Short Wave Reception

So, last semester I posted very many illegible responses to my seminar on Lyric among other school-related writings. This semester, I am in a class called An (a)Poetics of the Literal. It’s quite a good one. So as to have more content here. And to share some fairly hasty thoughts on things I am reading, here’s a response to Marina Rakova’s The Extent of the Literal & David Antin’s talking at the boundaries. I don’t anticipate any genuine interest here, as songs composed by others and youtube videos are much less boring and much better.

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In the final chapter of her book, Marina Rakova posits two conditions for what she calls the no-polysemy view. First off, it is a shift away from “the standard assumption” which removes the notion of there being one primary literal meaning to words from which metaphorical extensions are created or used. This distinction, she says, between the literal and metaphorical cannot apply to the conceptual structure. Second, she claims that within the no-polysemy view, “a theory of concepts does not have to be at the same time a theory of meaning” (142).

What this distinction seems to hinge upon is Rakova’s concern that in her theory (and within theories that follow a “standard assumption” view), words should not be confused with concepts. In this way, the final chapter of her book very patiently lays out a translation of the cognitive process from CONCEPTS to ‘words’ (and which, in analysis, return to CONCEPTS) that distinguishes language use (especially as synaesthesia and double-function adjectives). Concepts (like HOT, BRIGHT, or SHARP) are “mental entities” which span, potentially (as in the discussion of HOT), “real world properties that resist reduction” and come before perception (i.e., in the case of BRIGHT: “the disposition to detect brightness in the environment has to be present before any interaction with it begins”) (146, 146, 142). In that concepts come “before precepts,” Rakova puts pressure on the fact that the use of language is decidedly unarbitrary as the representative values, the words, are used and understood within their social contracts and thus the non-metaphorical distinction between two (or more) conceptual primaries as parallel advents can be asserted: “‘[E]numerationalism’ is wrong, and nobody has so far made any sense of the idea that the understanding of ‘sharp’ in ‘sharp sound’ is secondary with respect to the understanding of ‘sharp’ in ‘sharp knife’” (141).

But I indeed am not being as careful as Rakova as I am, perhaps, indirectly dripping into a conversation about meaning. Rakova equates the level of meaning with semantic representation. Witness:

To think of something as big one needs the concept BIG. But what enters the interpretation of ‘big’-expressions is [BIG(x)], where the default value of x is ‘for its own kind’. This way we can draw a distinction between the level of concepts and the level of semantic representation or the level of meaning (152).

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Although individual words can be used metaphorically, they do not have metaphoric meanings. When a word acquires a new fixed use such that its denotation can be made precise, a word acquires a new literal meaning (167).

It is as if, the definitions (or literally the ‘denotations’) of ‘words’ (take ‘sharp,’ for instance, in the last paragraph) and ‘big’ (in this paragraph) as found within the dictionary should not be given the numerical representation of 1., 2., 3. & 4. but rather should be replaced with 1, 1, 1. & 1. wherein each definition can claim the “property of being sharp” – SHARP (141). And in this sense, she is right: there is no reason to think that ‘sharp’ only has one meaning. These denotative and ‘literal’ meanings that Rakova puts forth – as opposed to her discussion of their respective concepts – are able to be established and distinguished specifically because as language speakers, we can distinguish between them:

when sensory information reaches higher-level processing centers and becomes translated into a representation of subjective experience, that representation presumably contains both the information about the quality of received stimulation which is decomposable into particular sensory characteristics and the information about the similarity of sensory experiences (149).

In other words, as sensory beings, we are aware of our several different sensory modalities and can attribute language use and understanding (as in the use of ‘bright light’ and ‘bright sound’) to its right register: “[these] difference[s] [are] part of our conceptual make up” (150).

That being said, an intriguing connection that I find between Rakova’s study and David Antin’s talking at the boundaries is the idea of “free enrichment” and localized context. Antin’s talks emerge from an awareness of talking at a particular place – even more so than talking to a particular people. Just the titles of each talking piece suggest this concern for locality: (“what am I doing here?”; “is this the right place?”; “a private occasion in a public place”; & “a more private place”). Or, take for instance his discussion of “preparedness” and pornography:

And that was also a place / and it was closer to johns place / that we had somehow been unable to find / it was somehow / we couldnt find the right place / and pornography / is all about inauspiciousness and preparation also / one of the main things about pornography is that its involved with finding the right place / with preparations and litanies / you know a pornographic movie is something like the recitation of a text / there is a naming of parts / and a naming of acts / and the recitation itself becomes a kind of incantation in order to arrive at some place / which is in fact called “coming” (48).

There is a continual or rather always engaging presentness to Antin’s talks that is at each moment revealed as a prepared question of place: where, perhaps, am I? And that song sings several tunes: Where am I – in terms of geography; within a particular improvisation/lecture; and/or where am I within my own controlled/developed context. To bring Rakova back in, she says of “free enrichment” that

[A]ny contextually felicitous interpretation can be considered as an instance of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. The question here is whether movement verbs come with a directional variable or whether directional elements, whenever necessary, are supplied by free enrichment on the basis of general world knowledge (157).

Is it that we can literally (and I am trying to follow Rakova’s notion of literal meaning as constructed by denotation here) follow Antin through his various places because of a general “world knowledge” in that we can fill in the blanks between his horizontal lines and create “truth evaluable propositions” from his quotidian, punctuated and forward-moving boundary-searching talks? It seems that we have moved away from conceptual (or even etymological) structures onto its alternate plane (or perhaps a new search for) the literal. Or another question: by establishing our own place in the swiftness of Antin’s talks (again and again) are we experiencing the literal as it is and as it is being prepared?

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elsewhere:

The Arcade Fire won the ‘Best Album of the Year’ award at the Grammys last night. I am arguably as shocked as the rest of the country:

For many many more: whoisarcadefire@tumblr