The Trouble with Naming

What have we already named?  What do we not yet have a ‘proper name’ for?  In English, we tend to rely on ‘thing’ as a placeholder until we’ve come to consensus on a better term–or, at least, until various parties have submitted their respective names for the subject and one or a few have shaken out in regular discourse.

Here, then, maybe the start of that process.  What do/should we call those media products that are made to appear within a narrative?  Products that, at some level, are still made for us–the real-world audience–yet which don’t directly acknowledge any intended audience but that of the narrative in which they appear?  Should we be calling them full-fledged ‘media products’ in the first place, or does their contingency on the larger narrative somehow negate the fact that they were yet produced and can be independently viewed, at least sometimes?  For example, see the comic book that appears in the trailer for Logan, a page of which was released via Tumblr, as well as the newscast that serves as the trailer for Stranger Things‘ second season.

Are these ‘inward facing’? ‘Narrative-bound’? ‘Viewer-blind’?  None seems entirely accurate for the unusual position of this type, though I’m not yet sure that the two examples cited above are even the same animal themselves.  Specifically, the end of the Stranger Things newscast, in which we see only an empty chair, might be the point at which that product specifically stops being for its own narrative realm and starts being only for us.

Suggestions for tagging this phenomenon would be welcome.

 

Random Theory

Barthes, from ‘An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’:

‘…formalization is a generalization that differs from other generalizations.’

My version:

1. The word is not the thing. (Actually, Korzybski’s version here.)
2. The word ‘thing’ is not the thing.
3. The word ‘thing’ is not other words.
4. ‘Thing’, as a general(izing/izable) word, holds a different function in linguistic structuration than other words.

Random Theory

Another attempt to summarize my perspective that will only seem inaccurate later:

At this point, it’s seeming as though the only notable difference between narrative and linguistic subjects (fictional characters and real people) is one of physicality in this linguistic, physical realm (lacanian ‘reality’): we linguistic subjects have bodies, narrative subjects don’t and may or may not ever. But, in discourse–communication via representations that pretty much constitutes all media by definition–physicality is what’s precisely not needed, worked around, obviated. So, the distinction between the subject who has a body and the one who doesn’t, at least in how they’re treated, how their identities are socially understood, how they are defined in discourse, doesn’t amount to much.

Especially since we’re also getting around the lack of fictional bodies by making our fictions more realistically interactive in various ways, such as gaming, VR cinema, and even ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ YouTube series.

[In]Defining[able] ‘Media’

‘Doors and mirrors, computers and gramophones, electricity and newspapers, television and telescopes, archives and automobiles, water and air, information and noise, numbers and calendars, images, writing, and voice–all these highly disparate objects and phenomena fall into media studies’ purview.’

-Eva Horn, “There Are No Media”, Grey Room #29

Random Theory

Pilcher could have made Wayward Pines into a Hegelian utopia of mutual, face-to-face recognition and valuation if only he’d had better PR and solid personnel and materials managers. A few ‘You Are Valued’ posters, a suggestions box, and 1st Amendment rights would’ve been a good start. 

Random Theory

So, I’ve been listening to some podcasts about the liar’s paradox and I’ve come to understand that the very existence of paradox–at all–is a major conceptual problem for some philosophers.  Something must be wrong in how we perceive or cogitate.  Yet, I can perceive the very concept of paradox, and could continue to do so even if every specific paradox was logicked out right in front of me as fast as I could think them up.  But that truth seems rather easily gotten to, and that tends to be part of the problem; some solutions aren’t acceptable because they’re too easy.  The root construction of the social order, life, etc., must be something beautiful and complex, especially if it is capable of coming up with paradox in the first place.  But we ourselves quite literally came up with the very conception of paradox through our own brain power, and some of us aren’t so beautiful.  Simple is ugly, and The Truth can’t be both dark and ugly.  Dark, unknowable, impossible: all equate to ‘unknowable’, and that’s like answering the question with itself.

So the problem of paradox is the problem of paradox’s own existence–a physicality of the universe that falls short of our conceptions.  We don’t want to believe that we can outthink the universe that we were born into, at least in some respects.  But then, in paradox, in the theory that makes no sense, perhaps we can see a reflection of the stupification we feel when we are present with all the rest of life’s contents that fail to stretch so far as our imaginations.

Random Theory

Revising Wimsatt and Beardsley’s ‘The Intentional Fallacy’:

But the text itself remains to be dealt with, the [never completely, never entirely correctly] analyzable vehicle of a [contextually inextricable] complicated metaphor [for an ever-changing referent].
-pg. 12

Random Theory

the human potential for abstract communication + the material potential for absence = written language

Random Theory: The Inflatability of Relatability

When it comes to considering the popularity of a narrative, we over-invest in the very concept of ‘relatability’.  It’s a largely discursive maneuver, too.  We go to Star Wars because it’s Star Wars, not Farm Wars; what attracts us is the exoticism of space, the novel unreality of a well-detailed realm in which the reliability of physics are defamiliarized by the manipulability of The Force.  We don’t go to Star Wars to get the low-down on how Uncle Owen’s moisture farm is doing–I don’t care how big of a John Deere fan you are–and yet, with all that other stuff of The Force and the Death Star and droids and prophecy, and how do we persist in identifying this farmboy?  But do we need any of those other fabulous elements to be, themselves, ‘relatable’ to be understood?  We might call The Force ‘magic’ or even compare it to religion, but neither can we experience what ‘all’ of religion is like, so we’re still not really trying to relate it to a fundamentally human condition that we feel, for some reason, we can ‘know’ despite the fact that literally 99% of us exactly AREN’T farmboys.

I guess the deeper question might be, then: if we can so readily conceive of so much, in both physical and abstract terms, that is not human, yet we can come to understand it all so vividly nonetheless, why can’t we do the same for subjects we do identify for their humanness, if not necessarily for their humanity?  Is it really such a need of the audience to be able to ‘relate’ to a protagonist somehow, or have we long been sophisticated enough in our discourse to be done with that crutch of expectation?

You know, Heartbeeps (1981) bombed–but I really can’t tell if that supports my point or refutes it.