I hate definitions. I absolutely hate them. They drive me crazy.
I refuse to do them! Or I do them as little as possible! Or I do a when-based definition instead, which is a cop out.
People tell me they like what I say about definitions but then they also disagree with me.
“But Lu, we need to define things! We simply must.”
And I say to you:
I don’t care! It’s fine! Try it!
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but the world is a big big sloppy sloppy mess. We try to make sense of it by not seeing it that way, but instead see it as being made up of discrete things, like cat and man and woman, and it doesn’t work.
Or maybe it works for 98% of cases but it doesn’t work for the remaining 2%. And so what we do is we add all sorts of asterisks and exceptions to our definitions to account for the 2%. And I think that’s terrible, because for me: The 2% of exception cases to any definition are the MOST INTERESTING PART but they end up being an afterthought.
Those 2% of cases reveal the truth of the world to us: They show us what we— that we are just sloppy sloppy slodge made of bazillions of tinier pieces of slodge and therefore the gaps between us / me and you are only an illusion. The air I breathe out is a tendril between us, inside my lungs only a second ago, now in yours, hopefully not giving you covid. We all get ill together. We all get well together. We’re one gigantic ecosystem organism of slodge.
“But Lu—”
After the first world war—
“Oh no—”
The surrealist movement—
“Not again.”
After the first world war, artists and philosophers tried to figure out how we could have fucked up so badly as a people. How could we end up in a situation like this? where we’re killing each other in slodge filled trenches? where we walk out our young to die? all in the name of… what? something? what is it?
The surrealist movement tried to make sense of this, but it couldn’t. So it moved towards nonsense instead, quite rightly. It identified that too much emphasis was placed on intellectualism: On seeing the world in clear boxes that make sense.
Move to surrealism! Where definitions are looser. A pipe can be a pipe but it can also be a woman or a leaf or poetry. The point of Magritte’s work is that words and definitions can say whatever we want. We can define a pipe in any way we want! We can say it’s anything. We can say it’s live coding. But we may look at the pipe itself and see something different, regardless of what we say. What does this all mean? Who the fuck knows. It doesn’t matter and that’s the point.
Maybe definitions and other made up boxes and rules don’t matter so much. Maybe we should zoom out and gain some perspective on these small things that seem big but they really shouldn’t be.
Of course, the surrealists were subject to the same flaws as everybody else, perhaps because the movement was full of sexist men like usual.
And yes, anyway, either way—
“Lu, that’s great and all, but I don’t really see what any of this has got to do with live—”
The surrealists of Paris fell into pieces because of in-fighting. They all argued and argued and argued about the true definition of live coding— Sorry— They all argued about the true definition of surrealism and groups became splintered. They fractured off into competing groups. They divided and conquered themselves.
And they ultimately failed. No one learned anything. World War Two came around quickly with even more hate, with even more “intellectualism” and even more death.
Don’t you want to shout at them? Don’t you want to tell them:
What are you doing???? Why are you nit picking and squabbling over something so small and made up?????? It doesn’t matter what surrealism means. You’re doing something that you love and you think is important. You don’t need to know what it means. You don’t need to differentiate yourself from other art movements. If they like what you’re doing, they’ll join in. If they don’t, they won’t.
“Lu—”
I’m not finished yet.
“I just—”
No.
“I just wanted to say—”
What I know is this: I’m connected to the people and the world around me. I have no—
“I don’t think surrealism—”
I can’t— You can see me. You can hear me. I might not be able to clearly define my stance or my views or whatever it is that I—
“I just don’t think that surrealism— I mean, really, come on, it’s—”
We don’t need to finish our sentences! Thoughts and concepts don’t have to be—
“I don’t think that surrealism would have ever been able to stop World War Two from happening. Even if it succeeded.”
You don’t mean that.
“Yes I do.”
You wouldn’t dare.
Thank you for reading my blog post about my personal definition of “live coding”. I hope that clears up some things for you! And I look forward to seeing you at ICLC.
Back to the wikiblogardenite.