THE SEARCH FOR A POST-BABEL PERFECT LANGUAGE IN ‘WORKIN-MOVEMENT’
By Beyza Boyacioglu
Keywords
Perfect language, work-in-movement, generative art, perspectivism
Abstract
This paper begins by investigating the origins of the quest for a perfect
language that can express an absolute truth and its impossibility in a postBabel world. According to the religious story, a post-Babel world would be
a world of many languages. In the context of this paper, the post-Babel
world represents the postmodern world of many realities, meanings and
truths, thus many perspectives. The question that is been investigated is if
there is no absolute truth, then how can there be a perfect language that
can express it?
The Search for a Post-Babel Perfect Language in ‘Work-in-Movement’
offers a redefinition of a perfect language and proposes an
omniperspectival representer of reality. This perfect language might offer
as many versions of the truth as possible and that is how it could get closer
to an ideal (and impossible) truth. In this paper, generative artworks ‘inmovement’ are offered as fluid platforms that can represent various
realities through their changing forms. Works-in-movement from literature,
music, theatre, and visual arts are discussed in terms of their ability to
generate various perspectives under the constrains of their specific
medium.
THE SEARCH FOR A POST-BABEL PERFECT LANGUAGE IN ‘WORKIN-MOVEMENT’
“God spoke before all things, and said, ‘Let there be light.’ In this
way, he created both heaven and earth; for with the utterance of
the divine word, ‘there was light’ (Genesis 1:3-4). Thus Creation itself
arose through an act of speech; it is only by giving things their
names that he created them and gave them ontological status”
(7).
Umberto Eco begins The Search for the Perfect Language with an allusion
from the Book of Genesis. God spoke the world into existence; therefore
everything that existed was expressible through this “perfect language”.
The founder of prophetic Kabbalah, Abulafia, suggests that there were
two types of languages during the creation of the world: the divine
language and the natural language. Divine language is the language
god created the world through and spoke to Adam. Natural language is
derived from the divine language and Adam taught it to Eve and their
children. It is the language every human on earth spoke before the
“confusion of tongues” at the tower of Babel (Eco, 16). After Babel, the
imperfect “natural language” was fragmented into various languages.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or linguistic relativism suggests that the
structure of one language affects the thoughts of its speakers thus the
way they conceptualize their world (Boroditsky). The famous example is
the study on the language of an Aboriginal community in northern
Australia. In the language of this community, relative directions (left, right
etc) do not exist. They employ cardinal directions (North, South, West and
East) even in their everyday conversations. As a result, the people of this
community have an amazing sense of orientation. Even a five year old
can tell the cardinal directions as accurate as a compass. On the other
hand, she/he does not have an idea of egocentric directions. If the
language is so powerful to shape the way we look at the world, then
everything we take for granted could be reliant on the language we
speak in. The meanings we produce and reproduce through language
are not absolute but relative to the microcosm we live in. Moving from
psychology to philosophy, in Poststructuralism, Catherine Belsey refers to
German Ideology by Marx and Engels:
…in an example that perfectly anticipates semiology, Marx and
Engels point out that under feudalism we hear a great deal about
‘honour’ and ‘royalty’, but when capitalism takes over, ‘freedom’
and ‘equality’ (of opportunity, presumably) rapidly take their place
(32).
Similar to Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, poststructuralists propose that “ideas are
the effect of the meanings we learn and reproduce” (Belsey, 7). If
meanings are produced by the symbolizing systems we learn, then every
language, as a major symbolizing system, creates its own realm built upon
its particular meanings therefore limitations.
The arguments of linguistic relativism and poststructuralist approach to
language make the quest for a perfect language (which claim to speak
the absolute meaning) meaningless, since they both deny the existence
of one absolute truth. According to Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’, all ideas
are created from particular perspectives. Therefore the truth can be
determined in endless number of frameworks, which makes it impossible
to take anything as definitely true: “I shall reiterate a hundred times that
‘immediate certainty’, like ‘absolute knowledge’ and ‘thing in itself,’
contains a contradictio in adjecto [contradiction in terms]: we really
ought to get free from the seduction of words!” (Nietzsche, 23). However,
if there is no “nonperspectival seeing”, it does not mean that there is no
“omniperspectival seeing” says Maudmarie Clark in Nietzsche on Truth
and Philosophy (145). Her interpretation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism
proposes that “…what we know is only partially true, that it would be
completely true only if we supplemented it by the way things appear from
other perspectives” (Clark, 146). Under the light of this line of reasoning,
we can say that only when the number of perspectives goes to infinity, we
get closer to “the” truth, and this means that the truth itself is an
unachievable ideal. Therefore, rather than trying to determine what the
truth is, we might attempt to express what the truth might be through
various perspectives and versions of reality. Unlike any other system of
thought, art offers a representation or expression of an idea, a reality, or a
truth, rather than making absolute statements about them. Therefore art
might be the appropriate medium for investigating the possibility of truth
through many perspectives.
Eastern miniatures do not employ a single perspective because they aim
to illustrate an all-knowing, all-seeing God’s point-of-view. This point of
view shows many perspectives in one plane, which is an impossible view
to the naked eye. Orhan Pamuk’s novel My Name is Red takes place in
16th century Ottoman Empire, in the world of the court painters. The
reader witnesses the painters’ dilemma of choosing between the
traditional miniature painting which is a way of worshiping to Allah and his
‘shadow on earth’, the sultan, and the western painting which is
individualistic because it depicts the artist’s own point of view. Unlike
western painters, Ottoman painters do not study nature so much in detail
but they try to see God’s perspective in their mind’s eye. In Pamuk’s novel,
we learn that it is very common for very devoted painters to blind
themselves so that they do not see the deceitful physical world from their
individual perspective, but they dedicate themselves completely to their
mind’s view. This way they attempt to get closer to God’s omnivision.
Miniature painting is an important example of art being the medium for
the depiction of many realities or maybe a transcendental reality. The
attempt of getting closer to the reality by seeing all possible perspectives
translates into Ottoman painters’ effort to illustrate god’s point of view. In
the remaining part of this essay, I will discuss various works of art from
literature, music, theatre, and visual arts, which utilize a perspectivist
language to achieve such effect.
In 1960, Frencois Le Lionnais founded Oulipo (Ouvroir de Literature
Potentielle- Workshop of Potential Literature), with Raymond Queneau. It
started as a research group for writers and mathematicians who wanted
to experiment with constrained writing techniques. One of the most well
known Oulipian works is Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand
Billion Poems. The piece consists of ten sonnets and each line of the
sonnets is printed on a separate strip of paper. Any line from any sonnet
can be combined with any other, which makes one hundred thousand
billion unique combinations possible. By not offering one version of the
piece, Queneau experiments with “producing custom poems in ways that
give the reader an enhanced role in the process of literary creation”
(Wardrip, Noah and Montfort, Nick, 146). Two years after Queneau’s
piece, in 1963, Argentinean writer Julio Cortazar published his ‘counternovel’ Hopscotch. In the beginning of the novel, the reader is given a
table of instructions, which proposes two ways of reading the piece. An
unambitious reader can enjoy the novel linearly from the beginning until
the fifty-sixth chapter. The author suggests that the last ninety-nine
chapters are expendable. A more motivated reader is recommended to
hopscotch through different chapters designated by the table of
instructions:
The multiple reading of the book is also supported by the content itself.
Morelli, a writer who appears in the novel briefly, mentions his idea of
“reader-accomplice”:
…the usual novel misses its mark because it limits the reader to its
own ambit; the better defined it is, the better the novelist is thought
to be… A text that could not clutch the reader but which would
oblige him to become an accomplice as it whispers him
underneath the conventional exposition other more esoteric
directions (556).
Similar to Morelli/Cortazar’s idea of blending the reader and the writer into
one body, post-Webern music allows the performer to “impose his
judgment on the form of the piece, as when he decides how long to hold
a note or in what order to group the sounds: all this amounts to an act of
improvised creation” (Eco, Open Work, 1). The composer sets some
constrains for the performer while also leaving room for interpretation. In
The Open Work, Umberto Eco defines such systems as work of art, which
can be refashioned by each individual addressee. There is no absolute
version of the piece, as “in poststructuralist terms, [the work] preserves the
secret of its final signified” (Belsey, 15). However open work can be
interpreted as any artwork since Roland Barthes declared the death of
the author in 1967. At this point, Eco goes deeper in the definition of an
open work and suggests a sub-category: work in movement. A work in
movement is an artistic product with “a kaleidoscopic capacity to
suggest themselves in constantly renewed aspects to the consumer” (Eco,
Open Work, 13). Rather than being subject to interpretations only, work in
movement can change its form in relation to the audience or performer.
The British site-specific theatre company Punchdrunk performs an
immersive theatre experience, which allows the spectator to choose
his/her own path in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Sleep No More, the visitors
are asked to wear a mask and wonder around a four-floor building where
the well-known tragedy unfolds in a non-linear fashion. Each spectator is
free to poke around the rooms or follow a character as she/he dances,
performs or interacts with other characters while also leading the
audience towards a bigger room where a major scene will take place.
Every participant-viewer experiences a totally unique show, you may
spend hours reading medical reports in a psychiatric hospital, eating
candy in a spooky candy shop, or shadowing a character. The best part
of the experience may be to meet with friends after three hours of
legitimate voyeurism and compare each other’s perspectives. Sleep No
More definitely possess the kaleidoscopic asset of a generative work of
art.
Moving from theatre to visual arts, Eve Sussman’s video piece White on
White proposes an intriguing illustration of a generative “work in
movement.” White on White is a film noir that takes place in the close
future, in a city called A-City. The main character works for a company
but he does not know what his work is used for. As a good detective story
protagonist, he decides to find out the big mystery. Meanwhile, we look at
the beautiful scenes from the Kazakh city Aktau/A-City, feeling the
isolation and solitude of the main character. At first glance, White on
White is a gorgeously shot conventional film noir with its flawed anti-hero
on a transforming journey. What is not conventional about the film is how
it is edited and reedited continuously. Each cut we see is a unique one
generated by an algorithm, as well as the sound, which accompanies it.
Audience will see a one-of-a-kind representation of the story according to
his/her timing. After learning about this aspect of the piece, the name
White on White becomes more meaningful. The founder of Suprematism
movement, Kasimir Malevich painted a white cube on a white canvas in
1918 and he also called it White on White.
Suprematists focused on painting geometric forms, which possessed no
reference to anything, which was “dry and monotonous, without art and
without individuality” (Liukkonen). In White on White, Malevich went one
step further and got rid of colors too. In her homage to Malevich, Sussman
designs a meaning generator rather than the meaning itself. Like
Malevich, she also attempts to strip the piece off of the crucial feature of
its medium, its meaning maker: the cut. Under the constrains of a timebased narrative, she tries to stay away from making a single statement but
welcomes the audience in the making of the narrative, generating
various versions.
“In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in
proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be
viewed and understood” says Umberto Eco in Poetics of Open Work (3).
Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Cortazar’s Hopscotch,
examples in post-Webern music, Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and
Sussman’s White on White all follow a formal artistic decision in order to let
the audience get immersed and be a part/perspective of the piece. All
these “works in movement” have specific constrains as the borders of the
playground. Queneau’s limited number of sonnets, Cortazar’s table of
instructions, Punchdrunk’s story of Macbeth, and Sussman’s film noir form
set the borders of audience’s autonomy. However, within those limits,
each viewer/reader/spectator, consciously or unconsciously, determines
how he/she will experience the piece. Finally, “work in movement”
generates various versions of the artwork, which gives birth to a
perspectivist “perfect” language in art. This language attempts to be as
fluid and non-tangible as possible, letting the audience mold it any way
he/she desires. As the number of spectators/perspectives increase, the
work of art gets closer to a better expression of a post-Babel truth.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.
Boroditsky, Lera. “How Language Shapes Thought.” Scientific American
Feb. 2011: 63-65. Print.
Clark, Maudemarie. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.
Cortazar, Julio. Hopscotch. New York: Random House, Inc., 1966. Print.
Eco, Umberto. Search for the Perfect Language. Malden: Blackwell
Publishing, 1997. Print.
Eco, Umberto. Open Work. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.
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Liukkonen, Petri. Kazimir Malevich. 2008. http://kirjasto.sci.fi/malevich.htm
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Random House,
Inc., 1966. Print.
Pamuk, Orhan. My Name is Red. New York: Random House Inc, 2002. Print.
Sleep No More. By Punchdrunk. Dir. Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle. The
McKittrick Hotel, New York. 2011. Performance.
Wardrip, Noah and Montfort, Nick, eds. The New Media Reader. London:
MIT Press, 2003. Print.
White on White: Algorithmic Noir. Dir. Eve Sussman. Perf. Jeff Wood. Rufus
Corporation. 2011. Video.