[Xmca-l] Re: mediate perception and direct perception

[mike cole]

Sounds like Novalis was cribbing from the writings of the Wizard of the 5th
Dimension, Greg. And of course, the stramge-->familiar to familiar-strange
dynamic is the ritual rite of passage in anthropology, or it was until both
the familiar and the unfamiliar became so strange.
mike

Overall-- Isn't it just common sense that one cannot get a full
understanding of a system one is a consituent part of? Passim the
discussion of Shotter and others - reality overflows our attempts to
understand it.

Strange isn't it?
mike

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Martin,
> I once heard that somewhere Foucault said (somewhat shockingly) that his
> life's work was an engagement with Kant.
> Phillip, and to Martin's point about not being able to step outside of the
> novel, (the following is taken from Daniel Chandler's web-book Semiotics
> for Beginners - http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem11.html
> ):
> "As Hodge and Tripp note, there can hardly be 'an exhaustive semiotic
> analysis... because a "complete" analysis... would still be located in
> particular social and historical circumstances' (Hodge & Tripp 1986, 27)
> <
> http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem13.html#Hodge_&_Tripp_1986
> >.
> This is reinforced by the poststructuralist stance that we cannot step
> outside our signifying systems. Semioticians seek to distance themselves
> from dominant codes by strategies aimed at *denaturalization*. The notion
> of 'making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar' is now a
> recurrent feature of artistic and photographic manifestos and of creative
> 'brainstorming' sessions in many fields. The phrase itself has been
> attributed to the German poet Novalis (1772-1801, aka Friedrich von
> Hardenberg), who declared that the essence of romanticism was 'to make the
> familiar strange, and the strange familiar'. The concept is found amongst
> other Romantic theorists such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. The notion is
> also closely associated with Surrealism and with Brechtian 'alienation'.
> However, its adoption by semioticians probably owes most to Russian
> Formalist criticism (Lemon & Reis 1965)
> <
> http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem13.html#Lemon_&_Reis_1965
> >
> . Victor Shklovsky argued in 1916 that the key function of art was
> *estrangement*, *defamiliarization* or 'making strange' (*ostranenie*) -
> i.e. renewing our perception of everyday things and events which are so
> familiar that our perception of them has become routinized (Hawkes 1977,
> 62-67
> <http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem13.html#Hawkes_1977>).
> Russian
> Formalism was a key influence on the development of semiotics in Eastern
> Europe, and the legacy of 'making the familiar strange' is an important one
> for semiotics. However, as Simon Watney notes, the strategy of
> *defamiliarization* is itself, of course, ideological and has been
> associated with the notion that the tactic of surprise may serve to banish
> 'distortions' so that we may 'objectively' perceive 'reality' (Watney 1982,
> 173-4)
> <http://visual-memory.co.uk/daniel/Documents/S4B/sem13.html#Watney_1982>.
> Clearly the strategy of 'making the familiar strange' needs to be coupled
> with an awareness that whilst we may be able to bypass one set of
> conventions we may never escape the framing of experience by convention.
>
> ​And here is the original "familiar strange" Novalis quote as he is
> defining Romantic style (in the German Romantic tradition):
> "*To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and
> wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as
> extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite
> as infinite.*"​
>
> ​Best,
> greg​
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 7:52 PM, Martin John Packer <
> mpacker@uniandes.edu.co
> > wrote:
>
> > Right - Kant aimed to identify universal necessities in the seemingly
> > contingent. Foucault aimed to unmask the contingencies in seemingly
> > universal necessities.
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > On Sep 16, 2014, at 8:32 PM, White, Phillip <Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Foucault, moving in opposite direction of Kant, looked to see what
> > contingencies were cultural constructions, rather than universal
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 882 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>



-- 

Development and Evolution are both ... "processes of construction and re-
construction in which heterogeneous resources are contingently but more or
less reliably reassembled for each life cycle." [Oyama, Griffiths, and
Gray, 2001]