From: Madison Brookshire (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Nov 02 2005 - 10:22:10 PST
Alan Sondheim <email suppressed> wrote:
Subject: Re: Dada
"That said, since the real is unrepresentable precisely because it is
inconsistent, I think any attempt to _represent_ the real is, of course,
doomed. And, to that extent, all this talking about it gets us no closer
than never having considered it."
I've often wondered about this, which is standard theory at this point re:
(re)mediation, representation, etc. It's worthwhile taking in fact the
opposite tack - that in fact the real is completely consistent and trans-
parent; certainly Wolfram and Penrose tend towards that. Inconsistency
does _not_ imply something is unrepresentable, any more than, say, Skolem
or Church or Godel or whatever imply that the mathesis of physics is
contradictory. (In fact Godel himself was a platonist.)
In other words, the "of coures" above is, like anything else, open to
question, and I think the matter is far from settled - if anything it's a
symptom perhaps of theory (in the Fr. sense) and its poverty at the
moment.
- Alan
I agree. Of course, the of course is far from settled. I'm also interested
in hearing more on the notion of transparency (I'm unfamiliar with the
thinkers, Wolfson and Penrose, you refer to).
To be clear, I don't consider the real unknowable, just unrepresentable.
That said, I think the earlier posts do suggest that we often use systems of
representation to suggest things that are indeed outside of those systems.
The example tha comes to mind again and again is the way in which certain
poets use particular words (or grammatical conventions, punctuation etc.
etc.) in ways that suggest meanings beyond the words themselves, things that
are essentially outside of language. And I don't just mean metaphors, but
instead they tend to stretch the word over a void in language, something
that language alone cannot express. Wish I had a concrete example at hand
that might clear this up. Maybe Yeats' "dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea."
I think the link, for me, between inconsistentcy and unrepresentability is
about limits and/or the lack thereof. If we can argue that any act of
representation is an act of reification and that reification is inherently
limiting, it would follow that it is impossible to represent the unlimited.
That said, I think the work of John Cage, Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman,
James Tenney, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Leslie Thronton etc. etc. all deal
with this very conundrum: using limits (structures, strategies, heuristics:
form) to invite or describe or delineate or _trace_ the ineffable,
unrepresentable, immaterial, potential...
Not sure I have much else to add at the moment except a quote from Stephen
David Ross:
“The gift is given by no one or thing, circulates everywhere, in every
place, a giving without a giver, without a receiver, given everywhere. In
this sense, it is impossible to speak of the good, impossible to fix its
limits. This is not because the good is something we cannot know, but
because speaking of it is endless interruption.”
—Stephen David Ross
Madison
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