Andrew's Wiki
The Reality Effect (changes)

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Intro

• Why does he need this essay? B/c structuralism has seen details in works only significant as connex to the structure, or otherwise they just ignore them
  • But you have to admit that details don’t always seem to be functional, which pure structuralism may see as “narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many ‘futile’ details and therefore increasing the cost of narrative information.”
  • For there will always be details that DON’T actually contribute knowledge appropriate to get the structure: so to talk about details that are apparently useless will answer the question, “Is everything in narrative significant?...What is the significance of this non-significance?”
• All Western narratives have such useless detail, ie “singularity of description”
  • (Of course he notes they are never “pure,” not just a decontextualized object, but placed w/in syntagm)
  • reveals how description is always “enigmatic:” while all other narrative info is predictive (within chain of events), description never predictive, but rather “summatory)
    • by the way suggests that the diff between say the bee’s language of dance is that bee’s lang is only predictive, never descriptive
  • why useless? “justified by no finality of action or communication” (never goes anywhere, whereas rest of narrative is like “huge traffic-control center)

Basics

• Historically, description put under the label of the aesthetic function of language, just to be beautiful or provoke admiration
  • cf Alexandrian ecphrasis: the “detachable set-piece” meaningful only in itself, whose job was descriptions, popular through Middle Ages
    • this description isn’t realistic, hemmed in by verisimilitude; not referential but discursive
      • hmm is all description anti-realist?
      • also recognizes Flaubert’s Rouen in Madame Bovary, b/c its six revisions by Flaubert show NOT a logic of increasing verisimilitude, but rather to up its purely discursive ante, make it more beautiful, making Rouen “a sort of setting meant to receive the jewels of a number of rare metaphors”
        and only an excuse for rhetorical figures, making it a “painting”
• How is this Rouen justified? Not by normal significance of atmosphere, causality, etc, but instead by “cultural rules of representation”
  • It may sound realist b/c of its exactitude, its “referential restraints” (that is it does kind of look like Rouen): thus we have two impulses, one of decoration one of denotation
  • “vertigo of notation:” once you start describing, there’s no natural place to stop, no apparent need to stop
    • Tempered by the feeling that well at least you’re following something real, “avoids being reduced to fantasmatic activity” and thus secures “objectivity”
• Hypotyposis
  • Classical rhetorical figure, “put things before the hearer’s eyes” in such a way that transmits desire (not neutral)
  • What’s the danger? “Renouncing the constrains of the rhetorical code, realism must find a new reason to describe.”
• “The pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real,’ the naked representation of ‘what is’ (or has been), thus appears as a resistance to meaning.”
  • in other words “the great mythic opposition” between the lifelike and the intelligible
  • “as if, by statutory exclusion, what is alive cannot not signify” (concrete isn’t meaning)
    • our ideology’s “obsessive” need to make things signify
• Fiction “By definition” only needs to be intelligible
  • But historical narrative tries to take what is real as its referent: thus can’t be surprised that the age of history is the age of realism is the age of photography tourism journalism exhibitions (which are all techniques of proof of the real)
  • Thus this era allows “real” to be self-sufficient cause for writing, reading, outside of any position w/in a structure (that is, outside of any function)
• There’s been an historical shift in discourse
  • Ancient: verisimilitude: esto (“let there be” or “suppose” – a kind of subjunctive, in which we have people agreeing, a majority opinion)
    • Corresponds to an older type of history that created “strong structures” that “functionalize all details” (rather than accepting fact for fact’s sake) (the land of public opinion, of context)
  • Modern: realism: no “esto” (no implicit understanding that what follows will be opinion only); wherein you accept speech-acts because they have a referent, not because of their structure
    • “real, fragmented, interstitial notation”
• Concrete detail: “direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign”
  • when he says “Signified is expelled,” he means the identity of the marking sign as having meaning via the larger semiological structure
  • Concrete detail versus narrative structure: concrete detail rejects the signifier’s status as a sign within a system and says it’s only denotating
    • So we have the concrete detail which says it points directly to an object (denotes), but really it’s part of a larger system (connotes)
    • Andrew says this is similar to Heisenberg uncertainty principle: can’t determine two properties of any particle at once (position OR speed, not both)
  • See explanation of Peirce below: by “referent” we can read Peirce’s “interpretant”
• Narrative structure: “form of the signified”
• What are these objects, then?
  • “Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real. It is the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents) which is signified.”
    • Objects that appear just to be themselves are actually the signifier of the system of the real: where you take these things to be the guarantor of reality
• Realism
  • “the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent alone, becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, that basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity.”
• The reality effect is an illusion, making you think that you’ve accessed the actual referent, when really all you’ve done is been convinced that the real exists: you’ve been tricked by the signifier, believing it’s “true” b/c it seems to be outside of the semiotic system. The real signified is “we’re real,” not the object, which is just bait for you to accept the reality.
  • It tries to “degrade the sign’s tripartite nature in order to make notation the pure encounter of an object and its expression.”
  • hence “modernity’s grand affair” is “the disintegration of the sign”
    • realism a “regressive” version of this b/c whereas the “goal today” is to empty the sign, realism’s goal was to “occur in the name of referential plenitude”

Here Is My Own Theory, Which Barthes Of Course Has Said Before Me

• In a parenthesis no less
• “Realistic literature is narrative, of course, but that is because its realism is only fragmented, erratic, confined to ‘details,’ and because the most realistic narrative imaginable develops along unrealistic lines.”
  • Why? b/c he’s making a fundamental opposition between structure and realism
• “Referential illusion:” in realism, “just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do—without saying so—is signify it.”
  • The referential illusion is the “collusion” between signifier and referent. This isn’t gonna happen: you only get in touch with the category of “the real.”

Notes

• Me: what if the set-piece descriptions in Huysmans are like what I saw in Veblen, this pattern of something being a metaphor, but then having significance in and of itself (the catalog)
• Me: I would say that realism isn’t real in terms of how we live b/c it purges life of all of the narrativizing we NATURALLY do to our experience, to put it into a meaningful structure that makes us think we are indeed in charge. Realism either purges life of this narrativizing or it says that meaning is made by cruel nature not by humans. The fact that realism is associated with pictures of the lower classes tells ME that we have a bourgeois ideology that whereas WE are exceptional and are allowed to experience life in a haze of our own subjective creation, whereas the poor are not that lucky and are doomed to live in a land of mere concrete objects, unable to indulge in narrativizing our lives.
• Peirce: signifier, signified, and interpretant. The signifier actually points to the interpretant, which is merely another signifier for the signified, the latter of which therefore is inaccessible. Signifiers all the way down. “Sign gives birth to another” without creation of words as meaning: rhetoric not grammar
• Barthes’ Semiology
  • Tripartite: because the signifier and the signified together make a new signified
    • the example: a magazine cover where the signifier (bits of color) and signified (the young Black man saluting French flag) create new signified (“France is a great empire”)
  • Because of two orders: first, the order of denotation (which is Saussure’s) and second, the order of connotation (always cultural, where cultural meetings are made: values, discourses)
    • What is truly signified is a cultural meaning
  • referent: the object; signified: the concept; signifier: the expression
    • referent: the piano
    • signified: “the real”
    • signifier: the word piano and the syntagm it’s in (its sentence)