Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto
Fantasy and Internalization of Daily Life Experience: A Conceptual Approach to Sculpture
Yuga Hatta
Mestrado em Artes Plásticas
Orientação: Professora Doutora Sofia Ponte
Fantasy and Internalization of Daily Life Experience. A Conceptual Approach to Sculpture is an
artistic project resulting as a consequence of my daily life experience, interpreted mainly through language, and its comparison with interpretation of the local population which compose the foundation of the experience. It explores a space between my subjective interpretation of quotidian scenes and their communality, the shared knowledge that derives from and also maintains them. In the project, some of the experiences are expressed as seven art works, which are mediated by various materials and to be presented in different situations. The purpose of this project report is to frame the ideas, processes, and results of each artwork represented. It also provides a brief theoretical background that has taken into account the notions of “Narrative” by Paul Ricouer and the notion of “Actor Network Theory” by Bruno Latour.
With this project I have sought to unveil some of the qualities the production of knowledge of daily life experience in the format of narrative. Together with focus on the role of language in the interpretation process the study follows how narrative attributes roles and functions to its agents through figuration of their actions in each plot. Meanwhile, the study also approaches my motivation for what I call “internalization” of daily life experience as an expression of my obsession towards it. The outline of the internalization is delineated through examining how it explores and intervenes into the daily life elements, such as coffee napkins, supermarket flyers, etc. Perverse use of the daily life knowledge by internalization is determined by focusing on the act of appropriation, referring to three discursive techniques, namely myth, metaphor, and jokes.
The project allows me to understand how the act of internalization expands the everyday scenes by discovering and creating possibility of new interpretations by sacrificing achievement of my original goal to be integrated into the local context. Internalization may not let me be part of an existing context but recreating it, in an inclusive manner, by demonstrating how it can be otherwise.
Daily life Language
Common Knowledge Internalization Conceptual Art
Fantasia e Internalização da Experiência da Vida Quotidiana: Uma Abordagem Conceitual para a Escultura é um projeto artístico resultante da minha vivência quotidiana, interpretada sobretudo através da linguagem e da sua comparação com interpretações da população local que compõe a base dessa experiência. Explora um espaço entre a minha interpretação subjetiva das cenas quotidianas e sua comunalidade, o conhecimento compartilhado daí derivado que as mantém. No projeto, algumas dessas experiências são expressas em sete trabalhos que são mediados por materiais diversos e apresentados em diferentes situações. O objetivo deste relatório de projeto é enquadrar as ideias, processos e resultados de cada trabalho representado. Para isso, apresenta também um breve referencial teórico que levou em consideração as noções de “Narrativa” de Paul Ricouer e de “Teoria da Rede de Atores” de Bruno Latour.
Com este projeto procuro revelar algumas das qualidades da produção de conhecimento da experiência do quotidiano em formato de narrativa. Junto com o enfoque no papel da linguagem no processo de interpretação, o estudo segue como a narrativa atribui papéis e funções a seus agentes por meio da figuração de suas ações em cada trama. Entretanto, o estudo aborda também a minha motivação para o que chamo de “internalização” da experiência da vida quotidiana como expressão da minha obsessão por ela. O contorno da internalização é delineado examinando como esta explora e intervém nos elementos da vida quotidiana, tais como guardanapos de café, folhetos de supermercado, etc. O uso perverso do conhecimento do quotidiano por internalização é determinado com foco no ato de apropriação, referindo-me a três técnicas discursivas, nomeadamente mito, metáfora e piada.
O projeto permite-me compreender como o ato da internalização amplia as cenas do quotidiano ao descobrir e criar possibilidades de novas interpretações em troca do meu objetivo original de me integrar no contexto local. A internalização pode não me deixar fazer parte do contexto existente, mas recriando-o, de forma inclusiva, demonstro como pode ser entendido de outras formas.
Vida Quotidiano Conhecimento Comum Internalização Linguagem Arte Conceptual
Abstract ... i Key words ... ii Daily life ... ii Resumo ... iii Palavras-chave ... iv Table of Contents ... v Table of Figures ... vi Introduction ... vii
Aim and Research Questions ... ix
Methodology ... xi
1. Daily Life as Narrative ... 1
1.1 Perceiving Daily Life as Narrative ... 1
1.2 Popular Knowledge ... 4
1.2.1 Language ... 5
1.2.4 Repetition ... 25
2. Perverse Production ... 29
2.1 Internalization and Perversion ... 29
2.2 Function, Appropriation, and Substitution ... 33
2.3 Myth, Metaphor, and Joke ... 40
2.3.1 Myth ... 40
2.3.2 Metaphor ... 44
4.2.3 Joke ... 47
3. Conclusion Remarks ... 55
Figure 1: Yuga Hatta, Fala Baixo Portugal Não É Nosso (2015) ... x Figure 2: Yuga Hatta, Coroas de Fim de Semana (part); from top right: heater: Box of Beers: Detergents: Meat, (2019) flyer, acrylic sheets ... 2 Figure 3: Flyers of supermarket collected ... 4 Figure 4: Typical café in Portugal ... 10 Figure 5: Yuga Hatta, Operações - Prototypes, (2019). from top right: Edit: Help: Select: Open: Erase: Hide: New: Undo, paper napkins and acrylic paint, 16 x 16cm each ... 11 Figure 6: My father in law, the former engineer at a textile factory in Guimarães, uses homemade chouriço and a pencil to explain how industrial textile machines function ... 19 Figure 7: Simulation of placing household objects for saving parking space. from top left; simulation 1, 5, 14, 18, 22, 24 ... 21 Figure 8: An Imperfect Vacuum, 2020. video 5’14. at MAPeriferico, Galeria de Cozinha, FBAUP, 2020. ... 21 Figure 9: O meu Lugar / Barreira de Segurança, 2020. Ice, 80 x 200 x 30 cm. at Descongelar, FBAUP, 2020 ... 22 Figure 10: O meu Lugar / Barreira de Segurança, 2020. Ice, 80 x 200 x 30 cm. at Descongelar, FBAUP, 2020 ... 23 Figure 11: Os Dodos, 2020. Polyurethane, acrylic paint, PVA glue, metal ... 24 Figure 12: Still from a video Simulation for Self Portrait as Contrail, 2019 ... 26 Figure 13: Personal Monument for Immigrant / Self Portrait as Contrail, 2019. expansive foam, 180 x 45 x 500 cm at SACO Festival de Arte Contemponráneo, Antofagasta, Chile ... 28 Figure 14: Diagram of Appropriation and Substitution ... 35 Figure 15: Wishes of Neighbors, Exhibition View, at FRESTA, Centro Comercial Invictos, Porto, 2019. ... 36 Figure 16: Still from video, Wish of Neighbors, 5'17, loop. 2019 ... 37 Figure 17: Two digital collage for A Barragem, 2020 ... 38 Figure 18: A Barragem. wood, tile, counter of stainless steel, plastic, dish of the day of café, finished plates, plastic paint. 220 x 120 x 70 cm. at collective exhibition MAPEriferico, Galeria de Cozinha FBAUP, 2020 ... 39 Figure 19: Drawing for O Erro Não Mora Aqui, Colored pen on found print, 2018 ... 52 Figure 20: O Erro Não Mora Aqui, metal, wood, LED. 190 x 120 x 45 cm. at São João de Madeira, 2019 ... 53
The art project, Fantasy and Internalization of Daily Life Experience. A Conceptual Approach to
Sculpture, is based on the practice I have been developing since 20181. It has borne out for my wish, or desire, to understand and digest – internalize – the reality around me, my daily life: how and with what it is constructed and sustained. My background as immigrant2 surely has very much to do with this interest. Driven by the desire to integrate, beyond simple adaptation, into the local context and joy of small discoveries behind daily ordinary scenes. The project began from thinking how I understand and perceive everyday life. In this project, artistic activity is considered as one of the strategies, a useful tool, or even consequence of the internalization of the context that constitutes everyday life. Therefore, the process of research, production, and presentation is equally significant and sometimes disappears distinction between them3.
As the project developed hand in hand with my personal experience of learning and understanding popular knowledge on my surrounding context, it is inseparable from the issue of language4 in three overlapping levels: as a way of interpreting actual experiences and establishing communication, as knowledge of the local language of which mastery certificates integration to the local context, and as an identifier of objects, persons, and concepts that bind together the local paradigm5. As a way of interpreting daily life experiences, the project focuses especially on the elements of an experience, their roles and in the third function6. The Latin word narro, the etymological origin of the English word to narrate, also means to “relate” and “make known” besides other meanings that we identify as its English descendant7. William Labov and Joshua Waletzkey, in their studies on popular oral narrative, propose narrative as “one verbal technique for recapitulating experience — in particular, a technique of constructing
1However, some works in the project have their roots in earlier experiences and works.
2I was born in Japan but left the country at the age of 18. I moved to Porto 7 years ago, after spending some years in the U.K.
and in the U.S.A.
3The final product in some of the works only completes as an image of the public interacting with the produced object within
a certain setting in the sphere of daily life.
4 The relation between the two is also emphasized in the title of the works. They are language specific; the work titled in Portuguese has a different relation or distance between me and the object of the work from those named in English.
5The second mainly corresponds to function of communication, the third to signification, and the first to configuration of the
second for the first.
6For example, Ilya Kabakov’s The Communal Kitchen (1991) and Martha Rosler’s Semiotic of the Kitchen (1975) both burrow kitchen
utensils from narratives of daily life in which they are serving as actant while the utensils point at two completely different narratives and context.
7Lewis, T. Charlton, “narro” In An Elementary Latin Dictionary, American Book Company, 1890.
and its elements. Simultaneously, the project proceeds as a narrative itself by me taking the role of a composer of the narrative, the narrator, and its audience at the same time9, just like an act of writing a diary. In this regard, the art project that this report refers to can be paraphrased as an autobiography101, as this introduction begins with the description of my current situation.
Meanwhile, what I refer to language as a part of the local knowledge, in this project, points out to the other two functions, I mentioned before: as a “certificate” of my integration to the context, and the as the identifier of person, object, and concept, its culturally bound referential function. Agnes Heller writes;
“… everyday knowledge which every subiectum must internalize if he is to live and move successfully in his specific environment. This minimum requirement includes knowledge of the local language, knowledge of the primary customs, knowledge of these customs and collective images which are peculiar to the given habitat, ability to manipulate the means and implements of production, etc.”11
This language, while being a mediator of actual experience and thought in itself a part of the actual experience. The lack of the knowledge that constitutes and accompanies everyday life does not allow its experience to be “always escaping” as Maurice Blanchot describes12. Instead, it haunts me in a form of frustration but also fascinates and seduces me as exotic. An experience of “wrongly understood”, puts knowledge one holds, or more precisely, thought to have learned, into question13. The famous remark of Guy Debord that everyday life is “the measure of all
8William Labov and Joshua Waletzkey, “Narrative Analyses: Personal Version of Oral Experience,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 7, n° 1-4. (1997): 4.
9The works are to be consumed myself to fulfil the desire I mentioned earlier. This process will be further explained in chapter
2
10According to categorization of Gérard Genette, the identification of author and narrator falls into either autobiography
(identification of author, narrator, and character) or historical narrative that include biography (identification of author and narrator). Gérard Genette, “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative,” trans. Nitsa Ben-Ari and Brian McHale, Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4, Narratology Revisited II (Winter, 1990), 766. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1773076
11Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, Trans. G. L. Campbell (London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henry: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984),185.
12 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” In The Everyday, ed. Stephan Johnstone (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2008), 36. 13 Even though what was learned sometimes turned out to be “correct” at the end, it is mostly “wrong” in the popular sense. Popularly spoken language is often not identical to the correct language explained in textbooks.
own context. This means the local knowledge that the project tries to grasp is not necessarily scientific but rather constituted by accumulation of the perception of empirical experiences, that I share with others15. The richness of the experience of daily life, at least for me, is made of such knowledge that fails to hide reflection of our emotion, interest, ego, memory, belief, education, and all other subjective motives that might project fantasy on objects and situations.
I take this art project as a simulation of such a process, to the point, I hope that it stops becoming a simulation.
“On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”
And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”16
Figure 1: Yuga Hatta, Fala Baixo Portugal Não É Nosso (2015)
Aim and Research Questions
The aim of this written component is to provide a description of the seven artworks that encompass this art project, and to sketch out and reflect upon the mechanisms of production of the works in relation to their object and to myself. This means to give an explanation to each process of production, presenting, clarifying the intention behind my
14 Guy Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life,” trans. Ken Knabb, Internationale Situationniste #6 (August 1962). https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/everyday.html
15“A paradigm is a form of knowledge that is neither inductive nor deductive but analogical, it moves from singularity to
singularity.” Giorgio Agambem, Signature of All Things, On Method. trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2009) 31.
This report approaches this task in two steps; studying the idea of taking daily life experience as narrative, and studying some of the structural elements of the process that makes use of the former. The former is the field, especially in urban environment, where many artists and their works have been explored to reveal forces, that normally escape one’s focus, shaping our daily life experience17 or to make voice of those “ordinary” populations that normally remain passive to such building of urban environment18.
To elucidate on this subject, I have posed a few research questions: - How can everyday life experience be interpreted as narrative? - How does narration equals creation of knowledge?
- How created knowledge becomes a measure of one’s life? - What is the internalization of knowledge? How?
The interest of this reflection rather remains on the side of perception of passive population19 and how their interpretation constitutes their everyday life. The study approach the field by questioning how identification of elements (agents) of everyday life, formation of
17For example, a documentary film project Césky Sen (English title: Czech Dream, 2004), Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda
launched a national level mega advertisement for a fake hypermarket Cesky Sen. Klusák and Remunda put together designers, photographers, analysts and all sort of professionals that would generally be involved in the real marketing of big firms. This crew created the advertisement strategy for a hypermarket that is no more than an imitation of the marketing protocol but in real life an illusion with no real facilities. On the day of the opening they faced a couple of thousand people that was attracted by the campaign in front of the facade. There was nothing besides the facade made of a huge plastic sheet. Most of the crowd, of course, became furious and only a few realised what this prank financed by subsidy of the country was meant for. Some related it to an advertisement campaign for the referendum for the country’s participation in the European Union that the government was running. The crowd continued then how they came to understand that there is nothing guaranteed behind huge images they are repeatedly exposed to in their everyday life. Césky Sen, directed by Vít Klusák and Filip Remunda (2004; Prague: Hypermarket Film).
18 In How to Make Archway Tower Disappear (2012), a public art project in the neighbourhood of Archway London, artist Ruth Ewan temporarily installed a viewer in a fixed position for the public to see their neighbourhood through the viewer. From a very specific position and angle, they see the building of Archway Tower disappeared. Along with conversations Ewans, who is not a resident of the neighbourhood, had with local residents, discovered their discordance towards this building, that was built in the late 1960's by the UK government. In the project, Ewans literally found the dead angle and right distance in order to bring forward the fantasy of the neighbourhood to reality. The artist revealed the common sense about the building that was a consequence of the imposition of a State led vision of the future that did not reflect that of the neighbourhood. - Ruth Ewans.
How to Make Archway Tower Disappear (2012). Ana Hart, organiser of the artistic residency in which the project took place,
describes the tower as: “The tower, and this site, mark time for un in Archway. The tower itself is new, but not very, new, and certainly not old enough to encourage any familiarity that might soften some edges… It lacks both architectural kindness, and through a twist of fate, has contained of lack of social kindness.” Ruth Ewans, How to Make Archway Tower Disappear (London: AIR, 2012) 5. The tower was later sold to a private developer and went through renovation. The dark colour oppressive facade is softened to light beige, also changing its name to Vantage Point.
19 For Michel de Certeau this passivity is actually active participation in the formation of society through the act of “reading”. Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life. trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988) xx
balance and composition between those elements, and also how they can be appropriated and consumed by artistic production in order to attain its purpose.
Methodology
To answer the above questions, I organized this report in two chapters. Chapter 1 seeks to determine inter-relation between three essential elements of everyday life and our interpretation of it: language, knowledge, and narrative. My ideas reflect on the work of structuralist’s authors, such as Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Greimas, Tristan Todorov, Claude Bremond, and Roland Barthes; analyses the concept of narrative through Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) and Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic study on narrative. This allowed me to understand the production of the identity of agents of daily life through their action, roles, and consequence of the action (function). I will conclude this section by considering the concept of repetition, revealing the impossibilities, or ambiguities, caused by the lack of popular knowledge in a given locality. This lack creates a sort of a blank space in the knowledge necessary to properly adjust to the cultural expectations of its locals.
In Chapter 2, my reflection takes into account Klossowski’s readings of Nietzsche and also of Sadian perversion. This will allow me to exam the psychological background of the project that in turn helps to elucidate the idea of “internalization”, and more precisely what the seven artworks I grouped in this art project are looking for through the internalization and also appropriative act immanent to it. This chapter further examines the act of appropriation in detail, also by revisiting the ATN of Latour, among others, that leads the reflection to take insight of three discursive and rhetorical techniques: myth, metaphor, and joke. With which each rhetorical technique the project accesses and manipulates the knowledge defined in the previous chapter for its own end. The study forms a contrast and a kind of parallel to the works of the project: language (interpreted) and reality (experienced) where the reader becomes their mediator.
1. Daily Life as Narrative
1.1 Perceiving Daily Life as Narrative
Coroas de Fim de Semana (Weekend Crowns)
There is a flyer of a supermarket announcing their products on discount for the weekend in the post box. I never check them (I prefer to check price tags at the shelfs that have the same information). But I go to the supermarket anyway to do weekend shopping. And I know, on the way, I will find the same flyer crumpled and thrown away on a sidewalk. I know there at the supermarket, I will see a guy picking up the same flyer in the entrance, and I will see a lady complaining at the cashier that the price on the receipt of her shopping and price on the flyer do not match. These scenes, nothing but ordinary, fascinates me for they are so ordinary. Ordinary, or mundane, because I already have experienced it more than once. I know that next weekend I will be there again to see more or less the same scene. In similar situations with similar agents, the scene is always taking place there, or at other supermarkets, but never being identical. While being aware of the differences, however, ladies, or gentlemans, who complain to employees about the price of a product with a flyer in hand start forming a tribe in my head. The more I witness the similar scene, the more those who play the role become close in my memory and eventually their faces merge together into one, as I already described above, as “those people”. And I know one day I will become one of them.
The flyer of supermarkets has the function of showing the value of others (products), it tells us what is at a low price and abundant. For products featured on flyera means being in sale, so the lowered value it represents is also temporary, products in promotion are different every weekend. Meanwhile, the Crown is an object only seen at historical museums if not on very special occasions. Its function is limited to representation of power, virtue, and wealth. Its uniqueness holds its value as a symbol. Its value is absolute in the sense that the same crown endows different persons the status of the position that the crown represents by being on their heads. Though the value that crowns represents is beyond measure of economical value, of course the crown itself needs to have in itself value to represent what it represents. They are
both objects whose function indicate the value of something else but what and how they represent the value is almost opposite. The created crowns thus have a confused function. The work has the playful intention of a joke, or child’s craft. To whom and of what kind it gives value to?
Figure 2: Yuga Hatta, Coroas de Fim de Semana (part); from top right: heater: Box of Beers: Detergents: Meat,
(2019) flyer, acrylic sheets
With the urge to commemorate or celebrate the integrating and abstracting power of the ordinary, I began to make crowns with cut outs of those flyers, for each one of us who share the role. The images of the same products are lined in repetition and the last image is connected to the first image, continuing the repetition in circle (or circles). This is the story of the work
Coroas de Fim de Semana (2019). It all started with the flyer I found on a street. From this object
the story unfolded itself. The flyer becomes an agent by guiding me to relating it to other agents, mapping the experience and composing all the agents into a narrative. This process marks the moment of which an event or situation witnessed becomes our experience. Also, as a consequence, the formed narrative became a map through which I can understand the function of the flyer in retrospective. This is to say that by constructing a narrative where the flyer became the principal agent, or character, we can deduce its knowledge through its identification in the
course of the narrative20. Perceiving experiences of everyday life and its agents as narrative, that is interpretation of the experiences in language, consciously or automatically, thus, constitute the very first phase of their understanding: The woven narrative becomes the primary result of everyday life that is to be further processed and explored by one’s desire21. This project is also not an exception. The interpretation of daily life experience as narrative and desire to hold the knowledge it produces and shared within the local community forms the fundamental substructure of the project whose ultimate purpose is to help my integration to the local context22. Therefore, this leads me to a few secondary research questions: how does this production of the primary product of everyday life, that is knowledge on agents, through forming narrative take place? How are they established as popular knowledge? How thus formulated knowledge affects our everyday life in return? What knowledge does one have to have beforehand? And what is the obstacle in attaining that knowledge?
Perceiving an experience or an event as a narrative, begins with choosing a point of view and its focus. This act of choosing one’s viewpoint as author of narrative works under the principle of exclusion23. Functioning of this principle derives from subject of speaker (composer and narrator of a narrative), “the speaker [who] selects words and combines them into sentences according to the syntactic system of the language he is using”24 which is not completely aleatory but dependent “from the lexical storehouse which he and his addressee possess in common”25. Our everyday life is composed of an innumerous number of agents - person, animal, object, collective, institution, or even concept - that are interrelated, or with potential to be related, to
20“According to my thesis, the narrative constructs the durable character of an individual, which one can call his or her narrative
identity, in constructing the sort of dynamic identity proper to the plot (l’intrigue) which creates the identity of the protagonist in the story. It is primarily in the plot therefore that we much search for the mediation between permanence and change, before being able to transfer it to the character.” Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity” Philosophy Today, vol. 35, Issue 1 (Spring 1991): 77.
21The everyday narrative referred in this project also includes rumor or gossip around neighbors, that has its source on politics,
football games, TV shows, and all cultural-economic products that surround us in everyday experiences. Michel de Certeau redefines activity of bricolage in The practice of everyday life as “innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules.” Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday
Life. trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988) xiv.
22“To understand a story is to understand both the language of "doing something" and the cultural tradition from which
proceeds the typology of plots.” Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol. 1. 57.
23This principl of exclusion often causes dilemmas in fields such as documentaries (Longo, 2009) and history (Ricoeur, 1984)
where question of truth or “as it is” becomes a central concern. In this project, the idea of truth, or right knowledge does not hold such an importance. It celebrates wrong knowledge created by the process, too. Olivier Longo, ““Documentary”: Authority and Ambiguities.” In The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009) 30. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol.1, 117.
24 Roman Jakobson And Morris Halle, Fundamental of Language (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1971) 72. 25 Ibid.
each other like a web, arranged over multiple layers. Those agents whose relations are expressed in actions and other narrative elements, are traced in one narration line. A narrator, or observer who enjoys a scene of daylife in front of him/her as if seeing a film, limits the number of agents in order to confer a meaning to the narrative and to keep it simple enough to maintain the line. It is like shopping at a supermarket, from all the products and all the information about products one has to make a decision of what to bring home26, or Senhor José choosing, by accident, among all the records of existing and existed person of the city, one woman with whom his story revolves around27. For Roland Barthes this principle separates art and life; “art does not acknowledge the existence of noise”28 while life “offers only a “blurred” communication”29.
Figure 3: Flyers of supermarket collected
1.2 Popular Knowledge
Thus, daily life, or life in general30, in contrast to narrative, is characterised by the presence of all the agents and their presence being granted. Meanwhile, it is not only their presence that we take for granted but also various relations that exist between them and us. This
26Nicolas Bourriaud, Post Production (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002) 28.
27José Saramago, All The Names, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (Boston: Mariner Books, 2001)
28Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to Structural Analysis of Narrative.” New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and
Narratives. (Winter, 1975): 245.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-6087%28197524%296%3A2%3C237%3AAITTSA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3
29Ibid. p245. Meanwhile Barthes acknowledges exception by utilization of “blurring technique” in some works – For example,
my work 50 Anos em Setembro (2012), a book of documentary of a community based project, attempted to transcript all the conversation and even sounds, including noise of car, seagull, scream of kids, etc., recorded in the street together with the project.
30“It is where we all exist, no matter how exotic one or another feature our lives may be. The mundane is the venue for history,
memory, and our foundation in the future. It is where we will die, hopefully without a whimper.” Myron Orleans. “Why the Mundane? Or, My Unassailable Advantage: Reflections on Wiseman s Belfast, Maine.” Journal of Mundane Behaviour, Vol. 1, issue 1 (February 2000)
aspect of grantedness, either positive or negative, of daily life is often described by the word
mundane. As shown in my anecdote of the supermarket flyer, there are stories that we “feel like
having already heard somewhere else before”, like templates of narrative, whose agents, and also time and place, have dissolved into anonymity and repetitions31. Such mundane and templates express themselves as popular knowledge. Before continuing to reflect on the power of repetition that fixes and stabilizes popular knowledge, I would like to look through different elements of popular knowledge, of which understanding constitute the interim objective of this project. One is that it is a prerequisite for perceiving narrative of daily life and the other is produced within that narrative. The latter, once formed and confirmed within a community, transforms itself in.
First type, that is knowledge that one needs to know before either composing or understanding narratives from everyday life, that is always to some degree specific to the local context, corresponds more or less to the minimal requirement of Agnes Heller that I have quoted in the introduction of this study, “includes knowledge of the local language, knowledge of the primary customs, knowledge of these customs and collective images…”. Within this category, I will separate them into knowledge of the local language and other knowledge that are so called common sense in the local context, even though these two are closely related to each other in many cases.
1.2.1 Language
The local language is, needless to say, the most fundamental and crucial knowledge for composing and understanding narratives that are shared between locals. While narrative, and also other forms of interpretation, can be mediated by various media32, it is mainly in and with language, according to Michael Halliday, in their signs and grammar, that our general
31Mundane present itself in repetition and abondance and specific appears to us in contrast to
Mundane. However this project does not observe specific only through light it reflects from mundane. Specific also stands for itself. It is simply a question of frequency of being observed. Not being observed does not necessarily mean less in number. Likewise, specific situations can have as many layers of meaning as mundane one. Though they might affect our life and experience differently, in its process of perception methodologically there is no difference between the two.
32“Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an
ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation.” Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural Analyses of Narrative,. 237.
understanding and knowledge is formed33 . The author explains relation between the two element of language, semiotic and syntactic, in the process of understanding as follows;
I used the wording "grammar transforms experience into meaning"; and it is this that constitutes what we call "understanding". To understand something is to transform it into meaning; and the outcome of this transformation is what we refer to as 'knowing', or —in reified terms —as 'knowledge'. Understanding, and knowing, are semiotic processes - processes of the development of meaning in the brain of every individual; and the powerhouse for such processes is the grammar.34
In view of continental structuralist tradition, language mediates our interaction with reality and our thought and knowledge as “unconscious infrastructure”35. Paul Ricoeur, valuing structuralist’s approach as science as long as it stays in its limit, proposes that narrative “resignifies the world in its temporal dimension, to the extent that narrating, telling, reciting is to remake action following the poem's invitation.”36
In the field of artistic production, the gap between direct perception of experience and its understanding in language immanent in everyday life has long been explored mainly by conceptual artists37, most notably with Josef Kosuth’s One and Three Chair (1965). In this work, Kosuth provides three “chairs” - one actual chair, its image, and its description. Each corresponding to the Platonic conception of model, simulacrum, and idea. For the moment, this project follows the hierarchy in our understanding and will try to overturn this hierarchy through perversion, that I will talk about in the next chapter. In words of Nelson Goodman; “We can have words without a world but no world without words or other symbols.”38
But when one is not familiar with the local paradigm that constitutes referential function of the local language, while possessing some degree of academic understanding of the language,
33 Michael Halliday, Language of Science. ed. Jonathan J. Webster. (London, New York: Continuum, 2004) 11. 34 ibid
35Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jakobson and Brooke G. Schoepf. (New York: Basic Books, 1963)
33.
36 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative Vol1. 81.
37 Surrealists influenced by psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud also explored this gap between our experience and language from the perspective of desire and dream.
how would the formation of narrative from experience that takes place in the context be? In the level of experience there may not exist a big difference, as in our time after globalization the pragmatic of daily lives do not differ from culture to culture anymore, to the extent that one’s life is impossible. Using limited vocabulary and without certainty of referential capacity of each word, it is still possible to orient oneself to have experience quite the same to that of locals. However, a gap between the experience and perceived narrative of the experience is unamendable. Walter Benjamin notes that “[a]ll purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.”39 Even before one learns the thickness of the layer of “until where” that a local narrator of the context includes and excludes in the narrative, there is a great difficulty to overcome. Such thickness, bottom of an iceberg, can only be observed after understanding how deep the ocean is40. As long as all the experience, cultural and social, and its history accumulates and leaves its trace in language41, there is no identical translation42. The word “friend” in local language may signify different degrees of closeness to the same word in the foreign language.
When one tries to understand reality in insufficient local language, with very small “lexical storehouse”, the problem arises is similar to the symptom of aphasia which Roman Jakobson describes43. The lack of vocabulary leads to an incapacity in the “selection and substitution” of words. Use of abstract words such as “Please do the thing with the thing, please!”44 happens quite often in actual communication. In this way all the experience falls into
39Walte Benjamin, “The Task of Translator.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writing Volume 1 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and
Michael W. Jennings. (Cambridge, London: Harvard University, 2002) 255.
40Here one can find the difference between adoption of a context and one’s integration to it. While adoption is rather pragmatic
acceptance of the context that operates as a sort of functuary or re-arrangement of one’s daily life according to the context, integration requires rebuilding of everyday life with a mixture of what was and is.
41 Difficulty in talking of language is that while it is a system to be mastered in order to read the context of everyday life, it is also agents themselves. I have heard my neighbour telling her daughter crying “Fala Baixo! Portugal não é nosso!” such a use of language, words, or way of speaking does not make sense, at least, in Japanese. I asked several locals where they think the phrase came from. Some related it to the time of dictatorship while others claimed, though they are related events, it rather refers to campaigns against independence of Angola from Portugal.
42“Thus, in his last book, entitled Du temps [Of Time], Jullien maintains that Chinese verbs do not have tenses because Chinese
does not have the concept of time worked out by Aristotle in Physics IV, then reconstructed by Kant in ‘The Transcendental Aesthetic’, and finally universalized by Hegel through the ideas of the negative and the Aufhebung.” Paul Ricoeur, On Translation. trans. Eileen Brennan (London, New York: Routledge, 2006) 36.
43 Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamental of Language, 72.
44 A joke that appears in an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants. SpongeBob SquarePants, Season 11, Episode 14b, “The Way of
the Sponge.” Directed by Casey Alexander, written byCasey Alexander, Zeus Cervas,Derek Iversen, and Andrew Goodman, featuring Tom Kenny and Carolyn Lawrence, aired November 25, 2011 in Nickelodeon
abstraction. The inability to name, or explain the entity, due to lack of words, poses great obstacles for understanding and building one’s “world”. Another type of the deficiency, which Jakobson calls “contiguity disorder”, is related to the “syntactical rules organizing words higher units”45, that is of grammar46. The construction of meaning that emerges from correct grammatical ordering of words, that constitute narrative47, cannot be expected here. Mistake in conjugation of verbs blows off the present narrative to past or future.
May it not so much be illogical to say that the mobilization of artistic activity as strategy to understand and internalize the local context, that this art project carries on, is a way to complement my incapacity in grasping the local context in detail through language? Can artistic activity take the role of filling the great disequilibrium between the world experienced and world understood through language48? I will answer these questions in the next chapter. But on the other side of the coin, the questions simultaneously claim audacity of ignorance that is full of both possibility and danger; Do not knowing the meaning of an object, person, or concept, means that it can mean anything?
1.2.2 Shared Knowledge
Besides local language there are also sets of knowledge, generally referred to as common sense or tradition, that can bar those who are not familiar from fully understanding a narrative that takes place in a context. Some of this kind of knowledge is, of course, embedded within and constructed with the local language, as we have seen. The clear definitive distinction between the two is impossible. Here I limit myself to describe the idea of shared knowledge with an example. On the one hand common sense that I am referring to here is expressed as a consequence of repetition of everyday life, pragmatically, culturally, and socially. Or on the other
45Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamental of Language, 85.
46“Only a few longer, stereotyped, "ready made" sentences manage to survive. In advanced cases of this disease, each utterance
is reduced to a single one-word sentence.” Ibid 86. This “symptom” is quite visible in my Works and interests in works such as
O Erro Não Mora Aqui (2019) and Operações.
47 “To understand a narrative is not only to follow the unfolding of the story but also to recognize in it a number of "strata," to project the horizontal con- catenations of the narrative onto an implicitly vertical axis; to read a narrative (or listen to it) is not only to pass from one word to the next, but also from one level to the next.” Roland Barthes, Introduction to the Structural
Analyses of Narrative, 243.
48This explains the project’s use of techniques that are similar to that of language in manipulation of objects that I will explain
hand found in collective memory of historical events, including scientific knowledge. The former can be located in daily life, trivial or essential, and its specificity to the context is mostly unconscious. For instance, here in Portugal people do not peel skin off favas (broad beans) and eat it together while in Japan people take their skin off regardless of the way it is cooked. In the case of the collective memory, its context specificity is rather consciously acknowledged, for example, in commemoration of 25th of April in Portugal as end of dictatorship.
Collectively confirmed knowledge, or rules in other words, whose validity is free from doubt, no matter its actual validity in regard with truth, is licensed for its unnecessariness to be explained anew. This is to say that, following the principle of exclusion in the formation of narrative we saw earlier, that facts derive from common sense is likely to remain unmentioned and unexplained in local narratives. You can watch the second film of a series without watching the first one, you may still enjoy it, however, the understanding of the work will never be equal to those who have seen the first one. The result is that such popular knowledge often becomes a kind of a blind spot49 for those not familiar with local rules. It is like a dead angle, where mundanity can be hiding, and daily life perceived as narrative.
In daily life, for example, when I recall my experience of going to a Café50 , the information that would appear in the story would be at which Café place, with whom, what did I had, and what kind of conversation took place, etc. But there are other elements that take part in the experience that would not immediately appear in the story. Things such as paper napkins in its plastic or metal holder, frequently placed on every table in a Café. When someone talks of a Café, at least in Portugal, the presence of paper napkins and holders is included in the word “café”. Their presence is taken for granted, it is not worth talking about them, which means we should know about them beforehand to fully understand the scene! This example of paper napkins at cafés shows that some of these agents that are excluded from narratives are, from the point of view of the narrator, actually not excluded at all but included under the name of a bigger entity. This is simply because the presence and function that the napkins serve is only a
49 B This blind spot appears somewhat similar to Black-boxing of Bruno Latour when he explains of technological equipment whose structure is hidden and invisible unless one dissects it for analyses, that will be explained later in this chapter. Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation.” In Common Knowledge Vol.3, n°2. (1994) http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-B
50This blind spot appears somewhat similar to Black-boxing of Bruno Latour when he explains of technological equipment
whose structure is hidden and invisible unless one dissects it for analyses, that will be explained later in this chapter. Bruno Latour, “On Technical Mediation.” In Common Knowledge Vol.3, n°2. (1994) http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/54-TECHNIQUES-GB.pdf
detail of the experience. It is, in most of the cases, too trivial to hold any function within a plot of narrative51 that takes place in a café. But the fact remains, the napkins and their use are
Figure 4: Typical café in Portugal
undoubtedly part of the experience at a Café, even though it does not hold any significance what so over in a narrative. It is, in popular sense, a necessary agent to be present in the scene52. In this sense the exclusion of the napkins from a narrative is completely different from excluding other agents that are also not attributed to the plot but still could be present by chance in the event. Noise, such as Barthes describes, that is interpreted into narrative. The information that “you are supposed to know” is formed in complicity with the context53. At the same time, such barely visible information expresses itself by indirectly influencing scenes by conditioning it. They become visible only when they are transgressed, or someone shows unacceptance to the condition. Thus in a way this condition functions as a boundary54 . This characteristic of mediation is often explored in art in two ways. First in revealing what remains invisible and
51 The spaces of cafés in Portugal is one of my favorite places. People are there for a small cup of espresso chatting about their daily life, politica, gossip, etc. The metal tables and chaira in terraces, yellow pastries fully loaded with egg and sugar, all the characteristica of the space, and also their menu and services, is so uniform that there is almost no distinction between one or another. The space and habit fascinate me that it seems almost ritual, like the ritual of tea or smoking together of other cultures, but nothing here is symbolic but purely pragmatic, embedded deeply in “popular” daily life that has nothing to do with expectation of transcendental achievement.
52Roland Barthes recalls Chekhov’s famous remark on a gun that must be fired in a story, “The fact remains, however, that a
narrative is made up solely of functions: everything, in one way or another, is significant.” Roland Barthes, Introduction to Structural
Analyses of Narrative, 245.
53 Maybe we can insert this property, presence without need of being mentioned, of object to the meaning of mundane that I described earlier.
54 Idea of art is no exception in this. Lucy R Lippard quotes refusal of Frederick Barthelome to utter the word “art”, in introductory section of Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object, “I do not agree that by putting something into as context one admits
to making …. I do not like the word . I do not like the body of works defined by the word. What I do like is the notion production. I produce in order to pass time” . Lippard, Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London:
secondly by attributing metaphoric power, or status of symbol, to objects that can be transplanted and embedded into another context.
For instance, Gillian Wearing’s Signs that Say What You Want Them To Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say. As its title refers, some of the signs held by a businessman, police officer, student, and other people in photographs betray symbols that we automatically place on them and expect them to maintain in order to keep the templates for narrative of our daily life. Suddenly the image of individuals gains power over templates, like when a rumour is proven to be wrong. It is a fascinating fact that our everyday life is not built at all on “correct” knowledge or truth. Fiction is already there, much more on a pragmatic level than we think, and one may be crossing a bridge made of trash and styrofoam55 everyday.
Figure 5: Yuga Hatta, Operações - Prototypes, (2019). from top right: Edit: Help: Select: Open: Erase: Hide: New: Undo,
paper napkins and acrylic paint, 16 x 16cm each
55In 2009, a chunk of concrete fell from a bridge in Shanghai newly renovated earlier in the year. The investigation discovered
a pile of trash and Styrofoam inside the bridge. Even though material such as Styrofoam is used often in construction as cushioning material, its use needs to be inside regulation. Construction with defect engineering has been a problem in China for many years and causing controversy especially after the collapse of a school in an earthquake in 2008. Fiona Tan, “Shanghai bridge found stuffed with foam,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Dec. 30, 2009. https://www.scmp.com/article/702337/shanghai-bridge-found-stuffed-foam
The work Operações (Operations)56 deals with this type of mundane. It takes the paper napkins of a Café as objects just as I explained earlier. Disposable, abundant, and repeatedly used and placed on the table, its presence is very much granted despite its function within the space, as a part of its experience. Napkins themselves are almost invisible, all the more images and letters printed on them. Operações combines this triviality with the other trivial of our daily life; names of operations generally used in many basic computer programs and applications namely “New”, “Open”, “Search”, “Hide”, “Select”, “Edit”, “Erase”, “Undo”, “Help”, “Save”, and “Quit”. These words hold powerful meaning in terms of the actual action they indicate. But removed from the general context of language and placed in a toolbar and repeated in almost automatically way they become mere names of virtual operation; from signifiers of actions that require some energy to be invested for actualization to names of simple useful programs. Their power is diminished to a touch on a keyboard. The napkins printed with these words are to be placed in cafés as paper napkins in a way no different from normal napkins. Does printing these words on paper napkins change anything of an experience of the clients in Cafés? Do they even notice that printed words are different from the ones they are familiar with? And if they see a person at the next table wiping his/her mouth off with napkins saying “Undo”? What about if they only realize the letter “Save” on a napkin after using it and leave it on the plate after eating a toast? To which context they would relate the words to? They can interrupt the scene of the same as-everyday? I am curious about the image of those moments as an observer. The image of those moments is the product of this artwork. Meanwhile, there only exists a “prototype” of the napkins that are hand painted with acrylic paint. Each word has 6 x 6 = 36 napkins with three colours creating a gradation that represents the transition of nature of the word and meaning as they go through repetition. They are to be exhibited together with photographs of napkins printed and in use at Cafés at the end of the project, in order to question where the value of the project is. As in this project, the notion of value of work of art and reproduction is inverted from traditional sense - the intended poetics of the project can only be experienced through interaction with reproduction at cafés.
It is there, in attempt to insert and integrate artistic experience in actual action of daily life, without losing function of the napkin, instead of inverting the movement of framing daily
life into the sphere of art experience, that is the main intention of this artwork. As I stressed above, the work is activated, producing images, only through being used as a napkin while the audience, or clients of cafés, have freedom in the way they interact with it. If they tear the napkin with the word, it creates a different image and story. Thus, the work is complete only through collaboration, intentional or not, between clients and the napkins. It hopes to create a diversion from a “normal” course of action and narrative.
1.2.3 Function / Role
The second type of knowledge is what can be produced and informed by narrative. Earlier, I referred to interpretation of experience into narrative as almost automatic act, as a matter of course. But why is it so natural for us to recount and share experiences as narrative instead of other forms of discourse? This may be answered by what narrative is capable of informing us. Firstly, narrative expresses the narrator’s opinion or attitude towards the event recounted, that is, in Labov and Waletzkey’s term evaluation function57, his/her relation to the experience. This evaluation can be expressed by adjectives, adverbs, and other expressions that the narrator choses to describe the situation, his/her tone, and also emphasis made on the narrative. Thus, this forms one kind of knowledge, of relation, that narrative makes, that of narrator and experience and agents involved in the experience. This is surely important information we can get from the narrative however such information can also be carried in other forms of discourse as well. Secondly, narrative articulates compositions of and establishes relations between agents and contexts of the narrative, relating them and revealing chains of who? what? when? where? and why? It is knowledge, or identification, that is born out of the role of agents, or actants, that play within an experience, re-signified and emphasized in a composed narrative.
Irving Goffman studies our behavior in daily life in a theatrical performance perspective where each of us is acting a role, or roles, that are suitable or demanded from situations one is
57 William Labov and Joshua Waletzkey, “Narrative Analyses: Personal Version of Oral Experience,” 30. They separate the function of narrative into referential and evaluative. Ibid. 4.
in58. For Goffman there is a certain expectation, that is formed by past experiences or from other’s behavior, of how one should behave according to a scene so as to provide impression to those witnessing the act59. This means, from the point of view of the audience, that we label a person according to correspondence between our knowledge on a role and how the person actually behaves and acts60, identifying him/her with the role. The same person can hold a function: such as being a teacher, a father, a neighbour, a son, etc. The study of Goffman also tells us that, when one is in the position of taking a role, our act and behavior is affected and can also be limited by that role. And as much as a situation ascribse an agent to a role, performance of agent, at the same time, can define the situation and vice versa. Bruno Latour adds to this by warning that “[w]e are never simultaneously but always sequentially fabricators and fabricated, and we shift roles at specific deadlines that are themselves scripted”61, thus rejecting Goffman’s metaphor of describing real life in terms of theatrical play.
However, once experience has been interpreted as narrative, we do not have to worry about the “problem” pointed out by Latour because the scene is already framed; the “problem” is excluded as noise in favor of composing coherent and effective narrative. So, through what ascribed role is an agent taken in a narrative? In other words, how does an agent identify itself, appearing to us as a character, by organizing information such as who, what (and how, with whom), when, where, why in a narrative? Aristotle famously defined, in Poetic, tragedy as imitation of action, placing emphasis on action over character who is a carrier of action62.
Vladmir Propp, through his studies of Russian fairy tales, locates and classifies the elements, which he calls function, as an important role in expressing succession of events which compose the narratives63. The function of Propp is defined by actions, whose order cannot be dissociated in narrative, taken by character64. What is important is the relations they create
58Irving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Science Research Centre,
1956). 59 Ibid. 1.
60“It has been suggested that the object of a performer is to sustain a particular definition of the situation, this representing,
as it were, his claim as to what reality is.” Ibid. 53.
61Bruno Latour, ““What’s the story?” Organizing as a mode of existence,” in Agency without Actors? New Approaches to Collective Action, ed. Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Birgit Peuker and Michael Schillmeier (London: Routlegde, 2012) 172. http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/110-ORGANIZATION-PASSOTH.pdf
62 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher. The Project Gutenberg. November 3, 2008 [EBook #1974]
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1974/1974-h/1974-h.htm
63 Vladmir Propp, Morphology of the folk tale, ed. Luis A. Wagner, trans.Laurence Scott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968 64 Ibid. 21.
throughout the narrative, “defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of action”65 and “according to its consequences.”66 Propp concludes that most of the Russian fairy tales
share the same functions and their relation, that is how a story unfolds, with different characters. Structuralists follow this idea by examining a linguistic model of immanent structure of narrative that is common to all narratives to help their analysis. Many of them depart from the notion of function of Propp. Claude Bremond introduced decisional logic in succession of functions, choices of actions or non-actions offered by “network of possibilities”67, in order to achieve the goal. The actions are examined how it maintains a situation or brings change to the situation, positively or negatively 68. In Bremond’s analyses, agents are distinguished, such as “debtor/creditor”, according to the role they take in the action and in order to achieve its goal.69 Algirdas J. Greimas, with idea of semantic narrative, goes further in an attempt to define structure that can be accountable for explaining meaning produced by narrative. Greimas distinguishes three levels in constructed narrative grammar, deep structure, superficial structure, and manifestation structure. On deeper level, that is “the fundamental mode of existence of an individual or a society, and subse-quently the conditions of existence of semiotic objects”70, the author introduces the idea of semantic square, influenced by Levi-Strauss, a constitutional model in which a meaning gains signification in relation, contrary and contradictory, to other terms. At a superficial level, that Greimas describes as “anthropomorphic level”71, utterance is produced by arrangement of contents into discursive forms. Products of the two levels are prefigurated thus, according to Greimas, and therefore applicable to “any given language (or more precisely they define the specific characteristics of languages) or of any given material”72 on a manifestation level. To emphasize the state of the prefiguration, Greimas introduces the term actant for operator of actions. In his actantial model, it is relation, which is function,
65 Ibid. 21. 66 Ibid. 67.
67Claude Bremond, “The Logic of Narrative Possibility,” trans. by Elaine D. Cancalon. New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3
(Spring, 1980): 388. Accessed December 20, 2019. http://www.jstor.org/stable/468934
68Ibid. 390. Tzvetan Todorov calls former relation “succession” and the latter “transformation”. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Two
Principles of Narratives,” Diacritics, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1971): 39. Accessed December 17, 2019.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/464558
69Claude Bremond, Logic of Narrative Possibilities, 395.
70 Algirdas, J. Greimas, On Meaning, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 48.
71 Ibid. 70.
between actants that produce narrative utterance73. The insight into structural narrative of analyses and schema offered by it provides the project further clue on how, by putting an experience into narrative, one can retrospectively grasp and confirm the relation of agents and attribute it to the agents as their property, thus providing knowledge about them. However, its “problem”, especially on the model of Greimas, that collect critique of many scholars is that its formalistic position in supposing that in a narrative “meaning was therefore directly derived from a structure that was immanent to it"74 thus devaluating the temporal factor of narrative which for Paul Ricoeur constitute its essence. Meanwhile, Greimas suggests that this kind of analysis is also applicable to other fields such as understanding cultural objects75. This idea is explored and schematized later by Bruno Latour in his Actor Network Theory in the field of Social Anthropology in relation to Technology.
1.2.3.1 Narrative Identity of Paul Ricoeur
Paul Ricoeur’s extensive study on narrative, on the contrary to achronological approach of structuralism, focuses on the temporal dimension of narrative. Ricoeur regards narrative as where our conception and understanding of time, temporality of events can be grasped by composition and by unfolding of the plot. Past memory, for example, is an experience that is embedded in signs and images. It is projected on the future as expectation and passes through the present as narrative, that is a re-signification of our actions and its consequences. Ricoeur, by elaborating Aristotelian idea of narrative and tragedy, shows the process through threefold imitation of action weaved into a plot of narrative76, which he names mimesis1, 2, and 3; The author explains the functioning of each stages as a prefiguration of action into signs,
73Ibid. 76.
74 Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism 1 The Rising Sign 1945-1966, trans. Deborah Glassman. (Minneapolis, London: Minnesota University Press, 1997) 214.
75 “Considered from the point of view of their results, which are cultural objects, gestural programs appear to be genetic definitions of things and events (a dress can be defined by the program to sew a dress). Moreover, semantic programs, at the level of natural languages, could be defined in the same way as literary objects (novel or poem). It should be noted that cultural objects, once they have been produced, in turn can be seen as morphomatic structures (an automobile can be reduced to parts and subparts, each having in turn a gestural subprogram from the point of view of genetic definition). Be that as it may, gestural praxis, which is by nature predicative, appears as a syntax able to produce an infinite number of utterances in the form of cultural objects and events, which are circumstantial in nature.” Algirdas, J. Greimas, On Meaning, 45.
composition of them into narrative where he refers to and also confines within the study of structuralists, and their configuration by reader or audience. Ricoeur further explains, through reading on Aristotle, that pleasure of learning can be brought by reading figuration of actions and created meaning through their composition, the joy of recognizing77. Meanwhile, what interest most of the author’s study on narrative to this project is the idea of narrative identity convergence of two concepts: the concept of identity sameness (idem), “a concept of relation and a relation of relations”78, and the concept of self (ipseity), one’s continuity, which he pursues in parallel to, but supported by, the temporal configuration of narrative79. Ricoeur’s search for identity in narrative is focused around the question of who, what, and why of actions carried by emplotment of it80. In short, Ricoeur finds the fusion of the two concepts of identity in narrative through actions attributed to agents, together with other prescriptions made to it, and continuity of the character throughout the story, despite the transformation that it might go through, that forms “one and same individual”81. The investigation leads Ricoeur to ask “whether every plot does not proceed from a mutual genesis involving the development of a character and that of a story”82. He affirms this by reflecting on Bremond and Greimas. While a character belongs to a story, another way around also can be said, the story belongs, wholly or partly depending on the role the character takes within it, to the character. Do we not find ourselves identifying a certain narrative as “of” the character? If “telling a story is saying who did what and how by spreading out in time the connection between these various viewpoints”83, to know about something or someone is to know about the story. Here we find what corresponds to the idea of “knowledge” that this art project is seeking to bring it to a stage of internalization. At the same time, the study of Ricoeur helps the project to give sense to the act of collection as an expression of desire to know. Collecting various relations between objects, persons, or concepts, that are agents of daily life. This also leads to refiguring them by language, or with other media, becoming a story about the agent.
77 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 116. 78 Ibid.
79Ibid. 88.
80 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 116. 81 Ibid. 118.
82 Ibid. 143. 83 Ibid. 146.
