[Post by Lelangir]
I posted this on a different non-anime blog of mine some time ago:
You can interpret the effect of technology as an archaeological study. Technology, a product of society – society, a product of technology – says and objectively states something about its influential parentage, its social pedigree, the conditions under which it was wrought. It’s objective: or rather, its subjectivity necessitates that very objectivity (lest we revert to simple-minded sophistry), because it was born of that exact subjectivity. It is pristine, virgin, unadulterated, unaffected by extra-sapient cognizance, which in itself is impossible at the moment. It is a direct product of the cultural womb from which it came, and thus is liable to be read textually; its inanimate authors leaving absolutely no ambiguity, no connotation, only denotation, because it is a mere fossil, a relic, a speechless artifact. That is the, for lack of better wordage, subjective objectivity of archaeological sociology.
To flesh this out, I mean to say that when reading anime (or anything specifically as text) it is possible to define the conditions from which that anime was produced because such a product was generated by those very circumstances. We can solve an equation in terms of y {34x + 5b/2y = 4c}, but “in terms of” doesn’t necessarily state what those terms are since we don’t escape the circular logic of recursive semantics; what is y? – it’s not x, b, or c; what’s x, b or c? – anything but y. Y is not concrete, it’s an abstraction.
Anime is subjective, we can never really know what it means in its entirety, even if we ask the animators. Perhaps the animators themselves don’t even know (or antecedent authors of adaptations). But I think we can know what an anime means in terms of the conditions it was produced from. Socio-historical context. Anime can’t precisely mean much besides y when y equals the history from 1xxx-200x, and even then it’s still going to be ambiguous to some degree. It’s not even really saying what the anime means (if such a thing exists), but, rather, what society means. What does anime say about the society that created it – where else could it have come from? Thus texts are archaeological, society is the hand that crafts text, criticism the excavator.
It’s a more refined way of spelling out what I meant by the objectivity of subjectivity and the subjectivity of objectivity.1
1 http://lelangiric.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/presentation-the-problem-with-reading/
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
r042
Cuchlann
/ 11 October 2008The thing about this — and you’re not wrong — is that the reader must then define the society that produced the text. And the only way to do that, or one of the only ways, is to analyze the texts the society produced. For my tastes it seems like too many steps: just analyze the text, or texts, and get on with it.
But then again, I refer to texts sometimes thousands of years old to deal with almost anything, so who am I to say? : D
lelangir
/ 11 October 2008Chuchlann: Must we then define the society that produced the text? If I go to an ancient site where cavemen were supposed to live and find a bunch of peanut remains, I can merely state that there were, in fact, a bunch of peanut remains there. If I investigate these remains and find dried saliva and teeth marks, I can posit that these cave people ate peanuts. Cave people ate peanuts. Do I have to define the entirety of their society? Or maybe I’m missing your point…
I guess with “middle English” (if that’s at all correct a term), if there is enough viable history lying around that you can make use of, those form the base of your least common denominator. The history you’re provided with becomes x, a and b, while your textual evidence y.
Cuchlann
/ 12 October 2008Well, you’ve sort-of got it. I’ll try to, well, make sense: with your example about peanuts, that fact doesn’t do anything for me. The context, the definition of society, would be the only reason I would care. Further context — peanuts weren’t native to the area. Suddenly I care about the peanuts, because they imply some form of good-transport over distance, possibly trade.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of new-historicism. I was just saying that, in the act of analyzing a text, it doesn’t appeal to me as much as just analyzing the text. But then I realized that I just do it differently — I place texts in the context of the whole tradition of storytelling, rather than a society (that is, I use myth rather than history, most of the time).
So, like I said, I wasn’t even disagreeing with you. I was just throwing my two cents in.
Pontifus
/ 12 October 2008I think your approach to texts as historical artifacts is a valid one, and I suppose it allows for objectivity insofar as the historic societies that produced the texts did what they did, and didn’t do what they didn’t do — there’s some truth out there, whether or not enough evidence remains for it to be discerned by us. To what degree texts accurately reflect the societies from which they’re born is probably debatable, but not by me; I can’t say for sure what my field is, but it isn’t socio-historical.
The questions I prefer to ask when analyzing a given text are 1. how do previous texts shape the meaning of this text, and how does this text shape the meaning of previous texts (thanks, Eliot), and 2. how could this text be made relevant to society x by a reader from that society (assuming that any text can be made relevant to any society, which I believe to be the case)? I’m still bound by the limits of human understanding in these lines of inquiry, but, as I said in my most recent comment to my previous post, if we can’t take something into consideration due to the limits of the mind, it effectively doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned. There may be some outer framework of objectivity, but if we can act within it only subjectively, subjectivity is existentially all there is.