Conjectures

Framed and Hung

Contexts frame our issues and provide a perspective. I recently was reminded of the importance of context over the course of the week. And context applies to everything for it forms the basis of what and how we think. To ponder something in abstract, would be to deprive it of real world applicability. And to keep an outdated context as a base layer would result in susceptibility to orthodoxy and fundamentalism. Take culture for example. The most orthodox way of thinking about culture is to talk always about discontinuities, breaks, ruptures, leaps. Walter Benjamin said, 'the only way to think legitimately about tradition is in terms of discontinuities.' Nevertheless, I think that it is possible to forget the meaning of something in ritually referring to it all the time. So it is necessary to develop language and forms which express the continuous aspect of the development of vanguard-ist culture or post modern culture. And it is this language and form that provides a fluid context. But having said that, I sometimes wonder if the concept of context has been taken to its extreme, resulting in contexts within a context or as we of this profession are so used to saying "drill down to the core issues", thus bringing us back to where we started; and none the wiser?