Contextual note: I have to read (skim) Gates’ work very quickly, because it’s been recalled by the library. Please read my notes with that in mind… I’ll return to this entry and give a more detailed reading when I get the book back.

each literary tradition, at least implicitly, contains within it an argument for how it can be read (xix-xx).

I think that, for my stuff, the most valuable parts of Gates’ text involve meta-discourse and the vernacular: the idea that a discourse can discuss itself in a coded meta-language.

I have turned to two signal trickster figures, Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey, in whose myths are registered certain principles of both formal language use and its interpretation. These two separate but related trickster figures serve in their respective traditions as points of conscious articulation of language traditions aware of themselves as traditions, complete with a history, patterns of development and revision, and internal principles of patterning and organization. Theirs is a meta-discourse, a discourse about itself. These admittedly complex matters are addressed, in the black tradition, in the vernacular, far away from the eyes and ears of outsiders, those who do not speak the language of tradition. (xxi)

Importantly, this meta-discourse is intertextual: …”the Monkey’s language of Signifyin(g) functions as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition” (xxi).

Signification is an act that reassembles a coherent cultural tradition in the face of diaspora (xxiv). Signifyin(g) is “repetition with a signal difference” (xxiv), an act of intertextual repetition and revision, which in literature

is similar to parody and pastiche, wherein parody corresponds to what I am calling motivated Signification while pastiche would correspond roughly to unmotivated Signification. (xxvii)

However, unmotivated Signification does not necessarily carry with it the postmodern critique one associates with pastiche. Gates points out the “intertextual” homage performances in black jazz albums, like Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, as a “double-voiced” form that “implies unity and resemblance rather than critique and difference” (xxvii).

Esu-Elegbara is a a trickster figure of West African and Caribbean descent, refigured in Vodoun (Haiti) and Hoodoo (New Orleans) traditions as the loa Papa Legba or Papa La Bas. This loa of gateways and crossroads is invoked by Jim Crow in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles.

As a loa of crossroads, Esu-Elegbara occupies the space between man and the gods; he is the mediator. This mediation manifests itself linguistically: “For Esu is the Yoruba figure of the meta-level of formal language use, of the ontological and epistemological status of figurative language and its interpretation” (6). Esu is the representation of interpretation, of the ongoing, open-ended unfolding of a text (21).

Gates discusses the intertextuality of Signifying Monkey poems and distinguishes narremes or cardinal functions from authorial invention on the level of the signifier rather than the story signified:

It is as if a received structire of crucial elements provides a base for poeisis, and the narrator’s technique, his or her craft, is to be gauged by the creative (re)placement of these expected or anticipated formulaic phrases and formulaic events, rendered anew in unexpected ways… meaning is devalued while the signifier is valorized… all other common structural elements are repeated with variations across the texts that, together, comprise the text of the Monkey. In other words, there is no fixed text of these poems; they exist as a play of differences. (61)

Out of time. More soon.

Review of the Text
Discussion of the Signifying Monkey

Spinuzzi opens his study of “the crucial subversive interactions in which workers engage as they use designed information” (27) with an anecdote that brings to mind de Certeau; Barbara, a police officer presented with a traffic accident tracking system that uses a old database and an unwieldy map, uses her own artifacts (Post-it notes) to optimize the process herself. This, he claims, presents a very different paradigm for information design — the user is not a victim waiting to be saved by good design, but an agent who refashions the system for her use.

Barbara is not waiting around to be rescued. Although the software is not set up to facilitate the particular tasks in which she is engaged, she does not wring her hands and wait for an information designer to come slay the dragon. She picks up available tools, adapts them in idiosyncratic ways, and makes do. (2)

Spinuzzi uses the phrase “the messiness of work life” (3), which makes me think of Morson and Emerson’s reading of Gregory Bateson to illustrate centrifugal forces in Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics: “There are an indefinitely large number of ways in which things can be messy, but very few one would call tidy… Order needs justification, disorder does not. The natural state of things is mess” (29-30).

Genre tracing, Spinuzzi’s methodology, grows from Bakhtin’s theories, and he uses Bakhtin’s centripetal/centrifugal framework to compare fieldwork-to-formalization methods of user-centered information design (centripetal, systemic, global) to the refashioning of information processes by users themselves (centrifugal, idiosyncratic, local). Of course, this is not a simple binarism — for example, user innovations can become systematized — and systems always reflect the pressures of both forces (20-21).

Genre tracing, his alternative to fieldwork-to-formalization methods,

draws on the metaphor of dialogue to examine how people interact with complex institutions, disciplines, and communities; how they solve problems and disseminate solutions; and how their conversations and problem solving are instantiated in artifacts. (23)

It locates these interactions, solutions, conversations, and artifacts within activity theory, which categorizes:

• macroscopic activities, described as “cultural, historical, unconscious” (30)
• mesoscopic actions, “goal-directed, conscious” (30)
• microscopic operations, “habitual, unconscious” (30)

He argues that user-centered information design studies should appreciate the “coconstitutive” relationships between all three levels.

Genre in the work extends from an understanding of “mediating artifacts” (38), mediations or actuations of group activities which, in turn, change those activities… similar, I guess, to “boundary objects” as described by Wenger in Communities of Practice. Spinuzzi warns against understanding genre as simply a typology for artifacts: rather, he invokes Bakhtin via Morson and Emerson to establish genres as traditions of “producing, using, and interpreting artifacts” (41) which, in turn, generate forms:

Genres convey a worldview, not by laying out a set of explicit propositions, but by “developing concrete examples” that “allow the reader to view the world in a specific way” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 282-284). (Spinuzzi 41-42)

In practice, genre as a concept allows connections between artifacts that might not be otherwise formally associated: Spinuzzi points out the generic history that links paper form fields and online dialog boxes (42).

Genres map to the three levels of scope presented earlier. On the macroscopic level, the traditional aspect of genre is emphasized; “genre is seen as shaping and being shaped by its sociocultural milieu” (44). On the mesoscopic level, genre “is typically taken to be instantiated in an artifact — usually a text — that is used to meet an actor’s goals. When goals change, actors might choose to abandon the genre for another, more amenable one” (46). The microscopic level emphasizes the conventional aspect of genre: unconscious sets of “operationalized actions” that are used to complete “familiar, repeated tasks” (46).

Genres interact and evolve within genre ecologies: “genres are oriented to different sorts of problems and have developed relatively stable connections or coordinations with other genres… activities are mediated by an entire dynamic, shifting ecology of different genres” (48).

Genre tracing, then, analyzes genres, “their compound mediational relationships, and the destabilization that workers encounter when using them” as operative concepts across the three levels of scope. This methodology informs a model of “open system” design which “make(s) it possible for workers to consensually modify the system’s genres and add their own genres to the system” (204).

It’s interesting to play this against The Practice of Everyday Life and Henry Jenkins… it offers a methodology that might be adapted to analyze not only the reworkings of popular fictions that readers and fans make, but the evolutionary effects those reworkings have on the fictions as ongoing systems. Something to mull over…

Pavel starts from previous understandings of fiction that center atomically on the truth-value of characters, events, and utterances, and points out the limitations of defining fiction on that granular a level — instead, he argues for an understanding of fictional worlds, “…a model that represents the users’ understanding of fiction once they step inside it and more or less lose touch with the physical realm” (16).

His understanding of fictional worlds allows for a degree of porosity between the actual world and worlds of different truth-value. Key to his argument, and distinct from a fictional world, is the realm of myth, which through its sacred meaning is actually endowed with greater truth-value than actual experience. Myth becomes fiction as its position in the culture, over time, slips away from the sacred.

Pavel also discusses realism as “not merely a set of stylistic and narrative conventions, but a fundamental attitude toward the relationship between the actual world and the truth of literary texts” (46).

Fictional worlds should not be considered possible worlds in a literal sense… rather they are “abstract models or conceptual constructions” (49). But even this conveys a sense of independence, and decouples the world to a certain extent from the “creator” or author. Fictional worlds can contain contradiction yet still cohere as worlds. (49)

Pavel’s understanding of fictional worlds and reference decouples, to some extent, fiction from its medium or text, which is useful to me:

The worlds we speak about, actual or fictional, neatly hide their deep fractures, and our language, our texts, appear for a while to be transparent media unproblematically leading to worlds. For, before confronting higher-order perplexities, we explore the realms described by compendia and texts, which stimulate our sense of referential adventure and, in a sense, serve as mere paths of access to worlds: once the goal is reached, the events of the journey may be forgotten. (73)

Of course, it’s no more accurate to assert the exclusive truth of transparent referential travel to a fictional space than it is accurate to assert the absolute influence or opacity of the form, and I don’t think Pavel is doing this. Rather, he makes an argument for keeping referentiality in the picture, for understanding the referent as well as the text making reference as important and discrete:

The desire not to dismiss the medium leads, for all practical purposes, to the loss of the worlds.

But would this not, again, lead to the neglect of what internal models can show us — the detailed meanderings and obstacles of our journeys through fictional spaces? (75)

This leads to a discussion of borders between fictionality and actuality, in which he mentions variants of a fictional world, and the elements that connect variants:

Narratologists distinguish between basic elements of a story — cardinal functions in Barthes’s terminology, narremes in Dorfman’s — and less significant elements, whose presence may be dispensed with without the story’s losing its coherence and identity. In such a view, it may be assumed that a sequence of conjoined sentences is basically true of the world w if all important states of affairs are represented by true sentences. (80).

Pavel avoids easy truisms about the nature of fiction, and his discussion of boundary is no exception: “While proposing a general ontological framework for fiction — the salient structures — I argue that the demarcation between fiction and nonfiction is a variable element and that as an institution fiction cannot be attributed a set of constant properties, an essence” (136). In support of this he points out the dual ontological status of sacred spaces:

“This situation instantiates a remarkable property of ontological systems, namely the fact that they rarely command an unqualified loyalty… the points of articulation at which the two worlds meet in what can be called a series of ontological fusions” (138).

He then situates fictional systems in this model: “Taking the division of the ontological space into central and peripheral models as a very general formal organization of the beliefs of a community, we may localize fiction as a peripheral region used for ludic and instructional purposes” (139).

Beyond the discussion of myth as a truth state, Pavel has some useful statements for me on what myth does: “Myths, being narratives, are composed of chains of events; by virtue of their privileged ontology, they serve as models of intelligibility for events in the profane world… as paradigms of sense they furnish explanations for profane events” (131-2).

The story recounts the wars between nations on an enormous and unnamed planet, of which Earth is a moon. The confict is provoked by the Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement. After hundreds of ferocious battles, the good Christian nation of Abbiennia forces the ‘haughty’ Glandelinians to give up their barbarous ways. The heroines of Darger’s history are the seven Vivian sisters, Abbiennian princesses. They are aided in their struggles by a panoply of heroes, who are sometimes the author’s alter-egos. The battles are full of vivid incident: charging armies, ominous captures, alarms and explosions, the appearances of demons and dragons.

Darger’s work includes some disturbing portrayals of violence visited upon hermaphroditic children. Matthew Michael writes on his Darger site:

Darger’s paintings, as well as the passages of the Realms of the Unreal they illustrate, often are disturbingly violent. Great numbers of clothed and naked children are strangled, eviscerated, and tortured by cruel Glandelinian soldiers. The numerous, explicit depictions of torture have led several critics to speculate as to whether Darger was in fact a child murderer or serial killer. He most probably was not.

The “most probably” is not particularly comforting, but the general consensus seems to be that Darger’s was a troubled and violent mind which, in a testament to the benefits of art therapy, found expression through the creation of his epic work, rather than through acts of violence.

John Ashbery has written a long poem on Realms of the Unreal.

Art in America’s article on Darger is particularly good.

Anyway, this is what I’m researching today.

Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations–the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film–have had on art in its traditional form.

An attachment to an idea of originals and forgeries weighs over Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; perhaps it eulogizes the idea of originals. But “the original” is not only an artifact but its context:

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity…

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.

The “authentic” artwork is the original artifact in a place and time; in the case of drama, this includes the performance captured. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the authentic object and context are diminished, and through reproduction the artwork detaches itself from its original context.

It seems like we’re so far past even the axioms here. There’s nothing prior to reproduction any more. What aura is “Toy Story” detaching itself from? Where does the original manuscript for this entry live?

… for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.

And so we return and begin again. One might, at first glance, assume that, with something like a persistent world game, we’ve left the territory of ritual altogether: there’s no single artifact or performance to even separate from its aura. All we have is the interaction of dispersed clients across a server. And yet in this space ritual is nearly all there is. The art of a persistent world game consists of countless moments that are too multiple and ephemeral to be reproducible — story-making so invested in the moment and in action that it exists only in real time. Even as we entirely detach art from a physical presence or locus, we restore its irreproducibility.

Here’s another writeup on art in the age of digital reproduction.

It is certain that mechanisms of this kind [the iterative scheme, with a closed causal chain, where events progress in a cycle rather than a line] proliferate more widely in the popular narrative of today than in the eighteenth-century romantic feuilleton, where, as we have seen, the event was founded upon a development and where the character was required to ‘consume’ himself through to death. Perhaps one of the first inexhaustible characters during the decline of the feuilleton and bridging the two centuries at the close of la belle epoque is Fantomas.

Fantomas is an inspiration for Grant Morrison’s Fantomex, who has been running around New X-Men recently, so it’s nice to see him thrown into Eco’s mix.