Search results for "narrative "
Being and Knowing: World as Diegesis
Tuesday, 14 July, 2009 - 22:52
Another conversation, this time with Shaun, and more thinking through, thinking aloud, thinking thought. Shaun attended all the first year media theory lectures over the last academic year, including the six part series I delivered on narrative. So, he got to hear me rework and reiterate impressionistically over the same endless themes of diegesis and artifice, story and plot, world and representation which I surreptitiously pretended was an overview of narrative theory.
So I was attempting to explain how that period of intense focus on ideas about narrative and, in particular, the phenomenon of diegesis, had since inflected my thought. The diegesis is the storyscape - the integrity of the imaginary theatre we accept when we give over to a narrator the suspension of our disbelief. The diegesis is the internally coherent world of the story - and 'world' is the key word here, since the idea of a 'world' is one of the ways in which I'm trying to muscle into an understanding of Heidegger which I think is going to be central to my PhD thesis. If you are going to read on here, put your Kafkaesque reading hat on and read it all as subjunctive: "I would, God-willing, understand in this way..."
Using a combination of Graham Harman's lucid writing on Heidegger, Timothy Clark's valiant exposition of Heidegger's thought, Hubert Dreyfus' concordance and commentary on 'Being and Time', and the dense source text itself, I've been trying to work towards an understanding Heidegger's concepts of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, theoria and praxis, not to mention Dasein, being there, and being a 'thing that things'. The concept of 'world' in this realm of thought seems helpful to me. Clark says that Heidegger's use of the term 'world',
"is close to the common meaning of the term when we talk about the 'world' of the Bible, or the 'world' of the modern Chinese or modern English - i.e.the fundamental understanding within which individual things, people, history, texts, buildings, projects cohere together within a shared horizon of significances, purposes and connotations. [...] the more fundamental shared disclosure of things within which [we] find [ourselves] in all [our] thoughts, practices and beliefs, providing the basis even of [our] self-conceptions and suppositions."
- all of which seems to be a perfect definition of diegesis if understood as pertaining not only to the fictional worlds we muster, but also the fields of meaning we conjure in every aspect of what we still call 'real life'. In the tool analysis, Heidegger's hammer [makes sense | obtains | is grasped] as part of the world of equipment, which [makes sense | obtains | is grasped] as part of the world of human action. These realms cohere diegetically - they belong to, define and co-constitute each other. In action, we grasp the hammer as a tool, we extend our limbs and 'be' our intentional 'being' in the praxis of carpentry, and by extension, the praxis of existence. We act, and as we do, we are attuned to the world of action and meaning we inhabit: we experience the world holistically - we cease to be figures, and recede into the ground of the diegesis. Praxis is the means whereby we live and dwell - believe - in the diegesis.
The hammer when it breaks, shatters the diegesis: we are no longer engaged in praxis, but in the comprehension of material objects divorced from their diegetic meaning: an extreme Brechtian 'Verfremdung', or alienation from the essence of the hammer. A broken hammer is no hammer: it is a residue, a fragment, a memory, a concept, an idea, an object, a construct, a prop, revealed and separated from its function in the diegesis: a corpse in the theatrical sense - a moment in which the illusion is shattered, the figure of artifice processes and emerges from the ground of the theatre, and we are appalled enough by the shattering of the illusion to be compelled to laugh uncontrollably in the face of the futility of pretence. The broken hammer is an object of our reflective thought, which we diagnose in its symptomatic failure; it is seen as though from above, outside, from nowhere, divorced as it is from the field of praxis. Our consciousness of the broken hammer is the kind of consciousness we simply relinquish in the midst of being. It is empty, shell-like, valueless, objective. It is the transcendental knowledge to which the academy, science, Western materialist thought aspires - and as in the perennial cliche, it pins the butterfly to a board in order to comprehend it even as it dies.
Following Harman, I understand the fate of the broken hammer not to be merely an event in the life of a lone doomed tool, but to be caught up in the being of all things that do their 'being' - the 'thinging' of things, people, starfish and coconuts - the dichotomy between Vorhandenheit (presence-at-hand) and Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand). All things which are capable of submitting to the gaze of other things and being translated into the intentional objects of contemplation are uncovered - as are figures processing and emerging from the ground of their diegetic existence - as lifted out of their being, their dwelling in the multiplicities of the interlacing diegeses to which they belong. The object of my reflection is a shadow of its being - the prehensile presence-at-hand of a thing, behind which all its indestructible being - the inexhaustibly rich readiness-to-hand of a thing - withdraws.
In this way, anything we care to articulate or speak of, any 'thing' to which we care to give edges through the process of signification, and by which we mediate a representation of that 'thing' to another, is reduced to a presence-at-hand - a mere one amongst its infinite resource of arbitrarily graspable facets - a reduction; a theory. Thus all representation, articulation and signification is work in the realm of artifice, mimesis - or presence-at-hand; a reductive distinguishing of a facet of an object from the ground of its diegesis - the world of its Romantic potential, its being, its participation in praxis. The insertion of the stethoscope between the healer and patient is no less than a conversion of the human subject into an object of instrumentation, a reduction of the being to one amongst its many facets: a mediated, rythmic, booming pulse stands in for the beating heart of a living being. The sound is a metonymic reduction of the living being of the beating heart.
***
A short recap then: praxis is the unification of human action and knowing - holistic. Theoria (and hence conceptual, reflective, objective knowledge) is the distantiation of the world from the experience of that world. This distanced, alienated knowledge, extracted from the diegesis of its being, is a projection, a paper-thin shell, a shadow - a presence-at-hand, available to our consciousness as no more than a facet of the fullness of being. Being itself never emerges from the ground of diegesis - the integral, coherent, self-consistent, co-constitutive storyscape of the world in which we un-self-consciously dwell.
From these thoughts flow other problematisations, to be dealt with another time, of impartial academic enterprises, traditional doctoral theses, and the very nature of the attempt to document the research process.
Health fiction
Monday, 12 November, 2007 - 18:45
I considered going to the hospital carrying a copy of 'Narrative Based Medicine' by Greenhalgh and Hurwitz. My experience has become so reflexively, regressively contingent that I thought I might as well go the whole hog, and encourage the consultants and nurses, by noticing the book, to become radically self-aware of the experience they were creating around me.
Earlier in the year I registered for my PhD, which I intend to focus on the therapeutic uses of creative activity. There is evidence that people who keep journals during their treatment for serious illnesses such as cancer have a statistically significantly improved prognosis. Why might this be? Is it the case that our experiences of serious illness are such chaotic, disempowering transactions with the machine of healthcare, that the productive act of creating our own purposeful, narrativised story out of the bare, brute facts of therapy and treatment actually improves our bodies' ability to survive?
My father was diagnosed with cancer 7 years ago and died six months later. He said the process of pin-balling between consultants and treatments was frustrating precisely because doctors want to tell you as little as possible. Perhaps for good reason. Perhaps euphemism ('growths' rather than 'tumours') helps to minimise the psychological trauma. Perhaps a gradual induction into the language of primary and secondary, benign and malignant, potassium levels, morphine and death spray is a therapeutically beneficial approach, and ignorance is convalescent bliss. Perhaps knowing little, and trusting in the authority of the medicinal apparatus improves the prognosis.
"How is your hearing?" one nurse asked him. "Pardon?" he replied.
And so, as I have had constant headaches since February of this year, which usually recede only after the self-medication of Nurofen, I have been witnessing at first hand the efficiencies of the British healthcare system. And rather like a media studies student who is suddenly noticing how adverts are constructed, I can't not examine the story of illness (or lack of narrative) the actors in my performance are creating. My consultant informed first, not me, but his dictaphone, of my almost certainly necessary surgery. What surgery, I am still only able to speculate. It is sinusitis, an infection, pus in the ethmoid. Today's MRI scan of my head was olympically efficient - I arrived 15 mins early and had left the hospital by the time my appointment was supposed to take place. I, rather unnecessarily, slowed things down by asking the nurse what happened next. "Your scans go to the consultant now, and then he will contact you soon. Just turn left out of the doors."
Of course I have the problem of Einstein's observer, watching trains travelling in different directions at the speed of light. I'm in the train, and can't get out of it to look. I can't experience medicine without thinking about the experience of medicine, and I can't think about the experience without picking out the moments that are self-selected to illustrate the competing narratives that constitute the phenomenon of medical treatment.
I also can't help but think there is a certain kind of guilt associated with querying the treatment that our noble welfare-state doctors and nurses provide. One is supposed to say "mustn't grumble...", adopt the Blitz spirit, "there are people worse off than me..", "oh it's just a touch of sinusitis..." How self-indulgent to expect a consultant to spend an extra few minutes explaining the diagnosis and how the treatment will pan out, when he must dash off to start someone's heart any second now. "Remember that the appointment that you cannot attend is very valuable to someone in pain or distress" the leaflet says. Unusual, fatal, healing, fictions.
