I said quite possibly one of the most nonsensical and regrettable things I've ever said in class. I said that that Lacan has a thing called a meta-language, and it's like a universal construct of explanation. And it seems like something like the Divine Comedy has more of a system, as some works do, while Beckett has practically no system. This speak to the post-modern element, where one has to take from outside of the text, to read into it, because the author does not put his intentions on the page. So how can one build a system, if there is no blueprint? But someone said oh, isn't that all language, all the time? And so I realized that what I meant was meta-narrative. Quite possibly the most embarrassed I've been all semester. The student proceeded to say that every moment has no system behind it, or something, and then the teacher said it has a system by having no system, by having a system, by having no system, or something like that.Of course there is no meta-language, the thing I meant to say is that there's no meta-narrative, because meta-narratives like the ones in the divine comedy are certainly something which we see the death of in Beckett. But can one feasibly say that a meta-language can be a standin for a meta-narrative? One might think that if they are kind with the way I described language, as a sort of universal code, then one can see how there's somewhat of a similarity between meta-language and meta-narrative. I assume that it's simply that definitionally speaking a meta-language is pertaining to words, while meta-narratives are pertaining to stories which are chains.I essentially argued that the divine comedy has a system and a universal language, and Beckett does not. Devastatingly nonsensical.
have fun wasting your youth on pointless issues like these. in a few years you won't be 20 or 21 or whatever you are right now any more and reality will hit you in the face like a bag of bricks when you're deep in student's debt with a worthless humanitranny degree and little prospect of paying it off in the future. should've pursued some other course like learning to weld and reading light fiction in the meantime instead of pondering nonsensical questionscaptcha: 0WNXV
>>23981474But yall, the CRINGE.
I have done things I can't take backIf I said it was just things I saidIt doesn't mean I can take it back
>>23981474It's really better to have just never done anything at all.
>>23982142That quote sums up all of life.
>>23981446It's not nonsensical, you're just trying to express your thoughts and you'll get clearer with more practice. You just haven't yet realised that all academic discussion is nonsensical in a certain way, the older you get and the more you are exposed to seminars the less self-conscious you will be. Words, especially broad theoretical terms that you're using, don't always have a strict definition and the way in which we use them have to be inferred from context, so I'm sure everyone understood the kind of thing you meant.I think the primary difference between metalanguage and metanarrative is one of context, in that the first tends to be used in linguistics and logic and the second in literary and cultural theory, and in the way you're using it specifically from Lyotard. But there is distinction between the concepts, because whereas metanarratives are assumed to be the transcendental source of meaning (and thus critiqued from a postmodern perspective), metalanguages are normally conceived as merely descriptive of the operations of language. Metalanguages are another set of signifiers to describe the relationship between signifiers, while a metanarrative purports to be what is Signified. And actually thinking of metanarratives as related to the transcendental signified in this way might provide a different perspective on your notion that the postmoderns believe "one has to take from outside of the text to read into it" -- many poststructuralists believe the reverse, for as Derrida says, "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" -- to which Lacan's later rejection of metalanguage, or his earlier belief that metalanguage is embedded in language, compares. In this way, it is precisely the Death of the Author that relinquishes the burden of a transcendental signified that previously compelled us towards biographical readings and may instead allow us finally to *read the text*. I do agree with your essential point and get what you mean when you say that there is a difference between the systematic meaning/Christian metanarrative of Dante and the loss of it in Beckett, although as with everything the binary can often be overstated (which is another point of the poststructuralists, really). Dante's Belacqua and ante-purgatory might now be seen as a premonition of the postmodern just as Beckett's Belacqua is memory of the medieval.
>>23982270Thank you for this reply, it is re-assuring that people could know what I mean even if I didn't say meta-narrative. The reason I say that it's rather that we take something from outside of the text as a post-modern narrative, is that when we go into a text we have a lot of pre-conceived assumptions. So we are in fact bringing outside knowledge to the text, when we read a text and don't know the history of the text. It's kind of like when you mis-hear a song and then you remember the song differently. So a Deleuzian approach, which is markedly post-modern, doesn't hold an essentialism of inside and outside, and so anything which is supposedly outside the text collapses into a sort of univocity. Our own experience and the experience of reading the text are essentially the same. This is another Lacanian point, in that for Lacan there is a collapsing into each other of fantasy and reality as truth contains the structure of fiction, as he says in seminar 8. Deleuze has a truth as fiction paradox structure to his belief. So a post-modern reading of a text is particularly encouraged in something like Beckett, because you are required to bring so much from outside of the text, away from the author's intention. It's funny to me when people say that Beckett himself is what makes the text interesting. While there are narratives and themes in some of the works of master/slave dialectics, land ownership vs destitution, atomization, alienation, etc. It's almost less systematic than say, someone like Nietzsche. In Nietzsche you get truth is an army of metaphors, in Beckett you get "the aesthetics of failure" in which determinate meaning fails. I don't really even hold any religious beliefs except the belief in consistency in thought, and the belief that that consistency in thought is rhythmic and patterned, at the same time that it is chaotic. The hardest part for me about reading someone like Hegel, or Dante, is accepting beyond faith that there could ever be a system at all. I would say the post-modern reading into the text paradox becomes complete, and universal, when one realizes that they are the text. A Hegelian point. The impressions of the text leave a mark on consciousness, and there is nothing else but that trace of memory which is the text, as life is simply a network of these traces, formed into the I.
