Four-Colour Commentary

Textual Agency

To speak meaningfully about ‘texts’ we have to have something to which we can attribute it’s actions. Even in that very sentence, I implicitly speak of actions it performs, which attributes to the text a limited kind of agency. The only other options that I can see are to speak of the agency of the creator or the agency of the reader.

The creator’s intent, and that’s really what I’m talking about, is something that I have been indifferent to for quite some time. Not only can’t we know it most of the time, but what the creator intended and what she actually did, let alone what the creation does, are entirely separate things. This is why I’m simply unconcerned with intend. It seems immaterial compared to the effect of the work, the art itself.

So what about the intent of the reader? If we can’t know the intent of the writer, how can we speak of the reader’s? We might not be able to. Most literary criticism has a little trouble with that concept. It projects a reader as possessing some kind of ‘average’ nature, which means that it becomes a receptacle for our social norms, but ultimately we can’t actually know what the reader intends, or even, in the end, what effect the text has on the reader. The best we can do is talk to readers (plural) and make some very general statements about large-scale trends.

What we’re left with, then, is granting a kind of limited agency to the text for the sake of discussion. It’s generally agreed that it is the reader who evokes or makes meaning out of the text. Without a viewer or a reader, the text is merely an object, ink and paper, lights on a screen, whatever. But the important thing to observe is that that’s a relationship between observer and object, not observer and creator of the object. So the text doesn’t actually do anything. It is a vessel for signifiers that the viewer interprets. Now, there is a very large common ground for how those signifiers are interpreted given a particular cultural context, so the individual viewer interprets given a set of cultural norms. But that doesn’t mean that the text is doing something, does it? It means that we’re trained, socialised, to interpret it in certain specific ways.

But it seems like the way we talk about that experience is as a text doing or saying or demonstrating or performing, or other words like those. They’re not strictly an accurate way to describe the phenomenon. The more accurate way, if the preceding paragraphs are themselves accurate, is to say that predominant social norms would have it that we will mostly likely interpret this arrangement of signifiers in a particular way. To shorten that, however, we say the text does this, but that agency seems… metaphorical?

looking for a song...

I have a song stuck in my head that I don't know the words to, a playful, vaguely jazzy song in which a woman tells the man she's seeing that it's okay to not take their relationship very seriously. I've forgotten almost all of the words, but there's something that ends with "just like we did before the war!" or possibley "just like we did in World War Two!" and lines that ask things like why must you take this so seriously? but not those actual words. I can hear the tone of the singer's voice in my head but nothing else, not the title or the artist's name, not the words or even really the tune. It's driving me nuts. She just keeps saying, over and over, "why do you have to take this so seriously when we're just having fun?" but not those actual words. Other words that mean the same thing.

If anyone knows what the hell this song is, please leave a comment or email me personally, those of you who have my email address.

Edit: there was also a line like "Why can't we just enjoy each other?" or "I enjoy you and you enjoy me" or something like that, using the verb "enjoy."

Thank you.

150th Entry Extravaganza!!!!

Rewatching Return of the Jedi.

It's really stunning how much Mark Hamill cannot swing a sword to save his god-damned life.

Oh and, two tests down, one to go, then the defense. Go me.

Stan Lee's Watchmen

I'm mostly doing this to test my ability to 'quote' pictures on this here blog, so Just Imagine: Stan Lee's Watchmen...

The one, the only, Star Wars

Lucasfilm has put up a shot-by-shot breakdown of all the changes made to the Special Edition of Star Wars (though I'd still like to know which bloody Special Edition). I just today realised the philosophical inconsistency in how Lucas et al. have handled the whole fiasco.

There are many, many examples of different versions of 'great works' of literature in which none of the extent copies are the 'true' or 'real' version. There are four different King Lears and three Hamlets. There's are two different final chapters to Great Expectations. There's an extra chapter at the end of Clockwork Organge that wasn't published in America until about ten years ago. The list goes on and on and on. Modern art history and literary criticism has become comfortable with the idea that these mulitple editions exist, and in many cases, especially with Shakespeare, we can't say which is the 'real' version. In most cases, they're just multiple takes on basically the same text. I would be happy to treat Star Wars the same way, to say that the Special Editions are a slightly different version of the same story, but treat all of the versions as having a certain validity, the originals because they're the ones that first grabbed audiences and the updates because they're what Lucas always wanted to do.

What I cannot abide, though, is the insistance that now that the new versions exist, the originals must be eradicated, and all hyperbole aside, that is what Lucasfilm is trying to do. It's very difficult to find the original cuts anymore. The on-line community has fallen back on the old LaserDisk editions from the 80s. What Lucas is trying to do is make new versions of Star Wars, thus displaying the flexibility of film as an art form, especially so since the advancement of computer imaging, while at the same time implicitly insisting that there is only one true version. Either update it and let us decide which one we want to watch, or leave it the Hell alone. You don't get to have it both ways, George.