Excursus

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Interfaces 5. 1994. Dijon: Centre de Recherches Image Texte Language, Université de Bourgogne.

This issue is a selection of papers from a 1993 conference on theory of the relation between image and language.
Michel Baridon contributes an annotated bibliography.

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Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

A magistral survey that traces

"the detranscendentalization of perspective",
"the recorporealization of the subject"

and

"the revalorization of time over space".
(187)

Jay, Nancy. "Gender and Dichotomy," Feminist Studies 7(1) Spring 1981, pp. 38-56.

Examines two epistles of St. Paul noting the distinction in addressee for appeals based on contradiction versus those based on contraries.

Joyce, Michael. "Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-linear Electronic Text, "The Ends of Print Culture". Postmodern Culture 2:1 (Sept. 1991).

"We can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. There are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities."

Odd Heideggerian overtones here.
I prefer to reverse the syntagm: modalities and structures are tools,
no humanities without technologies.
Furthermore, who is the "we" that disembodied reading in the first place?

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Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The illusion of the natural sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1992.

"The art that is designated as a natural-sign art, when the arts are viewed as forms of representation, is differnent from the art considered closest to nature, when the arts are viewed as modes of human expression"
(107).

Krieger points to the Longinian versus the Horation traditions as opposing views on the dependence on external materials and implements.
He continues

"In the latter consideration [expressionistic view], nature itself, as it realizes itself in the expressions of human nature, dictates that what otherwise was called the natural-sign arts be consigned to the category of artifice dependent upon external materials and implements."

McLuhan would represent a contrary movement - the naturalization of tools.

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Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

"semiosis specifies the mutual overdetermination of meaning, perception, and experience, a complex nexus of reciprocally constitutive effects between the subject and social reality, which, in the subject, entail a continual modification of consciousness; that consciousness in turn being the condition of social change."
(184)

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Regarder Écouter Lire. Paris: Plon, 1993.

"L'esprit humain était capable de concevoir ces formes et leurs rapports bien avant que leur existence réelle ne lui fût révélée."
(159)

The thesis of disenchantment of the world in the wake of technological innovation still produces some beautiful and enchanting lines.

Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen, 1984.

Certainly helps one distinguish between the text of Descartes and Cartesianism.

"In the Sixth Meditation he acknowledged that the inferior senses, once they have been set aside from the search for truth - - where they can only mislead and distort -- are reliable guides to our well-being. To trust them is not irrational. He does not maintain that we are rational only when exercising arduous pure thoughts, engaged in intellectual contemplation and assembling chains of deduction. Indeed, he thinks it is not rational to spend an excessive amount of time in such purely intellectual activity."
(49)

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Markham, Sheila H. "Islamic Calligraphy." Antiquarian Book Monthly Review 16:1 (Jan. 1989).

"Islamic literature delights in the image of the reed as pen for the calligrapher and instrument for the musician, both revealing man's inner thoughts to the different senses."
(12)

The balance is lost in the sentence immediately following:

"There would be general agreement with Walter Pater's remark that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.""

Marshall, Stuart. "The Contemporary Political Use of Gay History: The Third Reich" in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video. Eds. Bad Object-Choices. Seatle: Bay Press, 1991.

"The problem with homosexuals, as far as the Third Reich was concerned, was the fact that they supposedly did not reproduce."

Marshall contrasts Nazi racial and sexual regulation.
Useful for developing a sense of the complexity of reproductive models.

Miles, Margaret R. Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

"The point, then, is not to heal the split between words and images, but to see what interests and powers it serves."
(44)

Mowitt, John. Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object. Durhan: Duke University Press, 1992.

Most interesting final chapter which revisits Eisenstein's introduction of movement as a category uniting visual and musical modes of signification.

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