THE VALUE OF SUBJECTIVITY: Knowledge is Personal

The importance of understanding that all knowledge is personal is to begin to redress the overbalance toward objectivity that became the obsession of the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries. Geoffrey Clive in his book The Romantic Enlightenment: Ambiguity and Paradox in the Western Mind, a monumental critique of the 19th Century, demonstrates the emergence of the daemonic through what amounted to a war on subjectivity. This is a brilliant book that uses music and literature as the basis of much its analysis. This connection of art, philosophy, and science provides a rich tapestry for discussion.

According to Michael Polanyi, a scientist of the mid 20th century, a free society that strives to be value-neutral undermines its own justification. In his book Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi set out his opposition to a positivist account of science. A revised version of his 1951 Gifford Lectures was later published as Personal Knowledge in 1958. Polanyi asserts that all knowledge claims rely on personal judgements. He denies that scientific method can yield truth mechanically. All knowing, no matter how formalized, relies upon personal commitment. 

As knowers we do not stand apart from the universe, but participate personally within it. Our tacit awareness connects us with reality. Our awareness generates the context within which our articulations have meaning. 

It was while writing Personal Knowledge that Polanyi identified the "structure of tacit knowing,”which he viewed as his most important contribution. We experience the world by integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness. In his later work, The Tacit Dimension (1966) he distinguished between the phenomenological, instrumental, semantic and ontological aspects of tacit knowing, articulating concepts much more developed than in his previous writing.

Knowing and Being are a set of essays by Michael Polanyi assembled and edited by Marjorie Greene. 

THE INTERNET AND IDENTITY

As I have reflected since my romance with WWW began in the early 1990s, I am struck by the realization that this new medium enabled me to explore identity as process, in which reflection becomes a deeper transaction in fabric of discovery. As the Chair of a dynamic, evolving multidisciplinary department, I purchased the first computers for the department, and as the Arpanet became the Internet, we were one of the first music departments in the world to have a website, for which I wrote the code. As I tried to interest my colleagues in this new medium by suggesting that in a couple of years we wouldn't need bulletins because students would be choosing schools on the Internet, I was generally dismissed as being a fanatic.

I began to explore the idea of on line courses and several of those classes still survive although by today's standards they are somewhat pristine. Even so, there were the kernels of some good ideas. One that I remember is The Creative Process. Despite its age, the site remains strangely relevant to our inquiry. Not everything survives from this ancient website, there are some corrupt movie files, but one can see the foundations of what became IMPACT.  The following quote from the website illustrates:

  Notice how technology has also shrunk our perception of the world, and in some ways perhaps tended to homogenize cultures into a world culture. This is probably the greatest fear that confronts us about technology: that we are blended into a mass of humanity serving science and technology within the dictates of a new world order. Yet, this is a reactionary fear, and not at all at the root of the problem. Robert M. Pirsig in Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance focuses the problem of the meeting of East and West in a new context, of an indutrialized Western World intersecting with the metaphysics of Eastern modalities, of a different knowing of reality:

"The real cycle you're working on is the cycle called 'yourself.'""The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motocycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon."

The motorcycle is a metaphor for Western industrialized culture and technology encountering a process of deep knowing and involvement emanating from the East. Within his quest for excellence and quality, Pirsig confronts the demons of himself, and helps us share in his personal, inner "Chautauqua." Chautauquas were tent shows which once "moved across America...in an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer." Now you are calling yourself to your own Chautauqua...your own quest (questioning)... ...your own discovering in the workshop of yourself.

As I began to Blog, I found that a Blog could serve as a journal, but it is also enables your reflections to become objects of thought in which you see yourself looking at yourself. It also became a vehicle for creative reflection, for poetry, for writing stories, for noticing moments and transforming them into explorations. Wyzard Ways became a place for reflection, for noticing, for creating. I am writing some short-short stories such as Karla's World.  Having the space to explore, revise, create, reflect has transform the journaling process for me. And although I am prone to continue to write journals and books in the old fashioned way of paper, pen or pencil, it is great to have a dynamic medium that can talk back to you.

Using the Internet as an archive, some ideas may get preserved, if you are lucky enough to survive updating and obsolescence. You constantly have to recheck your old pages, and often you are too late.  Web Arts Collectives contain some gems, like the Brazilian Capoeira Viola Enluarada (only Brazil could turn a love song into a national anthem), or the sequence of Gene Kelly and Singing in the Rain, with Usher's recreation of Kelly's scene from the movie, and then my stab in technology to place them side by side as I looked at the intimacy of rain and digital collaboration.

The following links are referred to in this entry:

The Creative Process
An example of an open ended structure for a class. An early attempt, but I see possibilities for a platform creative collaboration.

Karla's World
I found that I could experiment with a form for writing called the short-short story. I tried developing them exploring New Yorkers in the 21st Century, an update of O.Henry's Four Million, if you will.

Web Arts Collectives
A Blog for presenting multimedia as class content. This link explores Viola Enluarada,  a Brazilian song in which Love and Liberty are combined. Only in Brazil could love serve as the focus of an anthem for rebellion.

Intimacy of Rain and Digital Collaboration
I began IMPACT singing in the rain as I left orientation and headed for the pizza party in the lobby of Pless Hall.  This Blog uses media to research Gene Kelly's famous rain scene compared to Usher's recreation of that masterpiece live on the stage half a century later.

THE TECHNOLOGY OF OURSELVES

The summer group of 2013, comprised of students who began working on the technology of themselves, are entering new domains of awareness. This is the ongoing challenge we face as artists and educators. But the good news is that our training and sensibility actually prepares us for change. We are receptive to Time as it changes, because art itself is about transformation and change. We are sometimes fooled by the products of arts, but art is always process. Process becomes a way of researching the world, of knowing the world as always at the point of becoming.

Looking at the work of M.C. Escher, we can see how wonderfully he expresses the notion of change and evolution through images that come in and out of the foreground and background. Evolution is about constant change, and as we have changed in response to the world and its changing environments, we invent ourselves over and over again.

Now technology becomes the environment that calls for change, and we are in the midst of an information revolution that may control our destiny in ways beyond our imagination. All of this is involved in the technology of ourselves. We work on ourselves to become more than we are now, to become different than we are now. Education itself was once viewed as the way that humanity could preserve the past, Now we see Education as an agent for personal and social change.

Two books come to mind that have to do with a sense of mastery and change: Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel that examined the meeting of East and West on a very personal level, and how a westerner came to experience Zen on a deep and profound level that changed his personal awareness of the world. This book was very influential on artists in the West in the 1970s. Another book grew out of that sensibility and borrowed from the title of the Herrigel book: Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The industrialized West encounters a different value system of the East in an exploration of the quality of our thoughts and experience.

All of this deals with the technology of ourselves, and this is what we are about as we go through the creation of new materials through the mastery of technologies that call for different ways of knowing and creating the world that is our home.

MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND UNDERSTANDING IMPACT

We are in the midst of revolution. The world is changing so rapidly that although we think we see the world around us, the world is changing right before our eyes... right now. A serious question faces us as educators. How relevant is the past? Do we cling to the past because it created us as we are? Does this past image (and sound) of ourselves prevent us from seeing and hearing ourselves in the immediacy of the present?

 Marshall McLuhan predicted this paradigmatic shift in the 1970s and the media revolution has succeeded in transforming the culture and moving us away from a culture of point to a culture of media, creating what he described as the "global village," as he proclaimed "the medium is the message."


 When we examine what constitutes the materials and ideas we try to communicate to our students, we are confronted by the challenge that we must learn the past before we advance further. In fact,the past has controlled our curriculum. You must know the history of yourself or you are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

 Yet a new paradigm has emerged that challenges us to create the future--- not from the past but from the energy of newness and discovery. A new creature has evolved. Generations are separated by an evolutionary process that separates young and old. This has always been true, but Time is so accelerated that the separations are more distant and defined.

 Yet consciousness transcends these barriers and situates the moment as the fullness of awareness and experience. Education becomes a term, perhaps antiquated and captured by the past. Education is replaced by conscious awareness that spontaneously knows and understands in an unending kaleidoscope of discovery. The Past and the Future are consumed in the fullness of knowing at the point of discovery.

 In some ways, the new technologies empower us to know the world in the presence of now. We can see ourselves, imagine ourselves, and transform ourselves in the media of conscious awareness. Does anything exist without our awareness of it?