I’ll respond on three seperate points I thought I had something at least semi-worthwhile to utter comments about. Being steeped deep in analytical philosophy is interesting in an environment veering more towards continental theory. It is quite giving, since it’s long been a desire of mine to join the two once again, finding the divide unnecessary, harmful even. This’ll also mean that my viewpoints will be at times quite… incongruous to the discourse the others are in (as opposed to disagreeing), but nothing is more beautiful than the harmony of dissonance. Oh and at times (read: most of the time) I won’t respond at all, but only go on about my view on things without really addressing theirs.

First Response-point: On Plot and Metaphor

Ghostlightning and lelangir touch upon what relationship plot and metaphor has; specifically in the case of Kannagi.

lelangir: I think the fanservice superficial plot is more vehicular to the metaphorical content

Ghostlightning: consequence of conflict: complication of ordinary high school life

lelangir: in the anime, what we see first and foremost is Nagi years ago

Ghostlightning: the metaphorical content does not equal plot

lelangir: clad in traditional clothing as goddess

hmm

Ghostlightning: plot can be ‘bad’ but metaphorical content can be awesome

kannagi’s metaphorical content is awesome imo

plot is ordinary

not a value judgment

lelangir: but the metaphorical content is so well lined up that I dont think it cant be anything but plot

To clarify: I don’t use plot in the way Ghostlightning and lelangir does; I use ”plot” for the presentation (”narrative” – Ghostlightning does point this out), and ”story” for the content, their ”plot”. Plot(Use)_l+G = Story(Use)_k.

To further elaborate, unlike the poststructuralists, I think that it is possible to discern between signified and signifier: in this case, the signifier is the plot, hiding within itself the story – the events as they ”actually” are in diegesis. It gets very interesting when one adds in metaphor as being plot – I agree more with lelangir there than I do with Ghostlightning, not that I’d ever thought of making the equation myself – since metaphor in itself is a signifier of the signified material, the -phoros. (While I am using Sausserean terminology, I have a good deal of Pierce in me – it’s just that his triad is not necessary to make clear what I mean here and I believe Saussures terms are more well-known.)

Without the story, the metaphor doesn’t work. The story as a vehicle for the metaphor establishes soundly that it is a signifier/signified relation. Words are ”vehicles” for meaning – meaning being, as I’ll get into later, a reference to an object (quite possibly another sign).

So the fictional work is a lattice-leaf within the greater semiotic complex-lattice of anime (which is part of the different fields of Western otaku subculture and Eastern, each part of their own greater complexes of nerddom and fiction, which are ultimately part of the semiosphere – the totality of all signs and sign-systems in use). They are all great masses of signs and their ordinary, accepted and controversial relations, all a bit skewed since they lie in the heads of different people, all with slightly different intra-sign relationships due to differing interpretations and experiences.

I have gay colours in my diagrams and schematics because no one else does and I think that’s a shame.

Putting this into a hierarchy and schematizing it (you can atomize it a good bit more – I stop at the objects of metaphor since I won’t adress lower-level signs) as I did above, one might think that they are separate entities, but they are quite inextractable from eachother. Or at least, down to the metaphor – it is not a necessary subdivision of a story. Note, though, that as we go lower down the hierarchy, we also go closer the fictional world and its reality – is perhaps the metaphor-plane where this stops and the false reality again gazes up at ours, slowly becoming more and more part of what is again, to culminate in the signifieds of the smallest signs? Perhaps a fictional world is trapped inbetween the larger social construct from whence it originated and the elements of that construct – or is it a mirage, that the real lies only in the smallest of propositions, and as we craft larger and larger semiotic webs, we lose reality¹?

Whether this applies to Kannagi, I am not quite sure myself yet – so while I am defending the viability of lelangir’s original thesis being a viable model for some fiction, I am not arguing that he shouldn’t have abandoned it when it comes to Kannagi in lieu of the two-coexistant-stories view. At least not yet.

Second Response-point: On Genera

I find genera (proper latin plural, biatches, because it looks better, which generoi doesn’t) to be a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating and harmful practice. The way they originate is wholly arbitrary: while fantasy and sci-fi are named after the elements that appear in the stories, tragedy and comedy are named after what emotional effect they have, and ‘slife after what situations the story is about (yes, Lucky Star has a story. Shock ain’t it?). We could just as well have a genre which went after if there are cellphones or close analogies and an associated set of tropes/clichés – after all, we already have mecha series, with their associated tropes and clichés. That is, unlike the hierarchy of Work-Plot-Story in a signifier-signified sense, genre is a set, with elements being some of the atoms of story.

lelangir: and that’s where I thought the heirarchy of plot/genre was upset

Ghostlightning: particular to specific works

lelangir: ok

yeah

Ghostlightning: yeah

lelangir: so which form does kannagi utilize

I’m just having a hard time articulating this

Ghostlightning: i can imagine

lelangir: the first case is how plot is a glue that connects genre

the second is how everything is already cohesive in the first place

but it’s not visible

it takes something more to realize it

Rather than ”genre” being part of the hierarchy of narrative fiction, it’s an overlapping, intrusive set. It overlaps the whole area of fiction but only contains certain elements – tropes, clichés, conventions, emotive effects. Unlike the internal hierarchy of the work in question, genre only makes sense when it’s an comparison between several works. It is not extractable, not an atom, within a work, as narrative form, events, signs and so on are. But I’d still not say that it is higher in the hierarchy – as I’ve implied, it’s not on the same ”plane” of sign-relations, instead of signifier/signified-relations it is about similarity (belonging to the same set). When a large enough amount – relatively speaking – of signs belong to genre X, the work is now called being a X-show.

Genera give birth to themselves through the prevalence of their cells within a work.

Ghostlightning: use sets

^ The man’s got it all down.

Of course, they are still members of the field of narrative art. They work on the plane of intertextuality, being inplicit, inexact references to a wealth of other work sharing the same interreferences and elements. They are not much different from, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s endless Judeo-Christian references or the whole of Ulysses.

lelangir: so there’s a distinction here

between style and genre

style is romance

genre is mecha

mecha romance

slice of life romance

mecha comedy

’slife comedy

And here I’d sort-of-disagree sort-of-totally-agree: styles are pretty much the same as genera. Since genera are defined by elements that fall under the umbrella term, works have small doses of genera here and there, of all manners and types. Style is simply renaming; a different kind of similarity cross-works-in-the-discourse.

The harm of pidgeonholing art into genera is the effect it has on the production of it. In further establishing that ”if element A appears, so must element B since they are both members of the same genre”, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Acidic on creativity, and worse, it leads to snobbism of the worst kind (”genre fiction” vs. ”literary fiction”).

praetera censeo genera esse delendam

Third Response-point: On Art and What it Means

Or just ”Meaning”, since I do not fancy aesthetics and go hard for Wittgenstein/Russell/Pierce.

lelangir: things have no meaning until it is represented

representation is CONSTITUTIVE of meaning

Ghostlightning: YES

lelangir: there is no “thing” before it is represented

representation MAKES the thing

Ghostlightning: there is NO KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT LANGUAGE

Total agreement here. Just had to say that. Or well, ”refer” is a bit different than ”represent” (and the theory of meaning I mostly adhere to is referring), but not by many nontechnical shades.

Pontifus: art has no intrinsic value, which makes it infinitely valuable

Same thing again. I’d extend it to ”everything”.

Cuchlann: Answers, though, real quick: does a book have content if no one reads it?

[...]

Cuchlann: You’re unaware of the social mores concerning books.

Pontifus: well, then the book might mean firewood, but we’re talking about the text, i guess, lol

A text, can it mean anything when it is not read or thought of? Once again, I agree with their conclusions (in some sense). I agree too much. Must be my nationality.

Because what does ”mean” mean²? Being the generous semiotician I am, to ”mean” something is to be a referrant relevant to a certain decoding system. Languages are decoding systems, our base cognitive functions are decoding systems (sorted into fear-recognizing areas routing impulses to the amygdala, arousing-specific centra responsible for getting things in order for lovin’ and so on), RNA is the language that decodes DNA into a full human being and so on.

Is the mere possibility of being possible for a decoding system to ”extract” meaning from sign-complex A enough to give A a latent meaning? No, and here Pierce makes an entrance – the interpretor is a necessary part of the sign.

This ”referrant”, the property of referring, is pretty much an atom. It cannot, at all, be described in lower terms, cannot be made an atom.

Of course, this makes the distinction between all possible sorts of meaning sort of fuzzy – the text is meaningful in being decoded by an automaton, prior to that it has still meaning though – it still has an effect on our vision, on our thinking and our relating to the thing, even if we can’t read the pertinent alphabet.

Cuchlann: Discourse is about making meaning. Art makes no meaning on its own, and cannot take part in discourse, as discourse is a two-way street.

Here I’ll disagree on a technicality. Meaning isn’t made – it is decoded after a set of rules. We do not, once in possession of a text, see to the creatio ex nihil of a signified complex. Nay, given the rules for decoding it we have, we conclude the meaning that is decodable by the given set of rules. This is of course possibly a misinterpretation on my part given semantics. Suffice to say, I do not see the reader as ”active” in creating the meaning , and that is what I disagree with – she is on the other hand definitely necessary, no sign without an interpretant. (I need to learn some reader-response and phenomenology, I blame Husserl for being incomprehensible enough for me not to want to get deeper into it).

This is a bit similar, but stated in a very different terminology, to this:

Cuchlann: Art can be considered a product of discourse.

lelangir: but the aesthetic experience can be discursisve

Cuchlann: True.

Pontifus: insofar as discourse is one person agreeing with himself…is, i think, the idea, correct me if i’m wrong, o mighty cuchlann

[...]

Ghostlightning: the discourse with the self

is between one’s memories

lelangir: nice

Ghostlightning: and the idea at hand

lelangir: your habitus

oh shi-

your habits

your consciousness

[...]

lelangir: because

your identity is not stable

Ghostlightning: does the idea at hand, FIT?

lelangir: always morphing

being changed by external forces

Imagination is a bitch though, I am still not quite sure it has any semiotic language per se, even if it works with signs and nothing but signs. I am therefore forced to admit a leeeway there that allows for the active creation of meaning.

And what is more important in fiction than imagination?

Notes

1) Just me rambling. Seeds of thought, probably already rotten, to be tossed to fat birds, or for the connoisseur with sharper eye than I to breed into a lively and vital tree. (Ooh, metaphor in a discussion about metaphor. How meta).

2) …Sorry, I felt as if I had to ; . ;

I should really just have trailed off into something fun and entertaining now. It’s my first post after all, and first appearances count. Yet I’ll have to disappoint you – hereafter follows no such thing, but a theoretical foundation for my writings – when my writings follow my theoretical foundations, that is, which is seldomly the case (I prefer writing something entertaining – brainservicewise – than actually writing something I think might be true, as that’s often more boring). Stay till the end for bewbs.

Justifying my Hedonism

One of my main interests is how we affect culture and vice versa. This is, of course, a rather large thing to tackle, so it’s useful to have some kind of restrictions that limit the effort needed without lessening the accuracy of the models you develop by any significant degree. One simple thing to do, then, is to choose a subculture as an object of study, which has led to me trying to observe what is produced that nerds in common digest, and how nerds react to it, et cetera. That’s just a rundabout justification for being able to watch anime days on end and buying Exalted supplements (me desires the First Age book), of course, but that is irrelevant¹. The means justify the goal.

A small problem is of course deciding exactly how nerds think, act and feel. We’re no longer a homogenous group of spectatles-bestowed, shirt-wearing, borderline-sociopathic stereotypes (well, we never were, and I still am one). The anime-watchers, the otaku (a loose definition of that word do I carry), claim membership of all from emo body-builders to spectatles-bestowed, shirt-wearing, borderline-sociopathic stereotypes. Luckily, such diversity applies to all cultures, be they sub-, ultra-, post-, de- or proto-. There will possibly still be a leeway of very common values, weltanschauungen and socially codified behaviour. As an extra bonus, this subculture is the one I’d wager is the most internationally communicating one, by grace of our beloved intertubes and their magnanimous² gifts, and the possibly still far-too-prevalent real-life social maladjustment. Exactly how I’d utilize the web for these sociological pursuits is the topic of a later³ post; now is not the time for escapades in the land of empiricism. Nay, it is time to look closer on the exact definition and nature of culture, and the parts of it that are of interest.

Dissection

Culture stems, like oh so many other hard-to-define words of some intellectual pretention, from Latin – cultura, which in turn comes from colere, which means to cultivate or worship⁴. This is still a rather apt metaphorical definition, allow it to in your minds eye cast The Culture as a vast holy garden, with pines in peculiar shapes there, beds of starkly coloured flowers there, and mazes of hedges there. In this garden we walk, and the plants mutate and change for every step, we grow new ones, tend to old ones, sometimes we burn down a whole swath of The Culture and use the nutritious ashes to grow something very new. We also eat and live from it, and in the end, many of us blindly worship it, as it is all we know and can think of. Well, no time to wax lyrical, we’ve got places to go to, people to meet (again metaphorically).

Culture is profoundly human. It’s the height of our cognitive processes – a massive organic machinery of meaning, semiotics. It’s through culture symbols, such as words and letters, attain a mutable meaning. It’s through human processes culture come into being, and it’s culture that determines what those human processes mainly are. The process is deceptively simple – whenever a symbol is used in a certain context, the symbol attains a certain amount of attachment to other symbols used in that context. When this happens in large scale – which is the case with mass culture – meaning can mutate very fast. Simple examples of this process could be, say, how the cross went from an execution device to a symbol for a particular religion, and now also denotes death, a casualty. But symbols are not only words and pictures – symbols are patterns (I might pick up that another time) – and as such clichés, archetypes and stereotypes applies.

The important thing here is that these meanings permeate our thinking. Human thought is, I believe, largely or at least significantly symbolic in nature – symbols pointing at (I’ll have to brush up my Lacan but here I think signifiant/signifié would be better words to adopt – or symbols to hijack and mutate in meaning) which means that as the meaning of the symbols mutate – originally merely pointing at an observed fact or thought – so does the worldviews and possible actions of people affected by the culture. This makes culture into something moral and weighty – it is not merely entertainment or distraction, it is what decides large parts of our mass psyche, actions we take, ideas we have.

End Thesis (and some gratuitious fanservice)

In short – humans associate meanings with symbols. A symbol is a vehicle for meaning – a symbol is largely unchanging but invariably contains meaning. At their most base level, they have a single thing they symbolize – the original meaning of the symbol. Meaning is a metapattern – how this pattern is made to interrelate with others. When this happens at a large scale, that’s culture. Because at least a significant part of thinking is decided by symbolic (or at least uses it as a tool, a vehicle), culture is responsible for how communities work. That also means we are responsible for culture, of course, as it’s not an autogenerative phenomenon – it might be unavoidable, but it certainly is not independent of us who create us (that’d be pretty stupid).

If you’re familiar with memetics, you have probably already noted the rather significant similarities. You could say this theory is a combination of, in part, Baudrillards and Ecos postmodernism/structuralism, semiotics (which again Eco is rather deep into), and said memetics. Of course, bastardized and made cuddly. For dissecting meanings and the like, maybe Derrida is a good way to go.

This has been a boring post.

This has been a long post.

You know that you deserve it.

So here she is.

Kyou.

Only 35% away from naked.

A good way to earn instant friends is to end your posts with women-objectifying imagery. It also justifies the 13+ rating we, after all, have.

Notes

¹A lie, in my first post? I pray you look the other way, madame.

² I love how this word clashes ever so slightly in its hyperbolic antropomorphing of the simultaneously dead and very cultural Web.

³ Highly eventual. Mainly because this does not interest me as much as the other part.

⁴ Don’t believe in the me who believes in you, believe in the Wiktionary which believes in you!