*EDIT*
Turns out I read the wrong Eilola article... So the first half of this might not make much sense. Or, maybe it will be unexpectedly relevant. Who knows.
After reading Porter's article, reading the Johndan Johnson-Eilola chapter at first seemed like a natural progression and deepening of those same themes: Johnson-Eilola quotes Grossberg in theorizing that "meaning is not the text itself, but is the active product of the text's social articulation, of the web of connotations and codes into which it is inserted". But as cool as all this is, at some point in the conversation it felt like I broke out to the other side, as it were, and was right back to where I started from before even Porter's article.
Maybe it was because Johnson-Eilola deepened the meaning I had of intertext into a more foundational kind of truth, but in the end I had trouble differentiating the implications of such a theory from what most of us hold as the implications of traditional texts today. Intertext depends a lot on the absence of 'creation' or 'newness' and the embracing of reorganizing or combining. But if there is no new material, no true originality, it doesn't really matter because in every facet of our capitalist society, people still need to profit and individuals still need to tie their names to things. 'New combinations' are obviously synonymous with 'new creations', and the result of this entire theory is that nothing really changes, functionally, for any of us in the end at all. "Writing (is) a process of arrangement and connection rather than simply one of isolated creative utterance," says Johnson-Eilola, but after I got over my initial gosh-wow at the 'newness' of this idea, it seemed that despite all the controversy discussed in the article, the implications of such a statement aren't really so bold, and don't really mean much to anybody, when society obviously values fresh and intriguing combinations as much as anything definitively 'new'.
In this sense, Fisher's article actually felt to me the more mind-bending of the two: I loved his discussion of narrative, and, more specifically, the implications of his descriptions of 'Narrative probability' and 'narrative rationality'. To me, these two things seemed to define the real value we place on new combinations. Fisher's argument for our species as homo narrans rang true for me by taking what we've all heard about humankind as being a species rooted in stories and showing how it goes down to how we are built on language which in turn is built on the foundation of narrative.
This made a lot of sense to me, especially considering all our discussion of text as cross-references and linkages. But the core of narration gives these links and recombinations a sense of order. Narratives by definition can't be random: value comes from pushing the limits of the 'narrative probability' and 'narrative rationality' Fisher describes (i.e. 'recombining them') without breaking them (i.e. 'making something original but incomprehensible).
For example, if I say 'Improper west decade estate cybernetic allowable blasted enjoy herd,' then I am making connections that are, without a doubt, unique. But they lack value to us as a species because they don't bend toward a narrative. They're not something we can relate to. But if I say, "The moonlight was cold and sharp, like a silver fork dropped on the tiles", I'm making something that, by all accounts, should not actually make much more sense than the first sequence. But because its following a narrative building of images while simultaneously bending the limits of rationality and probability, it has meaning as well as at least some kind of value.
Yet this is all mostly reiterating what Fisher more or less says— where I took the greatest mind-warp was in thinking of stories (of entire 'texts') like people might normally think of single words.
Just as words are meaningless without stories or narratives to fit into and derive context from, stories themselves are meaningless without being able to fit into the larger patchwork of the Human Story—Porter's Intertext, if you will. We exist only in narratives; nothing exists out of context. Our stories and books and films become little more than syllables or words in the great woven fabric of the larger human story. When we build stories, we're not just borrowing words, we're borrowing scenes, emotions, qualities of light, symbols and archetypes and expectations that make up our real vocabulary, our narrative vocabulary, the things with which we build not words and sentences, but stories.
Johnson-Eilola quotes Reich and says "reality must be simplified so that it can be understood and manipulated in new ways." But reality can only be simplified so much before it isn't reality anymore. We need more than just words and letters to express the very real stories we feel and experience. We need other stories, literally pieces of the reality we wish to express, broken down and remingled and stitched back together— only to be ripped apart by our neighbors and remade as their own.
Turns out I read the wrong Eilola article... So the first half of this might not make much sense. Or, maybe it will be unexpectedly relevant. Who knows.
After reading Porter's article, reading the Johndan Johnson-Eilola chapter at first seemed like a natural progression and deepening of those same themes: Johnson-Eilola quotes Grossberg in theorizing that "meaning is not the text itself, but is the active product of the text's social articulation, of the web of connotations and codes into which it is inserted". But as cool as all this is, at some point in the conversation it felt like I broke out to the other side, as it were, and was right back to where I started from before even Porter's article.
 |
Maybe it was because Johnson-Eilola deepened the meaning I had of intertext into a more foundational kind of truth, but in the end I had trouble differentiating the implications of such a theory from what most of us hold as the implications of traditional texts today. Intertext depends a lot on the absence of 'creation' or 'newness' and the embracing of reorganizing or combining. But if there is no new material, no true originality, it doesn't really matter because in every facet of our capitalist society, people still need to profit and individuals still need to tie their names to things. 'New combinations' are obviously synonymous with 'new creations', and the result of this entire theory is that nothing really changes, functionally, for any of us in the end at all. "Writing (is) a process of arrangement and connection rather than simply one of isolated creative utterance," says Johnson-Eilola, but after I got over my initial gosh-wow at the 'newness' of this idea, it seemed that despite all the controversy discussed in the article, the implications of such a statement aren't really so bold, and don't really mean much to anybody, when society obviously values fresh and intriguing combinations as much as anything definitively 'new'.
In this sense, Fisher's article actually felt to me the more mind-bending of the two: I loved his discussion of narrative, and, more specifically, the implications of his descriptions of 'Narrative probability' and 'narrative rationality'. To me, these two things seemed to define the real value we place on new combinations. Fisher's argument for our species as homo narrans rang true for me by taking what we've all heard about humankind as being a species rooted in stories and showing how it goes down to how we are built on language which in turn is built on the foundation of narrative.
This made a lot of sense to me, especially considering all our discussion of text as cross-references and linkages. But the core of narration gives these links and recombinations a sense of order. Narratives by definition can't be random: value comes from pushing the limits of the 'narrative probability' and 'narrative rationality' Fisher describes (i.e. 'recombining them') without breaking them (i.e. 'making something original but incomprehensible).
For example, if I say 'Improper west decade estate cybernetic allowable blasted enjoy herd,' then I am making connections that are, without a doubt, unique. But they lack value to us as a species because they don't bend toward a narrative. They're not something we can relate to. But if I say, "The moonlight was cold and sharp, like a silver fork dropped on the tiles", I'm making something that, by all accounts, should not actually make much more sense than the first sequence. But because its following a narrative building of images while simultaneously bending the limits of rationality and probability, it has meaning as well as at least some kind of value.
Yet this is all mostly reiterating what Fisher more or less says— where I took the greatest mind-warp was in thinking of stories (of entire 'texts') like people might normally think of single words.
Just as words are meaningless without stories or narratives to fit into and derive context from, stories themselves are meaningless without being able to fit into the larger patchwork of the Human Story—Porter's Intertext, if you will. We exist only in narratives; nothing exists out of context. Our stories and books and films become little more than syllables or words in the great woven fabric of the larger human story. When we build stories, we're not just borrowing words, we're borrowing scenes, emotions, qualities of light, symbols and archetypes and expectations that make up our real vocabulary, our narrative vocabulary, the things with which we build not words and sentences, but stories.
 |
Johnson-Eilola quotes Reich and says "reality must be simplified so that it can be understood and manipulated in new ways." But reality can only be simplified so much before it isn't reality anymore. We need more than just words and letters to express the very real stories we feel and experience. We need other stories, literally pieces of the reality we wish to express, broken down and remingled and stitched back together— only to be ripped apart by our neighbors and remade as their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment