Continuous Reframing
Berkeley linguist George Lakoff’s analysis of linguistic devices in contemporary art and writing joins a long conversation between the sciences of language and radical experiments of the avant-garde, from the influence of Russian futurism on the St. Petersburg OPOYAZ (Viktor Shklovsky) and Moscow Linguistic Circle (Roman Jakobson) through Prague structuralism and French poststructuralism. In the early 1980s, Lakoff was a central participant in what came to be known as “the linguistics wars,” which pitted the logicist and rationalist models of language of Noam Chomsky against the critiques of several of his most advanced students, Lakoff among them. In moving from “generative grammar” through “generative semantics” to the development of a new approach, “cognitive linguistics,” Lakoff and Berkeley linguists such as Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay sought evidence of embedded cultural frameworks in the cognitive structures of language. Lakoff saw the avant-garde as formally deploying these cognitive elements of language—prototypes, categories, and frames—even while contesting their normative use. Reading strategies of “frame shifting” and “partial local coherence” in performance artist George Coates and poet Michael Palmer, Lakoff shows how the frames we employ to make sense of experience are both linguistic and available for art. It is crucial that Lakoff’s linguistic examples are not confined to literature or theater; his concepts of category and frame suggest a larger cultural poetics.
The Way of How, by George Coates. With Leonard Pitt (mime), Paul Dresher (composer),
John Duykers and Rinke Eckert (vocalists). First performed at the Performance Gallery, San Francisco, 11–27 September 1981
Notes for Echo Lake, by Michael Palmer (San Francisco: North Point, 1981)
We make sense of our experiences by categorizing them and framing them in conventional ways. A frame (as the term is used in the cognitive sciences) is a holistic structuring of experience. Each frame comes with a setting, a cast of characters, a collection of props, and a number of actions, states, and/or images. These may be related in various ways, for example, spatially, temporally, by cause-and-effect, means-and-end, plan-and-goal. One typical kind of frame is a scenario for a cultural event: a wedding, lecture, or football game. Another typical kind is a conventional scene, say, a hill with a tree on the slope, or a stagecoach being chased by bandits. Framing requires categorizing; the objects, characters, images, and events must all be of the right kind to fit a given frame. And just about everything we do requires framing of some kind, most of it done so continuously and unconsciously that we don’t notice it.
If we notice framing at all, it is when there is a problem. Are we still in a friendly conversation or has it become an argument? We may need to frame it one way or another to know what to do next. A sequence of events happens. Does the shooting amount to a civil war or a foreign invasion? Our actions, from the most minute to the most momentous, depend on framing and on the corresponding categorizing of people, objects, and events.
Art is framed as art: the curtain rises, the musicians take their seats; the urinal is on the museum wall not in the men’s room. If the art is representational, then we understand what is being represented by using our ordinary non-art frames together with whatever means of framing the genre provides. A traditional play has a plot, that is, a frame that spans the whole work, with a fixed setting or sequences of settings, fixed props, a fixed cast of characters, and a recognizable sequence of events. Now consider a scenario—a structured sequence of actions by a cast of characters with some props. Let a company of actors start the scenario and play it until it becomes clear what kind of scenario it is. Then stop the action. At that point, the scene could be one taken out of an indefinitely large number of other scenarios. Pick one. And let the action continue from that point as part of the new scenario. What we’ve done is shift frames, and in the process the characters, props, images, and events have to be recategorized. If it is done well—and without actually stopping the action—the transition will be smooth. Frame-shifting is one of the basic techniques used by the Blake Street Hawkeyes—George Coates’s alma mater. It’s a technique Coates has mastered, and it is central to the structuring of his pieces.
To work at all, a Coates piece must make use of partial framing and categorization. We don’t (and can’t) frame and categorize every aspect of our experience, however much we may try. Part of Coates’s art is the use of uncategorizable and unframeable objects and actions. The result is not merely a shift from one frame to another, but from the frameable to the unframeable and back. What permits the smoothness of the transitions is the partialness of the framing. A scenario may be partially frameable as an attack by two characters upon a third, but various aspects of the attack frame will be left unfilled—who the characters are, their relationship, the motivation for the attack, etc. The partialness of the framing is part of the art form, and an indispensable part, since this kind of art requires the audience to try constantly to categorize and frame, while never being totally successful. Things unframed gradually become framed, and through the piece there is at each moment some partial framing or other. It is this partial local coherence that holds the piece together, and that constantly holds our attention.
To see what I mean by frame shifts, reperceptions, category shifts, and partial framing and categorization, let us take a sequence from The Way of How. I will divide the sequence up into regions with illustrations so I can talk about it more easily.
Region 1 Eckert, at the end of a sequence, says: “I’m thinking really big.”
Region 2 Duykers, ten feet tall in a black robe, appears at the rear of center stage, and starts singing a decomposition of “Una Furtiva Lagrima.” (He is standing on a wheelchair, which Pitt, who is in the wheelchair under the robe, grad ually moves forward with his feet.) The image is of the ten-foot Duykers moving toward the audience, getting larger and more menacing as he sings.
Region 3 Pitt, in wheelchair, emerges from under Duykers’s cloak as Duykers goes on singing and remains ten feet tall. (Eckert, invisibly from behind, has gotten under the cloak and has taken Duykers on his shoulders.) Pitt in the wheelchair is covered by a black cloak. His covered head barely sticks up over the top of the wheelchair, his body is horizontal, and his legs are extended far forward, moving the wheelchair around. On top of the cloak he is wearing strangely colored goggles on both the front and back of his head, each looking like an otherworldly partial face.
Region 4 Pitt moves about in wheelchair.
Region 5 Duykers and Eckert enter from the sides holding saws at the ends of sticks. They make menacing sawing gestures around Pitt’s head while rubbing the saws together and thus creating music that is elaborated through Dresher’s feedback system.
Region 6 Pitt’s head disappears into the cloak and a plastic bag floats out of where the head disappeared and goes up out of view.
Region 7 The wheelchair with the cloak around it collapses and Pitt emerges from the rear.
Region 8 Pitt pulls a long piece of cloth out of his mouth bit by bit and does various movements.
Region 9 Pitt notices string attached to floating plastic bag and pulls bag down. He puts the bag on his head and then lets it slowly float up again.
Region 10 Two sticks appear, coming down from above on each side of the stage. They stop at the level of Pitt’s ears and start moving toward his head. Duykers and Eckert appear holding the sticks. As the sticks hit Pitt’s ears, Duykers and Eckert sing “Vesti la Giubba.”
Region 11 Duykers and Eckert, still singing, move sticks so that they cross in front of Pitt, emprisoning him.
Region 12 Pitt grabs hold of the sticks in desperation. Duykers and Eckert, still singing, lift him up as he rolls into a ball-like object.
Region 13 They put Pitt in the wheelchair. Dresher enters lying on his back on a dolly, pushing it with his feet. He is carrying five plastic-bag balloons. Duykers and Eckert attach a balloon to each of Pitt’s limbs and one to his mouth.
Throughout these regions there are entities that are not completely categorizable. Duykers ten feet tall, in a black robe moving toward us on wheels. Pitt, low in the wheelchair, head up, body horizontal, feet down, at an inhuman angle, covered completely by a black cloak, with unearthly goggles on both sides of his head, creating the illusion of two faces. The wheelchair collapsing under the black cloak. Pitt rolled into a ball on the sticks. Part of the power of these images is that they are partly, but not completely, characterizable.
The regions are characterized by partial framing. Duykers, in region 2, is a menacing figure, ten feet tall, all in black, moving toward us, getting even bigger, booming out an aria. The emergence of Pitt from under Duykers’s cloak in region 3 is like a birth scene. In region 5, Duykers and Eckert move the saws as if to cut off Pitt’s head, which disappears in region 6, and is replaced by the balloon, which floats up off the body-wheelchair, which then collapses and “dies” in region 7. In region 10, Pitt is made the victim of opera, is imprisoned, turns into a vegetable, and is put in a wheelchair.
Reperception occurs throughout. The bottom of Duykers’s cloak in region 2 is actually Pitt’s cloak, and is reperceived as such in region 3. The plasticbag balloon in region 6 is perceived as replacing Pitt’s head. When the sticks hit Pitt’s ears in region 10, they are perceived as a single pole going through his head. The wheelchair functions as a wheelchair for the first and last time in region 13. In a somewhat later sequence, a stiff pole becomes a snake-like flexible object forming waves, which splits into six short sticks, which then become percussion instruments and later wind instruments.
Sequential frame overlapping is not the only kind of structuring I see in Coates’s art, but I think it is central to the art form. Moreover, I see the same kind of structuring in Michael Palmer’s poetry—again not the only kind of structuring, but a kind that is of central importance. The smoothness in Palmer’s poetry also comes from partial local coherences, partial framings that exist at each point in a poem and that shift gradually as one goes along. Since Palmer’s medium is so different from Coates’s, the framings are naturally of a different kind. Palmer’s medium is language, as written and as spoken. His resources are (among others) syntax, words, images, sounds, individual speech acts, spoken and written genres, etc. Each of these can be viewed as a dimension within which framing can occur. Syntactic constructions are one kind of frame; idiomatic expressions are another; conventional images are another, and so on. At each point in a Palmer poem there is a coherent framing in one or more of these dimensions, and at the same time there may be discontinuities—a lack of framing or a break between frames in other dimensions.
Here are some examples:
An eye remembers history by the pages of the house in flames,
rolls forward like a rose, head to hip, recalling words by their accidents.
“Notes for Echo Lake 11” (68)
Here the syntax provides the local coherence, while the meanings and images overlap and shift from phrase to phrase.
Someone identical with Dante
sits beside a stone. Enough
is enough is enough of.
It’s odd that your hand feels warm …
“Pre-Petrarchan Sonnet” (38)
In line 3 there is an overlap of “enough is enough,” and the syntax breaks off at the end of the line, but the “enough is enough” formula has evoked an expression of frustration that is carried by the breaking of the syntactic frame as well as the semantics of the idiom.
One of the most characteristic of Palmer’s structuring devices is the use of syntax to set up temporal regions of a poem, where the presence of the syntactic element or construction functions like an object or character on stage—evoking a setting, a partial framing which can change gradually.
And throughout the winter each said one sentence
And more were alive than had ever been dead
More than had ever been
A thing said as if spoken as if
A thing told with eyes closed
A chain I dragged along in quotes
In Cairo there had been a fire
Then he read to her displeasure
Then he misremembers the names of the bridges
Then he says seven
Then he says seven inside her …
“Notes for Echo Lake 8” (51)
Region 1: The two lines beginning with “and.”
Region 2: The second and third lines containing “more (…) than had ever been….”
Region 3: The three lines beginning with “a” followed by a noun.
Subregion 3a: The two lines beginning “a thing,” followed by a past tense verb and a manner adverb.
Region 4: The two lines containing “in” followed by a noun (“quotes,” “Cairo”).
Region 5: The four lines beginning with “then.”
What we have is a gradual series of changes in the grammatical cast of characters. The presence of each defines a region of the poem and creates a local coherence.
The art of Coates and Palmer is experientialist art—in which the main focus is experiencing, moment-by-moment, always in the present. To work at all, experientialist art requires constant changes and shifts in perception. The reader or theater-goer can’t just sit back and watch from a distance, secure in the knowledge of where and when the action is located, who’s in the cast of characters, what has gone before, what long-range expectations have been built up. Any of these would take focus away from the changes occurring at the moment. The real action is not just on stage or in the text. It is in the mind of the audience, moment-by-moment, line-by-line, with nothing taken for granted for very long.
Art of this sort has sometimes been mistakenly called meaningless. The mistake comes from an overly narrow view of meaning, one where meaning is objective—in the work rather than in the audience. Contemporary linguists, myself among them, have been challenging the idea that one can speak sensibly of “the meaning of the ______,” where the blank can be filled in by “text,” “sentence,” or even “word.” Meaning (if you want a slogan) is meaningfulness to a person. Linguistic and other symbolic elements are meaningful only in a context, and only to a person who has had a certain range of experience and knowledge, some of which is shared and some of which isn’t. Language evokes frames that constrain the possibilities for meaningfulness, sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely. Since the framing of one’s experience is always partial, any constraints imposed by language are usually open enough to permit a broad range of meaningfulness for most people. Much of the meaningfulness of any experience comes from framing and categorizing. Art like that of Coates and Palmer, art that requires constant reframing, is art that requires its audience to find new (and fragmentary) meaning in the work as it progresses. It is art that is centered around the discovery of meaning.
PUBLICATION: Introduction (1981), 1:68–73.
KEYWORDS: avant-garde; linguistics; performance; meaning.
LINKS: George Lakoff, “The Public Aspect of the Language of Love” (PJ 6); Ed Friedman, “How Space Stations Gets Written” (PJ 5); Félix Guattari, “Language, Consciousness, and Society” (PJ 9); Jackson Mac Low, “Persia/Sixteen/Code Poems” (PJ 4); Joan Retallack, “Blue Notes on the Know Ledge” (PJ 10); Kit Robinson, “Bob Cobbing’s Blade” (PJ 1); Haj Ross, “Poems as Holograms” (PJ 2); Ron Silliman, “Migratory Meaning: The Parsimony Principle in the Poem” (Guide; PJ 2); Barrett Watten, “On Explanation: Art and the Language of Art-Language” (PJ 3).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: with Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); with Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); with Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999); with Rafael Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2004); Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America’s Most Important Idea (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking, 2008).