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Week 13 - STUDY DAY

Page history last edited by KJA 11 years, 3 months ago

**ASSIGNMENT**

 

BY FRIDAY AT 12 MIDNIGHT, WRITE AT LEAST TWO PARAGRAPHS (of the soulful variety) EXPRESSING YOUR IDEAS ABOUT HOW WE CAN THINK ABOUT HEIDEGGER'S NOTION OF A THING/THINGNESS/THINGING IN LIGHT OF OUR STUDIES OF EITHER 1) NIETZSCHE OR 2) FREUD.

 

Some ways to reflect:

 

--Go back to the page on Heidegger for the week, and browse some of the links I have posted to the secondary sources: Week 13 - Heidegger, "The Thing"

--Carefully read the two passages (by Nietzsche and Heidegger) I posted on the aforementioned page.

--Re-read the passages from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras.

--Think about the activity we did in the VERTIGO class, and the lessons we have learned about hysteria and the hysterical subject, and of dreams. In light of Freud's thought, how do you think "normal" people relate to things in the world?

--Revisit the poem I handed out, by Wallace Stevens, "The Anecdote of the Jar":

 

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

 

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

 

It took dominion every where.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

 

 

--Ask yourself: What kind of a thing is this? What does the way it is perceived (by the artist? by the viewer?) tell you about the nature of thingness? of the world? of the subject/perceiver?

 

 

 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sara Sol

NEITZSCHE àHEIDEGGER

 

 

     In The Gay Science Nietzsche constructs negation of “truth”, stamping humanities attempts at it into the category of faith, he first deconstructs common sense, then art, religion, and science.  Within this construct, science as much as Buddhism becomes a system of belief that excludes all others and praises itself as the “truth”, or the correct method. In the last book he shows the “prejudice of science” and at once preserves science/intellectualism as an important development, not negating its validity, just showing that it too relies on the faith of its makers. Throughout the whole book he oscillates between praise of science as a step away from religion, and critique of science as an extension of that religiosity. The ambiguity which this oscillation gives to Nietzsche’s perception of science is, I think, a purposeful one. It lets science be what it is, a new thing and a repetition of the old thing.   The belief in a god is equally a faith as  “the faith in a world that is supposed to have its equivalent and its measure in human thought and human valuations- a “world of truth” that can be measured completely and forever with the aid of our square little reason” (aphorism 373). Nietzsche starts the dismantling of science as an objective truth, as an absolute removed from our unstoppable want of explanations, of a reason, a cause. He doesn’t only document the death of god, he kills its killer- science- and makes them almost one in the same, and yet as Kaufman points out he doesn’t negate the truthiness of science, only the blind faith in it, and the quickness which we misconstrue something as the truth just to declare that we’ve found it:   “[scholar’s ]needs which led them to become scholars in the first place, their inmost assumptions and desires that things might be such and such, their fears and hopes all come to rest and are satisfied too soon” (aphorism 373)  Our desire to pin “thing” down as one particular, as solely a group of atoms conglomerated together by nuclear forces or solely a chemical reaction,  allows science to gain the title of the most truthful as  method of “mastering the thing completely and forever”. Nietzsche, with as much disgust as he mustered for faith in god, asks: “Do we really want to permit existence to be degraded like this- reduced to a mere exercise for a calculator and an indoor diversion for mathematicians”(pg 335, same aph)

     Sixty years later, already sunk deep into the “age of scientific discovery” and the abolishing of distance in all manners, Heidegger answers this question in The Thing. He says, not only do we not want to degrade existence this way, but we already have! He expands Nietzsche’s critique of science, which has already been questioned and established as a form of faith, and finds a connection between the abolition of both near and far brought on by modernity and the simplification which science demands of thing to object. The abolition of thingness, of nearness, becomes a facet of the scientific method of explanation because science by nature looks at everything as a compilation of its parts, e.g. solely atoms in space, or energy in photons, not its actual being, its jugness or lightness or general thingness. “Science makes the jug-thing into a nonentity in not permitting things to be the standard for what is real”(170)

To Heidegger, the thing lost its thingness when explanation simplified it down to its constituent parts. We no longer see the pyramids of ancient Egypt as what they are, which I am not really sure what Heidegger would find this to be, instead we see a stack of rocks, or an amazing structure- but not what it is. In his search for the thingness he negates one definition of thing qua thing after another, demonstrating  throughout the essay that the thing is none of these: an object, a product of its maker, the “eidos” or appearance it has, as Plato has it, or its ability hold something, or the summation of its scientific makeup. Instead all of these conceptions of a thing are what unthings it, they are what produce our misconstruing of the thing qua thing and turn it into an object, or rather, never let it grow out of objecthood, for as Heidegger says things must become things they are not “born” that way. In our misconstruing of the thing, the abolition of both thing and distance take place, for without the mortal, i.e. human, appropriation of the thing qua thing, it cannot make the transformation from object to thing.

     Heidegger takes Nietzsche’s questions and expands them, but at the same time he answers them by creating a new definition, a new thing to believe in, which although could be seen as a faith in the truth of itself, seems to abide to Nietzsche’s plea: “Above all, one should not wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity”(Nietzsche, 335). Heidegger reconstructs the thing as a reflection of the world: “the thing stays- gather and unites- the fourfold”(181). The fourfold is not any one of its parts (mortal, divinity, earth and sky) but instead their appropriation of each other. He takes four pages of his twenty page essay to truly clarify this new definition, and although it may be seen as four pages of repetition, he really takes the time to look at each side of his construction. The thingness of the thing exists in its ability to hold together the parts of the world- i.e. mortal, divine, earth, sky. Each thing therefore is a reflection of the whole world; it contains in itself the process by which we get a world that no scientific definition succeeds at defining. Heidegger is concerned with our simplification of something as complex, varied, and multi-layered as the world. He says it’s not just a pile of dirt; it is what holds us, what makes life, what makes death. It’s the ultimate dialectic because it everything at once and it is the ultimate circular argument because each part necessities the part before it.  He maintains the ambiguity of the thing, not breaking it apart into parts but showing the necessity of each part in the whole and the necessity of the whole in each part. He makes it so that each thing is a reflection of the world, and shows that breaking it apart into constituent parts makes it incomprehensible: “As soon as human cognition here calls for an explanation, it fails to transcend the world’s nature, and falls short of it”(180) As Nietzsche said of man’s desire to  make things “such and such”, Heidegger attempts, and perhaps succeeds?, at construing a picture of the thing that doesn’t define it and leave it at that, but makes it a unification of many things, and shows the thing’s ness to be an ambiguity, a many sided and interwoven system. The importance given to ambiguity, to dialectic nature of things goes back to Heraclitus“46. They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of a bow and lyre.” It is this ambiguity which is missed in absolute definitions provided in mechanical structures.

      He tries to answer Nietzsche’s question and say: “no, we don’t want to degrade it, so let’s not”.  Nietzsche ends the scientific prejudice aphorism with an example that I think explains both his and Heidegger’s concern very well: “Assuming that on estimated the value of a piece of music according to how much it could be counted, calculated, and expressed in formulas…What would one have comprehended, understood, grasped of it? Nothing, really nothing of what is “music” in it!”(336) In music, like in the Van Gogh, it is easy to see the products of an oversimplified analysis of it, but ironically the amount of sound-science that analyzes music as a stimulus to the brain does deconstruct it in the very way Nietzsche was calling ludicrous. He says: “an essentially mechanical world would be an essentially meaningless world.” Where Nietzsche was concerned with mechanization of the world, Heidegger deals with the repercussions of mechanization- i.e. television, film, radio, planes, jets, DNA dating, etc. Heidegger wants to re-music the music, find the real essence(?) of it, the thingness that can undo the dissection science requires and look at whole.

 

 Jack

I tried to write a few paragraphs on Heidegger and failed. I don’t understand his essay.

 

In “The Anecdote of the Jar” Stevens’ jar differentiates itself from its natural environment, seems to tame its immediate surroundings, “takes dominion,” but is still grey and bare—this is an anti-romanticizing tale of human perception of the world. As just a jar, it is an über-mundane version of Keats’ Grecian urn. “I” places the jar in the first line, but then disappears; casting everything as a function of the jar’s effect is more conducive to the I think rather pompous and negative ponderous “around…round…ground” assonances and the overall mission of non-celebration.

 

For some much more celebratory, romantic Stevens, read “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” written, I think, slightly later:

 

 Not less because in purple I descended

 The western day through what you called

 The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

 

 What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?

 What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?

 What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

 

 Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,

 And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.

 I was myself the compass of that sea:

 

 I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

 Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

 And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

 

Here, the role of “I” as the defining force in all relations between objects and the perceiver is recognized as primary, embraced, and celebrated. I’m not sure what Heidegger means when he says that “a mere shift of attitude is powerless to bring about the advent of the thing as thing” but I think that the “mere shift of attitude” present in this poem is much more understandable than Heidegger, and I feel—admittedly at least partially due to my incomprehension—more useful and profound. I think humans are better at thinging things than things are at thinging themselves.

 

 

Karena

 

According to Nietzsche, humans now and have long since had an innate capacity to falsely perceive the things around them.  Though these false pretensions have served useful purposes in the history of our species, Nietzsche finds some value in breaking it down to bring it to our consciousness.  Nietzsche claims that there are in fact no “things, substances, bodies”; a thing is not what it appears to be; our will is not free; what is good for us is (not necessarily) good in itself (169).  If we did not project our human knowledge onto the world, there would be no categories of things.  This will to designation and separate identification is only an illusion which helps us function more efficiently.  With it comes a bevy of other mistakes.  There are no “things.”

 

Heidegger recognized a related issue of identification.  It is for him not outright “false,” but rather what we do.  “Near to us are what we usually call things.  But what is a thing?” (166).  The thing for Heidegger is that which is merely lumped off from a channel of things which are, in essence, connected anyway.  Nothing is separate in itself because they were already united before the category “thing”.  “The suspicion arises that the understanding of the nature of the thingness that we are here trying to reach may be based on the accidents of an etymological game.  The notion becomes established and is already current that, instead of giving thought to essential matters, we are here merely using the dictionary” (174).  A thing doesn’t appear as thing because we negate its status as such.  Its names stands arbitrarily against it.  A jug's status as “jug” does not depend on its being made.  “It remains a vessel whether we represent it in our minds or not” (167).  Our human projection of knowledge leads us to this designation inscribed in language, and thereby our minds.

 

How is this painting of sunflowers any different from sunflowers in nature?  How is this painting of sunflowers any different from John’s?  Those are real sunflowers, for Van Gogh.  John's painting is how John sees it.  For whatever artist, a painting is as much the object of their representation as the representation itself.  There is no representation.

 

If this painting of sunflowers appeared in Van Gogh’s dictionary, he would understand it immediately as the real thing.  This is how he sees it. 

 

 

Stacy

 

At first I was stumped by the differences between a thing and an object which made it difficult to understand what Heidegger’s argument was. And it did not help that he described things as the things themselves (i.e. “What in the thing is thingly?”). From what I understand, a thing is able to stand on its own. It is its own entity regardless of our perception of it. An object is perceived by us or we have an idea of it. Nietzsche states that “a thing is what it appears to be.” To me, it appears that a jug is a vessel, thus, it IS a vessel. But, this transforms the “thing” into an object. However, the jug does what a vessel is supposed to do, it holds things, and it does this whether I perceive it or not so it’s still a thing right? I hope I didn’t just confuse myself.

 

As for the sunflower painting, I would think that it falls under the category of an object. The painters perceived the sunflowers a certain way and so that is how they painted them. I don’t think that the paintings themselves would constitute as a thing in itself but maybe I’m wrong. I’m only basing it on the definition of things that I understood from the text. I don’t think an image can stand on its own.

 

P.S. I hope this is perceived as a soulful contribution. =)

 

 

Chris

 

I too am with Jack here:  Heidegger is proving much more difficult than the others.  In attempting to look at the poem as an effort to actually post something (my apologies for it being after midnight), I’ve decided to look at the poem’s ability to separate the jar from many of its prior contexts.  In Steven’s poem, the jar is placed upon the hill and “It made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill.”  A jar’s function is generally to both contain something and protect its contents and here the poem removes the jar from what exactly makes it a jar.  I suppose it is possible that this is, as Sara put it, “the abolition of [its] thingness.”  The jar has disassociated itself with its signifier through its interaction with the wilderness around it.  It is no longer simply a container, and instead exists in relation to the wilderness that surrounds it, rather than Stevens' perception of it as a jar.  It instead becomes something with what would seem to be agency in its ability to “take dominion every where.”  It would seem the jar becomes more an “it” than it is a jar in this moment and this brings attention to the way we perceive the jar through associating it with its functions.

 

Jenneke

 

 (my apologies for not posting by last night)

 

 

     I, like several others, took very little understanding out of Heidegger’s essay. What I did take away was the phenomenological aspect of it, describing experience. With all the analysis he did revolving around the jug, I was confused. What I took away from it is that the jar is only an object unless it was a part of your life, your experience, in which case it is a thing because it held meaning to you.

     In terms of Freudian thinking, I believe the concept of object versus thing could be applied to analyzing an individual’s thoughts. There is a very fine line between being physically sick versus having hysterical fits that would seem like a sickness. I feel like the difference between having abnormal/hysterical dreams/daydreams and having a ‘normal’ dream/daydream lies in how you interpret the concepts they revolve around and the meaning or bearing they have on the individual. Whether or not an everyday mass had bearing on their life, making it an object or a thing.

     Similarly, with the Stevens’ poem and Van Gogh painting I feel like the reason they are significant and resounding is because they touch base with their own experiences/encounters with a thing. For example, a jar on a hill would be an object to me because I cannot personalize either; neither have been a part of my life. But if I were to sculpt a jar myself and put it on a particular hill for something reason or other, it would then because a thing.

 

MAZZIN

I've been trying to come up with an understanding in "the Thing" essay, but can't seem to do it.  So I will write about what our group discovered in class last week. On page 84. Heidegger  begins talking about the multiple uses of a a jug. The first use is a drink. "The gift of pouring out is drink for mortals. It quenches their thirst." He also says that the pouring of jug can be used for consecration. A service in the dedication to a deity.  If this is the use then "..it does not still a thirst. It stills and elevates a celebration or a feast." He then explains how the use of pouring as a gift to the gods is associated with the origin of the word "gush".  Gush is comes from Middle English "guschen" which mean to offer in sacrifice. He goes on to say that in the gift of the outpouring mortals, divinities, earth, and sky each dwell together in their differences.  Presumably because the jug came from the earth, the mortals pour and benefit from the drink, the mortals take the sacrifice, and the sky..well I don't know how the sky fits in.  he goes on to say that the gift of the pouring is no longer the mere persisting of something but it appropriates things. It appropriates the four elements, sky, earth, mortals, and divinities. Here I began to realize a theme of this writing. He first separates different things. He tells how they are different and how they are separate. Then he continues to search for the origin and the essence of these things. The result of his discoveries erase the separations and eventually bring everything together. 

 


 

Michael

 

Sorry for posting so late, but technically no one made the deadline of "midnight Friday" (protip for the alpha male: midnight Friday = 12:00 AM Friday = Thursday night).

 

Interesting in looking at "The Anecdote of the Jar" and "The Thing" is that the jar is set in opposition to nature. By being placed on a hill, and not being wild, suddenly everything around it is wild. And then when wilderness comes near the jar, it is no longer wild. The jar is a "port": a window, a gateway. Using it, one can see the wilderness around it... which is, however, no longer wild. At the beginning of "The Thing", Heidegger rants about how technology brings a simulacrum of nearness. The jar brings a simulacrum of wilderness. Once the wild has been brought to the jar, however, it is no longer wild—once the far thing has been accessed via technology, it is no longer far. 

 

"Nature hides itself." In the poem, nature approaches the jar, intrepid. If we synthesize Heidegger and Stevens, we maybe get that the spread and advancement of technology, and the effects thereof—both good and bad—are inevitable. What will controls nature other than the inevitable? Wilderness approaches the jar. Wilderness is destroyed. 

 

What does thingness have to do with any of this?

 

The entire question of what a thing is and whether it is thinging, etc., seems to be trying to get at something's essence. This presupposes an essence. Stevens's poem seems to suggest that wilderness's defining aspect—its wildness—can be changed, and trivially at that. How can it be the essence if it is malleable? And how can a thing have an essence other than its defining aspect?

 

Wilderness is destroyed, along with the possibility of wilderness having essence. Wilderness is no longer wilding at the end of the poem. But it is still wilderness, because that is our word for the concept. Because we think it's wilderness, it is. We create the essence of the thing through perception... much like how in Heraclitas we invent for ourselves that a river is a single unique river every time we step into a different set of water molecules.

 

 

K.A.

 

                                                                                                      The thing

 

Any account of things is a desiccation of the thing as such and today all that we have are accounts of things. Heidegger takes Nietzsche's claim that all we have inherited until now is an instrumental reason borne of errors one step further. Whereas before the subject/object distinction constituting instrumental reason was presumptuous enough insofar as man was the measure of all things and all things were objects laying in wait to be controlled by him- now, the distinction bears no preference for man or thing at all, they are interchangeable as a result of technology and science, yet there are still subjects and objects, which means that something like Hal 9000 is an essential outcome of instrumental reason as well as an avatar for our fundamental ontological uncertainty about what we are as those subjects who examine themselves as objects. 

     Instrumental accounts are also called technological accounts and here I want to use the word technological because of its relation to the Greek word techne which denotes a method, a knowledge that is put to use in a way that compliments the form of said knowledge. Things cordoned off, catalogued, 'understood', handled and filed away for future generations. When the anarchy of modern technological reason is giving way to a levelling of all things to the same ordered vault of knowledge and of being made available for whatever reason -useful or not- there is only distancelessness, uniformity, a phony sort of awareness without any truth beyond the truth of its usefulness (or lack thereof) to man's current historical configuration's goals. Meanwhile and despite the attempts of science to answer to every aspect of being, being itself is constantly withdrawing (Nature loves to hide), not near not far. Things in themselves are only covered over, abstracted by an always constituted relation to Man and capable of being invaded in all manner and at any given time. And man himself is somewhere in that relation, neither subject nor object, firmly grounded in a no-space between the two with little hope of extricating himself 'by means of' something, except perhaps thinking. This finally is the outcome, the essential outcome of instrumental reason, that man has no use for himself but to be put to use by others or to use others. And this is why at the end of his essay 'The Thing', Heidegger refuses to put the period on his own reception of the thing and sets himself the task of dwelling and thinking. Through thinking man steps backward to his essential state as the receiver of worlding and as he who discloses the world. To set apart his essay by concluding his rendering of nearness, worlding, and the thing would be to violate that very rendering. This is why the essay spins out of the confines of a mere description of -and answer to- the question 'what is a thing' and begins to orbit around its own centerless construction, 'semipoetically', as Heidegger says.

     To think thing is to be like the vessel. It can be made to hold and be filled with one object after another in relation to its capacity to stay i.e. to hold those objects, but this locutionary arrangement is not, in essence, that which is the essence of the vessel, nor of man. The appropriative ringing of the fourfold Einfalt is the worlding of the world. We might ask Heidegger then, what difference does it make if we call the jug an earthenware production, or a tool, or an object, or a thing, if the limits of the world are contained in this jug and by implication all that we could possibly call a thing? Is it merely, as Sara writes, a new understanding, a new 'faith' in these things?  But what can be new if we are still ourselves subject, and as such still subjects, to our present way of Being in everyday life? Where is the possibility for resisting technological Being, Being which assumes its own comprehensibility and remains in this fashion for eternity as truth? Well, philosophy for Heidegger and to the same extent Nietzsche is not didactic and cannot teach us how to think things through, let alone hold those things in mind for ourselves and our progeny. Philosophy is a correspondence of Being with Being and attending to it alone, while not exactly 'progressive' or 'constructive' (clearly telos of an instrumental reason) can at least stave off our most automatic compulsions in life and in thought. Thinking can open us to the wonder of being and the horror that has been made of it, which, if nothing else, allows us to live a waking nightmare as opposed to an insipid and utterly overpowering daydream. Of course then we might smile, why would anyone want to do either? Why exist at all? The answer I think depends on one's disposition. There isn't a compelling argument that is also truthful which can be given as an eternal reason, or moral impetus, to go on living- but the privilege of mortals (in one of the most beautiful constructions of thought I have ever encountered) is that we are 'capable of death'. In that sense, it is at least partly something of a positive privilege that we can and do die at all; and it makes no difference one way or another whether one chooses to end their life or die late in the game. This raises a problem though which strictly speaking isn't a problem: from a purely abstract point of view it also makes no difference whether one obliterates a life. That is, until Being itself imposes its reign on mortals, and it is always doing this, just in different manifestations across human history, taking a life is an abstraction. Thus, because we live today in the age of technological reason, to take a life is to waste something, a reserve which may be 'useful'- perhaps useful for no other reason than that it simply is there to be used at some later date. But what is a life 'to have' and 'to be useful for' something? No real life at all, just a little calculation waiting to be exploited. And that is the justification for preserving life which modernity, not Heidegger, gives for its constant and dishonest plaints for peace amidst the ever-growing and already-achieved capacity to destroy, to snuff out, all life as we know it. How often have we heard of the dead spoken of as 'so much potential'.

     Does this imply then that Nietzsche and Heidegger would rather abolish religious faith, Western philosophy, science, and technology once and for all? I don't think so. I think that thinking for Heidegger, unlike the more rigorously pessimistic Nietzsche, is the last, the only bastion of mortals and that in itself it does not preclude any of these others. It is simply the default essence of mortals. It has been denied and abused over and over again by historical attempts to prescribe one final and unambiguous intelligibility after another to every last 'such and such'. And since the codification one way or another of every last 'such and such' is incomplete until every last thing has been gathered together, in the meantime all this instrumental knowledge has been put to use in bringing people into line and into a state of mind of infinite manageability, from without themselves via the injunction of authorities and received wisdom, and from within via our own eagerness, readiness, and seeming naturalness in setting ourselves in order. In all this there is a note of infinite despondence over a feeling that things, whether they had to be this way now, are the way they are and that to simply posit some withdrawal from or total immersion in technology, faith, thinking, etc. is worse than just unthinkable: it is a lie. The thinking's the thing and in Heidegger it is difficult not to conclude that what thinking is isn't necessarily thinking in our sense at all but rather a protracted 'letting come into being' of being with being- as though Descartes had never finished his first meditation and just kept sinking deeper and deeper into being beside his fireplace for all time... inging.

Comments (12)

Sergio Cárdenas said

at 4:51 pm on Apr 22, 2010

study day? meaning no class tomorrow?

Jack Gedney said

at 10:42 pm on Apr 22, 2010

Correct

Sergio Cárdenas said

at 11:43 pm on Apr 22, 2010

thanks

Chris said

at 7:13 am on Apr 23, 2010

I'm trusting you on this one Jack seeing as I missed Wednesday :\

Sara Sol said

at 8:45 am on Apr 23, 2010

dont worry he is right, no class .
hey chris, i didn't get your text till a few hours after class on wed. so i didnt get a chance to tell Davy, sorry. Hope you are feeling better

Jack Gedney said

at 1:03 pm on Apr 23, 2010

If anyone was thinking that that Van Gogh looks a little funny and wondering why it says "John" on the vase, I discovered by searching "van gogh sunflowers" that that's an image from some guy's photoshop experimentation. Here's the real painting: http://www.vangoghpaintings.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/van-gogh-sunflowers-version-03.jpg

Sergio Cárdenas said

at 2:38 pm on Apr 23, 2010

no wonder it didn't look very van gogh like.. thanks

David Walter said

at 9:14 pm on Apr 23, 2010

yeah, john did an okay job, but i uploaded the authentic image.

Sam Tobis said

at 8:33 am on Apr 25, 2010

“Because the word thing as used in Western metaphysics denotes that which is at all and is something in some way or other, the meaning of the name "thing" varies with the interpretation of that which is--of entities."

If thingness resides in a duality of being; “that which is at all and is something in some way or other,” then the claim that Van Gough’s self-portrait is mere representational art, is only the claim that the painting is a thing. Well obviously a painting is a thing; a thing called painting within the category picture. So easily we recognize and dismiss the painting’s imitative quality; it’s just a picture. But we also call a movie by this name picture. This type of picture is an utterly different thing, for a picture, in this sense (as film), is of a different representational quality. A “still life” picture pauses a moment in time, representing in the momentary depiction of the flower or the face. A “film” picture, on the other hand, constructs a new temporal reality; a complete and enclosed story. But are these pictures so different?

We could gaze upon a painting’s pause for at least 120 minutes, in this way; a still life’s meaning is more constitutively dynamic in time. A film tells us when it is over; its temporality is actually more definite than the still life that appears only as a pause. A still life and a film are of a different nature but their existence share a fictional quality, the story we tell brings them into being; depending how you consider, a painting and a film can be utterly different or exactly identical. The names we assign to things are similarly fictive; their supposed entities do not exist until we describe them.

Sergio Cárdenas said

at 11:07 am on Apr 25, 2010

Hi guys... davy's line (i uploaded the authentic image) got me thinking of W. Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Maybe i'm wrong but to me Art, craft and or act of creation are closely related to one another and thought that since we are already talking of the jug, and the painting in relation to our being, i think that this article might shed some light on Heidegger's description of present day human perception of the thing..

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

p.s. i'll write my comment on the wiki tonight

David Walter said

at 4:20 pm on Apr 25, 2010

sergio,

in the spirit of the "authentic" and "inauthentic" -- which you and karena (and jack, of course) invoke -- i have put john van gogh back on the wiki below his "authentic" predecessor. of course neither of these vases of flowers is the "thing-in-itself." can we say one of them is "farther removed"? where exactly are we to locate the original?

i think it would a great idea to read the benjamin this week -- especially as we find ourselves sandwiched between two films that call the notion of authentic thingness in question.

think for a minute of MIDGE'S "SELF PORTRAIT AS CARLOTTA." it's is a powerful example of "travesty," in the literal sense of the word. and it has its origin in the desire to be "not me," but someone else -- or both "me" and "not me."

there's another classic essay i've thought of that intersects with this nexus of ideas. it is laura mulvey's "visual pleasure in narrative cinema" (1973). mulvey's work is a freudian/lacanian (generally, "psychoanalytic") approach to gender and desire in films like VERTIGO.

here it is:

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~mquillig/20050131mulvey.pdf

David Walter said

at 7:48 pm on Apr 25, 2010

sara -- i LOVE your readings of those latter passages in THE GAY SCIENCE. it's a great point to make that n. is kind of playing the prophet of modern alienation, while h. is looking back and saying "what happened" to our nearness to things? we've been through the industrial revolution in the 19th century and thanks to thinkers like marx we've learned how mechanization erodes the social system and makes a whole class of people into machines. thanks to darwin, we've come to understand that the survival of our species is the motivation for our progress -- a fact that deprivileges us, knocks us off the podium as "special" beings who are different in kind from animals.

but with heidegger, we have a retrospective gaze, one that looks at the advancements the 20th has made to create an enormous -- and enormously comfortable -- middle class. and technology -- far from alienating -- brings everything we'd ever want without waiting. but it also led the charge to total destruction in two world wars, culminating with the harnessing of atoms -- the ultimate things which make up all things -- to destroy millions. how do we look at science now? and how can we think of the world it has ushered us into?

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