Lacan

Understanding linguistics and psychoanalysis all in one text is not something that comes naturally to me, so I’m going to use this space to go ahead and try to make some sense of what I just read and, to the best of my ability, throw in a comment or two.

What I understand as the premise of Lacan’s text is that the unconscious is structured in the same way as language. However, according to Lacan, language does not work in the way good old Saussure made us believe. What we had learnt was that signifier and signified worked hand in hand, like two sides of one page in the creation of the sign but the signifier always above the signified: S/s.  Here, Lacan says “not really” signifier and signified actually work independently they are separated by a bar and the two sides of a page are more like to stages of a process in which the signifier relates to other signifiers in the system, in order to cross over the bar to reach the signified and create signification, a signification that can be “something quite otherthan what it says”. This notion emphasizes the importance of metaphor and metonymy because they work precisely by signifying something other than what they claim: part of a whole in the case of metonymy and substitution of two different things for metaphor.  Metaphor and metonymy are at the core of the structure of language and their functioning depends not on likeness but on difference and word-to-word relations.

Then Lacan says that that’s exactly how the unconscious works. He takes as basis Freud’s ideas that what the unconscious transmits through dreams is a coded meaning for something else and makes a parallelism between condensation and metaphor and displacement and metonymy.

This reminded me of last class’ discussion when the idea of “textualizing” (I hope it’s ok to invent words) the imagery of dreams came to the table but in this case dreams are already “textualized” in the sense that they’re structured just like our language so there’s actually no translation taking place but a transcription.

I can’t help but think that through this view people are to some extent slaves of language because it “writes” its letter on the unconscious and we have the need to decipher it for our conscious sake. Furthermore deciphering represents a very difficult task since the method of interpretation seems to lack rigorous accuracy. At least the unconscious is not anymore a place of no law, of the primitive, the instincts and the irrational but it is now subjected to the symbolic rulings of language. If only language weren’t an arbitrary mess…

Marx

The socio-economic history of the world has been shaped by the existence of two main classes which have the role either of the oppressor or the oppressed.  With the Industrial Revolution and its consequential shift on the means of production the oppressor and oppressed received the names of bourgeoisie and proletariat. In this relationship the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and the proletariat works to produce capital that the bourgeoisie will keep and in turn will receive a wage that is no way proportional to the time and effort invested working nor with the capital that work has produced. This situation falls into the exploitation category and creates a condition of raging inequality within society.

The main idea of Marxist communism is to restore economic and social equality through the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the elimination of private property. This is supposed to occur when the “self-destructive” capitalist system comes to a point of inefficiency which allows for the proletariat to organize into unions and later into political parties that will start a revolution. Land and industries will then be expropriated and the power will be centralized in the hands of the State who will make sure to look after the wellbeing of its society in terms of equality. This is of course an over simplification of Communism that only serves as contextualization for this exercise’s purpose.

Communism and capitalism are of course much more than only economic systems, they are also ideologies that can be perpetuated through many different vehicles and that can be used as tools to theorize about artistic and cultural representations. In terms of literature I believe communist theory can be utilized to analyze content in terms of the ideologies denoted in a story or in terms of character development; is there an oppressor or an oppressed? What kinds of struggles are being fought socially? Is any character resisting or embracing the values representative of certain ideologies?

I believe some writers tend to bring upon themselves a social responsibility of giving a voice to the oppressed (probably because they consider themselves as part them). I can see how communism serves as the foundation for the creation of a kind of literature that has as a purpose to rebel against oppressive power structures, and as a consequence to help spread a certain ideology. Latin America has hundreds of examples because of its history of authoritarian governments.  Let us only think about all the literary creation that has come from the dictatorships in Chile or Nicaragua, for example.  Communism can also work in literature as a way of understanding the historical meaning of a certain novel or poem in relation to the discourses of power it presents.

As an ideology it is inevitable for communism not to permeate many aspects of representation within a society, literature is especially prone to reflect or criticize ideologies because of its “word spreading” nature.

Freud

It is uncanny how much dreams resemble literary creation and interpretation at least if according to Freud’s ideas on the Interpretation of Dreams. The whole notion of dream-content and dream-thought could be easily extrapolated into the literary realm. In terms of interpretation of dreams dream-content refers to the dream in itself, the mental images we get while asleep. The dream-thought on the other hand is the interpretation of what the subconscious or unconscious wanted to represent, the hidden meaning. Very much like in literature, where what we read can be considered as a representation of something else that can only be discovered through interpretation.

Dream-content also uses some “tools” that work as to help create further symbolism in the dream. Things like condensation which refers to the dream-content being a lot shorter than the dream-thought. Displacement, objects that appear central in the dream-content that are not really important for the dream-thought; and transference, which appears when some kind of affect is displaced from one element to another. By being aware of the existence of this “tools” the interpretation the dream becomes more accurate. There are other interesting things that take place in dreams such as the loss of meaning of words or the creation of a new meaning that is different from the official , the mix of real and imaginary events and words that are treated as concrete objects to name a few.

Perhaps all the previously mentioned characteristics of dreams could be exchanged in a literary text as rhetorical figures and poetic licenses that is, if we only focused on the form of dreams versus the form of literature. However, I wonder if literary creation and art in general could be treated exactly as a dream. Namely, if we could say that what an author expresses in a novel or in a poem could be considered as a direct reflection of his hidden anxieties and desires and furthermore the possibility that the author does not even realize what he is projecting through his writing, not until it has been psychologically interpreted of course. If that were the case then it wouldn’t really matter what the author wanted to say but what he unconsciously says and we couldn’t kill the author as Barthes would have wanted us to because his psyche would be essential for the analysis of a text.

And in terms of the audience maybe some authors use this psychological theory to create texts that appeal to the hidden desires and motivations of a certain kind of ready who may feel unconsciously drawn to them. Could an extreme example be the Twilight Saga and teenage girls?

I have probably allowed my imagination to run a little wild and maybe most of my assumptions are farfetched however I feel very interested in all the possibilities that psychoanalysis brings to the plate of art and literature.

 

Barthes: Myth/Signification

In Mythology Barthes addresses the myth as a semiological system that uses Saussure´s linguistic system as its base. The sign becomes the signifier which Barthes chooses to call form, and then a different signified is incorporated, this is called the concept. Finally, the result of the union of these two terms is the myth or signification.

Signification is nothing more than a further meaning behind the pure linguistic one. In the text Barthes gives plenty of examples from different kinds of representations. Perhaps, the most useful in terms of literature is this sentence:  my name is lion. This sentence has a simple straight forward meaning that anyone who is familiar with the English language can understand, however placed in a certain context it  can signify something more than the initial meaning . In this case, the sentence was found in a grammar book so the reader understands that the sentence is not only about a creature whose name is “lion” but it is also a grammatical example, the unification of these two notions creates a complete new “global signification”.

The example of the portrayal of Romans in film and especially the segment where Barthes explained what the sweaty foreheads of the Romans meant in one particular film, made me think about the exercise we made previously with Maupassant’s Toine. In the text’s example Barthes says that the sweaty foreheads of everyone but the Caesar are there to symbolize “preoccupation”, moral dilemma. With a little bit of knowledge in history one can easily understand why everyone is so troubled, except for the Caesar, but that is not the point. My point is that what Barthes did here is exactly what we did with Toine, we didn’t focus only on the linguistic meaning of the story we took the signs and gave them further signification. That was how Toine´s fatness and laziness signified a socio-economic system for some or the condition of peasants on XIX century France for others.

These train of thought led me to the following questions: How does one learn to understand these significations? Are significations different for everyone? Are there universal significations? Furthermore, according to Barthes signification should be represented either openly, intellectual and remote or deeply rooted and invented on each occasion. Failing to do so is considered deceitful. So in the case of literature, is the author always aware of the existence of significations in his text, of how they are represented? Are they there on purpose?

 

 

What I get from Saussure

According to Saussure language is the social aspect of speech in the sense that it is not a natural function of the speaker and it can’t be created nor modified by an individual but only assimilated. It is a system of signs in which the essential thing is the union of concepts and sound-images (the “formal” representation of a concept). One aspect that is constantly stressed throughout the text is the psychological quality of these two entities that form the sign which are joined in the brain by an “associative bond”.

Saussure continues to explain that one of the main problems of the common use of the word “sign” is the perception that it only designates a sound-image and forgetting that it always carries with it a concept. These two terms are like two sides of one page, he says. To further differentiate (and the same time relate ¿?) these two terms and with the purpose of creating a proper terminology for the study of the sign, Saussure renames them as signified (concept) and signifier (sound-image). It is important to note that the relation of the two and the sign created as a consequence is a product of arbitrariness. That is, there is no actual reason behind the connection between the sign and what it designates, not even in the case of onomatopoeia or interjections, it is mere convention.  It is all in our minds.

For Saussure the most important thing is to understand that language is a system and the sign only has value as part of that system which can be analyzed synchronically (in its present state) or diachronically (through its evolution). Going back to the value of the sign, it should not get confused with its signification. Two words can have the same signification but not the same value. For example, dedos in Spanish has the same signification as fingers in English, however when referring to the wiggly appendages on your feet, English uses toes while Spanish still uses dedos, it has a double value. Furthermore, the value of a word may be modified without affecting its meaning or idea but because another term of the system’s been modified. Value is completely determined by the environment.

In terms of the material value of a word, written or spoken, it is completely arbitrary, negative and differential; we know an R is an R because it is not a T as easy as that, or at least that is how I understand it.

It is made evident that the differential characteristic is true for most linguistic relations; the signifier and signified exist in opposition to each other and even when the product of these two creates the sign, something that Saussure considers positive, it only exists in opposition to other signs in the system. If this is true, then language doesn’t have the capability of actually apprehending reality because it can only be defined in terms of its relationship with it itself. This is probably what Saussure means when he says that “language is only form and no substance”.

*I apologize for this entry. I realize it is more of summary than an actual commentary on the reading. I’m still having trouble fully understanding the text, however after Tuesday’s seminary I promise I’ll have something better to share.

Art as a Technique

If there is something that we as human beings in the 21st century have experienced in our lives that is without a doubt automatization.  After riding the same bus for months, walking the same streets, dusting the same divan and saying the same “good morning”, situations, words, objects and even their concepts start to become habitual, automatic… almost meaningless.

In Art as Technique Shklovsky addresses the problem of automatization and postulates art as the tool to recover “the sensation of life”. Of course if we consider art as a tool,  there is always the possibility of it being used repeatedly in the same manner, assembled in conventional ways and of it falling once again in the dreaded circle of “automatic recognition”. Shklovsky’s answer for this matter is defamiliarization which is nothing more than, in the case of literay, manipulating the language in order to create images that disrupt the reader’s automatic recognition or in simpler terms, representing things in a new way, changing perception.

One really good example of this technique is given through a passage of Tolstoys’s “Kholstomer” in which a horse tries to understand the meaning of “property” in the human world. This is representative because it tackles a concept that is used so commonly, -what is mine? -what is not yours. But what does it really entitle, what is do we perceive from this concept. There is probably no absolute answer for these questions however, art can be used to transform the usual perception, gives the reader the possibility to understand it from an angle that is no too familiar.

Shklovsky says that defamiliarization is present “almost everywhere form is found”. Literary speech has particular phonetic and lexical structures, that makes it sound foreign, difficult,  impeded  and that make of it a formed language. Nonetheless it is possible for prose speech to transcend into literary speech but this doesn’t violate it’s condition of formed speech. Shklovsky constantly uses the term “roughened” as to explain how this kind of speech should always be challenging, even if it’s being permeated by prose. This automatically reminds me of Bakhtin talking about how poetic language (any kind of language for that matter) is always in constant change, but is also in a constat quest of cannonizing these changes to keep its differentiation from every other language.

Shklovsky separates prose from literary speech one last time when writes about rhyme. According to him the rhyme in prose is always the same and serves as yet another factor for automatization. In contrast the rythm of poetry, even when it may have a certain structure, it is disordered and attempting to systematize this disorder would completely contradict the roughening principle of this   kind of speech.

In the end for Shklovsky the purpose of art seems to be separating itself from reality, and allowing, in this case the reader, to experience life not as he knows it but through a deep sea of perceptive possibility.

Bakhtin: It’s all about dialogue

Language is constructed through form and content however, according to Bakhtin it is a mistake to study the two of them separately because it leaves behind the social, political an philosophical baggage that language invariably carries. Furthermore, language cannot be understood only as a centralized set of rules that serve as norm for everybody, the creation of a unitary language works as to ensure a maximum of mutual understanding, but since it exists within a context that is anything but homogenous (heteroglossia) and where centrifugal forces are constantly pushing for decentralization, stratification is an inevitable risk. That stratification can be in terms of lingusitic dialects, socio-ideological languages or the language of certain groups. In the end, every word (utterance) that is ever written or spoken is affected by these opposite forces that saturate them of meaning.

The existence of different meanings within a single word gives cause to dialogue that relates it directly to the object it “describes”. Throughout Bakhtin’s text, dialogue appears as an essential aspect of language, dialogue between sociopolitical eras, historical contexts; dialogue as the main substance of discourse that enables languages not only to    coexist but to intersect/juxtapose.

This brings us to the literary face of languages. According to Bakhtin languages exist in the creative consciousness of people who write novels, writers use certain and many languages intentionally and create what he denominates as “double voices”. It is interesting that the proper use of double voicedness is for Bakhtin the only way to create artistic images in the literary world. When Bakhtin talks about poetry he says that it only utilizes cannonized language (that is also affected by heteroglossia but every time it changes it is “officialized” as poetical language) which as a consequence renders superficial the use of the double voice. Double voice is only real when it plays consciously with the baggage (for lack of a better word) of the languages and creates a dialogue between them, not only rhetorically or as a figure of speech.

With this in mind, there are a few questions that automatically arise: Is poetry not an artistic form for Bakhtin? Should poetry be analyzed by stylistics and lingusitics like a rhetorical text? Moreover, if the artistic value of a novel lies in the skillful use of various languages, what is the literary worth of those narrative texts that master the unitary language?

In the end I think the idea of stylistics studying language in a way that takes into consideration the changing nature of it and the obvious power that context has over it is of utter importance. However, I don’t completely understand how this condition of the language is applied to the artistic aspect of literature and if it is as determining as Bakhtin ponders it to be.

Toine

Maupassant’s Toine is a combination of mundane issues and contrasting humor that build up perfectly into the irony of everyday life. This “everyday matter” approach given to the relationship between Toine and his wife works as a humorous cover for an in reality fairly tormenting relationship. However, as the story progresses, one comes to the realization that the antagonism between these two characters is not superficial, the feelings of envy and frustration the wife has in regards to her husband surpass the levels for a normal quarreling couple. And Toine’s ability to make fun of his wife’s concerns and his complete disregard for her emotions seem like the perfect set-up for a tale full of comical conflict. This realization immediately creates expectation, who is going to win the annoyance game? Toine or the wife?

Furthermore, as each one of the main characters is developed as the complete opposite of the other; Toine is a corpulent, joyous man “a friend of all”, the wife is an “ill-tempered” woman who lived in “perpetual discontent”, it is inevitable for the reader to pick sides and hope that in the end one of the characters will benefit over the other. This adds to the twist of the ending, since one might or might not get what one was expecting for the narration.

Along these margins there is something very interesting to note, that is the way in which Maupassant manages to weave whimsical remarks between the lines of the story that mainly serve as clues for what might occur in the end. Antoine rolling his sleeves back and saying: «That would make a fine wing now, wouldn’t it?». We learn later on that that arm will work as a wonderful wing to hatch eggs under. And the fact that he called everyone his “son-in-law” even though he had no daughters is also a perfect example of the small hints the author skillfully hid amid sentences.

The conclusion of the of the story can be observed from two different points of view, both equally ironic. The first one would be to understand it as a defeat for the wife. Her actions were intended to bother Toine, but backfired and helped him become more content than he was before, they gave him a purpose in life further than just lying in bed and moreover he was able to experience parenthood in someway, an unfulfilled desire that is clearly portrayed throughout the narration.

The other way of approaching the ending could be as a win-win situation. Even though the wife did not completely succeed in troubling Toine, she also got something that she profoundly desired: a husband that would help her earn money through hard work.