Oh trendy art methodology, so full of catchphrases like "ekphrasis" and "agency!" Let's talk about ekphrasis first. Ekphrasis spent a great deal of time in school, studying language and culture in order to translate Japanese humor for Americans. Lo and behold, the only Americans who even began to get the jokes were the ones who actually were into Japanese culture, and had themselves become scholars of the culture. Sometimes Ekphrasis' comedy fell flat on it's face. So Ekphrasis began evaluating each different audience and lost a little of his honesty. He began to translate, no, convert the Japanese jokesters' verbal chicanery into something of the same spirit as the original joke, but also something that was literally unequivalent... Ekphrasis had become an Agent. He began equating things based on the system he chose for the situation that would give his preferred result. After all, it was all in good fun.
So we choose our systems of interpretation.
The older I get, the more I realize that understanding eachother is impossible. Being understood is impossible. We are at every moment, interpreting stimulai. We provide ourselves a variety of systems with which to view these stimulai, because at bottom, if we don't like what we see, we have a box of other lenses to change our interpretation. After all, if we are looking closely, no matter what the lens, the interpretation must be objective.
So let's take science as a lens. As a methodology it seems ahuman. We think of the approach as cold and detached. The objective is not to see what we want but simply to record what we see. So what happens when we look into the microscope and see nothing? We reach for another lens. We raise the magnification. We lower the magnification. We change our lens until we can interpret. But it is not because there is an objective something to be interpreted that we finally see through the correctly chosen lens. It is because we want to understand that we feel understanding. The goal is still happiness. People are "objective" and "scientific" for the same reason that they are "religious" or "sympathetic." There is great joy in the feeling of understanding. In epiphany.
To say "epiphany" is nothing more than an emotional climax, a release of chemicals in the brain at the end of an arduous attempt to "understand" might sound hideous to one under the objectivity delusion, but I think it's a testament to the awe-inspiring microcosm of our human brains. Each brain is world of carefully balanced extremes, of incompatible elements all co-existing so that to the casual observer, everything is thriving. Our planet, while made up of our microcosmic brains among other equally complicated individual entities, is another system full of oppositions carefully balanced and checked against eachother. And yet our planet appears so solid from space.
I might be getting more Buddhist in my old age, but I find great comfort in this. That every complication, everything "wrong" with the world is just as much a part of it's structure as what is "right" with the world. And how amazing are humans that they find a lens to look at every uncomfortable disharmony in a way which makes their puny life burst with meaning, understanding, and happiness.
