recognition/ethics

[from Melissa]

Erm, if I could jump in here.....
I think the problem with the idea that we bring everything we know to
the encounter with the artwork is that, while true of course, the notion
of the encounter implies a rejection of this condition. It is in
experiences of recognition that what I see now is coordinated with what
I know, remember, have experienced previously etc.
In the encounter, on the other hand, while I still bring my past to the
present experience, the encounter proper defies the application of my
previous knowledge, as the absolutely new, the unrecognisable.
I understand this neither as an 'extension' of my previous experience, nor
as a kind of ex-nihilo newness.
The encounter doesn't reject the past _per se_, but the past as _condition_
of the new. The elements of the past experience thus enter into the event
not as conditions or as 'frames' for the new experience, but as series of
differences contemporaneous with the new (thus in no sense conditioning ie
prior). In a way, the 'I' itself, insofar as it is understood as a counter,
'condition' of experience, the 'past' of the present, must also be rejected
in the encounter. The relationship of the past to the present is no longer in
the form of a set of conditions for experience but a set of differences
activated in the experience itself. Myself and my past are no longer
'frames' which by right precede and structure 'possible' experience, but
are the series of differences actualised in real experience.
I don't think this is just a fancy way of saying much the same thing -
it challenges the whole notion that we 'apply' previously received ideas
to the present. Rather than the past determining the conditions of the
encounter, it is the encounter itself which determines the sense of the
conditions.

- Melissa

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