My three responses follow.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Saul Ostrow" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2010 9:08 PM
Subject: Re: "There9s more alienation and separation of people in a
commodified landscape ...
I think you are confusing two different notions of free here
1. not restricted
2. self ruled
And by the way most people are not free to catch an airliner - they can
not
afford it and therefore are restricted by the economic system
________________________________________________________
Mike - The notion to which I refer is the concept signified by the word
"freedom" in the sentence, "I have the freedom to do 'x'." If we take the
sentence, "I am free to run for the office of president," the following
observations could be made:
a.. I meet the legal qualifications, there are no legal restrictions which
prevent me making that choice. (your 1. not restricted - sense)
b. I would argue that I have no meaningful choice to run for president,
because I lack the "enabling conditions", to wit: the ability to raise
millions of dollars in campaign contributions, political connections and
allies who would support the campaign and political fans willing to work
tirelessly on my behalf with little or no renumaration.
My apology for Dewey is that limitations, which may disable the conditions
necessary to meaningfully choose to do some act are only the negative
aspects of the notion of "freedom" and in order to fully account for the
ability to make choices in life we must also examine the contextual support
for the choice. It seems to me that (a) is a superficial and rather
meaningless account of freedom, whereas (b) is a better description of
whether the choice in question is available to me.
c. I am agnostic when it comes to the notion of "self". I certainly do not
believe in something called the "True Self". The whole idea of "self ruled"
strikes me as a quagmire.
Your point about most people not being free to catch an airliner because of
the economic conditions is, I believe, the right way to frame the issue.
The political question would then be whether this freedom - to fly - is a
freedom which society wishes to support.
__________________________________________________________
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Conger" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
But
this is simply an expedient way to define freedom as a matter
of what's possible
to do at any given moment.
Mike: Which to me makes more sense than saying we have the freedom to do
something that is not possible at a given moment.
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Conger" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
When you say you insist
that an artwork is intended to communicate experience
(Tolstoy's view) you
assert that experience can be packaged as something and
transmitted to
someone, like sending package. I suggest it's impossible to do
that.
Communication is a complicated process that engages people in a creative
context of constructing their individual meanings. My outlook on this is
taken
from Roy Harris, the Integrationist linguist. See his Signs, Language,
Communication 1996 or check online for a summary. I wouldn't respond to
your
assertion if it had not been so insistently stated while the questions of
what
communication is and how it happens are so obviously unsettled in
communication
theory.
wc
Mike - I take a probabilistic, rather than a deterministic approach to
communication. The only process available in communication, in my opinion,
is that the communicator (speaker, writer, artist, etc.) creates an artifact
(sounds, signs, images, etc.) which are perceived by a communicatee
(listener, reader, viewer, etc.) The artist cannot determine through a
process of communication the experience of the viewer. When the viewer
apprehends an artifact involuntary associations arise: images from the
viewer's past, feelings associated with similar images, theories of
interpretation the viewer has learned about the type of artifact involved,
etc. Each viewer's associations will be unique; they are not determined.
The viewer may or may not devote the internal effort toward an organization
of the associations. The viewer may or may not make a judgment about the
worth of this particular bundle of associations "communicated" by the
artwork. Part of the skill of the artist is the ability to create artifacts
in such a way as to create predictable associations in the viewer. No two
aesthetic responses are identical, but I believe they are usually clustered
around one or more interpretations. Kinkade has tighter clusters than
Rothko, but that is also, in my opinion, part of the the artist's intent.
So, I am committed to the notion of communication. And, while I will
concede fallibility and further concede that I haven't read Harris's book,
if he claims that we cannot communicate then I would bring up Zeno's Paradox
and suggest that maybe the problem is with the analysis, not the the object
of inquiry.
Mike Mallory
