Paradoxes of abstraction

"Our central thesis may be summed up as a statement of the necessity of the paradoxes of abstraction. ... Rather, we believe that the paradoxes of abstraction must make their appearance in all communication more complex than that of mood-signals, and that without these paradoxes the evolution of communication would be at an end. Life would then be endless interchange of stylized messages, a game with rigid rules, unrelieved by change or humor."

(Gregory Bateson p .193; 1972)

How meanings can be produced, shared, and exchanged?

(First image from www.sayho.org) The phrase sprayed-written, it reads "we are happy". it is part of all kind of protest-notes posted around the Korea Art School. This one appropriated the work 'We Are Happy' by the late Korean artist Yiso Bac. The original work was produced in a huge advertisement board painted in the pastel orange color (the second image). The protest is against the current neo-liberal government's "non-ideological but just pragmatical" policy and its decision to remove the program of theory and inter-discipliniary study in the curriculum of the school.

Sign as a Signal

"If we speculate about he evolution of communication, it is evident that a very important stage in this evolution occurs when the organism gradually ceases to respond quite "automatically" to the mood-signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal: that is, to recognize that the other individual's and its own signals are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified , corrected, and so forth.

Clearly this realization that signals are signals is by no means complete even among the human species. we all too often respond automatically to newspaper headlines as though this stimuli were..." (Gregory Bateson; 1972)

"Signals Are Signals"