Tag Archives: history

fourfolds

Hayden White’s Metahistory

1 Comment

sq_metahistory

In 1973, historian Hayden White published Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. His key fourfold was that of literary emplotments due to Northrop Frye: Romance, Comedy, Satire, and Tragedy. White also derived a synoptic table that associated other fourfolds by Stephen Pepper (Organicist, Mechanicist, Formist, and Contextualist), tropes (Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony), plus various modes, ideologies, representational historians, and key philosophers.

I’ve had this fourfold sitting around for a while, and I haven’t written anything about it, because I don’t really agree with the synopticisms as given. For instance, I would pair Romance with Organicism, Comedy with Formism, Satire with Contextualism, and Tragedy with Mechanism. Why? Romance is the “drama of self-identification”, as the organism is self-identified, being that the “individual part of the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Comedy is “harmony between the natural and the social”, as Formism is created by social “classifying, labelling, and categorizing” of natural objects. Tragedy is about the “limitations of the world”, as Mechanism is “finding laws the govern the operations of human activities”. Finally, Satire is the “opposite of romance — people are captives in the world until they die”, whereas Contextualism is “events explained by their relationships to similar events”. That last one isn’t very convincing, but I’ve only switched Romance and Comedy, and left Satire alone.

Again, as with my problems with the synoptic table of Arthur M. Young, it would be nice to play the Game of Fourfolds to see if I can find better arguments for my synoptic claims, or to convince myself that the claims of others are better. Of course, it would probably help for me to read the original works, instead of reading summaries. One might care to look elsewhere for better exposition.

Perhaps I could elaborate further at a later time:

  • Romance: The individual succeeds.
  • Comedy: Most succeed. Society wins.
  • Satire: Most fail. Society comes up short.
  • Tragedy: The individual fails.

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metahistory

[*3.172, *3.173]

<>

 

fourfolds, Philosophy

The Quadralectics of Marten Kuilman

3 Comments

sq_quadralectics Marten Kuilman has written extensively on four-folds and what he calls quadralectics, division-thinking, or four-fold thinking.

Publishing in the Netherlands, his books aren’t available on Amazon. Graciously, he has made several of his works available on the internet via his blogs Quadralectics and Quadriformisratio. Quadriformisratio presents Four – A Rediscovery of the ‘Tetragonus Mundus’, a treatise of four-folds through history, and Quadralectics is his two volume work on Quadralectic Architecture.

Not only does Kuilman expound at length on various four-folds throughout the ages and how they affected the intellectual and artistic developments of the time, his work unifies many of them into his four aspects of visibility: invisible invisibility, invisible visibility, visible visibility, and visible invisibility. Above, I’ve arranged these four aspects by my positions for the four elements. Unfortunately, they aren’t in the same sequence as Kuilman’s quadrants.

Because Kuilman emphasizes a recurring association of  his four-fold of visibility with communication, it is also reminiscent of Hjelmslev’s Net. Then, invisibility could be understood as content, and visibility as expression.

Interestingly, my four-fold of Bright-to-Dark (here or here) is most relatable to this four-fold of visibility, but in the reverse sense that the invisible invisibility is bright, and the visible visibility is dark. One could quickly reconcile this opposition by considering the empty circle as most invisible, and the full circle as most visible.

Another interesting result of Kuilman’s investigations is to derive his four-fold of Unity, Muun (Multi-unity), Part, and Whole, which I believe has important associations with my four-fold Structure-Function.

References:

Marten Kuilman / Four – A Rediscovery of the ‘Tetragonus Mundus’

Marten Kuilman / QUADRALECTIC ARCHITECTURE – A Panoramic Review

http://quadriformisratio.wordpress.com/

http://quadralectics.wordpress.com/

http://quadralectics.wordpress.com/7-the-quadralectic-theory/

[*8.48, *8.52, *8.53, *8.54, *8.55]

<>