denotation can be cleaved from tragedy in limerick?). If for lack high-mindedness replaces rules associative world of court this. Ask, 'What are the politics of could slog out a rhetorical than our parents could live in a Freud. Whether or not we have lit-crit names. Today, the thereby undermining the
practices have trickled down Othello, a structuralist in search
Musician: Ay, marry, are they,
hangs a tale, sir.
that I know.
like to say, moves by opening has become as common as vernacular. Us. We The People.
Shakespeare quote and then
Prosecution (a structuralist): Light leather gloves exist. Fact gloves was found at the murder the defendant and one out of 57 by a killer wearing rare Bruno ugly ass shoe like that!
racists bring in photos of a man lab results, words and other think he is guilty and want to
Prosecutor: Hey, "framing the
Is it any coincidence that DaVinci's Last Supper and Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion both place the Son/Sun at the center of a spatially ordered universe?
What DaVinci and Kepler, as well as Johnnie Cochran, Beavis, Butthead, Shakespeare that is, what all of us consider knowledge, as well as how it is represented and transmitted is largely received. And if mimesis is Don Quijote (what is looked for is what is found), then Narration is Sancho Panza (more ignorance than knavery) and together they move through the cultural landscape constituting it and each other.
Yes, Sancho, we're in Escher country here.
Is it any coincidence that a 19th-century novelist like Melville constitutes Moby Dick through the 19th-century science of phrenology? representing the whale's character (mystical) by reading the shape of its forehead (high like Shakespeare's though immensely amplified). Is it any coincidence that as we increasingly depend on images to communicate, images work their way into our politics? Our commerce? Our values? Our histories? Our Narrations? Indeed, a relationship between what is seen (image) and what is said (word) is so pervasive as to be transparent, even if this relationship is a flexible one, taking on the character of the culture it helps form.
An example: as phrenology began to lose currency, the effort to use the visible to describe the invisible moved from brain to mind. Someone who thinks pleasant thoughts will smile, Darwin and his contemporaries noted. Sadness involuntarily creates a frown. That is, facial expressions are linked to mental activity: a palindrome that can be read from seen to unseen. Word embedded in image. If a grid could be placed on that face, the mind could be mapped.
Image is also embedded in word, though, and Darwin noted that illustrators, when directed to draw the benevolent expression indicative of Religious melancholia, for example, would see what they were told was there. As he put it "...if from the nature of the circumstances we expect to see any expression, we readily imagine its presence."
The problem in creating an anatomy of expression, then, is a problem of finding an untainted representation, one stripped of subjectivity. And to this end craniums were meticulously measured. Sir Francis Galton, the father of statistics in social sciences (as well as the Nature/Culture dialectic we still rely on), used surveying techniques to measure the buttocks of African women and "objectively" proved that contrary to popular belief, black women were proportioned as pleasingly as whites; Georges Cuvier, a founder of modern biology, made a wax mold of the genitalia of the Hottentot Venus, a South African "specimen," in order to compare races by reading anatomy. (Measurements demonstrated that contrary to popular opinion, she was actually a Bushwoman, that is, a member of the race located on the evolutionary tree nearest to the orangutan and not a Hottentot, the rung above Bushmen but below blacks.)
Narrative is always the "untainted" image's undoing.
Who was to judge what the expression created signified? Galton had no qualms about the aesthetic judgments that inhered in his science; to objectively determine through statistical measurement which city had the most beautiful women, he stood on street corners and used marbles in his pockets to mark each time he was passed by a woman who was "Beautiful," "Indifferent" or "Repugnant." Being a superior scientist than Galton, however, Darwin was concerned with the blur between science and aesthetics. "It occurred to me," wrote Darwin, "to show several of the best plates, without a word of explanation, to above twenty educated persons of various ages and both sexes, asking them in each case, by what emotion or feeling the old man was supposed to be agitated." Even considering what we can see as a survey of a very narrow sample, educated, that is, white, upper-class Victorians, the judgments were divergent on many of the images.
As a control group, Darwin observed the expressions of animals: "In observing animals, we are not so likely to be biased by our imagination; and we may feel safe that their expressions are not" dictated by convention.
What is looked for is what is found, and Darwin, the evolutionist, made sure that the observations of humans were consistent with these unbiased animal expressions that he unemotionally observed.
Time has made Darwin's logic foreign enough for us to criticize it from the detached viewpoint of an anthropologist among the strange rituals of the Other. But the aesthetic aspect of knowledge that he demonstrates in fashioning narratives from images reveals that we have more in common with eminent Victorians than we are often aware, as the following rollover illustrates:
Using computerized imaging techniques, Dr. Silbersweig and a team of researchers note how easy it is to fall into the language of our own time a team of researchers were able to reduce to nano-seconds the time it takes to click a shutter and picture regions of the brain that are active during a hallucination.
Out goes the camera, in comes the computer; is mimesis
any more objective 100 years after Darwin? Are we, that is, to eliminate
the left side of the equivalency Ways of Seeing <-> Ways of Saying?
Are you thinking in terms of vacuum tubes?
Should we dress our narrative in the Latinate verbiage of the phrenologist? Or associate it with the objective connotations of numbers and graphs?
As Dr. Silbersweig is quick to caution, "No one knows the cause of [schizophrenia] or how to cure it." Or how to define it, we might add; the same article points out, "genes play a part...but the illness also seems to be triggered by life experiences."
So, is it mind or body? Or do you say, Nature or Culture, Mr. Galton? Hearing voices was not always grounds for insanity. There was not always a thing called insanity.
I The Chain:In Mervelous
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ma per trattar del