The Icarian Fall -- Further Remarks

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Thu Jun 6 00:11:21 PDT 2002


Try browing in this.

Carlo Parcelli, Is everyday language sufficient to embody everyday experience?....

Carrol Cox

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Okay. I tried. (http://www.flashpointmag.com/everyday.htm):

``...The lack of basic epistemological and philosophical tools is also behind the critical position that the work of contemporary poets, be it Derek Walcott, Jorie Graham, Philip Levine, Katha Pollitt, or whomever, is at heart ineffectually bourgeois no matter what their radical pedigree. It is informed by bourgeois ideas not because these poets do not 'mean' or intend their radical sentiments, but because they do not realize the nature of the critical depths and demands of the system they are attacking. Only a radical epistemological and philosophical understanding of science and technology, and a poetics based on this can now be truly revolutionary...''

Well, I disagree. I tried this idea out some twenty-five to thirty odd years ago, using geometry and group theory in painting and sculpture. I thought the efforts succeeded. Unfortunately, nobody else did. So they failed. What you see are a series of very austere geometric abstractions in different materials. Some were in steel, some in heavy roofing paper, creosote beams, large embossed prints, chalk drawings on the floor, and a series of painted constructions. All typical looking stuff from the late Sixties through mid Seventies: minimal, post-minimal, conceptual styles.

First of all, there is something wrong with the idea that art and science are antagonists. This opposition is something like two 18th century dualing aristocrats who stand back to back, fire their weapons and claim to be shooting at each other.

What I found was that these activities at a sufficiently abstract level were actually quite similar---but you have to get waay abstract to see it. The abstract level of similarity takes place in mathematics (very loosely defined), which forms a common ground, as architects and numerous artists from every culture have discovered. Now you can quibble about math as a science, if you want. But you will have to admit that most science is heavily dependent on mathematical ideas, and that's where the relationship to some of the arts comes in---since they deal with many of the same spatio-temporal concepts.

And the plain fact is most people are just not used to thinking in these terms. So whatever concordance between the arts and sciences via mathematics you might discover is almost completely non-communicative and functionally un-intelligible. That is because, returning to the quote above, everyday language is fine for everyday experience. What everyday language isn't good for is all the rest of experience. In other words, all those exciting, imaginative, and wonderful worlds that the arts and sciences are attempting to illucidate.

But then some other theme of history intervened to re-asserts the primacy of everydayness, which was at its moral heart a kind of bourgeois fuddiduddiness.... Icarus falls, and pretty soon all that was forgotten, and now we're here.

Chuck Grimes



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