William wrote: > Listers know how strongly I've advocated ambiguity, in the poetic metaphorical > sense of "multiple meanings" as relevant to art expression. In other words, > nothing kills art faster than "one-liner" content. In fact, I have long > asserted that the more complex the content, the more associative meanings > evoked, the more seeming contradictions they put into play, the better. Of > course, this sort of ambiguity and meaninglessness can be very clear and > powerful.
William the Conjurer uses "meaningless" in a meaningful way, meaning "ambiguous." A nice sleight of terms. Ambiguity is not meaninglessness; it's a lack of singularity, it's poly-"the"-ism (that's for CSKP), it's openendedness, it's an ambi-pamby word. <g> Some ambiguities, such as the Necker Cube, the Duck-Rabbit, or Rubin's Vase (the face-vase figure-ground illusion), provoke at least two equally probably interpretations, but both interpretations cannot be held simultaneously without contradiction. There are a few pairs of identical words (in English) that are exactly contradictory, e.g., "cleave." (Actually these two words aren't syntactically identical: "cleave," to split, is transitive and takes a direct object directly, whereas "cleave," to join, is immediately followed by a prepositional phrase introduced by "to.") "More associative meanings" doesn't necessarily imply "more seeming contradictions," merely doubt about interpretation. Saul's comment, "Art and language are best when they are imprecise," barely rises above a bumper-sticker aphorism but it touches on a fundamental aspect of representation, namely, that the representation is less than the referent. It reduces the referent in many ways and by many degrees of magnitude. In fact, a more precise version of Saul's aphorism would be "Art and language are always imprecise." The moment when the maker or viewer notices the differences between the image or word on one side and its referent on the other is the moment when reinterpretation, realigning of the parts of the comparison begins. And next comes ambiguity, doubt, and eventually the moment of explicit fiction, when non-existent referents are just 'made up' by the speaker or artist to test what the new creation (horse + horn on forehead) proposes. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
