Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Books on Demand
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A revised version, of an introductory study addressing the dynamics of cognitive, discursive and narrative diversion and distortion. First issued in 2003, as a critical exploration of classical cinematic storytelling, involving an integrated interplay of visual, verbal and conceptual Regeneration.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 81
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
Bo Kenneth
(2003) 2019
Innehållsförteckning
The Presence of llusions
The Illusion of Presence
Presence, Absence and Angst
Aspects of Being
Being as Presence
Discursive Distortion
Primitive Figuration
References
The Presence of Illusions
It is impossible for the human intellect to grasp the idea of absolute continuity of motion. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he can examine arbitrarily selected units of that motion. But at the same time it is this arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous units which gives rise to a large proportion of human error.
Leo Tolstoy; War and Peace1
Human interaction is typically depicted in stories.
Historical annals are conspicuously stereotypical, offering organized accounts of ambiguous conflicts, accentuating the roles played by heroic heroes and vicious villains.
Or vice versa.
Out of the confusion of human coexistence historical narratives identify a patterned if paradoxical, allegedly factual yet largely fictional and illusory human universe.
A human reality.
Histories of human being are remarkably irrational.
Human interaction is portrayed as an endless string of battles, in which the heroes are the villains who seem to win the wars. Where wars are fought to present and preserve heroes. And to topple villains no longer seen as heroes.
Or vice versa.
Human coexistence is seen as based on competition. On a common struggle for prosperity and presence. Where presence is inseparably linked to prosperity. And prosperity depends on possessing symbols and tokens of social presence.
Human excellence is seen as present in palatial splendour and glorious cathedrals. Built on wars and common subservience. As massive manifestations of princely power and pious sovereignty. As monuments of ceaseless struggles and insatiable greed.
Coupled with a certain sense of sumptuous glory.
+ + +
Faced with the flow of life man creates illusions.
And deities. Shaped in his image.
Aware of his transient existence, within a transient reality never completely real, man maintains a fictitious world.
In which women are offered a central if subordinate role.
Through the centuries human beings have ceaselessly reiterated stories.
In poems and sagas, novels and dramas.
Broadly sharing a narrative structure.
Through the telling of largely similar stories an integrated system of figurative configurations is repeatedly redefined.
Included in every story a narrative structure conditions the telling. While every story embodies a manifestation of a figurative world.
All stories include and redefine a recurrent scope of principles and configurations, shaped and sustained by the telling, which decisively condition the telling and constrain the scope of the story.
Infinitely variable yet structurally stable, all stories are preserved through a patterned process underpinned by a common lack of critical reflection.
+ + +
The basic principles defining and preserving a fictitious human universe are consistently, conveniently and conspicuously present in stories.
In a continuous practice of narrative regeneration.
By way of repeatedly portraying a process of self-preservation, a figurative tradition preserves itself. And continually redefining the configurations shaping the narrative conflict the narrative discourse effectively sustains a fictitious realm.
Stories underpin an endless discursive practice through which heroes and villains continually confront themselves and each other.
Offering peace through war, and freedom through subservience, a narrative discourse proposes to structure the chaos of life. And to maintain a fictitious universe.
Far from lifting the veil or breaking the spell the telling of stories sustains a narrative realm, and supports a collective illusion.
A stable network of narrative configurations dependably stimulates the telling of different yet always similar stories. In which the roles played by men and women, heroes and villains, are persistently confirmed.
+ + +
Stories are not inherently trivial.
A persistent practice of storytelling preserves a pervasive and persuasive existential strategy, in more than one respect.
Told to entertain and amuse, to explore the processes of being, stories also offer to maintain the presence of the storyteller.
Stories maintain a promise of presence.
Through a partly unconscious process of cognitive diversion.
Which is partly why stories are still being ceaselessly told.
To distinguish us from other species??
With the presence of the printing press the process of telling stories was vastly expanded.
Through commercialized film and television, a technologically assisted industrial production, of stereotypical stories, has expanded into a globalized form of massive narrative diversion and distortion.
A development significantly including a US-American component.
Thus, a kind of commercially enhanced diversion is sustained as a central discursive practice, actively promoted by a predominant proponent of a so-called Western culture.
+ + +
A human universe is deeply conditioned by stories.
And by an endless line of heroes, assumed to command the course of a common struggle. To preserve a promise of presence and power, through solving conflicts broadly caused by the struggle.
Within a human universe heroes have to struggle to sustain their presence.
And their powers.
Through arousing and sustaining the angst required to sustain the struggles aimed at alleviating the angst.
Where heroes are seldom seen as embodiments of angst and irrationality.
A human universe embraces an illusory realm.
As suggested by widespread celebration of heroes and idols. Sustained through deceptive rituals and practices. Which include and redefine a broadly self-deceptive mode of being.
In which most aspects are consistently distorted and perverted.
A reversed reality.
Turned upside down.
+ + +
A human universe may be seen as a deeply flawed and fallacious realm.
In spite of claims as to human rationality and ingenuity.
In spite of continuous efforts aimed at verifying and substantiating the absolute existence of an objectified reality.
By way of assumed and presupposed abstractions and axioms.
By way dogma and doctrines. Sustained by experiential evidence.
And linguistic figuration.
A human universe is partly maintained through a ceaseless practice of reiterating stories.
Redefining and consolidating a fictitious realm. Frequently seen as real.
While obscuring the underlying complexity conditioning the continuity of figurative regeneration.
An essentially primitive and still primeval human universe is persistently redefined through a partly blind and unconscious discursive interplay. Veiled and obscured by illusory presence.
By an irrational reality.
Involving an integrated practice of figurative interaction and regeneration, the classical Hollywood drama embodies and illustrates the dynamics of discursive diversion.
Of visual and verbal re-presentation.
And narrative distortion.
Conspicuously visual the Hollywood film includes and illuminates a regenerative interplay.
Enhanced by verbal and conceptual presence.
While often considered a technical accessory, a scaffolding to be removed once the film is made, the Hollywood screenplay identifies an integrated network of transparent verbal and conceptual configurations.
Simultaneously stimulating and restraining the regeneration of the visual presence.
Whereas an image may speak more than a thousand words, words and images are inherently illusory.
While a continuous flow of moving pictures persuasively portrays a seemingly real fictitious world, a ceaseless discursive practice is fundamental to maintain the figurative configurations sustaining the illusion of reality.
1 Tolstoy 1982, 974.
The Illusion of Presence
It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man’s very nature. And so the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of circumstances conditioning an event, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the reason for it, snatches at the first most comprehensible approximation to a cause and says; ‘There is the cause!’
Leo Tolstoy; War and Peace2
In Der Sichtbare Mensch, written in 1923, librettist, filmmaker and early film theorist Béla Balázs welcomes the return of a visual culture3.
Similar to the printing press a new machine is seen to inaugurate an altered cultural direction. And to shift a collective attention back from a culture of concepts, which “gradually rendered illegible the faces of men”.
Like the printing press the new machine offers to enhance “the multiplication and distribution of products of the human spirit”, where the cinematographic camera seems to renew “the rich and colourful language of gesture, movement and facial expression”.
To renew a culture in which “Man has again become visible”. In Balázs’ inspired account the machine is identified as a basic causal agent prompting a new process of development and change.
With the subsequent introduction of sound, however, this process later brought back a significant verbal and conceptual presence.
To A.R. Fulton, writing with the advantage of hindsight, motion pictures, “the newest of the arts, the only art to originate in the twentieth century, are a product of the Machine Age”4.
Motion pictures are seen to depend “to a greater extent than any other art, upon machinery”, and the cinematic machine, described as “the machinery that makes the pictures, and that makes them motion pictures”, embraces the complex apparatus employed to operate and control production, distribution and exhibition.
In Fulton’s discussion the focus is shifted from the machine to the movement of the machine.
And further to the processes of trial and error, innovation and development behind the appearance of the overall apparatus.
The origin of motion pictures is linked to the pragmatic “ingenuity and effort, not of artists, but of inventors, mechanics, photographers, engineers and manufacturers”, whose utilitarian purpose was “to perfect a machine that would have a use”.
Commercial and financial problems and prospects came to equal and rival technical considerations, and Thomas Edison presents an example of “an inventor aware of the importance of patents on devices that could be manufactured for profit”.
Thus including a wider causal scope Fulton concludes that “The essential principles of motion picture photography and projection having at last been applied in a commercial enterprise, motion pictures were born” (38).
On the basis of what he calls a “neoclassical economic theory of technical change” Douglas Gomery distinguishes between the phases of invention, innovation and diffusion, through which a commercial enterprise actively explores, develops and disseminates new products or processes for the purpose of commercial gain5.
