LOCATIONS in INTERSEMIOTIC SPACE*

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Peeter Torop of reception and creation. A blueprint or a fragment of a work not yet completed is consciously brought to the addressee in the marketing process or as a pre-ad- vert. What earlier used to belong to the sphere of textology or the reconstruction of the creative process, is now part of the functioning of the text in culture. Text therefore locates into a wide intersemiotic space, and the analysis of it demands complex inspection of its creation, construction, and reception. us a text is a process in intersemiotic space. A process taking place in intersemiotic space can be compared to a textologist who tries to sense, through notes, blueprints and versions, the working of the writer’s mind and the story of the creation of his work. In the case of literature we can talk about the macrotime of the manuscript and the microtime of a concrete page of the manuscript. e macrotime of the manuscript is first related with the possibility to create a complete diachronic string, i.e. to arrange all the materials of the manuscript chronologically. Second, in the case of the impossibility of re- constructing the diachronic string, all the material can be divided into the stages or periods of the creation of a work or the realisation of an intention. is means that concrete time is replaced by an interval in the frame of which the material is arranged according to the psychosemantic principle, i.e., in accordance with a vision of the given creative process. e microtime first relates to the sequence of the filling of a concrete page of the manuscript as a holistic unit of the manuscript. Second, microtime connects to the psychosemantic sensing of the filling sequence of this page; during this every single entry becomes a minimal unit. In this case the importance of relations between different entries on the same time is replaced by the importance of the psychosemantic connection between repetitive entries of a certain type that link up different pages of the manuscript. In addition to the macro- and microtime of the manuscript there is also reason to distinguish the achrony of the manuscript, which means the understanding of the manuscript as an archive document in which the minimal unit is formed by the whole manuscript or its holistic part as a fascicle, notebook or the like. us any text is, on the one hand the result of a creative process, and a start- ing point of the reception process, on the other. Bringing the creative process and blueprints into theoretical discussion seems to be necessary in spite of the fact that during the age of computers the ordinary blueprint has changed. Ossip Mandelstam, the Russian poet and thinker, has written about the permanence of 62
Locations in Intersemiotic Space the blueprint: ‘Blueprints never perish. In poetry, plastics, and art in general there are no completed things ... us the permanence of the blueprint is the law of conservation of the energy of the work.’ (Mandelstam 1967: 27–28.) e study of the blueprint, like the conscious bringing of the blueprint into culture increases teleology in the creative process. A blueprint researcher is usually familiar with the final text and can, through blueprints, follow the generation of the text both on the level of diverse sign systems and as the emergence of a conceptual whole. Blueprint is like culture. In blueprint we can distinguish the complementarity of sign systems in the creative process, follow the shaping of an intention into a conceptual work of art, analyse the world of thought of the creator and his location in the intertextual space. For example, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s notebooks contain ideas, pictures, blueprints of others, but alongside them also details of at- tacks of epilepsy, facts connected with housekeeping, and also social and political thoughts. Being a notebook belonging to the pre-material of a novel, it contains a lot of information that is seemingly of secondary importance, though belonging to the same era. e result of complex study of a blueprint is the peculiarity of the creation process, and together with that, understanding the specific nature of the final text. Analysis of the creative process is holistic by nature, since the final result is already known. Whereas, if we start from the already created text that switches into the intersemiotic space of culture it, as a prototext, becomes a foundation for an infinite number of metatexts; it creates intertextual and other connections and loses its ontological boundaries in the end. In culture, text becomes a diffused mental whole. Evaluating a text from the side of reception we can, on the one hand, es- timate the translatability of a text into other texts and into other sign systems by the comparison of the prototext and metatext. Whereas we can study the reception process as a whole, the original prototext turns, in its essence, into an arche- metatext, i.e., into a non-existing text that is reconstructible through metatexts. Non-existence or invisibility means that the reception is formed of a range of events and the study of them can lead us quite far from the actual nature of the text. Michael Riffaterre was afraid of exactly that when he opposed intertextuality to hypertextuality. According to his logic, the study of intertextual relations is yet the study of a conceptual whole. In his opinion the text itself creates the rules of intertextuality that are applicable to it. At the same time Riffaterre is afraid of hypertextuality exactly because of the diffusion of the nature of a text, and of 63
Page 1 and 2: A key concept for cultural semiotic
Page 3: Locations in Intersemiotic Space Ho
Page 7 and 8: Locations in Intersemiotic Space de
Page 9 and 10: Locations in Intersemiotic Space ti

LOCATIONS in INTERSEMIOTIC SPACE*

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?