“Art and games allow us to stand aside from the material pressures of routine and convention, observing and questioning.”
-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, p.210
Yes. Hence they are two of my favorite things.
Roland Barthes declared that ‘no sooner is a form seen than it must resemble something: humanity seems doomed to analogy’. The ubiquity of tropes in visual as well as verbal formscan be seen as reflecting our fundamentally relational understanding of
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“signification is…nothing but…transposition from one level of language to another, from one language to a different language, and meaning is nothing but the possibility of such transcoding.”
–Algirdas Greimas, quoted in Semiotics: The Basics by Daniel Chandler
“Understanding consists in the reduction of one type of reality to another”
–Claude Levi-Strauss, 1961
(This comment is brilliantly, enviably dense and concise)
“Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being “not even wrong.” Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type.”
–Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
“The question itself keeps the mind pressing against a blank wall, thereby preventing it from ever finding the outlet. To show a man how to get out you have first to of all to free him from the misleading influence
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Ludwig Wittgenstein, making a point via a primitively-drawn human face, gives us the following gem:
“You may then feel inclined to say: “Surely I don’t see mere dashes. I see a face with a particular expression”. But you didn’t mean
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“The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value…hence also there can be no ethical propositions…It is clear that
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