What's in a Title? - Perpetuating Confusion

“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
Builder Levy's slide show and book talk will be held on Thursday, February 9, 2006 at SEIU Local 32 B.J's auditorium; 101 Avenue of the Americas, 22nd floor (between Grand and Watt Streets one block North of Canal Street). Use the Canal Street subway stop on the A, C, 1 or 9 trains. For more information please contact Michael.Nash@nyu.edu, 212-998-2428.
Labels: Salgado
Labels: Berger, John Berger, Sontag
"The heart of language is not "expression" of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an actiivity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to understand is to fail to come to an agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action at cross purposes. ... Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behavior,and secondarily a property of objects. ... Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and exclusive sense."- Experience & Nature (179-80)So this would be a reminder to those who might want to follow Sontag and take a too narrow view of intention or to imagine that "use" is somehow governed entirely by convention. Dewey warns against the first tendency. And everything we know about the pragmatics of language suggests that conventions hardly determine use; any convention can be exploited in unforeseen ways. The late philosopher Donald Davidson went so far as to suggest that the ubiquitous opportunities for generating neologisms (unanticipated, unconventional usages) calls into question the very idea that language is conventional. And while sometimes such exploitation is accidental, sometimes it must be intentional and creative - hence the possibility of art.
Labels: Conventions, Dewey, lynching photos, Meaning and Use, Sontag