Re: <documenta X><blast> <DocumentaX><Blast>Naked Truth

Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Fri, 22 Aug 1997 13:07:43 -0400

> Of course, as George Santayana wrote, as was once valid, in the
>olden days, there have been those good people who did not care to look
>at the way things really existed. The early Christians wanted nothing
>to do with reality as we know it, with life on earth with other people.
>Perhaps ancient believers in God or Buddha understood very well the
>thoughtful mind of an atheist such as Santayana or Plato and chose not
>to see their scientific reality or decided that they too wanted nothing
>to do with reality, with the naked truth, with people like William S.
>Burroughs or Laurie Anderson.

Quote from Santayana: "The ignorant mind believes itself to be omniscient
and omnipotent. The inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it
confuses with the creative forces of nature"... I think that one of his
many points is that the naive mind IS naive because it only knows, and only
dersires, one perspective. The concept of "perspective", the
phenomenological task of coming to terms with ones native biases, is often
the hardest job facing the thinker, whereas often the thought (or the
content) itself comes rather easily.
Umberto Eco, as many others have, understood that humor is dangerous to
authority; that parody or satire, on a lower plane perhaps, burlesque, is
threatening, because it redirects attention to the very frames, or
brackets, that have to remain hidden for a social illusion to persist.
Humor is dangerous because it doesn't speak in the same terms as power.
Power doesn't care what you say, as long as you "talk its language".

-------------------------------------------------------------
a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures
texts are the property of individual authors
for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with
the following line in the message body: info blast
archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm
or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm
documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
-------------------------------------------------------------