toward defining aesthetic perception, semiotics and utopian reflection (wladimir krysinski)

8/12/2019 Toward Defining Aesthetic Perception, Semiotics and Utopian Reflection (Wladimir KRYSINSKI)

1/15

Toward Defining Aesthetic Perception: Semiotics and Utopian ReflectionAuthor(s): Wladimir KrysinskiSource: New Literary History, Vol. 20, No. 3, Greimassian Semiotics (Spring, 1989), pp. 693-706Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469362

Accessed: 13/03/2009 15:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless

you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you

may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed

page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the

scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The Johns Hopkins University Pressis collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to

New Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/stable/469362?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhuphttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhuphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/469362?origin=JSTOR-pdf


2/15

Toward Defining Aesthetic Perception:Semiotics and Utopian ReflectionWladimir Krysinski

L'imperfectionapparaitcomme un trem-plin qui nous projette de l'insignifiancevers le sens.AlgirdasJulien Greimas,del'imperfection'

1.0 WhatDoes GreimassianSemioticsHave to Say aboutAesthetics?De l'imperfection(On Imperfection), the latest book by AlgirdasJulien Greimas, comes as a surprise. No one who has followed thedevelopment of his epistemological discourse would have foreseenthe next step in his semiotic system to be a work such as On Imperfec-

tion. This short but very dense book opens a completely new fieldwithin Greimas's semiotic investigations. Neither his semiotics of nar-rativity nor his semiotics of modalities intimated the theme andmethod, the aesthetic and ethical considerations, raised by the anal-yses which this new work offers. At the heart of its critical project liesthe problem of aesthetic perception (saisie esthetique),or aesthesis,whose parameters and variants are systematically and progressivelyexplored through five studies focusing on certain modern narrativetexts and a single poetic example, Rilke's Ubung am Klavier.Greimas has not written an aesthetic treatise. Rather, he seeks todescribe various configurations of the subject-object relationship inwhich specific aesthetic perceptions arise. The form of the subject-object relationship may vary, but the reciprocal transformation ofsubject by object and object by subject remains the common event inaesthesis. A dialectical process of transformation constitutes thepathemic invariant of aesthesis.2 What Greimas tries to capture arethe precise stages and forms of the transformation which subject andobject undergo. One cannot say that the question of aesthetic judg-ment is the dominant theme of the analyses in On Imperfection.Thework is not a discourse about a discourse, nor does Greimas seek todefine beauty; beauty is implicitly understood as that which pleasesthe subject. The Kantian parameters universally and withoutconcept have been omitted.3 Kant's philosophical aesthetics is not


3/15

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Greimas's epistemological guide. He follows Baumgarten's principles,looking for the constitutive elements of sensitive knowledge (dieSinnliche Erkentniss),this cognitiosensitivaperfecta which according toBaumgarten is aesthesis.4Greimas presupposes the existence of being (etre),perfection, aboveor behind seeming (paraztre),or imperfection. Thus the cognitive andquasi-utopian stance of this discourse is to be found in the convictionthat although every seeming is imperfect, it hides being-if only, attimes, to unveil it and to open unto death or life. This is precisely thesense of aesthetic experience: to surpass seeming and to be projectedtoward meaning. The dialectical link that unites transcendence of themeaninglessness of seeming with an opening toward meaning pre-supposes the search for aesthesis and ecstasy. Aesthesis is understoodas a fundamental human experience that triggers a new understand-ing of life. In this way, Greimas's message is fundamentally ethical; itleads to a new definition of being in the world beyond the imperfec-tion of seeming.Greimas deals with aesthetic semiosis which is narratively or actan-tially present in a text. On Imperfectionundertakes an elaboration ofthe ways in which specific states of mind are created through thereader's or actantial agent's encounter with specific textual objects orsituations of value.2.0 BeautyDoes Not Lie Onlyin theEye of the Beholder

Greimas's analyses are based on premises about narrative and donot find their authority in psychology, philosophy, or art theory. Theaesthetic experience originates in the canonic actantial relationshipsbetween a subject and an object of value. Beauty is not accessible tothe subject through contemplation. It springs forward when an objectof value abruptly manifests itself in a particular way and strikes thesensory apparatus of the subject/beholder. Beauty appears in a nar-rative process and can be analyzed in terms of narrative sequence,contract (the object says : look at me ), and transformation. In theliterary texts chosen by Greimas for the demonstration of his views,aesthetic communication always produces itself at the level of visual orsensory perception. It implies, however, a specific tension betweensubject and object. The former is penetrated by the object's aura andis transformed into a subject of passion. This pathematization of thesubject is therefore a conditiosine qua non of aesthesis. Greimas un-derlines the narrativity of aesthetic experience by insisting on thetemporal and dialectical character of beauty. It does not lie in the eyeof the beholder alone. It is the synthetic coming together of a partic-

694


4/15

TOWARD DEFINING AESTHETIC PERCEPTION

ular situation: the object's emergence as visible form and the surpass-ing of everyday life by the subject. It is only through the aestheticrecontextualization of reality that we can assume the task of trans-forming imperfection into perfection, seeming into being.3.0 Five LiteraryCasesof AestheticExperience3.1 Hope Lies in the Silent Space Between Falling Drops

It is by means of a visual and acoustic experience described byMichel Tournier in his novel Vendrediou Les Limbesdu Pacifique (Fri-day or the Limbos of the Pacific) that Greimas begins to unfold hisexplanation of aesthetic vision. The pathematization of the subject isprepared for by discontinuous visionary and acoustic experienceswhich structure the whole process of the narrative. The hero ofTournier's novel, Robinson, who lives alone on an island, is looking ata drop of water about to fall into a copper basin. As soon as one fallsthe suggestion of another swells. The falling drop is linked to the nextone which refuses to fall. Having fallen, the drop is transformed backinto its original state; it returns, as Greimas puts it, to being a nor-mally objectified form (20). The aesthetic process, occurring as bothan experience of vision and an experience of cognition, consists in asort of epiphanic moment for Robinson. Under the impact of vision,looking at this motionless drop of water, precariously attached, hesuddenly realizes that time has been suspended, that a new life ispossible. This awareness of a possible change in his existence stemsfrom the observation of the two modalities of the being of things. Thefirst one, according to Greimas, consists in those things existing func-tionally for others. The second one is the existence of things in theperfection of their immobility (18), in the fulfillment of their es-sence. Perfect being is a sort of being-for-itself in which is manifestedthe whole existential and essential amplitude of an object or a subject.Robinson's cognitive experience concerns another island, differentfrom the one on which he presently lives so unhappily. On this newand different island, perfection would completely fulfill itself. Itwould be a fresher, warmer, and more fraternal island.In order to attain or deserve this perfection, one has to passthrough the segments of aesthetic experience posited as a complexand complete narrative process. This process involves various actantswhich could be called temporal. They determine the coherence andthe meaning of the aesthetic process. If the moment of aesthetic per-ception for the subject is a moment of dazzling (eblouissement)whichtransforms the subject's vision, it is also the vanishing point of a co-herent, albeit polyreferential, structure. After having analyzed the

695


5/15


sense and the progress of Robinson's aesthesis, Greimas summarizesthe components of aesthetic perception (saisie)as follows: (1) embed-ding by everyday life; (2) the wait; (3) rupture of an isotopy; (4) shock(ebranlement)of the subject; (5) particular status of the object; (6) asensory relation between the two; (7) uniqueness of experience; and(8) hope of a future total unity (conjonction) 22).It seems that the paradigmatic dimension of the aesthetic process isthat which determines its utopian finality. The temporal actants-everyday life, waiting, rupture of an isotopy (a drop which does notfall), shock of the subject, and hope for oneness or fusion in thefuture-embody within the form of the narrative's organization aquest for perfection. By the same token, the overcoming of the fatalityof seeming, of imperfection, is produced in cognition, through criticalcommentary on everyday life.We will see to what extent Greimas's paradigm of the aestheticprocess is applicable to the variety of texts which he analyses in OnImperfection.3.2 Mr. Palomar on the Beach: The Spectacle of the Breast

and GuizzoMr. Palomar, an observer of life and a philosopher in his own right,is walking along a deserted beach when he suddenly sees a woman

lying in the sun, her breasts uncovered. How is one to look correctly,morally, at a naked breast? he asks himself. Mr. Palomar is uncertain;his glance hesitates. Greimas examines the aesthetic perception of thebreast, Mr. Palomar's gaze, and Calvino's description of the process.The alternative portraits of the breast sketched out by Calvino areconsidered by Greimas to be either too aesthetic or too banal. Grei-mas suggests that the way in which the breast is visually seized isincorrect, exaggerated, incommensurable with the real meaning ofthe breast as an aesthetic, erotic, or cultural object. He defines thebreast as a new phrastic subject (27) and as a syntactic actor inCalvino's discourse. But his new actor goes forward in the directionof the subject-observer. In this way it manifests its pregnant form.The glance (regard)of the observer becomes his active delegue. Itadvances, it goes back, it places itself outside of the somatic subject.Aesthetic perception presents itself as a reciprocal conjunction, as anencounter between subject and object. In Mr. Palomar's field of per-ception, the breast produces a rupture, a deviation (ecart)or, in thewords of Calvino, a scarto and, more precisely, almost a flash oflightning (quasi un guizzo). Guizzo is a difficult word to translate. Itconnotes a sudden eruption, like a fish breaking the water's surface.

696


6/15


According to Greimas, the guizzo epitomizes Calvino's aesthetics. It isalso the term which best expresses the event of aesthetic perception.For Calvino, in opposition to Tournier, the subject's bedazzlementis not primarily an effect of the visual system, the eye, but rather oftactile associations with the visual image. In Greimas's analysis, theother important concept is quivering (trasalimento, tresaillement).When Palomar's gaze moves over and along the skin of the breast, italso goes backwards as though it were appreciating with a light quiv-ering the different consistency of the vision and the particular valueit acquires. 5 For Greimas, appreciation of the breast is of a tactileorder; it is not the product of a cognitive process. Palomar's appre-hension of the breast in proxemic terms, in terms of the feel of theskin, expresses the utmost intimacy. Cognitively, the shocking en-counter of Palomar's glance with the breast gives recognition to thequest for total conjuncture. The quivering, mediated through theglance, affects the object and not the subject. What characterizes thesubject is a vivid emotion and an unexpected sensation or feeling.These are the pathemic and sensory reactions of the subject. Thequivering is an instantiation of aesthesis. It touches both subject andobject, producing their syncretism. Greimas remarks that vision ( asupernatural representation ) is the opposite of reality, yet it is realitywhich provides the background for aesthetic perception when subjectand object are united. Once vision loses its brilliance, the subject be-comes just an observer.The aesthetic subject is for Greimas a special kind of subject. It is atonce a narrative, pathemic, and cognitive actant; the receiver of aparticular vision and the donor of the cognitive experience. The mostnotable aspect of the aesthetic subject is its potential to change andbecome different.3.3 Paradoxical Parameter of the Quest for a New Reality: TheProcess of Actively Waiting

If in the sequence on Calvino the particularly active temporal act-ants are negative and dialectical in nature-the rupture of an isotopy,shocking of the subject, and dissatisfaction with everyday life-thesection on Rilke's poem Ubung am Klavier can be said to deal withthe hope for total unity with an object in the future and the expec-tation of a new reality. The quest for this reality is presented as im-patience. The subject of enunciation, a young girl playing the piano,almost touches this new reality when interrupting her etude she looksout the window at the park. Suddenly she pushes back the scent ofjasmine. Irritated, she finds that the jasmine offends her (Siefand dasser sie krankte).Total fusion with the object does not occur here. What

697


7/15


is underlined, however, is the aesthetic value of waiting. Throughwaiting the object is idealized and everyday life is depreciated. Therejection of the jasmine's scent enhances the immensity of the ideal-ized object, the new reality (die Ungeduldnach einer Wirklichkeit).In this sense, aesthetic perception in the poem is a potential processrather than the narrative of a fusion between subject and object. Onthe other hand, as Greimas notes, if both Tournier and Rilke con-ceptualize aesthetic perception as the conjunction of subject and ob-ject, the object is, for Rilke, as it is not for Tournier, something inexcess of reality. Hermeneutically speaking, Rilke's poem refers toboth an idealized object and to the idiosyncratic subjectivity of theyoung girl. To interpret it in terms of aesthetics would imply someheuristic distance from the problem of the aesthetic subject. Thepoem is a pathemic receptor as well as a cognitive actor inasmuch asit participates in the experience of perfection. The fact that Greimashas chosen this particular poem is significant. It explores the problemof perfection to show that it cannot be an absolute. It is much more anideal, a wish, opposed to the mundanity of everyday life. It is a choicemade by the subject in respect to its passions. In this sense, the aes-thetic subject cannot escape the problem of cathexis. Being also thecathectic subject,6 this particular pathemic receiver enters a complexstructure of desire. The Freudian Besetzung ( cathexis, investisse-ment)would certainly explain the part of fantasy (as wish fulfillment)in the aesthetic process.3.4 Aesthesis as Fusion or Dialectical Interplay between Subjectand Object?

In Praise of Shadowby the Japanese writer Tanizaki Junichiro is areflection on darkness, Greimas tells us. In this short story the aes-thetic object is epiphanically revealed, like the breast in Calvino's Pal-omar.However, this Japanese guizzounfolds during a particular act ofperception, that is, during the apprehension of the composite form ofthe aesthetic object. Darkness is first perceived as form whose com-ponents can be precisely described in terms of verticality, density, anduniformity. This description is followed by what Greimas calls a gen-erative analysis (I'analysequ'ondiraitgenerative[49]). Darkness is seenby Junichiro as an object with a specific composition. Contemplationof its form affirms the specificity and uniqueness of the aestheticexperience, which is circumscribed in space and not iterative in time.For Greimas, Junichiro's is a negative description of darkness. It pre-supposes the exclusion of any other possible darkness. His secondeffort at description relies on impressions ( darkness seems to be

698


8/15


made of.. . )and is positive; it attempts to capture the essence of theobject. The matter of the object itself is being interrogated. It fasci-nates but much more as an object of cognition than as an object whichaffectively transforms the subject.As opposed to the descriptions and examples of aesthetic experi-ences found in the works of European writers such as Rilke, Calvino,and Tournier, aesthetic vision for Junichiro stems from differentfundamental premises. By looking for the colors of darkness, Ju-nichiro, who sees in darkness all the colors of the rainbow, is ananalyst rather than a subject who could fully lose his boundaries incontemplation of the object. Greimas sees in this the constitution of anaesthetics of dissection and of contemplation. To the European total-izing vision can be opposed the Japanese contemplation of the infi-nitely small. The European totus is opposed here to the Japaneseunus (52). In the very last sentence of Junichiro's text the aestheticexperience is described as taking place. Paradoxically, instead of in-volving the ecstatic transformation of the subject, it occurs throughthe invasion or absorption of the subject by the object. The limit of theaesthetic is reached when the subject's consciousness is almost dis-solved into the world, where a sense of separate identity is annihi-lated. Junichiro's subject cannot help but defend himself against thisloss of identity. He closes his eyes. This is an autodefensive reflexagainst the unattainable, says Greimas-and, he adds suggestively,Horror of the sacred? (53).What actually happens in this aesthetic scenario? Does Greimaswant to demonstrate the fundamental difference between two aes-thetic worlds, the European and the Oriental? I believe he has adifferent purpose in mind. It consists in scrutinizing a range of pos-sible aesthetic experiences available within the subject-object relation-ship. We should therefore review the play of parameters in Junichi-ro's particular aesthetic fable.What is striking here is the fact that some of the temporal actantsseem to have disappeared, for example, the wait and hope for afuture total unity. Dwelling upon the colors of darkness sketched byJunichiro enables Greimas to restate his conviction that aesthetic ex-perience implies a primarily visual relationship between subject andobject. At the same time, the very fact that the subject both recognizesthe object's uniqueness and dissects its form allows Greimas to giveshading to the meaning of aesthesis. The analytical attitude of thesubject transforms the object to the point that it threatens the subjectwho, in turn, runs the risk of being absorbed by the object. By seeingin this interaction the limits of aesthesis Greimas seems to imply twothings: first, that aesthetic pleasure is produced with respect to the

699


9/15


subject's intellectual and psychological needs, and second, that themaintenance of some degree of distance between subject and object is,if not normatively necessary, at least practically desirable even while amutual transformation is being effected. In other words, the subjectmust not be lost in the process of aesthetic perception; it has to be theimplicit master of its subjectivity throughout the aesthetic experience.Thus the Japanese example enables Greimas to reaffirm both thespontaneous character of the aesthetic experience and the constantequilibrium it demands of the interplay between subject and object.One might formulate this precarious tension as vision incites passionbut death in passion must be forestalled. The pathemic subject mustcontrol aesthetic perception cognitively.3.5 Aesthesis as Confusion of Boundaries

In Julio Cortazar's short story Continuidad de los parques (Con-tinuity of the Parks), the problem of aesthetic perception acquires anew dimension. In this allegory of the reading process, the subjectfinds a new identity through conjunction with the object of aestheticexperience.Continuity of the Parks is a story of a man reading a novel inwhich he becomes so absorbed that he enters the fictional world tobecome one of its participants. A literary object transforms the sub-ject, who becomes more than just a reader. The reader projects him-self into the fictional world. As an aesthetic artifact, the story called

Continuity of the Parks is created out of a thematic structure-intrigue, characters, names-and a figurative manifestation of se-quential or englobing images. The reader is passionately caught up inthe intrigue. The story takes place in a park where a man meets awoman in a hut. We learn a murder will be committed. Cortazar'sdiscourse maintains an aura of ambiguity and suspense. This secretmeeting of the lovers is a rehearsal for a murder. Since the narratorrelates but does not comment on the story, the relationship of readerto story is conditioned by a particularfigurativization7of the story andthe transformation of the subject-reader into a witness of the murder.The subject-reader passes from the level of enunciation to the level ofenunciated. Greimas points out that this movement is linked to thenew roles assumed by the subject: the pathemic and the ethical. Thereading subject becomes the judge of events. He reacts emphaticallyto what he is witnessing. In this way an identification of the readerwith the participants has been accomplished. Herein arises the prob-lem of aesthetic perception.According to Greimas, aesthesis is in this case achieved only on the

700


10/15


level of passion. But, on the other hand, the pathematization of theliterary figurative object is possible only because of the excessivedramatization of the story. The pathemic commitment of the readercan only be achieved on the condition that the story is of real interestto the reader. In Cortazar's discourse the logic of the miseen abyme-the story within a story-implies that the reader cannot completelydisappear within the textual horizon of the discourse. Some signifiersin the text clearly point to the reader's presence. For example, in thefollowing sentence a new subject is assumed whose voice can be com-pared to that of the chorus in Greek tragedy: A breathless dialogueflowed like a river of reptiles across the pages and one had thefeelingthat everything had already been decided.Greimas identifies the following structures as underlying the orga-nization of Cortazar's discourse: the polemical structure of the story,pathemic tensions, and the deontic universe where necessity andhaving-to-do (devoir aire) reign (64). In fact, observes Greimas, atthis stage of the story, the deontic universe prevails and constitutesthe guarantee of the autonomy of the tragic universe which governssuperstructurally what the story is about. Thus Greimas pointsout that it is only by acquiring a tragic dimension that fiction cantransform itself into something beyond reality (surrealite)susceptibleto receiving and absorbing the subject during aesthetic perception.Because of Cortazar's astuteness, and because of his discursive craft,the person of the reader coincides narratively and symbolically withthe person to be murdered. The man whom we come across at thebeginning of Continuity of the Parks is the reader of the story inwhich a murder is committed. He is sitting comfortably in an arm-chair. After the meeting of the lovers in the hut, the man who will bethe murderer sees the garden walkway leading to the house in whichthe man to be murdered is sitting comfortably in an armchair readinga novel. La boucle est bouclee.Greimas notes that Continuity of the Parks can be read as anallegory of reading in which the problem of knowledge, truth, andself-identity is always involved. However, he is drawn to the conti-nuity of parks as a hermeneutical principle and as a metaphor for theimpossibility of fixing a point of epistemological reference. For Grei-mas, the meaning of the continuity of the parks signifies more thanthe simple coincidence of two parks that surround the house of thereader reading the story and the house of the reader in the story.Since the same ethical lesson (cruelty, violence, fate) is probed in eachof the two stories, the meaning of life resides in the possibility ofsafeguarding aesthetic contact with others. The reader of the storytouches the green velvet of his chair from time to time. The tragic

701


11/15


universe of the story is at one particular moment interrupted by thegesture of one of the lovers, who softly touches the other's cheek.Greimas concludes: An ephemeral tactile sensation, a delicate con-tact of the subject with other-the velvet, the cheek-that's all thatremains when no hope is permitted (68).The last of the five analyses finishes with this emphatically under-lined ethical perspective, if not postulate, of human life. Greimas, theanalyst, meets Greimas, ethical aesthetician.4.0 Aesthetics,Life, Meaning, and Perfection

While the first part of Greimas's book, entitled La fracture (TheFracture), presents the five textual analyses discussed above, the sec-ond part, Les echappatoires (Ways Out), is an extremely dense gen-eral reflection on and plea for aesthetic experience in life in today'ssociety. Three chapters make up this section: Immanence dusensible (The Immanence of Sensitivity), Une esthetique forclose(A Repudiated Aesthetics), and L'attente de l'inattendu (Waiting forthe Unexpected). In this part, Greimas moves from a sketchy synthe-sis of the analytical first part of the book to raise some importantquestions about the meaning of life and the sense of imperfectionwhich for him characterize everyday reality in Western society today.Greimas is concerned above all with the ways in which a stheticperception could enable the subject to overcome the sense of mean-inglessness and imperfection of his life. Restoration of the categoriesof meaning, perfection, the unexpected, and the sacred is theimplicit postulate of Greimas's program for the recovery of the sub-ject's capacity for aesthetic experience as the way to a knowledge ofperfection. These categories, in Greimas's semiotic system, have beeninvested with new semantic content related to hope as a crucialaxiological principle of aesthetic experience. That is to say, every timeaesthetic perception occurs it entails hope for a true life (73). Thetruth or meaningfulness of the experience would come from thefusion of subject with object. Although we do not know exactly whatthis aesthetic event is, suggests Greimas, it embodies the beautiful, thegood, and the true. Cognitively ungraspable, it can be interpreted invarious ways, but it always presupposes both the hope for perfectionand a state of imperfection. In this context, imperfection is tanta-mount to alienation since the subject is separated from the continuityof aesthetic perception. He simply endures the monotonous spectacleof a meaningless life.The Greimassian discourse on aesthetics hints at a political projectwhere, in any better or utopian society, the aesthetic axiology would

702


12/15


have to be dominant. The utopian aspect of On Imperfections obviousas well as being a clear index of the closing chapter of Greimas'ssemiotic enterprise, which has taken him from Semantique tructurale oDu sens II.9 His endeavor to conceptualize and describe aesthetic ex-perience in semiotic terms in turn reveals both a search for new waysof practicing semiotics and an attempt to draw semiotics into an en-gagement with life.An important question for Greimas arises with respect to the trans-temporal versus circumscribed historic validity of the process of aes-thetic perception described semiotically in the five analyses of the firstpart of the book. Do aesthetic events really happen in these ways toreal historical subjects? Do they communicate something about thehuman condition in general? Semiotics has always been preoccupiedby these questions, but as yet it has produced no definitive answers.In Ways Out, Greimas makes some observations about the manyfacets of the process of aesthesis, namely: coalescence of sensations,Japanese tea ceremony, pictorial language, style as a cognitive oper-ation, poetic language, the relationship between the expected and theunexpected, the syncretism of the aesthetic object (functional, myth-ical, and aesthetic), and the monotony of everyday life in the modernworld. His always subtle consideration of these disparate issues servesprimarily to specify the sense of his cognitive and axiological project:how to rise above or to see through imperfection, and how to live anew understanding of life.The triad of aesthetic perception, hope for a true life, and thefeeling of imperfection makes up the central motif of the Greimassiancontribution to aesthetic theory. It postulates a praxis in which mean-ing and perfection would be central instead of the repetitive andmeaningless gestures Greimas sees as characterizing life today. Infact, Greimas's contribution (that is, his insistence upon the imperfectbeing of man in the world, for whom aesthetic perception must notonly be possible but necessary) bears some resemblance to that ofMarcuse, who emphasizes the function of subjectivity as a sort ofobjective correlative of aesthetic perception, understood as a mode ofpraxis.10For Greimas, imperfection is necessary to the dialectical process ofwhich aesthesis is a part, since it is the unhappy starting point fromwhich we are projected into a search for meaning, and through mean-ing, to the apprehension of perfection. No doubt in this contextmeaning not only has sense in semiotic terms, but it is also intendedto coincide with finality. Greimas is suggesting that a semioticunderstanding of the world will also lead to the subject's ability tochange the world.

703


13/15


On Imperfection mplicitly proposes that aesthesis is the means toreach an experience of perfection which would also constitute thegrounds by which to formulate a restructuring of the world. It is anaxiological presupposition and should be understood within the con-text of Greimas's discourse, which seeks, it seems, to convey in semi-otic terms a very general sense of the beautiful or the true in humanlife, rather than to propose a metaphysics of aesthetic perception.5.0 A Paradigmfor Utopia

Although On Imperfection urprises us, it may be understood as anecessary addition to Greimas's semiotic system, which heretofore hasoverlooked any discussion of aesthetics in communication.12 It couldbe seen as an attempt to rise to the epistemological challenge of ex-plaining in semiotic terms the subject-object relationship instantiatedin aesthetic experience. We can take the subject-object relationship asa sort of meta-isotopy within Greimas's discourse. This relationshiphas been given some specificity with respect to its forms and theircharacteristics and should by no means be reduced to the narrativedimension alone.This relationship is informed by various stages of semiotic articu-lation. First, it is an actantial relationship. Projected toward the object,the subject is in the position of willing while in quest of the object ofvalue. We know that in the canonic Greimassian schema the subjectmay be given a contract, be helped or prevented from accomplishingits quest. Second, by means of a modal relationship the subject andobject are put into relief. Development of the semiotic modalitiesformed an important chapter in Greimas's system. The modalities ofwanting, knowing, being-able-to, and having-to-do define the differ-ent configurations of the subject. The last type of canonic relationshipis pathemic. It concerns the being of the subject as opposed to thesubject as agent, in doing. Although the being of the subject is con-ceived of essentially in narrative terms, it is also a construct of aconfiguration or ensemble of the subject's positions in relationshipsof passion (rolespassionnels).13 t is here, at the level of various path-emic roles, that the aesthetic subject appears. It is through the path-emic roles that the construal or coming-into-being of the object by thesubject may be specified. It seems that the aesthetic subject is theproduct of the actantial, modal, and pathemic subjects, but it is some-thing else as well. Since the axiology of aesthesis involves not only agiven pathemic role of the subject but also the whole system of theworld in which the dialectic of perfection/imperfection, meaningful/meaningless, expected/unexpected is potentially in process, the aes-

704


14/15


thetic subject is much more a subject of ecstatic being than a subject ofnarrative doing.Greimas shows how the plurality of aesthetic values and experi-ences may be only partially available to description by semiotic toolsand, therefore, aesthetic perception neutralizes, so to speak, any claimfor the universal appositeness of semiotic descriptions of the states,actions, and transformations of the subject-object relationship. Whatstrikes the reader of On Imperfections the coming together of heter-ogenous languages, visions, and views that point consequently to thecomplexity of aesthetic perception and to the problem of knowledge,be it semiotic or otherwise, and to the utopian status of aesthesiswithin the horizon of Greimas's discourse.UNIVERSITi DE MONTREAL

NOTES1 Algirdas Julien Greimas, de l'imperfectionPerigueux, 1987), p. 99; hereafter cited intext. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in the body of the text are my own.2 According to Paolo Fabbri, Pathemique, in Semiotique:Dictionnaire raisonne de lathiorie du langage, II, ed. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtes (Paris, 1986), p.165, pathemique s defined as the role which concerns the being of the subject, inopposition to the thematic role which concerns the doing of the subject.3 In his CritiqueofJudgement,tr. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), Kant defines beautyas that which pleases universally and without concept.4 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, in his Aesthetica Frankfurt, 1750; rpt. Hildesheim,1961), describes the notion of the aesthetic faculty common to humankind as interme-diate between sensation and ideation.5 Italo Calvino, Palomar (Turin, 1983), as quoted in Greimas, de l'imperfection,p. 25:Lo sguardo avanza fino a sfiorare le pelle tesa, si ritrae, come apprezando con un lievetrasalimento la diversa consistenza della visione e lo speciale valore che essa acquista6 According to Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis(Middlesex,1977), p. 16, Freud used the German word Besetzungas an economic concept to de-scribe the quantity of psychical energy attached to any object-representation or mentalstructure. Applied to the case of the aesthetic or pathemic subject, this notion ofcathexis draws attention to the fact that any subject-object relationship entails both anobject-representation (an idea) and a quota of affect (libidinal energy from the uncon-scious structure of desire understood in the sense of Begierdeor Lust rather than in thesense of Wunsch)by which it is cathected.7 Let us remember what Greimas understands by figurativization. It is characterized

by the specification and the particularization of abstract discourse insofar as it isgrasped in its deep structures, and by the introduction of anthroponyms, toponyms,and chrononyms (corresponding respectively, on the plane of discursive syntax, to thethree procedures constitutive of discoursivization: actorialization, spatialization, andtemporalization) that can be inventoried as going from the generic ('king,' 'forest,''winter') to the specific (proper nouns, spatio-temporal indices, dates, etc.). As such,figurativization is supposed to confer the desirable degree of reproduction of the realupon the text. See Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Court6s, Semioticsand Lan-

705


15/15

toward defining aesthetic perception, semiotics and utopian reflection (wladimir krysinski)

Documents