WHITE NOISE

I've posted a short review of Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS here, noting one of the more interesting philosophical observations:

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing.  But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as important as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

Perhaps because Robinson's characters exist in an era far removed from the twentieth century, they don't discuss in detail the archaic origin of their philosophical ideas. Indeed, Robinson has a little bit of fun with the idea of attribution, implying that over time scholars may simply get things wrong, as when one character calls modern literary critic Harold Bloom an "alchemist." However, Dent Ios's dual forms of knowledge may have been borrowed from a similar dualism propounded by Bertrand Russell in 1910: "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description." That said, Russell's duality seems to have been preceded, according to this Wikipedia entry, by similar formulations by at least three other philosophers: John Grote, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William James. I have no idea what if any indebtedness Russell might have to these predecessors, but James apparently reproduces Grote's categories exactly in James's 1890 book THE PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY:

There are two kinds of knowledge broadly and practically distinguishable: we may call them respectively knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about.

Now, most of these philosophers seem to be talking about how humans organize knowledge according to what James calls "perceptual" and "conceptual" knowledge. The characters of MEMORY, however, are not concerned with the way language encodes perceptions, but with the way that music, the least "linguistic" of the arts, does so. On the next page following Dent Ios's assertion, he adds that, "Music is a dynamic, polyphonic process, while writing is linear and static." This seems like an odd thing to say right after he's claimed that discursive knowledge is as important as that of acquaintance. The second statement seems to privilege the dynamism of the direct sense-experience, and to downgrade the "static" qualities of what Grote and James call "knowledge-about." In the 1941 book PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, Susanne Langer categorically downgrades music as against the more "assertive" arts:

 "[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

I would tend to agree with Langer more than with Robinson's characters. For exanople, although I agree that discursive knowledge is *primarily* linear, I don't think it is necessarily "static." Great philosophers-- and critics-- always combine the linear/horizontal logic of the discursive process with what I have called "vertical meaning." Such meaning is put forth roughly along the same lines that Levi-Strauss imagines myths being a combination of "harmonic" and "melodic" elements. Plato's TIMAEUS, in seeking to describe the perfect society already envisaged in THE REPUBLIC, does not depend purely on linear logic but finesses that logic with a mythic image from outside the immediate argument: the image of the city Atlantis, whose extinction signals a counter-example to the "perfect society" once represented by its contemporary opponent Athens. 

THE READING RHEUM: THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS (1985)

Knowledge by acquaintance is the direct apprehension of something through the senses-- the primary way of knowing. But discursive knowledge includes all that language does... discourse is as importance as acquaintance, even if it isn't primary-- the character "Dent Ios" in THE MEMORY OF WHITENESS.

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's MEMORY OF WHITENESS-- his second novel, I believe-- after forcing myself to plow through the first, ICEHENGE. While ICEHENGE was a tedious exercise in anthropological SF, MEMORY seems to be chock full of philosophical SF-elements that seem just like my cup of tea: concepts of language and music (as seen in the above quote), Romantic poetry (Shelley in particular), archaic myth, particularly that of Persian Mithraism, and even Epicurean ideas a la Lucretius. In terms of all of these elements, MEMORY is as rich as Herbert's DUNE.

However, Robinson doesn't manage to make any of the elements live, because the characters of MEMORY, like those of ICEHENGE, never grabbed me and made me feel like they were anything more than spokespersons for Robinson's thoughts. It's not entirely a matter of the skill of drawing characters. Robert Heinlein generally uses only a small handful of character-types, and no one would call him to be the equal of Dickens in terms of making fictional figures seem intensely real. Yet even in Heinlein's worst works, I've always felt that his characters are intensely involved in their own lives, whether in terms of preserving themselves from danger or just expatiating on their own philosophies. Thus, as rich as Robinson's concepts are, the characters are unable to make them "live." This may be, in part, because one of Robinson's themes is that time may be an illusion and that there is no "Becoming," only "Being." It may be that it's awfully hard for an author to make himself care about his own characters if he considers their arcs predestined.

ADDENDUM: Originally when I wrote this, I included the tag "high-mythicity fiction." However, on reconsideration, I think all of Robinson's concepts remain at the level of the purely didactic, with no room for the inventiveness of myth.   

THE LINE BETWEEN "FAIR" AND "GOOD"

I recently ran through all of the film-reviews I'd rated for "mythicity" on my film-blog for the past six years, and as I did I noted how many of them had received the rating of either "good" or "superior." Not surprisingly, there weren't a lot of these, and though I didn't amass totals for either "fair" or "poor," my overall impression is that the vast majority of my reviews got a "fair" rating.

When I started the "1001 myths" project in June 2015-- which took in a smattering of earlier blog-reviews-- the only specific statement I made regarding the level of mythicity in the stories selected was this paragraph:

Starting the week of June 28-July 4, I will start posting at least one review of a comic book that meets my criteria for being "mythic." I would like to do two, but that may not be realistic. It's also occurred to me that it might be instructive to post not only an analysis of a consummate "myth-comic," but also one of an *inconsummate* story. Such stories make good counter-examples, in that they will possess myth-elements-- as do all narratives, by virtue of being narratives-- but the story uses them poorly or not to their greatest potential. It might also serve to make clearer that I don't regard "mythic complexity" as some sort of rapture that descends upon the writer as from heaven. Some raptures result only in babbling, while others culminate in a poetry that transcends all the Babel-like confusions of language. 

There's clearly no "rating" associated with my idea of the "consummate 'myth-comic,'" so it's more than a little likely that on some level I associated it even with comics that were either "good" or "superior." I didn't stick with analyzing "null-myths" for very long, but clearly they compare pretty well with the rating of "poor mythicity," partly in line with my remark about "babbling" and partly in line with my formulation of why potentially mythic texts end up as mere null-myths.

...because of my realization that on occasions a given work may have symbolic potential, and yet does not use it because of some flaw in the execution, I've started utilizing "null-myth" as a label for all examples of "frustrated mythicity." Thus far all of the null-myths I've identified thus far have frustrated their potential due to one of two reasons. Either their authors UNDERTHINK the UNDERTHOUGHT-- that is, the authors show some realization of the power of myth-symbols on their own, but said authors use the symbols as if they were static functions, like Joyce's door... Or they OVERTHINK the OVERTHOUGHT, in that they impose some mental straight-jacket around the potentially free-flowing images and symbols. This might include phenomena as intellectually disparate as the over-intellectualizations of figures like Sim and Ditko, as well as instances where some editorial consideration overrides the free flow.-- MORE NULL-MYTH NOODLINGS.

 

So "null-myths" are works in which the mythic potential is "poor"-- but what works are merely "fair" (without yet even getting to the question of what "fair" itself means)? The simplest answer is that these would be the "near-myths" that I started formally identifying in this May 2016 essay, where I wrote:

I've defined a "null-myth" as a narrative that shows potential for mythicity / symbolic discourse but fails to articulate that potential to its best effect. In contrast, "a near-myth" is a part of a narrative that sustains a mythic kernel of meaning, but does not become unified into a fully-developed "underthought" throughout the narrative.

So, to answer my question as to what provides the line between "fair" and "good," it would seem to be the "unity of action" I described in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS.

I may use this line of thought to a lead-in to another question, regarding whether it's most beneficial to have a "unity" of idea between a work's overthought and underthought, or whether the two exist on essentially separate but intersecting mental planes, not unlike the interdependence of harmony and melody in music.

CONSUMMATING PASSIONS

"[Music] is a limited idiom, like an artificial language, only even less successful; for music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an unconsummated symbol.  Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression.  The actual function of meaning, which calls for permanent contents, is not fulfilled; for the assignment of one rather than another possible meaning to each form is never explicitly made."-- Susanne Langer, PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, p. 240.

Definition of CONSUMMATE


1: complete in every detail : perfect

2: extremely skilled and accomplished
3: of the highest degree

-- Merriam Webster online.

 In order to talk further about the question I've raised re: the nature of Jack Kirby's creativity, I find myself drawn back to Langer's use of this term, "unconsummated symbol," in order to suss out some of the different levels of expressive power found in his work.

My first approach with the brilliant philosopher Langer is, unfortunately, to correct her terminology.  On a minor note first, I would not call music itself a "symbolic form."  The philospher most associated with that term, under whom Langer studied in the 1930s, was Ernst Cassirer, and he tended to use the term "form" only for those large-scale phenomena of human culture that could not profitably reduce into one another, such as Art, Science, and Philosophy.  "Music," being a subdivision of Art, would be better considered as a "symbolic discourse."

Langer is entirely correct, however, that pure music, unalloyed with lyrics or other forms of artistic expression, has no "permanent contents," and that it expresses emotion but cannot assert thought as such, even to the extent that a wordless comics sequence may.  Yet her use of the term "unconsummated" is badly chosen because it suggests transience, as if music had not yet reached its consummation (devoutly to be wished, surely!) but that it might do so at some future date.

There is no official dictionary term for a state in which it is impossible for a person or thing to become "complete in every detail."  However, I experimented with the neologism "inconsummatable," and found that a few Internet sites had also used it to mean pretty much what I meant.  Thus it is proper to say that music is an "inconsummatable symbolic discourse," in that, *if* one accepts that Art should be capable of both articulation and assertion, expressiveness and expression, then music can never be "complete" in the sense that other art-forms can.  This takes absolutely nothing away from music, for it's a judgment that can only be made within the cited definition of art's completeness.  Viewing art as having this dual capacity for assertion and expressiveness makes for a convenient heuristic tool in terms of judging other forms of symbolic discourse which *do* have the capacity for consummation on both levels.

Now, dictionaries do recognize that the opposite of the adjectival "consummate" is "inconsummate," which means precisely the same as "unconsummated."  Both mean that a given object has not reached a state of completeness.

In earlier essays I've spoken in symbolic discourse in terms of *mythicity,* through which concept it's possible to detect differing degrees of symbolic complexity within a range of literary works.  This remains the cornerstone of my theory, but Langer's terms are useful for determining the processes behind the articulation of complexity. In this essay I formulated the term "null-myth" for a given element in a narrative that did not happen to be complex in a particular iteration, with the explicit statement that no such element was beyond a high-mythic transformation elsewhere. In yet another essay I conjoined my Frye-influenced theories of symbolic complexity with those of Philip Wheelwright, who employed the terms *plurisignative* and *monosignative* for differing levels of symbolic expression.



In a future essay I plan to develop distinctions between a *consummate* symbolic discourse and an *inconsummate* one, probably with reference to the work of Jack Kirby.

KANT STOPS THE MUSIC PT. 2

As indicated in Part 1 my principle interest in Kant's evaluation of music in his CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT is not so much to defend music as one of the fine arts, though I'll be referencing a later philosopher who mounted such a defense. My principle concern is with Kant's justification for giving music a low rating, in part because "it merely plays with sensations." (See PART 1 for the full quote.) Elitists often argue against modern popular fiction on the basis that it invokes nothing but base sensation, as against whatever "fine art" they may be advocating. This is at best a partial truth, but one that does not stand in light of a pluralist aesthetics.

One can't help but wonder how Immanual Kant could have viewed music as possessing no qualities of sublimity, given that his lifetime intersected those of both Bach and Mozart. It may have to do, as Susanne Langer suggests, with his over-valuation of "Reason" as the most important quality of mankind's essence. Though Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY does not address Kant's objections to music specifically, it seems likely that she read the JUDGMENT given that (1) as an academic discipline of post-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, she would have been expected to be familiar with Kant's major works, and (2) some of her own qualifications of music's powers seem to reflect those of Kant.

For instance, she admits that music's effects for its listeners seem transitory, even as Kant asserts. However, in keeping with her idea of the "gesture," on which I expounded here, she adds that music is more than just a play of sensations: that it is a "formulation and representation of emotions, moods, mental tensions and resolutions-- a 'logical picture' of sentient, responsive life, a source of insight, not a plea for sympathy." The idea that feelings might have had a logic of their own, apart from their ability to suggest concepts, does not seem to have loomed large in Kant. Langer imputes this logic to the connotations attached to images as well:

Images] are not only capable of connoting the things from which our sense-experience originally derived them... they also have an inalienable tendency to 'mean' things that have only a logical analogy to their primary meanings.-- Langer, NEW KEY, p. 145.

Langer admits that music is a "limited idiom" (p. 246). This resembles Kant's pronouncement that music "cannot bring about a product that serves the concepts of the understanding as an enduring vehicle, a vehicle which commends itself to these
very concepts, for furthering their union with sensibility" (Section 330). And Langer almost seems to be agreeing with Kant on music's low pecking-order among the fine arts when she says that "music at its highest, though clearly a symbolic form, is an 'unconsummated symbol.' Articulation is its life, but not assertion; expressiveness, not expression."

Yet clearly Langer disputes Kant's notion that music "merely plays with sensations" by saying that there is a logic behind its representation of emotions, and in its ability to evoke the meanings latent in emotional states:

"The assignment of meanings is a shifting, kaleidoscopic play, probably below the threshold of consciousness, certainly outside the pale of discursive thinking."

And later, quite in contrast to Kant's views on "understanding:"

"Because no assignment of meaning is conventional, none is permanent beyond the sound that passes; yet the brief association was a flash of understanding."

Though I've not referenced Langer's concept of the "unconsummated symbol" earlier here, I find in it an apt metaphor for the way symbolic forms operate in the fiction of thematic escapism. In popular fiction one often finds such archetypal symbolic forms as "overreaching power-seekers" or "deceptive femininity," but they have not been either brought into line with either Langer's "discursive thinking" or Kant's "sensibility." Thus such symbols, like those of presentational symbolism generally, operate "far below the level of speech."

On a side-note, it's odd that though Langer defends the "kaleidoscopic play" of musical symbols, in chapter 7 of KEY she is less than charitable toward what she terms "fairy-tales" as against the more serious myth-stories:

"For the fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, 'as a dream doth flatter.'" (p. 175)

Nevertheless, Langer's insight improves upon that of Kant, whose tendency is to regard the "free play" of emotions and associations as the cultural equivalent of lollygagging. But Kant's insights upon the sublime will prove more significant in further considerations of the nature of metaphenomenality.