At 03:05 PM 5/8/01 -0700, Paul H.Dillon wrote:
>At this point YE turns to the transpersonal experience. The artist who
experiences himself as someone subordinated to "something outside himself
[that] has taken charge and is now settling everything that happens". YE
summarily explains this as follows: "The phenomenon is due to the
anticipation of the essentially collective and societal, teritary character
embedded within a work of art under creation." But isn't this what we were
supposed to be theorizing? How can it appear here as the basis for
explanation? If we are to push the explanation onto the collective and
societal, what impells the movement toward novelty: some societal TELOS?
I wonder if it is the nature of reciprocal relationship, here seen between
collective and individual development, that makes explanation seem
circular, as in the cause-and-effect feedback cycles that one encounters in
cybernetics.
Nevertheless, the point about activity theory accounting for *surprises*,
not necessarily how they are taken up, or ignored and buried as
contradictions, but how the surprises and accidents emerge in the first
place, is a good question. Where in a tension are the seeds for innovation?
What were the trajectories of people and things that lead to a
particularly creative moment?
bb
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