Week 5: As structured as it’s ever gonna get

Saussure

The funny thing to me about Saussure is it seems he’s a bit poststructuralist himself. (Not that I’ll presume to know too much about Poststructuralism yet as we’ve still yet to get there.) But isn’t his biggest theme pointing out the paradox of how language is arbitrary, illogical, and doesn’t have much of a “structure” in terms of what we would generally assume? Well, whether that’s Structuralism or not, it’s certainly quite interesting. (Again, I’m probably just misunderstanding my terminology and –isms here, but whatever.) I do get that Saussure is structuralist because ultimately he’s still breaking everything down into its structure, and focusing on structure. It’s just cool that he’s so conscious of how structureless things begin to appear when you do that.

This theme of structure imposed on a structureless world really intrigues me. “Language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses [thought and sound]” (Saussure 856)…basically, without language we have nothing that appears at all logical. Or maybe it’s more that once we have it, it’s hard to imagine anything else that could appear to make any sense, although obviously animals and nature do without it. (Urge to jump ahead to Lacan rising.) In any case, I suppose this is the point – language does give us structure, but because thoughts and sounds don’t tend to have much structure on their own, language needs to create one for them (for the most part) arbitrarily. In the end, it’s really just a case of “whatever works” – any language or system of signs can achieve meaning equally well in their own unique ways. The important thing is that there is meaning.

I liked the way we discussed Saussure’s sign in class and took it beyond just language and into the realm of imagery, especially in regards to advertising. The whole idea that the signifier can provoke millions of signifieds is probably the most intriguing part about the sign. We never just think of a word’s definition alone, we think about other things it relates to, both from context (what Saussure calls “syntagmatic relations”) and from what it makes us think of in our own heads, from our own experience (what Saussure calls “associative relations”).

One minor critique of our in class discussion though – we didn’t use Saussure’s diagram of the sign, and I feel it’s kind of important. In fact, I think we made a mistake in class, as I’m pretty sure at one point we said something along the lines of the signifier gives us the signified, but it doesn’t go the other way?* That’s the whole point of the arrows in Saussure’s diagram, isn’t it? As he says “The two elements [signifier and signified] are intimately united, and each recalls the other” (Saussure 853) (italics mine). This is why Saussure’s diagram is so important, because it makes the point that both signifier and signified are a part of the whole sign, and they are both equal parts that work backwards and forwards to create meaning.

(*I do apologize if I’m remembering this wrong, I just seem to remember we said something like this and it just didn’t seem quite right.)

And lastly, the idea that “in language there are only differences” (Saussure 862) and that whole idea of binary opposition and such is really interesting. Saussure says language is a “form and not a substance” (863) and those terms confused me until he goes on to say “all the mistakes in our terminology…stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance” (863). Again, it’s that whole illusion of logic, of the sign not being arbitrary. Basically, meaning ultimately comes from the signs interacting, not the signs themselves.

Frye

I just wanted to touch briefly on Frye, even though this is getting a little long. One of the most intriguing things he brought up was ritual’s importance in human life. “It is the deliberate expression of a will to synchronize human and natural energies…in ritual, then, we may find the origin of narrative” (Frye 1310). This, and this whole paragraph, is beautiful, and oh so true. It shows how natural storytelling is for us, how whether it’s ancient myths, or religion, or any type of fiction at all, the drive is to create rhythm (as Frye says) in our lives…that structure in a structureless world. (This is beginning to sound like Existentialism, actually, but that’s a whole nother theory.)

As for the question posed in class about whether or not it’s possible to find a story without any archetypes, I’d have to say no. I feel like if you did, then could you even still call it a “story”? I think our definition of story implies at least the use of some kind of archetype, whether it’s just the fact that there’s a character doing something in some order…or at least I think people will always be able to find some kind of archetype that would fit for any given situation. Also, as Prof. Haake likes to say, “stories aren’t about the world, they’re about other stories.” I’ve always had mixed feelings about this statement, but I think it’s generally true, and what Prof. Haake’s point is is that archetypes are basically our language as writers, just as much as language itself. To tie Saussure back in, they’re conventions we use to create meaning, and we use them because they work. Without them, wouldn’t stories just be formless masses, just as thoughts and sounds would be without language? I think this is debatable, but it’s not a bad way to think of archetypes, and makes sense to me.

This also makes me think of Jung. Frye brings him up, and although he didn’t mention this theory, it made me think of Jung’s personality types. I’m a huge fan of the Myers-Briggs, and it’s really interesting because personality types are really archetypes applied to human psychology. This begs the question, can we reduce human beings’ personalities to archetypes? I personally think they can work more or less, and again theorists and psychologists stress that these things are always on a continuum. The interesting thing to note I think is that we can always make them work, and, again, I think humans tend to want to fit things into patterns. That’s the significant thing about archetypes, and stories in general (and theory, psychology and philosophy themselves)…that we are naturally drawn to patterns and logic.

Even when there’s none. Especially when there’s none.

(I apologize that this got so long, I couldn’t help it! This stuff is brain food.)

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Works Cited

Saussure, Ferdinand De. “Course in General Linguistics.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 850-66. Print.

Frye, Northrop. “The Archetypes of Literature.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1304-15. Print.

Week 4/Analysis 2: Word Picture – Defamiliarized Flight

Robert Williams – “The Flight of the Last Dodo” (This painting was actually on display last year in CSUN’s art gallery at an exhibit of Williams’ work.)

The Narrative

They look to her to give them their wings. They were born with little stubs that they flapped and flapped, but they never managed to catch the wind. She brings them spare pieces of scrap metal, old remains from the planes that lay wasted and broken, rusting in the dry earth under the sun’s eyes. She puts them together – slowly, meticulously – welding and oiling and finally strapping them securely onto their backs. They try to master their excitement as they wait for their own turn to receive their fuel, solemn, for this is a sacred moment they never expected to achieve.

And then one day he comes, promising her that life she’s always wanted. And she is setting the last of them free to take flight into the sunset, because there has to be more than this, this vanity project. She never wanted to be a hero, she just wanted a purpose, and she can’t imagine staying here forever when he offers so much more. The last one finally has her fuel, and takes flight. And they all watch from above as the wing-bearer goes, slowly making their way to greet the sun-painted clouds. The two below are nothing but specks on the ground, ants lost in a tiny world.

The Analysis

Robert Williams’ “The Flight of the Last Dodo” is an excellent example of Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarization. Familiar objects, namely birds, are made unfamiliar by being attached to another object that is similar and yet different than a bird – airplanes. In this way, both the birds and the planes are defamiliarized.

Taking into consideration further that the birds aren’t just any birds, but specifically flightless dodos, adds to Williams’ approach to defamiliarizing – there is a logic here to the planes, and yet it’s such an amusing and unusual sight we must take our time to comprehend it. Eventually, we begin to see that the birds aren’t that much different than the humans beside them – both can only dream of flight, and need external machinery to make this dream reality.

Moreover, Shklovsky’s remark that “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” (para. 4) takes this even further. What we know about dodos is that they are flightless, but this isn’t something we immediately perceive – when we first see them, we just see a bird. But the planes bring in a human element, and now we perceive the dodos less as birds and more as humans. This creates an emotional connection between us and them, even as they remain clearly separate creatures from us (note their rather expressionless faces in contrast to the humans). Ironically, there’s almost something more attractive about the dodos, something that makes them more relatable than the man and woman. They seem to be achieving their dreams, while the humans stay firmly on the ground. The dodos in this way take on an almost divine role in contrast to the man and woman – the birds are elevated, while the humans are trapped by what seems to be the more animalistic and earthly nature of romantic attraction. Thus our expectations are more or less reversed, further defamiliarizing the entire scene, and leading to an interesting commentary on what it means to be human versus a creature of nature.

(As a side critique, the little green guys on the bottom of the painting always seemed distracting and illogical to me, and I feel like they detract from the piece. Then again, I suppose they do “increase the difficulty and length of perception” (Shklovsky para. 4), I just wish they did so in a way that contributes more to the overall work, rather than as a side note that seems out of place.)

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Works Cited

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Vahid's Official Website, 30 Sept. 2007. Web. 26 March 2011.

Williams, Robert. The Flight of the Last Dodo. 2009. Flickr. Web. 26 March 2011.

Week 3: I do feel enlightened now, actually

I’d like to begin by admitting that this was the one week I missed class, so I was a little concerned I’d not know exactly what was going on in these readings. On the contrary, I’m happy to say not only did I understand them on the whole, but I found them to be brilliant, inspiring, and often enlightening (who would’ve guessed?). There was such a wide variety of views covered, and although I’d love to touch on everyone, I think I’ll have to stick with Kant and Burke. (Pope was a lot of fun with his theory in verse, and Hegel in Lectures on Fine Art reminded me a lot of the book I mentioned in my introduction post – Art & Fear.)

Kant

To begin, I’d like to thank this brilliant man for giving me faith in creating run-on sentences and not feeling bad about it in the slightest because I mean who doesn’t love a good long, long run-on sentence if it helps to enlighten us just a bit more and helps us understand things a bit better and who says they can’t be fun and who cares if they eventually get a little hard to follow?

Okay, all joking aside, Kant was a little hard to follow at times, but by the end I can say it was well worth it. At first, his definition of the beautiful confused me, even made me uncomfortable, but as I continued to read I started to feel better about it. His concept of the beautiful seemed almost zen to me, for he says it lacks “interest” and “emotion” in contrast to the sublime. It was a bit hard to wrap my mind around that, because there isn’t really any way to easily explain and comprehend what that is – but perhaps that is true of beauty. It reminded me quite a bit of Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and his concept of Quality (uppercase Q). Pirsig wonders whether quality is objective or subjective, and finally concludes that the problem is that it should be considered in reverse, and that Quality is a state that determines both the objective and subjective. Kant also uses these terms a lot, and I suppose the beautiful could be seen as the same as Pirsig’s concept of Quality. And then Kant makes things even more interesting by explaining that what we judge as beautiful is something we demand be universally so for everyone. And thereby it is a subjective judgment that we view as objective. Does kind of sound like Quality.

(Kant's beautiful = Pirsig's Quality? I need to re-read this book now.)

I think a lot of what made me feel “uncomfortable” with the concept of the beautiful at first was the whole idea of it having nothing to do with interest or emotion, which wasn’t what I was expecting. But when Kant went on to describe his concept of the sublime I felt better, since I realized this was what I had had in mind. I do see why Kant separates these terms, for there is a real difference between the two and the way they make us feel. Sublime has interest and emotion attached, which is probably why it’s a little more, I guess you could say “special” (or so I’m inclined to think). An interesting idea Kant brought up in regards to the sublime is how things that are fearful create sublimity, which relates a lot to the ideas of…

Burke

I love the psychologist that Burke is. His observations on pleasure and pain seem pretty spot-on. Ultimately, his most interesting concept is probably his definition of the sublime, similar to Kant’s and yet taken one step further. While Kant says “the sight of [powerful and fearful things in nature] only becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, as long as we find ourselves in safety, and we gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level” (Kant 438), he sees this as only one aspect or source of the sublime. Burke, on the other hand, flat out states that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling” (Burke 459). It seems this is almost contradictory to what we’d normally assume, or at least how it was previously defined by Longinus, although he did touch on this aspect of it. Actually, this was something I noticed when I wrote my first analysis, how Longinus briefly discusses how the sublime can involve ambivalent emotions and negative emotions, but Burke really takes this further by saying it’s only about negative emotions, because these are the strongest emotions there are. That’s some really interesting psychology. I also think it’s interesting because I’ve noticed the concept of ambivalence come up a lot in my classes, especially from the writer’s perspective in my creative writing classes, as being one of the biggest keys to great art. And I think for me the sublime tends to be ambivalence.

In conclusion, it seems to me that what all the theorists agree on is the sublime is basically whatever is greatest. Ultimately, that can come from tons of different circumstances and emotions.