Recent analyses in this forum of symb-pology, James Cameron's Avatar, neurosymbology, and other cultural products have all, in different ways, brought into focus a notable lacuna in the models of symbological thought, narrative, and production elaborated here and in related media. I refer to a repeatedly evident structural relationship between homo symbologicus (in which I include the entire range of subject positions allowed by the Generative Grammar) and homo economicus, originally defined by John Stuart Mill as "a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative efficacy of means for obtaining that end." What follows takes as its starting point the widely accepted assertion that homo economicus functions broadly as the assumed a priori position of the subject of Western capitalist modernity, and that the continued stability of the latter system requires the subject to understand himself and his underlying motives as reducible to the calculation of individual material gain. We should recall that in my review of Avatar, I noted that homo economicus, referred to there as the subject of Vulgar Economic Determinism (for the sake of convenience I will heretofore refer to VED), stands both as the antagonist and secret sharer of the only other available subject position, that of the Orthognostic Other, with weak mythognosis embodied in Sigourney Weaver's Dr. Grace Augustine occupying a merely subordinate position in the film's schema. The most notable contribution of Avatar, I suggested, is the quite explicit identity it establishes between the undisguised VED of the human invaders and the resolute orthognosis of their ostensible opposites, the Na'vi. Cameron's film renders more visible the manner in which the same VED-orthognostic identity is equally evident in the classical symbological novel in the initially not entirely predictable function of orthognosis as the vehicle of ideological recontainment via the protagonist/reader's compulsory adoption of the doctrines of indifférance promulgated by the Orthognostic Other (Poimandres's final interpellation of Rutherford and Catherine being the locus classicus here). If these narrative conventions permit the recognition of a metaphorical-substitutive relationship between VED and the orthognostic/indifférant endpoint of symbological narrative, the discourse of symb-pology exemplified for all time by Gopnik's review of The Lost Symbol establishes a complementary metonymic relationship, insofar as Gopnik locates the truth of the symbological novel, and the obligatory enjoyment its consumption entails, precisely in its profitability. The symbological text, in other words, turns out to be both about VED and a vehicle of VED. While its social instrumentality as a form of narrative interpellation depends on its temporary concealment of this complicity, its critical reception in the form of symb-pology may in fact foreground the VED underlying its production to defend it from any misguided charges of subversiveness, i.e. perverse-cacognostic commitment to its explicit premises. Proceeding from these observations, I would like to advance the following hypotheses:
1) In the classical symbological narrative (Brown, Martin, Martín), characterized by the deployment of the mythognostic-cacognostic-orthognostic continuum (hereafter MGCGOG), VED is generally concealed except insofar as it functions as the implicit subject position of the reader, suspended during the reading of the novel and renabled by the novel's closing disavowals. If VED appears within the novel as itself, it generally occupies a weak and evanescent position, exemplified nicely by the powerlessness of Secretary Miller and the other VED members of the Corporation before the CG agenda of Senator Kurtz.
2) In weaker forms of symbological narrative, in contrast, VED frequently has an explicit place in the narrative, which posits a dualistic framework in which the abeyance of VED corresponds to the assumption of one of the position drawn from MGCGOG. These weaker forms are generally characterized by the near exclusive prominence of one of the subject positions produced by the GG. Examples:
-In The Rule of Four, in which the narrator and his collaborator Paul never move beyond the mythognostic pole, their antagonists Vincent Taft, Bill Stein, and Richard Curry, differ from them only insofar as they have abandoned disinterested and avowedly irrelevant scholarly pursuits in the name of professional advancement and material gain.
-In Reilly's work, VED and CG constantly bleed into one another and are frequently indistinguishable, since the agon of the various world powers in pursuit of the code is usually explicitly justified in terms of material gain; yet Reilly seems to regard there as being a healthy (because ultimately reducible to VED) version of this pursuit, and a more disturbed, fanatical (and therefore identifiably CG) version of this pursuit, even if the reader may doubt the viability of this distinction.
-Avatar, as has already been suggested, performs the rather remarkable feat of explicitly juxtaposing VED and Orthognosis in a manner that simultaneously disavows and discloses their deep complicity: on the synchronic level, in the form of the implicitly VED subject position of the reader/viewer whose explicit endorsement of OG the film's rhetoric elicits; diachronically, insofar as the endpoint of the film in the narrative resolution of VED/OG antagonism to the benefit of the latter mirrors the indifférant viewer's reinvigorated resumption of VED.
On this basis, I would like to propose: a) a more thorough consideration of the divergence of "strong" and "weak" symbological narratives with regard to the explicitness of their treatment of VED; and b) the revision/expansion of the structural models that we have developed in a manner that will adequately portray the centrality and relevance of VED to all forms of symbological narrative and thought. However, in order to develop the desired synoptic framework, it will first be necessary to extend the interrogations of the heretofore excluded paragnostic/"Judith Butler" subject position, a project recently made necessary by the discovery of Martín(ez)'s The Oxford Murders. I, for one, look forward to this work with great eagerness.
No comments:
Post a Comment