Thursday, February 7, 2008

Liquid Words

I found the ideas and concepts within "Liquid Words" a little easier to comprehend than those in "Base Materialism." It seems that Yve-Alain Bois begins by saying that liquid and words, separately are two opposing ideas. Language, in regards to the foundation of actual letters of the alphabet, is "a hierarchial combination of bits." Liquid on the other hand is indivisible and remains in the same form, true to itself. So, naturally speaking, liquid words is not possible. But then he it seems like he later goes on to say that it is very difficult, but possible to attain liquid words in works like Ruscha's and Pollock's works, which were shown in the book. Is he saying that words really have no meaning, because when you break them down they are just mere symbols that any individual can interpret how they want? I thought it was quite an interesting point about the "unbridgeable gap between the sound of words and the silence of writing." It seems like such an obvious observation, which I have never really thought about. That is an idea worthy of further pondering, and I still haven't quite grasped it's correlation with concepts of horizontality and entropy. Entropic irreversibility....help? It's a lot to think about, and I'm diggin myself into a hole of confusion.

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