coldhearted scientist وداد

Now I will read some articles from Social Discourse, a journal issue I have been carrying around and not reading since 1989. It was my contention that writers of the teens and twenties were saying interesting things about subjectivity way before Foucault and others got into it, and we know this since the later 20th century theorists discussed these avant-gardes. As we know, Borges, Valéry, Guillermo de Torre and many others had things to say on these matters, and people like Joyce and Vallejo really worked with them. So, can I learn anything from 1989? Let us see.

1. Wladimir Kyrsinski on Ulysses and earlier. Why is Joyce’s treatment of subjectivity innovative? How does he subvert previous literary representations of it? (How does Moro treat it?) WK: the question of subjectivity is rhizomatic and polyreferential, having no stable system of references. What is the subject? Goldmann talks about the collective subject, and Levinas says subjectivity can only be defined within a specific frame of references in which “exteriority,” “sensitivity” and human face occupy the central position. // All of these philosophers, of course, have talked about who is the subject, who is the mind who thinks // But in Ulysses, subjectivity is the body in space. Moro: is like this. Body and mind are one, love and lust/sex are one, I and you are one, culture and nature are one, and so on.
2. Krysinski on Ulysses: “because life is a stream” (Joyce, “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysses.) Joyce doesn’t give the characters interiority or self-reflection. And subjectivity isn’t self-consciousness. (Is it in Moro? What about in the letters?) Subjectivity in Ulysses is ego-space-time rather than interiority. So it isn’t wholeness. The use of parallax. Here, the opposition is not between subject and object. (They can be next to each other, or together, or at an oblique angle, working together not on each other.) So, according to Kryskinski, the subject here is an inter-relational sign that is always constrained by space and time, and can’t be freely internal or reflexive. It is, rather, a momentum of the intermingled chains of phenomena and discourses where it cannot occupy the central position. The parallaxity does not presuppose any hierarchical order, but posits the subject in the evergrowing contextuality of the narrative, of the interdiscursive and of the symbolic signs (9). So it is metonymic. It achieves itself bits by bits, in a dialectic of idea and ocurrence, universal and specific, and between subject and subjectness; the subject is a set of tensions and forces (not an essence). The subjects here are objectified subjects and subjectified objects. And it is key that everything is always in motion or change.
3. Krysinski points out that Pirandello and Pessoa also do this (cf. Book of Disquietude). The 20s and 30s are full of literature of “lost ego,” he says. (Hm: the man jostled by the crowd, I am going to all this old-old work.) “Joyce conceives of the subject not as a loss of identity but as a continuity of the self by memory and discontinuity by time. Thus: “I am other now and now.” Being is discontinuous and the monologues are products of that. “Subjectivity is therefore .. the series of behavioral signs denoting and connoting body and consciousness in encounter and not in conflict with space and time.”
4. It’s interesting that I like Kyrsinski, he turns out to have been very popular in Spain and Spanish America. And this article will be hard to reacquire, so I am keeping this journal issue.
5. Somehow, if I can connect this paper to Bataille somehow and eroticism, body, it will be good already. So it took me all day to pick through it while picking through other things. I’m happy I did.

Axé.