The building of belief and its aporia.

12.12.2015 - 20.12.2015

gottrekorder e.v., Graz / Österreich

Opening: 11.12.2015 / 18:00

Anthropological Raptus number 13/241
for gottrekorder e.v. Graz
A Vienna, 28.11. 2015

The building of belief and its aporia.
/The durability of the body, the duration of the materials and the aporia of meaning

Meaning is a convention. Anterior to meaning are the conventions of meaning production. Meanings are not given; they must be produced. Pro forma, a question of rhetoric. Meaning per se is something mutable and changeable. The most honest state that a meaning can assume is that of relativization, in the sense that one can know that it is an affair of construction, which specifically at the moment and in the context is more than less credible....

In the case at hand the recognition of a specific meaning – not the assumption that meanings in general are relative – depends on the force, the steadfastness, of those conventions in which it is embedded. Various discourses are displayed in accordance with this rule.

Since meanings fulfil no argumentative and no designative function, but rather are themselves a function of rhetoric, they are a problem of stupidity or intelligence. And only then are they a problem. This stupidity and intelligence consists in the embarrassment of being in the position to provide only mediated descriptions.

Meanings therefore are treated as if they fit into a model of equivalences, values / qualities, without actually doing so immediately. The fiction of immediacy is a prerequisite for all equivalence transformations.

Talk has a designative and a signifying function.

Decisive here is not the consensus, the adherence to the insight that the convention makes sense and hence that the convention is credible, but rather that this is believed by common accord.

This is the purported decision about stupid or intelligent, which is made culturally as a decision reached on the basis of communicability, hence as a matter of faith. (Note: the argumentative value of this difference can only be “the smarter, the dumber” - Witold Gombrowicz.)

Meaning acts as an operationally designable dummy argument within the believed equivalence model.

In the sense that we say: “Yes, he died.” At the bottom of the possibility of discriminating knowledge from faith lies a designative or a signifying process. The more the focus falls on the construction, the more the construction remains recognizable and its existence as a matter of faith comes to light, the more plainly its meanings reveal themselves as that which they usually are: unclear, mutable and changeable. Evidently the mirror image retains the mirror in which it appears, in which it is embedded. On the one hand the mirror image shows itself, and on the other hand it faces its acceptance or rejection. To the degree that the construction divulges its existence in the form of a matter of faith, its fidelity endures longest, remaining unchanged.


B



“Pictures of the past, change their meaning fast.” (Amon-Düül)
To set one’s hand to material leads in the end to exhaustion, on both sides - of the material and of the self.

Translated by Jonathan Uhlaner