netpoetic.com

it is commonly observed that a great deal of contemporary art/writing involves a double sense of ‘the material’. the term is understood to refer not only to the subject matter (the ‘standard’ understanding in writing) but also the matter of the media in the piece, the material embodiment of the piece. it’s also commonly observed that the latter awareness of and approach to composition not solely by ideation, meditation on the subject matter, but also through operation on the material embodiment, has come to be much more widely understood as a part of reading than it was a generation ago. when we encounter work that does not follow the grammars and approaches traditionally associated with work, we inquire into the methods of composition, the approach to materiality, and look for relations between those methods and approaches and the subject matter, or look for the subject matter in the light of those things. and so read differently, thereby. and in this way, we now read some literary work in ways that are closer to how we approach a great deal of visual art.

but what i want to get at is something that isn’t so commonly observed, at the moment, but may be in the next generation. and that’s the relation of awareness of the materiality of writing/art to our ideas of who and what we are. that’s erm awkwardly stated. what i’m trying to get at is this. the whole emphasis on materiality is involved in a larger movement to explore how things like ideation, imagination, the spiritual, beauty, truth, goodness, justice–all our ideals and things normally associated with the immaterial–operate in the material world.

in this sense, we might say that the whole contemporary awareness of materiality in art is part of a larger ah spiritual materialism. i googled that term, after it occurred to me, and i assure you i’m using it in a different sense than chögyam trungpa, who uses it “to describe mistakes spiritual seekers commit which turn the pursuit of spiritualism into an ego building and confusion creating endeavor” (wikipedia). instead, i’m refering to a relatively common sort of philosophy in which the material substrate of ideation and even the spiritual is affirmed and its relations with even the flightiest of fancies are explored. not to denigrate or dismiss things like spirituality but to explore how they operate materially.

perhaps more evidently, now, this is also related to philosophies of mind in which the materiality of thought itself is affirmed–as a chemical and informational process, however emergent–and the brain and the mind that emerge from its processes are conceived as fully embodied in the material. so that the idea of being able to create thinking machines (however unlike us) becomes a real possibility. and we are conceptualized as nature’s (near?) ultimate machines. and machines are conceptualized not as the simple things we once thought they must be but as often very complex biological creatures that, nonetheless, are embodied in the material world and are, therefore, subject to the constraints and possibilities of machines in the material world.

to wrap it up, we now see the relation between contemporary artistic emphasis on the materiality of writing/art and the larger moment of ‘spiritual materialism’.

ja

http://vispo.com

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