One of the first things that critics like to do when entering a new field, handling a new art form or genre, or beginning a long treatment, is to define the field, the form, the genre, or the terms at issue. Doing so is extremely useful because those definitions and categories direct our attention at things we've determined to be important, and because terminology in literary study, especially once we take theory into account, is a highly contested and ever-changing landscape. However, defines terms does not make them 'true,' in the everyday sense.
This idea generated from discussing, reading, and just plain thinking about genres and media. As someone who works in genres/media that aren't as-yet fully accepted, either in the mainstream or academia, I am under some pressure to literally define my metaphorical territory. To state, unequivocally, where 'comics' end and other media begin, or where 'science fiction' ends and other genres begin. Truth be told, playing with definitions is entertaining. It's a task with a clear goal and a sense that once it's done, you never have to fiddle with it again. It appears to be a mechanical, even scientific, operation.
It comes as no surprise, then, that critics feel the need to construct definitions, and that they get off on it, just a little. Eisner and McCloud try to define comics as 'sequential art,' in implicit contrast to the common-sense definition of 'pictures and words.' Peter Coogan tries to define superheroes using four traits (mission, powers, identity, and generic distinctiveness) in reaction to the largely less concrete definitions that came before. And they're useful definitions. They illuminate things that we might not otherwise have seen.
But that doesn't make them 'real.' That doesn't mean that we can rely on them to be accurate reflections of the way the 'real world' works. Definitions, by nature, try to reduce something down to its most basic parts, which is why I think of them as pseudo-scientific, or possibly scientistic. Adorno and Horkheimer argue, quite convincingly, that Enlightenment, of which science is no small part, is specifically built to reduce the universe to its simplest elements, and conceptually rebuild it from there. To be clear, I don't have a problem with that approach in the sciences. It seems to work. But art doesn't work that way, as I've said on numerous occasions.
In the arts, we should not seek to reduce the world in order to understand it, but to expand the world in order to demonstrate its complexity. Terms are always contingent, concepts are always relative, and definitions are merely tools we employ. Anyone who has worked with a database knows these things intuitively. Any assortment of information can be arranged and rearranged in a variety of ways. I can sort by blueness, size, conductivity, or Albanianism, if I so desire. I can then sort by a whole new set of invented categories. Those categories, therefore, only exist for as long as I am concerned about what they ended up containing by virtue of what I was looking for. It's a totally circular, but extremely useful, process. At no point, however, do my search criteria change the basic nature of the things in question, except in so far as how I treat them once they've been sorted. The factors by which I sorted are merely that to which I happened to be paying attention in that moment.
This is how definitions direct our attention. If you define a car as 'thing with four wheels,' you will look for things with four wheels, and ignore the short-lived, three-wheeled vehicles invented in the 50s. The only thing we change about the universe when we define its parts is how we perceive the universe. That is both huge and tiny in its implications. What it means for the moment, though, is that I must treat categories as inventions, as human constructions, and resist the temptation to reify them, in both the sense of turning them into concrete things, and evacuating them of their contextual meaning.
Posted by orion at August 4, 2006 5:42 PM