Re:<documenta X><blast>aesthetics-ethics
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Sat, 26 Jul 1997 20:48:00 -0400
At 05:58 PM 7/26/97 -0400, you wrote:
>Perhaps I'm duplicating rather than corroborating the services of
>literary criticism, but
>I'd like to coin two phrases to be of use in favor of a greater visual
>ethics.
>First: proximity transparency. I'll define this as the failure to see
>that which is right in front of your nose. (I'll not go into the
>indeterminancy between the predictable quanta) Transparency
>is a problem all who possess knowledge have when they wrongly assume
>everyone knows what
>they know. Their knowledge is transparent to them, they can't see that
>students don't know
>what they are talking about. Thus the transparency always needs to be
>exposed, brought to light,
>revealed by asking questionable things. The act of questioning being the
>ethical act.
>Second: external preclusion. This is the well know phenomena of not
>being able to see the
>outside of the house while inside, of not being able to see the global
>environment while on
>the earth, of not being able to determine the form of the universe while
>inside of it. The ethical
>imperative of external preclusion is to strive to push it further off by
>including more into the
>world which we can see. To see all life as sacred in many forms rather
>than only a small group is an expanding of that which is externally
>precluded from vision, as is space exploration. A greater vision, not
>censorship, is offered by an aesthetic of visual ethics which seeks to
>see more rather than less.
>
>Consider pornography, for example. The proximity transparency hides an
>understanding of the
>natural affection which may be going on, and the external preclusion
>prevents an assessment of this as a possible obsession. We may need to
>question the normal, slavish, human sexual services provided to the
>rich, and we may need some more revealing images of loving, erotic
>touching to help us experience. It can be vitally important to see it
>all, to know more about this. Intolerance is not wisdom when the
>student is learning the ability to see such differences. And we are all
>art students in this respect, this visual respect of trying to see
>things intelligently, humanely, and
>as they often too horridly happen in the world. And who are the people
>against vision? The
>ethical? I doubt it. The guilty? The history of humanity says yes, the
>scum hide in a pretense
>of intolerance.
would it be helpful to see this *in terms of* category limits. The higher
logical levels of the subject in question, the categories to which they are
assigned, are where you can really get a grip on the sociology of
knowledge/power. Come to think of it, Francis Bacon did just that when he
collapsed the categories of knowledge and power into a single
knowledge/power nexus. Orwell explored category collapse as an absurdist
method of social control... by collapsing every meaningful distinction the
mind employs to get a grip on a subject, i.e. love/hate ,
freedom/subjugation, etc... a fictional population was reduced to mental
slavery because their mental apparatus had been imploded. The application
of the category, the way it is crafted to fit into the category-ecology of
social, political, and personal definition (which are the same phenomena
observed at different degrees of magnification) IS the art of directing the
flow of human existence.