Axioms
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Abstraction is good. Clear communication about
abstraction better. One is of the life of the
mind. The other, of the life of the mind in a
body.
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These boldly stated values are contagious. The
propagation of stances that affirm both feeling and
thinking is salutary for bodies and minds contending
against anti-erotic and anti-intellectual forces,
positions, and effects. Passionate theorizing
fosters a culture of the question and such a culture
cannot be disinterested, cannot be insensitive to the
manner of posing questions, cannot neutralize
inquiry. To remind oneself of this at the outset
is also to remind oneself that passionate theorizing
and adequate abstraction, like appropriate technology,
contribute to clarity and action. Theory has
consequences.
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Abstraction transports one from the given to the
possible. As abstraction moves away from an
underlying reality, a putative last instance, it moves
towards a form, a portable pattern, a template.
Abstraction is akin to transcoding. In the succession
of analytic and synthetic moments, in the movements of
separation and recombination, a materialism is
feasible, thought and bodily patterns readable.
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This is not a new way of being in the world.
There are precursors. Andrew Hodges, about Alan Turing,
has written that his "was a materialist view of
mind, but one that did not confuse logical patterns and
relations with physical substances and things, as so
often people did." (Engima of
Intelligence 291
). Turing was an
atheist. He was also a mathematician and
homosexual. A story could be told of how this
combination of ways of being in the world affected and
shaped his world outlook, contributed to his refusal to
reify logical patterns into empirical constructs.
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Of course a variant of such a story would imply that
the non atheist, non mathematician, non homosexual is
more apt to reify tropes as empirical constructs
especially if such a negatively defined way of being in
the world comes with literary training. The
classic case is Marshall McLuhan. The media guru
thrived on metaphors. His cyclical view of
history and his sharp periodization depend upon the
figure of ever reversible dominance of eye or
ear. It is a forgivable litotes to claim that
McLuhan's hyperbolic elevation of chiasmus to the
status of explanatory principle was and remains
influential. Not so forgivable is the claim that
the purity of his discursive machine is maintained by
his vitriolic condemnation of dialectic, a condemnation
not unrelated to his conversion to Catholicism and
championing of sex-role stereotypes.
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Regardless of its origins, McLuhan's undialectical
dualist division of the senses so aligns aesthetic and
cognitive practices that rationality is set against
sensation with no understanding of the mediating
instance that is perception. Jacob Bronowski's
argument in a lecture entitled "The Mind as an
Instrument of Understanding" offers another
succinct example:
If you think of it, there are essentially
only two groups of arts that human beings
practice. One group includes arts
which are mediated by the sense of sight,
like sculpture and painting; the other group
includes arts which are mediated by speech
and sound, like the poem and the novel and
the drama and music. Of the human
senses these two dominate our outlook.
The sense of sight dominates our outlook on
the outside world, whereas the sense of
hearing is used by us largely in order to
make contact with other people or with other
living things. There is a very clear
distinction in the way in which most of the
time we use vision to give us information
about the world and sound to give us
information about other people in the world.
I should just say in passing that, of course,
other senses enter the picture. For example,
it is said that Eskimos make those very small
sculptures because they carry them and feel
them. And one of the senses which is
not even one of the five classical senses,
the kinesthetic sense, is obviously part of
our appreciation of dancing or moving. But by
and large, this division between the arts of
sight and the arts of sound (including music)
is clear cut.
The world of science, however, is wholly
dominated by the sense of sight. (Origins of
Knowledge and
Imagination 10-11)
Bronowski unwittingly offers memoryless pictures and
sounds, a world void of stories. Perception in
such an account is severed from dispositions to act in
the world. The senses operate in a passive
fashion.
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However as Maurice Merleau-Ponty indicates
"[b]efore becoming the symbol of a concept it [the
sign] is first of all an event which grips my body, and
this grip circumscribes the area of significance to
which it has reference"
(Phenomenology
of Perception 235
). Or as
Harry Hunt states:
We do not notice the gap between the senses
because their intersensory combinations are
organized into a system of pragmatic,
sequentially directed intelligence that
allows the sight of something to be its
"name" and that name to include an accent and
emphasis that is also a postural readiness
for various motoric "doings." (955)
To return metadiscursively for a moment to the eye-ear
tradition of Bronowski and McLuhan, one can vouch that
the habits of postural readiness, the bodily gripping,
pro or con, induced by the invocation of a dualist
division of the senses become CLEARER and LOUDER once
that division is transcoded onto a gender grid (male
science and sight versus female arts and hearing).
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One suspects the division of the senses harbours a
marriage scenario. Even without the gendering of
the opposition, the dichotomy is essentialized,
mediations blocked, and dialectic dies.
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To rethink and to reassert the embodied nature of
knowledge, one comes to work upon and play with the
production of texts devoted to technology, perception
and reproduction. Attending to such a nexus
permits one to critique the assumption of dyadic
interaction in the construction of knowledge and the
apprehension of signification. One can combine
rhetorical and narratological analysis of these texts
to not only catalogue dominant tropes and cardinal
stories but also to read such a catalogue as a
chronologically dense map that indicates the passages
of forces shaping the production and reception of the
text, in other words, its history and teleology.
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If the organisation of the senses into somatic
configurations is similar to the organisation of
catalogues of figures and maps of stories, then the
embodied nature of knowledge operates by means of a
game of valences. Ideology is at home here.
These organisations and configurations represent and
enact axiological choices. Embodied knowledge in
the form of experiences is discursively keyed to
sensory modalities, stories or figures. According
to how they are valued and keyed, experiences are
differentially regulated. Also, the social
regulation of perceptual and cognitive experience
affects discursive possibilities.
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Technology, perception and reproduction are
ideologically inflected. This itself is an
ideological position. It is a position that
claims that an apparatus orients meanings. It is
also a position that redeploys points of departure in
that meanings orient the apparatus. Of course,
meanings and apparatus inflect the orientation.
Such a shell game in a field of axioms, such a bending
of metalevel relations, has material consequences for
one's understanding and interaction with machines and
systems.
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Depending on how one constructs one's machines, one may
be locked into two-player games and double-bind
situations. (n1)
A dialectical understanding of the senses
offers alternative games and a machine fuelled by its
own activity.
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A sensorium is a receiver and a dispatcher. A
sensorium is a semiotic machine. Such a device is
capable not only of sensation. It remembers; it
perceives. Acts of perception as discrete somatic
signals form a sequence. Sequences and their
manipulation are the basis of sorting activities and of
stories. The possibility of treating somatic
signals sequentially also ensures that a sensorium can
be its own translation device. One sensory
modality can "inform" another. Indeed,
cross-modal encoding acts as a material support for
narrativity in cognition. An interactive
sensorium permits a functional but non-reductive
approach to narration. Narratives can serve a
mnemonic function or act as an algorithm for problem
solving.
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For such a machine, perception is communication and
furthermore the fundamental unit of human interaction
is non-dyadic. Such design criteria pose a
challenge to the reproductive and perceptual models of
Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser and
Mary O'Brien. Adequate models of reproduction and
perception require triangulation.
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Sensory interaction is foreclosed by dyadic models of
reproduction. Such foreclosed interaction skews
theorizing about the experience of reading. To
wit, Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic, Roman Ingarden's
phenomenological aesthetics and the feminist
epistemology of dichotomy-oriented thinkers, Jane Flax,
Susan Bordo and Dorothy Smith. However, a
sensorium can be patterned on the feedback structures
of self-organizing systems if cross-modal encoding is
linked to narrativity defined as the
potential of transforming any sequence into a
story. Such a machine opens the discussion of
reading to dialectics. Taking account of
physiological midwifery and philosophical maieutics
does much to problematize reductions of both the
text-reader relation and the parent-child relation
to an
overdetermined relation of producer-product. Once
the accounting acknowledges the role of the witness or
facilitator, the economic aspects of reproduction,
reading and even perception can be abstracted.
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