Andrew's Wiki
On Longing

On Description and the Book

• “Modernism’s suspicion of point of view can be seen as a critique of omniscience, but a critique rooted in a self-consciousness that proclaims an omniscience of its own ontology, its own history” 3
• History
  • Allegory: reader dreamed over and above what the texts gives; the reader is where the action is; tries to transform reader over and over, with a faith that you are therefore a participant of a cyclical history; and that the reader will therefore use the eyes of this book to look at the world: it’s closure (you make the world the image of your book: you are converted)
  • But industrial revolution happens; we lose faith in “circularity of history” and in closure. Now we have realism and psychological lit.
    • Watt: beginning of 18th c, two shifts in realism: from collective experience to individual experience; “particularity of everyday life and the individual’s experience in this world became the locus of the real” 4
    • 18th c novel: “divided” between author and reader
      • but from picaresque novel you have them combined: the reader is within the novel b/c of the “wandering viewpoint”
      • reader identifies w/proper name character
      • you don’t read novel for closure or conversion, but for the mere sake of the signs themselves
• Thus the new realism: novel leads to “further signs, signs whose signified becomes their own interiority, and hence whose function is the production and reproduction of a particular form of subjectivity”
  • “the criterion of exactness emerges as a value” 5
    • exactness not to some religious eternal, but to the “material, the looking-just-like, that slight of hand”
  • new realism: mirrors “ideology of the world”
  • new realism: “what is described exactly in the realistic novel is ‘personal space,’ the space of property, and the social relations that take place within that space”
    • think Crusoe’s jealous protection of his space
• “The project of the realistic novelist is to move a complex set of characters through a complex set of interrelated actions; in other words, to acquire a rather fantastic omnipotence with regard to a rather mundane world.” 9
  • What realism gives you: the reader by end of the book has the omniscient knowledge of the narrator
    • what realism gives the narrator: reader is to accept the narrator’s point of view and time system

Fiction, Semiology, Commodity Production

• “The movement from realism to modernism and postmodernism is a movement from the sign as material to the signifying process itself” 5
  • Realism to modernism: “reflexivity of modernist use of language calls attention not to the material existence of a world lying beyond and outside language but to the world-making capacity of language, a capacity which points to the arbitrariness of the sign at the same time that it points to the world as a transient creation of language”
    • linked to devpt of P E: “The exchange value of language, a value we see at work in oral genres even in modern society…is replaced by a form of what we might, in analogy, call surplus value.”
      • it’s not about social exchange, but “largely private production and apprehension of the text, and the relationship between literary production and consumption becomes one of increasing distance in time and space.”
      • “The forms of alienation arising from preferences for difficulty and the exotic…reflect an increasing distances” between production and consumption of lit
• Dean Mac Cannell?, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class
  • Relation between commodities is semiotic: “In Marx’s treatment of it, the system of commodity production under capitalism resembles nothing so much as a language. A language is entirely social, entirely arbitrary, and fully capable of generating meanings in itself.”
    • Brilliant!
• Eco, A Theory of Semiotics
  • “It is possible to consider the exchange of commodities as a semiotic phenomenon not because the exchange of goods implies a physical exchange, but because in the exchange the use value of the goods is transformed into their exchange value and therefore a process of signification or symbolization takes place, this later being perfected by the appearance of money, which stands for something else”
    • Commodity exchange is semiotic b/c the signified (use value) is converted into signifier (exchange value), and both parts in each system have the relationship of symbol between them.
  • She extends it and says you can see gift shops (superfluous things) as poetic language 6
• Both commodity production and fiction part of “an entire semiotic system”
  • “isomorphism:” similar organization or form; there is an “isomorphism” between changes of genre and changes of modes of production
  • When genres change, conceptions of history as narrative change: that is, when relations between audience and performer change, so does the concept of the self’s particular position as agent/actor in history
    • conventions of both genre and history “emergent” in prevailing ideology (that is of concept of what the real is; not actually connex to real)
      • genre is caught in the middle: it is determined by social formations, but it has power to shape content
      • as a result, genre will reflect relationship between producer and consumer (artist and reader, who are further apart than, say, two people talking to each other in reciprocity)
      • shifts in genre = shift in artist/reader relationship = shift in economic mode (b/c producer/consumer structure inherent within artist/reader structure)
• As the distance between artist/reader gets bigger, the artist gets more specialized, and “the role becomes larger than the member who assumes it”
  • As a result we think of them as outside of historical time 8: “it works to make invisible the labor that produced it”
    • the laborer disappears
• Technology has made this increasing distance possible by allowing the performance to occur at diff places and times
  • not “simultaneous and reciprocal” (which is a collective experience, non-mediated Man to Man facing each other, no alienation)
  • Benjamin: “A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it…In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”
  • The Book: not simultaneity of experience, we must use time to unfold the book
    • “the material aspects of discourse emerged as an aesthetic factor”
    • “the time of the performance [the writing of the book] becomes remote” and therefore “potential for the fictive is increased”
  • Artificial light: you trade the mysterious of moonlight or firelight storytelling for the “space for its [the book’s] eruption” 9
    • b/c “storytelling contexts metaphorically and physically remove themselves from the immediate and historical context of everyday life”
    • (unlike Irish storytelling in the front of the fire as you mend nets for fishing the next day)
• Film: just as reader of realism “aspires” to be the narrator, movie watches take position of the camera (says Benjamin) 11
  • instead of interpreting, you watch, says Stewart, and this is exactly what Benjamin was getting at
  • and we’re getting towards “The self-sufficient machine”
  • Stanley Aronowitz: “film is the synchronous art form of late capitalism…enemy of time…reproduces desire as its product, removes the referent, the signified, and leaves only the act of signifying.”
    • this mode of production “has as its principal obligation the reproduction of itself” only
  • Just as bluegrass moves not at rhythm of the dancing body but “testament to technology” and “musical innovation” 12
• So, today the tendency is “Content is emptied of interpretability” and author disappears and is only mystery of technology that obliterates the specificity of any content
• Time of everyday world: “measurements of context and intensification…not undifferentiated and unhierarchical – it is textual, lending itself to…a process of interpretation” limited by experience 13 and can be “reflective and anticipative” even when it’s a “stream”
  • unlike the “prevailing” belief about time which is what our experience in workplace would tell us: “assembly line of temporality…all experience is partial, piecemeal” – and she wants to “question the function” of this idea b/c language too is part of the “ideological sphere”
  • however, language is significant: “If the form of experience is that of an ‘unmediated flow,’ it is only language which enables us to define the indefiniteness.” 13 “Language gives form to our experience, providing through narrative a sense of closure and providing through abstraction an illusion of transcendence” something “beyond” or “behind” what’s immediately present
• She wants to bring art closer to life
  • Quotes Kenneth Burke, “There are no forms of art which are not forms of experience outside of art” Counterstatement
  • “presumed disjunction between everyday life and art”
    • one example: ideas of time, where in linguistic art we can reverse or slow or make it faster, but in real life we tend to think of time as undifferentiated and linear only
    • another example: the “invisible social space of reading” 14
• “Handwriting is to space what voice is to time.”
  • but reading…invisible

Style

• Somewhere between an archivist, a Marxist, and a narratologist

Collection 151

• Often works to objectify nature, to keep nature but at on remove, to show how it is brought within realm of human intervention and creativity
• Metaphor, not metonymy
• “a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism” “replaces history with classification”
  • “all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collector’s world”
• “total aestheticization of use value”
• “Art as play” b/c you rearrange and manipulate in order to create diff types of attention
• “creation of a new context” that has metaphprical relationship to everyday life 152
• makes a “hermetic world: to have a representative collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements possible for an autonomous world—a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repetition and achieved authority”
• archetype of collection: Noah’s Ark: “completely severed from its origin…possible to generate a new series”
  • ME: THE COLLECTION IS WHEN A PERSON CAN TAKE CONTROL OVER REIFICATION
• “forgetting—starting again in such a way that a finite number of elements create…an infinite reverie”
• as Baudrillard says, collection not same as accumulation
  • accumulation “not connected to the culture and the economy in the same way that the collection proper is connected to such structures”
  • this kind of colleciton, the hobbyist’s collection, is about differentiation (whereas miser’s hoard is about LACK of differentiation)
• as William James say, “hoarders have an uncontrollable impulse to take and keep”
  • she compares to anal retentiveness
  • there is no difference here (the miser’s collection)
  • it’s an “insane collection” that has no “system” “thus metonymically refuses the entire political economic that serves as a foundation for that system”
• “impulse to remove objects from their contexts of origin and production and to replace those contexts with the context of the collection”
  • “replacement of the narrative of production by the narrative of the collection, the replacement of the narrative of history with the narrative of the individual subject” 156
• The past proves its authenticity

Souvenir

• Proves the authenticity of the past
• Removed from its original context, which is recovered by reverie and narrative
• Attention moved to past: “not simply an object…from the past incongruously surviving in the present; rather, its function is to envelope the present within the past” 151
• It’s a magic, but partial magic b/c cannot restore original context, and indeed it can only be created if that context is destroyed
• Nature’s “synchrony and atemporality are manipulated through human time and order” so it’s not about nature as such, but human relation w/nature (kind of dominating, subject construction)