Agreeing and Disagreeing with Terry Eagleton

I jumped into this text knowing a couple of things about Eagleton: (1) he is a marxist, (2) the last piece we read by him was just this side of unintelligible. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to find the blurbs on the book to be accurate: Eagleton is both articulate (something the other article was surely not. Intelligent: absolutely; Articulate: absolutely not) and witty.

(I suppose writing must be like abstract art, demonstrate that you are able to communicate in the medium so that Joe average can understand you for a long enough time and you then get blanket permission to be incredibly obtuse and impenetrable in any further attempts at communication with the public. Ah well. But I digress...)

I have posted several times this semester on the fate of knowledge in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. I maintain my argument developed in a previous post that the accepting of any givens in this intellectual climate is an act of faith, as there are no longer universal givens to which we can appeal even at a cultural level. Renee, in replying to my previous post suggested that it can be a form of intellectual laziness to reject truth as it allows one to sit back and refuse to do any heavy lifting intellectually or morally ("if not everyone's take on reality carried equal validity--well, just how many apple carts would that upset? At very least, many individuals would need to make some substantial changes--this would involve getting up off their butts [figurative and literal]"). Relativism, in this view would be the equivalent of ditching one's homework, or refusing to take responsibility for one's actions/life by abdicating all decision making on the grounds that all choices are absolutely equal and it is impossible to determine between them. How much rage can be generated over a crimes or injustices of any kind and how hypocritical is any form of law or restriction if we truly believe that there is no truth, that there are no absolutes?

I agree with Eagleton's arguments in favor of truth, and with Renee's about the intellectual laziness underlying relativism. When Eagleton said that "Principles can be flexible and still be principles" (144) I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Incidentally, I think if you injected that thought into the brains of those "serving" in Washington, most of their heads would explode.)

Unfortunately for Eagleton, comparing arguments about the truth of physical statements (There is a tiger in the room, for example) with arguments about truth and other abstract ideals is comparing apples and oranges. Given our limited knowledge of Reality and the mind's shaping power in creating the world we perceive, one has to make certain assumptions that Eagleton takes for granted before one is even able to have the discussion he wants. Eagleton is able to make these arguments and they appeal - indeed, they seem ultimately logical - to those who agree that there is some center around which the world functions.

It isn't necessary to agree on that center, or even to have an entirely clear idea of what that center is, only the agreement that there is one is necessary. If it is there, than there is truth (at least of a kind) and we can then move to discussing its nature. In comparing Marxism to postmodernism and post-structuralism (or at least in comparing Eagleton's marxism to these theories) one discovers that Marxism has far more in common with traditional, idealistic thought than it does with these modern "theories." Marxism assumes a center - history, i.e. class struggle - and attributes everything at (varying removes) to the effects of this conflict. This is far closer to putting the Gospel at the center of one's world view than it is to accepting a centerless, relative world. In fact, the de-centered reality posited by post-structuralism and postmodernism is anathema to Marxism, because if history isn't the center (or if it is one of many centers, or if there is no center, or the center is unknowable) than not only their argument but their world collapses.

The point? At the risk of beating a dead horse the systematic destruction of all of the pillars of epistemology on which our culture was built by the extreme ends of rationalism and postmodern/post-structuralist thought makes the choosing of any center arbitrary. Without a center there are no givens, everything is truly in freeplay. As Eagleton's argument assumes a number of unvoiced givens, it requires a center to make sense.

Nothing has yet replaced these traditional ideals and values as unifying elements in this brave new world. Instead as Eagleton notes, we are left with freedom alone to guide us, and we find that threatening, because in our experience on this planet anything goes generally means a whole lot of bad stuff happens. So we cast about in search of something to cling to, something that will make this existence tolerable. Or alternately, we ignore the implications of the thought shaping the world around us.

Before we can accept Eagleton's arguments as common sense and move toward any of the reforms he implicitly calls for we must discover givens that we can share (Eagleton posits several here: truth, virtue, species-nature, love [agape], not to mention good old history/class struggle) at least enough to create a common world where we're able to talk to each other and begin the process of developing that "consensual morality" that President Obama talked about on the very first day of class. Only once we have discovered the value in greater unity as a goal, and stopped fetishizing change and difference for their own sake, will we even be able to get large numbers of people sufficiently together to begin the conversation that Eagleton demands in this text. We must literally restore a common reality (at least to a greater extent than we now have one) before we can move forward in any significant way.

What if it's ALL constructed?

As I have most enjoyed looking at our two "Posts" this semester (Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism) I was fascinated by the following quote from page 139 of Barry's "Lesbian/gay criticism"chapter: "all identities, including gender identities, are 'a kind of impersonation and approximation...a kind of imitation for which there is no original.' As the text goes on to point out, if this "anti-essentialist" line is taken to its logical conclusion, "identity [is seen] as a a series of masks, roles, and potentialities, a kind of amalgam of everything which is provisional, contingent, and improvisatory" (140). If that is the case, than these identity based theories of culture and literature seem to be baseless...of course if Postmodernism and Poststructuralism are right, everything is meaningless, as there is not and cannot be a center, and even the idea of meaning as we have traditionally understood it is impossible because nothing is fixed.

So whither then the identity based politics and theoretical approaches we've encountered so very many times throughout our varied associations with literature in schools of whatever level? If this is true they would seem an inadequate way of facing the world, much less trying to understand it. An interesting point is made by Barry, which I am embarrassed to say I hadn't thought of, because it seems so obvious after the fact (that's how smart people work though, right? They challenge us by making new and complex ideas seem obvious and straight forward...if only I could do that....), that the opposite of identity politics is class politics. Duh! The opposite of the individual is the group, the opposite of individualism is collectivism, and the opposite of identity politics is group or class politics.

However, by the nature of the argument - one pulling on poststructuralist and postmodernist thought to demonstrate the failure of dualities - the idea of class politics as a replacement must also be questioned. Interesting. If we don't have identity or class politics (because the failure of one half of the duality must mean the failure of both if this self/other dichotomy is interdependent as Barry indicates [139]) what are left with? Would we stop beating each other over the head with meaningless labels and try to accomplish something? Heaven forbid.

The great result of the twentieth century's pursuit of theoretical knowledge is to prove over and over again that such knowledge is impossible, because, according to our greatest modern thinkers, we have no comfortable, accepted epistemological basis from which to know or understand anything, nor can we. Everything, including sexuality etc., is in post-structuralist freeplay, nothing is real: "everything is a model or an image, all is surface without depth; this is the hyperreal" (Barry 86). If followed to its logical extreme, modern thought cuts us all off from each other, denies our existence (If there is no individuality, no free-will, however limited, we don't exist at all, we are merely manifestations of outside forces. And, if nothing is real, and then what is doing the constructing of these identities that we don't actually have?), and leaves us with no possibility for proving otherwise, because modern thought invalidates all means of knowing. Reducing any claim to knowledge to an act of faith that must first arbitrarily choose its own givens and overcome postmodern/poststructuralist doubt over the very existence of reality itself.

Pathetically late without excuse!

I have to admit that arriving at the end of the introductory piece in which Greenblatt asserts his essentially Marxist premises and then being tantalized by the beginning of chapter two in which he actually employs the ideas of new-historical co-reading as discussed in Barry (172) was disappointing, that was the aspect I was interested in...but I digress.

Greenblatt spends the first chapter revealing the clear ties to Marxism that underly New-Historicism:

1. There can be no appeals to genius as the sole origin of the energies of great art.

2. There can be no motiveless creation....

6. There can be no art without social energy.... (12)

"The theater is manifestly the product of collective intentions" (4).

"The theater manifestly addresses its audience as a collectivity" (5).

"There is no escape from contingency" (3).

"They are signs of the inescapability of a historical process, a structured negotiation and exchange..."(6).

These as well as the emphasis on the transference and exchange of social energy as the purpose of artistic endeavor, and the emphasis on the practicality of nearly everyone involved in theatrical production, and the constant reference to the controlling influence of political factors on artistic creation, all reflect a distinctly Marxist tie.

It is left to us then to distinguish why it is we read this piece when it seems so clearly repetitive. And that must be that the emphasis on history qua history and not only on history as process. while the understanding of history (with the insistence on exchange, different forms of capital, and political control of artistic production) seems pointedly Marxist, it is not a general reading of economic factors reflected in the text, but a grounding of the text very specifically and independently in the history of its time in a dialectical manner. Greenblatt emphasizes that there is a co-creation between the history and the art. The Play creating the audience as the audience helps create the play.

Therefore, to my reading, I would conclude that the ties between history (class struggle) and art are (while not "vulgar" and strictly deterministic of the entire nature of any given piece) at least a lot closer than our previous Marxists (Hello, Eagleton) allowed for, and seems to stretch to encompass some of Biordieu's various forms of capital with perhaps a new one in this social energy...I'm not entirely sure what it is. I mean, art is the product, the effect of social energy, but while energia was defined I was never satisfied that I understood what was meant by social energy.

Ah well, given the speed with which it is written and the lack of time to read it over I am forced to assume the incoherence of this piece, but I'm now - perhaps even more than last week - out of time.

Beware the Thought Police

I am at pains to determine whether Bourdieu approves of the things he is saying/doing or if he (like a good descriptive grammarian) is merely describing what he sees of society.

For example: he continually discusses the language of women, particularly women who are part of various dominated linguistic competencies as "docile," "submissive," etc. and often refers to the sexual division of labor, which seems obviously (even here) to be a product of society. However, I'm having difficulty determining if the position of women as he describes them is due to society and the sexual division of labor, or if he sees these character traits that he attributes to them as somehow natural.

Again, the language arts instructor (and by implication the literature instructor/student/producer - which, is by implication all of us as students specializing in literature and literary theory, composition and rhetoric, and or creative writing) is labeled quite clearly as at least the unwitting tool if not the agent of the dominant forces in society (see pages 48 - 49 for the education system in general and, grammarians in particular, pages 55 - 56 for "training" and its implicitly unequal distribution among various classes/competencies, and pages 59 - 61 for the effect/role of not just literature, but the very idea of literary language as a conservative force opposed to popular speech). In fact Bourdieu names "the schoolmaster" a "maitre de penser" or "master[re:teacher] of thinking" whose primary function is to socialize the students to linguistic norms and therefore - how would one say it? - thought norms: "'In teaching the same clear, fixed language to children who know it only very vaguely or who even speak various dialects or patois, he is already inclining them quite naturally to see and feel things in the same way; and he works to build the common consciousness of the nation'" (Davy as qtd. in Bourdieu 49).

Bourdieu makes a compelling case for the symbolic violence inherent in such a situation. In another location (one I cannot find in the text at the moment - alas, the dangers of reading without a pencil!) he refers to the education process inculcating the dominant linguistic form or official language, as a way of killing the mode of expression of those whose linguistic competence is other than the dominant form. And he is right. He indicates that the teacher of language is primarily a socializing influence, working to enforce the strictures of a dead language (in that it is a variant of the living language that exists only in artificiality) in order to banish the undesirable elements of the various varieties (dialects, patois, "popular speech") which are arbitrarily deemed unacceptable by those in the power to determine the strictures of official language. He points to the tying of the linguistic market to the labor market in that the requirements for acceptance into the higher levels of the labor market are limited to those who demonstrate academic (and thus linguistic) proficiency. Thus the educational agenda (re: socializing agenda) is pursued under the guise of promoting the future economic opportunities of those being educated. He even refers to trying to promote the speaking of a given language or style at home in the interests of the children's welfare.

Given his effective and stringent critique of language as a form of capital and of linguistic capital as a good unequally distributed and of the public schools as tools in perpetuating the domination of those with the highest linguistic competencies, what are the alternatives?

I am about halfway through the text and Bourdieu has got me fired up for the presentation of some alternative (other than an anarchic existence in which nationhood is dropped so as not to oppress anyone by enforcing/creating the necessary uniform manner of communication for any basic type of unity) to the status quo, but at this point there isn't any, and in the appendix to part I, it seems that as teachers, the "cult of virility" of the lower classes ensures that we cannot reach them and provide them with the linguistic competencies to advance their situation even if we wanted to.

I guess I'm looking for some practical application of the ideas that would offer an alternative to the status quo. As far as I can see, Bourdieu seems to be indicating that this situation is inherent in the nation state as it exists. Does that mean that we have to achieve utopian anarchy before we can apply these ideas in a constructive fashion? Some hope, please!

Hooooo boy this is late...

I actually really enjoyed Benjamin's article. As a student/teacher of acting/Drama, and therefore someone tremendously involved with theater and film as art, this was fascinating.

Although not explicitly stated, Benjamin's argument seems to be that film is not art in the traditional sense because the stuff of which that art is created, the performance of the actors, the setting filmed by the camera etc. is all being reproduced by the camera, and we experience it (the film) only as the camera allows us to do so. In essence, caught off from the aura of the performance the film, as a reproduction of the performance cannot be authentic and therefore cannot be a work of art as art is currently defined.

Of course, this is all implied because Benjamin says explicitly that whether or not film is art is not the point, not even the question, but a distraction from the more important issues at hand. Still, it is the question that has attracted my attention because much of the argument is based on the assumption that film is what he describes: an extraordinary reproduction of the performances of the actors through technology.

However, this is not true. While it reveals fascinating things about the relationship of art to authenticity, and while it lays firm ground for the effects of politicizing art (although I found the leaps at the end from film to Dada and Dada to Fascism/War to be a bit of a stretch, taken, as they are so quickly after such a slowly, laboriously developed argument about film and the relationship between art and mechanical reproductions), it fails to account for the film as a whole, as a created work. What he describes a mechanical reproduction of a series of performances by the actors is simply the raw footage. While there is a nod to the editing/cutting process it is insufficiently discussed. The role of the director in creating a film out of this raw material is to piece together from the reproductions of the performance of the actors a coherent whole (whether or not the plot is coherent is irrelevant, the film itself must cohere in some fashion). In the process actors of great skill do essentially imput their aura, their essence. Their is a reason that a given film is a Spielberg film, a Tim Burton film, etc. Because it is the director who is ultimately the artist behind the film. He/she to an extent, even creates the performance of the actors because he/she controls how we see them, what we see of them etc. It's why director's cuts etc. of films exist: the film is not created in the shooting of raw footage, that is where raw materials are gathered for the creation of the film in the editing room. I would argue that to those who know how to "read" film (and I am not terribly skilled at it, but have witnessed those who really are doing so) there is an aura/essence to a film as a whole in exactly the same way there is in other pieces of art. It's the aura/essence of the director. The actor feeds raw materials, and no two films by a director will have exactly the same aura/essence as another, but you can watch a given director's ouvre and there is a continuance in something intangible that is identifiable to the actor who produces it.

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Incidentally did the very idea of aura and essence feel platonic and "idealist" to anyone else?

And furthermore, what happens to the argument about film in an age where we have DVD, DVR etc. and can pause and attend to any portion of the film that we please? What effect does that have on Benjamin's argument?

Theory on/of intransigence: Deconstructionism, Modern questioning of Epistemology, and the disappearance of unity...

After last night's class discussion I came to an interesting conclusion that I feel applies the theories we've been discussing (more in philosophical than a literary sense, but we're studying the theories right?) and can perhaps explain in part the intransigence on some of the issues that are fundamental to the various theories. I also personally had revealed the assumptions underlying a position that I had previously considered simply "logical" and frankly obvious once considered. I was wrong, for others it is neither logical nor obvious and I believe this explains it.

Simply because it was the catalyst for this idea in my mind, I will address a portion of last night's feminism discussion, and abortion in particular. I am not attempting to convince anyone, or shift anyone's position. I am simply laying out my position in order to show what I think was an interesting application of the theories we've been studied to each other, and to our own epistemologies and the very ability to know.

Modern science/thought/philosophy has systematically used the western rational perspective to disassemble the constructs on which western thought has been built. Beginning with the rejection of religion in the secular rational world view as at best unknowable, and at worst a delusion (witness Richard Dawkins, recently labeled Darwin's Rottweiler in parody of the current Pope [nicknamed God's Rottweiler as a cardinal] for his aggressive proselytizing of the atheist position). This of course begins with the movement to empiricism in the enlightenment and is nothing new, although several hundred years further developed. It follows with attacks on other western epistemologies until with deconstructionism we use rationality to discredit language and rationality itself. The current cultural condition then is that described by deconstructionists and post-modernists: the center is not the center, there is in fact no center for the culture to base itself around (unless paradoxically the fact that the center is not the center is the center...it makes my head hurt) and we find ourselves, as it were, in a huge train station, each individual on their own train with some or all trains constantly in motion and no agreed upon fixed point of reference from which to determine anything. Therefore, nothing is, or can be certain.

It is the portion of the condition of being each on our own train that I wish to discuss further and tie to last night's discussion. The structuralists and poststrutcuralists along with other modern thinkers/philosophers have posited that our minds, indeed our very language, is the - or at least A - causal agent behind our perceived realities. (I will be referring to Reality, capital R, as signifying whatever actually exists out there in its totality; reality, lower case r, can be assumed to refer from here on to Reality as it is perceived by, or as it exists for, a given individual or group.) Therefore, cut off as we are from Reality, with only language, (a fallible medium) or perhaps logic (logically an even more fallible medium[I love the paradox and irony in that statement]) to allow us any connection with others, we literally exist in individual realities. And, in the strictest sense, no one's reality corresponds exactly to anyone else's. Now there are degrees of overlap within individual realities to the extent which two given individuals overlap in their thinking. Where ever their thinking diverges, their realities will diverge. As systems of thought that share this shaping power constitutive of individual realities I include religions under the broader banner of theories. Thus stretching theory slightly to be any system of thought that constitutes a shaping world view that attempts to explain/account for the world (not the physical earth, but the human created world).

The power of theory as we are studying it in this course, in which, each of the theories is essentially constitutive of a world view or paradigm, is this: Our thoughts create our individual realities by ordering our perceptions. Because these paradigms have the power (because new knowledge has the power) to shape and even transform our thoughts they literally create/re-create our realities to the extent that we embrace new ones.

Think for example of some powerful new piece of knowledge. In Reality, (if Reality exists; I am positing that it does, it is one of the givens required for my particular theory here to exist) that piece of knowledge was always there, just waiting for you to discover it. However, as far as your own reality is concerned, that knowledge did not exist until you learned it and when you did learn it, the reality in which you live was changed. For example: you meet someone new on campus. You do not recall having ever seen them before. For you, that person did not exist before this moment as you had no knowledge of them. They were not a part of reality as it exists for you. However, once you meet them, know who they are and become aware of their presence on campus you tend to see them every where, right? (not always, but often true in my experience...it that can be projected at all to your reality dear reader) Now, where as before they did not exist, they may seem to be everywhere. Was not that person, in Reality, there all the time? However, in your reality, in Reality as created and perceived by your mind, they did not exist. Thus the interaction of our perceptions, our thoughts, and our knowledge create the reality we live in, and theories by giving shape to our perceptions, thoughts and knowledge, by framing or re-framing them create our realities in the manner described above.

With the modern/post-modern destruction of epistemologies, the removal of all centers in favor of truths and relativity, there is no way to know anything for certain without first choosing a center around which to order your thought. That decision by its very nature requires making fundamental assumptions about the world. They may be based on supposed "empirical" information or other evidence, but remember, once we enter the modern theoretical perspectives all knowledge and all methods of knowledge are suspect. Different theories accept different givens because accepting some givens is necessary to maintain any knowledge or agree with anyone about anything.

However, with no center that is agreed upon, and even individual understandings of a shared center across realities causing divergence in those most similar to one another, accepting any of these givens requires an act of faith. Or, to re-state, the acceptance of any world view requires the acceptance of fundamental principles that underlie it (Marxism - economic determinism [to varying degrees granted], Feminism - patriarchy and, apparently in the version discussed in class last night, being pro-choice, Religions - the existence of a deity/deities or some divine force,), fundamental principles without which you cannot be considered to have embraced said theory completely, or perhaps at all. That acceptance, given the destruction of all epistemologies, or at least their reduction to truths/relativity under modern theory/thought, requires an act of faith. By act of faith I mean that the acceptance of any given cannot be justified beforehand except by givens already accepted in an endless recursive cycle, so that the initial acceptance of a given by an individual is a figurative leap into the unknown.

Now after all of this discussion and theoretical argument to establish the existence of each of us within our own figurative trains in the endless train station from Barry's metaphor of post-modernsim, or rather to establish the existence of each of us literally within our own, individual realities, what's the point? What the heck does this have to do with intransigence? Much less last night's discussion? Well, the fact that we live in our own realities, realities devoid centers that can be accepted with anything less than an arbitrary decision/act of faith (remember we can't see the givens of a theory as justified until after we accept them as givens because all knowledge is suspect), is the reason we are so fragmented as a nation, a society, a culture, and a world. Issues that are important enough to touch directly on the givens that constitute our realities, or have very little separation from those givens, like abortion, for example, are things we are incapable of discussing "rationally" with someone whose reality doesn't overlap sufficiently with our own because what is logic to them will literally be absurdity (re: out of tune, contrary to the nature of reality) for us. Thus two entirely intelligent people of integrity, being entirely open with each other can fail to agree on the most fundamental questions, or even which given has primacy in determining one's decision.

I thought of all of this after our discussion of feminism, and abortion last night, when I discovered that what I thought was my nuanced, fair, and "obvious once you think about it" based neither on the given of freedom being a higher absolute good than life in all instances (a reductive statement I know, but an attempt to carry express the idea that freedom is worth dieing, for living for, and killing for, even removing life/potential life if necessary), nor the belief that life is an absolute good that trumps freedom in this instance (another reductive statement, but an attempt to convey the idea that in the instance of the existence of innocent life/the potential of innocent life choice [re: freedom] is trumped). Instead I had what, in my reality constitutes a logical alternative - limited legal abortion. The position that safe, legal abortion should be available in cases in which the choice of the mother was abrogated (rape/incest) or when her life is endangered by the pregnancy, but should in other cases be illegal. To my mind this logically balances the competing values of choice and life. However, assuming that what was logical in my reality would transfer to the reality of anyone operating from a different reality as logic rather than absurdity was fallacious and reflected a misidentification of the givens of my reality that are reflected in the decision.

Underlying my "logical" balancing act was a third given that won't transfer to a reality shaped by a feminism that includes the right to safe, legal abortion with no limits as a given. That given is a very old fashioned one, a belief in the sacred nature of the sex act, which to my mind justifies restrictions on when/with whom it can rightly be engaged in, and the validity of nature taking its course as a natural consequence of the decision to engage in intercourse. Now please, while this may sound quaint, or even be a source of irritation/anger to some, I don't expect you to agree with me, I'm just illustrating why it's so hard to come to agreement and theory's role in making it more difficult.

The disagreement over this issue in this particular discussion and the continuing large scale disagreement over this and many other seeming basic issues is due to the separate realities from which we are forced to argue by modern theory. The intransigence isn't due to the stupidity, ignorance, or evil nature of those arguing against us (whatever our side on any given issue) it is due to the absurdity of trying to discuss these issues across the gaps between realities.

A Feminist's Semiotic Playground...

Within Barry's summary of various feminist positions I found several ideas fascinating. One was the idea of language having "two aspects" (123) the symbolic and semiotic, from the work of Julia Kristeva. I found this idea, a repesentation of "Lacanian re-use of the notions" (123) of conscious and unconscious, fascinating. How true it is (as we saw in our discussion of post-structuralism) that as we consciously communicate in an ordered and rational way, there is always an undercurrent that works against us, that "emerg[es] into and disrupt[s] the 'conscious' or 'surface' meaning" (124). I'm not sure why, after encountering these ideas in only sightly different words from Derridas et al. I am now so intrigued, but this presentation jumped out at me. I was uncertain however, whether Kristeva and Cixous were claiming this semiotic aspect as a feminine aspect of a male medium, or if they were merely finding in its existence "s vital theater of possibilities, the value of which is to imagine alternatives to the world which we now have" (124). Barry does, just before the last quoted passage, label it "this visionary 'semiotic' female world" which would seem to indicate that is the case. Still, certainly it was something the women recognized they shared with other theorists both post-structuralist and psychoanalytic, and, as such open to everyone regardless of gender, right?

I wonder who they would characterize as making use of this semiotic language then? A single example is given: e. e. cummings, and I don't know anyone who plays with language quite like he does. Other examples seem to be other high modernists like Joyce and Woolf, maybe Faulkner (I haven't really read Faulkner so I'm stretching), perhaps some of Kerouac's more experimental work, although some of the beats' ideas about women are troubling in the context of applying feminist ideas. Still, I don't know that I would characterize many women writers that I have read as possessing this semiotic characteristic as I am struggling to understand it through the one example given. I mean Austen, the Brontes, George Elliott, even more modern writers such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, etc. don't seem to be playing with this semiotic aspect of language in the way she describes except in the sense that it is present in all of us. Are there a bunch of radical experimentalists out there that I'm not aware of?

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An addendum to my original post...I just finished reading Toni Morrison's Jazz and reading an article focused on the identity of her very, very fluid and mysterious narrative "I" in that novel. I would have to revise what I said in including her in the list at the end of the above...In this novel at least there is that experimental form in the interplay of voices, and the mysteriousness of the narrator that I'd have to identify it as an example of the conscious use of the semiotic in the manner Kristeva/Barry seem to be discussing.