“Such reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”
David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

“All of this comes to mind when I ask myself why I drew this scene and why this drawing has power over me. But I feel something is missing in what I have said or in the way I am saying it, something that undoes or at least alters meaning along the lines of what Roland Barthes rather dramatically called “the third meaning.” You’ve heard of the third eye and the third man. Now you’ve got the third meaning!

Barthes was a restless thinker. No sooner had he gotten things squared away with his semiotic theory than he found exceptions to the theory because the very act of squaring things self-destructs. What is called “theory” gives you insight. But it does so at the expense of closing off things as well. Theory can never do justice to the contingent, the concrete, or the particular. Yet if you don’t exercise that theory muscle to the extent that you realize its limits, then you won’t get to that cherished Zenlike moment of the mastery of nonmastery.”

Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw This