/lit/ - Literature

>>11159117
My idea is that human communication and decision making is done through imagining or fantasizing. When we listen to music, read or see a picture we aren't only equating what we perceive to specific objects, we also imagine specific developments of those objects, which aren't provided in what's being communicated so much as implied in their form, so to understand these things always requires a mental action from us; in its stronger form this means an almost total obscuring of the object through which communication occurs: not only music, but reading as well, require an obscuring that is almost total: but that does not mean what’s being obscured simply disappears, rather, it still determines what we’ll derive out of it. So communication isn’t a matter of mediation but of conventional evasion: we set a convention that letter a will stand for sound a, and this will form part of various words, and those will stand for their own objects; but for these things to activate our imagination, they require first to be out of context, not in a context: what we do when we imagine is not discover an organic universe, but rather we organize these severed things.

Here common sense would dictate that the more complex such an organization, the more meaningfully charged it would be, however on the contrary, the simpler a thing is, the more our imagination is activated by it and the more meaning we can potentially derive from it; the lighter the sign, the more attention we need to put into following and seeing it and not others, the stronger its impact on us; and yet this not because the other things are negated by it or obscured by it, but rather it’s their own inherent obscurity that points out to the more important thing; that is to say, we don’t perceive things because they stand out, but because other things make themselves not to stand out: that’s where the naturalness of important ideas or symbols comes from: we don’t see them everywhere, rather everything pushes it above them.

So when we see something which has no context what happens is that we provide a set of other objects in order to organize it in a way in which its now potentially infinite meaning will be accounted for and exhausted. A contextless object isn’t something which is meaningless but rather something that could mean anything as far as we now. To borrow Heidegger’s terminology, the problem is that these things aren’t “covered”, and yet this is why we do not understand them; we haven’t gone over them, we have not yet covered that. Often this means we have to bruteforce them into being covered, and so they lose much of what we perceive; but on occasion there are objects which manage to reorganize all others by something which was already inherent to them, but had not yet been presented: something which was already “covered” but seemed uncovered, and which becomes obvious because we hadn’t thought of the possibility which was always present in its form.