Re: question on Emak Bakia (Man ray, 1926)

From: malgosia askanas (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Feb 15 2009 - 12:08:10 PST


The problem is that the category "passive spectatorship" has no
precise meaning - and even worse, it is, as you know, very commonly
used, with a pejorative bent, to denote forms of spectatorship which
involve a dulling of awareness. I don't think that dulling
awareness was part of the Dadaist intent; on the contrary, the intent
was, in a certain sense, to renew or sharpen awareness. One of the
techniques for affecting this "renewal of awareness" is to force the
spectator to suspend certain "habits of cogition" - habits which dull
the perceptive and affective faculties, and block one from "seing
with one's own eyes". Unless we give the words "passive" and
"active" a very precise meaning, not much is achieved by labeling
such a suspension of habit one way or the other.

-m

At 1:58 PM -0500 2/15/09, bryan mckay wrote:
>There are certainly many shades of consciousness (and
>unconsciousness and subconsciousness), but I think it's useful to
>make the initial dichotomous split into "active" and "passive" forms
>of spectatorship. If you can figure out which general set one
>experience is leaning toward, then you can begin figuring out the
>finer details, but I think it's important to make that initial
>distinction. I'm not usually one to advocate reductive thought, but
>trying to define something so subtle usually requires distinguishing
>some broad boundaries first.
>
>Bryan

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