Had a bit of a revelation at The
Knowing Uv It exhibition here in Bergen. This exhibition was not about getting to the correct
understanding or correct representation of the work of the painter in The
Showing Uv It. It was in fact an invagination of the materials and themes
implicit in the painter's work (one of which was in the show). Sort of an
exploded diagram. A context explosion.
Ecological awareness just is this
context explosion. Contextualism often (despite its advertising language) stops
somewhere: usually at some kind of human/nonhuman boundary. Hence the rituals
of exclusion meted out by some new left fora on me and Dipesh Chakrabarty
recently. Class, gender, race—but as long as we remain within a human-scale
roughly Hegelian frame in which the silent partner of Kantian correlationism
(the nonhuman entity) is only visible as a projection of the human. To protect
this guilty secret, mentioning bunny rabbits is denigrated as "a hippie
thing" (actual words by actual New Left Review contributor).
Another implicit assumption is that art
is a bit evil and has to be disarmed in advance, and that supplying its
contexts disarms it.
But…
The more context you have, the more
text: that's the simple version of the key Derridean insight il n'y a pas
d'hors-texte. The more world you have, the more earth (Heidegger). The more
understanding, the more standing-under.
And at some point, your context
includes nonhuman beings such as bunny rabbits and geological time. And electrons.
So the context explosion forces you
into intimacy with all kinds of nonhumans, rather than elevating you above
them.
Knowing does not have to be about
rising above. Knowing could be like what sand does to a trilobite. Enveloping
and touching, for millions of years. A sand-morphic sand-ograph of a trilobite.
My uncle used to get very worried
about how a cd player "knew" that it was an oboe playing at 5:23. But
the machine doesn't have to "know" like that any more than a diamond
needle has to "know" it's an oboe. The needle just rides the groove.
The laser rides the sequence of holes. This absolute proximity is called
touching and it tends to be put down in Western philosophy.
When knowing touches itself, for
instance, it is called meditation and is denigrated as narcissism.
So then I decided to talk about it in Winnipeg. (In early Feb.)
...in Winnipeg, where you will have contact with the minus30- degrees electrons we've been having.
ReplyDeleteBut, I hear Architecture sets up an ice bar. A bar made out of ice. With alcohol.
Perfect for someone asked to give two plenaries, a grad roundtable, and an interview.
Yes! I think we make up for all the stuff we fail to touch by talking about all the stuff we "know" about. Intellectuals, that is. Athletes tend to do it a different way: by hitting it really hard, throwing it really far or moving through or over it really fast (this does involve touching, but never for very long). The more visceral types tend to make up for not touching stuff by consuming it in various ways. Meanwhile, the lack of touching isn't actually a lack at all: we just assume we can't have the real thing, so we take the only options we think we do have. Yeah, I think you may be on to something amounting to a directive here.
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