Abstract
This chapter builds directly upon the concept of fabulation crafted in Chap. 2. Its strange title is a reference to one of Aesop’s fables known as The Dog and His Reflection. The dog in the fable loses its food, but this loss gives it food for thought. A fable, as the word implies, is quite literally the product of fabulation. The chapter uses Aesop’s fable as the basis from which to unfold a theoretical account of transformative experience as the crucible for the emergence of novelty. The shocked uh oh! that accompanies the loss of the dog’s food is the basis for a creative ah ha! as the dog enjoys a novel flash of insight by way of this experience of micro-liminality. The chapter grasps this process through a notion of deep symbolism whereby insight is granted into previously unthought depths of felt experience. Resources for this account are found in the work of Susanne Langer (especially her definition of the art object as a perceptible form expressive of feeling, and her distinction between discursive and presentational symbolism), combined with A. N. Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference. From the perspective developed, the fable-qua-art-object can itself be construed as a presentational symbol expressing the feeling of this insight. The fable (which can thereby be construed as a liminal affective technology) affords its readers a devised liminal experience. But that fabulated experience is ‘doubled’ by the spontaneous liminal experience which haunts it: a counterfactual this is not experience.
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Notes
- 1.
There are numerous definitions of, and fine distinctions between, symbols, signs, signals, icons , indices, signifiers, signifieds, significations and so forth. Peirce’s semiotics, for instance, is based on a triadic concept of the ‘sign’ which he defines as ‘anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former’ (Peirce 1998, p. 478). Peirce differentiates three classes of signs:
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icons (which are signs that relate to their object through some resemblance, such as a map and its territory),
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indices (which are signs that relate to their object through an actual or imagined causal connection, such as a weathervane pointing out wind direction) and
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symbols (which are signs that relate to their object through mere social convention, like the word ‘symbol’).
In Peirce’s system, then, a symbol is a sub-class of the more basic category of ‘sign’, characterized by its arbitrariness. Peirce’s semiotics has the advantage of great generality. It includes natural language but is not reducible to it. Barthes (1967, p. 11) construed semiology, by contrast as ‘a part of linguistics’ and not the other way around. Peirce’s system is preferable because it does not reduce the study of signs to linguistics, but includes linguistics within the broader categories of semiotics. For present purposes, however, I discuss Whitehead’s (1927/1985) lesser -known concept of symbolism which is broader than Peirce’s, and in some ways equivalent to the latter’s notion of sign (i.e. it is broadly inclusive, as defined below). Whitehead uses the word ‘symbol’ to name a different concept than that named by most semioticians, including Peirce, Morris and, in parts, Langer.
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- 2.
Following Langer (1978) I intend ‘feeling’ in a broad sense inclusive of sensation, emotion, recollection, imagination and even reasoning.
- 3.
The notion of an image of thought is from Deleuze (1994), but it also resonates with Cassirer’s (1946/1974, p. 43) idea that the symbolic ‘expression of a feeling is not the feeling itself—it is emotion turned into an image’ (emphasis mine). The Russian psychologist Vygotsky (1925/1971) like wise understood art as a social technique of emotion which provides a means of bringing intimate feelings into the social domain. Art objectifies feelings into a material form.
- 4.
Connotation is usually distinguished from denotation. Discursive symbolism involves both. The connotation of a symbol is the concept it conveys. The concept is always a generality (the concept of dog can ‘fit’ or be applied to any particular dog). Once connotation is established, the process of fitting a concept to an actual specific exemplar is called denotation. A symbol like the word dog denotes a specific dog when the user of that word has a concept which satisfactorily ‘fits’ that dog. This kind of symbolism, which requires the confluence of four terms (subject, symbol, concept and object) can be called ‘representational’. It is re-presentational because the symbol (the word ‘dog’) can refer to a specific actual dog (object). But in doing so the symbol must go by way of a generality (the concept). Following application under the right perceptual circumstances, any actual dogs can be displayed as exemplars of the pre-given general characterization (the concept, linked to the symbol by connotation). Presentational symbolism need have no denotation. It ‘presents us’ with concrete and singular things. Even a painting that is a portrait of some person gives us that singular portrait: it is not a mere exemplar of a generality, and it does not go by way of generality. Its process of symbolization does not ‘refer’ symbol to object, but rather conceptualizes the buzzing flux of feeling to yield and ‘present’ concrete things. As Langer (p. 96) puts it, in the ‘non-discursive mode that speaks directly to sense … there is no intrinsic generality. It is first and foremost a direct presentation of an individual object.’
- 5.
As an object providing its reader with the occasion for an ‘artificial’ or ‘staged’ liminal experience, it is interesting to consider if the fable also entertains a relation—doubtless highly complex—to spontaneous liminal experience: perhaps an experience lived by Aesop himself, and formative of Aesop himself. We do not know exactly what Aesop’s experience was, since all we have is the fable . It might be anything from a lengthy ordeal to a momentary flash of insight, or it might be entirely bound up with the very material process of writing. It is, however, doubtful that Aesop could produce such a fable without first-hand knowledge of ‘this is not’ experience . This does not mean that for every fable he wrote, there was some real experience that he was ‘working through’. The very process of composing fables, however, might sensitize the composer to layers of experience usually ignored and inert. More generally, any composing or staging or fictionalizing or painting brings—through a quite material and painstaking process—an external form to feelings that would otherwise remain spontaneous. Through writing the fable, Aesop gave his experience objective form as an image /symbol. This form in turn provides a vehicle that can resonate with the feelings of its recipients and can lend the form of its composition to their feelings in turn. In short, if the fable is there for feeling, then this is because it is first there by feeling, as an objectification of feeling.
- 6.
By invoking a relation between this staging or composing or crafting, and an ‘unstaged’ experience, I am not suggesting a simplistic ‘representational’ or even ‘traumatic’ basis to art, myth, ritual and so on. This was stressed in the section above distinguishing presentational and representational symbolism . Art—even when it contains ‘representational’ elements—is precisely the kind of symbol that does not immediately point beyond itself to something else in the manner of a weathervane or, indeed, in the manner of the word ‘weathervane’. Rather, it invites the observer to linger on the artwork itself. The purpose of any mimetic or representational elements involved (the dog, water, meat etc. in the fable, etc.) is not simply to represent external realities, but to express the conceived feeling of importance that structures the constructed image . But equally, neither does the fable point directly to its maker, Aesop . It is not the symptomatic or cathartic ‘self-expression’ of brute feeling. This point is subtle but important, and dogmatism is to be avoided. A both/and logic is required. Langer skillfully navigates this both/and logic. On the one hand, as C. Ph. E. Bach (cited in Langer 1978, p. 214) put it with respect to music, ‘since a musician cannot otherwise move people, but he be moved himself, so he must necessarily be able to induce in himself all those affects which he would arouse in his auditors; he conveys his feelings to them, and thus most readily moves them to sympathetic emotions’. On the other hand, Busoni is equally correct to assert (in sexist language typical of his time) that ‘an artist, if he is to move his audience, must never be moved himself—lest he lose, at that moment, his mastery over the material’ (Langer 1978, p. 223). From this perspective, art is degraded when reduced to mere emotional sympathy, and some sort of ‘psychical distance’ is fundamental to artistic experience. A blues singer may appear to be expressing her emotions like so many symptoms, but she is performing according to more-or-less well-honed forms of expression and has a control over her song that does not depend—directly at least—upon her ability to enter a specific affective state during the performance . And yet both propositions contain part of the truth: a blues singer with no real-life experience lacks a vital ingredient for which no technical prowess can fully compensate. Part of this ‘psychical distance’ arises from the fact that aesthetic experience, as described earlier, is an ‘expressive’ mode that is differentiated from the mode of ‘practical reality’ that we adopt when we hear a car horn and get out of the road. But there is more to it than this. Whilst it is true that Aesop must have had access to a ‘this is not’ experience, his formulation of this into (presentational) symbolic form crystallizes the feeling into a concept that transcends the experience of any concrete and particular subject, but without losing the singularity of the event. By means of the artistic medium, mere emotional self-expression is transformed into presentational symbolisms with their own conventions and inventions. This is why Wagner could state (also with some exaggeration, but in the opposite direction to Bach), that what music expresses ‘is eternal, infinite and ideal: it does not express the passion, love or longing of such-and-such an individual on such-and-such an occasion, but passion, love or longing in itself’ (Langer 1978, p. 222). Of course the passion-in-itself expressed by music is not the passion-in-itself expressed by painting or by theatre or in a fable, since each symbolic form has its distinct features, yet each ‘removes’, as it were, the concrete subjectivity of the creator and makes it stand in the form of a singular ‘asubjective’ creation. The fabulous dog is a vehicle used to symbolize a ‘this is not’ experience as, or in the form of, an ‘image’ . Such experience resists being put directly into the discursive symbolism of words: it must take a condensed imagistic form before it can be further abstracted into thought.
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Langer acknowledges that mental imagery probably catalysed the evolutionary development of speech and she states something very similar to Whitehead’s position (as outlined above) in the following: ‘This recognition of images as representations of visible things is the basis on which the whole public importance of symbols is built: their use for reference’ (45–46). In the following she describes the image as a symbol: ‘With its liberation from perception the image becomes general; and as soon as it can represent something else than its own original stimulus, it becomes a symbol’ (46–54). This is very close to Whitehead’s original formulation of symbolic reference . Given that she was a student of Whitehead’s , it seems quite remarkable that Langer does not explicitly use his theory of symbolism, but instead appears to have forgotten it. It is possible that his ideas were criticized within the emerging disciplines of semiotics and semiology for overextending the use of the word ‘symbol’ (as described above, others preferred to use the word ‘sign’ as a generic and to specify ‘symbols’ as being high-level, representational signs) and it seems clear that Langer followed this trend. Nevertheless she retained something like Whitehead’s deep symbolism, and stated in a late essay that ‘what I did not see, twenty years ago—was how conceptual meaning accrued to any vocal products at all. I certainly never realized what part the private mental image played in preparing the way for symbolic language—that the whole mechanism of symbolization was probably worked out in the visual system before its power could be transferred to the vocal-auditory realm’ (p. 48). This idea of a deep symbolism proper to sense-perception is, as discussed below, Whitehead’s theory of symbolic reference between ‘presentational immediacy’ (as symbol) and ‘causal efficacy’ (as its meaning).
- 8.
This issue sheds light on Whitehead’s choice to refer to the process of synthesis as symbolism and not merely sign use. Langer (1978, p. 29) urges the importance of this distinction when she writes of ‘a profound difference between using symbols and merely using signs. The use of signs is the very first manifestation of mind. It arises early in biological history as the famous “conditioned reflex”. … As soon as sensations function as signs of conditions in the surrounding world, the animal receiving them is moved to exploit or avoid those conditions’. Note that here Langer’s distinction is between ‘sensations’ and ‘world’, and hence she misses Whitehead’s point that the contrast is not between subjective appearance and objective reality, but between two distinguishable modes of perceptual experience. Whitehead is thus not suggesting that the data from presentational immediacy (e.g. sensation) serve as a sign for conditions in the external world. He is suggesting that they act as a symbol for data experienced in the mode of causal efficacy . This satisfies what I call his ‘deep empiricist’ definition of symbolism as occurring when certain components of an organism’s experience elicit feelings and usages with respect to other components, all occurring ‘within experience’, as it were.
- 9.
In his monumental work The Act of Creation (1964, p. 35), for example, Koestler names this principle bisociation. He suggests that creativity always entails ‘the perceiving of a situation or idea … in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’. Bateson (1980, p. 77) grasped something very similar in his definition of information as ‘a difference which makes a difference’ and in his methodological principle that ‘Two descriptions are better than one’.
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Mead (1932/1980), it should be noted, develops his own theory of symbols—including his core concept of a ‘significant symbol’, and he works with a distinction between sign and symbol that is comparable to that of Peirce.
- 11.
Shallow empiricism (Stenner 2008), discussed further in Chap. 4, broadly corresponds to what we typically associate with the word empiricism, namely, a philosophical doctrine holding that clear and distinct sense experience is the origin of all knowledge. The concept of experience implied by shallow empiricism limits how we think of ‘experience’ to the observations of an objective spectator who perceives (ideally under experimental conditions) and theorizes (using concepts and hypotheses derived from data) an external nature. No other modes of experience are recognized. In shallow empiricism we find a potent combination: the evacuation of subjectivity from nature and its concentration into the figure of the human knower. Shallow empiricism thus assumes a splitting between a knower (who knows on the basis of sensory experiences disciplined by rational logic) and a known (an objective and external terminus for such experiences). For shallow empiricism, ‘the subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ are terms that pertain to the knower (and not the known) and the ‘object’ is that which is known (preferably ‘objectively’). The subject is thus associated with adult human beings undertaking difficult tasks of knowledge (and, as a corollary, with ‘less than adult’ human beings who fall short of the desired objectivity when undertaking such tasks because they are unable to control their affectivity ), whilst the object is associated with the externality of brute material thinghood. Shallow empiricism thus leaves us with a highly distorted and limited conception of subjectivity, coupled with a rather partial and superficial account of nature. That is to say, subjectivity is separated from objective nature, and nature is construed as an objective externality with no subjective depths (the bifurcation of nature).
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Stenner, P. (2017). This Is Not … Food: On Food for Thought. In: Liminality and Experience. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_3
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