Friday, April 10, 2020

The Appearance of Abstraction

Abstraction has a quality of not being much at all--and this quality has a lure to groups of people. The lure of abstraction is ticklish and follows this equation:
One is in love. One wants to share it with others.
When abstraction is shared in language the speaker is confronted with a dilemma with it's expression because of abstraction's lack of properties and at first it seems important to be clever. This cleverness is the decorations we add like polka dots to a square. The decorations come like a fever and are excessive and contingent. They are conceived to be amusing and dazzling but only serve to mask the actual content.

Then there is a tendency to renounce decoration but to become cynical and minimal. Abstraction becomes an eulogy of the assumption that it couldn't be fully shared in language. The cynicism becomes a mocking of abstraction from the view point of some miserable afterlife. The expression of abstract concepts is to show that abstraction is not there in speech and this expression becomes polemic in any direction.

There must be a sense of ease with abstract language to recover from being a pointless romp or icon for miserable-ism. Abstraction is whole when released from expectation that abstraction is fact-statement or that it must amuse an audience. Abstraction is not a mere fountain of latent fussy thoughts but is indexed by rationality in that its reality exists weather we perceive it or not.