December 04, 2003
poetics of the city
I've always admired the visual language of Walker Evans:
As Evans put it, photography is the most literary of the graphic arts.
Looking at American Photographs I'm continually reminded of the economic style of Ernest Hemingway or William Carlos Williams.
It has that sparse expressive pictorial style.
Rather than recording or documenting a historical aspect of American life American photographs make American life speak.
In doing so the book helped to define 1940s America as a particular culture in the process of change.
Evans posed the issue of language in one of his books, Amercian Photographs. What then is an American photograph? Therein is posed a problem of interpretation.
This more than the question: 'what is an American photograph?
Why so?
Because our experiences are within language.
"We are, then, within language and with language before all else." Heidegger.
So the question is: 'In what relation do we live the language we speak, write and shoot?
That is one way to read American Photographs.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 4, 2003 11:09 PM | TrackBacklanguage is like a tool.. we use it to communicate, to convey meaning, to entertain and/or to think about the world [amongst many other things]..
some guy called Rugden once said - When the only tool you possess is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
in the same way, the use of language effects the way we experience the world, and i think this is what Heidegger meant by us being within and with language..
and perhaps this is what you meant by "live the language"?
btw, i'd just like to thank you for sharing your eclectic interests in imagery.. i hope quiggan is taking notes..
Posted by: kez on December 6, 2003 11:30 AMWhat if language were not an instrument?
What if it were a system of signs?
Or the house of being?
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on December 6, 2003 02:41 PM
language is quite clearly not a system of signs.. there are big problems with such an idea. what does the word 'the' signify? how does one picture the different meanings of the word 'that' in the sentence: i know that that is the end of the line?
the house of being? i'm sure i don't know what you mean. what is this house? where is it, and if i don't know about it, do i no longer exist? nonsense!
Posted by: kez on December 8, 2003 11:15 PMI guess the idea is that we don't exist in any meaningful way without internal constructs. That is profoundly true on the neural level. We store a huge pile of stuff in our brains and signals come in, are compared with the store, and used as the stored stuff.
I don't know to what extent Heidegger falls into the fallacy of many highly verbal people that thinking has to occur in words. But i don't relate to those Walker photos by naming them. I name them (sometimes, to some extent) as a consequence of the stimulation they give me.
The whole point of some therapeutic problems is that they are preverbal. The product of thought, real thought, before words.
Are the rules that govern my non-verbal processing of a Walker photograph describable as signs? I fear there is a lot of work on film that suggests that in the end the use of signs is only trivially true. Certainly the rules are processing rules, but whether they belong to dendrites or to grammar I suppose occupies the minds of many more educated than i am on the topic. Me, I'd rather than use them than talk about them. ...
ps - the Quiggan crew are not visual. It's all conceptual.
Posted by: David Tiley on December 10, 2003 11:59 PM"we don't exist in any meaningful way without internal constructs" ????
who is deciding what is meaningful here? if there are 'internal constructs', what is an external construct? it seems like you're saying: if we didn't have brains, we wouldn't exist.. well der..
"In order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought)." [wittgenstein]thinking and language are infinately more complicated than naming - that much should be obvious..
how do you know that there are rules that govern your thinking? how would you determine if you were following the rule or not?
"Obeying a rule is a practice.. To think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule." [wittgenstein]perhaps if you paid more attention to what you say, you might have to admit that thinking [even really hard!] about how one thinks doesn't get you any closer to a discovery, and believing someone who says they know something about how the brain works because they thought harder about it than you is foolish..
"Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." [wittgenstein],
why are people so reluctant to admit they don't know something? what we don't know about how the brain works would fill 99% of your brain..
ps. i think you meant they are theoretical.. after all, one can have a 'visual concept'..
Posted by: kez on December 11, 2003 12:53 AMcould you tell me what therapeutic problems you believe are preverbal?
i thought most of those problems arose because people denied them by not verbalising them..
i'll admit that the pain in my back is preverbal, but are you willing to take it on my word that i am in pain?
Posted by: kez on December 11, 2003 12:59 AM