On Aug 25, 2008, at 10:02 AM, William Conger wrote:
To seek blankness, meaninglessness, is merely the effort to open up associative cognition, to make all associations seemingly equal, to pretend to return to some primitive state of mind when everything external to it was "anything at all".
This approaches the Russian Formalists' notion of c. 1916 of "making strange" from the other direction. By offering the viewer something that does not readily simulate or evoke or call to mind natural images or other referents, these paintings seem strange and, at first, meaningless. The theorists (among them, Shklovsky, Jakobson, Eichenbaum, and others) developed the concept of 'ostranenie' ("making strange") in literature, and they asserted that poetry pushed forward unusual imagery and such devices as rhythms, meter, and rhyme--which were not commonly evident in ordinary speech--in order to wrench their subjects from their habituated invisibility or routineness in everyday experience and, by "making strange" bring them to the awareness of the listener or reader.
I've said many times that this state of mind is doubtless impossible, given our fetal stage neural development at least, but it is a worthy quest for the sake of opening our minds to newness. At any moment everything in existence is without any meaning whatsoever and at any moment everything in existence has all potential meanings. Then we choose and mostly we choose to imitate. Except in art where "make-believe" is the most wonderous adventure possible.
A good point, insofar as every mental association can be untied from its original context and connected to another context. Empirical science is premised on the notion that natural objects follow regular "laws" or behaviors, which can be reproduced with a specified degree of exactness and certitude. Words, of course, are far more profligate and randy, and move around among many "meanings" with almost no qualms or hesitancy. Words and images, principally, and a few facial and bodily gestures, are mapped onto experience in a way that reflects the "meanings" that others agree upon.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [EMAIL PROTECTED]
