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Re: [xmca] The Armlessness of Venus



Oh, I see. I get that.
Andy

David Kellogg wrote:
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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*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hmca20/18/1
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857

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