ps Christopher
I get this word 'essentialism' aired in my vicinity now and then. Oddly, one
or two others, whose 'positions' appear akin to mine occasionally receive
the same warning word. Whatever ever that 'position' is.
I find it most curious: the word, as employed, has a certain Olympian air to
my senses. Or perhaps I'm responding to a certain prevailing tone of debate,
I don't know, I'm too preoccupied contingently to tell. Existentially, as it
were.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Walker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 1:58 AM
Subject: Re: authorships (2)
<snip>
what I was thinking of was something like a hypothetical poet, lets call her
Sheila Ramsbottom, from Oldham, who say has never showed her poems to
anyone, but they are brilliant [David B]
both [Mac Low] and Cage were at times seen as advocates for a Buddhist
writing without ego, through chance. [cris c]
<snip>
Might one compare Ms Ramsbottom's predicament with that of John Searle, a
philosopher, who sat (during his 1980 argument against Strong AI) in a
Chinese Room supplied with linguistic rules and a set of Chinese characters
and produced (for those outside the room) a series of apparently 'Chinese'
answers to various 'Chinese' questions?
If one substitutes an analogous room that has been equipped with the rules
of poetry (whatever they might be) and its tokens, the parallels should be
clear. Searle produces Poetry, but without understanding what that is;
Ramsbottom's poems are 'brilliant' but without any readers by whom
'brilliance' can be judged. In each case, there is an unacknowledged
essentialism: *understanding* is a quale, entirely subjective, in the
adapted Searle hypothesis. In David B's hypothesis, quality or value is a
sort of social quale: without an audience (or Ramsbottom's self belief) it
simply disappears. And Searle-in-the-room operates, apparently, without
extraneous experience. Just as Ramsbottom seems to operates without any
friends.
The differences, though, are instructive. Without 'brilliant' as its
starting premise, David's model is pretty threadbare. The adapted Searle
hypothesis, on the other hand, is oversupplied with suppositions, of varying
plausibility: that *poetry* is not purely a social formation, for example,
that it is a sort of *langue* (Jakobson would have agreed), that it is
essentially interactive (poems are sent into Searle through the letterbox to
which _his_ 'poems' constitute responses), that there is a distinction
between syntax (or perhaps a series of algorithms) on the one hand and
symbolic operands, on the other - between the rules and the characters (or
tokens), in other words.
For Searle, the hypothesis that those outside the Room would be unable to
distinguish between a Chinese speaker (or a poet) and someone who didn't
know Chinese (or who wasn't really a poet after all) was merely a means to
an end: it seemed to support the contention (I put this crudely) that
machines were not (and could not be) intelligent because they lacked
*understanding*. *Understanding* was foregrounded, in other words, but
remained unexamined.
Once essentialist *understanding* is abandoned as an unnecessary term,
however, it is *meaning* that is foregrounded, and with the very strong
implication that *meaning* may boil down to simulation. Which is certainly
the view taken by some semanticists (and overlaps, I think, with Veronica
Forrest-Thomson's notion of *poetic artifice*). Thus the Chinese (or the
poetry) uttered by Searle-in-the-room has validity precisely _because it
resembles_ something with validity - rather as the infant's reaching for
something (to take Vygotsky's example) has the meaning of pointing imposed
on it by the adult and so _acquires_ that meaning.
Ramsbottom's poetry, to continue David's model, in a direction he didn't
intend, acquires 'brilliance' only when it is treated as such by other
people.
This is important, I think. The *open text* (for which it offers, in
effect, a philosophical underpinning) resists identification and fixing,
'reduction and commodification'. We know this, because Lyn Hejinian told us
so. And it is more or less the point at which I started on my previous
excursus. It's also, I think, a part of what informs both Cage and Jackson
Mac Low, with Mac Low probing the nature of the algorithm and Cage exploring
strategies of egolessness and non intentionality (or lack of
*understanding*, in my terms). Which is, of course, a rather crude
characterisation of these two different, and complex figures.
Foregrounding meaning, also points up quite starkly one of the standard
dilemmas of the author-text-reader triangle: where does *meaning* lie? The
texts produced by Searle-in-the-room have no authorial meaning, because
Searle (Cageanly) has distanced himself from his own intentions. To allow
the texts to have meaning on the one hand whilst ignoring both the author
_and_ the reader, on the other, would be very extreme indeed: a sort of
Wahabite essentialism. And yet to give up everything to the
readers-outside-the-room would be to license a sort of feral solipsism.
The (post) Vygotskyan view, I rather think, would be that meaning is
collective rather than 'owned', that it is perfectly possible to work within
a cognitive system without fully understanding it and that texts are a
cognitive artefact: that is, they mediate between participants in such
systems.
Some time back, Robin referred to what he called nostalgia for 'a
pre-individuated prelapsarian stage -- if we can't be anonymous, let's
fracture identity'. My own view, FWIW, would be that the road from anonymity
to individuation isn't necessarily a one way street, that cultural
transmission is more a matter of intertextuality than of copyright and that
(as I tried to suggest in what I said before about Presley and 'the blues')
purely individual creativity may be distinctly moot.
Just the last of some unformed thoughts.
Christopher Walker
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