Andy:
Arturo's point is that cinematography is not *about* artefacts. it is
about the process of *making* artefacts. Of course, that is a material
process, in the sense that it takes place in the material world.
But it's not a product: it's not a finished thing, or even the process
of making a finished thing. Cinematography, as a project, is the
process of studying the process of making a finished thing.
It seems to me that "material" has to be reserved as a superordinate
category if we are gonig to talk about the process of studying the
process of making a finished thing being a material process (in the
sense that it involves flesh and blood students in brick and mortar
film institutes).
But that very superordination makes it pretty useless for making the
fine distinctions we require in explaining how things develop even
from century to century, much less from year to year (there is no
important sense in which cinema is more or less material than
literature, pace Colin McCabe, and no important sense in which our
material culture is more or less material than cultures past).
We all have our favorite terminological innovations (which suggests
right away to me that terminological innovations somehow involve less
material effort than building film schools or even attending them). My
own favorite is that artefacts vary dangerously between those that are
mostly ideal and those that are mostly real, but that the ideal and
the real are equally material.
Ilyenkov says that the ideal table contains not a single atom of the
real table. I will argue, nevertheless that is every bit as material,
for the following reasons:
a) The existence of an ideal table (or an ideal movie, or any other
artwork or scientific theory) depends entirely on potentials actually
present in real stuff and real processes (i.e. composed of atoms and
their interactions).
b) The existence of the real in turn depends on the realization of the
future, which is an objective sense (e.g. from the point of view of
observability) merely ideal.
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
(There--I did it. A quasi-philosophical posting without a SINGLE
capitalized word!)
--- On *Thu, 10/20/11, Andy Blunden /<ablunden@mira.net>/* wrote:
From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Armlessness of Venus
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, October 20, 2011, 4:48 PM
Arturo, a movie *is* an artefact.
Agreed, that "artefacts other than words" are material objects and
do not belong to a "different realm altogether."
Andy
Arturo Escandon wrote:
> I agree with David on this. Cinematography is not about artifacts.
> ... But what I am not ready
> to buy at this point is that artifacts other than words belong
to some
> kind of different realm altogether.
>
>
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