Weird Studies/Artworks are People

29 Jul 2026 - 04 Sep 2026

ref to You Must Change Your Life and the Rilke poem. But they think S doesn't go far enough?

Ref to Dan Sperber cognitive causal chains. Centaur-like structures that combine material and semantic causality. Well yeah. They seem very confused though.

Artworks intentions are not reducible to the intentions of their creators – they take this is kind of axiomatic.

PF: What is my purpose, how do you prove something like this? Proof is inappropriate in this context. OK.

Holly Cusack McVeigh - repatriation "stories find you, narrative of a sentient world"

Secular modernity vs Upik – I don't think his arg is accurate. Well, its the usual cartoon repreerntation of modernity.

Rita Felski’s Hooked: Art and Attachment; James Elkins’s The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing; Erik Wallrup, Being Musically Attuned: The Act of Listening to Music. (refs to chase maybe)

That’s the real horror trope, isn’t it: not just an object that has an occult effect, but an object that has an occult agency: something is acting consistently according to some obscure agenda of its own. As we move rightward on my diagram, we are moving not only from known to unknown effects, but from effects to agencies.

metapersons (and we would have to include sentient statues in this category as well) are not residents of some world beyond our own; they are right here and now, immanent in matter. They are persons like you and me, although they are more-than-human persons

Sahlins’s The New Science of the Enchanted Universe concerns those “metapersons” that, for most of humanity, form polities with living human beings. Metapersons could be animals, deities, or the dead: “although generally called ‘spirits,’ these beings have the essential attributes of persons, a core of the same mental, temperamental, and volitional capacities.”

Ojibwa people don’t “personify,” because they don’t share our division of the cosmos into animate and inanimate, such that one would have to paint a face onto something essentially faceless in order to find personhood there.

I know what he means but I do think the Ojibwa engage in personification, maybe at more natural or unconscious level than the word suggests, although that smacks of western condescension.

"the person is an irreducible mystery, more basic than matter or energy, time or space, and like these, indefinable." – Henry Corbin

hm, do I agree? "More basic than matter, time, space" – Exactly the opposite of what I have been taught. I'm willing to reconsider my assumptions these days, at least. But maybe we can put the factional fight of "more basic" aside.

An animist world is one where human and more-than-human persons form polities. Many of the persons in these polities — in fact, some of the most important persons — are dead.

The word "polities" invokes Latour, but I think he would say the polities are just as real for us as for "animists".

It is in the bow that we become one with everything we encounter; in the bow, life becomes life. The artwork looks back.

One can practise it, just as one practises melodic passages or syntactic patterns. In this sense, religiosity is congruent with a certain grammatical promiscuity. Where it operates, objects elastically exchange places with subjects. Therefore, if I accept that there are — on the shimmering surface of the mutilated stone — numerous “places” that amount to eyes and see me, I am performing an operation with a micro-religious quality

How about, nothing inherently is or is not a person? Instead, persons are created by other persons relating to them as such. That is, in fact, how human persons are made*, and how some animals (pets) become persons. So there is no yes or no fact of the matter. Personhood is not a sharp category, it's an inherently relational, fictional, dramatic, constructive process. This is different from pareidolia in its usual sense, because that implies that the personhood is merely illusory. Instead I mean that personhood is kind of a fiction that we enact and thus becomes real. Under this theory, trees and artworks are people if they are treated as such. That might sound a little too pat, as if we are projecting something onto them that isn't real. But it is more than that, since treating them as people means being open to their genuine autonomy. * See eg Kenneth Kaye (The Mental and Social Life of Babies, 1982) which made Attributed / presumed intentionality the core argument: parents systematically over-attribute understanding, and that pretense is what pulls the infant into actually having it. The "as if" is a self-fulfilling scaffold rather than a charming error.

Notes