7th Lecture 2015/2016 »Summary – from Understanding to Creation«
Summary of the 1st to the 6th lecture: From the understanding of what a text is to the ability to create a text:
1. Text: Every constellation of signs, objects or living things that can be read. Reading means to give the constellation a personal significance. Because of the fact that a text can only be read by a person, every text is a space of self-awareness; become aware that you are – as a reader – entering a position between the signs, objects or living things, that you are part of the text, that you are text, that means: with you the text is reading itself.
2. Texture: The combination of elements which are constructing the sensitive dimension of a text.
3. Fragment: In relation to a piece, a fragment is an element without reference to the original corpus the fragment is taken from. With a piece, the reference is still given, for example: a piece of a clay pot.
4. Volume: The expanding of a fragment which we have taken from the intersection between our own experience and an experience of any author which is fixed in an inter-positional form, like a construction of words or pictures is. This expanding will take place as long as it is guaranteed that the fragments stay in there separation from the original body. This is the condition to build the author's own space which, as a space of Inter-Position, could also become its own kind of body.
5. Inter-Position: The Inter-Position starts with the space between two or more fragments. The Inter-Position expands with the expanding of the fragments to its own space of recognition and action. Inter-Position is the combination of the grammar which builds a text, the volume of which is similar to the texture which happens by expanding the fragments (grammar means: which rules we have to use, to expand) and the impact of the Inter-Position on the individual recognition and action.
6. Inter-Position of History: The knowledge that every position, the intellectual as well as the emotional, is building borders and within these borders, history could be understood as an Inter-Position. The question is, whether these borders have a self-awareness about the fact of being a border or do they believe that they are building there own centre (also in relation with others); a centre of glory.
How to construct an “Inter-Position”.
In the concrete process of creating a work of art or design which stands in relation to history (i.e. to construct a Inter-Position), the following three steps are essential:
First step: Fixing the fragments of sensitive affection by writing them down (i.e. giving an expression of an impression (of an experience) by using words or lines).
Second step: Re-Coding the used words (the combination of words) back to its grammatical structure. Grammatical structure means the definition of elementary movements caused by the correlation of the movements of breathing and the modulated movements of arms and hands (or any part of the body). The rules of fixing these movements by setting a line from one point to another we call visual grammar.
Third step: Giving the structure an appropriate volume by using the coordinates of the structure as a score for producing (the volume) by movement which we have to follow.
He was taken to Tripolitania shortly after this region was captured by Italy in the Italo-Turkish War
He was taken away, when he was five years old. He remembered his mother melted down to a tiny line where she stands, far away with her right arm outstretched, still waving, a little wave with her small hand.
What was left, was an uncertain knowledge about the volume between her thighs he was sitting on and the murmur he sometimes listend to, coming from the circulation of her blood, pressing one side of his face to her chest.
He was taken to Tripolitania shortly after this region was captured by Italy in the Italo-Turkish War. Someone who lost his mother and had no father (or a father without relation to any regular fatherhood), is missing the borders of the land of childhood. A land without borders is a waste land. The land of childhood (especially the very early childhood) is always some kind of Inter-Position build by the space between the sensitive action and the sensitive recognition, both in relation to the surrounding movements and advice from mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandmother and so on, in his case, from his mother, grandparents and all the maids, servants and the bearded administrator of their North Italian manor and every living being on this property.
If we lose the homeland of childhood (and sooner or later there is a need to do so), i.e. the interposition in the middle of the sensitive actions and their intellectual refections which draw and describe the boundaries, we need a substitute to survive. This could be the land of religion, a national state or a kingdom. Is not a kingdom often similar to the homeland of childhood? At least partly? We love the Queen as the mother of us all and so did he with the King, Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy from 29 July 1900 until his abdication on 9 May 1946.
The King's land was his kingdom and the will to bring it back, after it was finally lost in 1948, was grounded on his hope that with its reactivation he might be able to find his way back to the lost homeland of childhood; the thighs, the murmur and the circulation of blood.
We should think about the following thesis: The substitute for the loss of immediate sensitivity could also be given by reactivating the original sensitive action and sensitive recognition in poems and pictures.