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Barebones Pitstop Puzzle

Pitstop Puzzle. Copyright 2009: Knut Skjærven.

I just did you a favour.

From time to time I have posts that simply consist of a quote. Often an image added. These posts are all tagged “pitstop”, but unless you go for that tag in the tag cloud, you will never find them in one go.

I have collected them all for you. Linked from the same blog post. This one.  If you visit the blog page pitstop puzzle you will find the same linked there. I will update that page whenever I publish a new pitstop  post.

The idea with the pistop posts is simply to give you a break. Read them, or leave them.

Each pistop is a breath of fresh air. They all stand on their own and can be read in isolation. However there is an intention with these pitstop posts. Not expressive written down, or instructed. They are pieces of the same puzzle. They are pieces of the same picture. The are pieces of barebones.

Take a closer look at the photograph above. It is one single shot. Not a compilation of many. By viewing them all together you get a picture that is different from viewing each “piece” in isolation. You get THE picture.

Your turn now. Here are the collected pistop posts. Collected for you. You must make the picture by piecing them together.

Here you go: The Barebones Pistop Puzzle.

Minkowski’s Measure.

What Persists Unseen.

Lost in Translation.

Gain and Loss.

The Pose.

And Nobody Can Do Anything About It.

The Language of Facts.

A Mode of Familiarity.

This Feeling of Gratitude.

Out of the Bits and Pieces.

The Unsurpassed Elegance of a Stork.

From Solid Ground.

The Principle of Relevance.

Open Possibilities.

For Me Simply There.

No Substitute For Original Thinking.

Pitstop 05.

Pitstop 04.

Pitstop 03.

Pitstop 02.

Pitstop 01.

Good luck with it. I never told you it would be easy.

The good news, however, is that these pitstop posts do not only fit into one particular picture. They fit many. Could even be yours. There are stuff in there that will last you a lifetime. You need to fill out the blanks.

For once, I have listed things in a chronological order. Bottom up.

Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation, Prague 2008. (c)

“Let us proceed to the exposition. Spiritual Europe has a birthplace. By this I mean not a geographical birthplace, in one land, though this is also true, but rather a spiritual birthplace in a nation or in individual men and human groups of this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. Here there arises a new sort of attitude of individuals toward their surrounding world. And its consequences is the breakthrough of a completely new sort of spiritual structure, rapidly growing into a systematically self-enclosed cultural form; the Greek called it philosophy. Correctly translated, in the original sense, that means nothing other than universal science, science of the universe, of the all-encompassing unity of all that is. Soon the interest in the All, and thus the question of the all-encompassing becoming and being in becoming, begins to particularize itself according to the general forms and regions of being, and thus philosophy, the one science branches out into many particular sciences.”

Edmund Husserl: “The Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology”, Northers University Press, 1970, page 276. Translated by David Carr.

Library Thing. Amazon.

The barebones visualisation of this quote from Husserl it right here. You have seen it many times already.

new theme on phenomenology.

Just to let you know that I am opening up a new theme, or track, on this very blog. I do that for several reasons.

One is to establish a new layer of resources on the blog. You may have noticed that I am already pointing to a set of resources. These resources are the overall scientific, and other, resources that I draw on, e.g. gestalt psychology, semiology and phenomenology.

I now need to dig a bit deeper within the resources mentioned. First and foremost I need to do that with phenomenology since phenomenology is the carrier of the whole project. I have mentioned that a couple of times already, and I did make that statement visually in the basic barebones diagram.

You will find blog posts carrying “what is?” in the title. In these posts I try to clarify what phenomenology is, and explain how you can work with it in the barebones context of communication. For instance, I have used the terms “intentionality” from time to time. The word “intentionality” have at least two areas of meaning; one derives from our daily use of the term “intention”, the other from the phenomenological tradition. I will make clear what is meant by “intentionality” within phenomenology.

Does this mean that areas like gestalt psychology and semiology will take “a back seat” on this blog in the future? Not at all, it only means that attention will be on phenomenology in these posts. Besides, I consider, e.g. semiology and gestalt psychology as areas within the broader work field of phenomenology anyway. You will soon find out why this is so.

If you are interested in, particularly, phenomenology as a requisite of barebones communication, you should follow these posts. Hopefully you will

I will tag these post “what is phenomenology?” You can always come back to them, or view them in one go, if you hit that tag in the tag cloud.

I will as always, well nearly always, illustrate and elaborate on the topic in questions using that brilliant medium of still pictures: photographs.

Basic inspirations for these “what is posts” will be Robert Sokolowski and Edmund Husserl. I will particularly use Sokolowski’s book Introduction to Phenomenology  as a window to phenomenology. The book is, in my opinion, brilliant.

Stay tuned.

gain and loss (pitstop)

Gain and Loss, British Museum, London. Copyright: Knut Skjærven.

“Gain and loss are balanced at every step: a new act has richer fulness in regard to certain properties, for whose sake it has lost fulness in regard to others”.

Edmund Husserl: Logical Investigations, volume II, page 721, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Translated by J.N. Findlay. Library Thing.  

More on pitstops.

You Can Pay Me Later: Husserl on Images.

Well, you will be surprised. I was.

Up till a month ago I had no idea that Edmund Husserl has written much about images. Not to speak about photography. Until I had a closer look in my bookcase and found this book: Edmund Husserl: Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerungen, herausgeben von Eduard Marbach, Husserliana Band XXIII, Martinus Nijhoff, 1980.

I am ashamed that I have to admit that I have had this book since April 22, 1980. On the other hand it might have gained considerably in value since it is still in mint condition. I paid Deutsche Mark 255,00 for it at that time. And that is a small fortune. It is a brick on 724 pages written with an obscure philosophical pen. Husserl’s pen. The major parts of it dates about 100 years back. Don’t let that disturb you.

The good thing is, that is was translated (yes, it was) by John B. Brough in 2005 and published in a paperback edition by German publisher Springer. Goes by the title: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898 -1925). And it comes at a much better price. It’s a good read.

What is even better is that the book is absolutely amazing for anyone that intents to dig into the ontology of images and photography. So, it you plan to have a career as a university professor, or simply settle for a Ph.D., or have an interest in the arts in general, you should simply start with this book. It leaves Roland Barthes and Susan Sonntag in the back seat. Well almost. And it does so already a couple of pages into the book.

You should move NOW, since this book and this branch of research have hardly picked up yet. But it will. You could really take the drivers seat for a while even if it will probably leave you with a 700+ pages headache.

You don’t have to thank me for this recommendation now. You can pay me later. When I loaded both books to Library Thing a little while ago it turned out that I, so far, am the only one that have pointed to these books. And there are tons of books in there already. So the show is yours for the taking.

And as I said. You can pay me later, but if you are into this area either as a researcher, a student or just out of plain interest: GO FOR IT. I will – with some delay

You will find the precise references to both the original version from 1980, and to the translation from 2005 by following the links. Both ways you are in for a brick of pages.

NB: When you are done with Husserl’s theory on images and photographs you could always send me a quick word as to why the image below might have a certain phenomenological affinity And, add a bit of semiological and gestalt psychological analysis while you are at it.

Good luck with both the books, and the picture.

All rights reserved.

Buy the English translation of Husserl’s work. Follow the link and support the site:
Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925) (Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Collected Works)

phenomenological-method

a mode of familiarity (pitstop)

 

Shot at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark 2008. Exhibition by Candice Breitz. 

“This means that what affects us from the current passively pregiven background is not a completely empty something, some datum or other (we have no really exact word for it) as yet entirely without sense, a datum absolutely unfamiliar to us. On the contrary, unfamiliarity is at the same time always a mode of familiarity.”

Edmund Husserl: Experience and Judgment,  revised and edited by Ludwig Landgrebe, translated by James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks, Routledge & Kegan Paul,London, UK 1973, page 37.

Library Thing.  

More on pitstops.

 Photograph shot by the blog author.

for me simply there (pitstop 08)

“Our first outlook upon life is that of natural human beings, imaging, judging, feeling, willing, “from the natural standpoint“. Let us make clear to ourselves what this means in the form of simple meditations which we can best carry on in the first person. I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing, etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somewhat spatially distributed are for me simply there, in verbal or figurative sense “present”, whether or not I pay them special attention by busying myself with them, considering, thinking, feeling, willing”.

Edmund Husserl: “Ideas. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology”, page 101.Humanities Press Inc. USA 1969. (Translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson with a preface to the English edition by Edmund Husserl). Library Thing.

More on barebones pistops. 

pitstop 03

“But this embarrassment disappears as soon as we consider that the life-world does have, in all its relative features, a general structure. This general structure, to which everything that exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative. We can attend to it in its generality and, with sufficient care, fix it once and for all in a way equally accessible to all”. 

Edmund Husserl: ”The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”, translated by David Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, USA 1970, page 139. (SBN:810102552). Library Thing. 

More on barebones pitstops.