To live is to radiate
On my way to breakfast I saw signs on the road. I say road, more like a path, but for vehicles. People carriers. cars containing those who would eventually walk that path to breakfast today. For this is the NSU summer school week in Estonia. In Rooster Holiday village.
What were these road signs? The photographs give my game away. The signs were indications that play had occurred. A play that laid down marks on a surface not meant as a blackboard, but sufficed. The center of reference for the markings, signs, what was that? Or rather who was that? An authorizing by a minder, or self authorized by the artist herself? A weather map? Who's heart? What is the significance of the Stone?
Assimilating the images I re-experienced the situationists concept of the beach under the pavements. In this case in rooster the pavement becomes the paper. In this case obviously an academic paper written by the children. One, three, many? Of these academics. An indication of the liberal judgments of the Entourage.
in writing this piece necessitated by way of recording my indebtedness to the NSU for my place in the proceedings I was momentarily aware of some phenomenal materialistic dialectic about the notion of signs, deconstruction and social constructs. I say banal as provocation. Academics can and do talk in materialist dialectical terms forever. In the quotidian this is often called going round in circles. Dancing to different tunes. Machines of various sorts in a playful jousting, sometimes more competitive than is good for the well-being of the jousters.
beyond the banal however is the visceral reality of the probability indeed the certainty that the being of meaning in these markings is in the beings of the artists themselves. probably now lost possibly probably not now in any fit state to articulate what at the time was being meant. and I thought of Wittgenstein as you do, as to gameplay and the notion of observing and describing as the new science. As what cannot be observed and described is best left to contemplation. That contemplation is perhaps the one part of academic life that this week in a somewhat remote and privileged condition of being, provides for me in an otherwise unduly materialized unduly digitalized binary world of yes no judgments in which context contemplation is considered therapeutic rather than a beginning. A third binary, a call to instinct and a judgment as to the fecundity of my resources for judgement, as instinct rather than as an appeal to encyclopedic textbooks. Learning as bildung :)
And so I was glad to be reminded of academic freedoms for playfulness that seemed to me the stuff of NSU. The third binary. The best yes-no-both-and of the possible. The opposition to an impoverished intellectual life.
Is this week an Oasis of contemplation for many, in the midst of a digital storm at home? The academic niche has been dragged from the monastery into commercial practices. The utilitarian liberalism mistakes science as engineering rather than as reporting on what can be observed. And when I saw the signs on the road this morning I can report that I smiled out loud.
