I presented on this paper/chapter this past weekend, and since I had previously discussed it, and as the conclusion is going to change substantially, I thought I'd go ahead and share it, in the hope of getting some feedback.
"To treat the materiality of mediation seriously and with a greater specificity, which is also to attempt an understanding that there can be no concept of materiality sans the media that disseminate the concept proper, requires a transition from a more conventional logic of representation to a more ecological appreciation of mimesis as the scene of communication. It is in this scene, this theater, that meanings are produced, disseminated, and interpreted, and more so, it is this theater that determines, at least in part, the inventional and interpretive possibilities that admit this hermeneutic process. Sylviane Agacinski explains: “Media spaces, the current locales of democratic visibility, are again a matter of a theatrical structure, even if we are dealing with the screen. This structure organizes the 'production' of power as much as of public opinion. It is theatrical, essentially and not by accident, because for a people, it is a matter of seeing and hearing itself.” This is not a question of representation, in which critics read a text an artifact in order to understand that X signifies Y, but rather a question of mimesis, in which critics engage the artifact as an argument for what qualifies as the appropriate theater for the dissemination of reality. The power of the modern media networks rests in their ability to sell themselves as the proper space in which the public can see themselves seeing the world (this provides at least a reasonable explanation for the inane strategy by which Fox News repeats, ad nauseum, that its coverage is - 'fair and balanced' — it isn't a question of fooling anyone into thinking that Fox News is objective, but rather the act of inviting the conservative portion of the public to view themselves as fair and balanced).
Very briefly, by way of a closing remark, let me follow through on a suggestion already made. If I am asking that critics call into question a certain representational politics in their work, one that often justifies itself by affirming a political determination of materiality as something outside the text, let me suggest a renewal and enriching of mimesis as a potentially more productive endeavor. Mimesis, like so much of critical vocabulary, is a difficult target to lock down, especially because the meanings assigned to it vary radically through the course of history and the passing of time. Most conventionally understood as a more technical or originary term for imitation, “mimesis” in fact broaches a much broader theme, one that signifies the whole breadth of interactions with and determinations of presentation. This no doubt includes imitatio, but it does so because of a certain theatricality at work. In the primary orality of ancient Greece, one learned by imitating the rhythmic patterns embedded in the great epics and poems of the day. Speaking was thus inherently theatrical, since the discourse had to have a hook – much like contemporary pop music – if it was to be memorable. If the rhythmic intonations were easily imitated, through routinized movements of the body, pattern repetition, and the parsing regularities of inflection, then the task of memory was all the easier. Mimesis has many guises – imitation, repetition, similarity, surreality, even representation – but these guises are bound together by the virtual, theatrical particularities of their modality, the different ways in which the scene is set, in the case of each and every discursive act, through the material substrate that mediates its manifestation. Mimesis is, as Gebauer and Wulf note, “always concerned with a relational network of more than one person; the mimetic production of a symbolic world refers to other worlds and to their creators and draws other persons into one's own world.” It is within its capacity to create these worlds that we can determine the history of différance as (in part) a history of the media through which it is invented."
Thoughts? And while I'm self-citing, see also this related discussion of representation and criticism.
Comments (4)
Good stuff dude. Seems like you're going the route of "performative rhetorics," no? Not in the old Bob Ivie program, but in the new, post-foundationalist direction you're forging, along with Diane Davis (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~davis/) and others. Could we use the language of the perfomative or performance without stealing the claims of our colleagues in performance studies, or should we simpy join them? Regardless: Yay! I look forward to the chapter, which you may need to loan me before the book appears, cause I'm teachin' the haunting seminar in the fall and I need you "representin'" for the inside.
Posted by DJ Joshie Juice | November 23, 2005 9:15 AM
Posted on November 23, 2005 09:15
Ken,
I just saw your name on the Long Sunday contributor list, which I thought was very welcome, so I scooted over to your site for a look, and find this very interesting post, one that touches more than one of my "obsessions" involving mimesis. Are you familiar with Lacoue-Labarthe's texts on mimesis and techne?
Btw, even if this sounds weird from a stranger, congrats on Helena, and thanks for the pic. Hope you are getting some sleep.
Posted by Amie | November 26, 2005 8:51 PM
Posted on November 26, 2005 20:51
Thank you for the congrats, and yes, we're sleeping just fine. Or I should say that I'm sleeping quite well, given that I don't need to do any feeding, and mom is doing pretty well too, thanks to a generally very pleasant baby disposition. And thanks, should be fun over at Long Sunday, though I'll still primarily be here.
As for Lacoue-Labarthe, oh yes. L-L is one of the (sadly) hidden theory gems in my opinion, at least from what I've read (Typography, The Subject of Philosophy, Heidegger: Art and Politics, Retreating the Political (with Nancy)), and his work on mimetology informs a lot of my reading of mediation. He's a bit too textual for me given the expansiveness and heuristic potential of mimesis, but for me at least, I've been trying to work through a confluence of Derrida's hauntology, L-L's mimetology, and then some more material research on media ecology (McLuhan, Kittler, Hansen) and some alternate takes on mimesis, and at least in terms of speculative power, I'm finding this mix productive. In large part, because I think this provides a theoretical way to think the specificity of different mediations (oral mimesis vs written vs print vs. telegraphic, etc.) as being coincident with textual analysis, but who knows. This stuff informs a bunch of the dissertation, but I've not attempted to publish any of the theoretical work on it, as I'm not sure I've reached the stage where I'm ready to do that.
And you? I'd love to hear about your interest in Lacoue-Labarthe and perhaps some of your thoughts/work on the question of mimesis.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | November 27, 2005 7:29 AM
Posted on November 27, 2005 07:29
And Josh, wow, I'll admit I've never been much of one for the performative literature. I find that I often like performances very much, but have not been that fond of many of the pieces I've read dealing with the subject, or more specifically, not that fond of pieces that aren't about the theoretical underpinnings of the performative. This is no doubt a bit of aesthetic myopia on my part, and something I should learn to overcome. More reading to do - lol :)
Now that being said, I loved Breaking Up [at] Totality. I liked the font choices, I loved the use of Kundera, and if I thought some of the arguments chastising the monolith of reason were themselves a bit hyperbolic, I still loved the project. But it's also an interesting case, and one I talk about in the second preface of the dissertation very briefly (I know, I know, I wasn't happy with this setup either, but I had one preface about the substantive nature of the project, and one about the material nature of the project), in that the font changes, as interesting as they are during the first two chapters, were for me at least largely played out by the time I finished those. The adaptability of reading, I suppose, which of course links yours and Amie's comments, as this adaptability (which stems from repetition within a set of normative material structures) is precisely the mimetic faculty of print-reading. So the book serves as both a demonstration of how to break the mold and also a model of how the mold is instituted in the first place.
House of Leaves is worth talking about too, as I think it offers a more robust rupture, as is Ronell's Telephone Book, but each of those remain fundamentally constrained by their instantiation as books, and so they are still both ruptures that produce their own sutures.
I find myself torn, as a consequence, since I think that, as with most Derrideans, the form of reading is essential to the form of thinking, and yet, I find myself shying away from experiments in writing, at least within print media. It may be that I just haven't matured enough as an academic to be confident in making those sorts of gestures (which is, as I told Michael Hyde last weekend, also why I feel uncomfortable doing anything beyond analytico-descriptive work at this point).
Now, when it comes to electronic media, there I'm all about it. I no longer take notes on my computer with notepad, I use either a modified TiddlyWiki or WikidPad, I'm very conscious of the role that style and layout play in organizing white space within this blog, and I've experimented a decent amount with newer social software, and I integrate a lot of that into my teaching. But I have yet to really figure out how to do performative well, and so I just haven't done it. You know my work as well as anyone does, so if you have suggestions, Joshie Juice, I'll definitely take them.
Posted by Kenneth Rufo | November 27, 2005 7:44 AM
Posted on November 27, 2005 07:44