2 results
13 - Art and origin: Bataille and Blanchot's return to Lascaux
- from Part 4 - Artistic framings
-
- By Peter Poiana, The University of Adelaide
- Natalie Edwards, University of Adelaide, Ben McCann, University of Adelaide
-
- Book:
- Framing French Culture
- Published by:
- The University of Adelaide Press
- Published online:
- 05 February 2016
- Print publication:
- 25 October 2015, pp 275-291
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot's mutual interest in the Lascaux cave paintings signals their common concern to construct a discourse of origin in relation to art. Both writers consider origin in terms of the anxiety-filled questioning surrounding the ontological and historical aporias that have plagued Western thought, including those that appear under the banner of the Modern and the Postmodern. Both ask: what kind of discourse presides over the disconcerting doubling of reality performed by the first artists? For Bataille, origin is bound up with the ritual significance of eroticism and death as these underpin all forms of artistic endeavour; Blanchot, for his part, focuses on the existential void that takes up residence at the centre of all poetry and art.
In attempting to break with tradition, modern art and literature heralded a period of anxious questioning in relation to origin. James Joyce, in Ulysses, illustrates the modern preoccupation with origin by making his young characters recall impertinently their forebears:
— Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.
— What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?
The youthful disdain of their illustrious forefathers brings the young men all the more surely to the question of origin: who are we to claim absolute knowledge, given that we have done no more than appear in the shadow of our fathers?
Joyce's insights find their theoretical underpinnings in the work of Michel Foucault, particularly in his historico-philosophical account of the Modern reconfiguration of the concept of origin. In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault points to the radical change that occurred around the middle of the nineteenth century in the manner of thinking about origin. From this moment, it was no longer possible to define origin solely in terms of the presence or absence of an external authenticating instance (such as God, Nature, Man). Instead, origin came to signify an enigmatic relation to being. What one ‘is’, essentially, is a condition of the invisible founding principle from which one emanates.
This is a theme that permeated twentieth century thought via the human sciences in particular, inasmuch as the latter aimed essentially to redefine the workings of language, …
1 - The doubling of the frame — Visual art and discourse
- from Introduction
-
- By Natalie Edwards, The University of Adelaide, Ben McCann, The University of Adelaide, Peter Poiana, The University of Adelaide
- Natalie Edwards, University of Adelaide, Ben McCann, University of Adelaide
-
- Book:
- Framing French Culture
- Published by:
- The University of Adelaide Press
- Published online:
- 05 February 2016
- Print publication:
- 25 October 2015, pp 3-26
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The notion of framing is one that has emerged as a key factor in current investigations into representations of culture. In the disciplinary area of French Studies, framing is understood as collective and individual rules of identity construction that are based upon a combination of modes of visual production, past and present narratives, and discourses of knowledge and power. The present volume will pursue the question of framing in all three areas.
The first sustained discussion of framing, understood in the modern sense, is attributed to anthropologist and linguist Gregory Bateson. In 1954, in ‘A theory of play and fantasy’, Bateson argued that no form of communication can be understood without reference to its metacommunicative frame; monkeys are able to distinguish the same gestures as aggression or as play, depending upon their framing, according to one of his examples. Sociologist Erving Goffman took up the concept in Frame analysis (1974), positing that individuals interpret experiences and situations through a series of frames. These frames are cognitive structures that guide perception; if one saw a person being chased down the street by a police officer, one could surmise that s/he had committed a theft, for example. The notion was soon adopted in the field of Literary Studies, which during the 1970s was busily adopting models from other disciplinary areas as ways of changing the scope and pattern of traditional literary interpretation. The rise of structuralism in particular gave prominence to the idea of ‘narrative’ and to the ‘science’ of narratology, and Gerald Prince notes how this new theoretical application led to the positioning of ‘narrative as a thematic frame’.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, framing as a theoretical device has since been employed across an array of disciplines to open new modes of interpretation, and between disciplines as a way of crossing disciplinary borders. Studies of the use of frames exist in, for example, Sociolinguistics, Cultural Studies, Psychology and Psychotherapy, Anthropology, Sociology, Museum Studies, Film Studies, Architecture, Cognition Theory, Discourse Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Postcolonial Studies, Intermediality Studies, Communications and Policy Studies. Framing has become commonplace and we readily accept that we interpret the world through the medium of frames. We understand reading, in its broadest sense, as a framing activity and use framing as a way of approaching the heterogeneous quality of texts.