Media as Scene
I seem to remember Gans saying that, but I don't think he's ever really insisted upon it and, anyway, by "speech scene" I would mean articulate speech, so, long after the originary event. Ultimately, we'd want to insist on full bodily presence as the originary model--but we can't explain everything at once.
I haven't given much thought to visual art and visuality more generally but I can certainly say that the modernist value of minimizing representationalism in favor of foregrounding the specific nature of the medium is very much part of my thinking on this. And some of that has trickled into the culture, where "cleaner" less cluttered, less "full" representations and scenes are more privileged than I think they were, say, 50 years ago. There are a lot of books on this that I haven't read.
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The emergence of full body presence is the becoming-sign of each of the participants. I.e., its part of attention becoming joint. So, yes, it kind of paralyzes everyone in front of the object.
Does Gans see the austerity itself as the call to sacrificial violence, or, rather, the re-introduction of "primitive," anti-bourgeois cultural/sacred forms? He focuses on a tiny slice of modernism. Ultimately, if I were to get at this at length, I would drop the label and look at individual artists--there might be quite a few different "modernisms." Is Paul Klee calling for sacrificial violence? Ad Reinhardt? Sol Lewitt? I'd like to hear how.
I would actually like a "formalism" in architecture that shows the insides of the building (piping, vents, heating and cooling systems, etc.), i.e., lots of transparency, while at the same time adorning the insides and making them stylistically compatible, even if not completely assimilated to, the rest of the building. I don't know if there's a name for this, if anyone has thought in these terms, or even how possible it is. The pedagogical point is that you don't have to conceal functional elements of a structure in order to make all the elements consistent with each other. It would be the equivalent of saying we don't need to pretend there's no resentment, or cover up the "dirty work" needed for civilization in order to be civilized.