Thinking with “more than”…

some more possible insight into the processes of “forming…” Through somewhere somehow recently I was alerted to the works of Eugene Gendlin – probably through the work of Mark Johnson, Andy Clark, or Don Tucker…but could be elsewise.  Embedded experience, embodied minds, enminded bodies – the whole mess of entanglement our simply being consists of.

and how that might apply to “writer’s block” or that reaching we experience when creating –

that feeling that we can feel it – know more than we’re able to articulate or organize or perform…

This article helps elucidate some of that, perhaps.  It has certainly stimulated my imagination and attention in attempting to write more than I seem to know how to….

Eugene Gendlin – Primacy of Body not Perception

“All thinking involves the bodily … to some degree.  Take for example any ordinary sentence.  In the middle of it you have an unfinished sense of how … You don’t know the end, and yet, all through it, as the sentence wends its way … “

Eugene T. Gendlin

PLEASE READ MORE TO FIND OUT!

 

Too Big to Know (Essential Readings in the Philosophy of LIS)

I’m currently reading Too Big To Know by David Weinberger and quite intrigued by his observations – Lane’s account is a cogent analysis of why.

 

Lane Wilkinson's avatarSense & Reference

If David Weinberger is to be believed, the Internet hasn’t just changed how we access information, it has altered the very meaning of ‘knowledge’. In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Weinberger claims that “for the coming generation, knowing looks less like capturing truths in books than engaging in never-settled networks of discussion and argument.” Supposedly, the networked, collaborative, and social nature of the Internet has changed our very understanding of knowledge to the point that knowledge is no longer tied to concepts of truth, objectivity, or certainty. Instead, as Weinberger argues in his recent book, Too Big to Know, “knowledge is a property of the network” (p. xiii). That is, the Internet has profoundly changed what it means to be a fact, to be true, or to be known. This book has been making the rounds among librarians, so I thought it might be a good idea…

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Found Thoughts

As I snatched books and items to head to a weekend class I grabbed an old partially used notebook just in case I’d sneak a moment or two to scribble my thoughts.  I did, but I also found the following past set of jottings that I catapulted off of for what I wrote next…

They felt like found thoughts that found me again…so I thought I’d share…

Oxford NotebookFrom Old Notebooks

I get a little weary of philosophy.  It fascinates and intrigues, has its spectacular, glittering moments – like architecture, hard sciences, and fiction – but with each human activity there can be too much of a good thing.  Perhaps it’s the fantasies involved in abstraction, in the “feeling” of figuring things out, or of “making sense” (instead of sensing) – our human super-additives to experience that are also experience themselves – that I, at times, weary of.  That eminently falsifiable intuition that everything is made up.

It can be hard work to keep a worldview active.  They involve such complexities and details, layer upon layer of biological and logical, illogical and irrational, intuitive – ologies and descriptions, manipulated perceptions and interpretations re-interpreted re-interpreted without ceasing, that a being grows tired.  Can grow tired.

Those same realities, capacities, activities are also exponentially inspiring, enervating, exciting – those behaviors of creativity, imagination, and survival – and our weird confounding capacity to think we can observe our perceptions make for a very strange frenzy of energy and productivity…

…our infinitely (perhaps?!) webbed interdependence with our surround provides for mysterious and copious possibilities of activity (material)…all bewildering.  Chaos can be so generative.  Chaos – so stultifying.

What might we know?

That we are organisms within systems?  How would we know that, from within systems?

That we are dynamic organism enmeshed with other dynamic forms of matter and energy, waves and particles, movements?  Seems to be our sense of it.

So what?

Alongside and within – in order to be – there is NO way to exist detached or without: to imagine distance, objectivity without imagination capacity of fantasy, illusion, for purposes like logic, mathematics, narratives and codes – DElusion in order to play the games with delusional sincerity – effectively.  The delusions are effective, often pragmatic, evolving, so they must also be part of being with/in a myriad of dynamics…

One would hypothesize.  Or suppose.  Infer, as in fantasize.

All enabled by immersion in symbols, languages, stipulated relations…

…which is what I had set out to consider – immersion in symbols –

the wonder of it

the delusion…

…to follow…

 

Scribbling – Formless Thing Things Form Being in Motion Exploring Complexity – week of 9/7/2013

Scribbling

Formless Thing Things Form   Being in Motion   Exploring Complexity

            In the first place (after a letter to Seth and moving and thinking and painting with wife and a few hours of homework – reviewing Management and Organization Theory and Design no less) the first thing to do is to write.  To simply write by hand, being in motion, that is, setting into motion, and all that follows, which usually happens (like today) first – after folding laundry, washing dishes, required reading, getting kiddos fed, dressed, off to school, checking email and phone messages and new assignments, touching base with wife, drinking (making and drinking) coffee, homework, family, tasks, events, chores, responsibilities, choices – after that the first thing to do is to write, after somehow quieting the buzziness of busyness, at the desk, reading something slow and singular like poems, philosophy, science, or art – something chosen, maybe a walk, maybe music, maybe a task, and then, oh then, the first thing to do is be in motion, set into motion, set being in motion at my desk with a ball-point pen (Bic) and blank, clean, beautiful, hungry, precious, anxious (anticipatory, aroused) lined notebook paper in a loose, forgiving stack, ready, ready, ready…

…for the first thing.

            Which is not to say I was an object before, or that anything was ever a thing, or still (static) prior to pen + paper by my hand – no – Formless Things were Thinging Forms in all the other ways of motion, movements, relationships between tools and water, emotions, skin, utensils and hands and mouths and sounds and voices and contact continuous through air, always movement, humming being in motion beings forming thingless things forming formlessness, changing motion swerves and stoops, bends and helps listening to movements vibrations tones noticing shapes and lines and particling waves of substances moving moving attaching disseminating shapes, sequencing, paces, difference all pointing out where everything connects to everything else – the joining nature of boundaries – what is always next to – observe how the line works:

ι

ι

ι

 

before which space was “empty” but now it holds together, walls like stitches, buildings like blocks stuck together so things stay gathered, movements, lines, dance, breeze, blood, noises, gluing, gluing, gluing every to-gether, difference repetition pattern

Categories.  To keep things adjoined, combined.  Lists, minutes, days, tasks, timelines, hours, keeping thingless things attached in their movements – different ways of sameness – being in motion – and so forth  →

→ Forth toward firstly, to write.  Being in motion, set in motion, slowly faster, faster by slowly, by hand instead of tapping, fluid choices – typing is stop-motion, discreet, discontinuous – comparatively faster but less efficient, slower (by hand) efficacy thinking images or imaginary thinking now less critical (embedded critique): fluid.  I stop.  Breathing continues with hand thought memory hope – NOW –

A kind of yearning motion movement in letters read as words, phrases, meanings, less representative more relational – unnatural to this and this and that and other.  Confusing writing, drawing, space and time, concept object sign symptom, doodle.

To communicate.  Being in motion together if sequentially the linking looping line (by hand) tracing where we meet, are joined, in movement against/with, with, with one another – here is where we meet, inadvertent/advertently.

Being in motion, set in motion by hand – to draw writing – an advert for connection, to construct lines to bring things together, to notice.  Exploring complexity through being in motion.  Reading is movement.

            We are.

 

Found Object/Subject: Self-Portrait

Inundated in end-of-semester bewilderment and projects….I riffle through book stacks and this catches my eye again…
lines - ingold

 

and I quickly recognize myself in the mirror:

Self-Portrait of Mind – July 2013

lines

When I speak of “Relations” – this is what I have in mind

the scales, the leaps, the constraints, affordances, limitations and opportunities of being alive…

…the modes and formats, forms and patterns, processes and movements…

the interdependencies

Jay Lemke
Jay Lemke

I can’t really add anything (currently) to this man’s work – without a doubt a hero of mine – thinking, being, creating…

if you have the interest and time…

I attest that this is brilliant…

and opens and opens and opens….

Feeling and Meaning – Jay Lemke

 

 

June 23, 2013 – 3:44 pm – if you had the coordinates you could Google Map it.

What I was composing the other day in my head, or wherever daydreaming occurs: filling up that gap between inside or outside, idea and actual, etcetera.  They told me not to worry about losing it – that it would return, re-emerge.  I lost it.  The idea, sensation, form, content – everything.  Well, not everything, exactly, I guess, because how could I conjure that there was something, some experience, some initiative or other, had I truthfully lost it?  Okay, maybe they’re right, and “everything” is a question of access.

In any case, well, no – in present case or tense or whatever now-situation might be (“Weather”? – see Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, or Tim Ingold’s essay in Vital Beauty) I am not experiencing “access” to something some part or parts of me (some connectivities) believe or invent a past tense for – a disjunction/abstraction/detachment from.  A difference.

I am believing that I felt differently about something at some other time, that language was forming out of me relating to that affect, and that I had the potential capacity to express all that semiotically – or, in a way that it might make sense, be shared, exist.

Now I’m languaging nothing.  Or, not exactly nothing, more like a different something that in fact is the semiosis of another inexpressible or inaccessible possible something.  Which means, potentially, anyone could find it, discover/uncover/invent/compose/co-construct (co- probably redundant to con- but then I’m not Russian, at least not currently) that initiative and perhaps I’d re-cognize or re-member whatever realigned threads rewove into this particular weaving (what is “now”).

Etcetera.  This is how it goes down for me (current context taken mostly for granted).

 

 

Significant?

Toying with significance, practicing writing by hand.

                 Cause of which:  online graduate school (hybrid) perhaps.  Blackboard (not a blackboard + a hand moving chalk), wikis, MS Word, blogosphere…

                  Writing is a different word than typing (“keyboarding,” “texting,” “thumbing,” “fingering?”)

                  Handwriting – is there another?

Writings is different from typing.

not only pacing.

Significance - Handwriting

Significance

“People exist

to attach importance”

(Rae Armantrout)

Exercise.

Once I had the most beautiful pen-man-ship.  Admired, envied, revered.

My hand now working by jolts and shirts (“stammering”)

Wife says I jerk in the night, in my sleep.  As if the wires were hot and crossed.  “Traumatic,” she says.

Like my father.

Who has elegant penmanship – consistent, beautiful, and flowing.

What I aspired to.

And achieved.

Now interruptive.  Herky.  Stuttering.  Multi-controlled.  Cross-wired.

Muscles, nerves, vision, brain + its fabricating memory and prediction: out of sync.

     I exercise a few moments in which I don’t feel particularly pressured and am thinking about significance.

“I listened with great interest and desire to have it be of no significance.

But you know how it goes.  Significance abounded.”

(Percival Everett)

Now my thoughts arrive sturdier through a machine.  Body – extension – return.  The pen was extension.  The ink.  Dependent on the body.  Embodied, enminded.  Transductive.

“‘transductive’ (a relationship whose elements are constituted such that one cannot exist without the other – where the elements are co-constituents)”

(Gilbert Simondon)

Tools.  Media.

Humanity — technology.

Me : keyboard : thought : language.

Me : pen/paper : thought : language.

Transductive.  Co-constituent.  Interdependent.

Significant?

Dreaming of – imagining – my recovered penmanship.

Therefore, exercise.

Communication.

Transductive.

“It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood.  Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing, but the meaning need not and does not confine itself to that intention.  Those sounds, strung as they are in their peculiar and particular order, never change, but do nothing but change.  Even if grammatical recognitions are crude, meaning is present.  Even if the words are utterly confusing, there is meaning.  Even if the semantic relationships are only general or categorical.  Even if the language is unknown.  Meaning is internal, external, orbital, but still there is no such thing as propositional content.  Language never really effaces its own presence, but creates the illusion that it does in cases where meaning presumes a first priority.”

(Percival Everett)

“A metaphor cannot be paraphrased”

 

“Acquiring an open rationality”

The best that I can do on this trip is to share some of the inputs coming my way… aside from the gorgeous lush thick greens of Oregon and Washington, there are also these gorgeous, lush, thick growths…

Edgar Morin – Paradigm of Complexity

Le Moigne – Intelligence of Complexity

It’s complicated

“In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar substances with the same chemical structure can become quite different in their reality and form”

-Michael Gazzaniga-

“On the evolutionary tree, we humans are sitting at the tip of our lonely branch…We have the same roots as all living organisms.  All those similarities are there.  Our cellular processes depend upon the same biology, and we are subject to the same properties of physics and chemistry.  We are all carbon-based creatures.  Yet ever species is unique, and we are too.  Every species has answered the problem of survival with a different solution, filling a different niche…Homo sapiens entered a cognitive niche…

…in one sentence Garrison Keillor captures humanness…such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity…

BE WELL.  DO GOOD WORK.  KEEP IN TOUCH.

-Michael Gazzaniga-

Another strong recommendation from me for those interested in the what’s and how’s and some where’s and when’s of being a particular we.