Some things that I've been thinking in class, and some things that I mentioned off-hand with a little more follow through, and some Merleau-Ponty (for the laughs, obviously).
Miniatures and Text:
I know that I brought up miniatures in class, but my notes just refuse to tell me why. Until I can learn to take better notes, I'll put down some things that I'm thinking about, and hope that the metonym will just make itself manifest by the sheer power of causality. I remember that we were talking about affect in artmaking, and the affect of puppets, most particularly the miniature, is an interesting one. According to Susan Stewart in her book On Longing, there are two ways in which we view the miniature. "First, the object in its perfect stasis nevertheless suggests use, implementation, and contextualization. And second, the representative quality of the miniature makes that contextualization an allusive one; the miniature becomes a stage on which we project, by means of association or intertextuality, a deliberately framed series of actions."
I started to feel like there must be an analogous relationship between theories of understanding the impact that puppets have on us and the way that we understand text. How does text point to a framed series of actions, or perhaps does it do the framing? What if we think of text like miniatures, nesting dolls of semiotic, intersubjective (intertextual?) and entirely reliant on their context in order to stand in for meaning? Maurice Merleau-Ponty would have something to say about that, maybe. In the essay that I was talking about in class, The Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence, he says that "[l]ike a charade, language is understood only through the interaction of signs, each of which, taken separately, is equivocal or banal, and makes sense only by being combined with the others." This is a more complex idea than the surface might seem, in the same sense that a miniature is a more complex representation than simply a tiny version of the real thing. We understand that language is not meaningful outside of context, but this observation of M.P.'s perhaps stretches our sense of context from merely the sentence to something quite larger. Also, he ask that "we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive-that it is, if you like, silence." So, in total what this suggests is that the constituent parts of language are meaningless AND ALSO, the whole is actually silence. That feels a little like pulling a rabbit out of a hat. In that I mean that I'm hoping that if I wave my arms around enough, you won't notice that there's a bunch of holes in the middle part right now I don't have a great solution to pull it all together, but I think it might be interesting to discuss.. Perhaps someone will do some nice magic in the middle there. More later that will hopefully pull this all together.
Oh, and germane to the conversation, tiny puppets with big puppeteers try to take on the Great War on a small scale...
Hotel Modern
If you want to read more on either of these:
On Longing by Susan Stewart
The Merleau-Ponty Reader
