unexpected events

Unexpected events, such as the sudden appearance of a stump across our path – when we manage to notice it – or Maxi's peccary sudddenly reviving can disrupt our assumptions of how the world is. And it is this very disruption, the breakdown of old habits and the rebuilding of new ones, that constitutes our feeling of being alive and in the world. The world is revealed to us, not by the fact that we come to have habits, but in the moments when, forced to abandon our old habits, we come to take up new ones. This is where we can catch glimpses – however mediated – of the emergent real to which we also contribute. 

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) pp. 65-66

Speaking is not seeing

– Words are suspended; this suspension is a very delicate oscillation, a trembling that never leaves them still.
– And yet, they are also immobile.
– Yes, of an immobility that moves more than anything moving. Disorientation is at work in speech through a passion for wandering that has no bounds. Thus it happens that, in speaking, we depart from all direction and all path, as though we had crossed the line.
– But speech has its own way, it provides a path. We are not led astray in it, or at most only in relation to the regularly traveled routes.
– Even more than that perhaps: it is as though we were turned away from the visible, without being turned back round toward the invisible. I don't know whether what I am saying here says anything. But nevertheless it is simple. Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence. I'll let you count all the words through which it is suggested that, to speak truly, one must think according to the measure of the eye.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 27

My body is a thing that reveals other things

My body is a thing that reveals other things, and can do so only because it is of the same fabric as they. My flesh is where the lines of direction of the world are inscribed on a fold in their midst. The movements of the eye and hand that are not desultory, are movements where – like the red that precipitates because the red of bishop’s robes, gypsies’ dresses, flags of linemen and of the revolution, lips of lovers haunts it – each phase of the movement recalls and refers to the eyes and hands that folded over or will fold over those robes, dresses, flags, lips. Its tissue, like that of the structured layout of a world, is made of these cross-references.

Alphonso Lingis, 'Bodies That Touch Us' in Thesis Eleven no 36 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993) p. 163

Invisibility isn't a quality of the object

"There are no invisible objects of perception," she replies. "Invisibility isn't a quality of the object. It is a quality, a capacity, an incapacity, of the observer. I call the soul invisible if I can't see it. That says something about me. It says nothing about the soul."

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) p.10

The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46

The technique of construction and the construction of technique

Along with the technique of construction, there is, one must not forget, the construction of technique, the ensemble of spatial and temporal mutations which continually reorganize on an everyday basis the aesthetic representations of contemporary territory. Constructed spaces is thus not simply the result of the concrete and material effect of its structures, its permanence and its architectonic or urbanistic references, but also the result of a sudden proliferation, an incessant multiplying of special effects, which, with consciousness of time and distance, affects perception of the environment.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 547

Not my way of feeling

'What about the intensity, the excitement?'

'Oh, none of those aspects interested me. They're precisely the things about abstract expressionism which didn't interest me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I'm perfectly happy about my feelings. I want to bring them, if anything, to some kind of tranquility. I don't want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don't want somebody else to disturb my feelings. I don't spend my life being pushed around by a bunch of artists.'

Irving Sandler, 'To Open Our Eyes' in Every Day is a Good Day: The Visual Art of John Cage (Hayward Publishing, 2010) p. 50

Premeditation is the enemy of tension. Predictability is the enemy of seeing. Design as a prescriptive method diminishes the tension between ourselves and the objects of our perception, and thus our ability to see them for ourselves. More critically, it diminishes our capacity to perceive what is there but not seen, exemplified by our perception of space itself.

Lebbeus Woods, The Storm and The Fall (Princetion Architectural Press, 2004) pp. 59-61

The mirror promises so much and gives so little, it is a pool of swarming ideas or neoplatonic archetypes and repulsive to the realist. It is a vain trap, an abyss, nevertheless the cold distant people of the Ultramoderne installed themselves in many versions of the Hall of Mirrors. They lived in interiors of gloss and glass, in luminous skyscrapers, in rooms of rarefied atmospheres and airless delights. The overuse of the mirror turned buildings, no matter how solid and immobile, into emblems of nothingness. building exteriors were massive and windows were often surrounded by tomb-like mouldings and casements, but the interior mirrors multiplied and divided 'reality' into perplexing, impenetrable, uninhabitable regions. The walls outdoors were ultra physical, while the walls indoors were ingraspable and vain. The purist is vain enough to imagine he is pure, but this ultimate viewpoint frightens the naturalist. The 'window' and the 'mirror' are secret sharers of the same elements. The window contains nothing, while the mirror contains everything. Consider them both, and you will find it impossible to escape their double identity.

Robert Smithson, 'Ultramoderne' in The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York University Press, 1979) p. 50

Appearances, at any given moment, are a construction emerging from the debris of everything that has previously appeared.

[...]

Any image - like the image read from the retina - records an appearance which will disappear. The faculty of sight developed as an active response to continually changing contingencies. The more it developed, the more complex the set of appearances it could construct from events. Recognition is an essential part of this construction. And recognition depends on the phenomenon of reappearance sometimes occurring in the ceaseless flux of disappearance. Thus, if appearances, at any given moment, are a construction emerging from the debris of all that has previously appeared, it is understandable that this very construction may give birth to the idea that everything will one day be recognizable, and the flux of disappearance cease. Such an idea is more than a personal dream; it has supplied the energy for a large part of human culture. For example: the story triumphs over oblivion; music offers a centre; the drawing challenges disappearance.

[...]

To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.
From each glance a drawing assembles a little evidence, but it consists of many glances which can be seen together. On the one hand there is no sight in nature as unchanging as that of a drawing or painting. On the other hand, what is unchanging in a drawing consists of so many assembled moments that they constitute a totality rather than a fragment. The static image of a drawing or painting is the result of the opposition of two dynamic processes. Disappearances opposed by assemblage.

John Berger, "Drawn To That Moment" in Berger On Drawing (Occasional Press: 2005) pp. 67, 69-70, 71
Originally published in 1976