Sign Language

           

            On Tuesday morning after yoga I skipped my usual song practice to edit my English essay. When the time came to leave for Continental Philosophy I put my essay on a flash drive and worked on it some more before the lecture. Maybe it’s a simple thing but for me it’s amazing that I can plug a usb storage device into my laptop to edit files and then transfer them back to my computer later.

            In his lecture, Professor Gibbs continued to talk about Levinas, which I hadn’t read yet at all because I’d been focusing on my Nietzsche essay. He began by saying, “Just when you thought it was safe to read philosophy, we gave you “Meaning and Sense”. This second essay by Levinas is quite thick, while the previous one, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” is easy, even though ontology is hard.

            With Levinas, we moved from Heidegger to something that escapes him: the Other. The other is the entity that escapes meaning. The other is the only being that I could murder, though in some sense it would escape. When I look him in the face I see the command, “Don’t murder!” The face does not signify by living in the house but rather calls me out of the house to language. To be in relation to the other face to face is to be unable to kill. This is a breach on the horizon. It is infinite but not huge, meaning it exceeds the finitude and mortality of my horizon.

            For Heidegger, death and mortality are the fulcrum, but Levinas says there is something else. A possibility of something not bound to my death resists my power without being a counter power. It resists with nakedness a signifying possibility of speech beyond the possibility to appear. It calls to me.

            Levinas is not sure if things have faces.

            Levinas is close to Kant’s practical philosophy but not his ontology. Beyond myself.

            All these issues about killing, face and signifying. Such reflection is only a personal adventure. The human presents itself to the relation that is not a power. In Levinas’s humanism, power is suspended. His is a space of ethics rather than ontology. Ontology is not fundamental (Damn! He didn’t even say “spoiler alert!” Now there’s no point even reading “Is Ontology Fundamental?” now that Gibbs gave away the ending.) Ethics is first a first philosophy. Ethics is the home of the fundamental inquiry.

            Language is about signs. “Signification” is the French word for “meaning”. 20^th Century philosophy was about language and time, but this is about signs. Semiotics is the study of signs and it used to be a big deal at U of T. Humanities have shifted away from this. Heidegger was about thinking in terms of language but Levinas is about meaning in terms of language.

            Levinas doesn’t express his own view at the beginning of his essays. Those who don’t read far enough in get the wrong impression.

            The professor talked about two kinds of metaphor. The first was an empirical intuitionist intellectualism in which reality signifies intelligibility. The sign points toward something that is not present but could be present, like a picnic basket. This as Husserl’s type of metaphor.

            The second type of metaphor is about absence. Humanity will never be present. Excess. It could never be present or contained like a horizon. It is hermeneutic, which means it is about the study of the methodology of text interpretation. In the margin beside this he wrote: horizon, world, context, culture. It’s like the place where the picnic happens. This is Heidegger’s type of metaphor.

            Of a book – it’s absent contents such as the shelves confer meaning. The book is a metaphor for things more real than the book. We can’t perceive the book without context. The book evokes it because it is prior to the metaphor.

            Signifying is poorer than perceiving.

            From the perspective of a god we have reality in the mind first and then we find words for it. Independent of particular minds signs compensate for absent things.

            The limits of language are circumscribed to the limits of consciousness.

            A metaphor as a reference to absence could indicate excellence.

            Meaning is not a consolation for a disappointing perception.

            The notion of the horizon is conceived after the model of the context. Smuggling in the model of language and culture. We use language as a model to understand language. We can’t ground words in pure thought. Language is only grasped with the linguistic image of context.

            Meaning or signification precedes and illuminates data.

            Levinas takes a familiar term, shows the horizon behind it and shows the way the word illuminates meaning.

            The given is presented from the first qua this to that experience. Experience is a reading understanding of meaning and exegesis. No hermeneutics and not intuition.

            The structure of the world resembles the order of language. The world is linguistic. Nothing just is. Everything is always against a backdrop of words. Disturbing totality in a different way. Going beyond totality.

            The body is key to signifying. I am in the world in a body. I have a mapable location but my access depends on the operation of my body. The world is deeply incarnated. I can only see with my eyes.

            For Heidegger things are illuminated on a stage of language.

            For Levinas the incarnate subject raises the curtain. The spectator is an actor. You are not outside the stage but are rather part of the drama. If you weren’t it wouldn’t be happening.

            A culture is a cultural object that we’ve made to accumulate meaning and to make whole. Thought happens in the culture of our stuff. Everything that we experience is cultural. He pointed out that we were sitting in chairs while listening to a lecture rather than sitting on the floor. Culture feeds and warms us and culture is inserted with the thoughts of incarnate minds.

            It is not fundamentally inwardness of thought that gives language meaning. We do not express our inner life. Professor Gibbs at this point declared, “I have rarely thought before speaking, though I have heard that some people do.”  Thought happens in a language that we did not invent. The meaning that we seek is already available but only in words in a fully embodied culture.

            Of overcoming the subject-object structure: the subject is not outside looking in or inside looking out. The subject is in a body. Signs refer to more than what they name. It takes effort to point to meaning and it is a bit of a lie.

            For Plato, meaning came before language. We are addicted to this thinking and grasping intellect that whistles things into reality.

            But for Levinas, meaning is not separate from the access leading to it. The scaffolding is not taken down. How we get to knowledge is part of knowledge.

            He gave us the subject of the next lecture by saying that as we are colonial subjects of the multiplicity of meaning, we can’t escape.

            When I got home I read through my essay out loud, changed two or three words and then took a siesta. Before leaving for class I had time to go through it again, changed a couple more words here and there, then I printed it up and went to campus.

            I was about twenty minutes later than usual. I could tell from the blackboard that a philosophy class had been in earlier. I erased everything but “I think, therefore I am”, just because I wanted to see Andrew’s reaction when he saw that phrase on the board. When he came in and was about to wipe it out, he hesitated and said, “There’s a debate!” before erasing it.

            In the first hour of class we looked at the last of the postmodern stories, which was Douglas Glover’s “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”.  Features of postmodernism on display in this piece are fragmentation and the use of language to obscure, separate and connect. Andrew asked what thing separates and connects, but I hadn’t heard the word “thing” in his question. I began to talk about the separations and connections in the story but he interrupted me and repeated, “What THING separates and connects?” and he seemed a little annoyed with me. There were a few wrong answers. I thought of a bridge but had forgotten whether there had been a bridge in this convoluted story. I put my hand up and Andrew took his time to acknowledge it but when he did I suggested “the river”. I guess I was close enough for him to reveal that it was the bridge. I said, “I was gonna say bridge!” and everybody laughed. When you think about it though, bridges only connect and it’s the body of water that separates.

            The bridges in this story are both real and invented embellishments.

            The plot is arbitrary and switches back and forth between two narratives that eventually connect: the narrator’s life and the story of the blind man and the dog on the river. The second narrative is a substitute climax for the first.

            All stories are found in conflict between the characters within. How a story is constructed is as important as the story itself.

            Andrew first of all made it clear that he loved dogs before he asked us the question, “Why do dogs rescue people?” He concluded that it’s because they are parasites and they are protecting their meal tickets. I think that he’s probably wrong about this. Dogs are pack animals and they see the human beings that care for them as members of their pack. They would just as naturally rescue other dogs with which they’ve bonded and here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HJTG6RRN4E

            Andrew said that the first sentence of the story can be broken into three parts: “My wife and I / decide to separate / and then suddenly we are almost happy together.”

            The first person narrator has no name. Is he being evasive?

            Since he is a first person narrator, he can’t be an omniscient narrator and so when he tells us what his wife is thinking, we know that he is probably off the mark.

            The story is fragmented and distorted by inexact recollection and so it is moving towards an unreliable truth. We can rely on the narrator to be unreliable.

            The story is a swamp of relativity.

            Trying to tell the exact truth leads to madness.

            He speaks as if the reader were a child.

            The narrator makes sure that we understand that he will frustrate and lead us astray.

            When he talks about being in the middle the text is in the middle of the paragraph. The middle of a bridge is the best perspective to have.

The narrator is two courses short of a philosophy degree he will never earn. The author though does have a philosophy degree. Both the narrator and the author worked as night editors for a local newspaper. The narrator mentions three philosophers in the story: Heraclitas, who wrote in fragments; Kierkegaard, who mocked system building; and Nietzsche, who wrote in aphorisms.

The narrator bestows free will on the reader and says, “Believe this if you wish.” Reading is always a process of modification. We are free to invent symbols as we see fit. The bridge is a symbol of change because there is always something on the other side. A bridge is an object of culture while a river is an object of uncertainty.

The narrator made a list of things that may or may not have happened in the story. Andrew went through the list with us and about two thirds of the things on the list did not happen. But the very fact that they were on the list in the story meant that they all actually did happen in the story.

In the second half of the class we looked at two graphic fiction stories.

The first was Mark Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury”. Andrew gave us some background on Mark Newgarden. He was one of the featured artists in the first issue of Raw Magazine, of which I had a copy back in the 80s though I don’t remember his work specifically. He was one of the creators of the Garbage Pail Kids, and I was the only one in the class familiar with them, I guess because they were an 80s phenomenon and my classmates hadn’t been born yet during their popularity. “Love’s Savage Fury” is based on the iconic comic strip, “Nancy”, which only Andrew and myself had ever seen. In the story, Newgarden adds Bazooka Joe, from the bazooka Bubble Gum comics as a romantic interest for Nancy. They meet on the subway and the poles are the panel dividers for the comic. There are panels that are entirely black to reflect the way the lights go out momentarily in New York subway cars.

The last story we looked at was Richard McGuire’s “Here”. Andrew projected the comic onto the screen, but while pointing out details in the frames he found a lot of dead flies in the way. Apparently flies are attracted to the screen when it is lit but then when it rolls back up they are crushed.
            Each panel of “Here” portrays the exact same location, which is where in most frames there is the corner of a living room by a window in a house. But the story goes back and forth in time to when the house wasn’t there or to when it will not be there. The house was built in 1902. Billy was born in 1957 and we see his whole life and death as we jump ahead and backward. There are sometimes smaller panels quarantined inside of larger panels as they each depict a different time. Within several frames there is a black cat in small panels dated 1999. The cat is moving in the opposite direction in which we are reading the comic and so a black cat is crossing our path. One image is mapped on another to suggest the transfer of properties from one to the other.

After class I told Andrew that I didn’t understand why we were doing graphic stories in a short story course. He dismissively said, “Why not?” and then he suggested that I should “expand my horizons.” As someone who has always been into comics all my life and who actually took Andrew’s Graphic Novel course, I don’t think he needs to tell me to expand my horizons. He argued that a graphic novel has been listed as the best novel, period, of the year. I argued that it would have been interesting if what the storyteller achieved with graphics could actually be achieved with writing. He just declared, “Sounds like an essay!” and left.

Some graphic stories have very good writing that would stand up without the artwork. I would say that if he is going to include graphic stories as short stories, he might as well include songs and television commercials as well.