Storing and Sorting
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5.0 |
With its techno-erotic jingle, the telephone company
invites consumers to reach out and touch someone.
The corporation promises an encounter perhaps only
realizable in the audio-tactile universe of a
McLuhanesque global village where talking and touching
are commutable. However, as with all effective
advertising, cognitive dissonance inhabits the
telephonic slogan. Seductive aurality suspends
itself upon the delectable pain of hearing your party
talk and an aching for the touch of their
touching. The telephone company of course has no
interest in mentioning that the infliction or
experience of such a state is possible without
technological mediation nor that its equipment provides
functions equivalent to the services of a dominatrix.
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Striking analogies aside, the ache is the kernel of an
implied narrative. The substitution of talk
for touch follows a bodily state of
talk with touch. The sequence
need not unfold in this order. Nostalgia can be
inflected in a future tense and the wish for contact,
directed towards strangers. Whatever the case,
talk with touch is highly desirable. Touch here
functions as a synecdoche for fuller bodily contact
including smell, sight, taste. But the wisdom of
the telephonic cliche resides in the counter desire to
avoid sensory overload. The coiners of the saying
astutely recast McLuhan: one reaches out to touch
someone, not the world.
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Even as telecommunications technology repeatedly places
persons in contact, a phone call is no Hegelian
Bewußtlosigkeit of lovers nor is
it blessed maternal-infant bliss. A chat is not a
caress. Material limits do apply to the figure of
total touch in the McLuhanite myth of the
uttering/outering of man [sic] in
language. Nevertheless, much discussion of
language and technology continues to invoke metaphors
of touch. Unfortunately, non-verbal modes of
cognition tend to be mystified in these explorations.
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George Steiner, for example, has written "[w]e know no exit from the skin of our skin" (After Babel 299). Skin is here a metaphor for language. Earlier in his book, Steiner speculated that "[i]f coition can be schematized as dialogue, masturbation seems to be correlative with the pulse of monologue or of internalized address." (40). His conceit is developed further: There is evidence that the sexual discharge in male onanism is greater than it is in intercourse. I suspect that the determining factor is articulateness, the ability to conceptualize with especial vividness. In the highly articulate individual, the current of verbal-psychic energy flows inward. The multiple, intricate relations between speech defects and infirmities in the nervous and glandular mechanisms which control sexual and excretory functions have long been known, at least at the level of popular wit and scatological lore. Ejaculation is at once a physiological and a linguistic concept. Impotence and speech-blocks, premature emission and stuttering, involuntary ejaculation and the word-river of dreams are phenomena whose interrelations seem to lead back to the central knot of our humanity. Semen, excreta and words are communicative products. (40)
One wonders if the production of female cyprine is
greater in masturbation or intercourse. One
wonders about the inwardness of flow, about its
relation to an articulateness and why articulateness
determines ability to conceptualize. Thinking and
speaking are linked without justification.
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There is one suggestion that can be salvaged from
Steiner's rather speculative exercise. If one
were to mop up the fluid, one would find that
articulations are very much like folds of skin and such
folded skin possesses different temperature as well as
moisture zones. If, in the comparison of sexual
activity with linguistic performance, liquid production
is not accepted as the prime comparator, touch
metaphors can be activated in a less totalizing and
less dichotomous fashion. Activity with oneself,
masturbation, cannot be so readily opposed to
intercourse, activity with others.
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Indeed, as Vygotsky argued contra Piaget, children
acquire capacities for ego-centric speech after passing
through a stage of speech for others. Such a
developmental scheme stems from the metadiscursive
dimensions of language. Furthermore, avoidance of
Steiner's phallic-based dichotomies permits one to draw
an analogy between the self-sensing capacities of skin
and the self-referring possibilities of verbal sign
systems.
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Skin like language can be sensitive to its own workings. The tactile and the metalinguistic both act as transcoders: the one of languages, the other of sensory modalities. The power of touch to translate is celebrated by Michel Serres in Les Cinq Sens. He proposes touch as the common sense: Les choses nous baignent des pieds à la tête, la lumière, l'ombre, les clameurs, le silence, les fragrances, toutes sortes d'ondes imprègnent, inondent la peau. Nous ne sommes pas embarqués, à dix pieds de l'eau, mais plongés. (72) Although he situates touch as the common sense, Serres places its operations in a tacit, silent dimension. In concluding an extended ekphrasis of the medieval unicorn tapestries, Serres relates the enigma of the mythical animal to "le secret de la subtilité: l'emprise tacite du tactile" [the secret of subtlety: the tacit hold of the tactile] (60). This perhaps explains why despite the prodigious power of touch, Serres places the sensory in opposition to the linguistic: Il faut sentir ou se nommer, choississez. Le language ou la peau, esthésie ou anesthésie. La langue indure les sens. (74)
For Serres language is noisesome. It generates,
in his words, dialectic and battle. He values
quiet since for him it is the condition for
creativity. However the initial opposition drawn
by Serres does not remain absolute. Battle,
political or intellectual, linguistic or bodily, leads
to thick skins. Serres recommends making one's
skin delicate and sensitive, rendering it attentive to
things and to others, ready for the birth of the work
and the man (74-75). Perhaps
the gender exclusivity in Serres's invocation of the
venerable commonplace of giving birth to oneself by
being in contact with the world explains the bloodless,
screamless parturition.
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However, shorn of reproductive mystique, the apparatus
of self-sensing skin retains its role as mediator
between self and the world. As Daniel Putman
writes "[t]he learning that occurs through
skin receptors has a reference, the disposition of the
person or the texture of the object being touched"
(Putman 61). Any
acknowledgement of cognitive attention divided between
two foci, a sensory apparatus and an object of
perception, forces a revision of McLuhan's metaphorics
of touch and language. There is no exit from the
skin of our skin, no exit from language, because we are
never in language, never in our skins. We inhabit
a space of inbetweens, a space of transcodings and
metamoves. It is a reticulated conceptual space
for language itself is between. A dyad will never
suffice to stage its dialectic.
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Nondyadic dynamics as well as dialectical distinctions
are made possible by the double articulation of
language. As demonstrated by Émile
Benveniste in
his essay "Sémiologie de la langue", the
sign system of verbal language possesses not only a
communicative function, it exists also in a relation of
interprétance to other semiotic
systems. He links the metalinguistic element of
verbal language to its ability to form interpretative
relations between semiotic systems.
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The interpretative function requires a system to be doubly articulated. As Benveniste explains la langue comporte à la fois la signifiance des signes et la signifiance de l'énonciation. De là provient son pouvoir majeur, celui de créer un deuxième niveau d'énonciation, où il devient possible de tenir des propos signifiants sur la signifiance. (65)
Verbal systems are not the only ones to possess double
or multiple articulation (n1). Metadiscursivity is not merely
metalinguistic, it may well be an effect of narrative
and narration.
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From a cybernetic perspective, metadiscursivity can be
considered as a specialialized form of feedback capable
of converting noise into information. Within
"the economics of cognitive organization",
human elements as components of a communication system
according to George Miller discover new ways to
transform, or to recode, received information (Miller 13;49). Miller calls this
practice "chunking" or
"recoding". Basically, a bit of
information is tagged or labelled. A set of
tagged bits can itself be grouped and tagged.
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Just as sets form sequences, cybernetic recoding
generates the possibilities of metadiscourse. The
theoretical space between recoding and metadiscursivity
is occupied by narrativity or the potential conversion
of sequence into story. In this space, verbal
signs and their enunciation are on par with other types
of signs and their presentation. The linguistic
need not be privileged. Once tagging itself
becomes taggable, the possibilities of
metacommunication emerge.
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Metacommunication involves comparison and as such the recoding it performs is a type of transcoding. Fredric Jameson likens transcoding to mediation: as the invention of a set of terms, the strategic choice of a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or "texts," or two very different structural levels of reality. (Jameson 40)
Jameson in this passage from The Political
Unconscious goes on to stress the stakes in
making comparable what a hegemonic discourse and ruling
apparatus does not wish to be so. It is possible
to translate the spirit of Jameson's remarks into the
current discussion of the bodily sources for
narrativity.
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When the discrete compartmentalization of the sensory
modalities is questioned, the limits of sentient being
become problematic for the connection between
CONSCIOUSNESS and VERBAL LANGUAGE becomes tenuous when
exclusive control over metacommunication is no longer a
linguistic affair.
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Just as recoding operates within a same semiotic
system, transcoding operates between different
systems. Once one treats the individual
perceiving body as a social entity, it becomes evident
that cross-modal encoding serves
metacommunication. For example, imagine visual
and aural objects transcoded by tactile
sensations. The body with its multiple sensory
modalities is a great comparator and arguably a
storyteller even before the speaking subject arises.
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In the realm of the human, whatever else it may be, the need to compare is a social need. Anywhere signifying practices are open to rereading and to question, interpretive relations abound. Jerome Bruner lists a striking range of such behaviour: The perpetual revisionism of historians, the emergence of "docudramas," the literary invention of "faction," the pillow talk of parents trying to make revised sense of their children's doings all of these bear testimony to this shadowy epistemology of the story. Indeed, the existence of story as a form is a perpetual guarantee that humankind will "go meta" on received versions of reality. (Acts of Meaning 55) Of course, all the moments here are verbal. Other modes exist for ordering, sorting or transmitting sequences. As Bruner tells the story, these other modes are fundamental for human linguistic development: Once young children come to grasp the basic idea of reference necessary for any language use that is, once they can name, can note recurrence, and can register termination of existence their principal linguistic interest centers on human action and its outcomes, particularly human interaction. [Bruner's emphasis] (Acts of Meaning 78)
Bruner's tale suggests that abstract powers such as the
recognition of sequence and variation are the necessary
precursors to a phase of anthropo-centrism.
Indeed, he earlier stakes a claim that
"[n]arrative structure is even inherent in
the praxis of social interaction before it achieves
linguistic expression" (Acts
of Meaning 77).
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The parallels with Greimas's generative trajectory are
striking. For the Paris semiotician, the
generative trajectory is the equivalent of an
anthropomorphic investment in the fundamental structure
of signification and its semic positions. For
both Bruner and Greimas, narrative need not be
linguistic. When human interaction is recognized
as the ground of cognition, then not only is narrative
structure non-verbal, certain narratives are
non-verbal.
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A case for the separation of narration from verbal
language can also be made on neurophysiological
grounds. Howard Gardner in Frames of
Mind offers the conjecture that
"sensitivity
to narrative, including the ability to communicate what
has happened in a series of episodes, seems more
closely tied to the pragmatic functions of language
(and thus proves more fragile in cases of
right-hemisphere disease) than to core syntactic,
phonological, and semantic functions" (89).
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Pragmatic functions relate to bodies in motion.
Such functions and dimensions point to systems other
than the linguistic. Sources of non-linguistic
narrative are rich and varied. One can consider
the Javanese shadow puppets and the Inuit string games
that appear as narratives in Kay Armatage's film
Storytelling (1983) or how in Australian
aboriginal culture visual design becomes song.
Wherever there is marking and action, notation and
performance, there is some capacity to predict pattern
and this pushed to the limit is the core of
narrative. Narrative occurs where there is the
reproduction of a sequence.
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If the core of narrative is reduced to sequence,
reproduction and reportage meld. For example, the
repetition of a performance of nonsense syllables or
tapped rhythms certainly displays the ability to
"communicate what has happened in a series of
episodes". But narrative is not solely
reproduction. Narrative is also a redoing.
It involves sequence and variation.
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It is like the re-represented behaviour that Richard
Schechner explores in both his performance theory and
theatrical production. He examines how
"strips of behaviour" are decontextualized
and processed in the "twice behaved"
behaviour of ritual or performance. (Between theater and
anthropology) Strips
of behaviour can be
slowed down, speeded up, juxtaposed. Narrative
can reach great complexity through multiple track
variations, through operating on many sequences.
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The pathways between perception and narration are
particularly evident in non-linguistic narrative.
Set in the context of general semiosis, narration
crosses sensory modalities. This does not explain
how a series of events becomes a sequence.
Sequences arise from learning. They develop from
bodies attempting to preserve and process
knowledge. Sequences disentangle
synaesthesia. For example, teaching children to
count aloud on their fingers is enhanced by the
introduction of slight pauses. The teacher
touches the child's finger, pauses, voices a number,
pauses, and makes eye contact with the child, pauses,
makes eye contact with the touching fingers. The
pattern which consists of tactile sensation, oral
marking, aural sensation, and concludes with an
invitation to shift to a visual mode, can of course be
varied. With two or more teachers the potential
for variation increases: sequences can be assigned
either solo or group performance and can be distributed
according to sensory modality. One teacher
voices, an other points, the child connects.
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This example is offered not to suggest that sensitivity
to narrative is conditioned by mastering the art of
counting but to stress that narrativity may have strong
ties to multi-sensory multi-player situations in that
both are instances of coordination games.
Furthermore, sequences incorporate adequate redundancy
into learning and communicative situations. The
episodic character of sequences (something happened at
a certain time) creates expectation. As well, the
choric potential of sequence manipulation provides for
intersubjective participation in knowledge production.
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As a coordination game, narration has two
functions: memory work and problem solving.
The story can serve as a template whose slots allow for
the addition of more bits of knowledge. The story
becomes a key for typological readings.
Interpretation produces a grid for storing and
recalling information.
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Approached as an algorithm, the story is a series of
steps for developing a solution to a problem. The
story models the movement between a source and a
target, between current conditions and desired
outcome. Interpretation is construction.
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Conceiving story as storage and story as algorithm is
the key to imagining a sensorium that is more than
merely receptive, to theorizing one that is interactive
in regards to its modalities and its environment.
The stumbling block in imagining such a sensorium has
been proper theorizing of the means of translating from
one modality to another. Verbal language seemed
to be the best candidate. However it privileged
sight and hearing, the distance senses, over those of
closer contact: smell, touch, and taste.
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In re-evaluating the closer contact senses, especially
their action under conditions of distress or extreme
pleasure, one discovers that the sensorium not only is
a receiver but also a dispatcher of information.
The senses are not only receptors. The senses
also transmit. By their operation the senses
provide events for interpretation. The blinking
of eyes, the cocking of an ear, the flicker of a
tongue, all signal.
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The human senses, whatever their number and relations,
produce events. Events can be connected.
This production of events can be experienced, can be
induced, can be guided. Memory plays a major role
in this process. Attention can be alternatively
devoted to percept and to the act of perception.
The possibilities for metacommentary are connected to
the possibilities for memory. Cognitively this
allows humans to preserve the trace of something
happening at a certain time. Events connected in
a series of episodes lead to narratives. The
transformation of discrete somatic signals into
sequences begins to explain cross-modal encoding.
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Although not dealing with sequences, Alexander Alland drawing upon the work of Charles Laughlin and Eugene d'Aquili, Biogenetic Structuralism, suggests that anatomical and physiological factors enhancing cross-modal association are responsible for the emergence of conceptualization ("Roots of Art" 13-14). ; Developing an anthropology of art, Alland posits an aesthetic-cognitive function for which he offers the term transformation-representation. His notion is allied to narrative or sequence processing. He argues: Art is an emotionally charged and culturally central storage device for complex sets of conscious and unconscious information. Structure guards information in well-ordered and easily retrievable forms. It also allows for a certain amount of variation (transformation) without loss of total information or organization. Transformation is something that is likely to occur by accident, but it is also likely to be part of the aesthetic game in which playing with form is a major element. Transformation without significant changes in over-all structure keeps the game exciting at the same time as essential information is guarded. (Artistic Animal 41).
As form is to storage and circulation, sequence is to
narrative and narration.
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It is worth keeping in mind the explanatory power of circulation and narration while examining a more recent account of evolution and cognition. Coupling biogenetic anthropology with models of self-organization in far from equilibrium systems, Alex Argyros attempts to construct an "affirmative theory of narrative". Argyros implicitly embeds narrative in verbal language ("Narrative and Chaos" 665). He equates narrative with the discursive representations of chains of causation. it [narrative] allows for the constitution of a representational structure whose basic unit is the causal frame: actor-action-object. The essential feature of narrative is that it maps the world causally. Given the universality of narratival structures, both in everyday discourse and in the myths, cosmologies and fictions generated by all human cultures, we must assume that the world is sufficiently causal to offer a species able to represent it in narratival forms a selective evolutionary advantage. (662)
As the neologism indicates, narratival structures are
not the same as narrative structures. If Argyros
had not implicitly embedded narrative in a verbal form
of discourse, his paradigm case would not resemble the
subject-verb-object formula of Indo-European sentences
(n2).
Furthermore, evolutionary advantage is a contested
concept likely to generate competing narratives.
In a bid to rescue narrative from those whom he
perceives as its detractors, Argyros's blocks
cross-modal interaction. The causal frame,
actor-action-object, is built up out of the
transformations of states of being and the observation
of these transformations. However, narrative does
not depend on the question "why?".
Narratives are not always accounts of causation.
Stories are not to be equated with causal frames.
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In Alland's terms narrative as a form of art is founded
upon a faculty of transformation-representation or as
Argyros writes "narrative is a remarkably
efficient information processing strategy whose
function is to store, manipulate, and create the
tremendous range of information constitutive of the
world of human beings" (667).
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Narrative and narration also explain how objects yield
events and events become reified or, in more technical
terms, how a syntagm can be labelled and function as an
actant. The self is not a sign, it is a story
machine and its acts of abstraction subtend both the
reconstructive and the recall dimensions of information
processing or transformation-representation.
Memory work draws upon powers of abstraction to make
knowledge portable. Problem solving draws on a
capacity for situation anticipation to make knowledge
applicable. With applicable and portable
knowledge, one can begin to think the embodiment of
knowledge.
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Pedagogical situations are sensory. They are also
interpersonal. Because they are sensory this
makes even learning by oneself interpersonal.
Egocentric speech is like a dialogue between the
senses. In Vygotsky's and Luria's experiments,
children placed in problem-solving situations that were
slightly too difficult for them displayed egocentric
speech. One could consider these as self-induced
metadiscursive moments. The self in crisis will
disassociate and one's questionning becomes the object
of a question.
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5.33 |
Not only is the human self as a metabeing both
fracturable and affiliable in itself, it is also prone
to narrativity. That is, the
human self will project its self-making onto the world
in order to generate stories from sequences and to
break stories into recombinant sequences. Its
operations on signs are material practices with
consequences for world-making.
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The fracturable affiliable self calls for reproductive
models suitable to the interactions of multi-sensate
beings, models that render dyads dialectical,
questionable, answerable.
Narrativity understood dialectically
does not merely mean making sequences or strings of
events into stories but also stories into things,
strung together for more stories. From such an
understanding, emerge non-dyadic narratives of
reproduction, narratives where a thing-born transforms
itself into an event, comes to understand itself as a
process.
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The historical possibility of such narratives owes much to the metacommentary of one man upon the work of another. Here is a segment of Marx's critique of Hegel's dialectic: To be objective, natural, sentient and at the same time to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature and sense for a third person, is the same thing. To be and to have for oneself are the same thing as to be oneself for a third. It's a good place to start making sense of sense. |
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