A symbol is intentional; it intends something beyond and stands for that thing. Every symbol gives birth to meaning by means of interpretation. Interpretation is the work of thought, which consists of deciphering the hidden meaning within the apparent meaning. Symbol and interpretation are correlative concepts; there is interpretation wherever there are multiple meanings, and it is within interpretation that the plurality of meaning is made manifest. The purpose of interpretation is to bridge a remoteness, a space between the symbol and the interpreter. By overcoming the distance, the interpreter can appropriate meaning to themselves: foreign, they make it familiar—they make it their own.
patterns of feeling and seeing; a movement away or toward; a movement of negative restraint or positive advance; a visceral aliveness; the touch of all things; to tolerate the disruption of intellectual order; to produce curiosity; the anxiety of uncertainty, which demands to be embraced; the anxiety of failure, which demands to be overcome; mind wide open to the limits of knowing; to open a space of inquiry
The terms fetish and fetishism have long been used to mark specific ‘problem-ideas’ for modern social theory. Despite the use of this terminology in a variety of disciplines that claim no common theoretical ground—the history of religion, Marxism and positive sociology, psychoanalysis and the psychiatry of sexual deviance, philosophy—there is a common configuration of themes. Four themes that consistently inform the idea of a fetish are: (1) the untranscended materiality, (2) the historicality of its origin: rising from a singular event that creates a fixation, (3) the dependence of the fetish for its meaning and value on a particular order of social relations, and (4) the active relation of the fetish to the body of the individual.
The central conflict of fetishism, whatever form it may take (commodity, sexual, anthropological), is between belief and knowledge; it is the belief that the fetishist acts upon, not knowledge alone. This reminds us how deeply knowledge is structured by the framework of interpretation, because it is the process of interpretation that most profoundly affects our understanding of a thing. Fetishism’s attention to the thing, its inappropriate emphasis on the thing, transgresses the boundaries of identity and enables us to become or do something we otherwise could not.
Fetishism is a means for focusing on the meaning and constitution of the relation between things; a point of mutual interest and exchange; a bridge between social reality and fantasy or psychic reality; a hermeneutic strategy that uses materiality to embody symbolic aims; an epistemology—a way of coming to know a thing.
There is a certain degree of reciprocity in coming to know a thing, as our reaction to the thing changes through the course of coming to know it. Knowledge is the responsive process of interaction between things, as the thing known is transformed through the process of knowing and simultaneously exerts a transformational force on us.
The body is the most basic structure of our awareness of the world—its first-person character. It is always an awareness from a particular point of view, a "here" that no one else shares. Its non-disclosable, non-expressible aspect arises from the fact that, at a certain level, each body constitutes a sphere of the private that escapes linguistic expression and escapes being known.
People in their self-making live in the tension of the private and the public, the non-communicable and the communicable, the true-for-me and the true-for-all-of-us. To be human is to be constantly engaged in the double perspective of public and private; regarding each side from the vantage of the other; grasping each in the claims it imposes on the other, continuously negotiating between the demands of both.
The relationship between what is private and what is public needs to be continuously redefined, though it is less necessary to give answers than to ask new questions—for example, questions about what is private and what is public.
Intimacy differs from privacy in that what is considered private is related to social structure, whereas what is intimate is an anarchic component of the self. In contrast to privacy, which is both a social-psychological and social-political issue, intimacy will not be regulated by social systems of control.
Accordingly, intimacy contains a powerful critical capacity.
It also offers the possibility of catharsis.
There is a type of death that is not the transformation of the body into a corpse, but rather the transformation of the body into another body within the same body, due to a sudden brutal event. Destructive transformation imposes a new form on the old form, when no possibility for escape exists. The body dies without being dead. A living-dead rises out of the wound, an absolute other, someone else, someone who will never be reconciled with themselves again, someone who will be this form of us without redemption, outside of time.
Between life and death, she becomes other to herself; a stranger to herself who no longer recognizes herself, who no longer remembers herself. The subject revives herself in the end, as if emerging from her own destruction.
I lose myself; I reappear.
Flesh is the dimensionality of our being. As a physical membrane that sheds and reconstitutes itself continually, flesh is never the same material, but always a contour in process. Flesh exists provisionally as a shifting physical perimeter, a limbic surround of virtual containment, and a visible tracing of the body. Metaphorically as well as materially, flesh is an envelope: a limit inscribing the juncture between inside and outside, but also the site of their joining. Life reveals itself in flesh in a way that no act of thought can, since it is only through living that we can know what life is.
Although the physical body is part of being human, it is not the totality of what a human being is. We are beings whose consciousness always already belongs together with others. The self is constituted by its relations to others: identity necessarily requires contact, association, and exchange.
In certain modes of interaction, we overlap with, extend into, and are continuous with others who extend into and are continuous with us. Not only is the self social in that it depends upon others to be what it is, but the self is also social in the sense that one self opens onto another.
This complexity lies at the heart of how two things can be distinct, but not separate—or together as one, but not one and the same.
Emerging as a sudden opening in a system of established and expected meanings, wonder disrupts our perception of things. To be wonderstruck is to be without words in the presence of a thing that exceeds existing frameworks of understanding. Inviting a thinking that might open itself to other ways of doing things, to wonder is to question the order of things, the meaning attached to things, and the value assigned to things.
Wonder is the possibility of transformation. Wonder is openness to difference. Wonder restores dimensionality to an otherwise flattened preconception of things. It is a refusal to reduce reality and a reminder that reality has not yet been exhausted.
Things don’t have to be as they are.
This is about an interaction that makes something possible that would not be possible otherwise. It is about the space in which connection can unfold, for things to reveal themselves. It is about collaboration.
Art is always more than itself: it refers to something else.
Art can deconstruct perception.
Art can devote itself to disruption.
Art can express the bitter undercurrent of life.
Art can aim for compassion, grief, and humility.
Art is a call from the deepest pit.
Another possibility for art: running away.
Sometimes it fails, and that is just as well, because that too is meaningful.
Misinterpretation is an important part of interpretation.
Art can question the real and imagine the possible.
Art, as a practice, must be understood as chance.