already existent and that time is the name time-bound creatures such as we give to what is actually a spatial phenomenon? Is “the future” (or “the past”) already in place like it is in a movie, book, comic book, etc? In this case spatial & temporal diegesis would be equivalent?
Thanks for that link, Jason. I was just looking at those Hokusai pages, believe it or not. Good on Matt for talking about them.
Watchmen is really very smart about this stuff, if you’ve read that…?
or even if you don’t believe in that deterministic mumbo jumbo, the separation of time into “what has occurred,” “is occurring,” “will occur” is an artifact of language and feeds back into how we perceive time. It causes a tendency to echelon time and see “what will occur” as something we are “progressing” toward and, therefore, more important than “now.” (Sorry for my quotational abuse!)
That’s my favorite part about Watchmen – that Rorschach sequence or, obviously, the Dr. Manhattan issue. Definitely an imperfect book but some of its constituent pieces are incredible.
This is all Derrida’s discussion of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena right? Not the discussion of time and Heidegger? I just want to run down the source
Jason — Awesome! I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to see these concepts finding their way back into representation that way. I’m gonna spend some time with your characters…
Eric — yes, the quotes here are from Speech and Phenomena. But, I picked those because they’re direct and very clear about the phenomenologial implications, which is what my question is about. Margins of Philosophy digs in deeper, and in relation to Heidegger, so it’s not that the Heideggerian stuff is irrelevant. There, though, I think it’s more the critique of metaphyscics than an establishment/articulation of a phenomenology, which is what emerges from S&P. You don’t get the idea that thought is representation nearly as strongly in the critique as in the phenomenology, for obvious reasons. I think the work on Husserl strongly informs the reading of Heidegger, and I think it describes the characteristic phenomenological stance of mid-century French philosophy from Althusser and Lacan to Sartre and Godard, but feel free to disagree!
I just want to make sure to say that I think Jason nails the “thought is representation” when he says this: “the separation of time into ‘what has occurred,’ ‘is occurring,’ ‘will occur’ is an artifact of language.” That’s a really good statement of the point: past, present, and future are not unmediated “empiricism;” they’re grammar. Both as stated, and as experienced. Everything is mediated.
The question for Andrei is about the implications of that and the ways in which abstract comics speak to the inevitability and absolutism of that mediation. Are there forms of thought that are not representational? I’m not sure how there would be, but we’d have to get completely out of the temporal metaphor and speak entirely structurally to begin to think that.
I also want to correct what I said here: “‘time’ implied in the notion of “becoming” is not an event, not a process, but a metaphor for something that is ultimately not temporal, but spatial.”
The right word at the end there of course should not have been spatial, but “structural.”
That all sounds very anti-Bergsonian, mistaking the map for the mapped (fallacy of misplace concreteness). He was a process philosopher who argued the spatialization of time was the abstraction, not the other way around. But I don’t want to make this all digress even further and I simply don’t get claims that everything is metaphor. Derrida, more than any other, makes my head hurt.
Not a digression…but a good point. For Bergson, the use of spatial metaphors for time is illegitimate, right? Precisely because it points to determinism; spatial metaphors create the illusion that the future has already happened.
Oddly, from that perspective (and related to the argument I made earlier) it’s standard, narrative comics which are *least* naturalistic, since they show time as space. Abstract comics are more realistic, because they avoid time, or at least push against the link between time and space.
I think the difference between Bergson and Derrida here (and risking Jeet throwing a fit again, I should note I haven’t read either of the relevant texts, but what the hell) is that Bergson feels the metaphor of time as space is wrong (morally and factually) while Derrida merely points it out without really commenting on its correctness or lack thereof. Bergson draws a line between metaphor and reality; Derrida is much more skeptical that there’s a reality accessible outside of metaphor.
That’s how I always think about Derrida, anyway, Charles. It isn’t that “everything is metaphor” so much as that we don’t really have access to anything outside metaphor; it may exist (I think he thinks it does) but we can’t talk about it, because talking is metaphor. There’s definitely a touch of the mystic about him…as there is in Kant…buried in both cases under a militant pedantry.
Yeah, I don’t think of it so much as anti-Bergsonian as post-Bergsonian, in the same sense as it’s “post-structuralist”: take Bergson, identify the thing that has “priority” in the system, show how it’s actually secondary and the thing originally thought secondary is actually key to the maintenance of the structure.
I’d agree with Noah that he means we don’t have access to anything outside metaphor, although that’s again a very Lacanian way of putting it. (I’m not sure I can formulate a Derridean way of putting it — his language is, oy.)
I think it’s that the metaphor of time as space (and vice versa, and anything that involves the concept of “time” in any form”) is deconstructable. And when you deconstruct it, you end up in the “negative,” aporia-driven structural logic that he describes in Grammatology. That’s the headache inducing bit: he does’nt re-establish a different ontic ground at the limit of phenomenology. He just leaves you there, hanging in space — but in the empty space of potential representations. Because once you start to fill space, you’re automatically “in time,” in metaphor, in language, in what he will ultimately call and deconstruct as “the metaphysics of presence,” in his classic reading of Hegel. Space and time are the same thing – we only differentiate them by means of the temporal metaphor. Which is why I then objected to the use of the temporal metaphor…I love this stuff, Charles — I think Derrida’s brain is sexy as hell — but writing about it makes my head hurt too!
Bergson specifically talks about the spatialization being a product of metaphor and language–so insofar as Derrida is talking in those terms, it’s definitely linked to Bergson.
Anyone read the “time” chapter in Nabokov’s _Ada_. He runs through most of the Bergsonian arguments…and is critical of relativity too…so it’s a semi-more-accessible version of some of these points…
I went spelunking and found a really lucid review of Leonard Lawlor’s _The Challenge of Bergonsism_, which discusses much of what we’re bringing up here (albeit Deleuze and Levinas are the focus in the review). Ordered the book, too.
Noah asks, “For Bergson, the use of spatial metaphors for time is illegitimate, right?” Yeah, that’s basically correct, but he doesn’t disagree that the spatial metaphor has its usefulness in science. If everything is “metaphor,” some metaphors are better than others for different purposes. Metaphysically, it has problems. I don’t have much to add at this point, but I thought Caro at least would find this section of the review interesting:
The Bergsonian Challenge to phenomenology comes in the form of Bergson’s concept of the image. Matter is images. The first characteristic of the image is that it has extension, objectivity. External things have an order that does not depend on our perceptions. The order of our perceptions depend on extension. For Bergson a thing can be without being perceived (MM 185/35). In this way the image differs from affection which is internal and the lowest degree of subjectivity (MM 205/57, 364/234). But the image also differs from the thing. Bergson writes, “The truth is that there is one, and only one, method of refuting materialism: it is to show that matter is precisely what it appears to be.” Bergson calls this a concession to idealism (5). The image is “presence.” But contra Derrida this notion of presence is not idealism. Presence for Bergson means only that the image appears to be (5). Lawlor says that we have thus two characteristics of the Bergsonian image: extension and presence. Bergson avoids both idealism and realism; the image is more than what the idealist calls a representation and less than what the realist calls a thing (9). The image is connected continuously with other images in the whole (10). At this point the body inserts itself as some- thing new in the universe. In my body I discover that constraint does not eliminate choice (11). Bergson says, “Yet there is one image that contrasts with all the others in that I know it not only from the outside by percep- tions, but also from the inside by affections: it is my body” (MM169/17). It is known from the inside as affection and the outside as object/thing. Known from the outside it is not radically distinct from the rest of matter which is a continuity of images.
I think that emphasis on the body as an experiential way to establish free will and reality comes from Comte (or at least, I just read Comte saying more or less that.) Which would mean I think that he’s using the notion of Will to try to run between idealism and realism, especially Will as bodily control (I think therefore I kick the ball might get around Lacan’s formulation that the I that thinks is not the I that is since the formulation “I think therefore I kick” could arguably be said to occur not in language, but in the body or in images.)
Now that I think about it…was it Lacan who separated the I think and the I am? Or Derrida? Or someone else? I guess it’s apropos that identity should be confused in this instance….
Charles, why didn’t you send that quote when I was making Andrei so miserable week before last? ;)
Am I reading it correctly that there’s an opposition of “perception” to “affection”? That’s the thing that I think is so thoroughly debunked by feminist theory, the notion that affection is unaffected by perception. (e.g., I weigh 110 pounds, but I perceive my hips as wider than the stove.) Even body perception is not unmediated internal affect.
I need to read this in context but my immediate reaction (the phenomenological point in Derrida, Lacan, et al.) is that yes, a thing can be without being perceived, but the perceiving of that thing is never identical to its being. That’s just so intuitively right to me (see hips::stove) that I find all attempts to reinstate the older way of looking at looking at things entirely unconvincing.
I buy that there’s something located in the body. I don’t buy that it’s unmediated reality.
Noah, that separation of cogito is earlier; it’s already articulated in Heidegger, but I don’t know whether he came up with it or not. I’d bet it’s in Husserl too. Before that I don’t know…
Yes; this is why it’s very hard to take Comte at all seriously. The effort to make human perception scientifically objective (in the interest of making philosophy scientifically rigorous for Comte, I think) seems really pointlessly Quixotic at this stage.
This gets at why someone like Zizek is so interested in Christianity and feminist theory too, I think. Bodies are really important in both (which pleases him as a materialist), but those bodies are placed in a context where they talk to or come out of or inflect knowledge but aren’t its basis. The way to resolve materialism and idealism really isn’t to thread the needle between them, but to resolve them dialectically or talk about the importance of their contradictions.
Also…not sure anyone cares at this point…but Paul Feyerabend in “Against Method” spends some time arguing that there’s a certain amount of evidence that the way we perceive our bodies (as ours, as subject to our control, as unitary) is quite distinct from what you see in, for example, Homer, where people are conceived of as catalogues of parts and motivations and actions are seen as coming from outside (the gods, fate) rather than necessarily from within. His point being that perception just not of the world but of the self and one’s own relation to one’s body are shaped by ideology (or theory, as he might say.)
Oh…and Feyerabend goes on to link those differences in perception not just to literature but to iconography….
Bergson basically says he gets this notion of the image via Kant… And/or that Kant basically gets time and space right in the Transcendental Aesthetic. That’s from Bergson’s Time and Free Will. He discusses the image more thoroughly in Matter and Memory.
Caro,
I’m pretty sure he means ‘perception’ in a biological way, not in the colloquial “I perceive you to be a good person.” Your sense of your body as being fat is more about affection, not perception proper. Perception proper is hardwired: no matter how much you know a stick doesn’t bend in water, you’ll still see the illusion. (I hasten to add that a term like ‘hardwired’ doesn’t sound particularly Bergsonian, but I’m just using it to get across what kind of perception he’s talking about.)
Charles, I think the idea that perception is hardwired is what Merleau-Ponty is talking about when he says “we make perception out of things perceived.” Perhaps not for Bergson, but certainly for Derrida and Lacan: his “Phenomenology of Perception” very much underlies their concept.
I think it ends up in exactly the opposite usage you’re describing: with affect being physiological and objective and perception subjective. But “affect” isn’t really a word they’d use, so that part may be wrong. But perception is definitely not a concept equivalent to biophenomena. Nothing is hardwired — there’s hardwiring, but that hardwiring is non-meaningful; the moment there’s any “sense” assigned to it, it’s no longer biology. So your eye/brain experiences the optical effect, but there’s a unbridgeable gap (a gap which I’ll describe for the sake of argument as the notion that culture exists independent of biology in exactly the same way and to exactly the same extent that biology exists independent of culture) between the physiological experience and any understanding of it, even the most simplistic one (“stick”, “bent”).
Caro,
I’ve been planning to reread PofP for years now and still haven’t. One of the best philosophical writers ever (Bergson being another one). I actually don’t see Merleau-Ponty taking a stance against perception being biologically derived. That page should, I believe, be read in relation to the behaviorists (who were the main school at the time that he was taking to task). They took for granted Kant’s transcendental illusion. There is a whole lot of what cognitivists call processing before the budding confusion of the world gets put into a form which will then be available to the conceptual level. What he’s describing there — the way he’s talking about the Müller-Lyer illusion, for example, or the contextual influence of colors, shadows, etc. — is pretty close to the Gestaltists (a definite influence on him and his book), and they certainly weren’t opposed to a biologically based view of perception.
Anyway, a useful term for beliefs, knowledge, etc. being able to influence some human function is cognitive penetrability. The guy who coined that is Zenon Pylyshyn, and I found a good article from him discussing visual perception and just what is and isn’t penetrable about it. I haven’t read the whole article (just knew there’d be something of his online somewhere), but regarding illusions, such as the one Merleau-Ponty mentions:
It’s not just that the illusions are stubborn, in the way some people appear unwilling to change their minds in the face of contrary evidence: it is simply impossible to make some things look to you the way you really know they are. What is noteworthy is not that there are perceptual illusions, it is that in these cases there is a very clear separation between what you see and what you know is actually there—what you believe. What you believe depends upon how knowledgeable you are, what other sources of information you have, what your utilities are (what’s important to you at the moment), how motivated you are to figure out how you might have been misled, and so on. Yet how things look to you appears to be impervious to any such factors, even when what you know is both relevant to what you are looking at and at variance with how you see it.
The illusion of a stick bending occurs, regardless of what you call it, or which culture you’re in, or how you’ve been interpellated by ideology. That image of the stick will appear to bend in that image of the water. To take the most basic sort of percept, cultures from around the world can distinguish between colors despite not always having terms for all the individual colors (this doesn’t address the problem of qualia, whether my red is your red, only the boundaries of whatever we both call ‘red’). Linguistic determinism just ain’t correct.
Feyerabend actually discusses the stick being bent. He argues that the sense that it is an illusion is actually ideological; that is, the whole point of that paragraph you quote Charles — that “illusions are stubborn” — is already embroiled in theory and a view of the world.
“Just as Achilles sitting does not make us doubt that he is swift-footed — as a matter of fact, we would start doubting his swiftness if it turned out that he is in principle incapable of sitting – in the very same way the bent oar does not make us doubt that it is perfectly straight in air — as a matter of fact, we would start doubting its straightness if it did not look bent in water. The bent oar is not an aspect that denies what another aspect says about the nature of the oar, it is a particular part (situation) of the real oar that is not only compatible with its straightness, but that demands it: the objects of knowledge are as additive as the visible lists of the archaic artist and the situations described by the archaic poet.”
Merleau-Ponty’s discussion is, from this perspective — entirely ideological. He sees perceptual illusions in terms of stubbornness and incapability. For him, the bent stick is an illusion which cannot be overcome; it ends up being a kind of tragic, existential dilemma (in a small way.) But Feyerabend is saying, you don’t need to see it that way at all, and in fact, many people thoughout history haven’t. If you don’t see the bent stick as an illusion, but rather as an aspect of the stick that is reconcilable and necessary to the straight stick, are you really seeing the same thing? If the entire framing of Merleau-Ponty’s paragraph (stubbornness, illusion, misled, incapacity), can we believe that he’s really talking about something that is stubborn and impervious? Or is the stubbornness and the impervious locked into theory — not necessarily less stubborn, but a stubbornness of culture, not objective reality, wherever that may be? Merleau-Ponty sees the illusion of a bent stick; Feyerabend sees a bent stick which is one non-contradictory aspect a stick. I don’t think they’re seeing the same thing.
Also — I have unfairly maligned Comte! It’s Schopenhauer who burbles on about the body. Darn 19th century philosophers — can’t keep them straight.
Anyway, here’s Schopenhauer talking about bodies and identity;
“The body is given in two entirely different ways to the subject of knowledge, who becomes an individual only through his identity with it. It is given as an idea in intlelligent perception, as an object among objects and subject ot the law of objects. And it is also given in quite a different way as that which is immediately known to every one, and is signified by the word will. Every true act of his will is also at once and without exception a movement of his body.”
Ugh; replace Merleau-Ponty there with Zenon Pylyshyn, right? Sorry about that. Again I demonstrate the infinite interchangeability of identity, or alternately of my own idiocy….
Charles, I think you’re misunderstanding what “linguistic determinism” (as a misnomer/synonym for poststructuralism) says. This is why the time discussion is so important: it’s not deterministic. It can’t be deterministic, because determinism is temporal, and temporality’s already a metaphor. Linguistic determinism is not a tenet of poststructuralism, because poststructuralism considers determinism itself to be a form of ideology. Derrida’s not making an argument that language is present and causal.
Cognitivism’s ground is the organism: Human organisms are individuated. But culture and history are not “caused” by individual brains. Yet they’re also not empirical in the same way the physical world is. They’re neither the product of the organism’s perception apparatus, nor are they something that exists entirely objectively.
Cognitivism can advance claims about how brains and eyes process cultural information, and it can investigate the status of perceptual information relative to those brains and eyes, but it can’t investigate the status of cultural and historical “being” from a perspective where human perception is secondary. It can, to whatever arguable extent, investigate the status of empirical “being” independently of human perception, because the “perceiving apparatus” is part of that empirical being. But the perceiving apparatus is not part of History’s being.
I’m trying to figure out a good metaphor that will make this clearer: there was, for a time, a notion that Marxism was “a science of history.” Follow that for a minute and imagine that History is a material thing (rather than a story or an ideology) and that you want to study how it functions, as if it were an alien being and you wanted to understand its biology. How would you observe it? It has no “present” reality — except as a story or an ideology. What would have the status of the “organism” in that scientific account?
This is why it always bothers me when people talk about how “subjective” Continental philosophy is, because it’s radically not subjective in the sense that subjective means “personal, individual”. The poststructuralist critique is a critique of individuality and the individual as ideological constructs that blind us to certain forces which act on us as a groups. Without individuality and individuals, you can’t have biology, because we are — empirically! — individuated as biological organisms. Biology starts from the individual and moves from there, properly so.
But these writers and philosophers focus on the extent to which there are other grounds to start from, too. The critique presumes that there’s no reason why philosophy should start from the individual organism, the way science does. Science is doing a fine job with that, and philosophy’s been working on that problem for a gazillion years already. But that ground in the individual organism is insufficient to account for those aspects of human society that are independent of biological functioning, and especially to account for History itself, as an entity independent of any individual human being.
That’s problem is at the kernel, I think, of all these philosophical perspectives: history is — by definition! — not present to us. It’s absent from our present perceptions, except as representations, or traces of representations, or metaphors — the constitutive stuff of culture. The idea that those things are grounded in presence is the the “metaphysics of presence” that Derrida deconstructs. The ground of culture is history, which is absent.
The point you raise, that linguistic determinism isn’t correct, is exactly why I pushed back so hard on Andrei’s temporal metaphors: that kind of language presumes that culture has a present ground rather than an absent one. It puts Derrida back in conversation with cognitivism, when in reality he’s fully structuralist. These are not theories of how individuals and organisms develop perception and consciousness and relate to culture and imagine history and exist in and through time, because the theories that account for that are already “in the ideology of the individual.”
These instead are theories of the cultural and historical logic of human culture and history, independent of individual organisms, where the individual is supplanted by a “subject” — subjugated to history. Human consciousness is neither a philosophical ground nor even a “cause, instead “history and culture are in a dialectical, non-causal relationship with human consciousness, because human consciousness, although characteristic of all humans, is individuated, and culture is not. Individuals come in and out of the system, so the kind of linear causality where perception emanates from the brain can’t account for the system and logic that govern culture. Derrida defends the assumption — and this is the reason that it’s so important to recognize that time is radically metaphorical — that the “causality” of culture is not mechanical but logical, not linear but dialectical, not temporal but structural. The philosophical project is to think a position where mechanical, linear, temporality are completely and entirely excluded. No development, no teleology, no causality – just structure.
It doesn’t mean, as you say, that some language doesn’t come closer to describing empirical things — like the bending of the stick — than others. It just means that empirical things are only part of what’s at stake — that empiricism is one way that human beings think about and interact with the world, not the only way. An explanation for how people perceive empirical reality doesn’t really help us understand why people believe in God or vote Republican or cry at Ghost but not Madam Butterfly. All of Continental Philosophy is about explaining ideology, not explaining perception.
But perception factors into ideology, because people will say that they believe things they perceive to be true. So continental philosophy has to have an account of perception that is logically consistent with the absent ground — an account of perception that is interested in and able to account for how individuals perceive things that are not present or empirical. Which includes how people perceive the abstraction of “scientific understanding” — how they perceive the mechanism of optics, for example, which we use to see but cannot actually observe from the outside, except through representations.
How does empiricism account for people who believe something empirically wrong, even in the face of evidence? It says they’re misguided, or deluded, or ideological, and it posits that empiricism is a more rational and lucid way of looking at things. Poststructuralism treats all those subjects alike and says that some of them have been “interpellated” into rational, empirical ideologies whereas others have been interpellated into less rational and empirical ideologies.
Ideological conviction may — probably does — have a cognitive mechanism associated with it, but that cognitive mechanism isn’t all there is. The brain perceives the bent stick, but is entirely value neutral about whether the bent stick is understood as “reality,” an “illusion,” the effect of a physical-optical phenomena, or, say, a miracle. The brain has gone on for millenia perceiving empirical things and understanding them non-scientifically. The stick could be metaphorized into God, or taken as a sign that there’s another world under the water where things are at a funny angle to us. It is ideological and cultural when we tell ourselves the scientific story and accept/believe that the scientific explanation is more true than the miraculous one. It may be better ideology, more useful ideology, but it is still ideology.
And at that point it mostly becomes political (and why it’s so misguided to see the author of “Force of Law” as purely philosophical, to reference a point from the last discussion about this) — it’s a political question whether a scientific account of how culture and history and ideology act on individuals is sufficient or whether we also need something else, something that emphasizes and allows us to see and talk about more clearly when and where ideology is at work within any explanation — scientific or otherwise, including the poststructuralist philosophy itself. In the 1950s and ’60s, after Nazi science, Continental philosophers clearly thought empiricism was not sufficient to that aim. In the 2000s, after mass media, I tend to agree with them.
Noah,
But Feyerabend is saying, you don’t need to see it that way at all, and in fact, many people thoughout history haven’t. If you don’t see the bent stick as an illusion, but rather as an aspect of the stick that is reconcilable and necessary to the straight stick, are you really seeing the same thing?
You’re playing loosey-goosey with terms. All Feyerabend is basically saying is that you don’t have to understand the stick as being bent. Of course, that’s the point of such examples: regardless of how you “see”/interpret/understand the phenomenon, it’s still going to look the same, across the individuals: what we’re calling “stick” appears as what we call “bent” in the what we call “water.” Any existential crisis upon pulling it out of the water is a matter of post-perceptual conceptualizing. As we know from Plato’s use of this particular illusion, the Greeks perceived it as bent, just as we perceive it as bent. A physics professor who understands the optics involved will perceive (not interpret, or understand) it in the same way as a religious nut who believes it’s God actually bending the stick with Divine Will.
Nope. You’re the one playing loose with the terms. You’re tossing around words like “same” and “post-perceptual conceptualizing” as if they nail down your point, when in fact the use of those terms is exactly what’s at issue.
Feyerabend is saying you can’t separate the conceptual framework from the perceptual framework. The claim that you can is always already dependent on a conceptual framework. You say “it’s still going to look the same,” which assumes there is some “look” that you can easily abstract from the cultural meaning of the look. If you understand the stick being bent as an illusion, what you see is different from what you see if you don’t understand the stick as an illusion. As Caro says, empiricism is an ideological framework, not the truth in itself.
Another way to think about this is in terms of the telescope. Feyerabend talks about this a good deal, and notes that initially, people had real problems not just figuring out what they were seeing through a telescope, but actually seeing through it. Without a common theoretical framework for what they were looking at, people couldn’t see common phenomena through the telescope. Galileo did not show scientists evidence through the scope and thereby convince them of his theories; he developed the theories and the empirical evidence simultaneously, because the second didn’t exist except in conjunction with the first.
Oh…and Feyerabend argues that Plato is on our side of this division, at least to some degree. He’s responsible for the universalizing tendency that sees a bent stick as an illusion and the “real” (Platonic?) stick as straight, in contradiction to an older Greek tradition where the stick is an amalgamation of all perceptions of it, without ever coming to an abstracted unity.
Caro,
Caro,
There’s a real problem with your characterization of science as being about individuals and something like poststructuralism being about the universal (trans-individual, the cultural, the historical, the structure), namely that the human and biological sciences are making claims about all humans, i.e. what we share (granting normal functioning). Any trans-individual non-biological structure is going to have to interact with the biological and mental structures each individual has. It’s a foolhardy endeavor to make claims about how the social structures interpellates an individual without considering what the individual brings to the table. What is the self? That’s a philosophical question and scientific one — very important one with real political implications (cf. death of the author). To just read it from a social constructivist view, you get reductionism — social reductionism, but reductionism (behaviorists were social reductionists, and the death of the author squares up just fine with Skinner’s politics). I don’t see that as an improvement over biological reductionism, psychological reductionism or any other one-level overdeterminations of human existence. I, therefore, see cognitive science to be an important source for understanding the multilevel structure of our world. Merleau-Ponty, a Continental, was certainly not just concerned with ideology. He was very interested in how his phenomenological investigations tied in with the psychological science of his day. And Bergson, another Continental, wrote an entire book on how his views tied into and were critical of evolutionary theory, plus numerous essays on Einsteinian physics. And then there’s Kant, who was definitely concerned with science, questioning just what empiricism really means. He recognized that he was questioning the same reality that science was, otherwise how could he critique science’s assumptions? Perception wasn’t secondary to his purpose, but crucial. I don’t think of any of these guys would’ve said that what they were doing wasn’t particularly relevant to empirical science. And if it is relevant, that’s because they’re talking about some the same things. I don’t agree that you can put Continental (even poststructuralist) philosophy over there and science over here.
But, besides all of that, this all began because I was just trying to suggest that Bergson was talking about perception in a similar way to psychology, but from a philosophical perspective. I was in no way arguing or suggesting that empiricism or cognitivism is the final solution to all human understanding of reality. The social level is important, too, and not reducible to the individual.
Whoops, one too many Caros, well, you’re very important to me.
I’ll have to get back to you Noah.
Noah,
The Galileo example is different: he wasn’t able to show people a causal explanation though the telescope. That’s not the perception I’m talking about. If you get subject after subject into a lab to look at the Müller-Lyer illusion, they’ll confirm that one line appears shorter than the other. That’s because of the perceptual apparatus, not because of their beliefs or language. One the one hand, Caro is arguing that philosophies of ideology aren’t making claims about “individual” psychology, and on the other, you’re very clearly demonstrating that they do. If Feyerabend is to really prove your point, then he should’ve pointed to a subset of people somewhere who, based on their cultural or ideology, don’t give the same perceptual response to these well-established illusions. Your position here isn’t much different from old-fashioned Berkeleian idealism, except for somehow other minds (through “culture”) can objectively alter your ideas about what you’re perceiving.
“don’t give the same perceptual response to these well-established illusions.”
But they’re only “illusions” because of your ideology. If you saw them as true, you’d be seeing something different.
“can objectively alter your ideas about what you’re perceiving.”
It’s not objective, and there’s no altering. You’re presuming that the empirical position is true, and that somehow another ideology has to come in and alter it. The point is that the fact itself only exists in terms of a theory that explains it. There isn’t an empirical reality separate from the empirical ideology that grounds that reality. Indeed, talking about the two separately is nonsense.
“If you get subject after subject into a lab to look at the Müller-Lyer illusion, they’ll confirm that one line appears shorter than the other.”
They won’t necessarily say “appears” though. And if they see it as an illusion, that changes the nature of what they’re seeing. To say it doesn’t (that there’s a real perception outside of ideology) is itself an ideological claim which assumes the very point we’re debating.
Caro’s saying that these arguments aren’t about individuals, they’re about cultures. Cultures don’t establish objective truths, but the truths they establish aren’t subjective either. That seems like a fairly straightforward point — but you can’t “see” it because you’re committed to an empirical viewpoint, where if you fail to see illusion as illusion, you’re duped into subjectivism by culture. But culture doesn’t come after perceptual truth; it goes along with it and is intertwined with it.
Galileo wasn’t able to show people any damn thing at all through the telescope. They looked at the heavens and they saw bupkus…or else a random assortment of things that were confusing and indeterminate. It’s not that what they saw couldn’t fit into a system — it’s that they had no system and so they could see effectively nothing. Theories don’t come after facts; they constitute the perception of the facts themselves. Similarly, anthropologists know that if you show a photograph to someone from a culture where there are no representational images, the person from that culture won’t be able to see a representational image in the photograph. So…is the image really there and they can’t see it? Or have we fooled ourselves through ideological training into seeing the image is there? The questions are nonsense, because they assume a perception which can be abstracted from our experience of that perception. That’s a Platonic position, yes?
Multiple Caros! Man, I wish there were multiples of me. I could make one vacuum and another conduct conference calls while I write comments on HU. Luxury!
I was just using “Continental Philosophy” definitionally as opposed to “Analytic Philosophy.” I think of it as inherently suspicious of empiricism, starting with Mill and moving through Russell and Bentham and into the analytics. There’s an explicit rejection of Hegel in the analytic tradition that you absolutely don’t find in Derrida, Bergson, or even Merleau Ponty.
That opposition acknowledged, though, I did not intend the opposition between the “individual” and “the universal” that you describe. That would negate feminism, for example, as well as pathology, both of which are absolutely central to poststructuralist psychoanalysis (which is far more my native philosopical discourse than Derrida’s pure poststructuralism). The idea that poststructuralism is a “universal” would make it a meta-narrative, and poststructuralists are broadly opposed to totalizing meta-narratives: what they recognize is that logical arguments start with postulates, which may or may not be empirical postulates. Scientific (biological) arguments postulate a central place for the organism, and Derrida’s point is that Western metaphysics generally, even the type that thinks of itself as philosophy and not science, postulates a similar central place for the individual and for “presence”.
But Derrida doesn’t posit “the universal” as the alternative to that. He posits “the decentralized subject” — which is still a form of “the individual” but one that is constituted differently from a logical and metaphysical perspective. This results in a very different picture of metaphysics — a non-totalizing picture, where there is no center, or rather where the center is absence. One that “decenters” the very possibility of totality right along with the subject.
This doesn’t change the fact that you can absolutely build perfectly logical theoretical arguments that start with the centered individual of science and empiricism. All of analytic philosophy does just that.
All Derrida asks you to do is treat those postulates as postulates rather than objective truths and then recognize that there are certain objects of study — cultural objects, History, women — that are actually obscured by choosing to start with them. Representation is one of those objects of study where you get very different outcomes depending on the postulates, as is philosophy itself (meta-philosophy). He asks you to become self-aware of the ways in which you are individually interpellated by those empirical principles, even if you remain committed to them. And there are degrees of that self-awareness: from a mild recognition that empiricism has a political dimension to the more radical postulates that treat History as a fully material but absent cause. In these threads over the last few weeks, I’ve been insisting on the radical stance; I think it’s the most interesting for talking about the relationship between abstraction and representation, and I think it’s the most philosophically rigorous in a context where representation is explicitly at stake.
Poststructuralism doesn’t argue that scientific empiricism is false — only that there are other things, including fully non-scientific, non-empirical things, that are also not false, and that sometimes the non-empirical postulate is more proper to the object of study and more illustrative than the empirical one.
But that’s where it becomes political (and why the Zizek book I keep recommending to everybody is called “Contingency, Hegemony, Universality”). When the scientific vantage point insists that there can be no starting postulates other than the empirical and centered ones (which is a strong form empiricism, not necessarily what you’re saying), then that’s a scientific hegemony. There is no comparable hegemony introduced by poststructuralism — there is only the refusal of the scientific hegemony. Any hegemony that claims to be poststructuralist is going to be grounded in an error. Following Hegel, the impossibility of hegemony, an impossibility which Derrida describes as the “logic of the supplement” is tautological within the logic of poststructuralism.
I should just say, re this
that I’m not saying “there exist no philosophies of ideology that make these claims.” I’m saying that this philosophy of ideology doesn’t, because it’s at pains to undo the concept of “individual” from the start, in basically the way that Noah describes.
Have you read Feyerabend, Caro? I wonder what you’d think of him. He comes at all of this a little sideways; he’s a history and theory of science person, so he ends up talking a lot more about Einstein and Galileo than about Derrida or Hegel. But he actually argues…not so much that empiricism is false, as that, if taken seriously, it would be a hopeless disaster not just for, say, discussions of art, but for practical science as well (which is in theory the thing empiricism is best organized to explain.) He argues for example that if Galileo had been an empiricist, he never would have claimed the earth went around the sun….
Anyway, not sure this is helpful…but from Feyerabend’s view, I think, the statement “I think therefore I am” would be correct…but it’s a conditional statement, based in a particular ideology. He would argue that you’re assuming a lot when you say “I think”. How do you know it’s you who thinks? Why couldn’t it be someone else? So the point isn’t that I think and I am are two different people, so much as it’s that, while one person might say, “I think therefore I am,” someone else (from a different ideological perspective — like, for example, Foucault) could just as easily say, “It is not me who is thinking, therefore I am not.” Which gets to what we’re trying to say about individuality I think, Charles; post-structuralists tend to argue that the individual is a function of ideology, which is somewhat different than saying that reality is a function of individual subjectivity.
I read Feyerabend in philosophy of science class, but that was ages ago and also not at length. What you say sounds right with what I remember, though. Your last sentence after the semicolon I think is exactly right.
You’re right to observe the difference between philosophy and the history and philosophy of science though: in that vein, I’d tweak this a little:
Your phrasing here, Noah, is more history and philosophy of science — because you’re at pains to emphasize the ideological character of empiricism specifically. I’m not, at least I wasn’t, since I was originally arguing with Andrei, who also takes a poststructuralist position quite similar to mine, about how radical the temporality of representation is. I think it’s as radical as representation itself (meaning I think temporality emerges right at the limit, at the moment difference emerges from the aporia, which is a position that I probably get from the philosophy of science but I’d have to think about that) and I don’t think he would agree with that.
That makes me want to layer in some references to what exists a priori to representation: maybe I would say “It is not possible to separate consciousness or understanding of the perception of empirical reality from whatever ideology grounds knowledge of that reality.”
Which is to say that knowledge is radically ideological, no matter how close it is to empirical reality, whether it’s the obviously ideological pseudo-knowledge of some crackpot, or the powerful and useful knowledge of a disciplined and well-proven scientific theory. (The version of this from Foucault is Power/Knowledge.) No matter how good the representation, no matter how empirically accurate, no matter how powerful, it is always representation. No matter how true the knowledge, how useful for manipulating the natural world, it is still ideological.
Which, from the standpoint of science, is meant to confirm, against the tendency to understand poststructuralism as lunacy, that (for example) the planets were in fact there before we understood they were planets. Their materiality didn’t suddenly emerge from nothingness when we described them. But our perception of them changed, and in the process, our concepts about metaphysics changed, and our culture and history changed. Epistemology is metaphysics, or more precisely, metaphysics is radically epistemological. At its limit, metaphysics is constituted by what we know. But not just what we have collectively observed — also what we have collectively imagined. It’s that latter that keeps at bay the teleological notion that once we have complete, perfect scientific knowledge, we will also have finished with metaphysics.
But, from the standpoint of art, that question of horizon is also why I was disagreeing with Andrei when he said that spatial differentiation isn’t automatically temporal representation. I understand the strong-form Derridean position (which does, as Charles rightly observe, have its origins in a phenomenology very much concerned with science and math) to state that differentiation in any form — abstract, spatial, logical, linguistic — is, in fact, automatically temporal representation (if not “represented temporality”, although that gets into a nuanced semantic distinction that’s less important to the question I was trying and failing to ask; although Andrei’s point may in fact hinge on that difference.)
Representation is always temporal, and is also always a radical horizon of both knowledge and thought, an effect not of diegesis, but of differentiation itself.
One reason I find Lacan more satisfying than Derrida is that Lacan gives an easy way to conceptualize “empirical reality” outside of representation and ideology — the “encounter with the Real.” But I think Derrida is entirely consistent with Lacan as the structural logic of the Symbolic Order, and I absolutely don’t think there’s any aspect of either art or scientific knowledge that would constitute “an encounter with the Real.” Falling off a cliff is an encounter with the Real. But both drawing a picture of yourself falling and calculating the acceleration of your falling body are Symbolic. The imaginary is less well-chartered territory: What is the status of self-awareness while falling? But properly poststructuralist answers to all of the above will still be still properly structural answers — resisting temporality in any sense, even the most metaphorical one.
“No matter how true the knowledge, how useful for manipulating the natural world, it is still ideological.”
Feyerabend would argue basically that the knowledge most useful for manipulating the natural world is not in fact empiricism; that scientists in practice use ad hoc estimations and half-baked theories to advance science, and that a rigorous empiricism would sink the whole enterprise.
Soo…any representation is temporal representation? Does that mean that temporal representation is more basic than spatial representation for Derrida?
Not just ad hoc estimations, but also ideal theories and mathematical abstractions, like the Ideal Gas Law or the Maxwell equations (although I don’t know whether Feyerabend talks about those.)
What do you mean “more basic”? As in, “a priori”?
Both are metaphors, each entails the other. Neither is more basic. The only basic thing is the aporia. Everything else is an endless, unchanging cycle of entailment and deconstruction, every thing and its supplement. The only thing that “suspends” the cycle is ideology itself…
Which is why Andrei’s reliance on hypostasis is so problematic for me: hypostasis is not logical, it’s ideological. But ideology is always historicized, which puts us right back in the register of “represented time.”
Ugh, I should have said:
In other words, you collapse into time, rather than stopping it. The options are history and time, or everything equally in play in the suspension of the structure, “waiting” for ideology to intervene and knock you into history. There’s no option of specific differentiated space outside of history and time.
I guess it’s just really hard to talk about the difference between space and structure. Structure is logical relationships though, regardless of order. The relationship among the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real is a structure, but not a sequence. The order doesn’t matter; the relationships are the same no matter where a thing is situated, no matter where you start. One Order doesn’t come before the other Orders; no Order is more fundamental or basic than the others — unless you take an ideological position first, such as the notion that the Real is more empirical, etc.
I’m kind of with Charles here—as seems to often be the case…although I usually argue the Noah/Caro position to my students.
What’s the relation of this Feyer… fellow with Thomas Kuhn?
Can you mime the position I’m coming from enough to explain Andrei’s position to me without reference to the hypostasis? ‘Cause I’m still confused about it and would really like to understand…
Hey Eric. Feyerabend knew Kuhn personally, I believe, and their positions are definitely closely related, though they had differences too, the ins and outs of which I can’t claim to follow. In my addition of Against Method, Feyerabend talks about him…I think maybe he (Feyerabend) sees the main difference as that Kuhn talks about radical ruptures in science; change in ways of perceptions. Kuhn seems to see these as replacing one another in a semi-evolutionary manner. Feyerabend, on the other hand, rejects the idea that you can talk about evolution of science in a way separate from culture or ideology…and he also rejects the idea that the frames of reference that are replaced through “evolution” are actually gone, rather than just shunted aside to perhaps be used another day by someone else.
I think also Kuhn is more straightforwardly committed to science qua science? Feyerabend sneered at the Pope for pardoning Galileo, on the grounds that the church was right to convict him in the first place, and the Pope’s late recantation was a unpardonable capitulation to mainstream scientific ideology by a figure who should really be holding the line against such things. I doubt Kuhn would have said that.
Why are you arguing this position to your students, by the by?
Testing something here.