>I like to think there's world out
>there that I can experience without feeling a signalling on either side.
>Am I just too paranoid to be paranoid?
Fiona, This seems to me an interesting (if problematic) thing to say, which
I read as: There can be 'experience' without /sign/alling; and that it is
(conventionally) paranoid (= ? [dangerously] self/consciousness-centred) to
conceive of all experience as signalling; but the excessively paranoid may
be driven to maintain the distinction.
Zen parable [... pause while my constant companion, that new-world gadfly,
Harry Wells, climbs a library ladder to fetch me down my ancient, dog-eared
paperbacks of Alan Watts, long exiled to higher shelves; f!@# it, I guess
the book must've achieved the final state of 'non-returning' -- adapted
from memory then...]:
Before I was paranoid there were mountains and water
When I was paranoid there were no mountains and water
After I became truly paranoid there were mountains and water once more
>Have we been talking just about art all this posting
>back and forth? Aren't we arguing after all?
Sorry Fiona, if this is a disappointment, but I didn't really think we were
arguing /per se/, unless it's about some distinction between language- and
other arts. I've been puzzling about how to respond to your last, and then
I stumbled upon this, which seems relevant, although it emerges from
Barthes' discussion of relations between pictorial art and the classical
text. (I quote a bit too much at the beginning, for context, but also
because of the mention of 'theatre'. The bit that seemed relevant is
between *'s.)
"All of which raises a twofold problem: first, where and when did this
preeminence of the pictorial code in literary mimesis begin? Why has it
disappeared? Why has the writer's dream of painting died out? What has
replaced it? Nowadays, the representational codes are shattered to make
room for a multiple space no longer based on painting (the 'picture') but
rather on the theatre (the stage), as Mallarme predicted, or at least
wished. And then: if literature and painting are no longer held in a
hierarchical reflection, one being the /rear-view mirror/ for the other,
why maintain them any longer as objects at once united and separate, in
short, /classed together/. *Why not wipe out the difference between them
(purely one of substance)? Why not forgo the plurality of the 'arts' in
order to affirm more powerfully the plurality of 'texts'?*" (_S/Z_, sec.
XXIII)
a_server,
John
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