On Friday I talked to my friend K about the definition of "mode." If I understand her perspective, "mode" has three kinds of features: mode (a) emerges from the weighted majority of tropes (tropes of both content and form), (b) projects an idealized form, but exists solely in textual and material features, and (c) emerges from the intersection of content and form.
Just for the sake of argument, I started thinking about alternatives theories of mode. For starters, I might conjure up objections about (b) the nature of the idealized mode, or (c) the form-content distinction. More importantly, I wondered (a) what if mode is a fundamental channel of narrative, rather than an emergent effect? Since Aristotle is very sharp at distinguishing between substances and accidents, actualities and potentialities, I decided to look at the term "mode" in Poetics.
"Mode" may be the least-theorized term in Aristotle's Poetics. Aristotle introduces Poetics mode in the ταξις (taxis, second paragraph): "Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. They differ, however, from one another in three respects- the medium, the objects, the manner or mode of imitation, being in each case distinct" (Poetics 1.1). He goes on to define "mode" according to the narrative speaker. (NB: At the end of this paragraph, Aristotle demonstrates the proof by "notation and conjugates," one of his more obscure topics of invention.)
There is still a third difference- the manner in which each of these objects may be imitated. For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration- in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged- or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us.
These, then, as we said at the beginning, are the three differences which distinguish artistic imitation- the medium, the objects, and the manner. So that from one point of view, Sophocles is an imitator of the same kind as Homer- for both imitate higher types of character; from another point of view, of the same kind as Aristophanes- for both imitate persons acting and doing. Hence, some say, the name of 'drama' is given to such poems, as representing action. For the same reason the Dorians claim the invention both of Tragedy and Comedy. The claim to Comedy is put forward by the Megarians- not only by those of Greece proper, who allege that it originated under their democracy, but also by the Megarians of Sicily, for the poet Epicharmus, who is much earlier than Chionides and Magnes, belonged to that country. Tragedy too is claimed by certain Dorians of the Peloponnese. In each case they appeal to the evidence of language. The outlying villages, they say, are by them called komai, by the Athenians demoi: and they assume that comedians were so named not from komazein, 'to revel,' but because they wandered from village to village (kata komas), being excluded contemptuously from the city. They add also that the Dorian word for 'doing' is dran, and the Athenian, prattein. (Poetics 1.3) (emphasis added)I think Aristotle also seems to agree with K insofar as the history of mode is material and social: the argument from notation and conjugates implies, at least, that the history and nomenclature of "tragedy," "comedy," &c., is determined by the etymology of various Achaian/Hellenic dialects. I would caution, however, that Aristotle's remarks are restricted to the nomenclature, and he doesn't make a proto-Stanley Fish move to define all textual effects by their interpretive communities.
Aristotle also agrees with K insofar as mode breaks the content-form division. "[T]he poet may imitate by narration," and thereby the poet may bring the represented character to the diegetic level of the representation. But Aristotle doesn't use anything analogous to the content-form division. I think the content-form distinction may be complicated with an unusual connection in Aristotle's works.
I like to relate Aristotle's Poetics to his De Anima, because the fictive beings of Poetics, such as characters, should resemble the organic beings of De Anima if Aristotle's general theories of mimesis should hold. And if Aristotle defines mode as "imitat[ion of character] by narration," then the mode of character narration is both a poetic and an animate concern.
So in De Anima, Aristotle lists four ways of defining an organic being: according to its material, its shape, its origins, or its ends. Aristotle thinks the best way to capture of this is through hylomorphism, which translates to something like matter-shape-ism. Once Aristotle understands the matter and the form of an organic being, he also understands its origins and its ends. I think K & I can generally agree on the origins of texts (human authors) and the ends (human audiences), so that just leaves the matter and the shape. I think K is absolutely right about the material of mode: mode is something that's materially assembled from text. And my principal objection concerns the shape of mode.
A hylomorphic compromise between K's perspective and my counter-arguments would describe mode as something an author makes out of text for an audience in some shape. That shape, I would posit from Poetics, is defined by the relationship it yields between authors, narrators, characters, narratees, and audiences.
