Citational Fragments

Self and Other in Bahktin

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Mikhail Bakhtin

‘I am conscious of myself and become myself only through revealing myself for another, through another and with the help of another. The most important acts constituting self-consciousness are determined by a relationship toward another consciousness [toward a thou]…The very being of man internal and external is the deepest communion. To be means to communicate…To be means to be for another, and through the other for oneself. A person has no internal soveriegn territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary: looking inside himself he looks into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another…I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another.’

Text reproduced from: Thinking space By Mike Crang, N. J. Thrift, 2000:pp73/74

Image reproduced from http://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/album/index2.htm

A Poetics of Detail

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‘The detail discloses hidden elements within a diegesis – a formulation that applies to psychoanalysis as much as it applies to the interpretation of narrative generally. Freud creates an interpretive pradagim in which details function as clues, distractions or unarticulated dimensions of diegesis. […] Details need only suggest in their effects of authenticity or usualness that they belong to a possible world. Framing that world, which can be entirely made up, ‘details provide an important aesthetic function when their concreteness, historical accuracy, or presicision captures and sustains the readers attention or conveys to him the illusion of immediacy’. That immediacy need not spring from the coherence of details. They can exist independent of each other, like so many curiosities in a cabinet.  For this reason details resemble material goods; the precise captures the essential qualities of an object.’

Perceived and interpreted, details offer counter narratives within narratives, they supplement stories with extra diegectical importance. In The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes reflects on details as narrative information: ‘Why this curiosity for tiny details, schedules, meals, habits, clothes and so on. Is this the fantasmic taste of reality [‘the materiality of this once existed’]?. Is it not a fantasy itself which summons the detail, the minutiae, private scene in which I might find my place at last’?. Fantasy stakes its claim in the kingdom of the detail. Whereas the realist text purports to offer historical veracity through a grisaille of details, details admit speculation, fantasy, even the fantasmic. The detail in this sense is not available for public scrutiny or sharing. The detail re-fetishizes ownership through particularity.’

Enchanted Objects: visual art in contemporary fiction, 2010:pp64/65

The Fictive and the Imaginary

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Anne Hamilton, Body Object Series, Bush Head

‘By opening up spaces of play the fictive compels the imaginary to take on a form at the same time as it acts as a medium for its manifestation. What the fictive targets is as yet empty and thus requires filling; and what is characteristic of the imaginary is its featurelessness, which thus requires form for its unfolding. Consequently play arises out of the fictive and the imaginary.’ [1]

Each fiction contaminates the imaginary purity of everyday life by denying the privileged authority of immediate, lived context and that context’s subsequent “authenticity” of experience.

Because fiction “occurs” in a world simultaneous to and “outside” everyday life, it interrupts the narrativity, the linearity of that life. The weaving of fictive genres throughout this linearity lends to everyday life a lyric quality, a quality of recurrence and variation upon theme. [2]

[1] Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and The Imaginary, 1993: pp.xvii

[2] -Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Image [from front cover] and text reproduced from http://www.gabrielblackwell.com/2011/08/imaginary-purity-of-everyday-life.html