How Things "Become" Part I: The Infinity of Definition
Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity.
~ John Berger, Ways of Seeing

In art, the act of interpretation grows newer tendrils of abstraction by which to strangle anyone vivacious enough to attempt to verify it – yet attempt to we must. I intend to show that the application of consciousness upon the interpretation of art is what defines it. This definition, in contrast to the kind of definition for words one might find in a dictionary, will not dwell arrogantly upon the assumption that art (or words for that matter) can be 'defined' at all. My definition of the word 'definition' from now on will be to 'add new dimensions and qualities to the universe itself in the examination and multiplication of qualia, thereby giving reality a greater clarity'.

A poem should not be but become.
~ Charles Bernstein, Rough Trades

From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word...
~ William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

Here an admission of restraint must be given: in order to throw so many broad terms into my examinations (i.e. art, consciousness, form, language, writing, reading, becoming, etc.) I am tightening the very tendrils of interpretation which threaten to choke me. To ignore the limitations of my own analysis would be to contradict myself, and therefore to void each word as I wrote it. Therefore I will attempt to utilise the methods of one for whom the constant redefinition of his own negation of definition was second nature...

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.
~ Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

According to Barthes, the clarification (or 'becoming') of a text involves acknowledging dimensions beyond the plane of the text as expedited by its writer. The topology of writing suddenly loses its Cartesian dimensionality: the constituents of meaning have exploded:
For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate enfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite – that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.
~ David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning
* (Of course this means that any absolutely defined digital camera image would have to be made up of an infinite resolution of pixels – "I'd like a camera with at least ∞ megapixels please" – true 'becoming' would have to be plotted on an exponentially divergent curve. All infinitesimal steps in clarification are worthy of acknowledgment simply because true definition is infinite.)
For those of you who are interested, read Part II of this piece here:
The Codification of Artistic Species...)
Thu, Dec 20, 2007 Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, art, language, quotes, Fiction, human, Maths, Weird, Humour, Literature, Writing, Nonsense, Ideas, Reality
Categories: consciousness, art, language, quotes, Fiction, human, Maths, Weird, Humour, Literature, Writing, Nonsense, Ideas, Reality
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