Jan 2018 Flashcards
catachresis
The improper use of a word, or its misapplication. The financial pages of any newspaper abound with examples, e.g., ‘grow your business’, which misapplies an agricultural term. It can also mean the application of a word to a thing or action for which no proper word exists. For example, we ‘board’ trains and aeroplanes, but since these are both relatively recent inventions there was no pre-existing term to describe how one enters these machines so one was borrowed from seafaring. Similarly, catachresis can be a means of creating thought-provoking metaphors such as Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement that ‘truth is a woman’.
chronotope
Literally ‘time-place’, it denotes the intrinsic interconnection of these two dimensions, but also connotes an author’s specific attitude to the passing of time and the location of events in a narrative. The chronotope, according to its inventor Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, is a formally constitutive category of literature, which means that it is a feature of every piece of literature. In other words, literature cannot not have a chronotopic dimension, but this dimension may vary quite considerably from example to example. Variations in the formation of chronotopes can be used to specify genre, Bakhtin suggests. His extensive historical account of the development of different types of chronotope in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) offers a vivid illustration of the importance of this concept. As he shows, in classical Greek narratives the hero often spends years away from home, having adventure after adventure, all without ever aging and when he returns home his youthful bride is still as youthful as she ever was. The departure from the constrictions of biological time is necessary for the type of tale being told and its peculiar effects clearly depend on this departure too. Chronotope should not be confused with duration or setting, which are surface features. See also carnivalesque; heteroglossia; polyphony.
Further Reading:
K. Clark and M. Holquist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984).
M. Holquist Dialogism (2002).
D. Lodge, After Bakhtin (1990).
code
- In a famous and highly influential essay ‘The Television Discourse—Encoding and Decoding’ (1974) Stuart Hall used the notion of coding to map the different and potentially oppositional ways in which TV producers and consumers make and receive texts. Television producers may encode a text one way only to find that the audience decodes it in a completely different way (decoding in this sense is equivalent to Harold Bloom’s notion of creative misreading). Studies of fan culture, particularly the so-called slash versions of texts created by fans—that is, texts which appropriate characters from a popular show like Star Trek and write new stories in which they are made gay or bisexual—bear this out. Hall was particularly interested in trying to discern the ways in which the hegemonic viewpoint is embedded in texts in a natural-seeming fashion.
- In his late work S/Z (1970), translated as S/Z (1974), Roland Barthes attempted to classify all the different types of signifieds (see sign) to be found in a literary text according to five codes: the hermeneutic code (the posing of an enigma or riddle—the standard forms are: What has happened? What is going to happen?); the semic code (the multiple meanings or connotations specific words, phrases, and scenes may contain); the symbolic code (reversibility and transformation, the logic of dreams, fantasies, and the body); the proairetic code (code of action sequences, genres and tropes); and lastly the cultural code (the sum of tacit knowledge required to interpret a particular text, e.g., the stereotypes, proverbs and such like by which a culture gives itself particularity). The five codes are not mutually exclusive and it is possible (indeed almost impossible for it to be otherwise) for two or more codes to be present in the one place at the one time.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari deploy the notion of coding in L’Anti-Oedipe (1972), translated as Anti-Oedipus (1977), to analyse the way desire is captured and channelled by social institutions. Coding subordinates the individual to the collective. It takes both an actual and virtual form—tribal tattoos, scarification, and so forth which renders group identity visible, but also collective belief in higher powers such as totems, and gods. They specify three separate processes: coding (the installation and policing of belief), decoding (separation from specific codes, either by means desacralization or secularization—it does not mean interpretation, as in Hall’s use of the term), and overcoding (the super-inscription of new codes over old—for example, the celebration of Easter incorporates both Christian and Pagan elements).
community
See imagined community; inoperative community.
imagined community
Benedict Anderson’s definition of nation. In Imagined Communities (1983) Anderson argues that the nation is an imagined political community that is inherently limited in scope and sovereign in nature. It is imagined because the actuality of even the smallest nation exceeds what it is possible for a single person to know—one cannot know every person in a nation, just as one cannot know every aspect of its economy, geography, history, and so forth. But as Anderson is careful to point out (contra Ernest Gellner) imagined is not the same thing as false or fictionalized, it is rather the unselfconscious exercise of abstract thought.
The imagined community is limited because regardless of size it is never taken to be co-extensive with humanity itself—not even extreme ideologies such as Nazism, with its pretensions to world dominance, imagine this; in fact, as Giorgio Agamben has argued such ideologies tend to be premised on a generalization of an exception. Its borders are finite but elastic and permeable. The imagined community is sovereign because its legitimacy is not derived from divinity as kingship is—the nation is its own authority, it is founded in its own name, and it invents its own people which it deems citizens. The nation can be considered a community because it implies a deep horizontal comradeship which knits together all citizens irrespective of their class, colour, or race. According to Anderson, the crucial defining feature of this type of comradeship is the willingness on the part of its adherents to die for this community.
The nation as imagined community came into being after the dawning of the age of Enlightenment as both a response to and a consequence of secularization. It is the product of a profound change in the apprehension of the world, which Anderson specifies as a shift from sacred time to ‘homogeneous empty time’, a notion he borrows from Walter Benjamin. In sacred time, present and future are simultaneous. Because everything that occurs is ordained by God, the event is simultaneously something that has always been and something that was meant to be. In such a conception of time there is no possibility of a ‘meanwhile’, or uneventful event, that is a mode of time that is empty of meaning rather than full of portent. Secularization, however, gave prominence to empty time, the time of calendars, clocks, and markets, which is concerned with temporal coincidence rather than destiny and fulfilment. This mode of time is perfectly embodied by the newspaper which places in contiguity news of events that share only their temporality.
It was the establishment of print culture, firstly through the mechanical production of Bibles and then even more strongly through the distribution of newspapers, that was the most important causal factor in creating the cultural conditions needed for the idea of nation to become the political norm. Print had three effects according to Anderson: first, it cut across regional idiolects and dialects, creating a unified medium of exchange below the sacred language (Latin in Europe) and above the local vernacular; second, it gave language a fixity it didn’t previously have, and slowed down the rate of change so that there was far greater continuity between past and present; and thirdly it created languages of power by privileging those idiolects which were closest to the written form. Anderson’s emphasis on the print culture in all its forms, but particularly the newspaper and the novel, has been extremely stimulating for a number of scholars working in a wide variety of different disciplines. See also postcolonialism.
inoperative community
communauté désoeuvrée
A theory of community put forward by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy which rejects the idea that community can be produced through work. By inoperative (‘désoeuvrée’) Nancy does not mean dysfunctional or failing, but rather a spontaneous or ‘unworked’ inclination to come together that has no object or purpose other than itself. Community does not confer a higher purpose upon its constituents, Nancy claims. It does not, as religious, quasi-religious, and metaphysical philosophers argue (he has in mind Martin Heidegger, but one could also name Alain Badiou), transform humans from animals into men and women. The coming together is not motivated by individual desire or collective insecurity, but inheres in the human situation as a passion for sharing. This model of community is resolutely set in the present and Nancy explicitly rejects those models of community (particularly Marx-inspired models) that situate community as either a lost idyll or future ideal that can never be realized.
Further Reading:
J-L. Nancy La communauté désoeuvrée (1986) translated as The Inoperative Community (1991).
B. C. Hutchens Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (2005).
I. James The Fragmentary Demand (2006).
constellation
Walter Benjamin famously proposed in the ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ to Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977), that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. That is to say, ideas are no more present in the world than constellations actually exist in the heavens, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects. It also means ideas are not the same as concepts, nor can they be construed as the laws of concepts. Ideas do not give rise to knowledge about phenomena and phenomena cannot be used to measure their validity. This is not to say the constellation is purely subjective or all in our heads. The stars in the night sky are where they are regardless of how we look at them and there is something in how they are positioned above us that suggests the image we construct of them. But having said that, the names we use for constellations are embedded in history, tradition and myth. So the constellation is simultaneously subjective and objective in nature. It is not, however, a system, and this is its true significance for Benjamin, who rejects the notion that philosophy can be thought of as systemic, as though it were mathematical or scientific instead of discursive. Benjamin developed this notion further in his account of the arcades in 19th-century Paris. Theodor Adorno adopts and adapts constellation in his account of negative dialectics, transforming it into a model. The notion of constellation allows for a depiction of the relation between ideas that gives individual ideas their autonomy but does not thereby plunge them into a state of isolated anomie.
Further Reading:
F. Jameson Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990).
negative dialectics
A new form of dialectical thinking developed by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialektik (1966), translated as Negative Dialectics (1973), which many regard as his magnum opus. Written with the explicit aim of radicalizing western philosophy as a whole by generating a mode of what he termed non-identity thinking, Negative Dialectics offers a bold programme for an immanent and self-reflexive critique of philosophy rather than a specific concept. This programme can be understood as the attempt to resolve, though not once and for all, two different problems: first, if concepts are not identical with their objects then in a certain sense they are inadequate to the task of defining objects; second, if we are aware of this, but accept that philosophy has no other resource for understanding and defining objects except the concept, then we have to figure out how to create an adequate form of philosophy using means we know to be inadequate. Concepts cannot be identical with objects by definition. So this isn’t simply a problem of a poorly conceived concept that could be remedied by creating a better concept. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that both concepts and objects change over time. Thus, every concept has a history and is embedded within history. Adorno’s solution to this twofold problem is to build a critique of concepts into his critique of philosophy. Since this is a working with (rather than a resolving of) the fundamental problem of the inadequacy of concepts it is described as negative dialectics. That is to say, it is a restless form of thinking which does not proceed from, or expect to arrive at a transcendental or transcendent ground or principle. Negative dialectics directs philosophy to confront the interfaces between concepts, objects, ideas, and the material world.
Further Reading:
D. Held Introduction to Critical Theory (1980).
S. Jarvis Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998).
critical theory
- The term coined by Max Horkheimer in 1937 to describe the work of the Frankfurt School. Defined against the traditional conception of theory governing the sciences (including the social or human sciences such as sociology), which holds that it is a system of abstract (i.e. ahistorical, asubjective, and asocial) propositions which can be verified empirically, critical theory holds the opposite view, namely that theory is historical, subjective, and a part of society. Critical theory is in this regard a highly reflexive enterprise—it is never satisfied with asking what something means or how it works, it also has to ask what is at stake in asking such questions in the first place.
Indeed, critical theory takes self-reflexivity a step further and asks whether or not its objects of research are not artefacts of the theory. Recent work by critical theorists like Donna Harraway, who writes about the relationship between humans and animals, has shown the degree to which this concern is justified. For critical theorists, the idea that it is possible to derive ‘mind-independent’ concepts, that is, concepts that do not involve the subjectivity of the theorist in some way in either their conception or application, is both illusory and ideological. The attempt to separate concepts from their producers, gives rise to what Horkheimer scathingly referred to as instrumental reason. Thus critical theory is ultimately concerned with what it is possible to know, given that the ontological status of neither the subject nor the object of theory can be taken for granted.
The word ‘critical’ should thus be understood to mean, as it does in Immanuel Kant’s work, the opposite of ‘analytical’: it refers to the set of concepts whose reach is always and of necessity greater than their grasp. For example, we can neither see, hold, nor properly think something as vast as the universe, in its totality, yet without the concept of the universe we would be unable to situate ourselves in time and space. The same can be said of concepts like nation, society, community, politics, and so on, all of which are necessary for thinking about the state of the world, even though none are verifiable in a strictly scientific sense.
In general, critical theory explores the connections, overlaps, intersections, and interferences between the three spheres of economic development, psychic life, and culture. Its starting premise, derived in part from Karl Marx, but also inspired by Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, is that midway through the 19th century the world as a whole underwent a major transformation and entered a new period of history known as modernity. This entails three consequences: tradition cannot be used as a guide for thinking about either the present or the future; society has splintered into semi-autonomous sub-systems (e.g. the market, the various professions, industry), making it difficult but necessary to find ways of speaking of ‘the whole’; the good, the true, and the beautiful have been disaggregated, presenting new challenges to ethics, philosophy and aesthetics.
Under such conditions, critical theory is interested in why human society has (in its eyes) failed to live up to the promise of enlightenment and become what it is today, unequal, unjust, and largely uncaring. Witnesses to the barbarity of both the First and Second World Wars, the first generation of critical theorists can perhaps be forgiven for the bleakness of their outlook. - Today the term is also used to refer—very loosely, it has to be said—to any form of theorizing in the humanities and social sciences, even when this isn’t politically consistent with the outlook of the original Frankfurt School. This has tended to empty the term of any meaning and rendered both its political and methodological concerns invisible.
Further Reading:
S. Bronner Of Critical Theory and its Theorists (1994).
D. Couzens Hoy and T. McCarthy Critical Theory (1994).
P. Dews Logics of Disintegration (1987).
D. Frisby Fragments of Modernity (1985).
D. Held Introduction to Critical Theory (1980).
F. Rush (ed.)The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory (2004).
P. Stirk Critical Theory, Politics and Society (2000).
Web Link: http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/ A collection of resources, based in the Frankfurt School of thought, from many contemporary writers of and about critical theory, as well as links to other websites.
death-drive
Todestriebe
The tendency inherent in all organic things to return to an inorganic state. The concept is part of a dualism developed late in Sigmund Freud’s career consisting of two forces the life-drive (Lebenstriebe) and the death-drive, also known as Eros and Thanatos after the Greek Gods for love and death respectively, which exist in a state of equilibrium (for this reason Freud sometimes referred to it as the ‘Nirvana principle’). According to Freud, the death-drive manifests in the psyche as a tendency toward self-destruction, or more precisely the elimination of tension, which can also be turned outwards, whereby it becomes aggression. The idea of the death-drive originates, to some degree, with the concept of the compulsion to repeat, which refers to behaviour which cannot be explained by the concept of the pleasure principle. For example, it does not give us pleasure to dwell on a humiliating incident and yet very often we cannot seem to get it out of our head, we keep going over and over it. This being so, Freud reasoned there must be another drive at work besides Eros. Similarly, Freud could not conceive that ambivalence, or aggression, or melancholia could be derived from the pleasure principle either. The death-drive is a highly contested concept in psychoanalysis and there is no agreement as to its coherence or cogency. Jacques Lacan maintains the concept of the death-drive within his own schematization of the drives, but renders it part of every drive, thus undoing Freud’s dualistic conception of it. Gilles Deleuze rejects it out of hand as ridiculous, while Slavoj Žižek shows in countless works that it is a very useful concept for thinking through many of the inanities of consumer society. The death-drive, which Žižek visualizes as a kind of zombie-drive, is used to explain the empty satisfaction of consumerism, the fact that no matter how much we buy it never extinguishes the urge to buy more.
ostranenie
defamiliarization or estrangement
A central concept in Russian Formalism’s attempt to describe and define what constitutes literaturnost (literariness). A neologism, it implies two kinds of actions: making strange, and pushing aside. Consistent with this double meaning, the concept refers to the techniques writers use to transform ordinary language into poetic language, which for the Russian Formalists is language which induces a heightened state of perception. Habit, according to the Russian Formalists, is the enemy of art, therefore to produce art the writer has to force the reader outside of the usual patterns of perception by making the familiar appear strange or different. The principal theorist of this concept, Victor Shklovsky, uses a famous passage in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), where an opera is described as ‘painted cardboard and oddly dressed men and women who moved, spoke and sang strangely in a patch of blazing light’ to exemplify this concept. Basically what Tolstoy does, according to Shklovsky in Theory of Prose (1990), is view things out of context, or to put it another way he fails to see the thing that makes the actions he describes either meaningful or coherent and in this way he defamiliarizes them. In The Prison-House of Language (1972), Fredric Jameson enumerates three advantages of the concept of ostranenie: firstly, it enables literary theory itself to come into being by providing a way of distinguishing its object—namely, poetic language; secondly, it enables a hierarchy to be established within works and between works (i.e. more or less defamiliarizing); thirdly, it generates a new way of thinking literary history in terms of ruptures and breaks rather than continuities and influences. The problem with this concept, however, is that it is psychological rather than purely textual, inasmuch as it is premised on the deadened senses of the reader being awakened by clever writing rather than something specific to the writing itself. Obviously, too, this process suffers from the logic of diminishing returns—what was shocking yesterday is all too familiar today, thus demanding an ever greater level of shock to achieve a decreasingly small level of shock value (this, as many commentators have observed, is the problem contemporary non-representational art also faces). See also cognitive estrangement; estrangement-effect.
Further Reading:
T. Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (1979).
V. Erlich Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine (1955).
