and translation (the problem of the paradoxical immediacy of the medium). Chapter 5 considers the emergent relationhip between ‘discourse’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of 1950s and 1960s French philosophy (and literary theory). This development is shown to be connected to several seemingly disparate developments: the nouveau roman (Michel Butor and the new problem of ‘form’), the beginnings of postmodernism, and the birth of cybernetics (with its idea of the open system). This context marks the discovery of a certain opaqueness (in other words, écriture) associated with the meaning of a text. Écriture seems to be very close to the concept of the text, except for revealing a hitherto invisible dimension of the ‘text’, its ‘third element’ (as Michel Serres would put it) – one previously excluded: the motion or process of its sense. Chapter 6 (‘Let Apparitions Return’: Modern Spectrology and its Media) turns to the negativity of media in the context of modern German (and French) cultural, social, and philosophical anthropology – the eschatological critiques of new technologies in the interwar and post-war periods (by Helmuth Plessner, Max Picard, and Günther Anders), as well as their mythological invocations (by Edgar Morin, for example, as resurrections of the archaic vision). Critical reflections on the new modern media, which is at once disembodying and technically materialized, are shown to have implications beyond that of a merely residual or conservative reaction. In this context, as in art, the liminal phenomena associated with physical human existence and its disappearance (body impressions, ashes, tears, spectres) become subject to representation, which in turn intensifies belief in various paraphenomena; spectres seem to acquire a more real existence than their actually existing ‘doubles’. The chapter aims to explain how this, together with the colonization of the human image by digital media (Hans Belting), is related to the more fundamental character of the image as double, and how the mediality of the medium is configured along these borders. To this end, it takes into account several symptomatic art works and photographies: the post-mortem photography of the painter Bohumil Kubišta, Jindřich Štyrský’s death mask photography and his painting Na hrobě, Le cube by Alberto Giacometti, or Paul Klee’s Tod und Feuer.
Literature, media, mediality, technics At this point of our research, a number of tensions in the medium/mediality concept have become apparent over the course of its gradual emergence, and these are further investigated in the context of several concrete areas of research, with special regard to the progressive advancement of media awareness as well as literary culture. These tensions are as follows: the instrumental vs 98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS293419
environmental understanding of the ‘medium’ (media as means, media as environments, habitats); regard for media ontology vs respect for media specificity (as starting points inspiring different sets of questions); technologics vs anthropologics (or post-humanist vs humanist conceptions); media as communication/representation dispositifs and mediality as a general property of (relating to) the world. The third section’s main focus (Chapters 6–13) is the way media – as dispositifs interlinking the parameters of perception and communication – provide the ground for making emergent medial phenomena visible, whether it be between media (in their mutual synergy or discrepancies), between media artefacts, or between human and apparatus. This last topic is critical for Chapter 7 (Gesture and its [Proto]media Thresholds). The main question here is the nature of the relationship between gesture and technique – the medial character of gesture and how its mediality appears in literature. The starting point is the medial multidimensionality of gesture: gesture as a social object-image, expressive movement of the hand or the body, semantic process, or the site of linkage between technics (or communication) and body. The concept of semantic gesture and unintentionality in the literary poetics and aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský and his early concept of ‘motor activity’ (motorické dění) is discussed. What conclusions can be drawn from the fact that while the gesture connects the various (linguistically and semantically defined) levels of the work they are at the same time established through it, taking form ‘at its touch’? The chapter emphasizes the intermedial dimension of Mukařovský’s literary analyses and brings particular attention to the work of Vítězslav Nezval and the mutual influences between Surrealist poetry, painting and photography. Based on these considerations, the author makes a distinction between different kinds of unintentionality, including technical. The (paleo)anthropological theory of technics by André Leroi-Gourhan, especially as developed in his Le geste et la parole (1964, 1965), is then revised. Even though the concept of exteriorization calls for criticism (which is further developed in Chapter 9 along the lines of Erhard Schüttpelz’s work), Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of the mythogram proves crucial. (It is also compared to Derrida’s ‘archi-écriture’.) Leroi-Gourhan’s concept explains the fundamental condition of correlation of communication/expressive means, which goes beyond the opposition between writing and speech or even writing and image and includes rhythm, among other components. Applied to Vladimir Nabokov’s story ‘The Vane Sisters’ (written in 1951), these concepts help to reveal a paradoxical duality of sense – at once hidden and visible – in words and images. At the same time, the story illustrates the vanishing status and conditions of a certain type of writing. 99 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS293419
The way the foundations of semiotic theories have changed since Saussure and Morris plays an important part in several chapters, explaining the shifting understanding of concepts such as representation, sign, communication, reception/reading and communication dispositifs. Chapter 8 (Openness: The Information [Cybernetic] Moment in Literary Studies and 1960’s Czech Experimental Poetry) deals with the fusions of semiotics and communication theory with the elements of information theory and cybernetics (information circuit, noise, concept of information, circular vs transmission model of communication process). In reviewing the development of communication theory (of Roman Jakobson), information aesthetics (Max Bense, Abraham Moles), poetics of open work (Umberto Eco) and literary semiotics (Miroslav Červenka), several crucial developments are noted: the dematerialized conception of information (and sign) was adopted from cybernetics, conforming to the prevailing idealistic currents in aesthetics and poetics; the concept of code emerged; and the channel was redefined as a structure of codes open to the recipient’s activation. New perspectives on communication were offered with the birth of the openness paradigm and a new respect for the viewer/ reader’s activity vis-a-vis 1950s and 1960s experimental art and literature. The second part of the chapter explores Czech experimental poetry of the 1960s as a specific current of neo-avant-garde art, whose many forms were related to the information-aesthetic understanding of creativity, but at the same time went noticeably beyond its limits. The specificity of the cybernetic-information strand of the neo-avant-garde is unraveled, which opens itself to the technical other. It is shown in what ways 1960s experimental poetry still represents a challenge to the communication and media conceptions of literature and a certain prediction of the future which is ‘happening now’. Given the unresolved questions mentioned above, and some of the lines of reasoning in previous chapters, it is fundamental that the problem of technics is thoroughly examined, and this is the task of Chapter 9 (Technics and Media). It also contributes to the discussion of the question as to which approaches and authors in the context of media theory and philosophy of technics should prove most promising in the effort to coordinate literary and media studies. Particular attention is given to Hartmut Winkler, with his emphasis on ‘discourse economy’, the concept of media’s evolution as reflective of unfulfilled wishes or wish constellations (Wunschkonstellation) and the interconnection of the technical and semiotic aspects of media; likewise to Manfred Faßler’s concept of infogenic man and ‘the artificial continuity of the medial’, and to Erhard Schüttpelz, with his ideas of recursive operations and contingent social relations 100 Ukázka elektronické knihy