ACTIVITY REPORT PT 1

 In this essay from last May, I preserved this nugget from Whitehead's book SYMBOLISM:

Here [Whitehead] states that his concept of reality is that "every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it." I would imagine statements like this caused Whitehead to be labeled a de facto advocate of "panpsychism." But I find it interesting that he uses a form of activity as his baseline, in contrast to Aristotle's law of identity, which was predicated on a self-evident identity of being, the celebrated "A is A." 

For whatever reason I reread that section recently and later found myself comparing it to what I remembered writing about my definition of icons in the first essay where I coined the term, I THINK ICON I THINK ICON. Had I said something about defining icons in terms of action? Turns out the answer is, "a little bit yes, a little bit no."

The base rule for an icon to be "strongly definable" is that the icon must either be given a name in the story or must have some characteristic or perform some action for which the icon can be named.  

I also noted that while one could formally term any entity within a fictional story to be an icon, in practice we only pay attention to the icons that either perform some action or represent some principle within the narrative, while those entities that don't meet those criteria (as I'm now refining things) 'don't merit iconic titles, so that no one bothered to label "that cop who shot at Spider-Man in that one Romita story" or "the 553rd lion killed by Tarzan."'

Whitehead, of course, is speaking of entities within the real world, so his baseline of "activity" is logical. In fictional narratives, all of the icons exist as propositions, so they are not always defined by "kinetic activity," by actually doing things in the story, but also by representing abstract quality-- which is what I take from my words "some characteristic"-- that important to the story. A pertinent example of an inactive character whose significance stems wholly of his enigmatic characteristics is the title character of Herman Melville's BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. As the Wiki summary indicates, the title character is a young 19th-century clerk who goes to work for a legal firm, and then, for no evident reason, simply ceases to work, yet will not actually leave the premises of the firm. Even when taken to prison for his intransigence, Bartleby simply declines to take any action at all, even that of eating, and so expires. In my 2013 essay THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT, I said that Ray Bradbury's story "The Last Night of the World" might possess the absolute least amount of conflict that I'd ever encountered. But BARTLEBY is at least the equal of "Last Night" in that respect.

So fictional icons are not definable only by what Whitehead calls "activity." What should one call the form of authorial will that manifests not in actions, but in simply "embodying" what I called a "characteristic?" I think I finally found a use for my earlier term "resonance," which back in May 2023 I considered as a metaphor for centricity, only to discard that theory in favor of eminence last July. It now seems to me that those icons that are not active, like Bartleby, still impinge upon readers because whatever abstractions they embody have a resonance between the universality of fictional depictions and the particularity of actual reader-experience. 

More to come.