The reader's gymnasium

Redundancy as key concept in cognitive information design. The script act is ramified in several levels of iconic and diagrammatic cross-mapping, so that rhythms are repeated from the phonemic, prosodic, bibliographic, graphetic, acoustic, mimetic, rhetorical, kinetic, physiognomic, gestural, proxemics, etc. dimensions. In a concert, the whole act is massively reproduced not just by the dancing clapping singing crowd but by the media technology which multiplies its replication a millionfold. Here, salience becomes the basis of real experience, that of an aesthetic waveform getting reproduced and translated by various modalities. Thus, a script act is always a concert where analogues are replicated on various media so that it can become saliently readable.

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Where is the Reader, how is it inscribed? Usually hidden, as ground, not figure, but sometimes foregrounded, thematized. Like the fourth wall. In the visual arts, the perspective, play of depth, light, volume, angle, ways by which the readerly gaze is embedded as a mode of looking. Until there is no more form or depth, and the vision stops short before the materiality of its medium. The focus is on the body, texture, surface, material of the frontal object of attention. Sometimes, in action painting for example, the reader's space expands (expressionism) to become the whole record of its nonlinear motions.

Artefacts of looking may or may not accommodate the space for the reader/observer; they may, partly or fully, demand or deny the observer's space. Not often is this aspect thematized, or this tendency follows historical modulations. Or, the ontology of the object is actually that of the readerly ''gymnasium,'' displaced to satisfy the age's rhetoric of discursive authority (positivism). In literature as early as the epics, the narrator function being given to the figure who takes over the narrative is a reader in disguise, where performance intersects and becomes part of the ontological space of fiction (metalepsis).

Radical community

We often presume that we seamlessly share the same cognitive or semantic context with others. The context, most of the time, is variegated among people. There are some road intersections (a mystery!), but the view of the whole may be radically different across individuals. I'm reminded of a poem by W. Stevens which practically says the world is as many or as varied as the number of individuals looking. This is a radical way of defining individualism or individuality, something more or less built into the composition of ''individual'' as a word itself. There is obviously a form of overlap and encounter, or else we won't even imagine the notion of ''context'' or the shared horizon of understanding called sensus communis. Yet, this is probably better seen less as a constant or stable frame than as something that must be built up concurrently with the ongoing speech or script act.

Perhaps a good way to negotiate these extremes is to look at them as assigned points in a kind of discourse or language game, necessary for taking stock of positions and tracing out the meanderings of communication or conversation. I recall here D. Davidson's idea of radical interpretation where the context is basically an emergent aspect of the speech or script act. That is, whatever the object text is, as utterance or as printed material or multimedia, part of the identity, content, message, information, or meaning of that object text is the emergent context which allows that meaning to become perceptible. Put another way, ''text'' and ''context,'' in the manner or extent that they are said to be ''connected'' in understanding, are emergent poles of the communication event as a radically creative or inaugural semio-poetic process, with all the attendant technological, socio-psychological, and political dimensions of perceptual formation and/or deformation.

Realism, redundancy, reading

--On the recalcitrant binary of mimetic and anti-mimetic: we need to step back and ask ourselves if a non-mimetic mode in linguistic practice is ever possible de facto even when it is claimed de jure. It would be more precise to say that the favoured mimetic object simply moves out from one type to another, from the realia of history to that of, say, semiotic forms. In the final analysis, the object of all mimesis would be other species of mimesis. It is this mimesis of mimesis which allows the language of realism to become possible, and it is a question that brings us all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. Hence, in point of fact, the anti-mimetic writing being alluded to, identified with the avant-garde, carries more mimesis than the plainly mimetic kind of writing. The disfavour this avant-garde species receives is due to something else than an issue of mimesis or realism. By attributing exclusively a thicker coefficient of the real to mimetic writing, wouldn’t we be reiterating the discursive authority, legitimacy, and rationality of the individuals who claim to have a better access to the referent? And this referent is being reproduced in writing untainted with fantasy and the resources of language and memory? (Maybe the more important or useful notion is redundancy, not mimesis or representation.)

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--We always produce diagrams to facilitate the deployment of salience, informationality, or significance. This is the sign as an aesthetic object, a cognitive material or procedural support which presents itself in the communicational field as a marked or overmarked object or target of perception. It is an act proposing for the recognition of a scriptural or semiotic move as a communal substance of meaning to be shared and passed along as a significant artefact or text: that is, as the locus of everyday or critical discourse. Ethnologically speaking, the rites and rituals which are repeated, the painstaking manner and formality or theatricality in their performance or presentation, could be seen as the prime distillation or modelling of the reproduction of the koinē aisthēsis as a cultural feature or substance. Cf. the material turn, the material repertoire of the culture. There is, of course, a politics here at work, since it is a discourse which delineates outsiders as nonparticipant discourses. There are those included and excluded in the “conversation.” It would be interesting to see where the lines are drawn, the signs of resistance, and the moment of transition or passage toward the exterior other.

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--The self-generation of textuality can be seen in the binary separation it enacts between itself and its referent. To exist as an object apart, it must name its other, thereby maintaining its status as a perceptible referentiable object. This primary ergonomic dichotomy can be seen via the deictic functions which orient the imaginary space of reading. Various reality effects depend on such markers which name the outsides of the text, while at the same time indexes itself as the site where such citation happens. More obvious self-references are locutions such as ''at the time of this writing.'' In general, the spaces and temporal dimensions it creates, its proleptic-analeptic axes, extend for the reader a plane of existence between what is read and what is mentioned. We can even look at narrative codes similar to what R Barthes listed in S/Z less as linguistic or literary "devices" than as ergonomic resting points or "landmarks" where both text and reader become locatable coordinates in the groundless space of representation.

   There is much work to be done in the elucidation of this self-generative logic where textual and non-textual coordinates are set up by reading motions as projections of its own prosodic traces. This ergonomic notion dilutes the over-emphasis on structurality or literary form and answers the question what audience it would be a structurality for. Encoded in the design feature of textuality are the means by which the dichotomy text-nontext is made and kept perceptible. It is a border that can become thematized whenever a metafictive or metalingual tactic is set in motion. Like the mirror stage, a reader is drawn into the deictic network of the interminable play of coordinative reference where binary values exchange places in an irresolvable dialectic. This could be seen as the chiasmic spiral where desire and semiosis animate each other in an exchange logic without closure.