Dreaming La deshumanización [del arte]

I often read a few passages right before going to sleep and end up ticking away at different analytical approaches to them.  Different in so far as I would not necessarily have thought about a certain way -- or I would have only approached a text from so many sides.

This was the case with Ortega (alongside Lezama's Paradiso and Luis Antonio de Villena's Nuevas semblanzas y generaciones -- the latter is a series of portraits, its title an homage to the 15th century work by Fernán Pérez de Guzmán).

My dream (analyzing the passages from the previous post) clarified the question about the role of nonhumans in Ortega's artwork.  "Is there something, let's say, nonhuman in art?" Ortega work's like a sculptor, subtracting human sympathetic qualities from avant garde artwork.  De-humanizing allows (or forces) a work to disorient or dislodge a purely human drama (cf. a certain passage from Harman's "On Vicarious Causation").

Despite the reduction in Ortega's own argument, the artwork's confusion (of human perceivers) begins to open up spaces and holes for others viewpoints.  Ortega senses this in his next section, "Unas gotas de fenomenología", in which he describes the scene of a man on his deathbed, surrounded by his wife, a doctor, a journalist, and an artist.  The reality of the dying is scattered across these perspectives, divided by the relationship to the dying man: while the woman is immersed in the scene, the doctor works through the anatomical implications, etc.  The journalist records the facts and the artist, only there by chance, gives a distanced depiction (i.e. interpretation) of the scene.  What if we add to this list?  First, we would want to dislodge Ortega's proclivity to diagnose through functionality, that is, vocation.  Second, one should wonder about the presence of the instruments and beds lying about.  The list should go on.  One should add to Ortega's "few drops of phenomenology" -- a beautiful phrase.