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This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning.
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Movement as Meaning Consciousness Liter ture the Arts & 13 General Editor: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board: Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow Movement as Meaning In Experimental Film Daniel Barnett Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Cover Illustration: Frames from The Chinese Typewriter ©1983 Daniel Barnett Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2385-7 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands Table of Contents Foreword: What this book is, what this book isn't… Preface: Arriving at the scene ... Introduction: Two pictures of a rose in the dark... i iii 1 Part I: Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. First ideas in new media: the cinematic suspension of disbelief… 9 Describing how the mind moves toward understandings… 11 New paradigms for viewing experience and new ways of creating meaning… 12 Theories of meaning: media, messages and how the mind moves… 12 The relevance of the mechanism: lessons to carry forward from an already ancient medium... 13 Frames vs. shots, surface vs. window... 16 What the surface of the screen can tell us about language... 17 Language integrates our perceptions as surely as the nervous system integrates our sense data – Hallucination or Metadata?... 18 Letting the mind surround an idea: an introduction to Wittgenstein... 20 Ascertaining understanding: What one language must evoke, another may stipulate (and vice versa)... 24 Dynamic and static theories of meaning... 27 Color, types of reference and the inveterate narrative... 28 The polyvalence of the picture... 32 Meaning and mutual experience – kinds of reference redefined... 34 What has art got to do with it... 36 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. A whole new way of reading – the surface of the screen and the modulation of self consciousness... The anteroom of meaning and our conception of space... Meaning and mental habits... Assumed and earned meaning... The spectrum of shared reference