Abstract: The scene of human culture is not found in nature; it is staged. Each of the utterance forms of language is a staging, whether it be the ostensive that stages an element of the world (Fire!), the imperative that forces the world to realize the staging implicit in the linguistic sign, or the declarative that allows us to construct in our imagination a fictive staging of this world. It is this latter category that most concerns Wolfgang Iser, but the imaginary construc tion of the fictive is conceivable only on the basis of the more elementary forms that link the world of signs with the world of originary experience. Staging as an Anthropological Category is the title of the last section of Iser's major work of literary anthropology, The Fictive and the Imagi nary.1 In the epilogue, Iser puts aside his categories of fictive and imaginary, first for those of and and finally for that of staging. All these last are anthropological categories in the sense that they explicitly abandon the dual subject-object relation of metaphysics for a scenic configuration in which the sign mediates among the members of a collective audience. A performance, the classical locus of mimesis as it has been understood since Aristotle, takes place before the representatives of the community, who observe the generation of a transcendent world of meanings out of human interac tion. To refer to the fictions that we enjoy in the privacy of our imagination as staged is to remind us of the communal source of these as of all representations. I would contend that the transcendence of reality through representa tion implicit in the categories of mimesis, performance, and staging, a transcendence that is for Iser the raison d'?tre of the human as a literary being, can most parsimoniously be explained by means of a generative hypothesis of origin. The impossibility of attaining the real otherwise than through representation?an impossibility that defines humanity from the beginning?is at the same time the basis of the imagination's capacity to liberate itself from the culturally given to explore the implicit potential of new, hypothetical realities. Generative thinking observes this process of liberation from the minimally disruptive standpoint of its hypothetical scene of origin.
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-12-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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