BERNEVAL

In a previous posting, Re-creased Readings, I asked if one could not “map construction onto technology, collaboration onto body and communication on mimesis” and now I am reminded of the three types of mimesis proposed by Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative. In that previous posting I let sprout a fragment:

building the tool, tending to the body, managing substitutions

Lots needs to be done to “mine” the alignment with Ricoeur…

In my view the building, tending and managing alignments turn on three stages of interpretation that Ricoeur calls mimesis1 (prefiguration of the field of action), mimesis2 (configuration of the field of action), and mimesis3 (refiguration of the field of action).

Mimesis3 concerns the integration of the imaginative or “fictive” perspective offered at the level of mimesis2 into actual, lived experience.

refiguration = managing substitutions = signification
tending to the body = configuration = communication
building the tool = prefiguration = interpretation

from Caged in our own signs: a book about semiotics by Kyong Liong Kim, I pull this out of context and contrast single meaning (communication) and multiple meaning (signification) and find a place for the work of interpretation – “We should heed the possibility that the same sign can be interpreted in many different ways by different interpreters.” (“interpretation is the key in signification because signification aims to evoke multiple meanings.”)

And so for day 719
01.12.2008

Diane Gossen in “Restitution: a way back to learning and understanding through self-respect” in Aboriginal Times (May June 2004) remarks

If you ask elders to comment on a community the worst thing they would say is that the people are having a hard time helping each other.

As a way of describing dynamics, it emphasizes collectively responsibility.

And so for day 717
29.11.2008

The spirit of Rabelais lives close by … I once signalled this passage to a colleague hinting at some parallels with Monique Wittig Les Guérillères.

The multinational Catholic army was in first-class shape. Those holy week preachers had the vigour of athletes. They wooed us little lesbians with their fatal frenzy: with snips of their scissors, tightenings of their nooses, hooks to the left eye, they made mincemeat of us. I was hamburger, tripes on the prie-dieu; there were only scraps of me left — bits of ears, nose, and mouth. With a final stroke of a plane over my skull, they scalped me of my imagination, just to hold it up to the redskins. The preachers leaked their homicidal gases. Was there any chance at all that one day the light would shine over this enormous ratatouille, this human meatball stew, this tender nursery of epileptic babies? One after another, we submitted to the outrage, the goosings, the aggression, the rape, the promise of resurrection.

Jovette Marchessault “A Lesbian Chronicle from Medieval Quebec” from Lesbian Triptych translated by Yvonne M. Klein (Toronto, Women’s Press, 1985)

And so for day 715
27.11.2008

The 2004 Nonesuch CD notes of the 2002 recording of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls reproduces a 2003 Atlantic Monthly essay by David Schiff which concludes thus:

In the months that followed the catastrophe, 9/11 became a source more of civic pride than of nationalism. The heroes were policemen and firemen, not soldiers; a mayor, not a president. The names read on television and the short biographies in the Times reminded New Yorkers of their diversity and their commonality. In Transmigration, Adams breaks down the divide between the high-bourgeois culture that created orchestras like the New York Philharmonic (and the repertory they play) in the nineteenth century and the mass culture that took its place in the twentieth. He has created a music that mirrors and exalts the public wisdom.

To learn more about the composition and the composer, visit www.earbox.com

And so for day 714
26.11.2008

In reading the mass of notes and musings that make up The Anti-Oedipus Papers by Félix Guattari, I come to a clearing where it begins to make sense (which is of course in Guattari’s world a way station and not a final destination). I think it is the comparative framework that gives this paragraph its coherence and cogency. He is contrasting two great linguists.

For Hjelmslev, there is no interpreted system, only interpretable systems. So there is always a possible opening, a passage from non-sense to meaning [sens]. There is never any closure back onto semantic or grammatical “normality.” And then there is Chomsky: the inherency, the realism of the state of a given language, the mechanism of engenderment, etc. What counts for Chomsky is for deep structures to rejoin real performances. And not for deep machines to produce non-sense, breaks and history.

In this translation by Kélina Gotman, I am particular taken by the implied syntagm: non-sense, breaks, history. It becomes almost possible to introduce a program: generate noise, cause disruption, alter history.

And so for day 712
24.11.2008