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Performing Intermediality: On Water Engines, Strange Loops, and Transgressive Thought
Boekbijdrage - Hoofdstuk
In her Avatars of Story (2006), Marie-Laure Ryan argues that drama "is a well-recognized cultural institution, but as a live performance using multiple sensory channels, it cannot be distinguished from ballet or the opera on strictly semiotic or technological grounds." Since the 'liveness' of a theatrical performance thrives on the sensory interaction between sender and receiver, such a communicative framework requires a set of mutually recognizable signifiers or patterns, even if these 'typifications', in turn, are equally the product of negotiation.
Since 'media' create their own operative languages while operating in a cultural context, they appropriate strategies and signifiers from other media and genres. Consequently, receptive frameworks appear as isomorphic constructions. Moreover, according to Patrice Pavis, media intrinsically do not favour activity or passivity by virtue of their technological possibilities. It is rather their specific mode of structuring and transmitting messages that stimulates a certain kind of cognitive involvement. The polysemous 'liveness' of an intermedial theatrical performance in particular draws attention to the contingent nature of cultural communication. This paper will therefore consider the connotative 'excess' of signifiers as principal indicator of the overarching framework's essentially functional purpose.
The selected case study of David Mamet's Water Engine (1977, 1978, 1992) should illustrate how in a hybridising cultural complex the interplay, interconnectedness, and interpenetration of various 'media' actually contradict feedback-models of technological 'optimisation'. Rather than the assumed or projected linear causality behind industrial and cognitive frameworks alike, distinctions and symbolic patterns arguably result from what Douglas Hofstadter termed 'strange loops'. Based on a differentiation between 'reception' and 'perception', the strange loop refers to "the passage leading from vast numbers of received 'signals' to a handful of triggered 'symbols', [...] a kind of funnelling process in which initial input signals are manipulated or 'massaged'" (Hofstadter 2007). This concept, rooted in the subjectivity of individual perception, integrates stimuli from various levels of abstraction, "which feels like an upward movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive 'upward' shift turns out to give rise to a closed cycle" (Hofstadter, ibid.). The application of such 'strange loop'-perspective to 'intermedial' theatrical performance provides a constructive platform that allows for a purpose-oriented integration of seemingly unrelated methods, concepts, or heuristic strategies and simultaneously reminds of this construct's artificiality. Ultimately, therefore, the 'strange loop' celebrates analogical thought while circumventing its essentialist excesses.
WORKS CITED:
Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am A Strange Loop. New York: Basic, 2007.
Pavis, Patrice. "Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference". Approaching Theater. Ed. André Helbo. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991. 21-47.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: Minnesota
U.P.,2006.
Since 'media' create their own operative languages while operating in a cultural context, they appropriate strategies and signifiers from other media and genres. Consequently, receptive frameworks appear as isomorphic constructions. Moreover, according to Patrice Pavis, media intrinsically do not favour activity or passivity by virtue of their technological possibilities. It is rather their specific mode of structuring and transmitting messages that stimulates a certain kind of cognitive involvement. The polysemous 'liveness' of an intermedial theatrical performance in particular draws attention to the contingent nature of cultural communication. This paper will therefore consider the connotative 'excess' of signifiers as principal indicator of the overarching framework's essentially functional purpose.
The selected case study of David Mamet's Water Engine (1977, 1978, 1992) should illustrate how in a hybridising cultural complex the interplay, interconnectedness, and interpenetration of various 'media' actually contradict feedback-models of technological 'optimisation'. Rather than the assumed or projected linear causality behind industrial and cognitive frameworks alike, distinctions and symbolic patterns arguably result from what Douglas Hofstadter termed 'strange loops'. Based on a differentiation between 'reception' and 'perception', the strange loop refers to "the passage leading from vast numbers of received 'signals' to a handful of triggered 'symbols', [...] a kind of funnelling process in which initial input signals are manipulated or 'massaged'" (Hofstadter 2007). This concept, rooted in the subjectivity of individual perception, integrates stimuli from various levels of abstraction, "which feels like an upward movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive 'upward' shift turns out to give rise to a closed cycle" (Hofstadter, ibid.). The application of such 'strange loop'-perspective to 'intermedial' theatrical performance provides a constructive platform that allows for a purpose-oriented integration of seemingly unrelated methods, concepts, or heuristic strategies and simultaneously reminds of this construct's artificiality. Ultimately, therefore, the 'strange loop' celebrates analogical thought while circumventing its essentialist excesses.
WORKS CITED:
Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am A Strange Loop. New York: Basic, 2007.
Pavis, Patrice. "Theatre and the Media: Specificity and Interference". Approaching Theater. Ed. André Helbo. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1991. 21-47.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: Minnesota
U.P.,2006.
Boek: Consciousness, Theatre, Literature, and the Arts 2009
Pagina's: 66-76
Aantal pagina's: 350
ISBN:1-4438-1649-3
Jaar van publicatie:2010
Trefwoorden:cognition