Material Idea - On The Legibility Of Culture eBook

What we call "the real" is also the result of a protocol of reading. Such a reading is unavoidably historical and contingent, as a product of a specific temporary sense. It also stands also within a complex correlation of marked and unmarked spaces, therefore in a spatial sense too. But this last one also carries the evidence of time. Such "marks", taken as individual projections or choices, are not only constantly changing, according for instance to the daylight (or nocturne illumination, or twilight palettes), to the instant temper or mood, to the physical conditions and the cultural antecedents of the perceiving and exposing subject - to sum up, according to a whole package of conditions and circumstances. If we put together the myriads of individuals on the global surface, we constantly have to redraw the lines of intersection and re-read the mappings of an interactive geography made of partly individual options, partly mimetic movements. Like ruins, views are constantly being destroyed and rebuilt; like lines, they are constantly being erased and rewritten. But this never happens completely anew. Culture work may also be seen as a patient attempt to read palimpsests - which are, as we well know, marked spaces par excellence.