The great French wave continues with Roland Barthes: semiotician, theorist of photography, and elegant fragmentier…
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.”
“”Am I in love? — Yes, since I’m waiting.” The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.”
— Roland Barthes - A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
I believe that all people should be given the opportunity to see things the way they are. - Stanley Kubrick
I believe that all people should be given the opportunity to see things the way they are.
“Language,” William S. Burroughs reminded us, “is a virus from outer space.” Performance artist Laurie Anderson adds, “That’s why I’d rather hear your name than see your face.” This metaphor captures beautifully both the power and the danger presented by the task of communicating the “flux of wholeness,” as Heather Raikes describes the rheomode.
Raikes’ use of the rheomode suggests that technology might be seen not just as a channel for communication and performance, but more radically as the environment in which subjects serve as conduits for experience. A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts.
written on the body III.
via w;t
danielholter:afghanistanbananastand:
A small group of hunter/gatherers living in the Amazon rain forest is overturning some fundamental assumptions about the mind. Although linguists have long believed that counting and having words for numbers are basic, if not innate, to human cognition, the Pirahã people in Brazil have no words to express numerical concepts such as “one,” “two,” or “many.” “They don’t count and they have no number words,” says MIT cognitive scientist Edward Gibson, who headed a study published in the journal Cognition [pdf].
The researchers spent eight days in a Pirahã rain forest village conducting counting tests on adult members of the tribe. Sometimes the experimenter placed varying numbers of spools of thread on a table and asked the participant to perform a simple one-to-one task, such as laying down the same quantity of uninflated balloons. Other tasks required remembering how many spools had been placed inside a can.
On a related note : I just finished reading Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, about an evangelist who goes to live with the Pirahã people (to ostensibly save them/convert them), and it was quite fascinating, eyeopening, and remarkable. The author ends up appreciating their way of life, renouncing his faith and losing friends and family in the process.
Nod Young’s take on The Puti Trees poems, an excellent exploration of Chinese characters. Did I just screw up the meaning by arranging them in this manner? Fail.
(via happy cavalier)
6od:
I fLOVE Jenny Holzer!!! I took pictures of something that Peggy Guggenheim bought of hers and is in her museum in Venice, Italy… but I haven’t posted them on flickr yet… It is probably one of my favorite poems and it’s engraved into a park bench.
I should probably post them now, huh?
juliemiller:sympathyfortheartgallery:maybeitsallok:This is by Jenny Holzer, she has a pretty great gallery on her website of this style work from all around the world.
Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it.
In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You’ll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running.
”
