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THE MECHANISM OF MEANING 1971
The Mechanism of Meaning
Not only has the complete set of panels that constitute the core of The Mechanism of Meaning been published in three editions, with each edition bringing more into the picture, it also appears in full and has primacy of place within the pages of the 1997 Arakawa + Gins Guggenheim catalogue.
For The Mechanism of Meaning panels click here.
The Mechanism Of Meaning
(1963-1973)
1. PRESENTATION OF BASES FOR SELECTION
(IRONY, AMBIGUITY, PARADOX, CONCRETE
ABSTRACTION, HUMOUR, HYPNOTIC
ILLUSTRATIONS, etc.)
2. LIST OF OPERATING RULES (INCLUDING
ANALYSIS OF SYMBOLS EMPLOYED)
3. NEUTRALIZATION OF SUBJECTIVITY
4. LOCALIZATION AND TRANSFERENCE
5. PRESENTATION OF AMBIGUOUS ZONES
6. THE ENERGY OF MEANING (MECHANICAL,
PHYSICAL, AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL ASPECTS)
7. DEGREES OF MEANING
8. EXPANSION AND REDUCTION-MEANING OF SCALE
9. SPLITTING OF MEANING
10. RE-ASSEMBLING
11. REVERSIBILITY
12. TEXTURE OF MEANING
13. MAPPING OF MEANING
14. FEELING OF MEANING
15. LOGIC OF MEANING
16. CONSTRUCTION OF THE MEMORY OF MEANING
17. MEANING OF INTELLIGENCE
18. MEANING OF THE MECHANISM OF MEANING
The Mechanism Of Meaning
(1973 - PRESENT)
1. NEUTRALIZATION OF SUBJECTIVITY
2. LOCALIZATION AND TRANSFERENCE
3. PRESENTATION OF AMBIGUOUS ZONES
4. THE ENERGY OF MEANING (MECHANICAL,
PHYSICAL, AND PSYCHOPHYSICAL ASPECTS)
5. DEGREES OF MEANING
6. EXPANSION AND REDUCTION
7. SPLITTING OF MEANING
8. REASSEMBLING
9. REVERSIBILITY
10. TEXTURE OF MEANING
11. MAPPING OF MEANING
12. FEELING OF MEANING
13. LOGIC OF MEANING
14. CONSTRUCTION OF THE MEMORY OF MEANING
15. MEANING OF INTELLIGENCE
16. REVIEW AND SELF-CRITICISM
Not long after the first edition of The Mechanism of Meaning appeared in 1971, Gins + Arakawa decided to scale back their list of subdivisions, categories under which their efforts were to be assembled, reducing the number of these all-important indications of directions to take and tendencies to be explored, from 19 to 16, eliminating PRESENTATION OF BASES FOR SELECTION, LIST OF OPERATING RULES (INCLUDING ANALYSIS OF SYMBOLS EMPLOYED), and MEANING OF THE MECHANISM OF MEANING.
PREFACE (1978)
Death is old-fashioned. We had come to think this way, strangely enough. Essentially, the human condition remains prehistoric as long as such a change from the Given, a distinction as fundamental as this, has not yet been firmly established.
If thought were meant to accomplish anything, surely it was meant to do this. Yet why had history been so slow? Was there something wrong with the way the problem was being pictured? What if thinking had been vitiated by having become lost in thought, for example? What is emitted point-blank at a moment of thought, anyway? Let’s take a second look a these comic figures, we decided. There did not yet exist even the most rudimentary compendium of what takes place or of the elements involved when anything is "thought through." Why not picture some of these moments ourselves, we thought, just a few?
As we proceeded, our forming intention took shape rather unevenly. Only some of the ambiguous events we examined made ordinary sense. There was also a natural tendency on our part as artist and poet to favor the nonsense. Although we certainly did not want to propose any theory, we did begin to notice some correspondence between each event and the rather awkward term "meaning."
The vagueness of the term was suitable. Meaning might be thought of as the desire to think something—anything—through; the will to make sense out of the ever-present fog of not-quite-knowing; the recognition of nonsense. As such it may be associated with human faculty. Since each occurrence of meaning takes place primarily along one or another of these paths, we roughly derived our list of subdivisions from them. The list as a whole is not intended to be any less inconsistent, clumsy, or redundant than the original on which it was based, that is, the composite mechanism of meaning in daily living viewed point-blank from moment to moment.
We hope future generations find our humour useful for the models of thought and other escape routes that they shall construct!
PREFACE (1988)
Our approach to this project has gradually changed over the years, and so too, inevitably, has our terminology. As we have already suggested, we no longer consider "a model of thought" to be the correct way to refer to what it is we want to do; this was helpful, for a while, as a means of pointing out what we were generally after, but as a title or stated objective, it turned out to be too static and too limiting. Rather, it is the entire situation, everything a person has at his/her disposal, that we want to build, and so we must think in terms of nothing less than a model or field of sensibility. We use a number of new terms to engage the determinant event of a "thinking environment." Although the terms "blank," "cleaving," "fiction of place" appear only in the revised Review and Self-Criticism section, to the extent that they have grown out of our work on the earlier subdivisions, and represent a further inquiry along similar, if not identical, lines, they should prove to be of use throughout the work. We have also come to realize that it was a mistake ever to have included, even if only in passing, the notion of "the Given" in a book as dedicated as this one is to "No more passive reading." If to perceive is to take things to be so, how much more useful for the perceiver to think directly in terms of "the Taken" (or possibly, in the first and last analysis, of the "Taking"—i.e., the doing, the arranging, the finding to be there, the bringing about), with the tempting notion of "the Mistaken" handily in tow, rather than of "the Given," which fairly screams for a passivity that perceiving must lack
It was for the sake of a radical reordering that we initially decided to study those abilities underlying any pragmatism whatsoever. If a re-ordering is what the process of art is, the question becomes one of how to make this radical enough, and there have, we hope, been built into this work enough self-subverting elements to prevent it from ever becoming de-radicalized. Next in order would be a new pragmatism, a radical re-ordering through-and-through, one through which answers might be worked out to questions as basic as these: How not to become your own sidekick before you are ready to; and how never to become this. Can we ever cease becoming the dummies of our own destiny?—What are all the factors, faculties, at hand, immediately?—and to what purpose—or, if purposeless, how exquisitely so?—and for what...not??—and for how long... (what is the outside limit?)... might this be extended?
How does it all fit together is the essential art query of our time. Mostly, art, and science, too, happens in fragments. To date, more fragments and more combinatorial possibilities exist than have ever before. Of course not every fragment will in the end fit as a piece of the puzzle...
In the first part of this work, we take fragments, and we try, by making linkages to perceiving tactics immediate, slowly to draw these tactics, these ways of construing a demonstrably conceivable whole that are the perceiver-reader, into a unified field that we refer to as "the perceiving field." We propose, in the second section, to re-create and to rejoin fragments, and would-be fragments, so as possibly to make a new whole, a completely other perceiver. We want to form a container that will serve as Proving Ground—a proving ground for all that which constitutes a person as s/he perceives. All elements that are in play might, as they fall into place upon this Proving Ground—a Blank (wide-open) Prototype—land in such a way as to be ostensively self-defining. For this to happen, a new order of pact with "the Taken," one requiring unusually desperate measures, would have to be entered into, physically, by the perceiver-viewer. The drawings toward the end of this book only begin to suggest extent and type of distorting physical exertions that will be demanded of participants-perceivers. The issues of phenomena must be forced. We cannot yet predict how complex the structure of that container, or those containers, which could accomplish this will have to be. In any event, the perceiver must become her/himself as if soft wax, pushing easily past any grid of rationality, moving and extending every which way so as to mold out of her/his perceiving that container, or generator, which will yield the Other.
We remain convinced that "subjectivity" is largely made up of false constructs that must be neutralized, if ever anything is to begin "to live unconditionally." Unconditionally to live, that is what a post-utopia might offer in contrast, yes, even to a utopia, with its more conservative range of promises, from universal plumbing, more equality, down to, quite likely, more uniformity in belief. No, the post-utopia has nothing to offer except a chance finally to know what you are doing. (Every post-utopia would call forth, for the sake of a working out of the details, its own utopia.) This would be a garden of Eden of epistemology, and more. Some predecessors in this have been Leibniz, in his "An Odd Thought Concerning a New Sort of Exhibition"; Alexander Pope, in his garden at Twickenham; the builders of Aztec, Mayan, and Egyptian pyramids; Marcel Duchamp in his last work, Étant donnés; and Adelbert Ames in his experimental rooms. We ask that sooner, later, after, and always, justice be done to the poetic jump!
SHORT TEXT BY A+G ABOUT THE MECHANISM OF MEANING ON THE OCCASION OF THE POETRY PLASTIQUE EXHIBITION AT BOESKY GALLERY, NEW YORK CITY, 2001.
The matter of art that has had its gag removed, the subject of this exhibition, can be restated as the question, And what of poetic jumps upon and within—in the vicinity of—works of art? This question lives within and by means of two other questions central to praxis, What needs to be done? and What can come to happen? Makers set themselves tasks, problems, something on the order of hoops through which to jump, that require of them poetic jumps—jumps to who knows where. After a fair amount of preparation on the part of a maker, or after surprisingly little preparation, if the whole lifetime is not counted, and in response to a persistent puzzle or concern, out jumps (strolls? jumps to stroll? jumps repeatedly giving rise to strolling?) a not-half-bad or not-too-disgusting or disgusting-enough tactic or explosive ploy or apt maneuver, the (partly conscious) path that will pull it off, the one false as true gambit that will do it for the moment, the live wire, object, word, phrase, image, plan for a building or town. Leaps of non-faith as much as faith, poetic jumps tear through radicality to re-radicalize it. Extent or value (trans-valuing value) of an artist’s tactical move or of a poetic jump depends on how large a task has been carved out, on availability (bioavailability, psycho-bioavailability) of that which can jump, that is, on "spring-loadedness," on how much (of everything) has been taken into consideration, and on how determined plus disciplined but unrestrained as well as how desperate plus unrelenting but composed the jumper (jumping medium). Poetic jumps, no matter how seemingly small and private, always involve in some measure a tactical maneuvering of self in relation to socious.
We do have more to say on this subject, but the best way for us to frame it is through how we have addressed it in the past, through what we once needed to say about all this. We declare our prefaces to the second and third editions of The Mechanism of Meaning to be (universal) ready-mades for this purpose, knowing that in taking our own texts as ready-mades, we force the hand of history. We next declare The Mechanism of Meaning in its entirety, together with the architectural constructions that came after it, a ready-made system for dismantling art and for reconfiguring it. Art exists for working out procedures that will help our species take charge of—radicalize—its own evolution. Perhaps you have heard the term "Reversible Destiny." Out it jumped at us, as direction and as a task, from this assertion, WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE.
THE MECHANISM OF MEANING — EDITIONS
Mechanismus der Bedeutung (The mechanism of meaning). Trans. Carlo Huber. 1st Ed. Munich: Bruckman, 1971. Introduction by Lawrence Alloway.
The Mechanism of Meaning. 2nd ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. Published in French as Le Mecansime du sens. Trans. Serge Gavronsky. Paris: Maeght Editeur, 1979. Published in Japanese. Trans. Shuzo Takiguchi and Kiichiro Hayashi. Nagoya: Takagi Gallery, 1979. Also published in Japanese as exh. cat. Osaka: National Museum of Art, 1979.
The Mechanism of Meaning. 3rd ed. New York: Abbeville, 1988. Published in Japanese, 2 vols. Tokyo: Seibu Museum of Art and Libroport, 1988.
