Eyes wide shut

Here I take a what I call a minimal element of theory, the incipit from Julia Kristeva, together with a minimal element from the film Eyes Wide Shut to examine the relation of ‘art' and ‘thought' which is the objective of the collection. By elaborating a rhetorical or grammatical turn in the essay around the unequal relation of ‘art' and ‘thought' to the gerundive ‘thinking', I develop my general research into the wider relation of theoretical models to adequate units of meaning and the frame of meaning in the work of art. Starting from this discrepancy, rather than from a theoretical a priori, art, thought, the work and the theoretical text are set in a possibly new relation to each other. In this I am constrained to examine their overlapping semantic and semiotic characteristics and how this overlapping produces different kinds of meaning rather than assume ready-made whole meanings. The enabling question concerns the level of abstraction on the one hand and the materiality of the art work on the other, and how these can be detached from conventionally structured narratives of social history or critical or post modern theory, and remixed in such a way as to generate fresh viewpoints and archives.