Art of the Occurrence of Meaning
I consider that I work strenuously to come to terms with (understand, be aware or conscious of, perceive and interpret) what it is I value, care about, intend, hope or purpose.
I am prodoundly interested in what is often referred to as “theory of mind” (TOM) – “that which hovers somewhere on the boundary between the explicit and the implicit, the conscious and the subconscious, the objective and subjective” – Maurice Bloch. And semiosis – what I understand to be the process and activity of utilizing available resources, situations, internal and external sensations to construct moments of meaning (“worlding” you could call it – co-here-ing in an embedded context). The seamless combination of culture/person-ality, internal/external, embodied/extended, conscious/subconscious – or selective/regulative – processes that occur in real-life human experiences.
Perhaps this is “Anthropology” as Maurice Bloch would have it:
“Anthropology, at least as I conceive it, presents the immense merit of uniting knowledge about human beings – that is constructed from the top down, by general theory, which in the case of cognitive psychology is supported by rigorous and controlled experiments – with knowledge of particular men and women that is constructed from the bottom up, based on the observation of people as they live their lives”
some commensurate multi-disciplinary examination of human life. I hear myself saying to myself…
[ASIDE: from high school through college when I envisioned being a great poet, I always wanted to be what I termed the “Master of Grey” – one able to plumb and express the indeterminate and indistinct – those liminal mixed and ambiguous realities of experience – exemplified by rain or fog or shadow – the betweens, the margins, the shades…]
Anyway, I hear myself saying to myself when I listen to myself speaking to myself (so very many variations of selves), that as much as I am fascinated and intrigued by the processes of the world (geological, biological, neurological, sociological and so forth) and the apparatuses and hows of human meaning-making (electro-neuro-biological, socio-cultural, etc…), I am yet more interested in the occurrences of human meaning experiences.
The “occurrence of meaning” seems to me the experience of all those elements and processes indiscretely conjoined and con-fused – wholes of which parts can’t be specified – signifieds/signifiers/significants indiscriminate: our PRESENT.
This is where art arises for me. Art and action, for art is action. Art seems to me – or processes of human making – an attempt at conjoining/confusing/commingling and co-relating of the many modes and motions, nodes and notions, processes and practices, influences confluencing the convergences we term experience.
Artistic acts are those where subject/object, conscious/subconscious, selective/regulative, internal/external, intentional/accidental distinctions in human processes do not apply – and these convergences, these realities of human living are sometimes actualized or embodied/externalized. Perhaps, in my way of thinking.
Modalities and genres, fields and spheres, behaviors, cognition and domains – social and personal intertwingled, the perceived and imperceptible carrying on simultaneously – CONverged – and that verge – that edge, rim, margin of activity – that liminal, boundary-zone open border-space is the essential –
a human way of mediately presenting occurrences of meaning, in their variety and multiplicity. Perhaps.
Or so I am thinking.
Answerability in the body of the world.
The meaning event seen in its total matrix.
Polysemic Stupor 