Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 11:25:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Gary E Davis <gedavis1-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: re: HAB: Art and Judgement (Stefan to Matt) 



--- Stefan Szczelkun <stefan-AT-szczelkun.greatxscape.net> wrote:
[S] But, what is language? 

A *prior* question is: What is *meaning*? A cognitivist perspective
bases meaning in cognition: PATTERN RECOGNITION, such that various
kinds of pattern/meaning *include* linguistic pattern/meaning, but
other kinds of meaning are part of intelligent experience: spatial
pattern, acoustic pattern, kinesthetic pattern, mathematical pattern.

[S] Where does it start and end? 

It starts in the ontogeny of cognition and never ends (as meaning
crosses generations through all pattern-channeling media).


[S] What does it exclude?  

No exclusions. 


[S] What about language sets? (Do languages ever exist in isolation?
) e.g. Are gesture, facial expression and tone of voice languages in
their own right? 

Changing your paradigm to *pattern* sets makes this kind of question
quite constructive: Of *course*, there are pattern sets (visual,
sound, kinesthetic, mathematical, empathic, self-reflective). But
they *can't* exist in isolation, because existence happens through an
holistic intelligence (omni-patternal existence). But a pattern set
can, of course, *become* a specified foci, as with a given "media".
The Painter is not doing music (though musical experience may be a
keynote of her painterly Place).

[S] They work together with spoken word statements to produce what is
sometimes called oralacy. How do we classify oralacy as language? 

We distinguish phonetics from syntactics from semantics from
pragmatics from rhetorics.

[S] What do such multiple [modes of pattern] imply for our concept of
the statement in the context of TCA? 

Translation happens. 

[S] Has only literary discourse pretended to exist above its
substrate? (ie apart from Typography, layout, binding, paper etc?)

Yes and no. Literary discourse *can* exist above its substrate, since
the substrate can vary without affecting the discursivity (I could
send you a print-out of a discussion or an audio tape of the same
discussion, inasmuch as a discussion *can* be considered
independently of its substrate). But the substrate can be thematic
(Audio inflection affects interpretation as uninflected written text
does not; a Derridean can see writing as the basis of speech).


[S] The illusion of fixity of meaning is also of interest. Meaning
seems to be a (dialectical?) moment between individual utterance and
collective response/ flux. 

Not especially dialectical. Socratic? Not usually. Hegelian? Not
basically oppositional. Dialogal? Sure, but duality isn't a dialectic
(two colors interplay, but there's no dialectic there; two musical
notes complement each other or clash, according to their physical
characteristics, but complementation, counterpoint and resolution are
not the main event in musical topography). 

[S] A moment that can (attempt to) be fixed in ritual and by academic
terminology. 

The work of art and its community of critical response (in the
interpretive sense of 'criticism')

[S] But any fixing would seem to have a price in terms of the
fluidity of consensus formation.

A musical composition is fixed in the score, but that doesn't exact a
price on interpretive performance of that *work*.
Theme-and-variations can become a new work. We are free to say what
the appropriate interpretation is--to claim that there *is* "an"
appropriate interpretation--while any fluidity of consensus formation
about this might justly lead to no consensus, thanks to the glorious
plurality of stances toward the work of art, which is art working
there, too, in the irresolute interplay.

Gary




 


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