Posthegemonic Comments
I wonder if your own final comments also set up a dichotomy between losing ourselves and defamiliarizing, on the one hand, and—unspoken, but implied—finding ourselves (identification?) and familiarity, on the other hand. You seem to endorse the former reactions to or properties of the aesthetic rather than the latter. But why? Don't both things often happen at the same time—we reread because we get pleasure from the familiarity of a text, as well as because we'll find something new. Why do we privilege the encounter with the new and the unfamiliar over the encounter with the familiar?
hi Jon,
Great post. I really like the 'we are all Menard' line. "The Menardist International: Author of the International Situationiste."
take care,
Nate
Nate, thanks. Susan, yup, I'm happy to privilege difference over familiarity. Which is not, I think, necessarily to declare absolute otherness.
I understand, and I'm not suggesting a simple reversal--that familiarity should be privileged over difference. Rather, I wonder if the two are always opposed. We can be moved and disturbed by familiarity—by ritual, or (differently) by the uncanny. And seeing something familiar in an apparently unfamiliar or strange text can also be unsettling.
Just been lurking a little bit recently. (nice blog. I wish I could maintain a more academic thread on my own).
Why do you need this dichotomy at all? Why not just look at it as a both/and, and make sense of it in terms of the experience of sense making: a text is a trajectory of sense and I am a trajectory of sense and my circumstantial/contingent experience of the text creates a milieu of encounter in which several new trajectories of sense are simultaneoulsy brought to potentiality. I'm just saying.
Anyway, the key problematic may be found in privleging interpretation itself, which requires one to submit the aesthetic of encounter to a moralising procedure.
(Comment count isn't updating when I load your blog, BTW. Shows 0 for this post. To me, at least.)
Doesn't Bourdieu say something to this effect in Pascalian Meditations in the chapter on "How to Read an Author?"?
Suzo, hmm. Most of your examples seem to be precisely of displacements. And we are moved by ritual, but are we really disturbed by it, in so far as it retains its familiarity?
Dr. m(mmm), thanks. I tend to agree with an anti-interpretative strategy. Worth thinking more about.
Craig, the comment counter's working OK my end. Perhaps it was a temporary Haloscan glitch. Otherwise, I'd have to go back to the Bourdieu text. But Jezzer might want to jump in here. Still, I've generally found Bourdieu pretty disappointing on literature and the literary. I had high hopes of The Rules of Art, which were really not fulfilled.
Oh, and I apologize to all for my telegraphic responses to comments that deserve far better. Stop. Will try to improve. Stop.
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