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Yes but that’s also the attitude of someone in psychosis: to connect everything, to relate everything to everything else. We miss gaps, breaks, what is irreconc

Yes but that’s also the attitude of someone in psychosis: to connect everything, to relate everything to everything else. We miss gaps, breaks, what is irreconciliable, incomprehensible in the work of art: and the attempt to reduce that gap in the dream of a potential full correspondence is a violent fantasy.

JoelMcCracken 2y ago
Reminds me of Foucault's Pendulum. Great book, worth reading, and extremely relevant to our day.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  I was thinking of that book when I wrote my reply!
photonthug 2y ago
This just dodges the issue by playing games with language and insulting anyone that doesn't agree. One can also argue that separating everything from its natural and appropriate context with some crowbar of the intellect is a violence. And while connecting the unconnected might be mental illness, insisting that nothing can ever be contextually related to anything else is also madness. Heidegger and Van Gogh are literally and very directly entangled. Trying to understand one without the other will result in an incomplete or impoverished understanding, and if Heidegger doesn't like disproving himself this way then he shouldn't have written one important work that referenced another while claiming all works can/should stand alone. This is not even really a matter for interpretation.. like, if the painting did stand alone before, it cannot afterwards. This conversation is part of the evidence for that, but don't take my word for it. Googling "heidegger shoes" will immediately drop you on Van Gogh paintings.. the mutual reference / footnotes on both works are written into history already in many ways. Meanwhile, Schapiro on Heidegger points out Heidegger's own fantasy- the idea that the shoes belonged to peasant woman, whereas it's more likely they belonged to the artist. What's the argument for preferring random speculation about the shoe-owner and rejecting more informed speculation about how historical/cultural context shaped the subject matter? One can think of any kind of wild subjective thing while engaging with art and art-appreciation, but if you're ignoring all the wider context as irrelevant, or insisting that context isn't even real, that won't make for a very coherent or well-informed position. It's art, so feeling something is more important than being well-informed.. but OTOH, if your goal is to engage with a work then "ignoring as much context as possible" isn't usually a great strategy.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Its impossible to ignore the correspondences, but there's a difference between taking context as such as given, and recognizing that the tensions out of which a work of art comes to be (recall the example of the Greek Temple) are already within a foreclosure of a fullness that would exclude all difference. Hence, context is nothing but irreconcilable difference.

JoelMcCracken 2y ago

Reminds me of Foucault's Pendulum. Great book, worth reading, and extremely relevant to our day.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
I was thinking of that book when I wrote my reply!

photonthug 2y ago

This just dodges the issue by playing games with language and insulting anyone that doesn't agree. One can also argue that separating everything from its natural and appropriate context with some crowbar of the intellect is a violence. And while connecting the unconnected might be mental illness, insisting that nothing can ever be contextually related to anything else is also madness. Heidegger and Van Gogh are literally and very directly entangled. Trying to understand one without the other will result in an incomplete or impoverished understanding, and if Heidegger doesn't like disproving himself this way then he shouldn't have written one important work that referenced another while claiming all works can/should stand alone. This is not even really a matter for interpretation.. like, if the painting did stand alone before, it cannot afterwards. This conversation is part of the evidence for that, but don't take my word for it. Googling "heidegger shoes" will immediately drop you on Van Gogh paintings.. the mutual reference / footnotes on both works are written into history already in many ways. Meanwhile, Schapiro on Heidegger points out Heidegger's own fantasy- the idea that the shoes belonged to peasant woman, whereas it's more likely they belonged to the artist. What's the argument for preferring random speculation about the shoe-owner and rejecting more informed speculation about how historical/cultural context shaped the subject matter? One can think of any kind of wild subjective thing while engaging with art and art-appreciation, but if you're ignoring all the wider context as irrelevant, or insisting that context isn't even real, that won't make for a very coherent or well-informed position. It's art, so feeling something is more important than being well-informed.. but OTOH, if your goal is to engage with a work then "ignoring as much context as possible" isn't usually a great strategy.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
Its impossible to ignore the correspondences, but there's a difference between taking context as such as given, and recognizing that the tensions out of which a work of art comes to be (recall the example of the Greek Temple) are already within a foreclosure of a fullness that would exclude all difference. Hence, context is nothing but irreconcilable difference.