Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 1, April 2012
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Operationalizing Hybridity, Performing Analogies: Towards a Theoretical Argument
by
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
As a conceptual metaphor rather than a foregone conclusion, hybridity resembles the analogy in its simultaneous connotation of inclusion and exclusion, of convention and invention, of product and process. In order to attain a better understanding of hybridization-processes and their cultural implications, this paper therefore proposes to theorize the analogy as a heuristic medium. Especially so, since the analogy provides an eloquent example of “a highly general mechanism that takes its specific inputs from essentially any domain and supports transfer across domains between analogs that have little surface resemblance but nonetheless share relational structure” (Holyoak and Hummel 2001). Accordingly, when addressing intrinsically interdisciplinary issues such as hybridity and analogy, it is believed that considering the analogy as a heuristic medium from the perspective of the performing arts provides a referential framework uniquely suited to integrate cultural hybridization, personal interpretations, and analytical objectives. After all, like the analogy, the performer functions as a communicative vessel mediating between convention (text/script), context (performative space), and invention (creation/interpretation). Hence the ‘performance’ becomes a metaphor for analogizing itself, effectively staging a ‘double vision’ of process and product that stimulates analogical thought.
A decade ago, British historian Perry Anderson defined the contemporary cultural complex along its ‘typical’ “celebration of the cross-over, the hybrid, the pot-pourri” (Anderson, 1998, 93). The term ‘celebration,’ however, was to be understood processually, rather than ideational. Polarizing in spades, hybridity inspired and still inspires both fascination and loathing. A “maddeningly elastic” (Kraidy, 2005, 3) phenomenon, it revolves around the notion that cultural distinctions are porous, that ‘truth’ therefore is relative, and hence that essentialist thought ironically becomes marginalized in turn. Metaphorically boosted by the invention of the ‘mixer,’ traditional values and attitudes came willy-nilly under pressure. But whether this led to euphoria or condemnation, comparatively little progress was made in understanding the mechanisms driving the debate (see Burke, 2009, 6). And yet hybridization is found everywhere in history. Better, historiography itself depends on taxonomic hybrids to organize interpretation. Discussing ‘Hindu-Saracenic’ art, ‘Hispano-Mauresque’ architecture, or ‘Afro-Portugese’ migration involves schematic blending; just as translations, rewrites, or simply interpretations of historical ‘texts’ imply the mixture of convention and invention.
To cultural historian Peter Burke, contemporary studies of hybridity regularly rediscover America and repeatedly reinvent the wheel because “scholars in one discipline have not been aware of what their neighbours were thinking” (2009, 34). Resulting in an outgrowth of overlapping concepts competing for survival, the intellectual debate is often the poorer for it – especially so, since hybridity at heart is more of a dynamic process than a static state. Simply put, there can be no such thing as an ‘Age of Hybridization,’ even though our own ‘cultural experience’ may lead us to posit the opposite. A consequence of exchange, the hybrid evokes both an end product and the encounter that shaped it, and thus resists easy encapsulation. At stake, therefore, stands a heuristic model capable of operationalizing the logic of hybridization while avoiding the critical tradition’s essentialist excesses. After all, its historical prominence alone confirms the principle as intrinsically generative, and hence too valuable to fall foul of factionalism.
To communication theorist Marwan M. Kraidy the concept of hybridity represents nothing less than the cultural logic of our globalized age. Indeed, it is precisely the contemporary recognition of diversity’s generative and – above all – transformative character which “allows for transcultural mixtures that are bound to take shape with sustained cultural exchange” (Kraidy, 2005, 161 – emphasis added). From this perspective, then, hybridity-scholarship would call for an approach that is contextually sound, processually pragmatic, and relationally specific. In other words, a methodology which is simultaneously focused yet open-ended, lucidly functional by default of being absolute. Of course the term ‘hybridity’ itself is but one in an unflagging stream of related notions. Still, as the least specific of a catalogue comprising concepts such as ‘creolization,’ ‘mestizaje,’ and ‘syncretism’ it paradoxically remains the aptest at capturing the typical tension between context, process, and relation. The concept’s prominent place in a wide array of traditional academic disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, or sociology only further attests to this.
As a conceptual metaphor rather than a foregone conclusion, hybridity resembles the analogy in its simultaneous connotation of inclusion and exclusion, of convention and invention, of product and process. In both cases, qualitative reasoning-expert Kenneth D. Forbus posits, “performance, rather than fidelity is their goal” (2001, 41), thereby stressing the broader relevance of the creational process over assessments of any decontextualized product. Accordingly, in order to attain a better understanding of hybridization-processes and their cultural implications I here propose to theorize the analogy as a heuristic medium, and thus significantly rationalize the current hybridity-debate. Firmly rooted in cognitive science – i.e. the science of thought processes – analogy provides an important example of “a highly general mechanism that takes its specific inputs from essentially any domain [and supports] transfer across domains between analogs that have little surface resemblance but nonetheless share relational structure” (Holyoak and Hummel, 2001, 162). Cognition itself, finally, like hybridization relies on the essentially analogical relation between originality and continuity to provide an ‘event’ with a meaningful texture. For, by blending at first sight unrelated particulars into a new, partially concordant construct, we effectively stimulate our imagination to discover similarity in dissimilarity, and hence to bridge the divide between the alien and the familiar.
Though centred around such problematic, unwieldy principles as analogy and hybridity, the approach I am proposing here should prove scientifically relevant through its insistence on the omnipresence and systematicity of the analogical procedure. At the root of this reasoning lies cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s observation that every concept we have is “nothing but a tightly packaged bundle of analogies” (2001, 507). Constituted along extant mental schemata paired with incoming stimuli, concepts operate by virtue of ‘slippage,’ i.e. processes of ‘inexact matching.’ Seemingly incompatible with the notion of ‘systematicity,’ this perspective nonetheless carries heuristic value when addressed in a cognition-based framework. In effect, Hofstadter’s claim implies that the human mind is biologically equipped to deal with the contingencies of a shifting context. Information and computing systems, despite their processual effectiveness, are far less capable of interpreting unscripted input. Our faculty to think analogically – i.e. across system boundaries – is a “neurological fact” (Eco, 1986, 129) that sidesteps the limitations of rigidly causal systems while recuperating and repurposing the ‘slippage’ from the unforeseen into applied adjustments. After all, intuitiveness need not preclude functionality. Quite to the contrary, art historian Barbara Maria Stafford argues, for analogies only “retain their individual intensity while being focused, interpreted, and related to other distinctive analogues and the prime analogue” (2001, 9). This makes it “the art of sympathetic thought” (ibid.) on account of its capacity to confuse and connect, hence a powerful transcategorical tool against the entropic pull of the status quo. Discerning the reality of ‘slippage’ between signifier and signified, between the arbitrary and the absolute, then, allows one to challenge essentialist discourses in a generative display of creative potential.
A semiotic vehicle, the analogy is the metaphor’s phenomenological double on account of its cognitive infrastructure. But whereas the analogy could be defined as the mere relation between two or more descriptional agents, metaphors rather stress the stylistic conceit that signals such an essentially figurative association (Coenen, 2002, 45). To semiotician Umberto Eco, metaphorical relations like the analogy therefore constitute a scandalous semiotic phenomenon permitted by almost all semiotic systems. Consequently, the “noise on the channel” (Eco, 1986, 217) that results from the cognitive interconnection of various framing devices can be recuperated for reflexive purposes on the nature of socio-cultural distinctions of virtually any kind – be they linguistic, artistic, or simply cognitive. In the preface to the second edition (1997) of his seminal work The Anxiety of Influence (1973), literary theorist Harold Bloom similarly argues that “any stance that anyone takes up towards a metaphorical work will itself be metaphorical” (xix). Concretely, both views indicate that to disregard the cognitive dimension of an ‘event’ – be it contingent or artistic – diminishes its interpretative range and increases the risk of solipsism. For, if thinking is the metaphorical product of an analogical procedure, it amounts to a continual process of setting up and breaking down barriers.
The model developed in this essay draws its inspiration from the partially overlapping ‘disciplines’ of philosophy, anthropology, semiology, and performance studies. Indeed, when addressing intrinsically interdisciplinary issues such as hybridity and analogy, both the overarching methodology as well as the various applied analyses must follow suit in order to be meaningful. By extension, it is believed that considering the analogy as a heuristic medium from the perspective of the performing arts provides a uniquely suited referential framework capable of integrating cultural hybridization, personal projections, and analytical objectives.
Strange as it may seem, generating an analogy does not require specific expertise, but only a context that highlights structural relations (Dunbar, 2001, 330). The perspective offered by the performing arts, precisely, provides such an environment. Like the analogy, the performer functions as a communicative vessel mediating between convention (text/script), context (performative space), and invention (creation/interpretation). Hence the ‘performance’ becomes a metaphor for analogizing itself, effectively staging a ‘double vision’ of product and process that stimulates analogical thought. Theatre in particular occupies an ambiguous cultural position in this regard. Not quite a genre, nor an artistic medium among others, its classification is problematic. Live performance on stage often enough enacts a scripted ‘text,’ but also the incapacity of reproducing it faithfully. What is more, the typical interplay of linguistic and paralinguistic signifiers ‘in real time’ challenges one-dimensional readings while refusing the performance’s objectification. Disciplined by a directorial ‘script’ as well as framed in space and time, the stage production is thus simultaneously present and absent, recognizable and elusive, transparent and opaque, conventional and original, action and reflection, constructive and deconstructive. Oxymoronic par excellence, the theatre is therefore above all a most appropriate platform for reflection on cultural hybridization.
Live theatre in particular draws attention to the contingent and polysemic nature of cultural communication because theatre audiences only perceive fragments of densely textured constellations in a continuous flow – i.e. a theatrical sign may function as a regular signifier but also as a signifier of a signifier pertaining to other semiotic frames (Fischer-Lichte, 1990, 238). Consequently, attending a theatre performance becomes an act of resistance to institutionalized values by consciously confronting ‘overdetermined’ stage signifiers. The parallel machinations of cognition and the performing arts thus imply that the spectator’s involvement is organized across different frames of reference through the evocation of analogical relations. Indeed, the interpretative Leerstellen or blanks created quite paradoxically by the partial overlappings of signifiers, contexts, and individual connotations function as syncretic purveyors of meaning potential (Iser, 1991, 168-178, 231). In a cultural context where distinctions have generally become unstable, live theatrical performance remains unique in its explicit resistance to charismatic transparency-effects. By incorporating a virtually limitless number of perspectives, signifiers, and signifying systems in a temporally and spatially ritualized event with “the performer and the spectator […] physically present at the same time in the same place” (Kattenbelt, 2006, 33), the theatre can be regarded as a hypermedium that iconizes an elusive content. For, as “semiology in action” (Pavis, 1982, 19), the theatrical mise en scène constitutes an “engine for spectatorship” that funnels heterogeneous stimuli towards “the production of a (meaningful) texture to the event” (Lavender, 2006, 63), with the concrete, the metonymic, and the virtual constantly in flux.
In fact, theatre’s reliance on analogies stages the metaphoric rather than absolute quality of signifiers. As a result, the question of the theatrical illusion’s mimetic transparency, for one, can be bypassed by the acknowledgment of the perceiver’s constitutive role, even if only by an artistically uncontrollable implication of the performance. After all, the conceptual potential and wider relevance of the theatre lies not in static models or ‘essences’ of meaning, but in the dynamically transgressive processes it generates and stages. Steven Connor even goes as far as to call theatricality “the name for the contamination of any artefact that is dependent upon conditions outside, or other than, its own” (1990, 133-4). Either way, emphasis on process rather than product carries the day.
According to media theorist Philip Auslander, “presence is the matrix of power” (1987, 26). The stage, then, demonstrates that power is transient because its presence is fleeting. Much the same applies to critical models derived from theatrical performance. Paradoxically, this is their greatest strength, provided they are sufficiently self-relativizing. Since none of the theatre’s components is ‘ontologically connected’ to it (Mukarovsky, 1975, 83), its “Talmudic” (Schechner, 1985, 33) capacity for hybridization and innovation therefore practically endless. Essentialist readings and absolute distinctions, conversely, make little methodological sense in a situation where “to describe is always to destroy” (Pavis, 1982, 122). But since, in the words of iconic theatre practitioner and anthropologist Eugenio Barba, “without distinguishing one does not see” (Barba, 1995, 105), a functional analytical framework nevertheless imposes itself.
On the other hand, the performing arts also reveal that paradigms allowing for the interchange of information must be generalizations, and hence that meaning must amount to a matter of perspective. Furthermore, performance theorist Jon McKenzie has demonstrated that, despite the current ‘hybridity-vogue,’ there is little effective feedback between the various frames of reference constituting our contemporary cultural complex due to the commodification and mass-reproduction of stimuli (2001, 93). The highly prominent medium of television, for one, derives its current authority from a charismatic assertion of presumed ‘immediacy’ despite and because of the distractions of a domestic setting, which erode the viewer’s instinctive reservations towards the technological mediation. This is what the iconic media theorist Marshall McLuhan, in an elaboration of his famous formula, termed medial ‘massage’ (qtd. in Mersch, 2006, 115). And yet such presumption of legitimacy can ironically be undermined by its very own feedback model for the assessment and sustainment of performativity. To McKenzie, the process of ‘debugging designs through use’ follows a ‘feedback loop’ ideally geared towards maximal output with minimal input, whereas focusing on the origin of technological innovation actually reveals a progression through a series of negotiations and compromises: "error è planned production è actual production è inventory è error è planned production è actual production è inventory è error è …" (McKenzie, 2001, 76)
Because the linear improvement of all constituents is impossible, objectives shift and compromise becomes inevitable, which makes ‘techno-performance’ – like the analogy and the metaphor – “satisficing rather than optimizing” (Vaughan qtd. in McKenzie, 2001, 116). In short, this spiroid evolution requires a constant flux of new impulses as the feedback model reveals that challenges trigger new insights, which in turn generate new objectives. Hence, as a focused but open-ended paradigm allowing for causality without being reductive, McKenzie’s deconstruction of the feedback loop provides an adequate framing device for an epistemological approach to so elusive a study object. Take e.g. the following examples of currently en vogue phenomena like ‘filmic theatre,’ ‘theatre/movie installation,’ ‘telematic theatre,’ or even ‘web-based theatre’: are all examples of hybrid constellations that reject ‘traditional’ medial distinctions in their joint pursuit of a heightened media awareness. In particular the concepts of suggestion and recognition are thereby used as a means of focusing the spectator’s attention and funnelling perception in an ongoing process of reciprocal confirmation and rejection. This, finally, would confirm that the hybridizing interplay between convention and invention, one manifestation of analogical thinking, is ‘incarnational’ for materializing issues in a non-absolute manner.
As Steven Johnson formulated it in his celebrated Interface Culture (1997), heuristic media – like, in this case, the analogy but also theatrical performances – are but “stories we tell ourselves to ward of senselessness.” A hybridizing cultural complex constitutes a daunting dungeon of irreverence, though our cognitive response to it is constructiv(ist) at heart. Put differently, in facing the void we embrace the frame, and this ‘double consciousness’ of product and process renders reductions inane. The analogy-based approach to the challenges posed by the concept of ‘hybridization’ here presented therefore already indicate that order is created from chaos through the fundamentally analogical perspective of ‘sympathetic thought,’ i.e. a disposition to connect strands of meaning potential by relying on a framework that is admittedly heuristic – necessarily flawed, but unavoidably generative.
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry, 1998, Origins of Post-Modernity, London: Verso.
Auslander, Philip, 1987, ‘Towards a Conception of the Political in Postmodern Theater,’ Theatre Journal 39.1, 20-34.
Barba, Eugenio, 1995, The Paper Canoe: A Guide to Theatre Anthropology, London: Routledge.
Bloom, Harold, 1997, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed, New York: Oxford University Press.
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Connor, Steven, 1990, Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to the Theories of the Contemporary, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Dunbar, Kevin, 2001, ‘The Analogical Paradox: Why Analogy Is so Easy in Naturalistic Settings, Yet so Difficult in the Psychological Laboratory,’ The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, Eds. Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov, Cambridge: MIT Press, 313-334.
Eco, Umberto, 1986, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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