But with a visual intake, the notions that arise are not just of memories. There is often NEW stuff there -- as with a page of Grey's Anatomy, or a map, or an instructional manual about how to work your new BluRay dvd player. I'd be ready (momentarily) to term that stuff "informational".
You had better be ready to term that stuff informational or give up any hope of ever using your new BluRay player. I also think that "memories" is a very blurry word to use. Kate Sullivan -----Original Message----- From: Tom McCormack <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Dec 6, 2012 2:23 pm Subject: Kate's excellent queries; Barthes; etc On Dec 5, 2012, at 9:03 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Well, I continued on,and I would like to say that that some marks are
fictive,that the information they imitate is invented and doesn't actually exist. (This is apart from outright lies.) What I was pondering when I was derailed was something like this: When we see a scription (i.e. a printed or written "word") or hear a sound that we recognize as a spoken "word", we scour our memories for the notions we've connected with that word in the past. E.g. simple words like 'milk', 'run', and 'shoot', and more abstract or complicated words like 'art', 'sin', or 'moral' -- the list is almost endless, as is the variety of memory from one to another of us. But with a visual intake, the notions that arise are not just of memories. There is often NEW stuff there -- as with a page of Grey's Anatomy, or a map, or an instructional manual about how to work your new BluRay dvd player. I'd be ready (momentarily) to term that stuff "informational". But then we realize that even a "word" can come with "information" (in this topic's sense of "information"). For example if it's the first time we ever heard a New Zealander speak it may come with an accent we've never heard before. Because we know he's from New Zealand, we learn, "Ah! So that's what a New Zealand accent sounds like." Moreover, the COMBINATION of words may be unique. (Barthes said, "The Author is Dead", and part of his argument for that was that all the words writers use today were used before. This seems to me a benighted observation. Exactly what we prize Authors for is their contribution of new COMBINATIONS of words.) At that point, just as a growing mound of complications began to rise before me, other urgencies intruded and I was bumped from the forum. Alas I still haven't worked my way through all those urgencies yet.
