4.0

The discursive formations exemplified by the classic eye-ear case such as dichotomous categorizations, frozen hierarchies, and cyclic reversals lose legitimacy if mind and body are considered as mutually interactive.  Recursivity, especially in its cybernetic manifestations, provides an analogy for that interaction.  It also provides a discursive mechanism that can generate rhetorical moves that do not pit hearing against sight or slight other sensory modalites.

4.0

4.1

Recursivity marks the relation of mind and body:  to know, to be a body that knows, to be a body that knows its knowing.  From successive recursivity, dialectic, the possibility of reasoning, the potential for asking questions, emerges.  The leap from recursivity to dialectic is managed by three premises.  First, the body is a medium.  It is material, tool and repository of repertoire (habit).  Second, sensory modalities are open to transcoding.  Such transcoding is related to powers of abstraction.  Third, nondyadic models of embodied consciousness and text handling best explain conceptual play and discursive practice.  The key in this cursory and condensed precis is, of course, sensory transcoding.  It permits one to model the thinking body by analogy with textual interaction and account for the semiotic intersection of different ways of knowing.

4.1

4.2

Using the analogy between the relation of reading subjects to texts and the relation of thinking bodies to themselves one can profitably reread Ricoeur's notion of appropriation and Ingarden's, of concretization.  With the analogy between a thinking body's relation to itself and a text's relation to a reading subject, the theorizing of text handling becomes less embroiled in sensory bias.  Likewise the excavation of sensory bias in some versions of feminist epistemology aids the exploration of embodied consciousness.  The exercise aims to discover discursive repressions and limitations that impinge on the imagining of thinking, feeling subjects.

4.2

4.3

The names that follow are rarely uttered in the same breath.  Less rarely, they are found in the same library.  Dorothy Smith's cartography of the modes of consciousness is cousin to the phenomenological literary aesthetics of Roman Ingarden.  Susan Bordo and Jane Flax share a common intellectual heritage with the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur.  He and they draw on psychoanalysis.  He, for his notion of appropriation;  they, in conceptualizing repression of maternal bond and the role of detachment in intellectual activity.  All the thinkers gathered here are golden fodder for critique but they are not entirely made of pale yellow straw.  All slight in some fashion either the body or the mind.  To do one or the other is to neglect the social aspects of technology, perception and reproduction.  Indeed theoretical consideration of this nexus depends upon privileging neither mind nor body.  Furthermore, placing body and mind on par amounts to accepting both mental and bodily experience as social and rational.

4.3

4.4

The genesis of ways of knowing is entangled with intellectual and erotic ways of being.  In some languages, the intellectual and the erotic share the verb "to know".  Often the struggle to disentangle sexuality from biological reproduction has been characterized by the adversaries of feminist positions as the imposition of reason on nature.  This argument also plays a role in the conceptualization of the relation of technology to perception.  This is the case for McLuhan.  Ironically, the same argument, reason dominating nature, inflects certain feminist epistemologies.  In some cases, social reproduction veers deterministic when sexuality is not sufficiently distinguished from biological reproduction.  Such discourse has difficulty articulating homosocial let alone homosexual phenomena.  Investigations are limited to cross- gender interaction.

4.4

4.5

However mere attention to same-sex interactions without a radical requestioning of the centrality of dyads would be no guarantee against the recurrence of dispositional explanations and the spectre of determinism.  Such dichotomizing feminist work seeks "to explain why objectivity as detachment and noninvolvement is the epistemological stance to which men are predisposed" (Arnault 204 n. 7).  The work rests on the construction of a pathologized target.  This is possible because a dichotomous category of participation (involvement and non-involvement) is positioned within a polarized relation of gender and valence: men and women; bad and good.  Truth-values aside, accounts based on the construction of predispositions remain unreflexive.

4.5

4.6

This pattern is not representative of all feminist epistemologies.  Stanley and Wise interrogate the relation between theory and experience within the production of feminist knowledge.  Their epistemology comes out of dialogues within British feminism.  They develop their work partially in response to their own experience of Marxist-feminist currents within British academic feminism.  Perhaps since they do not target an entity called Cartesianism, they avoid adopting dualist formulations.  For them positivism and scientificism are not the sole preserve of men.  They stress differences between women as much as those between men and women.  They refuse to pathologize even the oppressor class.

A feminist developmental theory that can explain neither feminism nor difference between groups of women (and men) except as the product of malfunctioning should be anathema to feminists [...] (Stanley and Wise 1993, 7)

Consequently their epistemology can not bolster moral superiority or nostalgic longing for an integrated body and mind.  In their thinking, theory is an activity.  It is of the domain of practice.  Mind-body relations are constructed out of social interaction.  This primacy of the social ensures that in their discourse mere reversal is never lodged as a fulcrum, never left unquestioned.

4.6

4.7

The ethnomethodological and interactionist-inspired work of Stanley and Wise does not find a place in the typology of feminist epistemologies offered by Lynne Arnault.  All the various thinkers she groups together are said to be concerned with masculine predisposition to "objectivity as detachment and noninvolvement".  Within this common design, Arnault explains that "some feminists make recourse to feminist revisions of "object- relations" theory.  [...] Less psychoanalytically oriented feminists account for the gender specificity of the Cartesian ideal in terms of a post-Marxist theory of labour and its effects upon mental life" (Arnault 204).  Of her examples, Susan Bordo and Jane Flax are users of object relations, Dorothy Smith, a user of labour theories.  These thinkers will draw closer examination.

4.7

4.8

Compared to the work of Stanley and Wise, the feminist theory represented in Arnault's typology suffers.  Stanley and Wise are very sensitive to the power of the telling of stories.  Despite psychoanalysis being a discipline devoted to the interpretation of narratives, Bordo and Flax do not display in the deployment of their tales such self-reflexivity.

4.8

4.9

Likewise in reference to the worlds generated by discourses, the epistemology of Stanley and Wise will not privilege access to an unmediated objective world.  Their discussion of Popper's three world model for example makes this clear (n1).  Smith's standpoint epistemology evolves out of responses to the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, responses that can be read as a reversal of the hierarchal relation between Schutz's categories of paramount reality and scientific domain.  Measured against Stanley and Wise, Smith's epistemology would appear insufficiently dialectical, insufficiently prepared to begin again.

4.9

4.10

Obviously, the present comparative examination esteems dialectical thinking and self-reflexivity as positive values.  It is a bias.  A style.

4.10

4.11

Let us see what it can do.  Following Patricia Meyer Spacks on Simone de Beauvoir and masculine standards of accomplishment (Spacks 19), Stanley and Wise state:

We are uncomfortably aware that similar remarks can ­­ and should ­­ be levelled at our own style of presentation and mode of argument, as well as that of many other feminist writers.  Words, sentences, writing styles, ways of presenting arguments, arguments themselves, criticism, all these are part and parcel of masculinist culture.  They are among the artefacts of sexism, and their use structures our experience before we can even begin to examine it, because they provide with how we think as well as how we write.  We are in a circle [...] Of course it isn't quite like this.  The social world is neither so determinate nor so relentlessly sexist as this ­­ but that it is presented as such is an important feature of the means by which sexism is perpetuated. (Stanley and Wise 1993, 179)

Fears of contamination bred from an us-them division of discursive property, a simply bipartisan distribution of the terms and styles of argmentation can hamper the transfer of critical theory into political action.  As the example of Stanley and Wise demonstrates, dialectical thinking potentially generates complication.  At every turn, inertia, set ideas, frozen interpretative frames are eluded.  Yet, paradoxically the mind's movement can question the goodness of overcoming inertia.  The value of recursivity is radically contextual.

4.11

4.12

Dialectic is not a forte of other feminists.  Determinism and dyads mark analyses like those of Jane Flax that stem from Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering.  The latter's position has been caricatured as blaming the mother for the production of sexism.  One easily reads such deterministic stances from her text, if one is not careful to remark that parenting and its ideological constructs are only claimed as one site of struggle among others:

An ideology of women as mothers extends to women's responsibilities as maternal wives for emotional reconstitution and support of their working husbands.  Assumptions that the social organization of parenting is natural and proper (that women's child care is indistinguishable from their childbearing, that women are for biological reasons better parents than men, moral arguments that women ought to mother) have continued to serve as grounds for arguments against most changes in the social organization of gender.  ( Chodorow 219)

The text in its use of plural forms intimates that there may be other grounds for the articulation of the resistance to change.  For example, the sartorial industries, the producers of wedding gowns and sex trade accoutrements, certainly do not advocate restructuring the social organization of gender.  Attitudes towards parenting are not an explain-all and Chodorow never claims to build a totalizing theory.

4.12

4.13

Ironically, deterministic postures in their psychoanalytic guise evolve from Chodorow's account.  This is the case of Jane Flax.  She focuses on the male child's relation to the mother to produce a single narrative of separation.  It is a narrative where she emphasizes the inevitability of the developmental outcome:

He must become male.  In order to do so he must become not female, since under patriarchy gender is an exclusionary category. [original emphasis] (Flax 246)

Absent here are a differentiation between gender and sex or an acknowledgement that patriarchy (n2)  under capitalism is very pliant (Gender roles often shift in war economies).  Note under patriarchy in Flax's version man becomes, woman is.  Flax's account seems to replicate the existence of an eternal feminine used to define historical male subjectivity.  How then will patriarchy be dismantled?  The solution rests on the alignment of several psychoanalytic postulates:  the eternal-feminine-coupled-to-male-subjectivity structure depends upon the repression on the part of men of infantile dependence and since this repression is equivalent to an investment of frustrated energies in the figure of the mother which is then cast out and since any woman can signify the mother figure, the structure will be dissolved when men cease repressing feelings of dependence and powerlessness, cease investing energy in figures to be cast away and cease reading all women as incarnations of the Mother figure.  Baldly stated the argument suggests that if men did not grow up, they would not demonize women.  The argument rests on shakey universal premises:  all women are mothers; all men desire mothers.  One might perhaps recognize here the twin premises of heteronormativity.  Psychoanalytic convolutions aside, even an unanxious relation to parent figures is no guarantee against adoption of a cognitive style to which someone somewhere will object because it appears to lack emotion in its commitment to reason.

4.13

4.14

When the repression thesis is applied to the adoption of cognitive styles difficulties arise.  Flax asks what is repressed in philosophical discourse.  She invokes the Oedipal plot and its outcome, the repression of dependence and powerlessness, to find that philosophical discourse represses "the interactive character of early human development" (251).  The connection is not clear unless one fantasizes that the boys doing philosophy are liable to feel threatened if they recognize interaction (read "involvement" according to Arnault's typology) as a valid philosophical topic or as an important factor in philosophical exchange.

4.14

4.15

The existence of philosophers of the male gender who discuss emotion and cognition, reason and passion, in non-exclusive terms before feminist critiques became widespread leads one to question how "philosophy" is constructed in Flax's discourse (n3).  It is telling that her analyses are organized by name not by theme.  This is not attachment to the names of the fathers.  This is the discursive practice of case studies.  They deal with lives not bodies.

4.15

4.16

The use of case studies presents the problem of induction.  However Flax's mode is not one of generalization from particulars.  The case studies illustrate theory.  They do not generate or modify theory.  Within her psychoanalytic framework, case studies have no impact on theory.  Every case is a life.  Every life is marked by the same crescendo organised along the dynamics of the Oedipal plot.  In Flax this is marked by the attribution of unsurpassed intensity to infancy:

This period [infancy] is marked not only by physical and emotional dependency but by an intensity of experience which will never be repeated except in psychosis and perhaps in altered states of consciousness such as religious or drug experiences.  Precisely because it is prerational and preverbal, it is difficult for the infant to screen, sort and modify its experience. (Flax 254)

In this paragraph Flax juxtaposes three elements:  infant difficulty displayed in handling experience;  equation of reason and language;  marginalization of intense experience.  Flax seems unaware that altered states of consciousness are mightily repeatable.  Furthermore, a bit of dialectical thinking would force a bit of modification in the relation of adults to childhood experience.  Questioning the distinction between altered and non-altered states invites a reassessment of margin and infant and the intensity ascribed to them.

4.16

4.17

Taking up Flax's points one notes that difficulties in screening, sorting or modifying experience also happen in verbal behaviour.  It is not a set of activities that is mastered once and for all.  Recognition of this would challenge Flax's topography of the ego.

4.17

4.18

Indeed, elsewhere in the same text she assumes similarities between verbal and preverbal stages.  There is a slippage in Flax's text from "infancy", "infantile drama" to "child" and "child within" (247).  Infantile and childhood memories, the child elements of the ego, are deemed repressed and difficult to access.  They are inside.  They are cathected to internalized objects.  Intrinsic to this stress on internalization is an equation of repression with a "keeping in" rather than a "keeping from".  What does this entail for the place of reason?

4.18

4.19

The characterization of the infant as prerational explains the difficulties in processing experience.  However the equation between reason and language contradicts the innateness of reason posited earlier in Flax's text.  As she points out, object relations theory is itself a questioning of Freud's instinct theory (n4) and the place of reason within his theory.  Object relations theory according to Flax sees reason

as an innate potential capacity rather than a faculty painfully acquired through the internalization of the authority of the father and as defense against frustration and threats from the external world.  (249)

If reasoning capacity is innate, how can the infant's engagement with experience be prerational?  The potential capacity can be activated before the acquisition of verbal skills.  Indeed it must be for those skills to be acquired.

4.19

4.20

The preservation of an inner prerational core depends finally upon the marginalization of intense experiences.  Flax claims religious and hallucinogenic experiences occur rarely.  It seems, for her, erotic activity registers no intensity.  If however one considers that experience is constructed and in a constant state of construction then its handling poses problems not only for the infant who is a being in a state of verbal impotency but also for adept language users.  Intense difficulty in sorting, modifying or screening ­­ tasks that construct experience ­­ are also the lot of reading subjects.  From Flax one does reach for intriguing metaphors.  As a child before the text, the reader is demanding, querying.  As an infant before the text?  The parental analogy reaches a limit.  Objects bob in a force field of drives.  Zones.

4.20

4.21

These metaphors play with the distinction between the speaking child and the extra-linguistic infant and do introduce the drives of Freudian theory.  Of course, the mother is not a text.  However the comparison has heuristic value.  The reading subject's relation to a text is best not patterned on a one-to-one dyad.  Memories of other texts hover and the reading subject is traversed by competing desires.  Field faces field.

4.21

4.22

Likewise the developing human's relation to sources of nurture or the human's consciousness of those sources need not, on empirical or conceptual grounds, be theorized as dyadic.  Since an ideology of the couple is basic to object relations theory, it is forced to assume separation in terms of break-up.  Thus the developmental stage of recognizing objects as independent of the self, the stage when the infant recognizes that temporally discrete percepts may constitute apprehension of the same object, the stage at which the mother emerges as a distinct object, produces anxiety.  Only anxiety.  There is no possibility for cognitive joy.

4.22

4.23

The game of losing and finding the object of desire is in object relations theory a stage that breaks up the blissful dyad.  Divorce is traumatic.  But equally so for both parties?  Posited in the theories drawn upon by Flax and her intellectual heirs is the essential unity of infant self.  That unity confirms the status of identification as a key category in gender role formation and authorizes interiorization of the infantile drama.  The preeminence of identification and interiorization is a consequence of the reification of the couple.  The reliance on dyads becomes even more perplexing when explanations move from individual to collective development.

4.23

4.24

In Flight to Objectivity, Susan Bordo extrapolates from the ontogenic story of individual human development offered by object relations theory to phylogenic explanation of changes in historical consciousness.  The psychocultural history outlined by Bordo rests upon two coordinations.  As in object relations theory, a relation to one's body is embroiled in a relation to one's mother.  It is also through this nexus that one's relation to the world passes.

4.24

4.25

For Bordo the gendering of nature is considered in universal rather than historical terms.  She accepts a mapping of the physical world unto the figure of the mother.  This allows a second coordination between the rise of the scientific method and denial of separation anxiety.  Since a cognitive style is coordinated with a developmental theory, Bordo can characterize the rise of modern science as a turning away from the maternal body towards the paternal mind:

The change may also be described in terms of separation from the maternal ­­ the immanent realm of earth, nature, the authority of the body ­­ and a compensatory turning toward the paternal for legitimation through external regulation, transcendent values, and the authority of law. [original emphasis] (Bordo 58)

4.25

4.26

The mind-body opposition is left intact.  Moreover, when Bordo's stress on the gendering of the opposition is amalgamated with the psychological defense mechanisms against separation anxiety, she opts for a narrative which terminates in the exemplary dream of knowledge "imagined as an explicit revenge fantasy, an attempt to wrest back control from nature" (Bordo 75).  The concentration on power struggles is vivid but not accurate.  Bordo chooses to focus on a single defense mechanism.  She explicitly recognizes that psychoanalytic theory has described three responses to separation from the mother (Bordo 106).  They are denial, longing and mourning.

4.26

4.27

It is possible to maintain the reading of ontogenic separation anxiety onto a phylogenic frame, without privileging the response of denial.  For example, Jacquelyn N. Zita, in a review of Bordo's book, refers to work by Genevieve Lloyd and proposes a different conjecture:

The ontological separation of mind from body could thus be seen as a way of making physical differences between the sexes less significant and asserting the equality of the sexes in rationality and will. (Zita 647)

With this interpretation of dualism, Zita does not demonize Descartes.  She considers biographical elements, his epistolary exchanges with women, the early death of his mother, and his decision to write in the vernacular (few women read Latin).  Descartes is figured as a creature of longing.  Bordo nowhere tackles the ambiguities in the Cartesian corpus.  She mentions Lloyd only once, in passing.  The mention is subsumed in a list of other names (Bordo 4).  To move beyond a dyad, she would have to account for the role of sisters and other siblings, as well as mothers in the development of individual and collective consciousness.

4.27

4.28

Related to the lack of consideration for intra- generational or horizontal relationships is a presumption that the past is a parent.  Medieval mother confronts the scientific age father.  The neglect of theology leads Bordo to favour epistemic breaks over continuities.  Even a strong adherence to a narrative of rupture does not preclude some problems in periodization.  For example, the medieval period itself can be the point at which separation anxiety arises.  This is a feasible scenario if, forgetting about charitable care of thy neighbour's body, Christian mortification of the flesh is compared to a previous pagan era's putative celebration of the body and of nature.

4.38

4.29

In the familial drama approach to history, any event can be interpreted as result or as motive.  Not all emplotment is caricature.  For example, the rise of the scientific method can be read within the context of a reaction to the wars of religion (Toulmin).  The entertaining of counter arguments and alternative narratives is facilitated if historical periods are not personified as parents.

4.29

4.30

Despite a tendency to homogenize historical periods, Bordo is not a total zeitgeist enthusiast.  An inkling of the concept of hegemony appears in her discourse when her psychocultural account grafts developments in the visual arts onto changes in the conception of space.  The evidence may point to another story.  Bordo claims

it is only after the conventionalization of linear perspective in art ­­ and, according to Karsten Harries and others, largely as a result of its influence ­­ that the homogeneous, infinite space "implied" in the perspective painting becomes the "official" space of the culture. (Bordo 68)

In the note to this section of Flight to Objectivity, the "others" represent only one other source (n5).  Furthermore, in the article cited by Bordo, Harries suggests Rhenish mysticism and hermetic tradition as other possible factors (Harries 31 n. 1) and announces a forthcoming treatment of these in a study on Nicolaus Cusanus.  In this later article ignored by Bordo his position is clear:

It would be misleading to place too much weight on this reflection, which leads from a consideration of perspective to the infinity of the cosmos. (Harries 1975, 7)

Harries unlike Bordo discusses the matter in terms of correlation rather than causation:

Historically and conceptually central perspective, which was given its theoretical foundation by Brunelleschi and Alberti, and the objective space of the new science are closely related forms of description. (Harries 1975, 7)

"Closely related forms" of description suggests a complex genealogy.  Other possible influences, such as the Kabbalah, on the development of the idea of infinite space are traced by Max Jammer (n6)  whose complementary study seems unknown to Harries at the time of the appearance of these articles.

4.30

4.31

For Harries art is only one locus, one expression, for "the rising awareness of and interest in the phenomenon of perspective [...] that goes hand in hand with the emergence of the objective conception of space which is presupposed by the new science" (Harries 1973, 30).  The wide currency gained by speculations on the nature of perspective is adduced by a circa 1530 Nuremburg woodcut which indicates that the "sixteenth century was ready for the discoveries of Tycho Brahe and Galileo" (31).  Harries describes the figure in the illustration as "breaking out of the shell of the cosmos" (31).  Bordo no doubt was seized by his ekphrasis.

4.31

4.32

The evidence offered can alternatively be taken to illustrate the question of Archytas who asked whether it would be possible at the end of the world to stretch out one's hand or not.  This ancient philosopher's challenge to the Aristotelian cosmology is preserved in a commentary on the Physics by Simplicius.  Reservations about circulation of early manuscripts and of thirteenth century Latin translations notwithstanding, the commentary became, just prior to the period in question, widely current.  In 1526, four years before the date attributed to the Nuremburg woodcut, is published by the Aldine press in Venice an edition of Simplicius.  Four years is enough time for story or book to cover the distance, an engraver to work, proofs be pulled, yet not too much time to elapse before discounting any possible direct connection or influence.  However, the common Renaissance practice of using the same illustration for different texts mitigates against conclusive interpretations. 

4.32

4.33

Nonetheless, the printing press does play a role in the rise of ideas about infinite space as much as it does in the circulation and production of any intellectual property.  It is not however a necessary cause except perhaps in a tale of detachment. And so Bordo claims:

the ability to "discover reality" in the perspective painting requires visual skills ­­ the ability to adopt a detached point of view and to scan a static frame ­­ that are developed, McLuhan argues, only through experience at silent, private reading of the printed page. (Bordo 66)

One would have thought that the experience of trying to draw would teach one about how to see.  Bordo uncritically adopts McLuhan's assumption of universal literacy and thus disregards collective viewing accompanied by oral commentary as a means of passing on the visual skills necessary for the appreciation of perspectival painting.  McLuhan's eye-ear dichotomy serves to authorize not only Bordo's spacial categorization of cognitive activity into private detached and participatory public but also her privileging of participation over detachment (n7). 

4.33

4.34

Regardless of the validity of the medium/message collapse, participation in its various guises (n8) does not curry full favour with all of Bordo's sources.  Enumerating several writers, she enlists their authority to claim that "The subject/object distinction has, at the very least, hardened over time" (Bordo 48).  One of her sources patently says the opposite.  Owen Barfield credits modern physical science and philosophy since Kant for recognizing participation of the human mind in the creation or evocation of the phenomena of the familiar world (Barfield 12).

4.34

4.35

She quotes from Morris Berman who describing a break in ancient Greek epistemology summarizes Eric Havelock's work (Bordo 48; Berman 71).  She does not apply herself to Havelock's work directly.  She does not recognize that the ethics of instrumentality are no purer in cultures governed by participation.  Havelock writes: "To control the collective memory of society he [the reciter] had to establish control over the personal memories of individual human beings" (Havelock 145).  To this effect, Havelock makes note of Marcel Jousse's description of verbomoteurs, the inhabitants of oral cultures, as mnemotechnicians.  As evidenced by Havelock's and Jousse's instrumental vocabulary, technocratic motives are observer-dependent.  Equally so are observations on contact with a maternal realm.  Approached from the pole of performance, participatory cultures are far from bonding with the mother.  Participatory cultures have their own technologies.

4.35

4.36

The objection may be raised that telling stories is not reasoning, not objectifying the world.  The point here is that knowledge production of whatever sort passes through social relations.  There is no unmediated access to a world.  Access, by participation or by detachment, involves power.

4.36

4.37

In situations where the ethical argument holds, where appeals are made to the character of a speaker or interpreter, be they in book-learning or oral cultures, mnemonic devices are never very far from the person of the knowledge producers, the epistemic interlocutors.  Such tools are important attributes of all persons involved.  Havelock's lone rhapsode may equally be controlled by collective constraints.  Indeed his account by stressing agonistic features acknowledges the claims of counter- memories.

4.37

4.38

Just as counter-memories imply counter-narratives or in less polarized accounts, variations, the paradigm stories of psychoanalytic discourse itself are subject to variant readings of its own condensations and displacements, its own dreamwork tropes.  A space is opened for rhetorical analysis.

4.38

4.39

The Oedipal paradigm centres on the acquisition of language.  It matters little if separation anxiety as postulated by object relations theory precedes or follows the achievement of linguistic ability.  In one case it is a reaction, a result; in the other, motive or cause.  Language is like a fence against denied psychic content or like a knife cutting off the repressed content, instituting the denial.  These similes highlight the axiomatic status within object relations theory of an instrumental concept of language.  Object relations theory itself does not employ these similies of knife or fence.  In psychoanalytic narratives of separation anxiety or stories of castration menace, language does things.  Language acquisiton is comparable to the grasping of a tool to cut and contain.  But language is also done.

4.39

4.40

Language as material product is worked upon.  Language is practised.  Language also refers to the site where practices and products meet.  Technical vocabularies attempt to control this polysemy.  For example, the structuralist terminology of language, langue and parole corresponds to faculty, rules and acts of expression.  These distinctions work well in considering the relation of system to performance.  They work well in theorizing the actualization of potentials.  They offer points of departure and arrival.

4.40

4.41

They do not alleviate tendencies to conflate place and means when language is considered as a medium.  The conflation is inevitable.  A place is a means.  Places are prepared.  Wisdom of sacred sites.  The uncanny energy of domestic arrangements.  The house of language.  The analogies are potent and have consequences for thinking language's relation to the body.

4.41

4.42

If language is a tool for the fashioning of self and the construction of an other, it is the body and its zones that facilitate the entry into language.  Is the body, this means to an end, a tool?  An instrument upon which the infant plays?  A tantalizing alignment ensues:  text as instrument, text as infant.

4.42

4.43

The jump from language to text through those teasing unvoiced dentals and their alliteration (text tantalizing infant instrument) issues from the seduction of the signifier.  Already the rearrangement implies text as agent of a pleasurable irritation, on the infant-instrument, of the infant- instrument, in the infant-instrument.  The difficulty in ascribing a preposition matches the difficulty of ascribing agency:  the text?  the infant?

4.43

4.44

With Flax is reached the limit of the infant as patient.  With Bordo, the limit of the agency of the instrument.  It is the limit of insertion that guides Dorothy Smith's discourse.  Unlike the feminists inspired by psychoanalysis, Smith does not invoke interiorization as a developmental mechanism.  In fact, her standpoint epistemology is not developmental.  However the dynamics of inside/outside structuration shape her claim for the suppression of bodily consciousness upon entry into the "abstracted conceptual mode".

4.44

4.45

Following Marx and Engels, in particular The German Ideology, Smith relates consciousness to what people do, not what they are.  The social division of labour places constraints on action and hence on consciousness.  The ways people think about and express themselves depend upon their embeddedness in an everyday world.  When Smith grafts phenomenological sociology on to this materialist base, her analyses shift towards meditations on spheres of activity.  Consciousness becomes spatialized.  One enters a cognitive mode.  As well she also situates both practices of knowledge production and spheres of activity in a sexual division of labour.

4.45

4.46

Grossly, her argument depends upon a mapping of private and public space onto physical and conceptual activity respectively.  This mapping is mediated by an implicit reading of social reproduction as woman's work and management or ruling as men's.  Women by analogy are in a position similar to the working class (n9).  The limits of the analogy remain unexplored.  When she further argues that the arrangement's perpetuation depends upon its unacknowledgement by those whom it benefits, that is, the ruling class, her epistemology, like that of psychoanalytic feminists, hinges upon repression as a prerequisite for abstract reasoning.

4.46

4.47

Although she makes no explicit reference to the difference between class consciousness and class analysis, between knowing one's place in a system and knowing the system, it is such a distinction that informs her assessment of material and conceptual labour as epistemological stances.  The values she assigns are of course informed by considerations of gender.  What she calls acting in the "abstracted conceptual mode" is associated with ruling.  The physical labour that supports this mode is "done typically by women" (Smith 1977, 165).  The one is ignorant;  the other, all-knowing.

4.47

4.48

Her appeal to Hegel confirms the class-gender-knowledge schema.  Drawing on the master-servant narrative in The Phenomenology of Mind, she explains:

That organization [of the relation between master and servant] itself is not visible from the standpoint of the master.  Within the consciousness of the master there is himself and the object and a servant who is merely a means.  For the servant there is the master, the servant's labour producing the object, and there is the simplicity of the relation between the master and the object.  The totality of the set of relations is visible. (Smith 1977, 164)

Undoubtedly, Hegel's narrative can be read as depicting the relation of particular social classes.  However, Hegel does not particularize consciousness in terms of vision.  As a consequence of Smith's visual idiom, in a move Hegel cannot underwrite, unmediated experience is poised against a conceptual mode.  Smith states that the "abstracted conceptual mode of ruling exists in and depends upon a world known immediately and directly in the bodily mode" (Smith 1977, 165-166).

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Oddly, within the perspective of standpoint epistemology, the bodily mode of knowing appears centred on a single sensory modality:  sight.  Smith links total knowledge to visibility.  This affects her reading of Hegel.  As an automatic consequence of position, the servant is conscious of the totality of relations between master and servant.  The servant is no agent.  No work is necessary to access consciousness.  This is certainly not what Hegel's text indicates to be the case.  One suspects the equation of agents to standpoints depends on a possible confusion in Smith between sensation and perception thus assigning an unqualified measure of passivity to sight.  Smith seems to forget that most bodies are conferred locomotion. 

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Standpoints are either points of view or blindspots.  The characterization depends upon which world a subject occupies.  Smith builds upon a distinction imported from phenomenological sociology:

Beginning from the standpoint of women locates a subject in a material and local world.  It shows the provinces of meaning described by Schutz not as alternatives ­­ a paramount reality on the one hand and the scientific domain on the other ­­ but rather as a bifurcation of consciousness, with a world directly experienced from oneself as center (in the body) on the one hand and a world organized in the abstracted conceptual mode, external to the local and particular places of one's bodily existence. (Smith 1977, 169)

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She continues:

The abstracted mode of the scientific province is always located in the local and material actualities.  Participation in the "head" world is accomplished in actual concrete settings making use of definite material means.(Smith 1977, 169)

This poses no problems.  Except it suggests a type of nesting almost like that of interiorization.  Headwork is done inside a setting.  Such a suspicion is not allayed when she continues by moving from many settings to a singular one:

Suppression of interest in that setting is organized in a division of labor which accords to others the production and maintenance of the material aspects of a total process. (Smith 1977, 169)

A possible plurality of settings and means is lost.  Without this discursive move the link between the suppression of interest and division of labour could not be so strong.  The concrete and abstract would not confront each other across a divide.

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From the suppression of interest, she argues for the emergence of greater consciousness on the part of those employed in material work:

To those who do this work, the local and concrete conditions of the abstracted mode are thematic.  But women's standpoint locates a subject in the fundamental "item" of the two fold basis of knowing the world.  The organization which divides the two becomes visible from this base.  It is not visible from within the other. (Smith 1977, 169)

Smith implies rulers are blind to the system as the ruled are not.  Somehow the agents get lost.  Consciousness is read off structure.

To exist as subject and to act in this abstracted mode depends upon an actual work and organization of work by others, who make the concrete, the particular, the bodily, the thematic of their work and who also produce the invisibility of that work. (Smith 1977, 166)

There is no mention in this passage or elsewhere of the vagaries of exchange value and the participation of the ruling class in determining comparable worth.  Smith implies that docile labour and self-denial on the part of those that do material work produce its invisibility.

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Oddly, the same qualities of bad faith are applied to the conceptual mode of action.

It is a condition of anyone's being able to enter, to become and remain absorbed, in the conceptual mode of action that she does not need to focus her attention on her labors or on her bodily existence.  The organization of work and work expectations in managerial and professional circles both constitutes and depends upon the alienation of members of this class from their bodily and local existence. (Smith1977, 166)

One need not dream up golfing doctors and surfing lawyers to recognize that these circles too are not so alienated from the body and its impact on job performance.

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Replace "conceptual" by "physical" and Smith's account reads like a description of factory work:

The structure of work in this mode and the structure of career assume that individuals can sustain a mode of consciousness in which interest in the routine aspects of bodily maintenance is never focal, and can in general be suppressed.  It is taken for granted in the organization of this work that such matters are provided for in a way which will not interfere with action and participation in the conceptual mode. (Smith 1977, 166)

Indeed, the whole difference between manual and intellectual labour collapses.

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In her later work, the sharp division between abstract and concrete modes inadvertantly limits the permeability of textual zones.  Smith's unintended legitimation of the mind-body opposition results from her constitution of text as an implement of a ruling apparatus.  In a preface to a collection of essays Smith outlines her project.  Again a shift from plural to singular is notable and leaves its imprint on her take on text:

Texts are analyzed to display what the subject knows how to do as reader and what the subject knows how to do in reading, and in so doing also displays the organizing capacity of the text, its capacity to operate as a constituent of social relations. (Smith 1990, 5)

In this scheme, text is a site that is entered or an institution that governs a series of practices.  This rich notion of text is not a matter for quarrel.  However, the syntax here betrays a one-way movement from text to reader.

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Smith's uni-directionality neglects the metalinguistic possibilities of verbal semiosis.  Questions about the boundaries of a text can be elicited from subjects demonstrating both their know-how in reading and their ignorance.  The handling of a text, especially in metalinguistic matters, does not always stem from knowledge.  Theories of the text cannot be based solely on the communicative function of verbal sign systems.  Theory aiming to deconstruct dichotomies cannot afford to expunge the interpretive function.  Theory making must account for interstitial spaces.

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In Flax, Bordo and Smith some form of interiority operates:  an epistemic subject is inserted into a mode (Smith), the intensity of infant phases is interiorized and repressed (Flax), it is in participation that non-Cartesian subjects are immersed in a world (Bordo).  Something is in the subject or the subject is in something.  Mediation slips out of the picture.  A thematics of release scored for a pas de deux choreographs all movement as motion away from or towards the other.  Liberation discourses, however, can also imagine repositionings between other others, in a choreography of an esprit de corps.

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Although still performing with dyads, Paul Ricoeur theorizes what passes between the hermeneutical players.  For him the aim of interpretation is not to recover access to the mind of an author or the historical context of an original audience.  Its aim is the disclosure of modes of being-in-the-world, the revelation of possibilities.

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Ricoeur characterizes understanding as an act that makes the other, the world projected by a text, one's own.  This is appropriation:

To understand is not to project oneself into the text;  it is to receive an enlarged self from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the genuine object of interpretation. ("Appropriation" 87)

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The enlargement of self is an increase in potential.  Reading gives power.  However, the acquisition is not without cost.  The acquiring of an "enlarged self" is accomplished by an exchange.  Something or rather some part of the reading subject is lost:

The reader is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.  Thus appropriation ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of...It implies, instead, a moment of dispossession of the narcissistic ego.  [...] It is the text with its universal power of unveiling, which gives a self to the ego. (97)

This is a hermeneutics of compulsion.  The text gives.  It does not simply present or offer.  The unveiling by the text of a self or a structure of being cannot be equated with a reader's acceptance of that self (n10).  Display does not equal the conclusion of barter.  At least this is so if one considers the interaction as occuring in a market economy.  However, for Ricoeur interpretation culminates in appropriation.  It must.  An imperative is lodged in the indicative.  The description is a prescription.  Here, there is no sales pitch.  The very structure of Ricoeurian textual interaction is shaped by the social obligations of a gift exchange economy.

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Economic formulations such as "Reading is an appropriation-divesture" (95) recur often in the essay but belie the unidirectional movement:  readers give before they get.  In Ricoeur's discourse there is a strong correlation between dispossession and emancipation.  A text "can procure new readers for itself" (96) since in Ricoeur's terms it escapes from the authorial situation and its original audience.  All evangelism is elided.  It is not a reader or readers who bring readers to a text.  A text, once released into the world, attracts.  Such textual autonomy is required to cement Ricoeur's analogy between self and text.

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In proverbial (something lost, something gained) double entry bookkeeping, Ricoeur tabulates a net gain for every admission into a textual economy.  Loss of author, gain of readers.  Loss of ego, gain of self.  What lends his argument credence is the disposition.  First, gain is accounted from a text-based perspective;  then, that of a reading subject.  As text receives so too the reader.  The analogy remains implicit.  If Ricoeur were to question the parallels constructed between subject and text, the universal unveiling power of text would be in need of much particularization.

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For the link between revelation and appropriation to be operative the reading subject must be susceptible to the game of exchange and accumulation.  This type of subject is found implanted in specific narratives.  Ricoeur assigns such a reader two tasks: growing up and finding a home.  These are the stories respectively of a Freudian and of a Christian subject.  Their stories are found in a previous Ricoeur collection, The Conflict of Interpretations.

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What has become in the essay on appropriation a vocabulary of Self, in these earlier writings was one of consciousness.  In these essays, the hermeneutical player is set the task not of dispossession of the ego but mastery of the libido of the ego.  Mastery evokes maturity and so Ricoeur expresses the opinion that the question of consciousness seems to "be bound to the other question of how a man leaves his childhood behind and becomes an adult" ("Consciousness and the Unconscious" 109).  Ricoeur's hesitancy is telling.  In the French version (Conflit 110), the phrases "sortir de l'enfance" and "être en proie à l'enfance" evoke perhaps more strongly the design of a release from infancy.  It is a pursuit-and-escape narrative or a story of temptation overcome that he presents.  But Ricoeur hedges.  He does not unequivocally link this narrative to the question of consciousness.

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The tentative tone signals his resistance or ambivalence.  At the very moment of advocating acceptance, submission to the unveiling power of a text, Ricoeur is challenging the temporal orientation of psychoanalytic discourse.  Ricoeur reverses the analyst's question.  As the translator, Willis Domingo, stresses, it is the analyst "who shows man subject to his childhood" ("Consciousness and the Unconscious" 109).  If Ricoeur's resistance itself is reversible, it is not a prospect envisaged explicitly.

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In Ricoeur's account there is no realm of freedom outside the child-adult pair.  For him sublation is inapplicable to the child-adult dialectic, adulthood remains an incomplete project.  If Ricoeur were to entertain the negation of a negation, an identity not child and not adult, the division of age would not be internal to the subject of enunciation but a function of the enunciating subject.  This location would expose the child-adult pair to greater reflexivity.  For example, there is a discursive position free from either end of the telling of a life story.  The listener so-positioned of such a tale would not, except by accepting a discourse's invitation, identify with either child or adult.

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At least two factors destabilize Ricoeur's concept of appropriation:  readers who test the trajectory of the escape from childhood or narratives which project modes-of-being and worlds undominated by teleologies of growing up.  Both are hesitant interpretants of journey narratives couched in a therapy frame, in particular a frame that situates loss at the beginning and at the end, gain.  Ricoeur's concept of appropriation rests on his overdetermination of a path he attributes to Freud.

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As expressed by Ricoeur, Freud's will is open to limitation.  Ricoeur declares that

What Freud wants is for the patient to make the meaning which was foreign to him his own and thus enlarge his field of consciousness, live better, and, finally, be a bit freer and, if possible, a bit happier. ("Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture" 150)

First, acceptance is independent of revelation.  Second, constant revelation might best be coupled to some active forgetting, else the reading subject is bloated with passivity.  Finally, at what limit does expansion no longer coincide with health?  On the way to substituting enlargement of field by enlargement of self, Ricoeur does not stop to pose the question.  Based on the figure of the analysand, the reader is pathologized or deemed in need of instruction.  Contra Ricoeur and based on the figure of the analyst, the reader as therapist offers a cure for the text.  The paradigm case is that of the critical editor as reader.  Such readers are aware that changes in the materiality of the text affect the projected world of the work.  Ricoeur assumes a text without variants.

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With their investments of labour and libido, analyst-readers offer a basis for pride in interpretation or at least an assertion of ego in choice.  However Ricoeur's reader in need of instruction leads to the scenario of the humiliation of the ego ("Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture" 152-153).  It is not quite clear how Ricoeur attains an ascesis of denial, figured as the gamble of ego dispossession for the promise of an enlarged self, from the scene of analysis's recapitulation of the classic injunction to know thyself.  The clue is perhaps to be found in the wandering character of such a reader.

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In the "Preface to Bultmann" Ricoeur writes of Christian hermeneutics:

this appropriation [of the Biblical text, of the Christian kerygma] is only the final stage, the last threshold of an understanding which has first been uprooted and moved into an other meaning. (397)

cette appropriation est seulement la dernière étape, le dernier seuil d'une intelligence qui s'est d'abord dépaysé dans un sens autre. (Conflit 389).

Wandering is the prerequisite to appropriate appropriation.  Closure comes with appropriation which is the last step of an understanding unsettled in an alien sense.  Even if appropriation is only remotely a prodigal homecoming, there is no denying Ricoeur's stress on reorientation.  Migrant readers, nomadic interpreters, have no need of enlarged selves.  The text is not a refuge.  It is a way.

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One holds a way, one is possessed by it.  The way may be a home and search for it, pointless.  The game of appropriation, shorn of its home-finding, need not appear as an inexorable cumulation of surplus.  Ricoeur's secular formulation of appropriation bears repeating:

The reader is rather broadened in his capacity to project himself by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.  Thus appropriation ceases to appear as a kind of possession, as a way of taking hold of... ("Appropriation" 97)

What do those suspension marks mean?  They are those of Ricoeur's text.  Indeterminacy?  Are they, these marks, a gesture?  Or simply the space between the event of speech and the written text since this piece was first presented as a lecture (n11).  Are they to be read as hesitancy, lack of assurance that appropriate interpretation is a being held, a being possessed?  Or are they not a mode of letting go, a pause offered for reflection upon the metaphors of ownership and dispossession?

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They are, those marks, a hold.  They are a space for the hook of questions.  They become only meaningful through the labour of an interpreter.  Readerly work is possible because texts are manipulatable and their projected worlds analysable.  Work-centred notions of reading and especially rereading thrive on recursivity.  Their own workings enter into the play of interpretation.  Not so Ricoeur's model of appropriation which shares with the models of interiorization deployed by some feminist epistemologies a masking of the labourer.  For the former, the labourer is libidinally invested in the products of interpretation thus incapable of dispossession of the ego, incapable of appropriation and understanding.  For the latter, the labourer is of the domain of culture, is an instance of instrumental reason, a rejection of the mother.  Others arrive at a similar condemnation of instrumental reason by reinscribing the intellectual and manual labour distinction onto gender.

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The alignment, child of psychoanalysis, labourer of sociology, reader of hermeneutics, is suggested by their common concern with transformation.  And, no matter the discursive object, from child to reader, the relation between techne and consciousness pivots on the key question as to whether the transformer is transformed.  Is the user of tools changed by their use?  Of course to answer such a question requires the application of critical tools.

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At a metadiscursive level "tool" and "question" are apt to become equivalent.  However before "answer" is made analogous to "consciousness" it must be recognized that questions solicit addressees as tools do not.  Another angle is possible.  Access to consciousness occurs through language.  In language according to Karl Bühler's analysis of the triangulation of communication one addresses someone about something.  Likewise it could be said one is conscious of something for some reason.  That tool use should transform tool users unconsciously should not deter one from at arriving at similar conclusions.  As one speaks so one remains silent vis-à-vis someone about something;  one is unconscious about something for some reason.

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Whatever the truth-value assigned to the link between language and consciousness, there exists a structural homology between the position of interlocutor in language and that of reason or motive in acts of consciousness.  For someone, for some reason, something is said, something is the object of consciousness.

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How does a link between tool use and asking questions relate to reading?  First, the analogy is not between text and tool but between tool use and reading.  A tool-use environment has three components.  They may be described as the tool proper, the instruction, directives or demonstrations of tool use and the material on which the tool is used.  Directive and tool are often conflated in the concept of techniques.  Regardless, effects of transformation should be ascribed to a combination of proper directives, competent tools and pliable material.

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Second, like a tool-use environment, a reading environment can be composed of three parts.  Sometimes the term "text" covers all three:  instrument, directive and material.  Text can be a tool proper.  In the case of Ricoeur it is a means to access projected worlds and to reveal modes-of-being.  A text can also offer a set of directives although these may more often belong to the discourse that takes up a given text.  A text presents material to be worked upon.  Reading presents a case where the relation between techne and consciousness is potentially recursive.

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In such situations questions proliferate.  Questions raise questions.  In such ways are texts mined for more than one mode of being.  Through such practices, reading becomes a species of translation.

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Elmar Holenstein, drawing on Roman Jakobson's elaboration of information theory's communication model, considers that the code-switching capabilities inherent in metalinguistic function place at the disposal of the interpreter a "whole system of regularly alterable patterns" ("Structure of Understanding" 235).  The implications for the encounter with texts prove triumphal:

If a situation is structured verbally it can also be reflected.  To each linguistic production belongs the possibility of metalinguistic reflection.  Every child learns language by relating new expressions to the ones already known and by contrasting them with each other.  Each linguistic utterance can be paraphrased, i.e. translated into ever new contexts. ("Structure of Understanding" 236)

Sharing Holenstein's unshakable faith in translatability, a sceptical interpreter, like a language learner, will return repeatedly to metalinguistic reflection in the action of comparison.  There appears to be no end to the recursive activity of paraphrase, translation or metalinguistic application.

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Never ending but not beyond control.  The metalinguistic moment can be self-reflexive and self-regulating to the extent that it asks about the parameters of its own applicability.  The moment is curtailed in the reading of texts ­­ if the material presence of an interlocutor is posited as a prerequisite for triggering metalinguistic reflection.

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This is how that quasi-passive acceptance of a world presented by a text becomes Ricoeur's paradigm case for reading and interpretation.  His discourse bars transcoding and hence metadiscursive moments.  The resources of the metalinguistic function are lost to theory and to reading if between oral and graphic realizations of verbal forms too strong a distinction is made.  For example, Ricoeur sets the possibility of operating metalinguisticaly solely in the context of oral contact, reserving hermeneutics for written expression.  He declares "hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends" (Interpretation Theory 32).  Notwithstanding the differences between listening and seeing, in face-to-face communication cultural codes may block any and all metalinguisitic or metadiscursive statements.  Interlocutors may not wish to appear rude.  Interlocutors may fear expressing ignorance.  Interlocutors may not possess the competence to frame meta-statements.  Dialogue, oral or written, can find itself impeded.  Ricoeur recognizes this.  However, for him there is no mechanism in the handling of written texts equivalent to metalinguistic statements in speech events.  He does not to consider such parallels possible.  Rereading remains untheorized.

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Other thinkers relying on eye-ear dichotomies also do not always consider such parallels and inevitably block consideration of the phenomenon of rereading.  They do however assign it a peculiar place outside aesthetic experience.  For example, although he also opts for favouring a single sensory mode, Roman Ingarden in his phenomenology grants a place to rereading.  Unlike Ricoeur, his choice to privilege hearing involves no necessary humiliation of the reading subject.  Like Ricoeur, a teleological dimension centres on an individual reader who is to adopt a proper attitude.  In this model literary works of art are not received via revelation of an inscribed word.  They are fulfilled via concretization.

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In Ingarden's aesthetics, the literary work is a schematic formation which contains places of indeterminacy.  Individual concretizations remove these places of indeterminacy only partly.  Other concretizations always remain possible.  The literary work is composed of four strata:  sound formations, meanings, represented objects and schematized aspects of those objects (n12).  Because the first stratum of the literary work of art is sound formation, the model generates a tendency to consider (though not explicitly) indeterminacy as equivalent to silence.  But this indeterminacy, this silence, is not the space for a hook of questions.  According to Ingarden the aesthetic concretization is disfigured by interrogative approaches such as rereading.

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Ingarden's description and not so veiled prescription is based on a dualist typology of texts.  Ingarden's literary aesthetics introduce a dichotomy between sonorous aesthetic concretization and visual scientific actualization.  His point of departure, the sound formation stratum, correlates with the cognitive attitude and reading practices he deems proper to aesthetic concretization and the realization of aesthetic value.  Richard Shusterman explains why Ingarden overlooks the graphic dimension of verbal artefacts:

I think part of the explanation is in an unsatisfactory and unnecessarily constrained picture of aesthetic appreciation, one that is too much enclosed in a singular temporally progressive and ephemeral experience of concretization where proper recognition is not sufficiently given to the funding effect and superimposition of previous experience of the work. (Shusterman 145)

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The injunction against rereading is clear in Ingarden's text:

Lengthy interruptions in reading, the repetition of certain parts of the work during reading, referring back to parts which have already been read and have sunk into the phenomenal past ­­ all this disfigures the aesthetic concretization of the literary work of art and its aesthetic value. (Cognition 165)

The reading habits that disfigure are those that prolong.  They are also those that test.  They relate more to the cognition of a scientific work.

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Ingarden states that

An essential feature of the scientific work is that it is intended to fix, contain, and transmit to others the results of scientific investigation in some area in order to enable scientific research to be continued and developed by its readers. (Cognition 146)

Whereas

The literary work of art does not serve to further scientific knowledge but to embody in its concretization certain values of a very specific kind, which we usually call "aesthetic" values.  It allows these values to appear so that we may see them and also experience them aesthetically, a process that has a certain value in itself. (Cognition 146)

Unlike Smith's abstract and material modes of cognition, approaches to the scientific work and to the literary work of art are not reducible one to the other.  Smith's modes both contribute to the same end: social reproduction.  Ingarden's discursive objects each serve different purposes and intend different values.

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Others have engaged Ingarden's ontology of values (n13).  Tempering Ingarden's objectivism, such work stresses the relational and decisional grounds of values.  In a parallel manner, the enlargement of aesthetic experience is possible.  Activities proscribed by Ingarden can be admitted.

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For example rereading is a proper aesthetic activity.  Indeterminacy in Ingarden's model is a function of incompleteness.  Undecidability and cruxes also play a role in the appearance and experience of aesthetic values.

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A brief example will illustrate the need to recast Ingardian concretization if unvoiced textual elements enter the aesthetic experience.  A character in Salman Rushdie's novel Shame expresses herself thus:

"Who is to understand the brains of those crazy types?" asked Munnee-in-the-middle, in tones of final dismissal.  "They read books from left to right." (36)

The tense of "read" is not indeterminate.  It is undecidable.  The consequences are significant.  Books with sentences reading left to right need not themselves be read continuously from left to right.  The persistence of past practices is a theme of the novel.  Depending on the tense one selects, one can play with, in this passage, either consonance or contrapuntal tension between the situation of enunciation and the subject of enunciation.  Both choices produce an aesthetic value very much in accord with an Ingardian axiology of harmony.  However it is a value that can only be arrived at through rereading locally, of the sentence, and globally, of the book.

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Rereading prevents the decay of dialectic.

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Rereading brings one closer to the desiderata of a model for embodied knowing.  The model is haptic.  The sheet of skin's touch is recursive.  It senses itself, the world and its own sensing.  Its recursivity like that of language is enhanced by multiple contact and regulated by interplay.  When sight and hearing act like touch, a common sense is possible and transcoding can lead to metacommentary.

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