I've decided to keep my religious musings off of this blog, and make it more geared toward literary theory, Critical Realism, etc. If you're interested in the religious stuff, however, I've been writing some notes on Facebook you might be interested in (you'll have to befriend me on Facebook in order to read them):
Critical Realism in Literary Theory, pt 1.5: Transcendent Semiosis
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This model I've been putting forth raises some questions. I can imagine someone accusing me of trying to bring about the death of meaning. This would be at once an overstatement and a misunderstanding. I thought of another analogy the other day which I find helpful. Think of a computer. It is designed by its "author" to perform a function, but that function is not realized until someone plugs it in, boots it up, and uses it. No one would point at a calculator and say "that plastic case contains calculation." Instead, you would say "that calculator can be used to calculate."But why insist on such a subtle distinction? As I said earlier, the various moments which comprise the act of reading require various disciplines to fully determine the [most efficient] function of a text. But I think there's an even more important payoff. Think of Biblical hermeneuticists, who devote time and energy into interpreting a text because they believe what God intends for humanity is encoded into this collection of words. By thinking in terms of semiosis rather than inherent meaning, they are forced to acknowledge that this decoding will always be ongoing. At least until people unplug the computer, or stop reading the Bible.
Consider what Umberto Eco says about hermeneutics:
The problem with the actual world is that, since the dawn of time, humans have been wondering whether there is a message and, if so, whether this message makes sense. With fictional universes, we know without a doubt that they do have a message and that an authorial entity stands behind them as creator, as well as within them as a set of reading instructions.So, if for Eco interpreting a text is an Ersatz for interpreting life itself, according to this model the meaning-making we engage in when we read a text is, in my opinion, more than just a substitution for the meaning-making we engage in as societies. Through semiosis, we as communities of readers cultivate our own ecology of meaning--something that is living rather than just in flux, something much more like the electrons pulsing through a computer than just the hard drive itself.
Thus, our quest for the model author is an Ersatz for that other quest, in the course of which the Image of the Father fades into the Fog of the Infinity, and we never stop wondering why there is something rather than nothing.
Critical Realism in Literary Theory, pt 1: Semiosis
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Labels:
critical realism,
literary theory,
semiosis
This is an expansion on my last post, in which I gloss over why I think Critical Realism (CR) should break into literary theory.
From my friend Greg, whose opinions matter to me greatly:
Just to be sure I'm accurately representing Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer's 2001 article "Critical Realism and Semiosis," let me make clear that what they prescribe is exactly what you suggest: that even-handed attention should be given to both the constantive (semiotic) and performative (extra-semiotic) functions of a text. I am going to differ with them, however, in suggesting that focusing on the constative (or denotative) function of a text reveals that we still believe that texts somehow hold meaning when no one is reading them. I'd like to debunk this notion. I don't believe that texts magically contain meaning within their margins. This misconception is similar to the misconception that people have about batteries, that somehow energy is coursing within the battery casing like a hamster on an exercise wheel.
In both cases (meaning in text and energy in battery), a process has been misidentified as an object. In the case of a battery, what one might mistake for "energy" is actually a process in which two chemicals interact with each other once the positive and negative terminals form a loop. This produces an electric current, which can then be used as energy. In the case of a text, a collection of signs lies there on the pages. Once read by a subject, the reading of each word sets off a kind of Pavlovian reflex in the mind of the reader, conjuring a meme that the reader associates with this word. This meme (or idea-gene) is shaped by the reader's experiences with those words (how the word has been used by others [social component] and how the word has been used successfully by the reader [human agency component]). Each of these memes are filtered through the reader's current mental/emotional milieu, and have a feedback effect, in which they in turn affect the reader's meme->word association and mental/emotional milieu. What I'm describing here is a series of events that form a process (semiosis, or the creation of meaning), not an object.
Critical Realism is helpful here, because it asserts that reality is comprised of objects (texts) that possess emergent powers (the power to catalyze semiosis in the mind of the reader) which interact to form processes (semiosis). But what does thinking in terms of semiosis instead of meaning buy us?
It helps debunk the idea that texts are a magical flagon of meaning to be poured out by English professors or theologians. Texts become more like a cultural artifact whose exhaustive study must also involve sociologists, historians, linguists, etc. I envision the text to be like a patient who interfaces with a wide variety of medical professionals (clerks, nurses, physicians, surgeons, x-ray technicians, anesthesiologists, etc). Except, instead of trying to cure the text of a disease (hermeneutics sees a text as a puzzle that needs solving, a patient that needs curing), the text becomes the cure--as a locus for interdisciplinary studies (involving all of the humanities). The text forces us to read humanity itself.
From my friend Greg, whose opinions matter to me greatly:
Can the solution to the hermeneutical fixation *solely* on the meaning of the text be legitimately compensated by an assertion that meaning is *not* found in words [as signs]? It seems to me that it would be much more reasonable given the problem to say that meaning is not *only* found in the semiotic function but also in the performative function of words (to say nothing of the author's subjectivity).
Just to be sure I'm accurately representing Fairclough, Jessop, and Sayer's 2001 article "Critical Realism and Semiosis," let me make clear that what they prescribe is exactly what you suggest: that even-handed attention should be given to both the constantive (semiotic) and performative (extra-semiotic) functions of a text. I am going to differ with them, however, in suggesting that focusing on the constative (or denotative) function of a text reveals that we still believe that texts somehow hold meaning when no one is reading them. I'd like to debunk this notion. I don't believe that texts magically contain meaning within their margins. This misconception is similar to the misconception that people have about batteries, that somehow energy is coursing within the battery casing like a hamster on an exercise wheel.
In both cases (meaning in text and energy in battery), a process has been misidentified as an object. In the case of a battery, what one might mistake for "energy" is actually a process in which two chemicals interact with each other once the positive and negative terminals form a loop. This produces an electric current, which can then be used as energy. In the case of a text, a collection of signs lies there on the pages. Once read by a subject, the reading of each word sets off a kind of Pavlovian reflex in the mind of the reader, conjuring a meme that the reader associates with this word. This meme (or idea-gene) is shaped by the reader's experiences with those words (how the word has been used by others [social component] and how the word has been used successfully by the reader [human agency component]). Each of these memes are filtered through the reader's current mental/emotional milieu, and have a feedback effect, in which they in turn affect the reader's meme->word association and mental/emotional milieu. What I'm describing here is a series of events that form a process (semiosis, or the creation of meaning), not an object.Critical Realism is helpful here, because it asserts that reality is comprised of objects (texts) that possess emergent powers (the power to catalyze semiosis in the mind of the reader) which interact to form processes (semiosis). But what does thinking in terms of semiosis instead of meaning buy us?
It helps debunk the idea that texts are a magical flagon of meaning to be poured out by English professors or theologians. Texts become more like a cultural artifact whose exhaustive study must also involve sociologists, historians, linguists, etc. I envision the text to be like a patient who interfaces with a wide variety of medical professionals (clerks, nurses, physicians, surgeons, x-ray technicians, anesthesiologists, etc). Except, instead of trying to cure the text of a disease (hermeneutics sees a text as a puzzle that needs solving, a patient that needs curing), the text becomes the cure--as a locus for interdisciplinary studies (involving all of the humanities). The text forces us to read humanity itself.
Critical Realism and Literary Theory
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I've been busy. I've been after the in-breaking of Critical Realism in literary theory. Here's why:
In 1975, Roy Bhaskar, a philosopher of science, published A Realist Theory of Science, in which he affirms fallibism (he acknowledges that knowledge is socially constructed and relativistic). He maintains, however, that there exists an objective reality quite independent of our knowledge of it, and that this reality is stratified, with layers of depth that subjective knowledge can penetrate while never reaching the bottom. After subsequent publications, and after breaking into the field of sociology, Bhaskar's theories became known as Critical Realism. I contend that Critical Realism should also break into literature in order to provide a counter to the post-postmodern condition in three ways: By resurrecting the human agent from her burial under socialization, by providing a model for coping with the arbitrariness of signs, and by providing a method for provisionally evaluating truth propositions.
Margaret Archer, a prominent Critical Realist sociologist, terms the subject buried under socialization Society's Being: "Society's Being thus impoverishes humanity, by subtracting from our human powers and accrediting all of them--selfhood, reflexivity, thought, memory, emotionality and belief--to society's discourse." And yet, Archer argues that “Society's being requires [a] sense of self in order for a social agent to know that social obligations pertain to her.” This self is what prioritizes between physical wellbeing, performative skill in the workplace, and social self-worth. The self is not subsumed by social identity; they are placed in a dialectical relationship. Archer would no doubt prescribe that we turn off the television long enough to spend some time thinking for ourselves instead of being blinded by a flood of images.
Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop, and Andrew Sayer have embarked on a project to integrate semiosis (the creation of meaning) into Critical Realism's account of social structure. They would argue that the arbitrary nature of signs has been so problematic because hermeneutics has focused solely on determining the meaning of a text. Their solution is to give even-handed attention to the effects of words by considering them more like chemicals in a complex reaction, to validate the extra-semiotic dimension of reading, and realize that meaning is not found in words but the subjects who read them. They would advise us to quit fixating on words as symbols which may or may not point to objects in the world, and to instead realize that words are more like events which take place in socially situated contexts.
Ruth Groff is a Critical Realist whose most recent monograph expounds upon a theory of truth which posits that propositions are true if and only if what they claim is actually the case. Because all knowledge is theory-laden and therefore fallible, propositions can never be said to be definitively true. Groff believes, however, that we can be reasonably justified in believing a proposition is true when any opposing propositions that can be falsified have been eliminated, when any remaining propositions wield less explanatory power, and when an interdisciplinary consensus has been reached that belief in a given proposition is justified. She might advise us to quit opting out of passing provisional judgment on things.
I recently presented this in the context of a paper at the South Central MLA.
In 1975, Roy Bhaskar, a philosopher of science, published A Realist Theory of Science, in which he affirms fallibism (he acknowledges that knowledge is socially constructed and relativistic). He maintains, however, that there exists an objective reality quite independent of our knowledge of it, and that this reality is stratified, with layers of depth that subjective knowledge can penetrate while never reaching the bottom. After subsequent publications, and after breaking into the field of sociology, Bhaskar's theories became known as Critical Realism. I contend that Critical Realism should also break into literature in order to provide a counter to the post-postmodern condition in three ways: By resurrecting the human agent from her burial under socialization, by providing a model for coping with the arbitrariness of signs, and by providing a method for provisionally evaluating truth propositions.
Margaret Archer, a prominent Critical Realist sociologist, terms the subject buried under socialization Society's Being: "Society's Being thus impoverishes humanity, by subtracting from our human powers and accrediting all of them--selfhood, reflexivity, thought, memory, emotionality and belief--to society's discourse." And yet, Archer argues that “Society's being requires [a] sense of self in order for a social agent to know that social obligations pertain to her.” This self is what prioritizes between physical wellbeing, performative skill in the workplace, and social self-worth. The self is not subsumed by social identity; they are placed in a dialectical relationship. Archer would no doubt prescribe that we turn off the television long enough to spend some time thinking for ourselves instead of being blinded by a flood of images.
Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop, and Andrew Sayer have embarked on a project to integrate semiosis (the creation of meaning) into Critical Realism's account of social structure. They would argue that the arbitrary nature of signs has been so problematic because hermeneutics has focused solely on determining the meaning of a text. Their solution is to give even-handed attention to the effects of words by considering them more like chemicals in a complex reaction, to validate the extra-semiotic dimension of reading, and realize that meaning is not found in words but the subjects who read them. They would advise us to quit fixating on words as symbols which may or may not point to objects in the world, and to instead realize that words are more like events which take place in socially situated contexts.
Ruth Groff is a Critical Realist whose most recent monograph expounds upon a theory of truth which posits that propositions are true if and only if what they claim is actually the case. Because all knowledge is theory-laden and therefore fallible, propositions can never be said to be definitively true. Groff believes, however, that we can be reasonably justified in believing a proposition is true when any opposing propositions that can be falsified have been eliminated, when any remaining propositions wield less explanatory power, and when an interdisciplinary consensus has been reached that belief in a given proposition is justified. She might advise us to quit opting out of passing provisional judgment on things.
I recently presented this in the context of a paper at the South Central MLA.
The Distance Between Law and Justice
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A friend of mine recently posted this about the recent Roman Polanski arrest. I know little about the case, and can say nothing intelligent about it. My friend's post, however, reminded me about Derrida's essay "Force of Law," which speaks of the fact that law can never equal justice.
If justice is a cosmic balancing scale upon which wrongs are righted, it's quite easy to see how law can never fulfill justice. Imagine a murderer who takes the life of another man. What caused the murder? The murderer? Yes. The older brother who tortured the murderer growing up? Yes. The murderer's father who abandoned his family? Yes. The mother who abused him? The mother's economic status? His teachers, his community, society as a whole with its violent television? Yes, yes, yes. All are complicit, all owe something on the scale of justice.
How could law ever calculate and accurately punish such a crime? The reality is that law is only enough of a deterrent to keep it from happening again. Only enough revenge to vindicate its victims. Only enough closure for society to bring resolution to the narrative of "justice" it has imposed upon a set of events -- a narration whose authors are trained in creating fiction (lawyers), whose audience is addicted to a happy ending (jurors).
But when the crime happens again, when the victims continue to lose sleep, and when society is still plagued by the narrative (consider the OJ Simpson case, for instance), we realize that the kind of retribution law dispenses has the propensity to leave behind ghosts with unfinished business: Justice.
If justice is a cosmic balancing scale upon which wrongs are righted, it's quite easy to see how law can never fulfill justice. Imagine a murderer who takes the life of another man. What caused the murder? The murderer? Yes. The older brother who tortured the murderer growing up? Yes. The murderer's father who abandoned his family? Yes. The mother who abused him? The mother's economic status? His teachers, his community, society as a whole with its violent television? Yes, yes, yes. All are complicit, all owe something on the scale of justice.
How could law ever calculate and accurately punish such a crime? The reality is that law is only enough of a deterrent to keep it from happening again. Only enough revenge to vindicate its victims. Only enough closure for society to bring resolution to the narrative of "justice" it has imposed upon a set of events -- a narration whose authors are trained in creating fiction (lawyers), whose audience is addicted to a happy ending (jurors).
But when the crime happens again, when the victims continue to lose sleep, and when society is still plagued by the narrative (consider the OJ Simpson case, for instance), we realize that the kind of retribution law dispenses has the propensity to leave behind ghosts with unfinished business: Justice.
Why I Go to Church
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My grandfather's last name is Paul, like the apostle. Sometimes names are like prophecies to be fulfilled. Like Princess Diana whose name is an anagram for "die in a car spin;" like the man who made off with billions of dollars whose last name is Madoff; like the woman whose name was Neda, which means "voice" in Farsi, whose death on YouTube made her the voice of the Iranian protest of the latest elections; my grandfather, whose last name is Paul, became a highly successful preacher, baptizing perhaps a thousand people into the Church of Christ, a denomination that used to have pretensions of not being a denomination, because it claimed to be the one true Church. My last name is Tarpley. As far as I can tell, this just means my family originated in the village of Tapeley in Devonshire. There are no prophecies for me.That my mother went to church, given who her father was, is no surprise. That she took me to church when I was young is also not surprising. What surprised us all was that my mother married my first step-father, who is the complete opposite of my grandfather in almost every way. My step-father was an anthropologist, a man with deep respect for every culture, every religion on the planet. And with so much respect in his heart, how could he hold one religion over any other? Instead, he showed reverence in every church, every temple. His religion was humanity, and I inherited this religion.
As a 14-year-old, I suffered the angst of any teenager, but I stacked on-top of this: anger over my mother's second divorce, culture-shock (I'd lived in Central America on and off for 5 years, and had to re-integrate into U.S. society as an awkward young man), and a growing resentment toward my grandfather's religion. Many of my fellow middle-schoolers were Christians, and I self-righteously asked them the following questions: Why believe in the mythology of the book of Genesis when the Big Bang and Evolution were enough to explain our existence? Where did Cain's wife come from? Why would God create us only to send the majority of us to Hell? Who would want Abraham as a father, when he was so willing to kill Isaac? Who would worship a God who asked Abraham to kill Isaac? Who would worship a God who commanded the Israelites to commit genocide on the peoples of "The Promised Land?" Out of all the people on the Earth, why did God appear only to the Israelites? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, why would he allow innocent people/animals to suffer?
Over the years, in order to refine my arguments, I read Skeptic Magazine. I purchased an anthology of atheist writings. I tried to understand Nietzsche. When I got my first computer, I read and posted on the alt.athiesm Usenet group. A friend and I attended the Bible club at middle-school in order to disrupt their meetings. Before Richard Dawkins ever mobilized his New Atheists, I was a militant young religion hater.
My anger and teenage rebellion boiled over the pot, and I spent a night in juvenile detention for setting a bonfire on a neighbor's driveway at 3:00AM. I failed the eighth grade. I looked at the wreck my anger had caused, and decided to calm down, to press pause for awhile. We moved to Tyler, Texas in order to be near my grandparents for various reasons, and in order to keep up appearances, we went to church. I hated every minute of it.
I hated every minute of it, until I befriended members of the youth group. As shallow as it sounds, I was thrilled to be around a group of people who thought I was unique because of my circumstances. I received attention, and soaked it up like a selfish sponge. Soon I was surprised by how much I cared for my newfound friends, how little I minded what they thought or believed. I became culturally indoctrinated into the church; I learned how to say the right things and act churchly. I think had the person I'd been six months before been watching me on video, he would've shaken his head and said I was being brainwashed. He might've been right: what's the difference between adapting to your environment and brainwashing?
Regardless of the amount of adaptation I underwent, at my core I remained highly skeptical. I still frequented the alt.atheism group. I still vastly preferred the sermons I heard on Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden albums to anything I was hearing from the pulpit. I was "playing church" and becoming quite good at it, but I was hypocritical at best.The skeptical, reasoning, rational part of me would love to say that I eventually worked out all of the problems I had with Christianity before becoming a true believer. The reality is that I was attacked from behind, I was snuck-up on, swept up, and irrevocably changed before I knew what hit me. The cliché idea of a "religious experience" embarrasses me. The idea of "finding Jesus," of being "born again" was hilarious to me before I became a Christian. What happened to me, however, was 100% emotional, and to borrow a line from one of my favorite movies ("Playing by Heart"), trying to write about what I felt is like trying to dance about architecture. But here's my feeble attempt.
The youth group had taken a bus to Nacogdoches, Texas in order to have a "retreat." For kids in a youth group, a retreat is an occasion to retreat from one's parents, to pretend for a number of days that one is an independent person. For me, it was a retreat from my bedroom, a full immersion into this churchly world I'd only been dangling my feet into. It was a Saturday night. The lights were switched off. The time was approximately 11:30PM. The youth minister and the counselors decided we'd all stay up and sing songs until midnight so that it would be Sunday morning, and we'd all take communion before going to bed. A caricature of church people sitting in a circle, holding hands, and singing "Kumbaya" exists in our culture. This doesn't approximates what it feels like to be surrounded by a group of people who have grown up singing a cappela, harmonizing at the top of their lungs. This is what I experienced that night, in the darkness. Inside, a great tidal wave of emotion broke loose. I felt ashamed of all the anger I'd felt. I felt silly for having mocked what these people believed with all their heart. I felt a question quietly presenting itself before me: Why? Why had I expended so much negative energy? Why couldn't I listen, why couldn't I truly consider what this first-century Jew had given his life for? What had he given his life for? Wasn't it love? Hadn't he stood up against the religious establishment and shouted that unless they were feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and helping the poor they were whitewashed tombs?
It felt as though there were a giant, cosmic question that up until that point I'd answered with a "no," and now I was answering with a maybe, with a half-hearted, sheepish whisper of "yes." Had I said "yes" to the existence of God, to the infallibility of the Bible, to the doctrinal stances of the church? I don't think so. I think I was saying yes to Love, and the best example I could find of this love was in Jesus Christ, a man whose story spans a mere four out of the sixty-six books in the protestant Biblical canon.
Since high-school I've had a love/hate relationship with my Church of Christ heritage. I've had moments of religious zeal (I was the president of my high school's Bible club, I went to a private Christian undergraduate institution, I've preached at congregations, I was a member of a mission team headed for Peru); I've had moments where I couldn't stand to step inside a church building. While I'm good at being churchly, I also use salty language, drink beer, and hold liberal political views. I love Jesus Christ; I hate right-wing, politically infused Christianity. I love the bride of Christ (the Church); I hate the fact that the churches in my heritage are (implicitly) racially segregated places where (explicitly) women can't hold anything resembling authority. I get tired of being disappointed, of watching while the "good news" of Jesus Christ is pushed aside by petty squabbling. I get tired of being hurt, of having to be tactful when I'm in church. So why do I go at all?To Learn
I've found that the majority of the questions I've struggled with have been picked apart for thousands of years by people who have devoted their lives to religious study. It is arrogant of me to assume I know all there is to know about these matters. Church is a lot like an Easter Egg hunt – sometimes the nuggets of wisdom are hidden deep in the grass, but once you find them, it's very sweet.
To Build Relationships
This can be the hardest, but most rewarding part about church. It's a lot like a family get-together. There are plenty of people in the room you don't like and have nothing in common with. For some reason, however, once you break that barrier and learn to love people you wouldn't have loved otherwise, you treasure those relationships deeply. It's proof that Love really can transcend.
To Recharge Spiritually
Spirituality is an ambiguous thing. Is it being in-tune with God? Is it simply stimulating a particular part of the brain? Both? I wouldn't presume to know. I just know that I've experienced it, and just like that feeling of healthiness and energy you get from working out, recharging spiritually is addictive.
To Further the Kingdom
Most people would read that title and think "evangelism." I'm not talking about converting people to Christianity. I'm talking about expanding the boundary of the place where the hungry are fed, the sick are healed, those who mourn are comforted, and the poor are provided for. These things are what characterize the Kingdom of God for me.
To Change the Church
If I want church to be less painful, I've got to work on changing it. I may be a single pebble on the road attempting to stop a runaway semi-truck. But if enough pebbles build a wall, maybe we'd have a chance?
Do you say "yes" to Love? If so, how does this look in your life?
Bon Voyage My Loves
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Marrying Eralda has been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I say that for many reasons, and one of those reasons is because, as a result, little Jack Tarpley has been brought into the world. I love the fact that Eralda is from Albania, and I adore her family back home. I just wish they didn't live across an ocean, on a distant continent.Tomorrow, Eralda and Jack will board an airplane and disappear from my everyday life for almost three weeks. The last time this happened, as many of my friends will attest, I went kind of crazy. Not good crazy, either. The kind of crazy that left me prostrate on the carpet letting a dog lick my face.
I'm going to try harder this time to keep busy, to keep myself surrounded with friends and constructive things to do. In anticipation of how much I'm going to miss my son, I took him to SFA's labyrinthine arboretum. I let him ride his bike, and I followed behind him on my 42" longboard (the closest thing to a surfboard you can ride on the asphalt). We rode until we were both sweaty and tired. At one point, as he was pumping his tiny legs on his pedals, Jack looked up at me and said, "Daddy? It's a beautiful day, daddy. It's a beautiful day." I don't know how I stayed on the longboard. I could barely answer him with a steady voice. "Yeah, buddy. It's a beautiful day."
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