We will use Motet - next Friday in the Olin Library computer lab
[A motet is polyphonic - many voices singing their own song while they also fit together to make a whole song.]
Rebecca Blazer on Belsey
Comments
A difficult read because I'm not well-versed in literary theory.
Exactly how I felt the first time I read it - even as an English major, we don't talk about theory.
Did tie into art theory which was helpful
Expressive realism
What we're all familiar with as the way stories work, e.g., a movie: characters, conflict, resolution - everything makes sense.
Belsey points out problems with this structure. Expressive realism makes the author a transcendent person, possessed of an important idea - you're supposed to connect with the author and come, by the end of the story, to the author's wisdom.
But the author is not necessarily transcendent, possessed of all the right answers. In addition, there are a host of assumptions written into the text - ostensibly commonsensical. But these assumptions are not so much commonsensical as assumptions characteristic of a given culture. In a different culture, different assumptions would hold and the story wouldn't work.
First structuralists and then post-structuralists attempted to deal with these inconsistencies. The structuralists: we need to have a set of rules - a standard - to guide our interpretation. Example: Northrop Frye. But they never quite broke away from the idea of the transcendent author and the reader meeting up with the author.
Post-structuralists, beginning with Saussure, point to our assumptions about language as the source of our theoretical difficulties. Over against the view that there is a single transcendent meaning to be found through language - meaning is created by language. Belsey's example: the words for colors in English vs. color words in Welsh. While we may think our color words are true by reference to an external reality - different languages can construct color differently, suggesting that our experience of the world is not so much anchored in an experience of an external reality as it is structured by our acceptance of a given language.
Knowledge is assumed to be fixed, "out there." But knowledge is likewise created through our language, set of assumptions, the ways we communicate. The danger of the assumption of an external, transcendent knowledge - it is deceptive, opens up the possibility of the author becoming authority becoming authoritarian. So instead of recognizing that people are living in an ideological construct, they take the ideological construct as reality/knowledge.
Relatedly, by taking the subject as fixed (as assumed in expressive realism) - this discourages the individual from changing.
Both language and subject, Belsey argues, are not fixed but created through all sorts of discourses. When you hide the fact that knowledge and subjectivity are not fluid but fixed - then you can keep people for examining themselves, changing, etc.
This is the springboard into her discussion of "interrogative texts" - they are open-ended; they don't try to tie everything up at the end, but rather leave lots of room for discussion, leaving lots of things out, etc.
Classical realist texts:
1) illusionism - they establish the illusion of a whole real world - do not draw attention to the fact that this is constructed, fictive;
2) they work by closure - they bring everything together at the end; all the loose ends get tied up, conflicts are resolved, etc.
3) a hierarchy of discourses - show which characters' voices are true, those which are not true (i.e., a meta-level discourse tells us how we are to understand the discourses of the characters)
By contrast - interrogative texts draw attention to their textuality, to the fact that the text is a construction, not a whole real world. Shakespeare is Rebecca's example: there are references to play crafting, etc.
They avoid closure - again, in Shakespeare's plays, there is never complete closure. Rather, i.ts raise questions, and perhaps suggest a multiplicity of answers.
[Q: But doesn't the director and the actors provide an interpretation of a play which thereby works differently from a text?
Belsey offers the example of Gulliver's Travels. You can't pin down the author's intentions. A lot of satire. At first, he seems to be making fun of those who are different from himself, e.g., the Lilleputians who are small minded, take petty things very seriously - vs. the next island of large people, over against whom the author seems petty.
Belsey also takes up deconstruction. A final chapter on constructive critical practice. A change in attitude in reading texts that is more accepting of contradictions, the questions that are apparent in interrogative texts. Rather than seek to erase the contradictions and inconsistencies, accept them.
[Q: So interrogative texts make people more dependent on their own interpretation?
Yes. We shouldn't rely on the author, in part because we can never be sure of the author's intentions. Rather than asking "What did the author mean?" - recognize that (a) we can't fully uncover the author's intention, and (b) we discern new interpretations which the author likely did not intend.
[See 60-64: be careful of the nihlistic spiral resulting from the extremes - a single transcendent fixed meaning vs. anything goes.
The latter extreme can lead to a relativism.
To get out of this: the concept of knowledge as discursively produced. Not a claim that there is a single transcendent knowledge, but a process of moving from one plausible, argued view to an better view (because it overcomes the contradictions and inconsistencies that become apparent in the first) - while this too is open to further critique.
Comment: this sounds remarkably like learning how to read a Platonic dialogue. This suggests the larger point - that what is "postmodern" in literary theory may not be limited to a postmodern view in philosophy.
Discussion about other disciplines' resistance to theory/reflection, in response to the first paragraph in Belsey on resistance to theory/reflection/philosophy in literature. It seems widespread - perhaps because of specialization; a knowledge explosion which "fills up" each discipline with more and more to know; an Anglo-American tendency towards the romantic and the anti-intellectual (Andrew Jackson vs. Thomas Jefferson); Anglo-American philosophy as dominated by an analytic approach which has historically ignored existential questions and focused on its own technical specializations, etc.?
A question about balance between theory/philosophy and other disciplines (art, architectecture, English, etc.) - people don't seem to know how to find the balance.
A focus on practicality rather than theory.
How to know when to stop acting [theatre] and start thinking, start acting and stop thinking?
A good analogy between theoretical research and applied research; the difference doesn't prevent their interplay, interrelationship.
Parallels: Aristotle's notion of ethos/habits - as intrinsic to being a human being // the dancer // Eastern medicine // football player
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So how does this relate to postmodernism?
She doesn't use the term - but her use of the structuralists and poststructuralists parallels the architectural distinction between the modernists and the postmodernist.
The poststructuralist/postmodernist approach is to celebrate adversity (Meidlinger): rather than try to develop rules, structure - they do try to find patterns but are more tolerant of inconsistency, "foregrounding the incompatibilities, collisions between discourses."
Conversation about liberation in the aesthetic domains vis-a-vis philosophical domains.
The problem is dualism - as old as philosophy itself.
Much of the source for postmodernism is French - hence the association of "modernity" with especially Cartesian understandings of rationality, dualism?
--> Habermas's critique of Lyotard.
Kristen reminds us of the tension between Heraclitus and Parmenides, between Sophistic relativism and old religion - and the Platonic effort to find a middle ground via reason. (See the web materials on the Presocratics and Plato).
Postmodernism seems to pose a similar sort of relativistic threat as the Sophists?
Parallels: Beckett and Euripedes, the Bacchae
But some differences: Lyotard deals with how technology interacts with our epistemology, sense of reality, etc. - whereas the Greek upheavals involved war, the construction of empires. Are the effects the same nonetheless?
The discovery of cultural diversity in ancient times and our own, as a global village, leading to questioning our own traditions.
For next week:
continue with discussion of Belsey, including Ess's comments on Belsey;
Ess's summary of the Habermas/Lyotard debate (reserve)
Rebecca will report on McCarthy & Hoy, Critical Theory, Part 4, "A Deconstructive Reading of the Early Frankfurt School," and Part 5, "Conflicting Conceptions of Critique: Foucault versus Habermas."
We will also read the selections from Derrida and Foucault in A Postmodern Reader (on reserve).