RELATED TERMS: Metalepsis; Postmodernism

A metanarrative may be understood as a narrative about narration, for example, experimenting with or exploring the idea of storytelling by drawing attention to its own artificiality. In this sense, there are resonances with a Genettian conception of literary or narrative metalepsis, where boundaries between narrative levels are transgressed.

Possibly more importantly for design practices, a metanarrative, otherwise known as a grand narrative, a master narrative or a narrative of mastery, is a term developed by Jean-François Lyotard, by which he intends a theory that seeks to give a totalising, comprehensive account to various historical events, experiences, and social, cultural phenomena based upon the appeal to universal truth or universal values.

In Lyotard’s theorisation, a narrative is a story that functions to legitimise power, authority and social customs. Thus, a metanarrative is one that claims to explain various events in history, giving them meaning by inter-connecting disparate events and phenomena through an appeal to some kind of universal knowledge or universal schema. Examples of such, often teleological, metanarratives include Marxism, religious doctrines, belief in progress and belief in universal reason.

As expressed by Christine Brooke-Rose (1991), “Our ‘postmodern’ situation … has been defined by Lyotard … as one of ‘incredulity with regard to metanarratives’ (in the sense of universalist Big Ideas, such as the emancipation of man, of reason; from ignorance, from inequality; the Hegelian or the Marxist metanarratives, etc.) and a recommended preference for ‘little’ narratives.”

Environmental design practices may wish to draw to attention the metanarrative assumptions at play in particular sites, for example, monuments or squares that evoke a country’s imperial or colonial past.

References

Brooke-Rose, C. (1991) Whatever happened to narratology?, in Stories, theories and things. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 16–27.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

New World Encyclopedia contributors (2018) ‘Metanarrative’. New World Encyclopedia. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Metanarrative&oldid=1014622 [Accessed 12 March 2021]

RELATED TERMS: Cinema and Film Studies; Deixis and Deictic Acts; Diegese and Diegesis; Diegetic Levels; Intradiegetic and Extradiegetic; Ontological Designing; Ontological Metalepsis; Performance and Performativity; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop; Theatre; 

Metalepsis in Rhetoric

Metalepsis in rhetoric has a different meaning from the use of metalepsis in narratology, theatre studies and cinema studies. In a yet further extended sense, metalepsis has an important role to play in transmedia phenomena and, most importantly, in the design of narrative environments.

In rhetoric, metalepsis is a trope which is similar to metaphor and metonymy, or perhaps combines them, as when metonymy (use of one word for another with which it is associated) is used to replace a word already used figuratively (metaphorically). For example, if the word ‘sable’ replaces the word ’black’ in the phrase ‘black caverns’, black is already figurative, standing for ‘dark’ or ‘gloomy’ or perhaps ‘dark and gloomy’. Thus, ‘sable’, already in a metonymic relation to ‘black’, in this new context takes on additional meanings of ‘dark’ and ‘gloomy’, with which it was not necessarily associated previously.

A metalepsis, as the example above shows, is a transgression of a common usage, such as the association of sable and black, through which the figure of speech is used in a new and innovative context, sable as connoting dark and gloomy rather than simply the colour black.

Metalepsis in Narratology

Gerard Genette extended the realm of metalepsis from rhetoric to fiction, in the process transforming it into a narratological concept (Petho, 2010). For Genette, fiction itself is an extension of the logic of the trope which relies on our capacity to imagine something as if it were real. Thus, for Genette, metalepsis creates a paradoxical loop through the ontological levels of the real and the fictional. This is a common feature of meta-fictional works, in which such shifts serve to foreground the artifice of the fictional world as well as the illusory nature of any ontological boundary between the story and narration. As a narrative device, it can be understood as a breaking of the narrative frame which separates distinct narrative levels, for example, between an embedded tale and primary story or when a third-person narrator appears within the fictional world of which s/he narrates.

As Macrae explains, interpreting Genette, in the context of literary fiction, the simplest ontological structure has three levels: the level of the story (the diegesis), at which the characters exist; the level of the narration (the extradiegesis), at which the narrator exists, for example, through third-person narration; and the level of the real, at which the reader and author exist. In contrast to the reality of the world in which the book is authored and read, the diegesis and the extradiegesis are both fictional.

Metalepsis has been used in the context of theatre, when characters onstage refer directly to the audience as if they are a character in the play, and into cinema, for example, when a screen actor steps out of a projected film within a film, as in Woody Allen’s 1985 film, The Purple Rose of Cairo. Such techniques are sometimes referred to as ‘breaking the fourth wall’, a metaphor taken from the architecture of the theatre, where three walls enclose the stage and an invisible fourth wall is omitted for the sake of the viewer. The (cinema, television, computer) screen technologises this ‘fourth wall’.

Brian McHale (1987) argues that a characteristic of postmodernist fiction is the foregrounding, through metalepsis, of the ontological dimension of recursive embedding. It is this emphasis on the ontological implications of transgressions of narrative levels that is of particular interest to the design of narrative environments.

When it comes to the specificity of the use of the term metalepsis within the design of narrative environments, taken as phenomena that examine how the metalepsis of ‘artifice’ and ‘life’ is becoming part of the real in the everyday experience of our lives, the insights of Jamie Freestone (2017) are particularly relevant. Freestone notes that recent scholars of narrative, such as Bell and Alber (2012) and Ryan (1995; 2006), following McHale (1987), it should be noted, identify metalepsis as part of a more general category of strange loops. Beyond describing the tangle of levels in a fictional text, metalepsis, as well as being extended to other media, increasingly figures in other discourses, such as logic, computer science, linguistics, and the natural sciences, where it is used to refer to the way physical (‘real’) levels are tangled as much as diegetic or representational levels.

The example which Freestone explores is that of gene editing. He points out that narratives of evolutionary history, such as Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, employ two techniques that contribute to metaleptic effects: a pervasive textual metaphor, which figures the genome as a text to be read and copied, and nowadays to be edited through gene manipulation technologies; and a personification of genes, such that the genome is presented as the author of organisms’ behaviour, including humans behaviour. Freestone reasons that, taking into account recent developments in gene-editing technologies and their potential future advances, the genome-as-text and genome-as-author metaphors implicate us as readers in a novel configuration: we find ourselves editing a text that itself has authored us. This, he concludes, is a novel kind of metalepsis. As he explains, “The term “editing” designates an intervention from a high level into a low level, where the higher level is dependent on the lower level to exist”. This relationship is characteristic of a tangled hierarchy or a strange loop.

The proliferation of different kinds of metalepsis led Monika Fludernik (2003: 396) to distinguish between real ontological metalepsis and metaphorical ontological metalepsis. The former involves the transgression of ontological levels in the story (diegesis), for example, when a narrator enters a story-within-a-story. The latter occurs when, for example, the narrator positions him- or herself as an invisible observer in the scene of the story without affecting it. However, these concern the relations between the diegetic and the extradigetic. Freestone, as indeed is the design of narrative environments, is more concerned with actual ontological metalepsis, in which real nontextual levels are tangled, such as when an actual strange loop occurs in the real world with an edit of the text of the genome.

Metalepsis and the Design of Narrative Environments

When used in the design of narrative environment design, it not just the transgressive character of metalepsis which is important, that is, taking something from one context and placing it in another, thereby giving it new meanings. This a manoeuvre that it shares with other literary and avant-garde practices such as collage, assemblage, detournement and Ostranenie (making strange). Rather, it is the combination of this transgression with the extension of transgression to ontological levels beyond the diegetic-extradiegetic boundary, towards the reflexive re-writing or re-making of the creative or the authoring level by the created or authored level, thereby putting into question the ontological status of the subjective entity involved in the ‘re-writing’ of its own self, along with the assumptions that the subjective entity makes about the ontological structuring of the real in which it is immersed and upon which it depends.

This is the kind of tangled hierarchy or strange loop which the design of narrative environments seeks to evoke and create, in which the narratee, as the authored level, enters into the re-writing of its self and its own world. Gene-editing is but one metaphor and example of such processes. This possibility arises because of the inseparability of the subjective, the narrative and the environmental dimensions of the narrative environment, each of which may serve as the top level for the other’s bottom level, with the third term intervening, in a series of interconnected tangled hierarchies or strange loops. In this way, for example, what is assumed to be environmental emerges, through the subjective, in the midst of the narrative, and vice versa; what is assumed to be subjective emerges, through the narrative, in the midst of the environmental, and vice versa; and what is assumed to be narrative emerges, through the environmental, in the midst of the subjective, and vice versa.

One feature that may distinguish the design of narrative environments from other modes of design, then, is that it consciously takes into account the condition of all design: that it seeks to un-throw or over-throw the world into which it has been ‘thrown’, a world full of existing ‘designs’. In this condition, design is always re-design. Equally, design presents a paradox or an aporia: design is the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ that is ‘design’. Perhaps this is the terrain in which the notions of ontological metalepsis and ontological design have value, enabling us to recognise the ‘fiction’, the construction, the mediation, the performativity and the immersivity of our ‘being’, or our being in-between, which is a process of constantly being thrown-over-thrown, made-re-made or designed-re-designed.

A warning note

Hal Foster (2002: 193) sounds a warning note in respect of the metalepses and transgressions that may occur in a narrative environment, borrowed from modernist and avant-garde art practices and their reiteration in post-modernism, when he proposes the thesis that, “contemporary design is part of a greater revenge taken by advanced capitalism on postmodernist culture – a recouping of its crossings of arts and disciplines, a routinization of its transgressions.”

Allan Parsons, May 2021

References

Bell, Alice, and Jan Alber (2012) “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology.” Journal of Narrative Theory, 42(2), 166– 92.

Fludernik, Monika (2003) “Scene Shift , Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode.” Style, 37(4), 382– 400.

Foster, H. (2002) ‘The ABCs of contemporary design’, October, 100, pp. 191–199. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779099 (Accessed: 7 September 2016).

Freestone, J. M. (2017) ‘The Selfish Genre’, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 9(1), pp. 225–246. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/storyworlds.9.1-2.0225 (Accessed: 10 March 2021).

Macrae, A. (2019) Discourse deixis in metafiction: the language of metanarration, metalepsis and disnarration. New York, NY: Routledge.

McHale, B. (1987) Postmodernist fiction. London, UK: Routledge.

Petho, A. (2010) ‘Intermediality as Metalepsis in the “Cinécriture” of Agnès Varda’, Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 3(3), pp. 69–94. Available at: http://www.acta.sapientia.ro/acta-film/C3/film3-5.pdf (Accessed: 27 October 2019).

Ryan, Marie- Laure (1995) “Allegories of Immersion: Virtual Narration in Postmodern Fiction.” Style 29.2: 262– 86.

Ryan, Marie- Laure (2006). Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

RELATED TERMS: Anthropology; Practice

Material culture is a notion crucial to design practices. As Daniel Miller (2005) highlights, the less aware we are of the objects that surround us, the more powerfully they can determine our anticipated actions by setting the scene and encouraging normative behaviour, without being open to challenge. They assert without seeming to assert. Thus, objects determine what takes place to the extent that we remain unconscious of their capacity to do so.

Part of the task of a critical design practice is to make explicit the capacity of objects and environments to act, that is, their actantiality, their status as actants, and to use that awareness of ‘objective’ actantiality to bring to attention, and possibly to alter, the ways we act and interact with each other through environmental actants.

Such a perspective, Miller (2005, 5) argues, can properly be described as that of ‘material culture’, “since it implies that much of what we are, exists not through our consciousness or body, but as an exterior environment that habituates and prompts us.”

This capacity of objects to fade out of focus and to remain peripheral to our vision yet determinant of our behaviour and identity also becomes, according to Bourdieu, the primary means by which people are socialised as social beings, an insight that Bourdieu forged by developing the thought of Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss demonstrated how anthropologists needed to abandon the study of entities and consider things only as defined by the relationships that constituted them. For Levi-Strauss, this became a grand ordering implying a largely intellectual foundation, with myth as philosophy. Bourdieu, however, turned this into a much more contextualised theory of practice.

He did so by stressing that the expectations characteristic of our particular social group are to a large extent inculcated through what we learn in our engagement with the relationships found between everyday things. The categories, orders and the placements of objects, such as the spatial oppositions in the home or the relationship between agricultural implements and the seasons. Each order is taken to be homologous with other orders, such as gender or social hierarchy. In this way, the less tangible aspects of a society are groundeded in the more tangible. Once these associations are fixed, they become habitual ways of being in the world which, as an underlying order, emerged as second nature or habitus. Bourdieu thus combined a Marxian emphasis on material practice with the phenomenological insights of figures such as Merleau-Ponty (1989) into a fundamental deictic system, enabling us to point to the world and to orient ourselves within it.

Historical notes

Daniel Miller (1998) comments that material culture studies developed through a two-stage process. In the first phase, it was demonstrated that things matter and that to focus upon material worlds does not fetishize them since they are not a separate superstructure to social worlds. The key theories of material culture developed in the 1980s, for example, those of Bourdieu, Appardurai and Miller himself, showed that social worlds were as much constituted by materiality as the other way around. This gave rise to a variety of approaches to the issue of materiality, for example, on an analogy with text or through the application of models from social psychology.

The second phase focuses on the diversity of material worlds which become each other’s contexts, rather than reducing them to models of the social world, on the one hand, or to specific subdisciplinary concerns, such as the study of textiles or architecture, on the other hand. In this situation, studies of the house do not have to be reduced to housing studies, nor studies of design to design studies.

Material culture studies does not exist as a given discipline. There are many advantages to remaining ‘undisciplined’ and many disadvantages and constraints imposed by trying to claim disciplinary status. Much the same could be said of the design of narrative environments, which can explore the advantages of being multi-, inter- or trans-disciplinary and, as a result, ‘undisciplined’.

References

Miller, D. (ed.) (1998) Material cultures: why some things matter. London, UK: UCL Press.

Miller, D. (2005). Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

RELATED TERMS: Anthropology;

In anthropology, as discused by Victor Turner, liminality, from the Latin word līmen, meaning ‘a threshold’, is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of rituals, defined as a psychic-temporal-physical space. At this moment, participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the ritual is complete. During a ritual’s liminal stage, that is, in the liminal space, participants ‘stand at the threshold’ between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way, which the ritual establishes.

What is interest in the design of narrative environments is the condition of being in-between, or betwixt and between, the world of the story, on the one hand, and the world of the everyday, the lifeworld, on the other hand, which occurs when the participant generates and enters the storyworld instantiated by the narrative environment. In that sense, a narrative environment might be said to constitute a liminal space and progress through it similar to engaging in a ritual practice. Narrative environments may, however, only be ‘liminoid’ or ‘liminal-like’, rather than ‘authentically’ liminal, as Stephen Bigger (2009) discusses:

“The concept of liminality (the state of being on a threshold) was applied [by Turner] both to major upheavals and to performances generally, distinguishing only between ‘authentic’ liminality, and playful artifices such as the theatre which are named liminoid, or liminal-like. Liminality is viewed as an in-between state of mind, in between fact and fiction (in Turner’s language indicative and subjunctive), in between statuses. This concept has endured in performance studies and has the potential for wider usage.”

A liminal space can be a key component of a narrative environment. A liminal space can be either a physical or a temporal space, and often both at the same time, but it is always a psychic space.

Liminal spaces are places/times in which the audience is disorientated/moved from their normative assessment of ‘reality’ in order to prepare them for a different ‘reality’ presented in the main narrative space.

An account of a temporal liminal space is given by Daisetz Suzuki, a 20th century Zen Master, as cited by John Cage (1973: 88) in Silence:

“Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. After telling this, Dr. Suzuki. was asked, “What is the difference between before and after?” He said, “No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground.”

Victor Turner, 1920–1983, working with his wife Edith Turner, was an anthropologist deeply concerned with ritual both in tribal communities and in the contemporary developed world. Since the work of Turner in the 1960s, usage of the term liminality has broadened to refer to political and cultural change. During liminal periods of all kinds, social hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, continuity of tradition may become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt. The dissolution of order during liminality creates a fluid, malleable situation that enables new institutions and customs to become established.

References

Bigger, S. (2009) Victor Turner, liminality, and cultural performance [Review of Victor Turner and contemporary cultural performance, edited by Graham St. John, New York and Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2008], Journal of Beliefs & Values, 30(2), pp. 209–212. doi: 10.1080/13617670903175238.

Cage, J. (1973) Silence: lectures and writings by John Cage. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

Thomassen, B. (2009) The Uses and Meanings of Liminality. International Political Anthropology, 2 (1), 5-28.

Horvath, A., Thomassen, B. and Wydra, H. (2009) Introduction: Liminality and Cultures of Change. International Political Anthropology, 2 (1), 1-4

Szakolczai, A. (2009) Liminality and experience: Structuring transitory situations and transformative events. International Political Anthropology 2 (1), 141-172

RELATED TERMS: Reception Theory and Reader Response Criticism; Semiotics

Intertextuality, and its cognate term, citationality, is the shaping of a specific text’s meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another.

It is likely that the design of any particular narrative environment will involve the citation other prior texts, designs, media productions and environments, from which it will derive part of its meaning. Such citation may have the character of a detournement, where the meaning of the cited item is radically altered. It is an acknowledgement that a narrative environment is, in many ways, like a collage, assemblage or montage, all practices of citation and re-contextualisation.

It is this awareness that ‘writing’, and by extension ‘designing’, involves the borrowing of elements, their re-contextualisation and the new meanings that emerge (the invention) that underlies Derrida’s practice of deconstruction, which engages with the invention that arises from re-contextualisation, the history and memory that comes along with the cited item and the tension or accord between the older and the newer meanings, which may give rise to contradictions, paradoxes or aporia (non-sequiturs, questions, puzzles).

As Edward Said (2003, 14) comments,

“Most humanistic scholars are … perfectly happy with the notion that texts exist in contexts, that there is such a thing as intertextuality, that the pressures of conventions, predecessors, and rhetorical styles limit what Walter Benjamin once called the ‘overtaxing of the productive person in the name of . . . the principle of ‘creativity,’ ‘ in which the poet is believed on his own, and out of his pure mind, to have brought forth his work.”

Similarly, Keir Elam points to the intertextual basis of theatre as a frame. Appropriate decoding of a given text derives above all from the audience’s familiarity with other texts, a skill acquired by learning textual rules. The genesis of the performance is also intertextual, as it bears the traces of prior performances at every level from the written text through the mise en scene, the actor to the directorial style and so on. In this way, any text, according to Julia Kristeva (1970, 12), ‘is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality. In the space of a single text several énoncés from other texts cross and neutralize each other’.

The ‘ideal’ audience, given this multi-layered citationality, is one endowed with a sufficiently detailed, and judiciously employed, textual background to enable them to identify all relevant relations and use them as an interpretive matrix. In practice, people bring whatever level of skill they have attained to the decoding and appreciation of the text/performance, opening to the domain of reception theory and reader response criticism.

In popular culture, intertextuality refers to the incorporation of meanings of one text within another in a reflexive fashion. For example, the television show The Simpsons includes references to films, other television shows and celebrities. These intertextual references assume that viewers know the people and cultural products being referenced.

References

Elam, K. (1980) The Semiotics of theatre and drama. London, UK: Routledge.

Kristeva, J. (1970) Le Texte du roman: approche sémiologique d’une structure discursive transformationelle. The Hague: Mouton.

Said, E. (2003) Orientalism. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Sturken M. and Cartwright, L. (2001). Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

RELATED TERMS: Philosophy

Intentionality has a more commonsense meaning, relating to one’s intention or what means to do or to say, and a more philosophical sense, which concerns the directedness of consciousness towards its other(s), highlighting the dependence of thought upon the world, in contrast to an idealist view of the self-sufficiency of consciousness.

Both senses have value for design practices, in relation to its purposefulness (what it intends to do), on the one hand, and its ‘aboutness’, on the other hand (what it is about).

Intentionality in design concerns the purpose or function of the design as meant by its creator or as interpreted by its audience or users, two perspectives that may differ

In graphic design, intentionality is often discussed in philosophical terms, especially in relation to language (Noble and Bestley, 2011). Some philosophers argue that intentionality is characteristic of a concept or an intention.

In philosophy, intentionality is related to mental states such as remembering, believing, knowing or experiencing as well as to the concept of free will.

In phenomenology, intentionality is taken to mean that ideas are directed toward an object, with the suggestion that all conscious states are characterised by such ‘directedness’ or ‘aboutness’. Thus,

“One of the core theses of phenomenology is the claim that all consciousness is consciousness of an other-than-consciousness. Consciousness simply is this aiming at or intending an object. This is Husserl’s famous thesis of intentionality as the defining characteristic of the mental.” (Flynn, 2006)

References

Flynn, T. R. (2006). Jean-Paul Sartre. In Borchert, D. M. (ed.) Encyclopedia of philosophy. Volume 8: Price – Sextus. 2nd edn. Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, pp.603-612

Noble, I and Bestley, R. (2011). Visual Research: an introduction to research methodologies in graphic design, 2nd ed. Lausanne, CH: AVA Publishing.