Narrativizing Theories

An Aesthetic of Ambiguity

Benjamin John Peters

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532694912
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Ours is an age of offense, a time of reactionary shock--always received, never given. Ours is an age that has forgone cultural narratives, a time of individualism--wherein personal identities trump the collective spirit.Ours is an age of failing earth, a time of ecological collapse--yet the consumption of global capitalism continues to run amok.But don't fear. You have the correct worldview, the best solutions.It's not your fault these things are happening. It's the president's, the immigrant's, and the Islamicist's.Or perhapsIt's the socialist's, the tree hugger's, and the baby killer's.But it's not your fault. Never yours. For the world exists as you see it--in an echo chamber lined with golden pixels.Do I still have your attention?Then join me.Within the covers ofNarrativizing Theories, I dive into ambiguity and aesthetics to depict how clashing worldviews exist side by side yet remain mutually incompatible.I examine how cultures distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs, embodiments, and identities.And I outline an aesthetic theory of ambiguity that highlights--through the twists and turns of literature--the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality.

Part I: A Theory of Ambiguity

1

Slippery Words

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.

—Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler

Introduction

How does one begin a book? It seems easy. Read everything there is to read. Pen an outline. Sit down and allow the muses to flow, watching as, in that moment of inky-black magic, thought transforms into material substance.

The muses, unfortunately, have surrendered their age-old task.

I’m starting at a blank page. Why are opening sentences always so hard? It’s the desire to make it zip and zing, catch the reader off guard. I want my first line through sheer, imaginative force to propel her into the cosmos.

The pressure’s too great.

What if the opening sentence falls flat, and she closes the book? What if she lays down Narrativizing Theories and picks up her smartphone instead?

Beneath this anxiety is a question. How do I usher the reader into an interpretive space that allows her to complete the book she’s currently reading? No. Not finish it. That’s not what I meant. By “complete,” I mean something like bring to fruition, fulfillment, or perfection. I want to pencil the lines and then watch as she fills them with unimaginable colors.

But perhaps this is too much to ask of any first sentence, and I should move on to other, pragmatic necessities. I find that this aimlessness, however, introduces my topic in an irregular and tangential way: to introduce ambiguity, aesthetics, and why I think the two should go together.

Before I begin I need to answer one, niggling question. Why does aesthetics need a theory of ambiguity to inform it? Aesthetics, in my estimation, has been held captive by the transcendentals. Not only has it concerned itself with Beauty, Truth, and the Good, but also with the mother of all transcendentals—God. Left to rot in the sun, materiality, sense perception, and embodiment have been eschewed for their more perfect brethren. Aesthetics, in other words, has been traditionally Plotinian over against the πάντα ῥεῖ of Heraclitus or the swerve of Lucretius.

To take in the continuum of sense perceptions and from that to formulate any kind of understanding about the world, I need both a thing and a concept.1 The thing, object, or percept, should never be taken for granted. While a percept is there, confronting and pushing back on me, I can’t know it fully because an object is always and already a semioticized thing. Aesthetics needs a theory of ambiguity because the latter reminds the former that I’m neither confined by the object nor the concept. When I confront a percept,2 there is always the possibility for new openings, categories, and ways of understanding. Neither I nor the percept—nor its category—is fixed.3

Ambiguity brings fluidity to aesthetics, like the opening sentence of a book that confronts a reader by establishing itself as that which is before asking that same reader to complete the book through a work of interpretation. But an aesthetic of ambiguity doesn’t leave the process of understanding there. A confrontation with ambiguity pushes and pulls, grows and stretches—through the work of perception and interpretation—the cultural encyclopedia of the reader and, when at its best, beckons her towards the horizon of the unknown.

On Ambiguity

Ambiguity isn’t vagueness. It’s not the antithesis of clarity. While the Oxford English Dictionary lists several definitions,4 all of which leave something wanting, I’m interested in exploring that which is capable of “being understood in two or more ways.” Artificial, perhaps, but I divide ambiguity into three distinct but overlapping discourses: literary,5 philosophic, and scientific.

Literary Ambiguity

When one thinks of ambiguity, one most likely brings to mind literary ambiguity. Immortalized by William Empson, this kind of ambiguity is defined “as an indecision as to what you mean, an intention to mean several things, a probability that one or other or both of two things has been meant, and the fact that a statement has several meanings.”6 Literary ambiguity can be summarized as a lexeme having two or more lexical entries or, as I suggest, a word or cultural artifact capable of being understood in two or more ways. When I come across the word “bank,” I am, due to its lexical possibilities, struck by an instance of ambiguity. Does it mean a place where money is exchanged or the place whereupon young lovers meet to ingest an egg salad sandwich?

Ever so close to literary ambiguity is the definition posited by semioticians, who extend ambiguity to that of the context of a given lexeme. “A sentence,” they write, “is ambiguous when it can be interpreted in two or more different ways.”7 For them, ambiguity is tangled up with both homonymy and polysemy, an entanglement that is the basis for creative language.8 Why’s that? Because literary texts are less constrained in their communicative goals than nonfictional texts.9 Show, in other words, don’t tell. The constraints or communicative effects of nonfiction are directed at clarity, understanding, and brevity, constraints commonly challenged by literature, the latter of which, à la James Joyce, pushes against the conventions of language and culture.

Literary ambiguity addresses the problem of multiple interpretations coexisting at the same time.10 Similar to the visual arts, the question arises: Who is responsible for generating meaning—the viewer or the creator? Ambiguity, when considering a literary text, foregrounds multiple interpretations and expressions that belongs to two or more categories.11

Slightly askew from either author or reader, Christoph Bode writes that meaning is generated from the event of literature itself, resulting in an ambiguity defined as the “conspicuous proliferation of multiple meanings.”12 Those that would say a sign or a text in its literariness—outside the use of everyday language—is both ambiguous and self-referential commit an error. A sign, at its most general, points to something else.13 If it must point to something else in order to signify, Bode asks, then how can it also be s...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: A Theory of Ambiguity
• Part II: A Narrativizing Theory
• Bibliography