I'm curious about this. Visual discourse between two people? Between an object and a person? Between two objects? Within a work of art or a structure? All of the above? None of the above?
I was thinking of "discourse" in the sense used by those who study literature and culture--that is, a set of shared values and an agreed upon way of expressing things. This notion of a discourse is the context in which any given piece of writing or conversation takes place; it determines what is taken for granted or implied in the very nature of a conversation, and it also constrains what meanings can be expressed. Hence we might speak of an academic discourse, the neoconservative discourse (how many times have you seen a FOX News commentator speak in a way that seemed to utterly circumvent reality as you think of it?), a religious discourse, etc. I meant "aesthetic" in the sense of "style," but I didn't say "style" because I wanted to imply the union of a form and an underlying set of ideas (as in cubism, surrealism, or something more idiosyncratic--e.g. the style of Marcel Dzama). Like a discourse, an aesthetic allows an infinite range of expressions that are nonetheless bounded in what they can express. You can say "X" a million different ways, but you can never say "Y" without moving into a different discourse/ aesthetic. I don't see this as any kind of profound insight, just an observation of certain similarities between two concepts.
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I'm curious about this. Visual discourse between two people? Between an object and a person? Between two objects? Within a work of art or a structure? All of the above? None of the above?
I was thinking of "discourse" in the sense used by those who study literature and culture--that is, a set of shared values and an agreed upon way of expressing things. This notion of a discourse is the context in which any given piece of writing or conversation takes place; it determines what is taken for granted or implied in the very nature of a conversation, and it also constrains what meanings can be expressed. Hence we might speak of an academic discourse, the neoconservative discourse (how many times have you seen a FOX News commentator speak in a way that seemed to utterly circumvent reality as you think of it?), a religious discourse, etc. I meant "aesthetic" in the sense of "style," but I didn't say "style" because I wanted to imply the union of a form and an underlying set of ideas (as in cubism, surrealism, or something more idiosyncratic--e.g. the style of Marcel Dzama). Like a discourse, an aesthetic allows an infinite range of expressions that are nonetheless bounded in what they can express. You can say "X" a million different ways, but you can never say "Y" without moving into a different discourse/ aesthetic. I don't see this as any kind of profound insight, just an observation of certain similarities between two concepts.
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