| II | |
| Newby
Descend ing a Staircase
Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase |
If
one can't manage true decadence, then what, of the postmodern, is still
interesting? The fractal imagination? The way it authorizes acting out
the kaleidoscope, the cubism, of perception and knowledge.
Because the trajectory of knowledge moves not toward ennui but toward understanding. --Multiple understandings. It doesn't matter that understanding is not a destination. Never was. We move in a world in motion, and we accept knowledge as a series of provisional, perpetually self-refining descriptions. Cue visual three Still, we pursue it restlessly, even if understanding reveals only anomie, or at best a cubist vision of fragments almost fitting, of forms re-forming out of their proper shape and proportion. Who determines "proper"? Visual
three, place it left:
What about essays that invoke this sensibility, that abandon the extended period for jump cuts, flashbacks, and collages of heretofore incompatible genres? Sound two: Perhaps
there are analogies
between
the psychic structures of precognition
and those
of art, which also depend on the
accumulating
effect of hints, glimpses,
and the
gradual accretion of that sense of foreboding
which
also goes by the name "meaning."
(Lanchester,
The Debt to Pleasure)
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