Semiótica

Docencia en abyme

Estoy a mitad de un cursillo de aplicaciones multimedia en la Uni, y no quiero dejar de anotar una bonita experiencia de irrealidad virtual que tuve en clase. El profe nos enseña cosas sobre elaboración de webs en un aula de éstas con muchos ordenadores, y nos pasa en una pantalla delante un vídeo donde sale él, en un aula de éstas con muchos ordenadores, dando una clase de aplicaciones multimedia, y les ponía un vídeo a esos estudiantes donde salían en pantalla más páginas web como las que teníamos delante de nuestras narices- en la pantalla de nuestro ordenador, digo, no en la pantalla grande, pero también en esa. (También podríamos ver el vídeo que nos proyectaban a la pantalla grande en nuestro ordenador personal, es sencillo) – Sea como sea, se produce un efecto de irrealidad cuando el vídeo pasa súbitamente de pantalla completa (la nuestra) a pantalla completa (la de ellos, los de la pantalla) o cuando miras en la pantalla de proyección un ordenador como el que tienes delante. Y atiendes al profe dando explicaciones, al real, o al de la pantalla, que es el mismo, dando explicaciones parecidas (menos mal que llevaba una camisa distinta). Se puede desarrollar todo un arte de la explicación alternada entre tu yo grabado y el real, con coreografías, turnos y relevos, contrapuntos docentes... Tendré que estudiar las posibilidades que se insinúan en este nuevo arte emergente de la enseñanza abismada, y sus efectos de ensimismamiento. Con la misma camisa, quizá. O haciendo que el yo grabado se comporte como un directo, y el directo como una grabación. Con apariciones súbitas del profe en primer plano en tu ordenador personal. Instalando una falsa pantalla transparente encima de la mesa del profesor. Que de repente deje de ser ventana y se convierta en pantalla de verdad... Me pregunto si contaría como proyecto de innovación pedagógica.

Efecto simulacro en París

Ending and stopping

A message to a thread of the Narrative List which discusses the "surprising" open ending of the TV series The Sopranos—the context is provided by Michael Kearns and Michael Frank's messages (after mine here).

This whole "ending" vs "stopping" business reminds me of the ending (or the stopping) of David Lodge's CHANGING PLACES, a reflection on the difference between films and written narratives as regards open endings "in which nothing is concluded" (and that in turn brings to mind RASSELAS). Abstaining from a conclusive ending is surely an extra twist to the tale which presupposes the need and the expectation for a more conclusive ending. And further twists may
be superposed I guess. Michael's observation that characters, too, have expectations is surely a reminder of relevant distinctions to be made in that respect. A satisfactory conclusion (a classical one I suppose) brings to a convergence the coinciding expectations of characters and audience
(identification, desire, etc.) whereas a more "belated" or experimental ending plays on more complex or contrapuntal relationships between story desires and discourse desires.

Jose Angel Garcia Landa
Universidad de Zaragoza
http://www.unizar.es/departamentos/filologia_inglesa/garciala/

Quoting Michael Kearns :

[Ocultar texto citado]
> Michael,
>
> I've watched probably 1 1/2 episodes of the show and haven't seen the
> finale, so I'm really not qualified to comment on the specifics.  But
> I'm intrigued by your story/discourse distinction relating to what
> happens in/to the narrative.  I would rather think that "ending" would
> have to be a discourse function, except in the case in which characters
> themselves decide that something has come to an end.  And even in that
> case an audience would almost certainly be expected to reflect on
> whether the characters were right in their assessment.  (Well, we might
> need a special category for narratives whose purpose from the beginning
> is to be the tracing of a sequence of events whose outcome is known in
> advance, but even in that case, the artificiality of the construction,
> its rhetorical nature, would seem to demand a discourse approach.)
> "Stopping" is surely a discourse function.
>
> It never ceases to amaze me how useful is the story/discourse
> distinction.
>
>
> Frank, Michael wrote:
>
>
>> while i'm not sure how i feel about the way  *sopranos* ended [i'm one
> of those miscreants who never much liked the show in the first place] i
> think that in discussing its lack of closure we need to be careful
> about one small but important detail . . .  other narratives that seem
> to lack closure  [of which there are many:  the final freeze-frame of
> *400 blows* comes to mind as a
>> particularly noteworthy example]  do in fact end, although they end in
> ways that don't satisfy all the expectations previously built up by the
> narrative . . . the final *sopranos* episode, OTOH,  doesn't end, it
> just stops
>>
>> i certainly realize in saying this that i'm raising the question of the
> difference between ending and stopping . . . a preliminary conjecture
> might be that the difference is anchored in the dialectical
> relationship of story and discourse, ending being something that takes
> place IN the story, while stopping being something that happens TO the
> discourse . . . but however we sort this out, the final moments of the
> final episode were structured and narrated differently than the final
> moments and/or pages of the other texts cited as examples of lack of
> closure 

The Dynamics of Narrative form: Ontological Plotting

Meaning in Interaction

Notes from Jenny Thomas, Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics (London: Longman, 1995).

Chapter 1, What Is Pragmatics?

2    Pragmatics: 2 interpretations: speaker meaning or utterance interpretation. 1st social, 2nd more cognitive. Levels of meaning: 1st level, abstract meaning; 2nd, utterance meaning or contextual meaning.

6    Assigning sense in context: “part of the process of determining what speakers mean (as opposed to what their words mean) involves assigning sense to those words”.

9    Assigning reference in context: “In order to understand an utternace, we not only have to assign sense to words, but also to assign reference (i.e. to determine in context who or what is being referred to).” Deictics, etc.

12    Structural ambiguity: “we have to derive the sense and reference which a speaker intends from the range of possible senses and references which a sentence could have.”

16    Utterance meaning: “what the speaker actually does mean by these words on this particular occasion” (= contextual meaning).

18    Force: “In pragmatics we use the term force to refer to the speaker’s communicative intention”. 4 possible permutations (interrelations) between utterance meaning and force, the two components of speaker meaning:
    - understanding both utterance meaning and force,
19    - understnding utterance meaning but not force,
    - understanding force but not utterance meaning,
20    - understanding neither utterance meaning nor force.

22    Speaker meaning: pragmaticists focusing on speaker intention rarely take into consideration the hearer. “It must be obvious that for the speaker ambiguities of sense, reference or structure rarely, if ever, exist”.

Pragmatics: Meaning in interaction. “In this book I shall be working towards a definition of pragmatics as meaning in interaction. This reflects the view that meaning is not something which is inherent in the words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone, nor by  the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic process, involving the negotiation of meaning between speakera and hearer, the context of utterance (physical, social and linguistic) and the meaning potential of an utterance.”

Chapter 2, Speech Acts

29    Moore vs Russell, pro common language; Austin vs. Russell, ordinary lang. is effective enough for communication.

31     Austin: “our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking in the lifetimes of many generations” (Austin).

32     Austin began with the assumption that most utterances have no truth conditions.

34     On explicit or metalinguistic performatives, used to distance speaker from commitment to the truth of the statement, “metalinguistic performatives are often used in precisely this way, even by speakrs who are completely naïve linguistically”.

35    “most seem to agree that I apologize often sounds like something one says for form’s sake, that it is less sincere than I’m sorry”.

36    “Although as I have already noted, all performatives are self-verifying, there is a difference between metalinguistic performatives and the rest. Metalinguistic performatives as well as always bein true, are, in addition, always felicitous or successful.”

37 (Mala definición de Ausin atando las felicity conditions a los pensamientos e intenciones de las personas).

40    Explicit reference to felicity conditions: “Often speakers make reference to the felicity conditions which allow them to perform  a particular act”. Collaborative performatives: bets or wagers; group performatives, committees, etc.

43    “the majority of speech acts require some degree of hearer uptake in order to succeed (and can thus be seen as ‘collaborative’).”


Chapter 3: Conversational implicature

(Grice's maxims, etc.)


Chapter 4: Approaches to pragmatics

88    “We have already noted that an utterance frequently has a range of possible interpretations; Grice, however, did not discurss the possibility that more than one implicature might be intended.”
Vs. Searle’s rule-governed approach to speech acts: conditions both over-specific and over-general.

103    “One reason for this is that Searle treats speech acts as if they were clearly-defined categories with clear-cut boundaries. In reality, as we have seen, the boundaries between, say, commanding, ordering, requesting, asking and inviting are blurred, overlapping and fluid…”

105    “As in literature, so in life: it is often the case in pragmatics that the most interesting effects are achieved when categories overlap or are blurred (such that one interactant can exploit the uncertainty) or are unclear to one of the participants.” Same thing applies to other ling phenomena such as discourse roles and activity types.

106    “a whole constellation of features contribute to the way in which participants in interaction (rather than analysts examining the data after the event) classify a speech act."

107    “the whole approach to describing speech acts in terms of rules was misconceived” “speech acts … are better described in terms of principles.” (Or maxims).

“Searle was attempting to handle pragmatics in a manner appropriate to grammar.”

108    “• Rules are all or nothing, principles more or less.
    • Rules are exclusive, principles can co-occur.
    • Rules are constitutive, principles are regulative.
    • Rules are definite, principles are probabilistic.
    • Rules are conventional, principles are motivated.”


Chapter 5, Pragmatics and Indirectness

119     Intentional indirectness here. It is costly and risky. Rational: advantages gained. Expressibility assumption.

124    How do we know how indirect to be? Factors:
    “• The relative power of the speaker over the hearer
    • The social distance between the speaker and the hearer
    • The degree to which X is rated an imposition in culture Y.
    • Relative rights and obligations between the speaker and the hearer.”

135    Wilson and Sperber 1981 argue “that there is a correlation betwen the degree of indirectness of an utterance and the amount of ‘work’ a hearer has to do in order to arrive at the propositional meaning” (NO- please. Not the PROPOSITIONAL meaning! jagl).

136    Further complications not addressed by them would involve “the nature of the activity type in which the interactants believe themselves to be engaged” (cf. Frames – jagl)

138 Also background knowledge.

139 The role of co-text in interpreting indirecness “on other occasions … the possible range of interpretations of an utterance is note heavily constrained either by context or by co-text and the n the process of utternace interpretation becomes much more difficult.”

Goals and the interpretation of indirecness. “Leech’s … approach to computing indirectness is to ‘calculate’ the length of the path from the illocutionary act to its
140    illocutionary goal.”    (Why not to the perlocutionary goal?)

“However, I would argue that the speaker will always bear in mind the steps the hearer will have to take in order to interpret what is said, and this will be a powerful constraint on the way the speaker formulates his or utterance (sic). Similarly, the hearer, in interpreting what the speaker has said, will necessarily take account of the social (and other) constraints upon him or her.”

142    “From this discussion it should be clear that the term indirectness covers a range of phenomena; in some situations it is the illocutionary goal which is unclear, on other occasions (as we shall see in the discussion of ambivalence in chapter 7) the speaker’s illocutionary goal is perfectly obvious, but the pragmatic force of the utterance is not” (e.g. If I were you… goal clear, but is it a warning, a threat, etc.?) (Debería decir perlocutionary goal, no illocutionary goal).

143    “Just occasionally we find examples of people using indirectness (in this case flouting the maxim of Quantity) in order to be uninteresting, or to deflect interest”.

144    Indirecness, too, in order to increase the force of the message. “If your hearer has to work at understanding the message, he or she has a greater ‘investment’ in that message”.

145    “Pyle … notes that we often employ indirectness because we have two goals which compete.”

146    “in speaking of politeness we are talking of ‘what is said’ and not (as in this chapter) of the genuine underlying motivation which leads the speaker to make those linguistic choices”.


Chapter 6 Theories of politeness

149 “Under the heading of politeness, people have discussed five separate, though related, sets of phenomena:
    • Politenes as a real-world goal
    • Deference
    • Register
    • Politeness as a surface level phenomenon
    • Politeness as an illocutionary phenomenon

150    “Deference … is  a distinct phenomenon: it is the opposite of familiarity. It refers to the respect we show to other people by virtue of their higher status, greater age, etc. Politeness is a more general matter o showing (or rather, of giving the appearance of showing) consideration to others”.

154    Register: “As with deference, register has little to do with politeness and little connection with pragmatics, since we have no real choice about whether or not to use formal language in formal situations (unless we are prepared to risk sanction, such as social censure” (like deference, register is a sociolinguitic phenomenon).  (¡!!!!! - no comment!!).

Difference pragmatics / sociolinguistics:

156    “’Doing’ pragmatics crucially requires context. This leads to the second issue: as soon as we put a speech act in context, we can see that there is no necessary connection between the linguistic form and the perceived politeness of a speech act.”

157    “The third reason why it is unsafe to equate surface linguistic form with politeness is that some speech acts seem almost inherently impolite” (¡¡¡y ahora lo explica con un ejemplo totalmente descontextualizado!!!)

“in pragmatics we are not concerned with whether or not the speakers are genuinely motivated by a desire to be nice to one another: all we can do is observe what is said and the effect of what is said on the hearer” (¿???)

“we cannot assess politeness reliably out of context; it is not the linguistic form alone which renders the speech act polite or impolite, but the linguistic form + the context of utterance + the relationship between the speaker and the hearer.”

Politeness as pragmatic phenomenon:

158    3 headings. Politeness in terms of maxims and principles (Leech), face-management view (Brown and Levinson) and Fraser’s “conversational-contract view”, plus Spencer-Oatey ‘pragmatic scales’ view.

159    Leech: Politeness Principle: “Minimize (all things being equal) the expression of impolite beliefs; Maximize (all things being equal) the expression of polite beliefs.”

“people will often explicitly ‘mark’ the fact that they cannot or do not intend to observe politeness norms”

160: Tact Maxim: “Minimize the expression of beliefs which imply cost to other: maximize the expression of beliefs which imply benefits to other” (Leech).

161    “It would seem that even in the case of ‘impositives’ minimizing the expression of cost to other is by no means universally polite”.

Lakoff. Give options. “Allowing options (or giving the appearance of allowing options) is absolutely central to Western notions of politeness”.

162. Generosity maxim. Better formulation than Leech’s: (JT:) “Minimize the expression of cost to other: maximize the expression of benefit to other”. (NO: Debería ser Minimize the expression of cost to self; maximize the expression of benefit to self). Important in Mediterranean cultures.

“remember that we are only dealing with the importance attached to the linguistic expression of generosity—there is no suggestion that members of one culture really are more generous than members of another”.

165    Agreement Maxim: “Minimize the expression of disagreement between self and other: maximize the expression of agreement between self and other” . “Remember, toto, that it is not being claimed that people avoid disagreeing with one another. We simply observe that they are much more direct in expressing their agreement, than disagreement”.

166 Leech, The Pollyanna Principle: “to put the best possible gloss on what we have to say”.

167 Problems with Leech’s approach: “there appears no motivated way of restricting the number of maxims” (but they are really subspecifications!!!).

168    “The term ‘face’ in the sense of ‘reputation’ or ‘good name’ seems to have been first used in English in 1876 as a translation of the Chinese term ‘diu lian’ in the phrase ‘Arrangements by which China has lost face’. Since then it has been used widely in phrases such as ‘losing face’, ‘saving face’”. Goffman’s definition, etc. (Not the same! not commented on).

169     “Within politeness theory ‘face’ is best un derstood as every indiidual’s feeling of self-worth or self-image: this image can be damaged, maintained or enhanced thorugh interaction with others” (Menos semiótico que Goffman).

FTA. Superstrategies for performing them. Without redress (bald-on-record), with redress (positive politeness), with redress (negative politeness), also 15 strategies for oof-record politeness in Brown and Levinson. Indirectness, etc. (Or: “do not perform FTA").

175    “There is a third situation—where there is such a strong expectation that something will be said, that saying nothing is in itself a massive FTA”.

176    “many acts can be seen to threaten the face of both S and H simultaneously.” (e.g. apologies.)
“Brown and Levinson claim that positive and negative politeness are mutually exclusive. In practice, a single utterance can be oriented to both positive and negative face simultaneously.”
“Nofsinger (1975): simply by speaking we trespass on another person’s face. Saying anything at all (or even saying nothing!) is potentially face-threatening.” (In Goffman too-jagl).

Politeness as a conversational contract:
Fraser includes ‘rights and obligations’ which fit well with the notion of activity types. (Missing: wider sociological framework articulating this. E.g. Goffman. etc.- jagl).

Misunderstandings of politeness theory fall outside pragmatics. (!!). JT pro less psychologistic terminology to avoid confusion.



Chapter 7: The Construction of Meaning.

183    Vs. formal grammar-like approaches being equally appropriate to pragmatics.

“It is therefore unfortunate to see in the work of many linguists who claim to be ‘doing pragmatics’ the uncritical adoption of rule-governed approaches to the description of pragmatic phenomena (such as speech acts), of static notions of context and of role relationships and a view of meaning as the ‘property’ of the speaker, as given rather than negotiated.”

184    How does pragmatics fit into linguistics?

“pragmatics is concerned with issues not addressed within other areas of linguistics, such as the assignment of meaning in context—utterance meaning and pragmatic force—speech acts, implicature, indirectness and the negotiation of meaning between speaker and hearer.” (Aquí entra la teoría de la interpretación en literatura).

“Pragmatics is a separate level of description, but there are also pragmatic aspects to other levels of linguistic description” Same with other levels.

Pragmatics versus sociolinguistics:
“There are certainly areas of overlap, but roughly we could say that sociolinguistics is mainly concerned with the systematic linguistic correlates of relatively fixed and stable social variables (such as region of origin, social class, ethnicity, sex, age, etc.) on the way an individual speaks. Pragmatics, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with describing the linguistic correlates of relatively changeable features of that same individual (such as relative status, social role) and the way in which the speaker exploit his/her (socio)linguistic repertoire in order to achieve a particular goal.”

187    “it makes as much (or as little) sense to say that sociolinguistics is the same as pragmatics as it does to say that phonetics and sociolinguistics are the same.”

Activity types vs. speech events:

Hymes’s SPEAKING mnemonic for his ‘speech events’: Situation, Participants, Ends, Act sequences (message form and content), Key (tone, manner), Instrumentalities (channel, language varieties), Norms (of interpretation, of interaction) and Genre. (Theory of action missing here - jagl).

189    “The sociolinguist tries to show how features of context systematically constrain language use. The pragmaticist tries to show how speakers use language in order to change the situation they find themselves in.”

190    “Clearly most situations lie between the totally pre-scripted and the totally unscripted and a good description of context could usefully take as its point of departure the sociolinguist’s description of givens ... but it would not stop there”.

Activity type description might include: goals of participants, allowable contributions, the
191    degree to which Gricean maxims and interpersonal maxims are adhered to or suspended, turn-taking and topic control, manipulation of pragmatic parameters (social distance, power, rights, obiligations, size of imposition), etc.).

194    “language which is not simply a reflexion of the physical or social context, or of the role relationship between the two speakers, but language used in order to establish and then change the nature of the relationship between A and B and the nature of the activity in which they are participating.... context cannot be seen only as a ‘given’, as something imposed from the outside. The participants, by their use of language, also contribute to making and changing their context. (Cf. Roger Sell. Cf. also contingency of context, established through negotiation, density of situation, integrational use of language - jagl).

195     The Construction of meaning. Intended force of an utterance may be left deliberately indeterminate (question, request, etc.). “it may be in the interests of both participants tthat the force of the utterance should be negotiable”.

196    “In fact, we find that almost all speech acts are collaborative, at least to a degree. Exceptions to this generalization are performatives such as I sentence you... “ (Bueno, cuestionable, claro. No hay excepciones).

“it is almost always the case that the hearer has a contribution to make in determining the successfulness (or otherwise) of a speech act.”

200    “speakers often ‘build up to’ the performance of a particular speech act” (sometimes stretching over days).

202 Discoursal ambivalence: Pre-requests? Levinson observes that this is a post hoc classification by the analyst (so what? Benefit of hindsight). “In pragmatics we want to know what the participants understood to be going on at this point” (Noción de la consciencia demasiado simplista. Debemos intentar comprender LO QUE PASABA, no lo que entendían que pasaba. Pro una teoría crítica de la interpretación).

203    Dynamic pragmatics. “Notice that assigning meaning is an active (dynamic) procedure. Meaning is not given, but is constructed (at least in part) by the hearer: it is a process of hypothesis-formation and testing, of making meaning on the basis of likelihood and probability.” (Cf. Herbert Blumer's symbolic interactionism - jagl).

204    What counts as evidence in pragmatics?
“- The perlocutionary effect of an utterance on the hearer
- Explicit commentary by the speaker
- Explicit commentary by someone other than the speaker
- Subsequent discourse

207 (Interpreta cotext como 'subsequent discourse', pero podría incluirse la interacción crítica).

208    “In real interactions we are often uncertain about precise meanings/intentions and can tolerate and operate with such uncertainties. What we need, therefore, is a descriptive system which adequately models this indeterminacy and which accords it proper theoretical status” (¿Y que ha hecho si no la teoría de la interpretacion en literatura?)

“in producing an utterance a speaker takes account of the social, psychological and cognitive limitations of the hearer; while the hearer, in interpreting an utterance, necessarily takes account of the social constraints leading a speaker to formulate the utterance in a particular way. The process of making meaning is a joint accomplishment between speaker and hearer, and that is what I mean by ‘meaning in interaction’.” (Cf. the basic assumptions of reader-response criticism - jagl).

Introduction to Total Speech

Acting Strange

Bonita columna del actor Anthony Sher, "You do not have to be mad to be an actor… but it helps" —en el Guardian Unlimited de hoy. Sher está interpretando ahora a un actor, "playing the player" en buena tradición shakespeariana, en la obra de Sartre Kean, sobre el primer Kean, también actor shakespeareano. Que se hizo famoso interpretando a Shylock de una manera no convencional. Ahora habrá que interpretarlo intepretando.... lo cual siempre lleva a un contraste entre modos de actuar y a una reflexión sobre estilos y convenciones de interpretación. Y así se pone Sher a reflexionar sobre la tradición teatral británica, de Garrick a Olivier. Él mismo es un actor imponente en esa tradición, ennoblecido como el propio Olivier— Sir Sher, por así decirlo. Ha interpretado hace poco a Primo Levi en la dramatización de sus memorias de Auschwitz; y una de sus más famosas actuaciones era una versión "arácnida" de Ricardo III, con múltiples muletas y mangas colgantes.

Olivier es para Sher quizá el último de los grandes actores dramáticos de la vieja tradición británica anterior a la invasión multimedia. Aunque el propio Olivier fue también actor/director de cine oscarizado, claro; sin embargo se mantuvo en la interfaz del teatro y el cine sin que su estilo de actuación llegase a integrarse al nuevo medio, como observa Sher en una anécdota reveladora. El egocéntrico Olivier enfatizó el papel central de su Otelo, al que interpretó pintándose de negro, en una actuación poderosa e histriónica, frente a un Yago mucho más contenido en su expresión, interpretado en clave menor por el segundo actor de la compañía. Pero en la versión filmada de esta producción, el Otelo de Olivier es teatral, amanerado, mientras que el segundo de a bordo triunfa con un estilo de actuación mucho más apto para el medio cinematográfico.

Y lo que han aprendido los actores de teatro de los actores cinematográficos... aunque la cosa empezase al revés (para mal). Nada más educativo que verse en pantalla, dicen. La tecnología de la representación actúa como feedback sobre la representación teatral de la realidad. La fotografía saca a la luz nuevas posturas y gestos del cuerpo humano; el cine nuevas posibilidades de movimiento.

Es cierto que el cine de ficción aún estaba inicialmente bajo excesivo control teatral: pero los documentales, y luego la televisión, muestran (re)presentaciones del cuerpo humano, sus gestos, expresiones y modos de interacción que suponen una iluminación para quienes creían que los actores actuaban de manera realista sobre el escenario. De la misma manera que una conversación grabada magnetofónicamente o en vídeo, y reexaminada, nos muestra mucho sobre el funcionamiento de la conversación, sus repeticiones, interrupciones... algo prácticamente invisible sin esa retroalimentación tecnológica.

El teatro siempre ha sido una sucesión de estilos de actuación, por supuesto; y la interacción con las nuevas tecnologías (con el gesto y lenguaje tal como son filtrados por las nuevas tecnologías) no es quizá sino la manera propia en que los estilos de actuación han encontrado una nueva vía para su desarrollo en el siglo XX.

El gesto originario del teatro era ritual, simbólico, en absoluto "realista" excepto en la medida en que se actuaba por referencia a una realidad ya ritualizada (—así el origen del teatro en las representaciones sagradas griegas o las festividades religiosas medievales). Una buena actuación era una actuación que sacaba a la luz ese carácter simbólico de la acción, y la llevaba hacia un arquetipo; de ahí que las figuras de las moralidades medievales sean abstracciones. No esperemos de ellas gestos tipo Bogart, ni esas pequeñas parapraxis y muequitas de compromiso propias de Sandra Bullock.

Pero esa abstracción va adquieriendo personalidad definida, primero a través de los personajes históricos de las tragedias, o de los personajes cada vez más individualizados de las comedias. Si en el Renacimiento se desarrolla el individualismo moderno, sucede esto en cierta medida a través de la interacción con la representación de esa individualidad sobre la escena teatral. Y allí está Shakespeare, claro, con una potentísima reflexión sobre la cualidad reflexiva del drama, que toma la realidad y la devuelve reelaborada al público, para que éste resulte reelaborado por ella y la devuelva a la escena en un proceso emergente de feedback. Una reflexividad, la de Shakespeare, que no es un simple espejo inerte, pues como nos dice Lacan el sujeto surge en su relación con el espejo, y esa relación nunca es de coincidencia.

Shakespeare es, por tanto, especialmente consciente del contraste entre estilos de actuación, y saca pleno partido a esa consciencia, exhibiéndola para hacer consciente de ella también a su público, y que siga complicándose el drama del drama. Lo hace de múltiples maneras: presentándonos un hombre vestido de mujer que se disfraza de hombre (Twelfth Night) o presentando el rostro público de un intrigante que oculta otros planes (Ricardo III, Yago en Otelo), o poniendo en escena a una compañía de actores incompetentes para apreciar el espectáculo de dos niveles de actuación, y de un escenario sobre el escenario (Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream). O en la escena de los actores de Hamlet, donde un príncipe-dramaturgo que debería ser implausible y sin embargo no lo es, da lecciones a los actores sobre la naturalidad en el movimiento y sobre la función del drama. E innumerables modalidades más de interpenetración teatro/vida, en cada una de sus obras.

Las teorías dramatúrgicas de observadores como Kenneth Burke o Erving Goffman llevan más allá esta interacción entre el drama y la vida. Si el teatro es imagen de la realidad, es porque esa realidad ya es una realidad teatral. Para Goffman no hacemos sino interpretar nuestro personaje en público, o en esa modalidad de lo público que llamamos lo privado (—Como, de modo similar, otros dirán que no hacemos en la vida sino desarrollar nuestra propia narración vital). La realidad ya tiene un guión, y unas convenciones de actuación, y por supuesto podemos modificar ambos con nuestra propia actuación; de ahí el carácter emergente de todo el proceso. Que no impide reconocer líneas generales, claro: no todos somos actores geniales que reinventamos el gesto, el movimiento, y la entonación. Pero sí los absorbemos, imitamos y reelaboramos quieras que no en cada nueva situación. Teatro, lo tuyo es todo teatro, le reprochaba la del bolero a su pareja. Y qué razón tenía. Pero lo que quería decir en realidad era que la actuación no era convincente. Como la del teatro—generalizando—en la sociedad actual. Podemos decir que la acción ha pasado a otra parte...

No quiero decir que no siga reinventándose el teatro, o innovando, e incluso influyendo en la dramaturgia social hasta cierto punto. Y el teatro experimental apunta también a una reelaboración de la propia simbólica teatral, recuperando y recombinando modalidades de dramatización rituales, simbólicas, esencializantes... Pienso, por ejemplo, en la dramaturgia minimalista e inmovilista de Beckett. (Que, por cierto, controlaba sus piezas teatrales con acotaciones detalladísimas, como si de un guión cinematográfico se tratase).

Pero evidentemente la mayor potencia cultural de reelaboración, reinvención y análisis del gesto, el movimiento y la interacción humana están actualmente en el cine o en la televisión— tanto en cantidad de influencia como en calidad/complejidad, por la reduplicación e intermedialización de la experiencia que proporcionan. Un ejemplo: la manera en que los biopics recientes (La Môme, pongamos, con la memorable actuación de Marion Cotillard) reproducen y reelaboran la imagen ya previamente mediatizada (y la teatralidad personal) de las celebridades del siglo XX.

Me ha llamado especialmente la atención la manera en que los nuevos estilos de actuación de las últimas décadas han ido separándose cada vez más de las convenciones teatrales. De actuación y de dirección de la actuación, y de la representación, porque todo va junto, claro. En las películas antiguas, los actores hablan como en el teatro clásico. La interacción es ordenada, la dicción clara, no se solapan las réplicas. La televisión en directo (hace falta ver la realidad en una pantalla para saber cómo es) nos ha enseñado que la gente no habla así. Aunque los actores de las series españolas, e hispanas, sigan hablando así—por eso son tan malos actores. Las nuevas modalidades de actuación incorporan el lenguaje corporal subliminal (falsamente subliminal, claro), o el gesto detrás del gesto: incorporan la reacción doble (explícita / tácita) a las palabras del otro, y armonizan de manera mucho más compleja el gesto y la palabra—incorporan gestualidad moderna, pues la gestualidad no es ahistórica, sino emergente, y está reinventándose constantemente. Por ejemplo, un gesto ya conocido se mezcla con otro gesto, o se superpone, o puede meramente indicarse... y así, existe más potencialidad de significado en la interacción actual, y en la actuación actual, que en la de épocas anteriores. Pena nos daría ver una actuación, social o teatral, de hace unos cientos de años. Y claro, al haberse hecho visible esa complejidad de la interacción, haberse asimilado a la interpretación consciente o controlada (quizá el método Stanislavski era un primer paso para apoderarse de esa totalidad del lenguaje corporal, por la vía intuitiva)—los efectos sobre la realidad son mucho más drásticos de lo que suponemos. Porque la realidad nunca es capturable por el drama, ni por la cámara detrás de la cámara; siempre está un paso más allá. A saber dónde está ahora.

Como sugerencia para seguirle la pista, no olvidemos otro espacio para la teatralidad del yo: el que está en la nueva dimensión de la representación de nosotros mismos en el ciberespacio social, con sus nuevos gestos, tonos y posturas. También aquí todo es teatro.

Interacción internalizada: El desarrollo especular del lenguaje y del orden simbólico

   

 

Carroll, McLuhan, and the Electronic Future

Notes from Noël Carroll's “Marshall McLuhan and the Electronic Future”, in Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998).

Like Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Marshall McLuhan defends the mass media on the basis of their inherent structural possibilities, not of the specfic contents they reproduce. For McLuhan, “The medium is the message”: which means that “the content of mass media is less important than their structures, since it is at the level of structure, McLuhan contends, that the mass media engage and shape human consciousness”.

Technology as a prothesis, as extension of human powers. Media symbolize consciousness at a certain stage of development, but they also expand the range of the human sensorium and raise consciousness to new levels. (See in this respect W. J. Ong's notion of the interiorization of communicative technology).

For McLuhan, new forms of consciousness are created by new media. E.g.: print gives rise to individualism. In McLuhan we find technological determinism, but not historical materialism. The key to historical process is not the ensemble of forces of production, but only communication technologies. Not the development of capitalism, but the "Gutenberg galaxy".

And the end result is not the socialist utopia, but the electronic global village. Mass art is on the side of history, it has an inherent progressivism for McLuhan. The story of humankind is the story of the enlarging of human consciousness. TV was the center of his theories in the 60s, but much of what McLuhan says applies even better to computer technology. The World Wide Web as the realization of McLuhan's global electronic village—uncannily prophetic.

Historical development can be seen as process of abstraction from multidimensional sign communication in spoken language. Progressively abstract alphabets are developed. The separation of sight and sound leads to separation of imaginative, emotional and sense life. Alphabetic writing is biased in favour of linear thinking. It achieves greater power, but it is power at a price—the decay of orality. Print technology intensifies the standardizing and mechanizing procedures of alphabetization.  

New media expand the alphabet-limited consciousness. E.g. development of photography calls atention to bodily postures, records actual gestures; new attention is paid to these. Visual technologies restore dimensions of consciousness alienated by print culture, and favour non-linear thinking.

TV addresses the whole human sensorium: TV as a "tactile" art for McLuhan. Media that exclude senses are hot, McLuhan says: they possess a high definition, are full of information, and self-sufficient. Cool media promote interaction, the participation of the audience. They are superior to hot media. According to McLuhan, “Society will become a global village, decentralized, communitarian, and fraternal, with people involved in one another’s concerns with scarcely a taint of individualism”.

Print is authoritarian, TV democratic. McLuhan rejects the charges of passivity fostered by mass art; they are profoundly interactional. And they are not subordinate or derivative from previous arts or media: instead, they are a new more total form of art.

There is a danger in McLuhan of taking literally the biological side of media as extensions of senses and physical limitation or extension of sensorium. Also, the notion of dominant media is insufficiently defined (from Carroll's viewpoint). Dominant, in which context? Etc.

Carroll also mistrusts McLuhan's superficial critique of linear thought—McLuhan's notions here are sweeping and loose.

A critique of cool media: communication not concerned with conveying whole of original experience, but with selection and focus; for Carroll, “too much inclusiveness is likely to thwart communication, rather than to realize its essence”

And print not necessarily biased towards linear thinking. Again, Carroll questions McLuhan's notion of an inherent de-centralization in electronic media. Neither print nor "the electronic media, indeed no media, have a pre-established moral destiny”. There is a basic mistake here: the automatic perceptual response engendered by new media is interpreted by McLuhan as active engagement of spectator: this is not the case for Carroll. There is in McLuhan an illegitimate assumption of a continuity between avant-garde or modernism and media art.

(... a confusion, I should say, which is replayed after McLuhan by naively enthusiastic advocates of Web utopianism, the interactive liberation of the mind through hypertext, and the "coolness" of social networking...- JAGL).

Sobre la "tiranía" de la narración 
 

Introduction to Total Speech

Michael Toolan, Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language. Durham (NC): Duke UP, 1996.

—A summary of Michael Toolan's introduction, with a few additional comments (marked jagl). This introduction is a systematic exposition of the main argument of the book, and of integrational linguistics as a whole—a perspective on linguistics which I find quite illuminating. There is much interesting common ground between integrational linguistics and symbolic interactionalism, including G. H. Mead's emergentism—perhaps to be explored some day.

Introduction

3 “A decidedly skewed conceptualization of language develops when certain ideas that are useful as simplifying aids to such pragmatic tasks as translation and language teaching—that is, generally useful rules of thumb—are recast as unquestionable foundational axioms, on which and without which the scientific study of languages would be impossible. Among these ideas is the claim that a language is an autonomous, decontextualizable biplanal code.”

Here: … “attention to the ‘inevitable contextual embeddedness’ of language is foundational for all that follows.”

Roy Harris, “integrational” perspective on linguistic interaction, vs. post-Saussurean segregationalist and autonomous linguistics.

4 “Integrational thinking declines to accept that text and context are distinct and stable categories, prior to consideration of particular cases.”

“Perhaps nothing has done as much to promote the text-context binarism in linguistics—in linguistics, the science of language famously committed to the idea of the primacy of speech as the most natural human linguistic medium—as the development and spread of writing.”

5 “Transcription is a kind of absconding with that part of an interaction most easily reducced to writing, leaving the remainder as disposable residue.”

… “a foundational way to study language is first to separate text from context, that is, raise up the ‘linguistic’ and set aside the ‘nonlinguistic’, is part of the powerful and environing picture that now holds us captive.”

Text and context are inseparable:
“Both text and context are ontological derivatives, and after-the-fact sense making, and just what is deemed to be the text and what the (relevant) context is decided locally from within the interactional situation at hand.”

“The integrationist resists here, as in other areas of linguistics ,the overly determined picture of linguistic interaction that ‘type-token’ theorizing presents”.

6 “beyond particular cases it is contentious to specify, in any absolute way, just what is or consitutes context and what does not.” Sentences are abstract theoretical items, not actual ‘raw’ utterances.

7 Lyons: “When we use language to communicate with one another, we do not produce sentences, but utterances….. since sentences are never produced by speakes … there can be no direct relationship between sentences and particular contexts (Lyons 1968: 419-20).”

“However, if —as from an integrational position— no sharp division between sentences and utterances is endorsed and the relevance of locally determined contextualizing of utterances is revealed, then all the factors that Lyons noted —cotextually displayed information, background knowledge, assumed shared conventions and beliefs— toghether with numerous further potentially relevant variables, are again matters for attention. Those further contextual variables may include, but cannot be limited to,the gender, ethnicity, nationality, class, expertise, etc. of iteractants and their use of paralinguistic factors such as tone of voice, gaze, posture, and facial expression. Since just which of these factors will influence the uptake (and the analysis—jagl) of an utterance on a particular occasion can emerge only froom that particular intaraction event, it is impossible to provide a general predictive account of ‘the nature of context’.”

“In normal circumstances, what counts as communicationally relevant or criterial context is revisable and indeterminate in nature.”

8 “the criteria for what counts as a souvenir or a sausage emerge from the particular circumstances of each controversy (and what the adjudicatory parties take to be the salient circumstances in those controversies); there is little direct submission to literal or dictionary (i.e., decontextualized) definition” (—por ej. lo que cuenta como lingüística en unas oposiciones—jagl).

“This is partly because dictionaries rarely provide a ‘single’ answer to any interpretive or definitional question posed of them but more generally because present circumstances can always override received lexicographical wisdom. Making appeal to dictionaries is recurrently found to be more a rhetorical strategy than a procedure assumed to be definitive, and appearing to defer to dictionaries takes place only if no pressing argument not to do so emerges.”

“Integrational linguistic emphases in the study of language invariably include the following:”

9     a) Cotemporality (a term of art proposed in Harris 1981: 157ff.): cotemporality refers to and emphasizes the profoundly synchronized nature of verbal and nonverbal events: it relatedly acknowledges the ‘now-ness’ of language in use. The foundational assumption here is that utterances are interpretable, in the first or default instance, by reference to the speaker’s here and now, even in tall its extralinguistic complexity. All our linguistic acts—like all our nonlinguistic ones—are invariably assumed to be immediately relevant to the current situation, unless indications to the contrary are provided. It is in part because immediate relevance is the norm that linguistic and nonlinguistic acts are so often intersubstitutable.

    b) The privileging of local relevance, rather than the precedent of remote behaviour, in the situational determination of the meaning of an utterance or exchange.

    c) Sequentiality of linguistic production.

    d) The uniqueness of experience (language can never, strictly, be rerun and played over again: our sense of repetition is always a sense of the close relatedness—and not of identical reproduction—between pairs or groups of utterances, things, or events).

Potentially infinite diversity of language practices, but held in check:

“individuals are born into highly socialized normative communities, within which they are taught to find their own socialized normative place. Thus, while language is never a code, it is apparent that most individuals become habituated to a code-like predictability of usage, norms and meanings. Nor need the habituation be thought of as necessarily undesirable or demeaning: it will often be a constructive acceptance of the limits to communicative innovation and the desirability of recognizably shared public forms. Also among the forces constraining and delimiting our individualistic excesses with language (as within other domains) must be counted time, aging and mortality.” Past experiences sorte into scripts, situations, stereotypes…
“It is though this shifting multidimensional mental network of scripts, situations and styles that we undertake the making of contextualized sense of particular episodes of linguistic interaction.”

10     Integrationalist view… “that grammar is therefore quite as appropriately conceptualized as constantly developing or emergent (Hopper and Traugott 1993) rather than as fixed: and that the interrelations between such a  provisionalized grammar and speakers’ interpretive schematizations of situations (the latter equivalent to what Wittgenstein termed ‘forms of life’) entail a dialogism that truly merits the adjective Bakhtinian.” (Cf. the hermeneutic dimensions of individuality and generality in Schleiermacher—who would perhaps be critical of the integrationalists' excessive leaning to the individual pole).

Questionable notions with wide currency in linguistics:

“The notions to be reconsidered principally concern literal meaning, metaphor, intention-free signification, use of words versus mention of them, repetition, ostensive behavior, directness versus indirectness of speech, and language as the following of mental rules” “What is argued for is the need for radical change in the way these notions operate as the foundations of contemporary theorizing about language and communication.” Against the notion of language-exclusive mental faculties and mechanism.

11 (Against generativism:) “The codificatory and systematizing impulses of modern linguistics have been so powerful as to render the idea of a language as a system and a code—in essence, a species-wide and species-specific complex mental program to be progressivley deciphered by linguistsd via slow but steady advances in technical modeling—utterly standard and barely questionable common sense.” Reluctance in neighbouring discipines to criticize the cognitive-mechanistic model; general respectful acceptance and tentative application of the paradigm, disregard of language use in specific situations.

12    Orientedness to others, crucial. “I accept that it may more accurately be represented as something fostered culturally for so long that it has come to be called simply natural.”

“Language is essentially rooted in trust, goal orientedness, memory, and acuity of perception since—like those very attributes—it is an integral part of human life (and not an autonomous faculty or organ, like a board or card added to a primitive computer, which miraculously developed along its own lines in our prehistory).” “Human life is a continual and creative puzzle solving (or attempting), in which we are repeatedly called on to make sense anew of things (as distinct from merely retrieving old solutions to things).”

“language is essentially a
13    flexible practice, shaped by profound interacting principles of self-awareness, normativity, other orientedness, and rational risk taking, integral to the larger phenomenon of risk-entailing puzzle working entailed in life itself.”

A crucial mistake of established linguistics: “it effectively regards language as a theory before it is a practice.”

“Literal meaning is a rather late-emerging construct, a derrivative” “Literal meaning is a precipitation, from countless occasions of use, of a purportedly stable or core meaning, under the catalyzing influence of pressures from a culture that has taken a ‘scriptivist’ turn: by ‘a scriptivist turn’ I mean a pronounced orientation in favor of written language (concerning which more is said in chapter 6). The conclusion is that the idea of literal meaning must be reconceptualized: proper weight must be given to the indeterminacies of meaning in context, which in turn compel us to discard altogether the notion of a stable, permanent phenomenon or level called meaning. In the longer run, in the phrase literal meaning it is not the term literal that is the more unsatisfactory but the term meaning.”

14     “In recent years, however, abundant evidence has been advanced in support of the idea that metaphoricality is no exoticism in the garden of language but a widespread indigenous part of the flora” (Well, "recent years"& Vico? Emerson? Nietzsche? Better talk of an alternative tradition—jagl)

Metaphoric creativity: “an inspection of fresh metaphors at work (in a poem by Sylvia Plath) gives us some insight into the nature and workings of language as a means of communication. Metaphors are high-risk redescriptions or reinterpretations with the goal of securing enhanced intimacy or insight.”

 (On intentionality): “It is not assumed here, however, that a speaker’s intentions somehow ‘govern’
15    the utterance’s meaning or that those intentions are recoverable or determinate. More important, I argue, is the contingent but crucial process of attributing intentions, by the hearer to the speaker particularly but viceversa also, guided by foundational faculties of pattern construction and perception, other-orientedness, memory, normativity, and abstraction”.

“’Coming into language’ is examined in relation to two imagined contexts of use: the accomplishment of a work task and the maintenance of mother-infant connection. In both cases, what is crucial is that instinctive processes become increasingly reflected on: what was first and necessarily a single integrated activity becomes dis-integrated or open to analysis (e.g., into the verbal and the nonverbal), for certain purposes. In part, the individual emerging into a langauged world is performing creative interpretation of (perceived) near repetitions…” Cf. Davidson, “radical interpretation”.

Cf. Derrida, Knapp and Michaels, Fish, Rorty—all OK, but:
“While neopragmatism is broadly endorsed, it is suggested that, in the antitheorists’ rejection of any divergence between authorial intention and textual meaning, insufficient attention is paid to the independent role of the addressee.”

Derrida’s iterability reinstates language as sistem or thing, sameness untrammelled by speaker intentions.
16    “This, I contend, is halfhearted contextualism. Taking language in context seriously entails deconstructing the very idea of language as a stable thing, to be shifted from one context to another. To view language thus is already to be viewing it at an abstract level…” (Cf. mi crítica al Derrida aprisionado en el lenguaje, todo lingüístico—jagl).

Mother-child interaction: mutual knowledge present precedes interaction, not implanted at a given point.

Ch. 4, “taking language in context seriously entails a revised account of the relations between language and society” Collectivist meaning entails an accomodation with hegemony: “collectivism is an enforced stabilization of the much more
17    fluid intrinsic conditions of language use, in which the key intermediary between language and society is not an autonomous and determinate plane of linguistic meaning but a multidimensioned, user-varying network of activity-type schemata” Reference to variable situations, not just to fixed signs. “As a result, the socially embedded nature of language shoud not be emphasized at the expense of the role of the creatively interpretive individual”.

(Pragmatic psycholinguistics): “primary memory is a memory of occasions, and not selectively or exclusively of the verbal part of those occasions or of any structural pattern in those occasions” Individual sifting and sorting gives rise to “metadescriptions such as mental models, schemas, prototypicality, grammatical ruls, and word meanings”.

18    “As a result, although language is never a code, nevertheless it is quite apparent that individuals and groups—especially subordinated and disempowered ones, although here the issue of what constitutes subordination must not be prejudged—may be habituated to a code-like predictability of usage, forms, and meanings.”

Bakhtin on free indirect discourse: “In addition to being a favored narrative strategy, free indirect discourse is an instructive instance of a larger tension in language—one that emerges  also wherever quotation is apprehended as more than a reporting, as an actual saying (e.g., in newspaper reports, oral recountings, references, or testimonials).”

—Or again, “categorial separation of uses of expressions from mentions is an impossibility.” E.g. Rushdie “mentions” things in The Satanic Verses, but that is also a use.

“There is no foundationalist, freestanding basis on which to arbitrate or transcend the picture of flux and emergence within which any use may be seen as a mention, or viceversa, and where indeed neither extreme of assessment—all uses are mentions, all mentions are really uses—
19    can be noncontingently ruled out. (Toolan usa mucho el concepto de contingencia: como Gould). Also pertinent here is Bakhtin’s proposal that in dialogic discourse a present utterance is always cast or slanted so as to deflect the answering utterance it foresees. (Cf. interaction even with one speaker—dialogism of one, cf. the symbolic interactionists' self-interaction—jagl). This is other-oriented constrained guesswork if anything is, and it is thoroughly congruent with an integrational view of intentionality: intentionality, I argue, must in essence be the intentions that a hearer attributes to a speaker, without hope, possibility, or need of confirmation (by the speaker) or their accuracy. The hearer makes those attributions prior to his or her involvement in an interactional response, informed by those attributions.”

“Chapter 5 argues that in important respects both Grice’s account and relevance theory appeal to an excessively determinate base, where language is code.”

Vs. definition of irony as “echoic mention”:
“I argue that echoism is neither necessary nor sufficient for irony and that the understanding of irony (verbal or situational) begins rather with the perception of mismatch, between words and world. In the case of intentional verbal irony, the hearer assumes the mismatch to be intentional and intended to be perceived (this distinguishes it from simple lying).”

20    Ch. 6, on repetition. “The picture of a language as a system of reliable repetitions and the extensions of that picture in such notions as an inventory of reliably repeatable performative verbs or a grammar of the conditions for the effective performance of particular and determinate speech acts (proposed by Austin and Searle, respectively) are metalinguistic abstractions.”

Nigel Love says that “a language is permanently such an idea-based construct: by its nature it cannot ever become, by any miraculous metamorphosis, a first-order reality for individuals.”

 “Part of what is interesting in these issues is the clarification of why it is that our culture has come so widely to assume something different, namely, that a language (English, Spanish, Cantonese) is indeed a first-order reality, containing agreed-on and relatively fixed forms and meanings. Here, as indicated earlier, the impact of writing has been significant to a degree still not fully appreciated”

21    Against the idea of deducing authorial meaning and intentions from writing, with only a secondary attention to the specificities of the stream of written signs. Interactional salience is foremost in interpreting meaning: not recognized by generativist accounts of stored forms.

22    “The integrational revision proposes that language is, in many respects and circumstances, less rule governed and more creative and, in other circumstances, rule governed but less creative than the orthodox view allows.”… “it is arguable that what is chiefly needed is not a new methodology but rather a revised application of extant methods.”

As against the typical linguist, “the integrationist seeks above all an ‘inward’ account of language, as opposed to a detached, abstracted, and idealized one. In a discipline pervaded by models and representations, the integrational approach would have us distrust models and epresentations—at least to the extent of addressing the question whether what is modeled is truly the lay language user’s own understanding of the given phenomena" (—but this may entail ruling out the relevance of interaction among linguists as a real-life context- jagl).
   
23    “Integrational linguistics names a principle rather than a method, the principle that understanding language must entail considering how it is actually used and understood by language users….” Who are more creative than is usually conceded. “My preference is to retain, shorn of their more extravagant theoretical underpinnings, as much of a number of extant models as is possible.”

Emergent narrativity 
 

Irrealidad de lo Real

Me leía hoy una reseña sobre el último libro de Catherine Belsey, Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2005). Belsey hace un generoso uso de conceptos lacanianos, como lo Real opuesto a lo Simbólico, con una ligereza filosófica que pone nervioso al reseñista, el ateniense Nic Panagopoulos (European English Messenger 15.2, 2006). En realidad es Lacan el que le ataca los nervios—a él y a muchos más, y Nic P. le dedica algunos párrafos despiadados a su estilo egocéntrico y portentoso. Si los seminarios de Lacan (se supone) habían de formar a teorizadores y analistas, ¿por qué buscar un estilo más próximo al del síntoma analizable que a la claridad del análisis racional? Esta crítica ateniense a Lacan recuerda muchas otras críticas (especialmente británicas, y del TLS) a las mistificaciones lingüísticas y conceptuales de los postestructuralistas franceses en general:

"En otras palabras [traduzco], si la explicación es más oscura o incomprensible que lo que se está explicando, necesitamos una explicación de la explicación, etc. Además, Lacan escribe frecuentemente como si sus teorías o bien estuviesen bien establecidas o bien hubiesen de ser conocidas para su público de seminarios anteriores, cuando las está exponiendo por vez primera, o, aún peor, añadiendo una nueva complicación sin anunciarla. Como observa Belsey en relación con Freud, ’cuando el argumento no se sostiene, nos parece que ha de ser por culpa nuestra’ (158), pero bien podría decirse que esto es más aplicable a Lacan, que, para prevenir resistencias, a menudo hacía que sus seguidores se sintiesen como si no estuviesen lo bastante atentos o no hubiesen hecho los deberes." (80)

En suma, los conceptos y razonamientos de Lacan le parecen a Panagopoulos (y a muchos más) vagos, fluidos, intercambiables, cuando no tautológicos o indefinibles. Las generalizaciones sobre los fenómenos psíquicos o culturales a partir de unos poquitos elementos básicos —el Falo, el Nombre del Padre, el pequeño objeto a,etc.,—son drásticas, panorámicas; a veces parecemos asistir más bien al show de un ilusionista que tranforma unos objetos en otros o hace brotar chisteras en los conejos, en un juego donde sólo él pone las reglas. A Lacan se le perdona por ser un aventurero del pensamiento—muchos lacanianos, en cambio, no tienen este beneficio de la duda que dan la originalidad y el pensamiento en movimiento. Allí la niebla se ha fosilizado.

Quizá el beneficio y el perjuicio causado por Lacan hayan sido comparables. Por una parte, sus conceptos han sido muy influyentes, han sugerido  multitud de trabajos, analogías, aplicaciones. Por otra, este mismo poder de sugerencia se ha debido a su vaguedad o carácter vaporoso y arbitrario. Y muchas veces, además, esta vaguedad ha sido contagiosa: el lenguaje y razonamiento nebuloso de Lacan ha pasado como legado a lacanianos menos imponentes u originales, una alianza entre la oscuridad y la mediocridad que promete ser realmente aterradora. Sobre todo cuando además se hereda el tono despectivo e impaciente hacia quienes no conocen los arcanos de la Doctrina.

Panagopoulos, a modo de niño escéptico señalando el falo del Emperador, no le perdona a Belsey / Lacan la vaguedad del concepto de lo Real sobre el que se asienta la base teórica de Culture and the Real. Lo Real—dice Belsey—existe, no puede ignorarse o reducirse a lo Ideal con los instrumentos del idealismo (alemán, o de Baudrillard). Lo Real "no depende de la idea que yo tenga de ello". Asocia Belsey el idealismo a la irresponsabilidad social y a la defensa interesada de nuestro status quo privilegiado, aunque observa Panagopoulos que un argumento parecido podría desarrollarse sobre la base de un materialismo determinista como el que parece inspirar a Belsey. Por otra parte ese materialismo no deja de ser un constructo ideológico—etc. Por otra parte, a lo Real "no tenemos acceso"; "no podemos hacer incursiones cognitivas" en lo Real según Belsey.

Revierte el reseñista el argumento cuando acusa a Belsey no ya de idealismo, sino de metafísica mística inconsciente: el concepto—si tal puede llamársele—o hecho, de lo Real, escapando a las determinaciones culturales, conceptuales, se sitúa más allá de la frontera de nuestra experiencia, en una dimensión que (para Panagopoulos) pertenece más al discurso religioso que al racional: "for like God (or his postmodern version, Godot) the real can mean all things to all people" (81).  "De hecho, Dios y lo Real lacaniano no están tan distantes conceptualmente, pues la naturaleza de ambos puede deducirse sólo imperfectamente de sus efectos, en lugar de ser directamente aprehendida" (82). El sublime kantiano/zizekiano le parece a Belsey demasiado teológico y nebuloso—Viga en tu ojo, le dice Panagopoulos, pues lo Real que tú invocas sí que es inefable, incognoscible, impresentable diríamos. Hasta el noúmeno lacaniano es menos metafísico (en el mal sentido del término) pues por lo menos se presenta explícitamente como un concepto metafísico (en sentido propio y recto).

Podríamos decir que este "Real" lacaniano es sólo parte de la realidad entendida en sentido amplio. La realidad simbólica, o más bien el juego descrito por Lacan entre relaciones imaginarias y simbólicas, sería "en realidad" lo que solemos entender por realidad. Lo Real queda más allá. (Y si tenemos en cuenta que es un elemento conceptual de una teoría, se abren interesantes aporías, conceptos abymés y estropeados, vértigos in infinitum). Es más partidario Panagopoulos de ubicar (con Zizek) a lo Real como un espectro fantasmático pero no situado fuera del orden simbólico, pues de lo contrario no estaríamos hablando de ello. En cualquier caso, no deja de ser curioso (nos dice Panagopoulos) que elija Lacan el término "Real" para esta parte inasible e imperceptible de la realidad-en-sentido-amplio. "O bien está siguiendo a Kant demasiado de cerca al proponer algo más ’real’ de lo que puede aprehender el sujeto, o bien está volviendo nuestro universo conceptual patas arriba para confundirnos más" (82—qué mal pensado, aunque razones podrían aducirse... Sea como sea, a su entender Belsey no soluciona el problema creado por Lacan, sino que lo vuelve más inasible).

Según Lacan no podemos conocer nada fuera de nuestro universo simbólico, "nada ... que no tenga la estructura de un lenguaje", le cita Panagopoulos. Y a continuación reduce Panagopoulos al absurdo este Real que sin embargo hacía entrar Lacan por la puerta trasera, pues si (como decía Platón) lo que es plenamente (las Ideas para Platón) es plenamente cognoscible, y lo que no es es incognoscible.... "entonces, algo que es enteramente incognoscible es también inexistente" (Panagopoulos 82-83). O sea... lo Real, lo externo al lenguaje, a la representación, a los signos, no existe. (Algo así parecían deducir no sólo los fenomenólogos con su epokhé, sino también Berkeley con su inmaterialismo, y hoy en día los físicos cuánticos cuando relacionan la existencia del universo y su observabilidad).

Conclusión de Panagopoulos: "Si existe o no algo más allá del lenguaje es una cuestión indecidible, porque nunca podemos acceder a ello; para nosotros, no hay nada fuera del texto, o, por usar términos lacanianos, el sujeto de la cultura existe siempre en y a través del significante" (83).  

Pues vaya—digo yo—lo que parecía empezar como una crítica al panlinguisticismo postestructuralista resulta que al final cae en el mismo pecado, y además invocando los términos lacanianos....

Esto sucede por acudir de manera demasiado precipitada (algo que hacen también con frecuencia Lacan, Derrida y muchos de sus exégetas) a la generalización de "lo lingüístico" para referirse alegremente a todo tipo de semiosis. Así sí que se compran boletos para sufrir de panlinguisticismo, y para encerrarse en la "cárcel del lenguaje", etc.

Reduciendo a "lenguaje" toda semiosis, no sólo se falsifica la frontera entre lo semiótico y lo "real" (lo "no lingüístico") sino que se pierde de vista por completo qué pueda ser eso de lo real, porque se ha renunciado al instrumento que permitiría definirlo. Porque lo real es... siempre comparativamente real, o más o menos real, y hace falta un contraste entre tipos de semiosis para generar esos "efectos de Real", como podríamos llamarlos si reciclásemos a Lacan a través de Barthes.

Si ando por ahí en bicicleta diciendo, "mamá, mamá, sin manos; mamá, mamá, sin pies..." ese malabarismo lingüístico generador de lo Imaginario acaba topándose con lo Real, en forma de piñazo; ese Real no es que sea a-semiótico, pero sí necesito para definirlo el contraste entre la semiosis del equilibrio perfecto imaginado y la semiosis fisiológica, las sensaciones físicas producidas por el batacazo. Al igual que la verdad es un efecto de traducibilidad entre sistemas de sentido, y sólo puede definirse de modo relativo a la no-verdad, así también lo Real no es nunca una Realidad absoluta, "en sí", sino un efecto de relación o contraste entre efectos lingüístico-semióticos de distinta naturaleza. Si queremos tratar toda la semiosis en términos de lenguaje—o de psiquismo consciente—mal enfocaremos esta cuestión. Por esto mismo, no hay una magna entrada en lo Simbólico, o en el Lenguaje, en el Dominio del Padre, etc. etc., sino que estamos ya desde siempre en la cárcel del lenguaje ésa, sólo que no es una cárcel a no ser que el mundo (y no sólo Dinamarca) sea una cárcel, y sólo que no está hecha de lenguaje; el mundo no está hecho de lenguaje, aunque sí está hecho de semiosis.


 Epilogo sobre el 11-M y lo Real...

Tampoco cambió la historia el 11-S, ni el 11-M, aunque algunos hacedores de símbolos los quieran presentar como el inicio de un nuevo orden simbólico.

Belsey alude al 11-S (al 9/II digo) como la prueba del algodón de la existencia de lo Real—entendido como la intrusión de la realidad material en las construcciones del psiquismo. Como de costumbre, se crea aquí una alegorización, un desplazamiento que falsea los términos supuestamente esenciales que supuestamente se están representando con esta imagen. Para Belsey, esos emblemáticos aviones que impactaron en las torres gemelas "no eran un fragmento reprimido de nuestra propia psique sino, por el contrario, una violenta intrusión material del exterior" que "impugnaba la soberanía de las defensas de América y la fiabilidad de la inteligencia occidental" (60). —Lo que digo, ¡antes que materiales, parece más bien que estos aviones están hechos de carne de simbolismo! Cada cual los resimbolizará a su manera, parece claro. Lo hace Belsey, y lo hace a continuación su comentador Panagopoulos, cito y traduzco el fin de su reseña:

"Sin embargo, conforme emergen más y más hechos sobre lo que realmente sucedió en el día que esencialmente cambió la historia postmoderna, parece que fue éste en efecto la orquestación de un gran espectáculo mediático diseñado para conmocionar al pueblo norteamericano para que fuese a la guerra contra un enemigo esencialmente imaginario, y al hacerlo diese su consentimiento al sacrificio de miles de vidas inocentes, así como a la renuncia a sus libertades constitucionales y derechos humanos. Esos ’aviones’ (y el objeto que golpeó al Pentágono no parece siquiera caer dentro de esta categoría) en realidad vinieron de ’dentro’ del sistema: esta fue la razón por la que no se hizo nada para detenerlos, y no servicios de inteligencia defectuosos o una defensa civil inadecuada. Con la perspectiva del tiempo, la única cosa real sobre el 11-S es el coste que tiene en términos humanos el confiar a otros la definición de lo que significa ’real’."

Los paralelos entre el 11-S ese y el 11-M hispano no dejan de ser, como diría Freud, uncanny, aparte de obedecer a lógicas similares de la relación entre Occidente, el Islam, el Estado, el terrorismo y los servicios de inteligencia que circulan entre unos y otros con subcontratas, arriendos y deslocalizaciones. Reconocemos en las palabras de Panagopoulos la famosa teoría de la conspiración, que (al contrario de lo que sucede en España) es de izquierdas en tanto que se opone a la versión oficial de Bush—La similaridad es que  la teoría de la conspiración en España es de derechas en tanto que se opone a la versión oficial del gobierno. Creo que izquierdas y derechas quedan en esta cuestión un tanto neutralizadas en su esencia, pues la oposición entre unas y otras se subordina a los automatismos estructurales del sistema en su vigilancia del terrorismo ’desde dentro’.

Obsérvese que (a modo de Lacan apabullando con su retórica a sus oyentes) Panagopoulos presupone que hay una verdad del 11-S (o del 11-M, pongamos) y que él la conoce... —Que si bien los aviones no vienen de "fuera" del sistema, el observador / teorizador sí está "fuera" del sistema, y puede dar cuenta objetiva de los procesos "reales" que se oponen a la fantasía imaginaria que Bush & Co. quieren imponer al país. Del mismo modo, la teoría de la conspiración local del 11-M presupone que de dentro del sistema vienen los complots, atentados, confidentes, y matanzas de Leganés. (¿Serán esto maneras de rechazar la posibilidad de esas intrusiones de lo real en la imaginación, reprimirlas occidentalmente, a la manera en que dice Belsey?)

Estas explicaciones conspirativas son explicaciones que creen en planes: planes que se elaboran en secreto, y que tienen éxito. Golpes de estado calculados a distancia. Ahora bien, este observador de aquí cree que si bien conspiraciones hay, y abundantes, cualquier plan tan complejo fracasa. Y que hay que tener en cuenta lo imprevisto, que siempre se da, las reacciones imprevisibles, las colisiones de complots, las apropiaciones sobrevenidas, lo todavía imprevisto por quienes estamos pillados. La Realidad del 11-S, o del 11-M, es en estos momentos una entelequia; no hay un discurso unificado a un nivel básico aceptable para estos acontecimientos. Por tanto, en cierto modo, no son reales—ni las conspiraciones gubernamentales, ni las de los servicios de inteligencia, ni las de los islamistas, etarras, mineros y nacionalistas. Son constructos ideológicos con alto grado de evanescencia. Las muertes, sí, ésas no están sujetas a debate, son reales. Pero claro, son lo de menos en todo este asunto, por extraña que parezca esta realidad. Nos puede el simbolismo, y las representaciones claritas y bien ordenadas. La sentencia que salga del juicio, me parece, va a ser un modelo de claridad—un tribunal siempre proporciona una representación bien ordenada. Pero lo Real es desordenado, y no responde a un único lenguaje ni a una lógica de significación unificada.

Lectura lacaniana del 11-M

Ontologies of Information Retrieval

Me llega esta col forpeipas, que hago circular: ontología aplicada del information retrieval.

Dear colleagues,

The XII Conference on Information and Documentation Systems (IBERSID 2007, 1-4 October 2007, Zaragoza, Spain)
is open for contributions in English to the special meeting on "Ontologies for information retrieval" (3-4 October 2007). It is entitled: "Ontologies: principles and practice. A challenge and an opportunity for the information and knowledge professional communities".

Please, feel invited to submit either long, short papers, posters or proposals for workshops till 31 May 2007, and extend this invitation to other potentially interested colleagues and partners. Acceptance will be communicated on 4 June. Full papers are expected till the end of June.

The programme and conference information are available at http:// www.ibersid.org. The preliminary programmme for the special "Ontologies for information retrieval" meeting is available at:

http://cicic.unizar.es/ibersid_en/Ediciones/Ibersid2007/programaEN.htm

Best wishes,

Javier García Marco
Universidad de Zaragoza
Ibersid chair

Desde hace tiempo, cuando oigo "ontología" no puedo evitar pensar en "fenomenología" (¿qué ontología hay sin fenomenología?) y cuando oigo fenomenología no puedo evitar pensar en "semiótica" (¿qué fenomenología hay sin semiótica?) y cuando oigo semiótica últimamente se me va la cabeza hacia las tecnologías de manipulación de signos y señales... pero me falta savuag-feg tecnológico. Así que quizá vaya a escuchar todo lo más.

Linguistics and Persuasive Communication