edenism

If bisecting messages into “the literal meaning” and “the rest” is a poor way to understand language, then how do we preserve the notions of form and content (preferably in a way that is blind to the medium)? To answer this question, we need only to look at the memes which use text to label different elements of a picture. What is obviously the defining characteristic of these memes is that the content is not the viral element: the content can be almost anything, as long as it fits the structure. Rather it is the structure itself of each meme, which, in its way of organizing a thought, structures the thought of its readers and imparts itself into their communicative repertoire. Generalizing this property gives us a new model for separating Form from Content for social artifacts in general; the Form is exactly that which is epidemic (adds itself to the vocabulary of the recipient), and the Content is that which affects the recipient's speech only indirectly. When analyzing Cubism, for instance, it is the whatness of Cubism that makes up the form of Cubist paintings. This already gives us an explanation of why James Joyce claimed that good writing has the property that the reader can remember exactly which words were used (a property that Shakespeare's works undeniably embody); a good writer's works have good poetics. In this way the Content becomes memorable because of the structure it is attached to, like the old trick of remembering text by putting it to song. These terms, Form and Content, may give the impression that the “meaningful” or “privileged” term is Content. Rather, the situation is the opposite: under this analysis, one is lead to consider that Cubism itself (the Form) was that which lead to the success of Cubist paintings, and only some resonance between Cubism and its surrounding society could have led to this. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek draws a parallel between (1) Karl Marx's recognition that the content of a commodity is banal, but that the form that the commodity must take to succeed speaks to a deep truth and (2) Sigmund Freud's recognition that the seemingly deep content (dream-thought) of a dream is banal, but that the seemingly shallow form of a dream is where true discoveries are made. This phenomenon is echoed here in a more general way as a property of social artifacts. We can also use this model to analyze the claim that sincerity is returning to art in the “New Sincerity” of metamodern art. The fact that this “New Sincerity” and its associated techniques are structurally similar enough should give us reason to doubt whether there is any change in sincerity at all: just as a meme can be appropriated for any Content, the “language of sincerity” can be similarly appropriated. There is no reason, then, to assume that the development of a new language of sincerity implies that (authentic) sincerity is truly in vogue, and in fact even gives us a reason to doubt it.