Sense: Orientations, Meanings, Apparatus. Ideological - T-Space

247 Pages·1998·11.66 MB·English

Sense: Orientations, Meanings, Apparatus. Ideological
dimensions of select twentieth-century occidental texts
devoted to technology, perception and reproduction.
Francois Lachance
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Centre for
Comparative Literature in the University of Toronto
8 Copyright by Francois Lachance 1996
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Sense: Orientations, Meanings, Apparatus Ideological
dimensions of select twentieth-century occidental texts
devoted to techno1o gy, perception and reproduction.
Ph-d. 1996
~ran~oiLsac hance
Centre for Comparative Literature
university of Toronto
ABSTRACT
The study tests the discursive limits of current models
of the human sensorium; outlines the mapping of the
eye/ear pair onto the mind/body dichotomy and how this
constructs a passive sensorium and entrenches anti-
intellectual and anti-erotic stances; calls for an
examination of the dialectical interplay between
sensation and cogitation through a re-valuation of the
role of abstraction in acts of reading and perception;
argues that unchallenged sensory biases are at work in
dyadic models of reproduction; examines ethno-
scientific assumptions underlying theories of social
and biological reproduction; probes deployment of
sensory organizations in theory-making about models of
generation; traces the consequences of sensory
organizations for theory-making about models of
interpretation; presents a typology of dichotomist
versus dialectical epistemologies; stakes the claim
that models and material practices stand in a
ii
dialectical relation to each other; posits, finally,
that non-reductive functional approaches to narrative
enhance the modelling of an interactive sensorium and
open the way for non-trivial analysis of narratives
coded in other than linguistic means.
Key Names: Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Louis
~lthusser,M ary O'Brien, Jane Flax, Susan Bordo,
Dorothy Smith, Sue Wise, Liz Stanley, Paul Ricoeur,
Roman Ingarden, A.J. Greimas, Marilyn Strathern, Alan
Turing, Hegel.
iii
for Douglas
mans amandus semper
Consciousness and discourse must remain
heterogeneous, their reduction to the same is
a return to metaphysics. Of this we must take
care.
Ronald A. T. Judy
In invention intellectuelle Judith Schlanger
suggests that noise, the sheer mass of popularisation
which the French call llvulgarisationcno ntributes to
significant breakthroughs. Each rearticulation of
current knowledge is a displacing repetition and
affects however slightly the paths open and openins to
thinkers. Opting for more flash, Marshall McLuhan
stated that breakdown leads to breakthrough. One could
endorse such a historiography of crisis and rupture.
However ways have been opened to do otherwise.
McLuhants way of telling stories was grounded in a
faith where the past was good and the future would be
better. Whatever alternatives were available to McLuhan
at mid-century, one does well in this late twentieth
century to attend to Ludwig Pfeiffer as he expresses
the hope of moving away from "cultural nostalgia and
technological euphoria" that have turned sour
(Materialities of Culture 12). The past cannot be
glorified and the future remains uncertain. The one is
not here and the other not gone.
Thus one comes to do the careful reading of less
than spectacular texts, to take up the essays,
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meditations and theoretical accounts of less well known
thinkers, to sift patiently and find the variations in
the production of cultural paradigms. There can be no
pharaonic injunctions against straw since all this
activity is of course keyed to intervention, repeated
intervention, wlgar intervention, against dominant
ideologies.
All this meddling is focused upon the repeated and
varied question of the organization of the senses, in
particular the possibilities of translation between
sight and sound. The study before you is testing the
discursive limits of current models of the human
sensorium.
Each section of the study that follows examines
how an organization of the senses affects theory
making. The sections need not be read in any particular
order. They may stand alone. Or they may be paired. The
first section demonstrates that forms of sensory
organization are correlated with models of
reproduction- To test this correlation, the next
section examines the sensory biases at work in models
of reproduction. The next sections are concerned with
sensory organizations in theory-making about models
themselves. The first of these examines a critique of a
model of the generation of narratives and there follows
a section devoted to models of interpretation. The
following section stakes the claim that models and
material practices stand in a dialectical relation to
each other. There follows a metacomrnentary which
explains why the boundary lines in the pairings
perception-reproduction and generation-interpretation
keep breaking up or down which ever direction you
prefer.
There is no getting lost if you have patience with
repetitions, tolerance for a bit of noise and stamina
for a lot of vulgar recoding. Nothing novel. But worth
repeating and refreshing. You will find the model of
the cybernetic machine applied to human communication
and perception. You will find the critique of the
ideology of romance applied to the politics of
reproduction. You will find critique and modelling
combined.
You will not find a big bang. In the presentation,
there is no moment of great disclosure. This choice
arises not only from a historiographic suspicion of
hastily claimed breaks with the past. The decision to
arrange the presentation to allow for a variety of
reading sequences also stems from epistemological
considerations. A plot marrying reproduction and
revelation would depend upon an initial separation of
the knowing, the known and the knower. It would be
senseless. The tool and the user are part of a system
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of events. And it is through tools we come to sense the
world, comprehend our selves, understand our work and
know our tools but also such ways of thinking and
practices of embodiment query the tidy relation between
revelation and reproduction, a relation that is
responsible in large measure for many a discursive move
that conflates world, self and text, reducing the
complexity of their interaction to a dull and deadening
dyad.