"In his book _Art & Discontent: Theory at the Millenium_, the art
critic Thomas McEvilley develops the notion of the periodic
recurrence of the postmodern, or rather the theory that modernist and
postmodernist tendencies have actually been following one upon the
other throughout history… I suppose in thinking of the Museum of
Jurassic Technology, we might similarly speak of the periodic
recurrence of the *pre*modern."
- Lawrence Weschler, 1995
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"The philosopher Michael Foucault describes how in the Middle Ages,
the world was experienced in a completely different way. Things that
we now view as being unrelated were, at that time, considered to be
intimately connected.
For one thing, people believed that words and objects really
corresponded to each other – that there was something inherently
'lionny' about the word 'lion' and that a plant that looked like a
brain (a cabbage for instance) could be used as a medicine that was
good for your brain. The object of medieval science was to identify
all these connections, and incorporate them into a grand scheme of
creation. God was considered to be the Great Thinker in the
background who had conceived the world in this coherent way.
It was only in the Renaissance that people began hesitantly,
haltingly, to split things up. In the Age of Enlightenment reason
and analysis reigned supreme. The world was cleanly laid out in
different categories and subdivisions, clearly discernable from one
another.
Designers tend to think in terms of finding or making connections.
they are inclined to use association and analogies to create new
possibilities for solutions.
Designers are basically medieval in the way they think."
- Kees Dorst, 2003
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http://www.militantesthetix.co.uk/osfa/osfa28.jpg
http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/12.228.185.206/html/wor
dsinimages/keydreams.jpg
http://deepyoung.org/sister
http://www.thesoundofsimon.com/kodachrome.html
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pre-modern [kodachrome/wunderkammer remix]
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Type: discussion
Comments
"For one thing, people believed that words and objects
really corresponded to each other – that there was
something inherently
'lionny' about the word 'lion'…"
or another way…
"To extend or operationalize these insights about
language as material to genetics research
Hi Ryan,
Later on in the passage I included by Weschler, he wonders if
cyclically, pre-modern and post-modern might be one and the same.
Here's a difference (and to me, no small one). The medieval goal is
to discover true relationships and proceed along those lines. To
quote Kenneth Clark, "That's the medieval mind. They cared
passionately about the truth, but their sense of evidence was
different than ours." The postmodern goal is to make over things as
we see fit, because there are no true relationships.
Tolkein would call the former art and the latter magic.
peace,
curt
Ryan griffis wrote:
> "For one thing, people believed that words and objects
> really corresponded to each other – that there was
> something inherently
> 'lionny' about the word 'lion'…"
>
> or another way…
>
> "To extend or operationalize these insights about
> language as material to genetics research - to see how
> genes, like language, are malleable and subject to
> political organization-we need to recognize that the
> codes of DNA are no more or less metaphorical than the
> codes outside DNA. Both are part of the environment
> that shapes various events, ranging from the political
> and economic forces of "environmental racism" that
> lead to higher incidences of asthma among African
> Americans than European Americans to the legal
> struggles against this disparity to the possibility
> that some genetic factors may contribute to disease
> disparities (though so far these have not been
> isolated as the source of this difference)"
> From J Stevens, "Symbolic Matter"
> http://jacquelinestevens.org/articlesessays.htm