Beyond The Literary Theories of Dialogism and Intertextuality; or from Text to Event

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Previous: The Ethics of Addressivity and Answerability: Otherness and Bakhtin's Non-Alibi for Being
Next: The Politics of The Dialogic

Overview

General Focus and Chapter Thesis Questions Raised in Discussion Dialogic Strategies Questions, Comments, Concerns
This chapter aims to move into practice by exploring what being dialogic entails (It anticipates the chapter on practice in important ways)

(a) identify the relations between intertextuality and dialogism via a critique of Intertextuality - (Acknowledge the fashion of theory [Intertexuality has fallen out of fashion] - also, in a way, Kristeva read/reworked Bakhtin via intertextualtiy. So what Rooksby is proposing is a (re)reading of Bakhtin by way of intertextuality - working backwards)focus in particular on the aesthetics - how these approaches the affect sensuous experience - look an example...Sofie Calle's "Take Care of Yourself" as an example of an intertextual artwork.
(b) observe that a problem with intertextuality is that it fetishizes "text" and "reading" at the expensive of spoken expression and "authorial intention" (there's got to be something between "the reader as author" and the intentional fallacy...Rooksby's hunch: this operates at the level of a two-way practice that confounds the divide between "producing" and "produced" - this seems connected to literacy [a later presentation])
(c) dialogues (and utterances) as a chain of context-specific events - situated and specific instances of "encounter" - this encounter is important because considers the extralinguistic - much more than just what's being trafficed between texts....dialogue engages a different kind of encounter than intertextuality via turn taking - not just about reading one text through another but about some kind of sustained and/or traceable interaction. (d) So utterances develop a memory of one another (what Bakhtin would call dialogized dialogue) in a way I'm not sure is true for texts in the case of intertextuality.
(e) Discuss the aesthetics of dialogue (as opposed to intertextuality) by proposing ways that Sophie Calle's "Take Care of Yourself" might have been doubly dialogized

(a) There's a question about labour--what kind of labour the artist (as first party) is doing; what kind of labour are the second and third parties doing and how the artwork provides space/support for these different types of labour.
(b) critique of intertextuality--and by extension dialogue--as been essentially meaningless when it becomes too broad - too metaphorical - Said differently: What are the limitations of a dialogical approach? (This question will be directly addressed in the section on dialogic practice)
(c) discussion around addressivity that relates back to the earlier presentation - Is it really possible for any account to be dialogic? If even there's an address to the reader - a "You" who is directly identified in the artwork, can there really be dialogic engagement if there's no way for this "you" to directly impact the dialogic account?
(c) A question in the discussion about what Rooksby didn't address: Kristeva's sense that intertextualty replaces intersubjectivity. Rooksby's presentation tends to emphasise intrasubjectivity - which is something that all art (as a social enterprise) engages with anyway.
(1) The "remaking" of Calle's work is a central dialogic strategy in this chapter - but it's not just "the proposition" - it's how the "proposition is propositioned" in the context of the barcamp - It needs to enact an example of dialogic practice for this strategy to be successful.
(2) Who is the "you" or the "one" that Rokeby's addressing in his presentation (This evokes the way the "You" operates in Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - see my notes from the TWH? Group here
Obviously aesthetics is more than just the material aspects of something that affects sensuous experience - but like the "ethics question," I'm hoping to weave the "aesthetics question" throughout the thesis.

Presenter Biog Rationale for selection
Don Rooskby - Based on David Rokeby
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source
David Rokeby is an installation artist based in Toronto, Canada. He has been creating and exhibiting since 1982. For the first part of his career he focussed on interactive pieces that directly engage the human body, or that involve artificial perception systems. In the last decade, his practice has expanded to included video, kinetic and static sculpture. His work has been performed / exhibited in shows across Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. source Rokeby is both artist and art theorist and his work around what might be called "genuine interactivity" makes him an interesting figure in this regard. See Transforming Mirrors for his work on subjectivity and control in interactive media.

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