Polylogue
1:
Excess supplies
“The collage aesthetic
remains one of the great innovations of the 20th century, and it continues to
burrow through artistic and technological practice. It engages any new technology.
It’s omnivorous. It demands new technologies to feed the jump-cut of the
collage—the essential mind-set of the 20th century. There’s so much
velocity, there’s so much capacity, there’s such a volume of imagery
that one of the only ways of responding to it, besides going white, like the
paintings of Agnes Martin, is just to dive in. Get into the volume, accommodate
the velocity, work with it, learn how to surf. Few artists have, and it may
take even longer than our lifetimes to see a kind of implicit mastery of the
medium.”
—David Ross
“Accommodating the Velocity,”
Wired 3.09, September 1995
“The
research may be of a particular kind, but, if so, it’s the best kind: that
errant, excitable, semi-accidental rummaging which is guaranteed to kick the
synapses into life.”
—Anthony Lane
“Byte Verse,“ The New Yorker,
February 20/27, 1995 p. 104.
“…there’s
my favorite low-tech, high-yield information transfer system: the 3 inch x 5
inch index card. I stumbled upon the 3 x 5 as a mode of communication completely
by accident early in my career, and I’ve used it ever since.”
—William G. Pagonis
“The Work of the Leader,”
Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec 1992,
“The
third factor in the making of my vision—intuition—might be better
understood as an uncanny ability to know fully how things must have been, how
and what people must have said or felt at a moment when neither I nor Wade,
my main witness, was present. There are kinds of information, sometimes bare
scraps and bits, that instantly arrange themselves into coherent, easily perceived
patterns, and one either acknowledges those patterns, or one does not. For most
of my adult life, I chose not to recognize those patterns, although they were
the patterns of my own life as much as Wade’s. Once I chose to acknowledge
them, however, they came rushing toward me, one after the other, until at last
the story I am telling here presented itself to me in its entirety.”
—Russell Banks
Affliction, 1989
“‘No
ideas but in things,’ said William Carlos Williams,
and though he was speaking of poetry it is true of fiction, too. Fiction’s
power to sway us comes about not through directed meditations and conclusions
but through depicted realities to which meaning clings, and which transfer this
meaning, unmediated and otherwise inexpressible, to our consciousness, dust
to dust.”
—John Updike
“Vagueness on Wheels, Dust on a Skirt,”
The New Yorker, Sept. 2, 1991
“We
know more than we can use. Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head:
rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc man and
Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms.”
—Susan Sontag
I, etcetera, 1979
— Mircea. Eliade
The Sacred and the Profane, 1957
“Recently
I was struck by the obvious: in the etiology of all psychotoxic disturbances
the wrong kind of emotional supplies is conspicuous. Some of the psychotoxic
disturbances (three months colic, infantile rocking, etc.) show in addition
a specific etiological factor, in essence the diametrical opposite of emotional
deprivation, namely, a surfeit, an overdoes of affective stimulation.”
—René Spitz
“Derailment of Dialogue,” 1964
“The
whole thing was so momentous, overmastering, tragic, that in the end what I
wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. I have always had an exceptional
gift for passing out.… There are times when the most practical thing is
to lie down.”
—Saul Bellow
Spoken by the character
Humboldt’s Gift,1975, p. 108, 110
“In
solitary confinement before his color TV, the citizen is made a part of all
that is happening on a planetary scale and impressed with his powerlessness
to act on precisely that planetary scale. Closed in upon himself, the citizen
is not the yeoman structure that creates the content of the Republic, but simply
a photograph in a collage enormously larger than himself.”
—W.I. Thompson
Evil and the World Order, 1975
“What
might be the implications of all this for psychohistory? It seems to me that
the ‘psychic numbing’ that Bob [Lifton] was talking about might be
a kind of impairment of this sign-making function itself, and could imply a
kind of psychically defenseless man who is overwhelmed by what has become for
him an undifferentiated and insignificant reality. The breakdown of symbolization
describged by Bob would be the incapacity to imagine that necessary leeway in
existence, an overacceptance of the literality of existence.”
—Peter Brooks
“Symbolization and
“Everything
had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments. Collage
was like an image of the revolution within me —not as it was, but as it
might have been.”
—Kurt Schwitters
In J. Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art,
Vol 6, 1975
“[This]
alludes to one of the more radical and persistent notions in Freud’s thought:
the memory trace, not as an image of its object, but as a sign constituted by
its coordination with other signs.”
—Jeffrey Mehlman
“The ‘floating signifier’: from Lévi-Strauss to Lacan,”
French Freud, p. 31
“It
would appear that the development of modern depth psychology parallels the development
of the character in drama and the novel, both depending on the inward turning
of the psyche produced by writing and intensified by print.… In both cases,
textual organization of consciousness was required.”
—W.J Ong, S.J.
“Writing Restructures Consciousness,“
Orality and Literacy, 1982
“Consecutive
presentation is not a very adequate means of describing complicated mental processes
going on in different layers of the mind.”
—Sigmund Freud
“The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” 1920
“The
novelist Donald Barthelme’s statement that ‘Fragments are the only
form I trust’ has ramifications far beyond the literary. However severe
the problems posed by such a principle for social and especially political revolution,
we deceive ourselves unless we learn to focus upon these shifting forms—to
recognize new styles of life and new relations to institutions and to ideas.
Indeed, we require a little revolutionizing of our psychological assumptions,
so that both the young and the old can be understood, not as bound by static
behavioral categories, but as in continuous historical motion.”
—Robert Jay Lifton
History and Human Survival: Essays on the Young and the Old, Survivors and the
Dead, Peace and War, and on Contemporary Psychohistory, 1970, p 351
“In
truth, the fragment, the sketch, the unfinished canvas, and the shattered statue
are all congenial to an age of relativity, indeterminacy, and agnosticism.”
—John Updike
“Dark Smile, Devilish Saints,”
The New Yorker, 1980
“You
are familiar with all that was written about the ‘true outline’ of
[Pascal’s] Pensés, until a structuralist analyst showed not only that the fragment
as a literary form was necessary to Pascal but that—and this is far more
important—he used it intentionally and that it was a Cartesian perspective
that had prevented considering fragments as ends in themselves. For Pascal’s
message is that Man is great in that he searches for absolute values but small
in that, without ever ceasing to search, he knows that he can never approach
these values. The only form to express this content is one which does not prove
the contrary: which doesn’t show either a man who has abandoned the search
or one who has approached the goal. The fragment is such a form.”
—Lucien
Goldman
“Structure: Human Reality and Methodologicial Concept,”
The Structuralist Controversy,1972
“The
mind is dealing with the world but is always working on itself. The mind takes
materials from the world…”
—Robert Jay Lifton
“Symbolization and Fiction-Making,” 1974
“The
modern mind is an incredible complex of impressions and transformations; and
its product is a fabric of meanings that would make the most elaborate dream
of the most ambitious tapersty-weaver look like a mat. The warp of that fabric
consists of what we call ‘data,’ the signs [signals] to which experience
has conditioned us to attend, and upon which we act often without any conscious
ideation. The woof is symbolism. Out of signs and symbols we weave our tissue
of ‘reality.…’”
—Susanne Langer
Philosophy in a New Key, 1942/71
“[Robert]
Rauschenberg found that his imagery needed bedrock as hard and tolerant as a
workbench…
The
picture plane [in some of his collages] could look like some garbled conflation
of control system and cityscape, suggesting the ceaseless inflow of urban message,
stimulus and impediment. To hold all this together, Rauschenberg“s picture
plane had to become a surface to which anything reachable-thinkable would adhere.
It had to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is, and everything a projection
screen is, with further affinities for anything that is flat and worked over—palimpsest,
cancelled plate, trial blank, chart, map, aerial view. Any flat documentary
surface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue of his picture plane—radically
different from the transparent projection plane with its optical correspondence
to man’s visual fielf… If some collage element, such as a pasted-down
photograph, threatened to evoke the topical illusion of depth, the surface was
casually stained or smeared with paint to recall its irreducible flatness…
And it seemed at times that Rauschenberg’s [collage] work surface stood
for the mind itself—dump, reservoir, switching center, abundant with concrete
images freely associated as in an internal monologue—the outward symbol
of the mind as running transformer of the external world, constantly ingesting
incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged field.”
—Leo Steinberg
Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth Century Art, 1972
“Contemporary
psychoanalytic theory…is impoverished when it is treated as a repository
of themes…
Rather
than [an interpretive procedure] which discovers or assigns meanings, [this]
would be a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning.”
—Jonathan Culler
The Pursuit of Signs, 1981,
Structuralist Poetics, 1975
“[Much
has already been said about [the expression of drives and defences], whereas
mental functioning is still a vast uncharted sea within the [psycho-]analytic
setting.”
—André Green
“The Analyst, Symbolization and Absence in the Analytic Setting [On Changes
in Analytic Practice and Analytic
“The
important thing is never to reduce the unconscious, to interpret it or make
it signify following the tree model, but rather to produce the unconscious,
and, along with it, new utterances and other desires. The rhizome is precisely
this production of the unconscious…”
—G. Deluze and F. Guattari
On the Line, 1983, p. 40
“The
question is whether the Freudian therapy enables the individual to [become free
of the infantile fixation], or whether it does not, as I think, obstruct it
by the infantilization of the actual therapeutic situation.”
—Otto Rank
Will Therapy, 1936/78
“It
is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards.
But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if
one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life
can never really be understood in time simply because at no particular moment
can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it—backwards.”
—Søren Kierkegaard
“
…if …instead of beginning with the conscious, that is, by being confronted
by the adult in whom consciousness and cognition are fully developed, and whom
one looks backwards to the unconscious, we start with the infant in whom cognitive
faculties are not yet developed, and look forward to cognition, then the reverse
of the (usual) picture arises. The strange part of the mind, the phantasy part
is what confronts us. This is now the norm, and the problem before us is: How
and why does the cognitive system arise?”
—Margaret Lowenfeld
The World Technique, 1979
“There
are a few further points which we ought to note. In the first place, we must
remember that we live our childhood as our future. Our childhood determines
gestures and roles in the perspective of what is to come. This is not a question
of the mechanical reappearance of montages… [The] gestures and roles are
inseparable from the project which transforms them… For this reason a life
develops in spirals; it passes again and again by the same points but at different
levels of integration and complexity.”
—J.-P. Sartre
“The Progressive-Regressive Method,”
Search for a Method, 1960 /63
“Croce
was not thinking of poetry in particular when he said that language is perpetual
creation.”
—Wallace Stevens
The Necessary Angel, 1965
“…if
Faust is a critique, it is also a challange—to our world even more
than to Goethe’s own—to imagine and to create new modes of modernity,
in which man will not exist for the sake of development, but development for
the sake of man. Faust’s unfinished construction site is the vibrant but
shaky ground on which we must all stake out and build up our own lives.”
—Marshall Berman
All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity,
1982
“Dynamics
drives toward form, in which being is actual and has the power of resisting
nonbeing. But at the same time dynamics is threatened because it may lose itself
in rigid forms, and, if it tries to break through them, the result may be chaos,
which is the loss of both dynamics and form.”
—Paul Tillich
Systematic Theology, 1951
“Rather
than repressing these contradictions, the primal scene enables the project of
the deconstruction of the subject to exist side by side with the historicist
project of the reconstruction of the object. The primal scene ensures that the
double operation of deconstituting the subject’s relation to language and
reconstituting language’s relation to the object retains its necessary
tension and complexity.”
—Ned Lukacher
Primal Scenes, 1986, p. 338
…the
‘operations’ I experience in making
—Donald Weismann
“The Collage as Model,“ 1969
Collage and language
“The real patterns of feeling … these felt events, which compose the
fabric of mental life, usually pass unobserved, unrecorded and therefore essentially
unknown to the average person.
It may seem strange that the most immediate experiences in our lives hould be
the least recognized, but there is a reason for this apparent paradox, and the
reason is precisely their immediacy. They pass unrecorded because they are known
without any symbolic mediation, and therefore without conceptual form.”
— Susanne Langer
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. 1, 1967
“Brecht’s epic theater … is a theater that is in certain ways
conscious of itself as signifying practice, and that draws attention to its
own means of production, its own processes of representation. This quality of
self-reflexivity largely derives from the devices of distanciation or alienation…
[The] means of representation are foregrounded.… This foregrounding of
devices, however, is not so much designed to produce a sense of aesthetic ‘play’
… [as] to offer the audience a place from which it can develop its own
criticism of and judgement upon the actions represented.…
…‘the individual episodes have to be knotted together in such a way
that the knots are easily noticed.’…
This process of ‘noticing the knots’ or of foregrounding the means
of representation has been a familiar one in modernist theroy and practice since
the time of the cubists.”
— S. Harvey
Quoting B. Brecht,
“Whose Brecht? Memories of the Eighties,” 1982
“Still, the difficulty of discovering an architecture that generates mentality
cannot be overstated.”
— Alan Kay
“Computer Software,”
Scientific American, September 1984, Vol. 251,
No. 3., p. 57.
“… consciousness in itself is not so much a representation, distinguishing
a particular object, but really a form of representation in general.”
— Immanuel Kant
The Critique of Pure Reason, Division II, Book II, 1781/1966
“In the collage, our modern method of thinking, in which reality only becomes
understandable when interpreted by human intelligence, is epitomized in an abbreviated
model which is itself graspable by consciousness. Characteristic civilizatory
processes and substantive situations can, with the help of the collage principle,
be re-experienced without the emergency-causing consequences that would accrue
in actual life.”
— Franz Mon
Prinzip Collage, 1968
“An image is different from a model, and serves a different purpose. Briefly
stated, an image shows how something appears; a model shows how something works…
[An image] is a rendering of the appearance of its object in one perspective
out of many possible ones. It sets forth what the object looks or seems like,
and according to its own style it emphasizes separations or continuities, contrasts
or gradations, details, complexities or simple masses.…A model … always
illustrates a principle of construction or operation; it is a symbolic projection
of its object which need not resemble it in appearance at all, but must permit
one to match the factors of the model with respective factors of the object,
according to some convention. The convention governs the selectiveness of the
model; to all items in the selected class the model is equally true, to the
limit of its accuracy, that is, to the limit of formal simplification imposed
by the symbolic translation.”
— S. Langer
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. 1, 1967, pp. xix, 59
“Transformation is achieved only by touching … the formative zone
of the psyche. One might also speak of the mythic zone, as it is very close
to what Mircea Eliade writes of as ‘the zone of the sacred, the zone of
absolute reality.’ The principle is one of psychic action, by which I mean
the genuine inner contact leading to confrontation, reordering, and renewal.
In describing ancient rituals surrounding the new year, one experiences (in
Eliade’s words) ‘the presence of the dead,’ the ceremonial depiction
of ‘a “death” and a “resurrection,” a “new birth,”
a “new man,”’ and the overall principle that ‘life cannot
be restored but only recreated,’ This too is the principle of genuine Protean
transformation.…
The ultimate task of transformation is the re-creation of the adult self.…
But of course the difficulties in the path of psychological and social transformation
are profound.…”
— R.J. Lifton
The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology, 1976,
pp 135-145
“…how can death pass into language? I am quite willing to say that
it does this, but the question is to know whether it is completely overcome
in the passage.”
— J. Hyppolite
“The Structure of Philosophic Language according to the ‘Preface’
to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, 1972
“Quite unlike the modernist collage, in which various fragments and materials
of experience are laid bare, revealed as fissures, voids, unresolvable contradictions,
irreconcilable particularizations, pure heterogeneity, the historicist image
pursues the opposite aim: that of synthesis, of the illusory creation of a unity
and a totality which conceals its historical determination and conditioned particularity.
(These ‘concealed collages’ in painting represent a false unification…)”
—B.H.D. Bulloch
“Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation
in European Painting,” 1981 (October # 16)
“Looking historically, there is a whole category of people, which would
include Piaget and Chomsky, Cassirer, Langer, and Jakobson, who represent an
emerging current of twentieth-century thought that Freud half began and yet
spoke of in the language of mechanism. Freud is transitional in this, because
he moves toward meaning and yet he speaks in the language of mechanism. The
term ‘fiction’ has dubious value in psycho-logical thought, because
it suggests falsehood. But the principle of fabrication is very important and
central.
Incidentally, the overall idea in all these twentieth-century thinkers has to
do, I think, with transformation…”
— R.J. Lifton
“Symbolization and Fiction-Making,” 1974, p. 223
“Picasso took the photograph in his small hands. He held it horizontally
in front of him, carefully, as though it were a valuable bowl. After assuring
himself that we were watching him attentively, he ever-so-attentively, and with
a concentrated expression of his face, turned it backward, downward, until the
picture’s upper edge touched the surface of the table. After a glance at
us, he raised it again and bent it till it became warjped. Finally, he slowly
rolled up. ‘Did you see?’ he asked. ‘There’s so much one
can do. And how little’s actually been done so far! Wherever you look,
there’re univestigated and unexploited things. Even this photograph —
which, although it might seem final, can be reused in the most varying ways
— can be re-photographed and yield the most unexpected effects. Every photograph
can be the sstarting point for a whole series of new photographs, and every
one of those can then be used in a similar way… When one works that way,
there’s no end at all’.”
— G. Jedicka
Begegnungen mit Künstlern der Gegenwart, quoted in “The Transformations
of Photography,” Tusen och en bild, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1979, incident
described occurred in the early 1940’s
“…symbolization … [is] an act essential to thought, and prior
to it. Symbolization is the essential act of mind; and mind takes in more than
what is commonly called thought.
…The symbol-making function is one of man’s primary activities, like
eating, looking, or moving about. It is the fundamental process of his mind,
and goes on all the time. Sometimes we are aware of it, sometimes we merely
find its results, and realize that certain experiences have passed through our
brains and have been digested there…
Symbolization is pre-rationative, but not pre-rational. It is the starting point
of all intellection in the human sense, and is more general than thinking, fancying,
or taking action. For the brain is not merely a great transmitter, a super-switchboard;
it is better likened to a great transformer. The current of experience that
passes through it undergoes a change of character, not through the agency of
the sense by which the perception entered, but by virtue of a primary use which
is made of it immediately: it is sucked into the stream of symbols which consitutes
the human mind.”
— Susanne Langer
Philosophy in a New Key, 1942/1971
“[Robert] Rauschenberg found that his imagery needed bedrock as hard and
tolerant as a workbench…
The picture plane [in some of his collages] could look like some garbled conflation
of control system and cityscape, suggesting the ceaseless inflow of urban message,
stimulus and impediment. To hold all this together, Rauschenberg’s picture
plane had to become a surface to which anything reachable-thinkable would adhere.
It had to be whatever a billboard or dashboard is, and everything a projection
screen is, with further affinities for anything that is flat and worked over
— palimpsest, cancelled plate, trial blank, chart, map, aerial view. Any
flat documentary surface that tabulates information is a relevant analogue of
his picture plane — radically different from the transparent projection
plane with its optical correspondence to man’s visual fielf… If some
collage element, such as a pasted-down photograph, threatened to evoke the topical
illusion of depth, the surface was casually stained or smeared with paint to
recall its irreducible flatness… And it seemed at times that Rauschenberg’s
[collage] work surface stood for the mind itself — dump, reservoir, switching
center, abundant with concrete images freely associated as in an internal monologue
— the outward symbol of the mind as running transformer of the external
world, constantly ingesting incoming unprocessed data to be mapped in an overcharged
field.”
— Leo Steinberg
Other Criteria: Confrontations With Twentieth Century Art, 1972
(Lacan and the phallus as symbolizing symbolization
“It seems to me that the essential function of all these much-decried variants
of classical analysis only aim, in varying the elasticity of the analytic setting,
at searching for and preserving the minimum conditions for symbolization. Every
paper on symbolization in psychotic or prepsychotic structures says the same
thing couched in differenct terms. The patient creates but does not form symbols…
[Much has already been said about [the expression of drives and defences], whereas
mental functioning is still a vast uncharted sea within the analytic setting.”
— A. Green
“The Analyst, Symbolization and Absence in the Analytic Setting [On Changes
in Analytic Practice and Analytic
Experience]”, 1975
“I have preferred to speak of a process of psychic numbing rather than
repression. Repression occurs when an idea or experience is forgotten, excluded
from consciousness, or relagated to the realm of the unconscious…
The concept of psychic numbing, in contrast, suggests the cessation of what
I call the formative process, the impairment of man’s essential function
of symbol formation or symbolization. This point of view is strongly influenced
by the symbolic philosophy of Cassirer and Langer.…
Psychic numbing is a form of desensitization; it refers to an incapacity to
feel or to confront certain kinds of experience, to the blocking or absence
of inner forms or imagery that can connect with such experience.…
…it took the work of Cassirer and Langer to demonstrate the truly radical
potential of the concept of symbolization — its possibilities for raising
questions at the heart of human knowledge and motivation.”
— Robert Jay Lifton
The Life of the Self: Toward a New Psychology, 1976
“I wonder…if we do not underestimate the extent to which becoming
able to speak the unspoken or unspeakable makes possible a higher level of functioning
or organization to the personality system.”
— M. Edelson
The Idea of a Mental Illness, 1976
“The depth to which the influence of language goes in the formation of
human perception, thought and mental processes generally is as impressive as
its evolution from human feeling, peripheral and central, of all corners of
man’s overtaxed psyche.”
— S. Langer
Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. II, 1972
“As for language, the notion outlined here differs, furthermore, from innatist
theories concerning linguistic competence (Chomsky) as well from Lacanian notions
of an always-already-there of language that would be revealed as such in the
subject of the unconscisous. I of course assume, with respect to the infans,
that the symbolic function pre-exists, but also maintain an evolutionary postulate
that leads me to seek to elaborate various dispositions giving access to that
function, and this corresponds as well to various psychic structures.”
— J. Kristeva
“Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents,” 1983 / 86
“Lacan’s concept of the symbolic as the key to the Unconscious system
would be much more acceptable if it could be related to a paradigm other than
that of language, but one which makes language possible. This seems to have
been understood by Winnicott… For the problem is not to inject representations
already elaborated by someone else, but to favour the processes which will enable
these representations to be put at the disposal of the analysand.”
— A. Green
“Conceptions of Affect,” 1977
“But what is specific in the psychoanalytic discovery is that language
itself works at the pictorial level. This discovery is not only a call for an
apppropriate theory of the imagination, but a decisive contribuition to it…
It is remarkable that condensation and displacement should be mentioned [by
Freud in The Interperetation of Dreams ] in the same context with regard to
words and visual images, as though these rhetorical figures and visual images
belonged to the same realm of ‘representability.’ Yet the ancient
rhetoricians had already noticed that a figured language is one that gives a
contour or a visiblilty to discourse. Consequently, the problem is not so much
that we find words in dreams and that the dream-work should be close to the
‘verbal wit’ which governs jokes, but that language functions at a
pictorial level which brings it into the neighborhood of the visual image and
vice versa.”
—P. Ricoeur
“Image and language in Psychoanalysis,”
1978, Psychoanalysis and Language , pp. 323, 315
“What first needs to be made clear in Freud’s method is this; it is
not the thing itself, but a representation of it that is being interpreted.…
In this light, the endless stream of talk on which the psychanalytic treatment
is carried becomes the opposite fof a liability, as some have urged; the value
of therapy is just its prolonged opportunity for the patient to formulate his
emotion.”
—P. Rieff
Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, 1979
“‘…our speech is not mere talk; it is an utterance replete with
workings.’ … it produces the things it names.”
— L. Dieckman
Quoting Asclepius, in Hieroglyphics: The Return of a Literary Symbol,
“The whole future of psychology is bound up with that of linguistic study,
with our deepening grasp of man’s unique speech status.… But it would
be surprising if an exclusively verbal alpproach could prove adequate to the
communicative energies of the psyche, particularly the psyche in some partial
state of lesion.”
— George Steiner
“The Langauge Animal,” 1969 / 76, pp. 88,87
Gadamer on language making things fluid
“Symbolization is the essential act of mind, and mind takes in more than
what is commonly called thought.”
— Susanne Langer
Philosophy in a New Key, 1942
“Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs,
particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons
and symbols... So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne
symbolum de symbolo.”
— C.S. Pierce
“The Icon, Index, and Symbol,”
c. 1895 / 1932
“… anything that grows has a groundplan, and . . . out of this ground
plan the parts arise, each part having its time of special ascendancy until
all parts have arisen to form a functioning whole…”
“The organismic principle that in our work has proven indispensable for
the somatic grounding of psychosexual and psychosocial development is epigenesis…”
“[On] each stage of development a child is ‘identified by the totality
of operations he is capable of’ … in an expanding arena of interplay.”
— E.H. Erikson
Identity and the Life Cycle, 1959;The Life Cycle Completed, 1982;
“Play and Actuality,” 1972
“Basically, the mental development of the child appears as a succession
of three great periods. . . [The] evolution of sensori-motor schemes extends
and surpasses the evolution of the organic structures which takes place during
embryogenesis. Semiotic relations, thought, and interpersonal connections internalize
these schemes of action by reconstructing them on the new level of representation.…
Finally .… formal thought restructures the concrete operations by subordinating
them to new structures.”
— Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder
The Psychology of the Child, 1969
“An infant’s first
cycle…achieves complete success. At the end of it the child can speak,
its ideas are classified, and its perceptions are sharpened…
Education should consist in a continual repetition of such cycles.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
The Aims of Education, 1929
“Everything that seems to us imperishable tends towards decay; a position
in society, like anything else, is not created once and for all, but…is
constantly rebuilding itself by a sort of perpetual process of creation…
The creation of the world did not occur at the beginning of time, it occurs
every day.”
— Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time, The Fugitive, 1925
“Forms are…preserved because they are constantly renewed by analogy…
But one thing in particular interests the linguist. In the enormous mass of
analogical phenomena built up through centuries of evolution, almost all elements
are preserved; they are only distributed differently… Language is a garment
covered with patches cut from its own cloth.”
— Ferdinand de Saussure
Course in General Linguistics, 1916 / 66
“During the first decade of this century a transformed world became theoretically
possible and the necessary forces of change could already be recognized as existing.
Cubism was the art which reflected the possibility of this transformed world
and the confidednce it inspired. Thus, in a certain sense, it was the most modern
art — as it was also the most philosophically complex — which has
yet existed…
…[Cubism] re-created the syntax of art so that it could accommodate modern
experience…
I find it hard to believe that the most extreme Cubist works were painted over
fifty years ago. It is true that I would not expect them to have been painted
today. They are both too optimistic and too revolutionary for that. Perhaps
in a way I am surprised that they have been painted at all. It would seem more
likely that they were yet to be painted…
Nevertheless I must insist on the sensation I have in front of the [Cubist]
works themselves: the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are
caught, pinned down, in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue
a journey that began in 1907… The Cubist moment was…a beginning, defining
desires which are still unmet.”
— John Berger
“The Moment of Cubism,” 1969
“In the future
collage will be an important means of (self) education. We will all put the
pieces of our case histories together and experiment with the simple process
of splicing and superimposition, to reach, maybe, the margins of our expression.”
— Martin Stanton
Outside the Dream: Lacan and French Styles of Psychoanalysis, 1983
“The doctrine of creation is not the story of an event which took place
‘once upon a time…’
God certainly created the world ‘in the beginning’ and gave it the
laws of nature. But [according to a deistic view] after its beginning he either
does not interfere at all (consistent deism), or only occasionally through miracles
and revelation (theistic deism), or he acts in a continual interrelationship
(consistent theism). In these three cases it would not be proper to speak of
sustaining creation.
Since the time of Augustine, another interpretation of the preservation of the
world is given. Preservation is continuous creativity, in that God out of eternity
creates things and time together. Here is the only adequate understanding of
preservation… God is essentially creative, and therefore he is creative
in every moment of temporal existence… There is a decisive difference,
however, between originating and sustaining creativity. The latter refers to
the given structures of reality, to that which continues within the change,
to the regular and calculable in things. Without the static element, finite
being would not be able to identity itself with itself or anything with anything.
Without it, neither expectation, nor action for the future, nor a place to stand
upon would be possible; and therefore being would not be possible. The faith
in God’s sustaining creativity is the faith in the continuity of the structure
of reality as the basis for being and acting.
The main current of the modern world view completely excluded the awareness
of God’s sustaining creativity. Nature was considered a system of measurable
and calculable laws resting in themselves without beginning or end. The ‘well-founded
earth’ was a safe place within a safe universe… Today the main trend
of the modern world view has been reversed. The foundations of the self-sufficient
universe have been shaken. The questions of beginning and end have become theoretically
significant, pointing to the element of non-bing in the universe as a whole.
At the same time, the feeling of living in an ultimately secure world has been
destroyed through the catastrophes of the twentieth century and the corresponding
existentialist philosophy and literature. The symbol of God’s sustaining
creativity received a new significance and power.”
— Paul Tillich
Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 1951
Insert quote from S. Hawking
[Petitot on creating deep structures]
“What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models
he has available… Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection
of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.”
— Seymour Papert
Mindstorms, 1980
“Whatever interest attaches to your subject-matter must be evoked here
and now… The present contains all that there is.”
— Alfred North Whitehead
The Aims of Education, 1929
“Our present, current
experiences have intensity and depth to the extent to which they are in communication
(interplay) with the unconscious, infantile, experiences representing the indestructible
matrix of all subsequent experience.…
Without such transference —of the intensity of the unconscious, of the
infantile ways of experiencing life that have no language and little organization,
but the indestructibility of the origins of life — to the preconscious
and to present-day life and contemporary objects — without such transference,
or to the extent to which such transference miscarries, human life becomes sterile
and an empty shell.”
— Hans Loewald
“On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” 1960
“Rituals as images in action.”“Every ritual has a divine model,
an archetype…
The conception underlying [ancient] curative rituals seems to be the following:
life cannot be repaired, it can only be recreated through symbolic repetition
of the cosmogony, for… the cosmogony is the paradigmatic model for all
creation.…What is involved is, in short, a return to the original time,
the therapeutic purpose of which is to begin life once again, a symbolic rebirth…
What is important is that man has felt the need to reproduce the cosmogony in
his constructions, whatever be their nature; that this reproduction made him
contemporary with the mythical moment of the beginning of the world and that
he felt the need of returning to that moment, as often as possible, in order
to regenerate himself… To listen to the recital of the birth of the world
is to become the contemporary of the creative act par excellence, the cosmogony.”
— Mircea Eliade
Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, 1954
The Sacred and the Profane, 1957
[Langer: an image shows how something looks; a model shows how it works]
“Perhaps my most influential model is that of biochemical metabolism, repetitive
and restorative as well as progressively and irreversibly transformative: the
lifelong succession of compositions, decompositions, and recompositions…
[Here also are countless instantaneous configurations…some of which…are
relatively solid and enduring like the framework of a house.”
— Henry A. Murray
“Preparations for the Scaffold of a Comprehensive System,” 1959
[V. Turner on V. Gennep: separation / transition / incorporation]
“I believe that change during adult life is real and perpetual. . . I wish
to describe in rough outline a pattern of personal change, another symbolic
form of death and rebirth.… We may conveniently envision it within a three-step
sequence: confrontation, reordering, and renewal.
— Robert Jay Lifton
Thought Reform: A Psychiatric Study of “Brainwashing ” in China, 1961
R.J. Lifton on the mind re-creates all sensory stimuli
“First images . . . arise in the spirit. Then words, applied to images.
Finally, concepts, possible only when there are words — the collecting
together of many images in something nonvisible but audible (word).”
[EXTEND]
— F. Nietzsche
“Principles of a New Evaluation,” The Will to Power, 1884 / 1901
— G. Deleuze on Nietzsche and the power of affirmation
“No one [Freud] announced, lives in the real world. We occupy a space of
our own creation — a collage compounded of bits and pieces of actuality
arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our
fears, our memories, and our anticipations.”
— Willard Galin
Feelings, 1979
R. Barthes on “the monument of psychoanalysis must be crossed”
“…the unitary method of thought can be used to facilitate the regenerative
processes which are latent in every organism. . . [The] time is ripe for an
approach which is neither subjective nor objective in emphasis but recognizes
the single form of all processes.
— L.L. Whyte
The Next Development in Man, 1944
[EXTEND,CRITIQUE FREUD]
“Increasingly in my clinical work I had found myself needing to find what
verbal concept in psycho-analytical thinking corresponded with what L.L. Whyte
has called the formative principle.… Certainly, some patients seemed to
be aware dimly or increasingly, of a force in them to do with growth, growth
towards their own shape, also as something that seemed to be sensed as driving
them to break down false inner organizations which do not really belong to them;
something which can also be deeply feared, as a kind of creative fury that will
not let them rest content with a merely compliant adaptation and also feared
because of the temporary chaos it must cause when the integrations on a false
basis are in the process of being broken down in order that a better one may
emerge.”
— Marion Milner
The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-Analytic Treatment,
1969
Chassugeuget-Smirgel on the ego ideal as formative locus
Tillich on breaking down false unities
— H. Jonas on metabolism
…the [modern] distress lies exactly in formlessness; a sense of disconnection,
or dissociation, of feeling from activity--the extreme form of which may produce
schizophrenic language, but the routein form of which creates a sense of meaninglessness
in the midst of activity. The experience of emptiness, of inability to feel,
is not easily encompassed by mechanical notions of repression. This shift in
ordinary symptomatology has challenged psychoanalytic thinking to find a new
diagnostic language, and to expand terms which in the early years of psychoanalysis
were poorly thought out, because the then dominant clinical experiences of distress
did not demand their articulation.”
— Richard Sennett
The Fall of Public Man, 1976
“…the psychoanalytic situation is extremely suitable to check whether
a certain set of propositions is true or false; but to discover anything new,
or of far-reaching consequence, from the observational field as given in the
psychoanalytic situation, seems to place unusually great demands upon the human
mind.”
[add: microscope; new methods of investigation-I doubt that, since Freud, much
progress has been made in that respect]
— Kurt R. Eissler
“Freud and the Psychoanalysis of History,” 1963
[-- M. Proust: any new conversation must at first appear labored]
“…despite their value those devices supplied by psychoanalytic theory
and technique are not irreplaceable; they are -- as I once said about free association
-- improvable tools.”
[add: a science is defined by its object, not its instruments]
— H. Kohut
The Restoration of the Self, 1977
“February 26, 1973
Dear Eric,
…I would like to think about still further ways to gather information —
or perhaps a better way to put it would be, to enter into and observe the psychoformative
process in the act of creating new syntheses.
Ever,
Bob”
[ R.J. Lifton, personal communication to EWO:]
[Jean Metzinger’s Cubist paintings] offer to the viewer’s intelligence…the
elements of a synthesis situated in the passage of time.
—R. Allard
Dear Bob,
This morning I got what I think is a good idea…
The idea is that we would ask people to make collages.
I think doing this is very much an appropriate adult equivalent of what Erikson
did in having children make play constructions, and I think both that and collage
making are very clearly ways of getting at concretely what we mean by the psychoformative
process. Something very exciting would be taking place in front of us.…
Best,
Eric”
[E.W. Olson, personal communication to Robert Lifton:]
— M.M.R. Khan
“Introduction” to D.W. Winnicott, Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis,
1975
“The mingling of object and image in collage, of given fact and conscious
artifice, corresponds to the illusion-producing processes of contemporary civilization…
what Walter Benjamin called ‘the age of mechanical reproduction.’
…In the vision of collage, the identity of an object is suspended between
its practical reality and the conceptual
whole in which it is set. A banknote incorporated in a
collage has surrendered its simple character as money and undergone an aesthetic
transformation.”
— H. Rosenberg
“Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togethers,” 1976
“The notion of heterogeneity is indispensable… [The term semiotic]
quite clearly designates that we are dealing with a disposition that is definitely
heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight of it or in either a negative or
surplus relationship to it.”
— Julia Kristeva
Desire in Language, 1977 / 80
[C. Greenberg: flatness, surface and depth; also early comment from Chipp collection]
Their use of found-objects, their fragmentariness and their direct conversion
of objective reality into a subjective experience, into abstraction, make collages
the model for the most profound work in traditional forms.
[begin this quote with comment on Picasso]
— C. Westerbeck
“Taking the Long View,” 1978
— J. Culler on Cubism/linguistics
“With the definition of modern man as one ‘condemned to re-create
his own universe,’ twentieth-century Viennese culture had found its voice.”
— C. Schorske
Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 1979
“Perhaps the strongest impulse toward a shift in the approach to language
and linguistics…was — for me, at least— the turbulent artistic
movement of the early twentieth century. The great men of art born in the 1880’s
— Picasso (1881- ), Joyce (1882-1941), Braque (1882- ), Stravinsky (1882-
), Xlebnekov (1885-1922), Le Corbusier (1887- ) — were able to complete
a thorough schooling in one of the most placid spans of world history, before
that ‘last hour of universal calm’ was shattered by a train of cataclysms.”
— Roman Jakobson
“Retrospect,”
Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1962
“I had also struggled with my own investigations and with concepts having
to do with individual experience in holocaust and historical
change….
…rigorous development of a psychohistorical perspective holds out special
promise, on the one hand for addressing the extraordinary threats and confusions
of our time, and on the other for generating a new conceptual and perhaps therapeutic
vitality within the psychological professions.
— Robert Jay Lifton
“Preface,”
Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, 1974
“I must insist on the sensation I have in front of the [Cubist] works themselves:
the sensation that the works and I, as I look at them, are caught, pinned down,
in an enclave of time, waiting to be released and to continue a journey that
began in 1907…
The Cubist moment was…a beginning, defining desires which are still unmet.”
— John Berger
“The Moment of Cubism,” 1969
“Until very recently, Cubism was seen as a quasi-scientific system that
set out to replace the Renaissance tradition of perspective and modelling with
a vision more in harmony with the discoveries of modern physics. Instead of
providing an illusion of space, a Cubist painting was supposed to be the log
of a journey, showing in a single image the world seen from all sides. By combining
multiple views in one picture, Picasso and Braque, or so the story went, silted
up the deep space of painting, and replaced the perspective recession with an
upright ‘grid’ — an implied network of straight lines and right
angles on the surface of a picture. In doing so, they changed the nature of
painting from an artifact of sight to an artifact of thought: a picture was
no longer a make-believe snapshot but a bulletin board for the psyche.
Cubism seen whole, however, turns out to be completely unsystematic. Picasso
and Braque’s vision seems less a dutiful bookkeeping of fronts and backs
than a response to the radiance of ordinary things and an evocation of the give
and take that shapes perception. Cubism emerges, in its original moment, less
as the conceptual grid on which the recognizable world was analyzed than as
a net stretched taut between the world and sight, catching eventually the whole
haeraldry of modern life: city lights, summer vactions, pop songs, news of distant
wars, and department-store sales.…
…there is no sense in the work of either painter of a ‘pictorial problem’
solved or of a plan going forward. In a picture like the ‘Violin and Palette,’
it is as though Braque suddenly asked himself what would happen if you treated
the surface of the picture not as a low relief but as a refracting glass or
a kaleidoscope, breaking up the surface into symmetrical facets and vertical
strips. The violin strings in that picture leap from a diagonal to a vertical
across a well of empty space, and seem the consequence less of a purposeful
attempt to represent something seen from many angles that of an effort to endow
it with the angularity of observation itself — to evoke thse stutter-step
ardor of the recording eye.…
The cylinders and cones and straight lines [in Picasso’s draiwings from
1909] fracture on regular fault lines, and what should be the continuous edges
of planes and solids move just a half interval out of plumb. The effect of shimmering
energy and indeterminate form is the consequence of a little game rather than
a big idea — a studio joke that unlocked a new dimension of energy.…
Cubism is a leap in the dark, and what is genuinely ‘scientific’ about
it is its readiness to make new things up without a plan or program; its willlingness
to extend the logic of a sudden thought to an apparently absurd conclusion (which
then turns out not to be absurd at all); its mistrust of reduction; its faith
that the free play of the imagination can summon up a picture of the world more
powerful than any patient description; its belief in the sanity of fragmentary
knowledge.…
Who could have imagined in 1907 that something remarkable could be made from
a weird mix of Cézanne, geometric drawing, Rembrandt’s light, caricature,
and dumb puns picked up at a newspaper kiosk on the way to work?”
— Adam Gopnik
“A Leap in the Dark,” The New Yorker, Oct. 23, 1989
“…the symbolizing capacity [is] ‘the unique hallmark of man …
the sine qua non of man’s highest psychological and spiritual capabilities,’
and … it is in impairment of this capacity to symbolize that all adult
psychopathology essentially consists.”
— Harold Searles
Quoting L. Kubie, in
“The Differentiation Between Concrete and Metaphorical Thinking in the
Recovering Schizophrenic Patient,” 1962
“…[in traumatic neurosis] psychic action, the essence of the formative-symbolizing
process, is virtually suspended, and the organism is in a severe state of desymboliztion.
In that sense psychic numbing undermines the most fundamental psychic processes.
That is why we can speak of it as the essential mechanism of mental disorder.”
— R.J. Lifton
The Broken Connection, 1979
“Under the stress of an extreme abaissement the psychic totality falls
apart…
It is as if the very foundation of the psyche were giving way, as if an explosion
or an earthquake were tearing asunder the structure of a normally built house.”
— C.G. Jung
“On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia,” 1939
The importance of this kind of phenomenon was impressed upon me very profoundly
by my work in Hiroshima. . . But my assumption is that psychic numbing is central
in everyday experience as well, and may be identified whenever there is interference
in the ‘formative’ mental function, the process of creating viable
inner forms…
There is a close relationship between the phrase used by a Hiroshima survivor,
‘A feeling of paralysis in my mind,’ and a Buffalo Creek survivor’s
sense, in explaining his isolation from people around him, ‘Now…it’s
like everything is destroyed…
— R.J. Lifton
The Broken Connection, 1979
…how can death pass into language? I am quite willing to say that it does
this, but the question is to know whether it is completely overcome in the passage.
— J. Hyppolite
“The Structure of Philosophic Language according to the
‘Preface’ to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, 1972
“I have preferred to speak of a process of psychic numbing rather than
repression. Repression occurs when an idea or experience is forgotten, excluded
from consciousness, or relegated to the realm of the unconscious…
The concept of psychic numbing, in contrast, suggests the cessation of what
I call the formative process, the impairment of man’s essential function
of symbol formation or symbolization. This point of view is strongly influenced
by the symbolic philosophy of Cassirer and Langer.
Psychic numbing is a form of desensitization; it refers to an incapacity to
feel or to confront certain kinds of experience, to the blocking or absence
of inner forms or imagery that can connect with such experience.
…it took the work of Cassirer and Langer to demonstrate the truly radical
potential of the concept of symbolization — its possibilities for raising
questions at the heart of human knowledge and motivation.
— R.J. Lifton
The Life of the Self:
Toward a New Psychology, 1976
Lacan’s concept of the symbolic as the key to the Unconscious system would
be much more acceptable if it could be related to a paradigm other than that
of language, but one which makes language possible. This seems to have been
best understood by Winnicott…
— André Green
“Conceptions of Affect,” 1977
When Winnicott aptly referred to traumatic neurosis as a ‘break in the
lifeline,’ he came close to articulating…our reason for using the
traumatic syndrome to epitomize all psychiatric disorder. For what is ‘broken’
— shattered — is the experience of life, the construction of vitality.
— Robert Jay Lifton
The Broken Connection, 1979
…in all psychotherapeutic work with patients, psychotherapists and analysts
have to provide two distinct types of relating from their side. One type of
relating is covered by interpretive work, which helps the patient to gain insight
into his internal conflicts and thus resolve them. The other sort of relating,
which is harder to define, is more in the nature of providing coverage for the
patient’s self-experience in the clinical situation. The knack of any psychotherapeutic
work is to strike the right balance within these two types of functions.
— M.M.R. Khan
“The Finding and Becoming of Self,” 1972
…the problem is not to inject representations already elaborated by someone
else, but to favour the processes which will enable these representations to
be put at the disposal of the analysand.
— A. Green
“Conceptions of Affect,” 1977
“It is the thesis of this work that human symbolism has its origin in the
symbolic interplay between two distinct modes of direct perception of the external
world… I have termed one mode ‘Presentational Immediacy,’ and
the other mode ‘Causal Efficacy.’”
— A.N. Whitehead
Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, 1927
“…history is impossible without the spatialization of time that is
characteristic of consciousness.”
— J. Jaynes
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976
[Petitot: problem of projecting the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic; problem
of inserting spaces to permit signification]
[B. Hopkins from “The Collage Attitude” on the daily newspaper]
[E. Cassirer on space, time and self]
[E.H. Erikson: every stage is a configuration]
[Von Uexkull; visiting that special stage]
“…the central concept of [von Monakow’s monumental contribution
to neurology of 1914] is the concept of
‘chronogenic localization,’ a concept which has been almost completely
ignored in the intervening decades.
— Dr. Klüver
“Discussion,” in K.S. Lashley,
“The Problem of Serial Order in Behavor,” 1951
[Bakhtin on the chronotope ratio]
The photograph is a thin slice of space as well as time.
— S. Sontag
On Photography, 1977
…the important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force,
and that its testimony bears not on object but on time.
— R. Barthes
Camera Lucida, 1980 / 81
Deeply aware of the photograph’s status as a trace,
[Nadar] was also convinced of its psychological import.
— Rosalind Krauss
“Tracing Nadar,” 1978
“Let’s return for a moment to our generalized model [of neurological
processes in the brain]. The model specifies two basic processes: spatially
organized states and operations on those states by pulsed neutral transmissions.…
[Constructions] of configurational, topological, i.e., spatial representations
in the nervous system constitute one form that brain states can take.”
— Karl Pribram
Languages of the Brain, 1971
“The dream-work then proceeds just as Francis Galton did in constructing
his family photographs. It superimposes, as it were, the different components
upon one another.”
— Sigmund Freud
On Dreams, 1901
“For Freud, the analysis of dreams, above all his own dreams, was a means
of seeing the functioning of the primary process, as if through a microscope…
Perhaps something was lost when, with Freud, the dream reached its definitive
status through interpretation and the dream dreamt in images was converted into
the dream put into words: every victory is paid for by exile, and possession
by loss…
Dreaming is above all the attempt to maintain an impossible union with the mother,
to preserve an undivided whole, to move in a space prior to time. This is why
some patients implicitly ask one not to get too close to their dreams, neither
to touch not to manipulate the body of the dream, not to change the ‘thing
presentation’ into a ‘verbal presentation.’ As one of them said
to me: ‘I likes this dream more than I am interested by it. It’s like
a picture made of different pieces , a collage’.”
— J. B. Pontalis
Frontiers in Psychoanalysis: Between the Dream and Psychic Pain, 1977 / 81
[R. Coles, S. McNiff: problem of how image and language go together in art therapy]
[P. Ricoeur: Freud discovered that language operates at the level of the image]
“By appropriating and broadening the method of collage, a method with remarkable
similarities in approach and potential to that of psychoanalysis…”
— T. Lawson
“Silently, By Means of a Flashing Light,”
[Wolfson: collage; reality has always been strong medicine]
“I’d notice you’d been using words like ‘montage’ lately.
You want to be careful; those who live by montage perish by montage.”
— Kenneth Tynan
Letter to Dwight Macdonald, published in
“Between the Acts,” The New Yorker, October 31, 1994, p. 84
Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them… In
a photograph time is uniform: every part of the image has been subjected to
a chemical process of uniform duration. In the process of revelation all parts
were equal… Memory is a field where different times coexist.
[add: a radial system has to be constructed around the photograph]
— J. Berger
Another Way of Telling, 1982
“It has become customary to apply the term ‘collage’ to all works
in which components belonging to separate intellectual or perceptual categories
are combined, even when…nothing in them has been pasted or glued. Max Ernst
himself has expressly sanctioned this omnium-gatherum notion in his assertion:
‘Ce n’est pas la colle qui fait le collage.’ (‘It’s
not the paste that makes the collage.’)”
— H. Weschler
Collage, 1968
“The concept of computational power refers to what a computation can do
rather than to its speed or efficiency. You might imagine that its secret lies
in some new and potent types of instruction. In fact, somewhat surprisingly,
the crucial modification does not call for novel instructions, but for a better
memory. What is needed is an unlimited memory for the intermediate results obtained
during computations. Memory is power.
The simplest form of unlimited memory works like a stack of plates. The only
plate to which you can have direct access is the one on the top of the stack.
A stack of symbols provides a similar form of memory with access to the item
on top. If a program needs to get to a symbol stored lower down in the stack,
the items above it have to be removed. But, once a symbol is removed from the
stack, it is no longer in memory. It must then be used at once or it is forgotten.…
(p. 41-42)
A natural step is to remove the constraint that memory operates like a stack,
and to allow unlimited access to any amount of memory. There are several ways
in which to conceive of such a memory. Alan Turing had perhaps the simplest
idea. He imagined a machine that has a memory consisting of a tape divided into
cells like a strip from a child’s arithmetic notebook. The tape can move
to and fro under a device that can read the contents of one cell, and, if need
be, expunge the current symbol and replace it with another. If the machine gets
to one end of the tape, then a further length can be added so that it never
runs out of memory. Since a symbol is lost from memory only when it is expunged
by the machine, this system escapes from the constraints of the stack. Two stacks,
however, can simulate an infinitely extendable tape by shunting symbols between
them.…
When a finite-state machine is equipped with an unlimited tape, the result is
the most powerful computational device: a Turing machine.”
— P. N. Johnson-Laird
The Computer and the Mind:
An Introduction to Cognitive Science, 1988
“Only the simultaneous representation of the visual field gives us co-existence
as such… * The present, instead of being a pointlike experience, becomes
a dimension within which thigs can be beheld at once and can be related to each
other by the wandering glance of attention. This scanning, though proceeding
in time, articulates only what was present to the first glance and what stays
unchanged while being scanned.”
[*add more]
— Hans Jonas
“The Nobility of Sight,”
The Phenomenon of Life:
Towards a Philosophical Biology, 1966
J. Lacan: the deep unities that have to do with light
A. Korzybski; eye / hand / brain
The interchange [between spatializing and temporalizing] never stops. …
How does the mind achieve this spatialization of time?
— R. Shattuck
“How are difference as temporalizing and differance as spacing conjoined?
…how am I to speak of the a of differance?
The two apparently different meanings of differance are tied together in Freudian
theory: differing as discernibly, distinction, deviation, diastem, spacing;
and deferring as detour, delay, relay, reserve, temporalizing …
The (pure) trace is differance.… It permits the articulation of speech
and writing…as it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible
and the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression and content,
etc.…
Differance is therefore the formation of form.”
— Jacques Derrida
“Differance,”1967/73;
“Linguistics and Grammatology,” 1967 / 76
“Space has not room, time not a moment for man. He is excluded.
In order to ‘include’ him -- help his homecoming -- he must be gathered
into their meaning. (Man is the subject as well as the object of architecture.)
Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more.
For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion…
Provide that space, articulate the inbetween.
— A. van Ecyk
Team 10 Primer, 1978
[Janis and Blesh: with Schwitters collage became a major art medium, ]
“The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for a phenomenological
study of the intimate values of inside space, provided, of course, that we take
it in both its unity and its complexity, and endeavor to integrate all the special
values in one fundamental value. For the house furnishes us dispersed images
and a body of images at the same time… A sort of attraction for images
concentrates them about the house. With the house image we are in possession
of a veritable principle of psychological integration… Now my aim is clear:
I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for
the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.”
[add: house as tool for analysis]
— Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space, 1958
Rites of passing through the door…are transition rites… A rite of
spatial passage has become a rite of spiritual
— A. van Gennep
The Rites of Passage, 1908 / 60
I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember,
I do and I understand.
— Ancient Chinese Proverb