Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 12:50:13 +0100
Subject: Re: HAB: Art and Judgement (Stefan to Gary)
From: "Stefan Szczelkun" <stefan-AT-szczelkun.greatxscape.net>


Gary 

On your catechismic answers to my primal questions to MattP. I luv'em
but sorry "Translation" is too easy an answer...

e.g. C19th Middle class collectors took British rural working class
song and 'translated' it into their own idiom in the rubrics of good
taste. i.e. They bowdlerised it, which is akin to gutting my
ancestors. Along with a series of similar mediations in other forms,
working class culture was practically eviscerated by the mid C20th.
An oral to literary 'translation' at the heart of oppressive
mechanisms.

Translation is always a reduction on the terms of power. Is the ISS
sufficient to adequately define fair conditions of translation?

The relation to understanding Habermas TCA... How is a key theory
like this to be understood?
1. As disciplined coherent argument (with an immense background) to
unfold a set of universal principles. (Gary) Engagement level -
intense.
2. As a model to guide/ discipline communicative practice (Stefan)
Engagement level - moderate.
3. As literary rhetoric and tonal value (most Pomo critics and
radical artists) Engagement level - bored tourist.

The model I want, needs to articulate conceptual tools that can be
used so that the sort of 'translation' illustrated above can't happen
again. The model must be accessible to be thoroughly understood/
internalised by working class intellectuals like myself. The Hab list
as an open structure seems a good place for this modeling to happen.

Fixity of meaning of art is primarily by canon formations which are
forged along with critics identities and all the economic vested
interests that this entails. Such a canon becomes a reified barrier
both to creative adaptation outside of the (class) lines drawn by the
canon and also to a complex understanding of past formations. We
might think there were only a couple of dozen Impressionist painters
by the account of most art histories. Of course there were thousands
of 'good' artists active in Paris and other centres at the time.

Communicative rationality does allow me full power to point out the
rigidities of any canon and its vested interests. But with Exploding
Cinema there is no canon in spite of the group screening some 1300
works in the last ten years. They operate in a sort of oral culture -
no critics. (see: Canon blasting for a living culture, by Howard
Slater, Resonance Magazine vol 8 n1,  www.l-m-c.org.uk  for an
account of informal canon formation, re communicative action)

It all about how oral forms, or forms framed by oralacy, take part in
formal legitimating discourses without losing so much in the
translation that their orginators don't recognise themselves.

You say oralacy requires we "distinguish phonetics from syntactics
from semantics from pragmatics from rhetorics". But why does written
discourse place this barrier on oralacy which it does not do to
itself? Our 'omni patternal existence' can surely deal with oralacy
as synthesised meaning as much as it can ignore the substrates and
veiled contexts of written discourses. Substrates are always
determining of the inflected meaning of inscriptions.

The art of 'irresolute interplay' that produces 'no consensus' is the
art of the individuated, systemically fragmented art scene. This is
the art I am against! (Wearing my 'Destroy Serious Culture' T shirt).

Gary I'm enjoying your mammoth replies to my vestigial efforts at
understanding Habermas. You seem to have reconstructed my thesis
design from this fragment! I have some notes in reply on context and
other matters I will probably post soon...

Regards
Stefan

PS  [G] "this passage from Ingram undermines most of your
critical case vis-a-vis Habermas!! "

Yes, it was meant to.

Re sloppy use of 'revelation'. Apologies. Freudian slip?  (Biblical
rhetoric or Heidegerian mysticism?)

----------
>From: Gary E Davis <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
>To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: re: HAB: Art and Judgement (Stefan to Matt)
>Date: Thu, Aug 23, 2001, 7:25 pm
>

>
> --- Stefan Szczelkun <stefan-AT-szczelkun.greatxscape.net> wrote:
> [S] But, what is language?
>
> A *prior* question is: What is *meaning*? A cognitivist perspective
> bases meaning in cognition: PATTERN RECOGNITION, such that various
> kinds of pattern/meaning *include* linguistic pattern/meaning, but
> other kinds of meaning are part of intelligent experience: spatial
> pattern, acoustic pattern, kinesthetic pattern, mathematical pattern.
>
> [S] Where does it start and end?
>
> It starts in the ontogeny of cognition and never ends (as meaning
> crosses generations through all pattern-channeling media).
>
> [S] What does it exclude?
>
> No exclusions.
>
> [S] What about language sets? (Do languages ever exist in isolation?
> ) e.g. Are gesture, facial expression and tone of voice languages in
> their own right?
>
> Changing your paradigm to *pattern* sets makes this kind of question
> quite constructive: Of *course*, there are pattern sets (visual,
> sound, kinesthetic, mathematical, empathic, self-reflective). But
> they *can't* exist in isolation, because existence happens through an
> holistic intelligence (omni-patternal existence). But a pattern set
> can, of course, *become* a specified foci, as with a given "media".
> The Painter is not doing music (though musical experience may be a
> keynote of her painterly Place).
>
> [S] They work together with spoken word statements to produce what is
> sometimes called oralacy. How do we classify oralacy as language?
>
> We distinguish phonetics from syntactics from semantics from
> pragmatics from rhetorics.
>
> [S] What do such multiple [modes of pattern] imply for our concept of
> the statement in the context of TCA?
>
> Translation happens.
>
> [S] Has only literary discourse pretended to exist above its
> substrate? (ie apart from Typography, layout, binding, paper etc?)
>
> Yes and no. Literary discourse *can* exist above its substrate, since
> the substrate can vary without affecting the discursivity (I could
> send you a print-out of a discussion or an audio tape of the same
> discussion, inasmuch as a discussion *can* be considered
> independently of its substrate). But the substrate can be thematic
> (Audio inflection affects interpretation as uninflected written text
> does not; a Derridean can see writing as the basis of speech).
>
>
> [S] The illusion of fixity of meaning is also of interest. Meaning
> seems to be a (dialectical?) moment between individual utterance and
> collective response/ flux.
>
> Not especially dialectical. Socratic? Not usually. Hegelian? Not
> basically oppositional. Dialogal? Sure, but duality isn't a dialectic
> (two colors interplay, but there's no dialectic there; two musical
> notes complement each other or clash, according to their physical
> characteristics, but complementation, counterpoint and resolution are
> not the main event in musical topography).
>
> [S] A moment that can (attempt to) be fixed in ritual and by academic
> terminology.
>
> The work of art and its community of critical response (in the
> interpretive sense of 'criticism')
>
> [S] But any fixing would seem to have a price in terms of the
> fluidity of consensus formation.
>
> A musical composition is fixed in the score, but that doesn't exact a
> price on interpretive performance of that *work*.
> Theme-and-variations can become a new work. We are free to say what
> the appropriate interpretation is--to claim that there *is* "an"
> appropriate interpretation--while any fluidity of consensus formation
> about this might justly lead to no consensus, thanks to the glorious
> plurality of stances toward the work of art, which is art working
> there, too, in the irresolute interplay.
>
> Gary
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