danielcoffeen's Podcast

Theory doesn't explain art; theory is art.

Some thoughts on the plenum and how the space between things is full, filled to the brim with forces that are social, local, global, cosmic all at once. With reference to Merleau-Ponty and online dating.

Watching The Graduate again recently, I was struck by the hilarity of youth thinking it understands life when it knows, we all know, our perspectives, feelings, horizon changes, relentlessly and necessarily — with some references to Gadamer and Bergson.

Sense is the way bodies cohere, or don't, in a perceptive field.

Sense is not the meaning of an experience; sense is the meaning + the immediate affect + temperature + speed + intensity + color + shape and the diverse terms in which different bodies interact and cohere, more or less, with other bodies (visible, invisible, organic, machine, vegetal (yes, that's redundant)).

Sense happens at the cusp of events, in the seams of bodies assembling and disassembling.

Sense is always at the point of its own dissolution, fragmenting infinitely into chaos or cohering too rigidly into cliché or meaning.

William Burroughs, in his cut-up method, plays at the borders of sense and chaos. It's often a subtle, tenuous, and moving line that separates one from the other. Artists reckon this moment at every moment.

The distinction between sense and meaning....

Meaning is abstract, general, changing very slowly over time.

Sense is an immediate configuration of bodies.

On the notion and experience of having hostility to life with reference to:

- Wilhelm Reich
- Nietzsche and amor fati
- Alan Watts & Taoism
- Derrida and there's nothing outside the text
- Neti pots

It suddenly occurred to me the other day that this cliché of a question has persisted because it's a profound existential, ontological question: If I experience something and no one hears, sees, knows did it happen? The answer, of course, is yes.

A brief discussion of:

- Why we read important books — sacred books — over and over

- The power of book spines on the shelf

- Changing environments when the baby is screaming

- The power of local spaces with reference to Carlos Castaneda

This is a ranting revelation I had while walking in GG Park, feeling, uh, good, as it were. It is a tad profane but I was just speaking to myself at the time.