By: davin

davin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 21:24:32 +0000

I read your piece after I posted my bit on my morning walk, but it occurs to me that your discussion of “events” would have added something to my bit about cultural packet switching, which is another way of talking about consciously framing spatiotemporal intervals.

By: saper

saper — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:55:59 +0000

Thanks. This is wonderful and it has set-off a chiasmatic eureka in me.

I am working on a project on the machines, and para-literate machinations, of reading — and talk about Levi-Strauss, but oddly I never made the connection with this mimicking as a form of event-making and my work on reading … now it came together …

Thanks.

It also makes me think of Lorenz’s ducks imprinting …

By: mirona

mirona — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:19:52 +0000

While reading your engaging thoughts on how “the event corrodes the neat structure that opposes the mundane repetitions to the orignality of art and performance,” I remembered one of the incidents narrated by Claude Levi-Strauss in his essay “A Writing Lesson” on his repeated encounters with the Nambikwara societies
Simply summarized, the story describes how the members of the Nambikwara society who have never been exposed to any sign of written language because they used to communicate only orally, come to be involved in a genuine exchange of gifts, during which they are handed sheets of paper and pencils. Because of their unfamiliarity with such writing instruments, their initial reaction is one of total confusion as, at the beginning, they did nothing with them” until one day when “they were all busy drawing wavy, horizontal lines.” It is a significant moment which celebrates not only their initiation in the art of drawing as a prewriting stage but also their yearning for learning how to properly imitate it as “they were trying to use their pencils in the same way as I (Levi-Strauss) did mine, which was the only way they could conceive of” At this stage, the event displays “the orignality of art and performance.”
And yet, since the tribe members notice that their first drawings could not reach that stage of visual similarity with the anthropologist’s writing, the majority of them gives up scribbling excepting the chief who, although hadn’t been previously exposed to such an activity, manifests “further ambitions.” Thus, he asks for a writing-pad and starts scribbling, pretending otherwise that he is writing. By speculating both on the others’ unfamiliarity with writing and also on “a tacit understanding” with the anthropologist that “his unintelligible scribbling had a[n] [actual] meaning,” the chief basically grasps the power of writing and turns it into his advantage simply by reiterating the movements similar to the actual process of writing, or as you put it, “mimicking as a form of event-making.”

Comments on: A Feeling Event: Boredom, Regret, Lack of Poetic Value?

By: davin

By: saper

By: mirona