1st Edition	2nd Edition	3rd Edition	Guggenheim Catalogue
PREFACE (1978)	PREFACE (1988)

The Project As It Appears Thus Far in Book Form:

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.

RANDOM ENTRY INTO THE MECHANISM OF MEANING
A SHORT TEXT BY A+G ABOUT THE MECHANISM OF MEANING
THE MECHANISM OF MEANING — EDITIONS
SELECT REVIEWS OF THE MECHANISM OF MEANING

PREFACE (1978)

If we had not been so desperate at that time, we might not have chosen such an ambitious title for this work. Yet what else would we have called it? After all, the phenomena we were studying were not simply images, percepts, or thoughts alone. Our subject is more nearly all given conditions brought together in one place.

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)

To this edition, we have added drawing and notes for an escape route that we had once thought of as belonging only to the distant future. ("Escape route" names what then was thought of as "a model of thought" and what since has evolved into something we now speak of as a Blank Prototype.) When, more than a quarter of a century ago, we assembled this series, it occurred to us that one day we would have to form in conjunction with it a complementary work to act as its ideal reader. Probably, it was partly our awareness of this need for an apotheosis of critical art or for a constructed reader-perceiver—carrying with it, as it did, a sense of an ultimately, to however slight a degree, animate something—that led to our thinking along lines of a modern-day Frankenstein, doctor and monster all in one. Previously, we spoke of "escape routes that future generations would construct"; now as we find ourselves ready to erect, to piece together, one of these, it might be said that, for the moment, we have decided to become our own posterity.

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!

Italo Calvino, "The Arrow in the Mind" Artforum, September 1985

Arthur Danto, from The Print Collector's Newsletter, September 1979

Suzy Gablik, "Painting About Thinking" New York Times Book Review, January 20, 1980