Perkins’ Disappearing Object

April 9th, 2008 Fred McVittie Posted in Grasp, Knowledge, Object, Objectivity |

When David Perkins identifies three different types of knowing; what he refers to as ‘possessive, ‘performative’, and ‘pro-active’, what he is effectively doing is mapping different types of knowledge across an expanse of metaphorical, phenomenal space. His ‘possessive’ knowledge is that which appears to have something of the quality of a object, placed at some distance but clearly within the line of sight. Like other ‘visual’ objects it can be ’seen’ simultaneously by a number of different observers and has something of the permanence, fixity, and unchanging nature of prototypical objects in lived experience. In this schema the ideal object of possessive knowledge may be the empirical fact, established through deduction, built on firm foundations of scientific research, and unwavering in its resistance to the attacks of falsification. It is a noun in the sentences of meaningful discourse.

Performative knowledge does not have this object status but, as the term implies, rather adopts the position of an action, and that position is always changing. Here is knowledge, or perhaps ‘knowing’, which engages as physical action, which has a changing profile over the course of time, and which moves nomadically through space. Performative knowledge functions as a verb, or as many verbs, and its role is to pick, to pack, to grasp, to fold, to tear, to chop, to walk, to talk, to write, to run, and to never set itself into stone and never to stand still. Its space of operation is not out in the open where it can be skewered in the triangulating gaze of multiple I’s, but at the limin between body and world. It lives in the interstices between the muscles of the arm and the bark of the tree, and it is also in the swing of the axe. It is motile, ductile, flowing, flowering, and possibly shimmering but it is never caught motionless between the pages of a book.

Proactive knowledge is closer yet. As Perkins says, it is ultimately dispositional, and has none of the qualities of an object or of an action. This is the knowledge or the knowing which is inseperable from ‘being’ and therefore is the subject of the sentence. Proactive knowledge swings the axe.