The release, over the past six months, of what will undoubtedly be remembered as two landmark works of symbological and quasi-symbological narrative, viz. Brown's The Lost Symbol and Cameron's Avatar, has provided crucial stimuli to our own meta-critical enterprise, whose formalization as a science proceeds apace. I would like to devote this post, however, to a related phenomenon that the release of these two massively popular works has allowed us to bring into focus: the patterns of rhetorical functioning of the ancillary discourse which we have come to designate "symb-pology."
"Symb-pology" refers to the entire heterogeneous body of commentary generated by the appearance of a symbological or quasi-symbological narrative which takes up the task of replicating, reinforcing, and/or rendering explicit the propositions instantiated by the portions of the symbological narrative we call the "cop-out" and the "injunction to disseminate facile wisdom" (see Prandleforth et al.'s "Glossary of Narrative and Rhetorical Strategies" [2008]). Since it is a widely observed fact that symb-pological discourse flourishes spontaneously in a wide variety of media and fora as a perlocutionary effect of the symbological narrative's successful interpellation of its audience, it is unnecessary to attribute its pervasive presence in the cultural sector of the mainstream press to the latter's toothless acquiescence to the vulgar priorities of the publishing and film industries, tempting as it may be to do so. Rather, such relationships, while real, must be read as themselves symptomatic of the broader structures of complicity which the detailed analysis of symbological fiction may help us bring into view, while all symb-pological utterances should be understood, a priori, as overdetermined in the highest degree imaginable.
I will confine myself, in this context, to providing examples from the critical discourse generated by TLS and Avatar. Nevertheless, my prolonged observations of symb-pological discourse over the past several years have led me to a broader conclusion which I believe to be generally applicable: the possible subject positions of the symb-pologist are constrained in a manner homologous with those available to the symbological protagonist.
More specifically, I would like to propose the following grid as a generative framework for symb-pology:
Form Content
Symb-pologist A (mytho-) Y X
Symb-pologist B (caco-) X Y
The discourse of symb-pologist B is, as should be obvious from this representation of the matter, generated as a strict reversal of the discourse of symb-pologist A, and vice versa. Furthermore, as the parenthetical prefixes indicate, both discourses function partially as a continuation of the major available discourses of the symbological text itself (N.B. orthognosis is, by definition, unavailable outside of the specrtral space of alterity [Orient/Woman] demarcated by and in the text.) I should note that there is, as far as I have been able to determine, nothing that renders a symb-pologist C (YY) strictly unthinkable, but the almost exclusive dominance of A's and B's is, in strictly empirical terms, absolutely irrefutable (Roger Ebert's review of Avatar is arguably an interesting exception). The impossibility of a symb-pologist D (XX) position should be obvious from the definition of the discourse provided above.
Symb-pologist A's essential proposition may be stated in condensed form as follows: "[Insert name of symbological work] may be stupid and pointless in the end, but who cares? It was a good read/fun/beautiful/riveting." Which we might translate: "[Insert name of symbological work] was an effective formal exercise, so why worry about the particular content that was plugged in to it?" It should be clear from this that symb-pologist A's basic move is to assume the symbological work's own disavowal of its ostensible driving commitment to the pursuit of some potent knowledge (about the Grail, suppressed matriarchies, ecology, etc.) - that is, the cop-out - at face value, and moreover, to position himself as a petulant defender of the work's right to engage in this disavowal. Implicit in symb-pologist A's discourse is what we might call a superego injunction to enjoy. In other words, other readers/viewers who might be less willing to swallow a blatant discarding of what were posed as the work's guiding epistemological and moral premises are themselves missing the point - i.e. to enjoy the book film, to have fun with it - in a potentially dangerous way.
Although it is likely to be found in any of the major feuilletons and cultural organs of the media establishment, the staff of the New Yorker magazine has recently excelled in symb-pology A, as evidenced by Adam Gopnik's review of The Lost Symbol, in which he helpfully reminds us us that "Much of it is bogus, to be sure—though modern Masonry borrowed some oogah-boogah from the Egyptian past, it was an Enlightenment club, whose greatest product was 'The Magic Flute,' and which was about as sinister, and secretly controlled about as many governments, as the Royal Order of Raccoons in 'The Honeymooners.' But Brown is having fun." In David Denby's rhetorically similar review of Avatar, the formalism of symb-pology A appears in a more explicit form. Denby enjoins us as follows: "let’s not dwell on the sentimentality of Cameron’s notion of aboriginal life—the movie is striking enough to make it irrelevant. Nor is there much point in lingering over the irony that this anti-technology message is delivered by an example of advanced technology that cost nearly two hundred and fifty million dollars to produce; or that this anti-imperialist spectacle will invade every available theatre in the world. Relish, instead, the pterodactyls, or the flying velociraptors, or whatever they are—large beaky beasts, green with yellow reptile patches—and the bright-red flying monster with jaws that could snap an oak."
The partial overlap between symb-pologist A and the figure of the mythognostic should be evident. These two subjects share a formalism in their approach to the object which turns out to be simply an avowed superficiality, an insistent refusal to go beyond the pleasure of appearances. Symb-pology B resembles cacognosis only insofar as it lends ultimate significance to precise what symb-pology A dismisses as incidental and irrelevant in line with the disavowals inscribed into the work itself. While its divergence from the explicit propositions articulated in the course of the work's narrative recontainment of any ostensibly subversive content has, perhaps predictably, rendered it a less commercially viable position for the symb-pologist to adopt, symb-pology B is no less hegemonic for the fact that it does not generally appear in such prestigious venues as the New Yorker. It is rather well represented by the large class of individuals with whom I have had frequent personal contact who argue that despite the pedestrian prose and all of the Priory of Sion nonsense, the Da Vinci Code has its heart in the right place when it comes to women's rights and the Catholic Church. It is also on splendid display in this blog post on "Avatar and Postcolonial Theory," whose author concludes: "at the end of the day, the movie does dramatize the important possibility of a colonizer learning, growing, and changing his mind. And according to this CNN article, it would seem that Avatar is, if anything, having a significant effect on people’s minds."
To conclude, I would like to suggest that the codification of symb-pology may help clarify further some of the priorities of our own project of critique. Our critical attention, the foregoing discussion suggests, should not be directed at any of the particular positions generated within the matrix delineated above, but rather at the conditions of possibility of the genesis of such positions. In particular, since the differentiation of positions within symb-pological discourse relies on the parceling out of "form" and "content," we must investigate both the ideological necessity of these terms as a function of the symbological text's rhetorical performance and the tendentious impoverishment of the possibilities of interpretation that their stratification represents. Our task, then, is to seek: 1) the content of the form, by way of a systematic critique of "fun," the "good read," and so on; 2) the form of the content, by way of a more thorough investigation of what underlies particular investment of a set of neighboring literary genres in spectral fantasies of originary orthognosis, and how the particular repertoire of narrative structures we have so effectively catalogued work to enact and instantiate symbological (mé)connaissance.
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