Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 78.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 07:08:56 +0100
From: Jan Christoph Meister <jan-c-meister@uni-hamburg.de>
Subject: Re: 17.046 nesting - terminology
12:08
10.06.2003
Wendell,
your analysis of markup in terms of the underlying concept of
representation is very interesting - as is this entire thread!
However, the narratologist in me finds it difficult to accept the
proposed adaptation of what, after all, is a well defined terminology
in his particular field of research. Don't get me wrong: I am not advocating a
purist approach for the sake of purism. My concern is rather that the
somewhat metaphorical use of concepts such as 'metalepsis',
'prolepsis' etc. in the description the non-narrative phenomenon of
textual markup (or does markup indeed constitute a kind of narrative?
One might wish to explore that idea as well) does not exploit the
analytical potential of the theoretical and conceptual import to its
full extent.
Metalepsis is certainly a very important and intriguing phenomenon in
narratives. Current aesthetic production thrives on it, and so does
literary criticism; the reason why 'La metalepse aujour d'hui' was the
topic of an international narratological conference held in Paris in
November 2002 in which Marie-Laure Ryan, Gerard Genette and other
narratologists (including yours truly) discussed it from various
angles. (For details see www.narratology.net/archive) . In our present day
and age cultural artefacts prove to be obsessed with this age-old self
reflective twist in representational technique. Like always, it comes
in different qualities. I just saw 'Matrix Reloaded' - mentioned as
one current example in Ryan's talk - and found it to be a
dissapointingly puerile and illogical attempt at something which we
know from Don Quichotte, or Tristram Shandy, or ... well, see
Kaufman's/Jonze's recent 'Adapation' or their previous 'Being John
Malkovitch' for an intelligent and ironically self-conscious version
of metalepsis and embedding in contemporary film narrative.
Back to our debate: you state that
> A markup language is metaleptic when the tags seek to reflect or
> elicit some feature or aspect of the text marked up.
In terms of representational logic I would rather call this an
'iconic' mode of markup and not a 'metaleptic' one. As Marie-Laure
aptly demonstrated it is important to understand that metalepsis is
MORE than just an iconic form of representation falling into the
onomatopoetic vein. Metalepsis in the sense of the narratological
definition amounts to a calculated conflation of the representational dichotomy
(sign/signified or tag/text marked up) with an assumedly (!) natural
underlying ontological dichotomy: namely that of narrator/narratee; or
in our case, of meta-text/text. Note that when we call something
'metaleptic' the prefix 'meta' in compounds such as 'meta-text' needs to
be understood as an existential and ontological qualifier, and not
just as an innocent qualifier in terms of the origin of speech acts as in
discourse theory.
This ontological problematic - which in itself should not be misread
for an empirical fact: it is merely a consequence of turning the idea
of representation which we accept as 'natural' in our particular
cultural context on itself - is at best implicit in the two related
cases of representational anomaly discussed in narratology, namely
prolepsis (the narratorial flash-forward) and analepsis (flash-back).
This too has consequences for your suggestion to use the former
narratological term in order to characterize different types of markup,
namely
> "proleptic" (looking forward to future processing) and "metaleptic"
> (looking backward to an extant, authoritative source of some kind)
I understand where you're coming from and what it is that you try to
capture here, but I suspect that this use (or is it indeed another tongue
in cheek
'adaptation'?) of terminology downplays the actual philosophical
problem. 'Proleptic' might still be OK - on the other hand, why not simply
call it
'anticipatory'? But the proposed use of 'metaleptic' is definitely
problematic since what
you want to highlight is mainly the legitimizing gesture embedded in this
type of markup, and not the idea of a presumed 'ontological divide' being
transgressed. Your argument that
>"proleptic" technologies are rather a special type of "metaleptic"
>technologies, and that all markup languages are metaleptic in a more
>general way (as representing representations)
seems to confirm this.
As so often the problem actually seems to be rooted in our
understanding of what a language is. I would hold that as long as we
talk about 'language' in the sense of 'conventionalised system of
symbolic representation' neither markup languages nor first order
languages in general are inherently 'metaleptic' - viz Cassirer for
the opposing mythical concept of signification which by contrast is
based on an entirely different and in fact decidedly 'metaleptic'
notion of 'sign' in which the sign IS the signified. In other words,
as long as we remain aware that in markup, as in any other language or
symbolic system, we are by necessity (!) representing representations
(an awareness which any Platonian worth his or her money should
uphold) there simply is no possibility for anything becoming
existentially 'metaleptic' - because the realm of the 'meta', that
higher-order ontological dimension, will be correctly identified as an
illusion or an aesthetic artefact. The whole idea of 'metalepsis' is
about suspending, of cancelling this Platonian insight into the nature
of representation. There's nothing in TEI or SGML that leads me to
believe that this discourse is being alluded to, and hence I am
somewhat reluctant to go pomo on this.
But then again this is perhaps exactly what we should do in order to
understand markup better. In other words, as a narratologist I may
find your retooling of narratological terminology problematic, but as
a computing humanist I find it extremely instructive nevertheless -
the reason being that this approach ultimately raises the profoundly
philosophical question whether the current notion of textual markup
with its heavy emphasis on technological doability and standardization
is not based on an unduly simplistic and materialist concept of
signification and representation. And that would surely be a question
worth to be debated in the HC community.
Chris
*******************************
Jan Christoph Meister
Forschergruppe Narratologie
Universitt Hamburg
NarrNet - the Information hub for Narratologists:
www.narratology.net
My site: www.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/JC.Meister
Mail: jan-c-meister@uni-hamburg.de
Office: +49 - 40 - 42838 4994
Cell: +49 - 0172 40 865 41
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