--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.)
***
--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.
***
--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.
No comments:
Post a Comment