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Deforming Gertrude Stein: A scholarly book in progress Main Menu Introduction: Deformance as a critical-creative research method DEFORMANCES - OBJECTS | OBJECTS Supplement: What's Behind the Door? Large Language Models in Humanities Experimental Methods Works Cited Acknowledgements

Sobchack

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Vivian Carol Sobchack, in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, argues that film has been understood through three ruling metaphors: the window, the frame, and the mirror. She discusses the window metaphor as one connected to the realist understanding of cinema.

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Reading [A CHAIR | CHAIR A] Backwards: Puns and fenestral innovations
This page annotates A Widow, the first deformance in a series of A CHAIR | CHAIR A

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⇒ LANGUAGE
"A widow in a wise veil and more garments shows that shadows are even. It addresses no more, it shadows the stage and learning. A regular arrangement, the severest and the most preserved is that which has the arrangement not more than always authorised." - Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons, Claire Marie, 1914, 13-14
This deformance renders Stein's punning language visible.
The LLM interpreted the text prompt literally. A widow in a veil became a wi[n]dow and curtains.

►What was Stein asking here? What's with this wi[n]dow [ad]dressing?

⇒ HISTORY OF IDEAS
“all media operate like windows because, far from merely providing innocent visual, acoustical or linguistic images of the world, they restructure how we perceive the world in the first place” (Kobnick 6).
With her pun, Stein seems to be connecting to a long history of windows in philosophy and literature.

Beginning with Leon Battista Alberti, who conceived of perspectival painting as an “open window,” (54) there has been a long tradition of imagining visual media via the model of the window. Leonardo da Vinci suggested that “perspective is nothing else than seeing a place behind a pane of glass, quite transparent, on the surface of which the objects behind the glass are to be drawn,” while Descartes viewed the window as a framework for viewing moral experience. Indeed, as Anne Friedberg notes, the window has been a central figure in the theorization of the space of vision, and “a key measure of epistemic changes in representational systems” (5). More recently, scholars in film studies and digital studies ranging from Stephen Heath who links the cinematic screen to Renaissance and Post- Renaissance painting’s “fascination with the rectangle of tamed light, the luminously defined space of vision” (34) to Vivian Sobchack, to Mark Hansen, and Lev Manovich have sought to understand the significance of the continuities and discontinuities between conceptions of representational media as windows onto the world.

While a camera he LLM (Runway) zooms into the wi[n]dow's veil. Stein's own interest in wi[n]dows might have to do with the way they operate as delimiters, marking difference between inside and outside, absence and presence, opacity and transparency:
The window as an opening in a wall refers to an absence which can be filled - by a material (glass, wood, paper, stone), by that which is seen through it, or by something rather immaterial like light or air. If defined as an absence, the window becomes a frame for its variable content, a marker of difference between what is inside and outside. Orell, "Window"
Stein's wi[n]dow has lost their other, and this too is carried in the idea of windows:
“The window is a framework of human construction. And since, in Descartes's text, it is a framework for viewing others, it implicitly becomes a framework for interpersonal, and therefore moral experience.... To see others through a window frame is to see others as beings in a picture, as in some sense man-made, the products of artifice.” ( Levin, 42-43)
Like windows, stage curtains, as açalya Allmer emphasizes, are also conceptual operators, delimiting foreground and background, spectator and spectacle: "They both protect what is behind but at the same time they sustain the hope that what is secret behind them might be revealed at any moment. The dichotomy between inside and outside, hidden and revealed, given and withheld."

⇒SHAPES

Carl Peters notes, in Studies in Description, that Stein's poem "A CHAIR" is "[c]leverly placed after the poem above [A PIANO] and its words 'the center is in standing': 'A Chair' (for sitting)" (Peters 69).

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