May 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie
Stanislaw Lem died of heart failure on 27 March, 2006, in Kraków.
In the spirit of Lem’s work, particularly A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitudes, this blog contains abstracts for papers which have not been written, for a conference which does not exist.
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May 10th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Douglas Harding died on January 11th, and somehow I didn’t hear about it. I am imagining he and Ivor Cutler sitting together, maybe with John Peel, Robert Anton Wilson and Stanislaw Lem, talking about the view from wherever they are now.
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May 28th, 2007 Fred McVittie
It has been estimated that between 75 and 90% of spoken and written language in not literal and concrete, referring to primary experiences with the material substances of the world, but is ‘metaphorical’. It is further believed that this use of metaphor in language reflects a similar widespread use of metaphor in thought, and that most of the cognition we engage in, both conscious and non-conscious, is non-literal. Metaphor allows us to think about aspects of lived experience which would otherwise be unavailable to the senses and therefore unthinkable. These include entities and forces which are simply beyond the reach of the senses because they are too small, too fast, too large, too distant etc. but also includes the many abstract concepts that have been created by human culture and cognition including ‘justice’, ‘truth’, ‘romantic love’ etc. Even such apparently literal and concrete phenomena such as our understanding of numbers has been shown not to be direct (at least above very small numbers), but grounded in metaphor. This dominance of both conscious and non-conscious cognition by metaphor is so great that an entity, person, animal, or artificial intelligence which was only able to process information directly and had no means of embodying abstractions through metaphor would barely qualify as the possessor of a mind at all. It is almost true to say that our modern concept of mind itself is as a kind of metaphor machine.
Our relation to the metaphorising processes which constitute cognition and the formation of mind range from unquestioning acceptance to more self-conscious awareness that we are not thinking or speaking literally. When we speak about atoms we feel that the language is concrete (except to a physicist who knows the truth about atoms), whereas when we speak about God we are not quite so sure if we are talking literally or metaphorically. An uncertainty that will also vary depending on our religious preferences.
Given the ubiquitous concerns with abstractions that seems to characterise the being of human, it is fair to say that most of our phenomenology, and most personal thought and interpersonal discourse is metaphorical. For the most part we live cognitively in a world which is not directly available to the senses, which is beyond human bodily experience. Instead we live in a world of shifting metaphors in which abstract ideas mould themselves into shapes of objects, spaces, and forces that we can see with our minds eye, touch with the mental feelings, move through with the body in our minds. These transient thought forms dissolve and combine, blending and elaborating into complex architectures of thought as our attempts to grasp the ungraspable lead us to constantly build and rebuild these mental structures using the blueprints of embodied experience.
This shifting internal landscape of embodied metaphor, call it ‘imagination’, is the ground for what we experience daily as normal waking consciousness. Behind the clear and constant solidity of waking awareness there is this ongoing dream populated by shape-shifters and transformers. Our consciousness lives on Earth, our imagination lives on Solaris.
Posted in Cognition, Consciousness, Embodiment, Grasp, Imagination, Lem, Stanislaw, Metaphor | No Comments »
September 25th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Stanislaw Lem died of heart failure on 27 March, 2006, in Kraków.
In the spirit of Lem’s work, particularly A Perfect Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitudes, this blog contains abstracts for papers which have not been written, for a conference which does not exist.
Posted in Blog, Imagination, Lem, Stanislaw | No Comments »
September 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The original purpose of this writing was to support my PhD research by acting as a repository for the various wayward ideas, both relevant and irrelevant, that occurred to me during this time. Because of my admiration for the work of the Polish author Stanislaw Lem I chose initially to frame these random thoughts within the conceit of a fictional conference, a space which offers the unusual literary form of the conference abstract.
Abstracts for conferences, from my experience, are often far more engaging than the full papers to which they refer. A well-articulated abstract does not only outline a set of findings or lay out the terms of a new piece of analysis, it also achieves something of the status of an artwork, compressing extensive polyphonal expressions into a single, dense piece of prose. There is something engagingly aleatory about such writing, it shows us the swings and roundabouts of conceptualisation and invites us to play on these for a while, before the more formal fencing off of that area that will take place during the full exposition of the paper. Metaphorical images and performances flow and strut across the paragraphs with an unfettered air of poetic freedom that is often suppressed in the more extensive discursions.
Although I abandoned this conceit quite early on in the process of this writing, the status of the conference abstract is nevertheless relevant to how the rest of this writing is working, for me at least. The conference abstract, like the abstract in art or of some poetry, is poised between two different poles of knowing and being. On the one hand is the apparently transparent revealing of the full paper, representational and photographic in its claim for truth, realism, and authenticity. Here is knowledge in the public domain, fully visible, fully referenced, and solid as a rock or a book. This is the direction in which the abstract leans and toward which it directs our gaze. On the other hand is the performance, the experiment, the experience, and the moment of coming-into-being which precedes the abstract. It is ephemeral, artistic, and phenomenal and is upstream from all writing; we are carried swiftly on, the illumination casts shadows on the page, the video of the performance misses the moment when the dancer’s foot is at just this angle. It is ultimately irrecoverable.
The writings in this blog traverse this odd liminal space of the conference abstract, sometimes reaching forward into the objective space ahead and touching the material of facts and shared knowledge, sometimes falling toward the point of origin and the moment of performance.
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October 10th, 2007 Fred McVittie
In ‘Beyond Understanding’, a keynote speech at the symposium on Threshold Concepts at Strathclyde University in 2006, David Perkins lays out a taxonomy of knowledge and its application to teaching and learning. He describes knowledge as located as in three ontologically distinct forms. Video here. Symposium programme here.
The first he describes as ‘possessive’ knowledge, in which the object of knowledge is felt to be owned by the individual and can be produced on request. So, for example, we might be asked in what year Columbus landed in the New World and we might retrieve the date 1492 and display this known fact, rather as one might take a rock out of one’s pocket and hold it up for inspection. Similarly, the question ‘Who who wrote the novel on which the film “Solaris” is based?’ might solicit the response ‘Stanislaw Lem”. In each of these instances the item of knowledge is considered as possessed by the individual and this possession is, in turn, conceived of as a kind of object, a rock, a book, that can be produced on demand. This metaphorical mapping of the concept of knowledge as object has the effect of awarding other object-like properties to the knowledge item. Objects tend to be relatively solid, clearly bounded, and consistent over time. Similarly, knowledge which has this character of a possessed object is also intuitively experienced as solid, bounded, stationary, and permanent. So, for example, the date of Columbus’ arrival on the shores of New Found Land is felt to be a ‘hard fact’; there is no sense in which we feel that fact to be ’slippery’ or ‘fluid’. Also, that experienced fact is clearly delineated; we do not feel that the edges of it blur into other facts, in fact it is difficult to imagine what this ‘blurring’ might mean. It is also experienced as still and intransient, that this article of knowledge is not wavering or changing its place in the index of human information, and it will continue to occupy this place, in history, in geography, in cartography, forever. This fact, as object-like, and as objective, as a rock, is something we feel we can hold, unchanging and fully graspable. We can take ownership of it and consider ourselves in possession of this fact. We can put this fact in our pocket and produce it on demand. Similar object status might be awarded to the authorship of the book on which the film ‘Solaris’ is based and the response to any question on any TV game show.
The second form of knowledge that Perkins introduces is that which he considers ‘performative’. This type of knowing goes beyond the rote recitation of solid items of data and begins to use this data, these facts, not as objects of thought but as tools to think with. Knowledge, in this formulation, becomes less like a set of solid, separate, inert entities and more like living dynamic structures, capable of breeding, hybridising, fissioning, fusing, and blending. Performative knowledge responds to situations in a way which is not hard and resistant, but which is flexible and yielding, and the clearest examples of this knowledge is its ability to respond to creative or problem-solving situations. Possessed object-like knowledge is speechless when faced with a question such as ‘In what way is the film “Solaris” a commentary on the exploration and conquest of the New World? The individual isolated facts which characterise a possessed knowledge approach do not allow the kind of analysis and creative thinking which the question demands. Performative knowing, on the other hand, is well equipped to make a response to this situation. This may be through, for example, allowing the live information structures which make up the knowledge of Stanislaw Lem’s book, and the film of that book, to mingle with those of Columbus and his first footfall in the Americas. One can imagine a text that brings out the mutability of culture and the act of projective imagination that allows us to conceive of such things as ‘nations’ and ’states’ being born from this miscegenation. This ability of what Perkins calls performative knowledge to dynamically construct novel solutions to problems and creative responses to situations is referred to frequently in literature on creativity and innovation. Koestler calls it ‘bisociation’, elsewhere it is formalised into knowledge generation systems and training routines such as Triz, Synectics, Scamper, etc. Performative knowledge is very good at responding to set briefs, solving problems, fulfulling creative criteria, and producing novel answers to well-framed questions.
The third type of knowledge which Perkins introduces, and the one which adds the most to current understanding of knowledge, is what he terms ‘proactive’. This form of knowing, as the name implies, is neither inert nor reactive or responsive, but rather is actively engaged in the processes of its own implementation. Individuals who are able to mobilise proactive knowledge resources are not ‘problem solvers’ they are ‘problem finders’, that is, the knowledge that they embody (possess is too passive a term) seems to constantly engage with the world around them looking for opportunities to perform. Proactive knowledge does not simply appear on demand when a question is posed or a problem is set, but is out there in the world looking for opportunities. This type of knowledge seems largely to be dispositional; certain attitudes or habits of behaviour need to be in place in order for proactivity to emerge, and whilst such disposition can be learned or cultivated it is likely that some individuals would find this easier than others. Proactive knowledge users, whether by accident of nature or design of education, are constantly asking questions of the world, noticing small irregularities in the fabric of society, finding new uses for old objects, coining new words and phrases because they like the taste of language. They make extensive and joyful use of metaphor and analogy, and are incontinent inventors. Give a proactive knower a new word or a new idea, and watch them scurry around looking for some way to use it.
This continuum of knowledge, from the possessive at one extreme to the most proactive at the other, is complementary to the continuum of objectivity and subjectivity. Possessive knowledge, constitutive of object-like facts, appears, unsurprisingly, at the objective end of the spectrum. It is experienced as distant, removed, existing in interpersonal space. Proactive knowledge, conversely, is felt against the surface of the body, or even inside the body, and is inseparable from the experience of being. It is part of the subjective phenomenological experience of one’s self concept.
Posted in Creativity, Knowledge, Lem, Stanislaw, Psychology, Self, Sense, Training | No Comments »