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?

THE DIALECTIC EXCHANGE

In summer, one day is the equivalent of about 7 days of an academic term., so we are completing the first three weeks of the term.  I still need Blog Addresses from some, and genuine regular entries from others.

Don't feel that you have to wait posting until you start reading the texts. You can be responding to the moment. Let the language help you discover what you are thinking. I was attracted to Mina's opening, it is a narrative... it could go anywhere... Julie captured the essence of a day in IMPACT though images and text...

We are starting a dialogue, but tomorrow is week 4 of our term... and let's begin the dialectic process of responding to each other while we notice our experiences of our day to day encounters. Learn to value the personal and subjective condition of existing.

Try to post something everyday. Include your documentation of events and happenings. Documenting an event changes it. Why?

NOTICING

Noticing is something special that you bring to Time and the World. What you notice makes a difference, and can define the quality of experience while providing insight into a moment that otherwise might go unnoticed. Poets are NOTICERS. Often their observations are so profound that the moments they notice become the lasting fabric of our experiences. But all artists are noticers. 

You notice all the time, but maybe you haven't thought about how unique and special is that instance of noticing. But looking or listening does not result in noticing automatically. Noticing means that you take note of the substance of a moment and it becomes etched in Time. When you share what you have noticed you transform Time into a certain permanence that lasts beyond the moment and can be "noticed" by others.

By entering into the collaborative process of IMPACT (Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology) as a class, you have committed to the act of noticing in the context of your of your experience in this workshop. In addition to your experiences in the various configurations and workshops, you will be noticing yourself in your creative process, and you will be noticing what you have noticed by creating a Blog like this and recording a journal of your experiences.

To help us explore the cognitive process of our creative encounter, I am presenting you with three texts that have formed a context for IMPACT and how it has developed over the past ten years.

One such text is Consilience. You will find Consilience mentioned in the IMPACT handbook that you received on Monday. Consilience means "the jumping together of everything." This is an old English word that Edward Wilson brought back into our vocabulary in his wonderful book published in 1998. The subtitle is "The Unity of Knowledge" which describes how the distinctions between difference disciplines are disappearing as we learn how information overlaps fields of study.  We are in the era of multi-knowledge, where nothing is remote from our experience and where all knowledge is readily accessible. Wilson provides a brilliant analysis of the enlightenment and why it failed. He also presents a convoking case that challenges the prevailing attitude that only Science produces new knowledge. Wilson uses his background in biology to present a stunning analysis of a Hopi Indian painting. In the final chapters, he describes the emergence of art as an important and significant way of knowing the world. He sums up his presentation by asserting that in the future, as a culture we will recognize that Art will be recognized as producing new knowledge, a knowledge that cannot be detected by science, but which in some ways, provides a deeper reality of our experience.


Our second text is Cassandra by Christa Wolf. Christa Wolf is a professor at an Eastern European university.  Cassandra is the creative research model she developed and pursued to comply with the academic rigor of significant research to advance her standing in the academic community. This book is actually two books: The first book is a poetic novel of the stream of consciousness of Cassandra, who one might argue was the first modern woman, trapped perhaps in an ancient world that could not appreciate the intelligence and insight of any woman. As Cassandra begins to predict the fall of Troy through her extraordinary powers of visiting the world, she was imprisoned and labelled insane.  This poetic novel is a stream of consciousness of the thoughts of Cassandra as she languishes in prison. She information provided here reveals the depth of Wolf's research as she describes the Fall of the Ancient world, and sees the beginning of a new world as her secret husband Aeneas takes their twin children and escapes from Troy to create the modern world of western civilization  that began with the founding of Rome. The second half of this volume describes the research model that she developed.


Our third text is The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic. This is an innovative examination of many of the practices that we have discovered independently through our IMPACT workshops over the past years. Much of the languages capture the sense of immediacy and embodiment that have become the conduits of development of IMPACT participants, which we have come to refer to as IMPACTORS. This is a profoundly important text. The Rhythmic Event serves as a philosophical foundation for our current practice but is also replete with many examples of new work that exemplify new work, and experimental modes that provides a fresh account of art through the this time of transformation as media and the internet develop new horizons of awareness.  This book is part of a series described by the publisher as "The Technologies of Lived Abstraction." With such a theme there is a need for an IMPACT book to describe the practice of the embodiment of technology and art through our lived experiences.  It seems no coincidence that IMPACTORS in IMPACT 2010 were exploring the edges of these ideas in their final presentation of THE RHYTHM OF CHAOS.

Don't be intimated by the scope of these three texts. I would compare our experience in these three weeks to an experience I had as an undergraduate where I took a summer course in The Complete Works of Shakespeare... and yes, we were expected to read the complete works of Shakespeare in three weeks. But the reality was that this course continues to reverberate in my life half a century later as I still assimilate the material of such an inspiring encounter.

We will experience these IMPACT texts in the domain of our mutual experience. I will be learning from you. I know there is no way you can read through these texts completely. But they provide a context, a foundation for an adventure we are undertaking where the technology we are working on is the technology of ourselves.