Two ideas from the Grosz reading stuck out in my mind.
1. The first is perhaps too reductive or essentialized in my summation: The origin of art as a bi-product of indeterminate evolutionary mutations, the only non irrelevant effect of which is its (art’s) influence on sexual selection (and thus the propagation of that specific mutation of living body). – wow-
2. The idea of framing chaos in order to slow it down to facilitate the extraction of meaning. I relate this directly to musical concepts, especially the Indian Nada Brahma, that everything was/is born of sonic vibrations and the Greeks’ Music of the Spheres. Chaos is “the whirling, unpredictable movement of forces, vibratory oscillations that constitute the universe” (Grosz 5). Grosz’s frame could be harmony, the organization of chaos into mathematical relationships more perceptible by us humans. But by the same right, maybe our universe, our chaos is a framed, less chaotic chaos to another, and so on and so forth.
While these two ideas stuck out to me, I’m confused about how Grosz links her arguments. How does Grosz make the jump from art as evolutional excesses to architecture and the frame? Each argument makes sense on its own but I don’t see the connection between the two.
More questing for meaning:
In chatting, a process of casual discourse, with one of my classmates, colleagues, associates, an interest in finding a common, unifying, integrative thread, theme, thesis (theses) between the writings, conceptual outpourings, of these two authors was revealed as a commonality, a shared interest of our, two, respective intellects. I find myself often looking for apoint, the corporate “take-away” and so I’ve striven to construct “useful” meaning, briefly, and flippantly, below.
Lingis seems be working from the perspective of a human, while Grosz appears to be working from the perspective of a larger, less subjective viewpoint (godlike/universal?).
Lingis’ correlates color and emotion. “All colors, according to John Locke and seventeenth century epistemology, including the “color” of emotion are subjective effects within the psyche of the viewer.”
Grosz presents color (a component of the larger category of art) as indeterminate evolutionary development facilitated by an “overabundance of resources beyond the need for mere survival”
Here our esteemed authors appear to diverge, but perhaps they are in agreement. Through the lens of “usefulness” color and emotion are irrelevant, except in the small ways in which art, color or emotion might slightly influence the life or death of a living body, sexual selection being the most relevant example.
Grosz’s concept of the frame, in/through which chaos is slowed down and something less chaotic/more meaningful (to humans) can be extracted could be likened to Lingis’ idea of the face as a blank wall on which meaning is made/shown/perceived.
Grosz: “Art takes a bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos that becomes sensory, or from which it extracts a chaoid sensation as variety” (Deleuze and Guattari)
Lingis: “A face is a field that accepts some expressions and connections and neutralizes others. It is a screen and a framework. To be so confronted with a face is to envision a certain range of things that could be expressed on it and to have available a certain range of things one could address to it.”
In the above two quotes, the scope of possibility is reduced, less choice = less chaos, therefore more human understandability, graspability. By framing chaos, we humans create meaning. But these frames are created with or without us humans, whether we conceptualize, write or engage in discourse about frames and chaos.
Grosz considers “Art and nature, art in nature (to] share a common structure: that of excessive and useless production – production for its own sake”. So, if art is being produced, naturally and in nature, and meaning merelya construction of the human psyche, then