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Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Notes
Notes to Preface
1. The term "effective" does not quite capture the German term wirkliche. Nothing in English quite can. We may therefore need a better term to approximate the combined senses of "working," "practical," "everyday," "actual," "mutable" and "plastic," along with the idea of "serviceability"; but one which does not (as does "effective") appear causalist. A further matter of terminology: I use the noun "semiosis" and the adjective "semiosic" for what is analyzed, and reserve the noun "semiotics" and the adjective "semiotic" for the discipline(s) which do that analysis.
2. Foucault, "Politics," 14.
3. See, for example, Bennett, "Foreword."
4. Quoted in Gadet, Saussure, 19.
5. de Saussure, Cours.
6. Though there is still a question as to whether Saussure's late concern with anagrams might be one instance of the picturesque. See Starobinski, Words.
7. In particular, I'm thinking of the work of Michael Halliday and post-Hallidayan versions of social semiotics. See for example, Hodge and Kress, Social Semiotics.
8. Nietzsche, Basic Writings, 381.
9. Chambers gives the following definition of "paralogia": "impairment of reasoning power characterized by difficulty in expressing logical ideas in speech."
10. Foucault, Histoire, 7-8. This translation by Betsy Wing; quoted in Eribon, Foucault, 124.
11. Garfinkel, Studies.
12. Rhees, "Private Language," 268.
13. This is a feature of them which I was completely unaware of until Bob Hodge pointed it out to me.
Notes to Chapter 1
1. The early Marx refers to consciousness as the fundamentally human property which marks this inheritance. See Marx, "Extract," 51.
2. Here I am not questioning Derrida's uses of the idea that there is nothing outside of the text ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte") so much as those of some of his interpreters. See Derrida, Grammatology, 158-159.
3. See Gleick, Chaos, 27.
4. The term "fixed laws" (lois fixes) is from Taine's positivist philosophy of art and literature. See Taine, Philosophie, 47.
5. In a lecture broadcast on the ABC's Science Show, Gould illustrated this by relating Mark Twain's moral tale which goes roughly as follows: at the top of the Eiffel Tower, there is a layer of paint one-tenth-of-an-inch thick. Everyone knows, of course, that the rest of the structure was built in order to make this layer possible!
6. Foucault, "Questions," 6.
7. Derrida, "Structure, Sign."
8. Foucault, "Questions," 6-7.
9. Foucault writes: "A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre - a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world view, an overall shape; a general history, on the contrary, would deploy the space of a dispersion." Archaeology, 10.
10. Or to invoke Harvey Sacks's notion of a "sequence grammar," history may be more like a conversation - something with rules, to be sure, but not the sorts of rules which will utterly predict the exact contents of the next turn. See Sacks, Aspects.
11. Derrida, Signéponge.
12. Wittgenstein, Investigations, para 38.
13. Horgan, "Profile," 17.
14. Gleick, Chaos, 24.
15. Nietzsche, Use and Abuse, 8.
16. See Winspur, "Wittgenstein's Semiotic."
17. Monk, Wittgenstein, 322. Monk's source is Wittgenstein, Lectures, 97.
18. Wittgenstein, Lectures, 98.
19. Wittgenstein, Grammar, 130 and 131.
20. Wittgenstein, Grammar, 86-87.
21. Wittgenstein, Grammar, 87.
22. See, for example, Hodge and Kress, Social Semiotics. Or, in a more traditional vein, Barthes, Image Music Text. For a recent and radical revaluation of the relations between visual and verbal production (and analysis), see Maras, "Hermeneutics."
23. See Coward and Ellis, Language.
Notes to Chapter 2
1. See Derrida, "Parergon," in Truth, 15-147. Derrida makes the following observation which is highly pertinent to the centrality of the parergon for effective semiotics: "No 'theory,' no 'practice,' no 'theoretic practice' can intervene effectively [effectivement] in this field if it does not weigh up and bear on the frame, which is the decisive structure of what is at stake, at the invisible limit to (between) the interiority of meaning (put under shelter [mise à l'abri] by the whole hermeneuticist, semioticist, phenomenologicalist, and formalist tradition) and (to) all the empiricisms [empirismes] of the extrinsic which, incapable of either seeing or reading, miss the question completely." Truth, 61, with added terms from Derrida, Vérité, 71.
2. Barthes, Camera Lucida.
3. See Jayyusi, "Reflexive Nexus."
4. Jacques Derrida, "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology," in Writing, 154-168.
5. For a further discussion see Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language Counter-memory, 139-164; and Hassan, "Pluralism."
6. Tagg, "Power." Revised in Tagg, Burden, 66-102.
7. On the connections between these factors, see Hunter "Culture, Bureaucracy." On the relations between these historical changes and photography, see Donald, "Beacons."
8. Sanders, "Notes."
9. This is by no means to deny the massive contribution of 19th century women photographers. As with other social practices and labor formations, it is only to say that there is an implicit set of gender expectations governing 19th century notions of who was to take photographs and who was to be taken by them.
10. Wittgenstein, Investigations, 178e. See also, his Culture, 49e.
11. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 4.
12. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 4.
13. Wagner and Lloyd report that by 1905 Barnardo's had 8,000 children in Homes, 4,000 boarded out and had sent 18,000 to Canada and Australia. Camera, 6.
14. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 14.
15. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 11.
16. See Tagg, "Power," and Donald, "Beacons."
17. Hacking, "History of Statistics," and "Biopower."
18. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
19. T.J. Barnardo, quoted in Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 14. See Tagg, "Power," 43-44, and Donald, "Beacons," 235.
20. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 39.
21. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 5.
22. Indeed, there were a number of charges laid against Barnardo during the late 1870s. Among these were that he ran his charity for personal monetary advantage; that he consorted with women of dubious moral virtue (the "Mrs Johnson" affair); that he was not legally entitled to call himself "Doctor" and had forged an entitling letter from the University of Giessen (though he was later admitted as an FRCS in 1879); that he was the author of the "Clerical Junius" letters criticizing George Reynolds and Frederick Charrington, Barnardo's main critics; that he used faked photographs to "prove" the effectivity of his work; that his missions extended to both the "deserving" and the "undeserving" poor and thus encouraged mendicancy and subverted the Poor Laws; that he was guilty of cruelty and neglect towards the children in his homes. The nearest I have been able to get to the detail is chapters 8 and 9 of Wagner, Barnardo, 21-155.
23. The Rev. George Reynolds, charges against Barnardo, in Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 12.
24. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 5 and 14.
25. T.J. Barnardo, in Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 14.
26. John Lee, personal communication. John offered these comments to me following a presentation of an earlier form of this chapter at the University of Manchester in September 1989.
27. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 20.
28. Charity card verso, c1874, reproduced in Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 21.
29. See Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics.
30. If literary history is any guide in this matter, it would seem that the problem of the orphan is a specifically 19th century one. This is not to say that there were no fictional orphans before the 19th century. Instead - and Moll Flanders and Tom Jones are paradigm cases - the foundling (rather than the orphan as such) was a positive central character who was cast as the person without connections or obligations and who was therefore free to make himself or herself through enterprising actions. By the 19th century, orphans are rarely central characters. The novel, by then, is much more centered on the family - though, to be sure, it often focuses on figures who are out of line with their family situations. The orphan, when he or she does appear, then, is cast outside the normal structures, to be pitied, to be an object of charity. The orphan, by the 19th century, that is, becomes a problem which demands local solutions. Barnardo simply institutionalized those solutions by creating the Homes and their manifold technologies. None of this would have been possible a century earlier.
31. Proust, A Search, 29.
32. Proust, A Search, 6.
33. Proust, A Search, 41 and 46-47.
34. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 15.
35. Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 16.
36. Indeed there is a deeply striking resemblance between Sarah and the gamine figure used as the logo for the popular 1990s stage play, Les Misérables.
37. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.
38. Berger, Ways, 118.
39. On the highly paradoxical position of history in "postmodern" thinking, see Frow, What Was.
40. Eagleton, "Capitalism," 67.
41. Huyssen, "The Search," 35.
42. Hutcheon, "Beginning," 14.
43. Williamson, Authorship.
Notes to Chapter 3
1. Natanson, "History as a Finite Province of Meaning" in Literature, 172.
2. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 18.
3. Greenblatt, "Towards a Poetics."
4. One anti-essentialist treatment of the idea of a cultural object is Hatch, "Analysis."
5. And indeed, some "conservative" critics of American English studies have almost completely conflated Cultural Studies with the "New Historicism." See, for example, Schwarz, "Review Essay".
6. See Hunter, "Learning." Hunter has shown how the CCCS critique of normative aesthetics shares many of its features in terms of the technologies for producing certain kinds of historical subjects. His argument needs to be looked at in detail in conjunction with the present remarks.
7. Emmison and McHoul, "Drawing."
8. Williams, "Base and Superstructure."
9. Hall, "The Toad in the Garden," 46.
10. By this I mean, of course, a quack remedy; but on a strictly etymological reading, "nostrum" could also remind us of Cultural Studies' (as opposed to anthropology's) avowed attempt to explicate "our own" culture.
11. Grant and Reeve, Observations, quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 452.
12. Stratton, "Sociology."
13. Kuhn, Structure; Latour, Science in Action.
14. Fabian, Time. Unlike me, however, Fabian is critical of anthropology's non-coevalist version of its "object" communities.
15. Derrida, Spectres.
16. Nancy, "Finite History," 150.
17. Nancy, "Finite History", 149; my italics.
18. See also Pratt, "Linguistic Utopias" and Anderson Communities.
19. Nancy, "Finite History", 149.
20. Nancy, "Finite History", 162.
21. Remarks by Harold Garfinkel in Hill and Crittenden, Proceedings, 119 and 121.
22. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 403.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. Part of my thinking in this case has been guided by Anne Freadman's concept of not-statements. See Freadman, "Untitled," 79 and 77.
2. To use Foucault's term, the adoption of attitudes towards oneself is properly the domain of ethics. See Foucault Care of the Self.
3. Vico, New Science, 137.
4. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 18. Note that while I want to locate signs' internal relations in the space of coscienza - of particularity - this does not mean that their external relations will be relations-in-general and therefore available to scienza. They too will be material particulars.
5. On this question, see Derrida, "Some Statements," and see especially pages 74-76 on the use/mention distinction as it is used in speech-act theory.
6. See Schutz, Collected Papers 1.
7. I would like to thank my colleague Horst Ruthrof for this form of words. For his own position on these matters, see Ruthrof, Pandora.
8. Derrida, "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy," in Margins, 211.
9. I take the notion of pertinent absences from Harvey Sacks. He mentions this idea in his lecture for 6th February 1970 (typescript). In his unpublished manuscript, Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation (which may also be from 1970), Sacks refers to utterances which are "noticeably absent" and to an analyst's "trivializable assertion that X is absent". See Sacks, Aspects, ch2, 26. In particular, he is referring to such things as "He didn't even say hello" - where one person complains that a greeting was expectable but happened, as it turned out, to be absent. See also Sacks, Lectures.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. Donald, "Beacons," 214.
2. On this project, see Henriques et al., Changing.
3. Staten, Wittgenstein, 84ff.
4. Wittgenstein, Investigations, para 167.
5. Wittgenstein, Investigations, para 167.
6. One disastrous and soon-abandoned wave of spelling reform, the Initial Teaching Alphabet, was precisely designed to remove the familiarity of the printed page from the classroom. For examples, see Diringer, Alphabet, 425-426.
7. Staten, Wittgenstein, 85.
8. Staten, Wittgenstein, 103.
9. Derrida, Grammatology.
10. Coulter, Social Construction, 69ff.
11. Chomsky, "Empirical Assumptions," 280.
12. This difficulty led Chomsky to distinguish between (ordinary) case of knowing and (special) cases of "cognizing." See Chomsky, Rules, 97-98.
13. See Heap, "What Counts."
14. Coulter, Social Construction, 74.
15. Freadman, "Untitled."
16. See Halliday, Social Semiotic and Spoken and Written.
17. Freadman, "Untitled", 71.
18. Freadman, "Untitled", 71-72; my italics.
19. Freadman, "Untitled", 72.
20. Wittgenstein, Investigations, para 71.
21. Freadman, "Untitled", 92.
22. Cf. Heap, "What Counts."
23. See for example, the "Definitions of Standards by the Revised Code, 1862" in Maclure, Documents, 80; cited in Donald, "Beacons," 234.
24. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 172. See also Donald's treatment of this passage, "Beacons," 227ff.
25. See chapter 2, above. T.J. Barnardo, quoted in Wagner and Lloyd, Camera, 14.
26. Donzelot, Policing, 47.
27. Tagg, "Power," 21.
28. The fact that, in British English at least, the term "reading book" is not a pleonasm might indicate that a rather special sense of "reading" is intended.
29. Hunter, "English," 730 and 734.
30. Again, I rely here and below mainly on Hunter's work but also on historical material from Donald. See Hunter, "Culture, Bureaucracy" and "English" and Donald, "Beacons."
31. Toby Miller has investigated this dichotomy (and the necessary ethical incompleteness of the subject it produces) at length. See Miller Well-tempered Self.
32. Aspects of its characterization can be found in Foucault's discussion of "man" as an "empirico-transcendental doublet" in the final chapters of Order of Things.
33. These terms are variations on Hunter's. He writes of "reciprocating tactics within a single pedagogical strategy." "Culture, Bureaucracy," 30.
34. See Hunter, "Learning."
35. Hunter, "English," 730. English is "the discipline in which children found themselves and found themselves wanting."
36. Hunter, "English," 730.
37. Again the phrase is from Hunter, "Culture, Bureaucracy," 30.
Notes to Chapter 6
1. The mistaken picture which formalism routinely uses is also summarized by Wittgenstein in terms of the "life" of signs: "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?" Wittgenstein, Investigations, para 432. I read the passage this way: against logicist and formalist versions of meaning which believe that one can treat signs by themselves (such that, later, they have to have life breathed into them), one can say instead that signs are always in use, in life. There is no need to account for them as "dead" objects, and therefore no need to find out how they come to be revived, "in use." Situations of use are signs' primary substance; one cannot go back "before" that.
2. Garfinkel, Studies, 28.
3. See Hartland, Discourse Analysis. This section on methods/activities (R1) and methodic activities/socio-logical problems (R2) owes a great deal to Hartland's elaboration of some of my work on socio-logics. Hartland argues that such an approach obviates any and every sign-based analysis of discourse. But I suspect our differences on this point are largely terminological. That is: he is correct if the concept of sign is a traditional semiotic one, but not (tautologically perhaps) if that concept is reconstructed in terms of methodic activities.
4. Later we will see that it will be more appropriate to use the term "the historical meaning of the sign" for R3 - since R1 and R2 can also be seen to be sites of meaning ("intelligibility" and "actionability" respectively).
5. Hartland, Discourse Analysis; Garfinkel, Studies; Garfinkel and Sacks, "Formal Structures."
6. Wieder, Language.
7. For a more detailed treatment, see Ashmore, Reflexivity Thesis.
8. One exception is the study of "formulations" (where participants say, in so many words, what it is they are doing in and as the activities they are producing). See Heritage and Watson, "Aspects" and "Formulations"
9. Garfinkel "solves" this problem by saying, after Schutz, that it is social members themselves who construct and use typifications. However, it may be equally true that communities use specifications. Then "to see as typical" or "to see as specific" would simply be distinct practices available to particular communities and their use (comparative to one another or not) could not be guaranteed by relying upon the essential givenness of typificatory practices for all sense-making; rather it could only be guaranteed by situationally specific relevances. "Typification," then, would seem to be an unfortunate hangover in ethnomethodology of one of Schutz's anthropological constants. See Schutz, Phenomenology and Schutz and Luckman, Structures.
10. Garfinkel and Sacks, "Formal Structures." Again, as with typification, the theoretical postulate is asserted to be extra-theoretical; that is, it is apparently grounded (prior to theory) in the theory's own object: everyday methodic accomplishments. But what are the grounds of that assertion?
11. Hartland gives a meticulous analysis of the many and varied methods which magistrates use for describing accused persons. Just one of these is the use of membership categorization devices, a major sub-domain of ethnomethodological inquiry. See Sacks, "Initial Investigation" and "Analysability."
12. Sacks, Aspects.
13. A collection of exemplars can be found in Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel, Advances.
Notes to Chapter 7
1. In the next chapter, these three points on the range of semiosis will be formalized as "intelligibility," "actionability" and "historicity."
2. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 29.
3. See Lodge and Law, "Structure."
4. Turner, The Body; Armstrong, Political Anatomy; Short and Bird, "Incorporation."
5. Foucault, Madness; Order of Things; "Orders"; Archaeology; and Birth of the Clinic.
6. Pollner, "Mundane Reasoning"; "Very Coinage"; and Mundane Reason.
7. Foucault, "Questions"; Garfinkel, Studies, 33.
8. Foucault, "Questions," 8.
9. Garfinkel, Studies, 32-33.
10. Foucault, "Le Souci."
11. Heritage, Garfinkel.
12. See Foucault, Archaeology, 81-87.
13. Garfinkel, Studies, 28-29.
14. Sacks, "An Analysis."
15. Foucault, Pierre Rivière and Order of Things.
16. Garfinkel, Studies, 116-185; Garfinkel, Lynch and Livingston, "Discovering Science."
17. Garfinkel, Studies, 32.
18. Garfinkel and Sacks, "Formal Structures."
19. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 212.
20. Heritage, Garfinkel, 227.
21. This question (the moral grounds of ethnomethodology's moral "refusal") is superbly handled by Lena Jayyusi. See Jayyusi, "Values."
22. Foucault, Order of Things, xiv.
23. Garfinkel is on record as saying that there is nothing of interest to be found beneath the skull. See Garfinkel, "Sociological Concepts."
24. See his contribution to Hinkle, "Phenomenology."
25. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1.
26. Dreyfus, "Heidegger's Critique," 33.
27. Dreyfus, "Heidegger's Critique," 31.
28. Dreyfus, "Heidegger's Critique," 31-32.
29. Garfinkel, Studies, 104-115.
30. Garfinkel, Studies, 116-185; Heritage, Garfinkel, 186.
31. See the review of these in Strong, "Doing Sex."
32. Source: Victorian AIDS Council poster, "When you say yes ... say yes to safe sex" (1990).
33. Sacks, "An Analysis."
34. For a different view of sex education's social positioning, see Hunter, "Laughter."
35. For details of the terms "membership category" and "category-bound activity," see Sacks, "Initial Investigation," and "Analysability." Put formally: if f and v are both logical and necessary functions (attributes) of A, the observation of f in A will mean that v is also present (though unobserved).
36. Sykes, cited in Strong, "Doing Sex," 36-37.
37. Willis, Learning, 36.
38. See Tolson, Limits, and Metcalf and Humphries, Sexuality.
39. The standard forms of transcript notation, devised by Gail Jefferson, were not observed by the original transcriber; however, I have replaced his or her ellipses by the conventional sign for the untimed pause: "(.)" since ellipses can appear to be omissions rather than pauses. See the "Transcript Notation" section in Atkinson and Heritage, Social Action, ix-xvi.
40. Payne and Hustler, "Teaching," 49-66.
41. Schegloff and Sacks, "Opening Up."
42. Prince, Narratology, 4.
43. For a remarkable reading of everyday utterances (such as "Boys will be boys") as logical tautologies (!), see Ward and Hirschberg, "Pragmatic Analysis."
44. Some readers will be able to hear an echo of a very famous Monty Python comedy sketch in this.
45. Foucault, "Rituals," 65-66.
Notes to Chapter 8
1. A case in point would be Mehan and Wood, The Reality.
2. Maturana and Varela, The Tree, 253.
3. See, in particular, Gleick, Chaos.
4. See Penrose, Emperor. So far I have relied on Penrose's notion of recursive enumerability. However, although it should not concern us, Penrose asks whether there are some (rather strange) sets which are recursively enumerable but which are not strictly recursive, in the sense that, for them, once algorithmically generated, "there is no general algorithmic way of deciding whether or not an element (or 'point') belongs to the set." Penrose, Emperor, 161. One case which he considers is the Mandelbrot set and its complementary not-set (that which lies outside the set).
5. The term "actionability" is a first approximation and may need to be replaced by a term which better represents the longer term, "acting as a problem-solution."
Notes to Chapter 9
1. On the various opposites of context-dependence and context-sensitivity, see Frawley, "Review Article," especially 364.
2. On the audio-visuality of methodic activities' intelligibility, see Sharrock and Anderson, Ethnomethodologists.
3. This makes the ethnomethodological concept of indexicality almost the exact opposite of Peirce's and comes closer to his idea of the "symbolic" sign. For Peirce: "An indexical sign is a sign that is actually connected to its object. A symbolic sign is an arbitrary and conventional (in the sense of socially determined) representation of whatever it represents." McNeill, Conceptual Basis, 5.
4. Derrida, Grammatology. Some readers may find the attribution of the term "critical theory" to Derrida problematic since, in sociology at least, it is sometimes thought that the Frankfurt School has a copyright claim on the term. However, I intend "critical theory" to refer to the theory of textual criticism in its broadest sense and to the Derridean inflection of it in particular. For a basic introduction, see Orr, Dictionary.
5. On this score, see Ulmer, Applied Grammatology.
6. In some of his recent work, Derrida has returned to using the term "deconstruction." While the term can, Derrida says, be used to describe a scholarly or philosophical activity, it is better thought of as a process in "what one might call history (all of the geopolitical earthquakes: the 1917 revolution, the two world wars, psychoanalysis, the Third World, the techno-economico-scientific and military mutations, etc., etc., etc.)." Derrida, "Politics and Friendship," 226. See also Derrida, Spectres.
7. On this possibility within in EM, see Silverman, Reading.
8. Heritage, Garfinkel, 144.
9. Wittgenstein, Investigations, §71.
10. See Pollner, Mundane Reason, 69.
11. Mehan and Wood, The Reality, 95.
12. I mark this point as "p0" since, at this point, all indexical potential would be null, the sign henceforth having a single meaning in perpetuity.
13. Here the expression would become indexical in Peirce's sense (see note 3, above).
14. Derrida, Origins of Geometry, 72.
15. See Derrida, Origins of Geometry, 101-2, and Ulmer, "Post-Age," especially 48.
16. I mark this point with the term "p1" because, at this point, the expression would have preserved its full indexical potential - it could mean anything and so would be a kind of semiotic plenum in its own right.
17. Cf. Eco, Limits, 32-34.
18. Wittgenstein says, concerning an uncontexted and, therefore, highly "entropic" expression: "a multitude of familiar paths lead off ... in every direction." Wittgenstein, Investigations, para 525.
19. This is shown most clearly in Garfinkel's re-writing experiment where students were able to proliferate descriptions of what they had said earlier (in a conversation), to proliferate descriptions of those descriptions, and so on, potentially infinitely - but precisely "in the name of" trying to say, definitively, what it is they had "meant." Hence, even in a very strange community (Garfinkel's seminar) which attempts indexical proliferation, Garfinkel finds the tendency to want to find relatively singular or definitive meanings. It was on the basis of experiments such as these that Garfinkel was able to conclude that indexicality (difference) was the basis of homogeneous social order. See Garfinkel, Studies, 38-42.
20. For example the attempt of the Presocratics to find an ideal language which adhered to the law of unum nomen, unum nominatum (one name for each thing named).
21. Schutz, Collected Papers 1.
22. For an imaginary version of the latter, see Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar."
23. I will use the terms "closing" and "opening" henceforth to refer to the tendencies towards p0 and p1 respectively. In this sense, my use of the terms is markedly different from the notion of "closed" vs. "open" texts in the work of Eco and others.
24. Latour, Science in Action.
25. The matter of "opening" methods or strategies will be discussed in the next investigation, chapter 10.
26. Cf. de Certeau, Practice. One problem with de Certeau's analysis of the "resignification" of everyday texts and objects is that it ignores the possibility (raised here) that certain kinds of popular texts may in fact be recipient-designed in order to be corruptible or "resignifiable" - in which case assumptions about "resistance" will be problematic.
Notes to Chapter 10
1. Another interesting account of cinephilia, from within that community, is Martin, "No Flowers."
2. Kelly and Donen, Singin' in the Rain; Masson, "Promenade." While Masson's "data" are filmic signs, my "data," which I want to describe by repeating them here, are Masson-as-cineaste's readings of them.
3. Masson, "Promenade," 52 (French), 162 (English).
4. Masson, "Promenade," 53 (French), 164 (English).
5. The documentary method and prospectivity-retrospectivity are methods which Garfinkel isolates as classical ways in which definite sense can be made of indexical expressions. See Garfinkel, Studies.
6. Masson, "Promenade," 52 (French), 162 (English). Lynn Davis has discovered a similar spatial indefiniteness operating in Peter Greenaway's The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. While Greenaway's films are sometimes thought of as "making no sense," the obvious possibility here is that they make more than one sense but provide no obvious resources for choosing between the contenders. See Davis, "Greenaway".
7. On reality disjunctures, see Pollner, Mundane Reason.
8. Masson, "Promenade," 54 (French), 165 (English).
9. Masson, "Promenade," 50 (French), 159 (English).
Notes to Chapter 11
1. Gibson, "Introduction," 3.
2. On the distinction between opacity and transparency of community descriptions, see Quine, Word and Object and Coulter, Rethinking.
3. Fabian, Time.
4. For example, readers of DC's recent Star Trek comics have been informed, following quibbles about continuities between the comics and other generic versions of Star Trek, that there is a canon (inside which continuity takes place) and an apocrypha (which may formally depart from it). In issue #13 (Oct 1990), comics editor, Ron Greenberger announced that "Gene Roddenberry [the originator of Star Trek] prefers to consider the filmed episodes and films Star Trek fact and everything else Star Trek fiction. That is the one reason few, if any, of the comics and novels refer to previous novels or comics - that is by Gene's and Paramount's request". A similar reading condition appears in issue #15 and Greenberger suggests that readers who are unhappy with it should "drop Paramount Licensing a line."
5. The concept of recipient design is, again, attributable to Garfinkel.
6. Groo the Wanderer #68 (Aug 1990), 31.
7. Rather paradoxically, this allows Mark Evanier (the writer of Groo and the one who replies to readers' letters) the unique luxury of occasional "literal" and, therefore, irreverent, readings. He frequently takes his readers to task for not seeing how obviously predictable the stories are, how obviously similar they are from month to month, how obviously stupid Groo is, how they are obviously being conned out of their money and so on.
8. Bennett, "Foreword," ix.
9. See Larry Feldman's letter in Detective Comics #624 (Dec 1990), 23. For a quickly digestible instance of the changes in Batman from 1939 to the present, see Detective Comics #627, a special anniversary issue, celebrating Batman's 600th appearance in Detective and collecting re-writings of "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate" from various different periods.
10. Burton, Batman. On the specific qualities of this production in relation to the comic, see Marriott, Batman, 8-13.
11. Stock Batman print versions also include a range of one-offs in hardcover (Arkham Asylum, Batman 3-D, Batman Archives, Batman Bride of Demon, Batman Dailies, Batman Digital Justice) and paperback (Batman Murders).
12. Although the legend and the list were included in almost every publication, this particular version is from Skreemer #4 (Aug 1989) which is, itself, marked "Suggested for Mature Readers."
13. See Batman #457 (Dec 1990) for Tim's formal emergence as the revamped (third) Robin who later became the main hero of the new Robin comic (DC Comics, Jan-May 1991). In Batman #466 (Aug 1991), the third Robin formally rejoined Batman in Gotham City in an episode ironically entitled "No More Heroes."
14. A distorted version of Batman-as-detective sometimes remains in the Detective Comics variation. And occasionally there is a reasonably straightforward use of the detective story genre: see Detective Comics #630 (Jun 1991), entitled "And the Executioner Wore Stiletto Heels."
15. Batman #454 (Sept 1990) includes references to Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and the Detective sequence ##622-624 (Oct-Dec 1990) examines the effects on Batman when a Batman comic begins to appear in Gotham City.
16. This is particularly problematic for non-American readers - and parallels the confusions of the off-shore Hollywood cinephile. See Martin, "No Flowers."
17. The four part Detective series, "Rite of Passage," involved Batman in a trip to the Caribbean to hunt out the voodoo leader called The Obeah Man.
18. Batman writer, Alan Grant, said "I find it easier to write Batman than any other figure, probably because I like him so much. It's not hard because you don't have to make him the center of every story, he's more of a presence. To me the stories are as much about Gotham City as they are about him." Nutman, "Psychotics," 20.
19. The Slasher sets up a classic ambiguity for the new Batman. His aim is to carve up the city's "vermin," but when Batman comes to inflict justice upon him, the Slasher himself is referred to (directly, by Batman) as "vermin."
20. Cf. a parallel use of this theme in the first Terminator movie. There the villain is utterly without human features and is set merely on his mission of destruction. Even though SF-horror movie-goers know he is a cyborg, there is, I think, a constant tension in the movie arising from the expectation that this villain will somehow crack, become more "human," be somehow pushed into a position where he has to be bargained with. No such thing, of course, is allowed to happen.
21. The fly-leaf to Pearson and Uricchio's Many Lives informs the reader that no original graphics from the comic have been reproduced in the book. DC Comics withheld permission since the cultural studies readings of Batman in the book did not correspond with "their" Batman.
22. It would be interesting, for example, to see how relativist cultural studies could square the Demon's prayer with the following discussion of the complexities of political targets for comic writers: "There is a great deal of mind control which is coming from the liberal rather than the conservative camp. It's very easy to do the usual corporate villains, dyed-in-the-wool Reaganites. It's a very easy target, but it has been done to death. I have a basic reflex action that when I see a sacred cow I shoot, and having had a few run-ins with censors, discovering that most of them declare themselves liberal, I found a whole new area that hadn't been tapped." Frank Miller (originator of the Dark Knight version of Batman) interviewed in Nutman, "Miller's Crossing," 24.
23. See Wittgenstein, Certainty.
24. While ethnomethodology, for example, has discovered the commonsense embargo on stating the obvious, it has not considered the possibility that what constitutes the obvious, in some cases, can be normatively indeterminate.
Notes to Chapter 12
1. Latour, Science in Action.
2. Penrose, Emperor, 114.
3. Penrose, Emperor, 124, my italics.
4. Brouwer's actual argument was highly influential on Wittgenstein's shift from a calculus-based semantics to a "form of life" theory of signification.
5. Penrose, Emperor, 125-6, my italics except for "there."
6. Penrose, Emperor, 126-7, my italics.
7. Perhaps Penrose's argument does not require the principle of external definability: but then his problem is an ontological rather than a merely logical one. He would then have to be saying that mathematical truth is absolute because E and C are absolute, not mere conventions of logic.
Notes to Chapter 13
1. Gadamer, "Universality," 131.
2. Habermas, cited in Bleicher, Hermeneutics, 203.
3. Habermas, "Universal Pragmatics," 1.
4. See Coulter, Social Construction.
5. Auster, Leviathan, 29.
6. I am very grateful to Heather Davies, Julie Hemmett and Alison Lee for giving me access to their transcripts. I have altered only the personally identifying details. Unless otherwise specified, the transcription conventions are those devised by Gail Jefferson. See the "Transcript Notation" section in Atkinson and Heritage Social Action, ix-xvi.
7. Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, "Simplest Systematics."
8. One other possibility which is technically possible (though for Linda it may not be morally possible) is what Jefferson calls the "nyem" - a half-agreement, half-disagreement. See Jefferson, "What's in."
9. See Schegloff and Sacks, "Opening Up."
10. Jefferson's conventions have not been used for this transcription.
11. Lee, "Gender."
12. McHoul, "No Guarantees."
13. Coulter, Social Construction, 26. The transcription is copied verbatim from Coulter. Its conventions are different from those currently used in conversation analysis. The symbol "//" marks the point at which overlap commences.
14. Coulter, Social Construction, 27.
15. Coulter, Social Construction, 30.
16. Lyotard, "Différend."
17. Lyotard, "Différend," 5.
18. See Bogen and Lynch, "Taking Account."
19. Bogen and Lynch, "Social Critique."
20. See Hartland, "Discourse Analysis."
Notes to Chapter 14
1. See Bogen and Lynch, "Taking Account."
2. Caputo, Against Ethics, 1.
3. Foucault, History of Sexuality 1; Use of Pleasure; Care of the Self.
4. Miller, The Passion, 328-334.
5. Miller, The Passion, 306-309.
6. Miller, The Passion, 307, quoting Cottam, "Inside," 3.
7. "The will not to be governed" is Miller's paraphrase of Foucault's position. The Passion, 310. It amounts to an inversion of the Kantian imperative, and could be expressed as follows: act in such a way that the grounds of your action defy all principles of general legislation.
8. Flax, "The End."
9. Braidotti, Patterns.
10. See Frow, What Was.
11. Wittgenstein, "Ethics," 11-12.
12. Feher, "Being After."
13. My argument here is informed by a (perhaps idiosyncratic) reading of the work of Luce Irigaray. See Irigaray, That Sex and Speculum.
14. See de Lauretis, Alice, 94, re. Foucault's "paradoxical conservatism."
15. Gasché, Tain of the Mirror, 154.
16. Derrida, "Afterword," 116.
17. Staten, Wittgenstein, xvi.
18. For a list of such counter-values, see Hasan, Postmodern Turn, 91-92.
19. On Derrida's turn towards deconstruction as a practical-political formation (as opposed to a merely analytic strategy in philosophy) see Derrida, Spectres.
20. The term "crypto-grammar" is taken from Threadgold, "Postmodernism."
21. Derrida, Spurs, 81.
22. On athesis and the athetical, see McHoul and Wills, Writing Pynchon, 90ff.
23. See Coulter, "Contextualising," 690.
24. Derrida, Speech, 135.
25. Bogen and Lynch, "Taking Account."
26. Lyotard's concept of the différend is briefly explained in chapter 13 (above).
27. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 11 and 8.
28. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 8-9.
29. If so, it is ironic that the nearest imaginable society to ancient Greece in recent times (where "free men," old and young, composed their own ethics, relatively unhindered by legal restraint) was, arguably, Wittgenstein's Cambridge.
30. Foucault, "Genealogy of Ethics," 245.
31. Derrida, "Politics and Friendship," 231.
32. Derrida, "My Chances," 27.
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