"Working Through Contradiction Interminably": Towards a Mathesis Singularis?

Then I decided that this disorder and this dilemma, revealed by my desire to write on Photography, corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical; and at the heart of this critical language, between several discourses, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis but that, by ultimate dissatisfaction with all of them, I was bearing witness to the only sure thing that was in me (however naive it may be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system. (Barthes 1981: 8)

1 Barthes does not elaborate on his use of the two terms.The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://www.rep.roudedge.com/philosophy;all the following quotations are from the web site and can easily be searched there) refers to Ramon Llull who in the Spanish middle ages "developed a complicated combinatory logic ... which offered an ingenious foretaste of our current axiomated logics."According to the encyclopedia, his thought "contains the seeds of the mathesis universalis, which served as the basis for European Rationalism as developed later by Descartes and Leibniz."Descartes' rules of method "were interpreted as recommendations to start with a few simple and acknowledged notions (axioms) and thence to proceed to unkonwn ones (theorems).... The supporters of such an interpretation maintained that the axiomatic-deductive method should replace logic and be the fundamental features that need to be taken into consideration: they invent the past as much as they record or retell it, and even if the strategies vary, they all relate to that same event, and often in profoundly similar ways, across or beyond generic boundaries.There are essential intertextual relations between all the narratives in question.And yet, each narrative resists sweeping statements: needless to say, as natrative, a graphic novel differs widely from a movie or a novel.Each narrative stages and re-enacts the event in its own way.
Significantly, the generic forms I have suggested ("novel," "epic poetry") often fall short in "defining" the constitutive elements of the narratives. 4As a result, I indeed find myself wishing fot a mathesis singularis for each new form.It is this conflict I wish to address here.Particularly, I wish to contrast how the wish for a mathesis universalis finds expression in recent attempts to rearticulate theories of "nonfiction," and how, at the same time, the practice of interdisciplinary analysis calls for theories that revolve around "conceptualizations" rather than systemic methodology, an approach reminiscent of Barthes' "curious notion" of a mathesis singularis.
The attempt to describe a type, to distinguish it, and to test its  Dallas, 1963Dallas, (1995) ) can be read as an epic poem, it is a postmodern version of the epic, a genuine hybrid. 5See Frye 1957 and any introduction to structuralism.Frye believes that literary criticism should "acquire something of the methodological discipline and coherence of the sciences", but several critics have found his approach "excessively schematic" (Lodge 1995: 421)."There is a place for classification in criticism ... The strong emotional repugnance felt by many critics toward any form of schematization in poetics is again the result of a failure to distinguish criticism as a body of knowledge from the direct experience of literature, where every act is unique, and classification has no place," Frye claims in his "Polemical Introduction" to Anatomy of Criticism (1957: 29)."Structuralism," as proposed by cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, normally refers to a form of analysis informed by Saussure's linguistic model.Structuralism considers cultural phenomena as a signifying structure, "a combination of signs that have a set significance for the members of a particular culture," and analysis explains how phenomena achieve their "cultural significance, and what that significance is, by reference to an underlying system" (Abrams 1993: 280).discourse of my training that inhere in structuralist thought" (xiii).Bal found that there was a discrepancy between her practice as an analyst and the systemic approach to narrative, between her encounters with narrative as "object-language" and her analysis as "meta-language."In the afterword of her new edition, she claims that there is "no direct logical connection between classifying and understanding texts": Asking whether or not an object 'is' narrative is both obvious and futile, just as the notion that an image 'is' visual hardly calls for visual analysis to make that point.Bal's contention is that initial classification and the application of a consistent theoretical apparatus in analysis too easily promotes dichotomy.When a value system is appropriated to the apparatus, it potentially disqualifies a specific kind of narrative that is formative for collective memory in particular ways.A classification that promotes a "fiction'V'nonfiction" dichotomy can therefore potentially seclude the historical event from the realm of "fiction," and leave it to the documentarist or the historian to treat it in narrative.Bal therefore cautions against a confusion of understanding and axiology, against a sense of "value inherent in narrative."The danger is that narrative is either understood as "true, hence, good" or as "intrinsically false, fictional, manipulative, hence, bad" (223).In either case the essential tension that is integral to a specific vision of history is neglected.
The reasons for cautioning against an axiology of "fiction"/"nonfiction" are, then, partly ideological.Bal's approach to "close reading" is definitely anti-totalitarian.She insists that no academic discipline can function without a notion of the concept of meaning (26), a view that is reminiscent of for example Bakhtin's textual/cultural approach, since Bakhtin insisted on any text as simultaneously "polyphonic" and "laden."Bal does not, however, embrace "the disabused endorsement of undecidability" (91-2).
Meaning is not forever delayed, it is rather articulated and re-articulated in interpretation, securing an ongoing questioning of textual authority.

In the case of the Kennedy assassination the narrativity in what John
Hellmann refers to as an "unbounded cultural space" is a battle of cultural authority (Hellmann 1997: x).6 On this battleground, the narratives I analyze co-exist with an abundance of narratives that claim to be "objective" and "scientific," and thereby present a closure in terms of meaning.They "stage" the historical event and may therefore be said to "play with meaning."The question of "truth" is as contested as ever when a story of the past is told, and this is particularly the case in the unsolved murder mystery of a president.7 Numerous Kennedy assassination narratives problematize the very distinction between "fiction" and Gadamerian approach: one should always allow tne object to "speak back" and allow a "suspension of certainties" (Bal 2002: 45).Theory, according to Bal, is not an "instrument of analysis" as much as "a discourse that can be brought to bear on the object at the same time as the object can be brought to bear on it" (65).The point of interpretation is, Bal claims towards the end of Narratology, to ever raise "Gadamer's perpetual questions" (Bal 1997: 224).This dialogic relation between "object-language" and "meta-language," where both can be said to problematize and investigate epistemological authority, disqualifies readings that insist on a clear-cut distinction between the two.Several of the narratives "do theory" in the sense that they both reflect and invite reflection on, say, "history as institution" or "the epistemological claims of historical representation.""The narratives can make claims that are theoretical.'"In Libra, one of DeLillo's characters is a retired senior analyst of the CIA, and as we follow him in his work we are bound to share his historiographical reflections.Similarly, if we read Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale (1995), a historical novel of almost 800 pages, we are bound to read through an immense amount of "documentary" material (interviews, records).This should not surprise us.In his essay on the relations of science and art, Thomas Kuhn points out that there are "close and persistent parallels" between science and art, the two enterprises he had been taught (as a former physicist) to regard as "polar."' 3 One cannot, according to Kuhn, apply "classic For elaborate discussions on how narrarives such as JFK can engender a new kind of historical consciousness, see Nichols 1994Nichols , 1996. ."Miniatures," for which the only requirements are that the topic "be in some way historical and the length no more than 1500 words... the subject matter of a Miniature need only be limited by the imagination and inventiveness of the historian.Like all contributions to Rethinking History, Miniatures will be refereed -by standards appropriate to the form."Editors Robert A. Rosenstone and Alan Munslow suggest that contributors send them "vest pocket biographies, poetic reflections, personal encounters, outrageous reinterpretations."332 dichotomies" between "the world of value and the world of fact, the subjective and the objective, or the intuitive and the inductive" and use these to distinguish art from science (Kuhn 1977: 340).Kuhn finds "disquieting" that "the distinction between artist and scientist or between their products seems to evade us" when we ate "deploying our subdest analytic apparatus."However, this is "due less to their intrinsic similarity than to the failure of the tools we use for close scrutiny."Kuhn propagates a search for an "alternate set" of tools, and hopes to find "entry points" in a reconsideration of parallels between science and art drawn by E. M. Hafner from three areas, "products," "activity," and "response" (341).Central to Kuhn's argument is the difference between the goals of art and science.In the arts "the aesthetic is itself the goal of the work," whereas in the sciences it is "a tool" (342).Sciences are to "unlock the puzzle."Whereas the artist "also has puzzles to solve, whether of perspective, coloration, brush technique, or framing edge" their soludon is not "the aim of his work but rather a means to his attainment" (347).
Obviously, Kuhn refers in these passages to the painter-artist, the epitome of traditional artistimages.However, the conflicting modes of thought described by Kuhn in a different essay as "convergent" and "divergent," resulting in a "tension" which is "essential" to "the very best sort

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occurrence and systemic function in relation to other types can be identified in literary theories of the twentieth century, such as Northrop Frye's theory of archetypal structutes or structutalist theory. 5Mieke Bal presents a break with such traditions in a second and revised edition of her 1985 book Narratology, in 1997.In her introduction she explains how she grew uneasy with the first edition when working with the second.She felt uncomfortable with the "tone of it," the references "to being sure," and "all those remnants of the positivistic 4 Although Steve McCabe's Wyatt Earp in

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nonfiction" narrative by not resolving this basic tension.Novels such as Don DeLillo's Libra (1988) or movies such as Oliver Stone's JFK {\99\), which are about events surrounding the assassination, are routinely placed in "fiction" shelves.Readers and spectators are familiar with the contrast implied, but the process of reading and watching is more complex, and invites a particular kind of interactivity.Of course, the reader/spectator does not interpret a movie or a novel in the same way as for example the first official interpretation of the event, the Warren Commission report in 1964. 8Whereas the documentary approach of the Commission attempted a necessary but flawed conclusive interpretation, the artistic narratives cannot and will not achieve such a truth-telling status, and their power is rather of a negative chatacter; they are free from burdens of empiri, open for artistry, and they raise questions about knowledge and the authority of knowledge.Their own considerable authority is thus of a different character.The anti-totalitarian polyphony of the narratives depends on their hybridity, on a textual play that frustrates generic and formal classification.They operate in a zone fittingly described by Bill Nichols as "between boundaries," where "the world put before us lies between one not our own and one that very well might be" (1994, ix), hence their troubled mimetic character.The novel Libra and the movie JFK address the assassination by way of montage of documentary material and reenactment, by way of ' On the hybridity of Libra: "Libra preserves the historical texture of everyday life the [Warren Commission] Report offers in its countless interviews and empirical facts and details ... DeLillo assembles and organizesthe historical materials of The Warren Commission Report in conjunction with several conspiracy theories of the assassination.Libra, however, does not vindicate either narrative of the JFK assassination, but rather negates each plot by revealing its moment of untruth, the blind spot that enables each narrative to restore meaning and/or stability to social reality."(Willman 1999: 622-23) "What [DeLillo] has done in Libra is given us one perfectly shaped, intention-driven narrative while folding within it, every other chapter, a second narrative, his imagined biography of Oswald ... With his double narrative DeLillo toys with conventional political and novelistic expectations.... Oswald is a contemporary production, a figure who is doubled everywhere in Libra, even, most harrowingly, in strategic places, in the narrative voice that DeLillo invented fot this book."(Lentricchia 1991 b), 201-3) On the hybridity of JFK: "Upon the film's release, the criticism continued along two fronts: Stone's decision to base his narrative on the much-discredited Jim Garrison, former New Orleans district attorney, and the film's visual strategy of intercutting archival footage with reenactments of alleged events."(Simon 1996: 205) "Everything is presented as if it were of the same ontologicai order, both real and imaginaryrealistically imaginary or imaginary real, with the result that the referential function of the images of events is etiolated ... All of the events depicted in the film -whether attested by historical evidence, based on conjecture, or simply made up in order to help the plot along or to lend credence to Stone's paranoid fantasies -are presented as if diey were equally historical, which is to say, equally real, or as if they had really happened."(White 1999: 68, 69) 330 combining what is imagined with indexical data, never settling in one mode, always disrupting what is simulated with what is real, always telling what may have happened.The use Stone makes of the 8 mm film of the assassination shot by Abraham Zapruder is highly controversial, because he "mixes Zapruder's real vérité with his own simulated vérité" (Williams 1999: 311).According to Marita Sturken it is this montage that defines the dialogical relationship between narrative and spectator, that allows the viewer to raise fundamental questions of meaning: The meanings of the Zapruder film continue to shift each time it is reenacted ... The Zapruder film replaces personal memories of the Kennedy assassination, becoming those memories, and JFK has the capacity to replace the Zapruder film.All subsequent depictions of the Zapruder film are irrevocably altered by its inscription in JFK.(Sturken 1995: 35) Sturken claims that it is "the reenacted image that carries the weight of historical narrative, that allows for a sense of participation in history" (1995: 35).° The meanings "continue to shift," and ongoing participation leaves history open-ended.The kind of spectatot participation that Sturken describes thus depends fundamentally on the essential tension that characterize this kind of narrative.This interpretational activity resembles the one preferred by Bal, a figures, literary genres, and historical periods"(Bal 1999: 45).What characterizes Mitchell's own approach?In an interview he submits that his attempt (in Picture Theory) at a synthesis of contemporary thinking about representation and art theory did not issue "in any system or method," and that it instead tended to be "somewhat anarchistic and eclectic, working by essayistic forays into concrete problems rather than an architectonic elaboration"(Mitchell 2000: 5)."Imagetext" as envisioned by Mitchell is whatBal calls a "travelling concept"(Bal 2002: 56-95), and Mitchell claims that he believes "in 'travelling light' when it comes to technical terminology"(Mitchell 2000: 5).He is more comfortable working with "mutable concepts" (6).Bal proposes a use of "concepts" as tools for analysis, not in order "to label" but because concepts can "offer miniature theories"(Bal 2002: 22).Bal's contention of "theory" differs distinctly from "theoretical apparatus" in ways similar to that of Mitchell."Concept" is to be understood not as "cleatcut methodological legislation," but rather as "territory to be travelled" (23).According to Bal, interdisciplinary analysis benefits from the projection of "working concepts" (99), concepts that have a history from more than one academic discipline.The movement back and forth between disciplines she envisions metaphorically, hence "travelling concepts." 23A trajectory is proposed for the reader/spectator instead of definitions or truth-claims (60).Textual hybridity invites an analysis that draws on different disciplines, ananalysis that is to lead the analyst to resist "sweeping statements and partisanship as well as reductive classification for the sake of alleged objectivity" (44).Bal even conceptualizes "messiness" in cultural analysis, by deliberately "messing" (as she puts it) with concepts.(Bal2002, 178-82).A systemic theory that relocalizes boundaries of "ficrion'V'nonfiction" cannot address messiness: Bal's argument is that the intertextuality of the work motivates an interdisciplinary analysis that constandy invites reconceptualization. "Messiness" is thus as serious a concept as "play."In her critical practice, Bal addresses the uniqueness of the work's aesthetic effort,

On the other hand, if so much of culture 'is' narrative, or, if not, at least 'has an aspect of narrative, doesn't any invocation of narratology initiate a circular argument that begs the question of specificity? This is why traditionally, narratology has been used to differentiate 'types' of narrative, narrative situations, 'modes' of story-telling ... But what's the point of thai>
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