Making Sense

When something has a meaning it doesn’t always make sense. Making sense has to do with one’s personal relation to meaning.

When something has a meaning it aligns itself against the backdrop of the already existing patterns we carry within. When something makes sense it goes beyond recognition and enters the realm of interpretation. A personal relation emerges, which can range from a mere confirmation (“that’s true”) to a sudden discovery (“eureka”). In other words, making sense is not only when we perceive, but also interpret – and on a very personal and subjective level.

“b a x z” appears to have a meaning, but does not make sense. “a b c d” has a meaning and makes sense. A sudden eye contact with a stranger may have a meaning. Brushing teeth every morning makes sense. Maybe when something can’t be defined it has a meaning. As soon as it’s defined, it makes sense.

It’s interesting when something does not make sense. “Laughter is the collapse of mind in impossibility to reason.” [1] This has something to do with affect produced by nonsensical. Emotion as a malfunction of communicative network, as a physical response produced by transgressing the impossibility to relate. “The community of love is a community living to share the absence of common being.” [2]

“When somebody else speaks to us we verify the things said with what we know, we need a point of reference of recognition and with this we assess what we hear, we agree or disagree with it. This technique is oriented towards stability, towards fixation rather than floatation and flexibility. Would it be possible to imagine that you just listen without checking it with-what-you-think, with-who-you think-you-are and with-what-you-think-is-right-or-wrong?” [3]

The process between something having a meaning and something making sense is full of potential. How can we recognize something in its multiplicity without reducing it to a predetermined mold and yet be able to have a very personal, rather than detached, relation to it?

Perhaps it’s about making sense of this gap between something that is meaningful and something that makes sense. Between recognition and interpretation. Between undefined and defined.

“It reminds me of the white spaces between the letters, this weak force that holds a balance between binding together and falling apart. Wouldn’t that be also an architectural question? Mere differences of intervals, themselves deprived of any meaning, these gaps remain within the architecture of any text. But exactly this emptiness allows for meaning to take place at first, and inherent to meaning, it might be the very gap to escape within language from language.” [4]

Wouldn’t a question of mere architectural difference create an interval deprived of the gap inherent to emptiness. Then the text remains the gap and they themselves produce the difference, the question that wouldn’t fall off balance. Something that holds the weak force between the letters and spaces.

Finding gaps to escape.

Or rather, using the gaps in order to exercise multiple possibilities for interpretation, jumping fully into each of them, pretending there’s no other choice.

Starting over.

Exhausting the possibilities.

Fictive activity on all fronts as a form of resistance.

Changing perspective.

[5]

Refusing the molds, escaping through pretense.

We can never truly experience each other's perspective. There's a difference between the "common sense" of an agency and the sense that one has as an agent within the network.

“Through the absurd and sometimes impertinent nature of the poetic act art provokes a moment of suspended meaning, a sensation of senseless that may reveal the absurdity of the situation. Via this act of transgression, the poetic act makes one step back for an instant from the circumstances. In short, it may make one look at things differently” [6]

This distance between meaning and sense is interesting. Tarkovsky's Stalker was the one lost in transition between something that has a meaning and something that makes sense. It's a beautiful film. The driving force here is the belief. It’s the belief that something has to make sense even when it doesn’t. Transgressing the impossibility to relate. An emotion. Love. Hope. Happiness. Enchantment.

[7]

“Whoever enjoys something through enchantment escapes from the hubris implicit in the consciousness of happiness, since, in a certain sense, the happiness that he knows he possesses is not his.” [8]

http://vimeo.com/17193603

Resources:

[1] Joseph Chaikin, “The Presence of the Actor” (New York: Atheneum, 1972)[2] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Love and Community” (EGS, 2001)[3] Jan Ritsema, “How to Think Property Liquid” (lecture, 2009)[4] Soenke Hallmann, “akin” (Moete 09, page 57)[5] Wolfgang Schlegel, “Breakthrough Red” (2009)[6] Francis Alys, 2008[7] Justin Palermo ”Covering is Revealing” (2009)[8] Giorgio Agamben, Magic and Happiness, from Profanazioni (2005)