Forms Conceived as Language
Rationalisation kills awareness, which is the very method of reasoning. Rationalism, as a goal or quality, kills the rational method. Thus rationalism is set up as an ideal absolute, with the obligation to go through the concepts of scientific idealism, by eliminating the creation of ideas (artistic and fantastic action).
...To state and attempt to resolve the problem for its part, a materialist art must put art back on a foundation of the senses. We say 'put back' with reason, for we believe that the origins of art are instinctive and thus materialist. It is the metaphysical aspects of classicism which have managed to spiritualise and intellectualise art. And it's miserable today to see the materialists in all good faith marching along on their heads -- with a realism and a naturalism which are opposed to reality and to nature, which are based on 'illusion'. True realism, materialist realism, lies in the search for the expression of forms faithful to their content.
But there's no content detached from human interest. True realism, materialist realism, renouncing the idealist equation of subjectivity with individualism as described by Marx, seeks the forms of reality that are 'common to the senses of all men'.
Thus, the red flag is an expression of revolution which immediately strikes the senses, the senses of 'all men', a synthesis of reality and the vested needs of revolution, a common link and not an allegory, outside the range of the senses or a symbol for 'flag manufacturers'. We can identify ourselves only accidentally with a poor woman buying fish. Asger Jorn
In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorists whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience. Victor Turner
The theory is merely a poetic interpretation or "soul" of the juxtaposition of dada (excuse me), data and its embracing hypotheses congealing & solidifying the memories of an adventure once taken:
If we get too semantically incisive, the reader may lose all connection with anything he has ever thought before. That might not be a great loss. But we assume that the reader can cope with his reflexes and make connections between the old words and new concepts with the new and more apt words. For example, since physics has found no continuums, we have had to clear up what we mean by a sphere. It is not a surface; it is an aggregate of events in close proximity. It isn't just full of holes: it doesn't have any continuum in which to have holes. R. Buckminster Fuller
