Zerzan's The Case Against Art

[derrida]

Rez: I'm not really going to address your second two statements, because archaeologists have uncovered plenty of man-made objects, often a great deal more intricate or delicate than stone or clay figurines, dated well before 30,000 BC.

I think you're only jumping on that first point because you're suspicious of anything offered in totality. But Zerzan is being quite general here, and I think most views on aesthetics are in concordance with this, going back so far as the Platonic Greeks. Why else would art be accorded any unique, self-consistent value?

In "Godel, Escher, Bach" Douglas Hofstedter explained the difficulty mathematicians have encountered ever since Godel revealed the self-referentiality that inevitably plagues any ostensibly "pure" formal mathematical system. I think that this leads to a helpful analogy we can use to begin to understand art. Art, or irony, or satire, or sarcasm can be seen as instances in which the schemae we use to cope with the world around us fall victim to this same self-referentiality- doubling back over themselves and looping in new and entrancing recursive configurations.

We can profess that the systems of thought we use every day refer to some real objective reality that lies somewhere out there; that if only we could devise a perfect machine of words or pictures could we truly know what it is to exist (I think the modernist fiction of Faulkner and Joyce represented an attempt towards this end through it's use of multiple perspective and excruciatingly precise and intricate symbology) but this is ultimately a doomed pursuit, inevitably leading us further along a recursive spiral.