Process rooted in the verbal and the disengagement of a teleological Weltanschauung

8/14/2019 Process rooted in the verbal and the disengagement of a teleological Weltanschauung

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Process rooted in the verbal and the disengagement

of a teleological Weltanschauung

(Verbal preface to a yet unwritten piece)

A cautionary note to those that would seek to understand what I‟ve set forth: I am

afforded the opportunity to experiment, and an experiment I have attempted. This

is not to say that I‟ve invented something unique or new, or that others have

written as I write here, but more that I haven‟t, and, furthermore, haven‟t read

anything comparable – something that will hopefully be pertinent to the overall

piece (I‟m not convinced that this could be called an essay). The guides I gave

myself form part of the body of the piece or should quickly become self apparent

and so there seems little point in my making them explicit or justifying them here.

Essentially, I would only have the reader know that although the concept of

purposefulness is up for question in what is to follow, it might be worth nothing

that things are as I would have them be, whatever interpretations the reader

wishes to superimpose.

I feel like we should start at something we‟re going to call the beginning, though I

should like that you thought that there is no beginning, nor end – well, obviously

there is! – and that this that you are reading plays at – in? – what we might call

the verbal. -------------------------- Straight away I‟m confronted with a paradoxical

challenge in my efforts to make effable that which dances and is emotional – a

problem of authorship or maybe authenticity. I could present a dialogue, minds

parrying and dancing between one another, yet surely a predetermined

conversation, composed to convey an argument is little more than disingenuous

prose. I had also considered transcribing an actual conversation, had with my

friend Jesse who lectures in philosophy in Seoul, and we even had the

conversation in which we gave some justice to my loose ideas. The problem is,

although I want to consider conversation; and consider it as something of great



worth, conversations that take place between, two, even three or four

interlocutors end up being a bland dialectic, bound to logical rules in which the

parameters of accepted, established guides/rules/laws determine the vast

majority of that which is said. And, to be honest, that doesn‟t sound like the thing

I‟m looking for, if it can be said we are looking for something at all. -------------------

---------------------------------------------- I keep coming back in my head to the idea of

dancing. I think I‟ve already mentioned it a couple of times actually. It seems like

conversation can be understood in terms of a dance. And to extend the

metaphor, prose might be thought of as some kind of purposeful run – like a

salesman running a package to his customer. It‟s admittedly not the neatest of

metaphors, but it might be worth sticking with a while longer. A „dance‟ can take

on many qualities – some are done really quite formally and learned, others – like

with your friends – are controlled, but offer some room for free expression.

Others are interpretive, considered and might have an esoteric nature. We might

be able to anticipate the moves of, say, a ballerina, predicting her obligations to

flow or adherence to a particular training school, say. Other dances might only be

negatively defined, as we struggle to understand the jostles and jolting

movements of someone we‟re watching. And I think it might be something similar

to this negative definition that might prove helpful in our understanding ofconversation. So what kind of activity might we be talking about, then? It‟s very

probably something we‟d find hard to index; something approaching the infinitive:

„to dance‟ or „dancing‟; and hence something essentially verbal or lived. It has a

concern for the world around it. It parries like Mowitt‟s city dwellers, beating their

way through their environment as they vie and jockey the crowd around them.

Yeah, I think this helps us, this idea of parrying. The contrast I‟m trying to evoke,

then, can maybe be understood in terms how dancing responds to it‟s

environment. But surely the man delivering his package is even more responsive

to his environment? He must negotiate the twists and turns of the road, dodge

rocks and avoid bumping into people along the way. Yes, to be honest prose

doesn‟t even seem to achieve even this. It‟s more like a dead beached whale, up

for our dissection and consumption. But I‟m probably just being silly now. ----------



---------------- The attempt is to allow you to see what its like here – should we

understand this word ontologically? – and hope that you find something useful to

take away. Grammar, structure, schema can be given a backseat for now –

anyone who‟s ever tried DMT or been in a k-hole is going to have some empathy

for this disregard. The choreographer attempts to explain his dance to the

sympathetic runner --------------------------------------------The first piece I wrote

contained no corrections – an attempt at a flow of consciousness, I guess –

simply a stream of that which was as it was. But how disingenuous, no? Anyway,

„flow‟ is misleading, even if such a trope runs in many directions, eddies, ripples

and surges, it still is bound to Science so that they are one and same – and I

want to go much further than Science. A gesture toward faith, maybe. Our trope

must start with us – you, I, everyone else – and dance us through our setting

forth. --------------------------------------------- I used to spend a lot of time thinking

about the Greek word „Hodos‟ – in that way philosophy appropriates it as the

path-like interconnectedness of ideas – like our multiplicity forms furrows in the

grass between water holes, carcasses, shady trees and even open savannahs –

and though the idea still appeals to me, its two-dimensionality would see us as

flat, and worse, like features on a vast schematic, and not as the masters of

beasts, savannahs, paths, cartography and all that may and may not presentitself – as I want us so much to see ourselves. No, this – if it can be called

anything – though we are unlikely to find out if „it‟ can be titled in any meaningful

way – is not hodological. Paths lead us somewhere and the place we arrive at we

call the end. They can rarely be said to move upward or downward and instead

form a two-dimensional plateaux. At best this becomes multi-linear. What I want

to explore is a very different kind of movement. One that explodes in gaseous

clouds yet finds meaning in dances, love and disillusionment alike. -------------------

------------- Maybe making a brief negative examination will help us explore. As

we‟ve said, a path – like the ones we just talked about – take us from

somewhere, on a course to somewhere else. It is defined by boundaries to our

(being us that use it) right and left and the assumption that we start on it with

intent – maybe to use it as a means to a yet another path – or it maybe it



provides the means by which we are led where we want to go. What

assumptions I‟m making! I mean, could we not just lie down on the path and

stare at birds, flying overhead? I could stage a play on the path, paint it, demolish

it or build a town along it if I really wanted. And maybe that‟s the point – too often

our initial assumptions and intentions of the path are of its purposefulness; it‟s

being toward an end. Our focus is not on the path at all but it‟s linear, directional

– too often mono-directional! – qualities. Does it lead me where I want to go? A

question even the rambler inadvertently assumes in his purposing for the path.

This is all starting to sound like I‟m championing the consideration of paths in and

of themselves, but I don‟t think that‟s quite it. ------------------------------------------------

------------------------ A Sunday afternoon we lie on BaDa‟s bed – slightly hungover;

slightly dizzy. His thick Korean accent lays a veil over his meaning yet we find

ourselves now watching a film he wants me to see. TED, Jill Bolte Taylor and A

Stroke of Insight – and I get what I‟ve come to recognise as a kind of „fizz‟, that

happens when something significant is taking place right in front of me. Her

emotion cannot be separated from her message – “Rejoice!” she tells me, “your

right brain is at one with the energies of the world; it doesn‟t recall the past,

anticipate the future or anxiously analyse the world around it”. I envy her stroke,

and her loss of rationality, logic, even sanity. Suddenly, I want to explode insidethat moment of loss and remain there, without reference to any schema or

guided sense of selfhood; all barriers between exterior/interior sublimated like

gasses, forever ephemeral and boundless. And in the same instant I‟m recalling

the fear/joy/oneness of taking too many drugs; Ketamine assimilating and

coursing through my own blood; logic evanescing; the structure of the world

diffusing – and feeling empathy with Jill Bolte Taylor. But it‟s not enough – the

standing ovation give close to something left open in my mind. I barely notice the

deterministic formalities of her bow and ceremonial acknowledgments to the

audience. Instead, I feel the possibility of my existence in the world – and the

contingency of my feeling it, and the necessity of that contingency. -----------------

And I‟m somehow reminded that if I had written all this yesterday – in the clarity

of that morning‟s mind – how radically different things would have worked out –



and how my truth – my ontos – embraces my contingency so closely that neither

can be discerned. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The paradox I mentioned at the beginning should hopefully be permeating a little

deeper by now and my grasping the ether hopefully a little less well understood.

This is the paradox simultaneously at its most and least comprehendible. Put

simply, the question imperceptibly filling the space around me has been: How to

realise the ineffable. There was clearly something I wanted to say, otherwise I

wouldn‟t have started writing this. But as soon as one tries to give materiality to

something as vague, evanescent and infinite as the inexplicable, it is gone. But

like the ether that surrounds us all, maybe this question is best considered as the

very mode in which we see at all, and the paradox is akin to the problem of trying

to see oxygen. ----------------------------- Was there an ethics somewhere in that

exploration? I kinda hope not. I guess I had wanted to recognise something, to

re-engage with something that I never stopped holding as a possibility but maybe

had misunderstood the mode in which it exists. I want that moment of authenticity

to jump up and engulf me, even suffocate me at times, so it can remind me that

I‟m free to chose it or reject it. But crucially I want for myself to recognise that this

state of false consciousness we all find ourselves in is not to be understood in

ethical terms –

authenticity good, false consciousness bad. But rather they areone and the same praxis. Like a piece of string tied round my finger; “Don‟t

forget!”, I hear myself say. Hopefully, I‟m reminded that „complexity‟ is only the

start of exploration - --------------------------------------------------- Should I feel

reproach that the performative style I‟ve sporadically written in has given way to

formal prose at times? Or that this whimsical, styleless approach inadequately

communicates my exploration? Or even that I have gone to such few lengths to

explain myself? If the reader or listener thinks so, or even has hung on to the

„should‟ at all throughout this piece then there is a sense in which I have failed,

though we might disagree on where my failure lies. I can still hear Jesse warning

me: “stick to the plan”, he urges. But I think I‟ve always had a problem with plans

and superimpositions – they feel like globules of water lying on a surface,

conjoining to form ever-bigger inverted, mini lakes so to avoid their evaporation.



And all I want is for the air to be filled with their vapour, and for me to breath;

absorb it.



0.3.2. Inclusive of mistakes and making process

1. Introduction

1.1. Why are we asking this on a visual cultures opening essay?

1.2. Is this a reaction against the sudden demands of the academic

environment?

1.3. What is it we are exploring here?

1.3.1. If it‟s a question that seeks and answer, we have already

misunderstood the premise

1.4. Dyslexia as link to conversational learning

1.4.1. Nuclear and linear mind mapping.

1.5. Pre-ethical

1.5.1.1. Should implies a purpose, this examination will explore

alternatives to a teleological engagement with the world.

1.5.1.2. How this might relate to the left/right brain

2. Teleology

2.1. Frustrations of a teleological perspective with the world

3. Process

3.1. Conversation

3.1.1. lends itself to the play of lived experience, which prose restricts.

3.1.2. Conversation does not address, it lives and responds; jostles and

shifts in meaning.

3.1.3. Pask and „Conversation Theory‟1

3.1.3.1. Offering a framework for how conversation leads to

knowledge construction.

3.1.3.2. But this is too fixed, too objective.

3.1.4. Dialectic view of conversation

3.1.4.1. Does conversation ever truly achieve synthesis?

3.1.5. Conversation as synonymous with Dasein‟s negotiation with the

world

1 Gordon Pask, Conversation, cognition and learning. New York: Elsevier, 1975



3.1.6. Conversation as ephemeral and contingent (as opposed to prose

as permanent and necessary assertions and informative of bad faith)

3.1.7. If the conversational „essay‟ is written, does it not act like prose?

3.1.7.1. Certainly in it‟s materiality it does.

3.1.7.2. But maybe the record of dialogue is differs ontologically?

3.2. Michel Sorres and the „untranslatability of the sonorous‟. Michel Sorres, a

man himself considered untranslatable by many academics, those chatty

people.

3.2.1. Anti- Adorno?

4. Conclusion - Where does this take us?

4.1. Conversation reminds us of the potentials of our existence and the

falsehood (false consciousness) of essentialism in ontological assertions.

4.2. Left/right brain differentials

4.2.1. Engagement with the now point and energies that connect us with

the world around us.

4.3. The Paradox

4.3.1. We are dependent on our finitude for meaning, a shared system of

communication – yet the world is presented as endless possibility and

half of our mind has no engagement with language, future projectionsor reflections on the past.

4.3.1.1. By championing an engagement with the verbal

Heidegger – (in)Authenticity, false consciousness

Autopoiesis Nicholas luhamn

Hermeneutics – gadamer –

Paradox that exists here

“Technology is a means to an end… Technology is a human activity. The two

definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and utilize the means

to them is a human activity2”

“a means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained”3

2 Martin Heidegger The question concerning technology in Basic Writings, London: Routledge, 1978, pp. 218



“The telos is responsible for what as matter and what as aspect (eidos) are

together co-responsible”4



Process rooted in the verbal and the disengagement of a teleological Weltanschauung

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