BERNEVAL

That’s page 130 in Touch by Gabriel Josipovici (Yale University Press, 1996)
—— and this is what I quoted:

The structure consists of a series of gestures in a certain order which satisfies.

The structure is never final. As soon as it has been completed satisfactorily it ceases to matter. The search for boundaries begins again. It will always begin again. Not as Sisyphus rolls his stone up the hill again and again, but as the sun rises each morning, as one breathes in and out and then in again and again.

Yet it is not as natural as breathing. Not even as natural as swimming or kicking a ball. For it is never possible to tell in advance where the boundaries will be or even if they exist.

There is no end to it. But ends no longer matter.

One thinks or imagines a mudra or a pose in ballet — that certain order that satisfies. And one realizes that all gesture is in flight. And translates. Aware of interdependence.

And so for day 881
12.05.2009

Mary Helen Kolisnyk’s interest in film theory prompted this description of my project in May ’95.

the new paradigm cannot be located in a single sensory modality. it’s more abstract. at least that is what i argue in my thesis. if the new like the old info environoments or virtual realities are interactive, then the question is one of translation between modalities and verbal semiotic systems, as Benveniste has taught, are very powerful metalanguages. i think non-verbal narrative structure ie. the casting, ordering and maniupulating of sequences, can best explain intersemiotic relations and cognitive processing accross sensory modalities without privileging sight or hearing or touch. I arrive at this position through a critique of the assumption in much occident epistemological and aesthetic discourse that the fundemental human unit of interaction is the dyad. you can imagine that psychoanalysis with the mother-child dyad gets a bit of a grilling but it is psychoanalysis and its theory of drives & body mapping [i’m thinking particularly of the work of Kaja Silverman] that offers a way out of stiffling duos & dichotomies.

more later

Amazing that some sense carries through in that long run on. I note that the “occident” trope got carried into the subtitle: Ideological dimensions of select twentieth-century occidental texts devoted to technology, perception and reproduction.

So many conversations, so many details.

And so for day 879
10.05.2009

Found another message to one of my treasured interlocutors. This to Bridget Keegan in September of 1994. Very interesting to see this stuff in its “primitive” form before it got worked up in Sense in the chapter on “Storing and Sorting“. It appears that the reference to Genette via Lodge was a stepping stone — never made it in the chapter’s discussion of memory work, body and narrative.

found the reference in lodge’s anthology p. 68

genette still makes a difference in kind between narrative and description. for him narrative and description are two different systems that one can study at a higher level of generality.

this has help me understand that my notion of description like that of narrative must also have a non-verbal set. i guess the notion that i hope to deploy is that of “notation”

both verbal descriptions and narratives can be phenomena that arise out of the general activity of notation. i know this sounds awfully abstract without the anthropological examples like Nancy Munn’s work on Walbiri iconographic systems. the example that i give is of teaching a child how to count. one sets down tracks, acoustic (the voicing of the names of the numbers), visual (good number teachers make eye contact with the child and then direct their gaze to the finger) and tactile (the actual touching of the fingers) my contention is that complex concepts and activity like predication arise in multisensory settings because the body is thinking or rather more of the body is used as a site to store information and hence is easier to recall. now what did all this have to do with literary theory????!!!

thank you thank you

And again thanks. After all these years.

And so for day 878
09.05.2009

Susan Sontag in “A note on novels and films” collected in Against Interpretation remarks

The cinema has its own methods and logic of representation, which one does not exhaust by saying that they are primarily visual. The cinema presents us with a new language, a way of talking about emotion through the direct experience of the language of faces and gestures. Nevertheless, there are useful analogies which may be drawn between the cinema and the novel — far more, it seems to me, than between the cinema and the theater. […] When the camera moves we move, when it remains still we are still. In a similar way the novel presents a selection of the thoughts and descriptions which are relevant to the writer’s conception, and we must follow these serially, as the author leads us; they are not spread out, as a background, for us to contemplate in the order we choose, as in painting or the theater.

Makes one think of the remote control as a camera. Rewind.

And so for day 872
03.05.2009