Dear Chuck

Yep - I agree with everything you say - these are the issues as we
struggle to reflect on thought as action. We have some kind of handle on
effect but almost none on affect. Which is at the source of the
affordance concept - we might accept that the resolving of affordance
amounts to knowledge as action - I read the door handle and manage to
open the door - and, we might go further towards the ecology of
perception and acknowledge that when we act we are actors and hence we
are afforded.

The resistance to the codification of these meanings is cultural and
historical - it also supported by the rush to facts that is seen as the
affect marker of maturity (yes, that is a gun and yes you are about to
shoot me).

The names for the knowers of such things I would rather not bother about
- the fact that there are names indicates that codification has advanced
in some cultures. The grounds for these processes of codification are of
more interest - and this is the sticking point as well as the starting
point for Western cultures.

Yep - I too "am interested in how people come to accept and elaborate a
convention (read theory)." This is the central agony, for me, of this
PhD Design group. Have we done any of this business over the last 5
years?

Science and cults - yep - that is also a very real distinction with
moving from facts to community issues. Again, we cave in to the facts as
we disclose the difficulty in forming and then developing a community.
For many people the difficulties are sustained within their immediate
families - that is, they do bother with the affect aspects when it comes
to family. But, for most of the time, we resist taking affect matters
beyond the front door of our homes. We go into the agora expecting
weights and measures not agonies. It helps that we treat the ecology of
perception as a resolved and highly stable and well established science.

Science of theory as community? Is this more than a probe or provocation
or pose? Yes! We are doing this science here and now.

Oh for a table of elements!

keith russell
OZ newcastle


>>> Charles Burnette <[log in to unmask]> 05/20/05 11:05 AM >>>
Dear Keith,

I don't really doubt the possibility of emergent meaning through
discourse
or dialogue. The problem as I see it is that people take away only what
they
comprehend based on how they interpret what they hear based on their own
background (or rhetorical background if you want). However, finding a
common
framework of understanding seems to require collective agreement on the
outcome of such events. This rarely seems to happen. We don't go home
with
facts but with what we accept as meaningful. This still isn't codified
enough to function either as theory or language. I am interested in how
people come to accept and elaborate a convention (read theory).

What names for those who form the science of theory as community do you
have
in mind? More particularly, what do you mean by the science of theory as
community? Are those who form it members of a cult of believers in what
each
other says? Or is there really some science involved?

Curiously,

Chuck



On 5/19/05 7:41 PM, "Keith Russell" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Dear Chuck
>
> You raise, for me, one of the key issues in terms of Design Theory as
a
> Practice. You ask: "How can theory be institutionalized to function
more
> like language?" (I've quoted the paragraph below)
>
> I think the example you take from Klau's article illustrates one way
> that theory is already determined as a language. Those of us from
> rhetorical backgrounds know what talk is for, we know how to listen,
we
> know how to form various discourse "rules" and we know how to look for
> larger patterns in the drift of things. This means that at
con-ferences,
> the con-ventions of different groups come to the fore. We are often
> looking for things to emerge and we provoke and pose and wait in hope
> that the community will emerge in language as a language. When this
> works the conference is magic - when it doesn't then we have to go
home
> with facts.
>
> There are names, in some cultures, for the various plays and players
> that go to form the science of theory as community.
>
> keith russell
> OZ Newcastle
>
>
>>>>>>>>>>>>
> [log in to unmask]
> Charles Burnette <[log in to unmask]
> Date:   Friday - May 20, 2005 4:24 AM
> Subject:        Theory as affordance
>
> How can theory be institutionalized to function more like language? (I
> assume you will accept that language becomes institutionalized to
> support
> dialogue wihin a culture.) You wrote "I see bricolages (..a relatively
> loose
> ecology of artifacts, produced or at hand, whose uses are guided by
> conceptions that its many participants bring to it...) as being lin
> guistically coordinated,assembled, disassembled, or reconstructed with
> novel
> artifacts, collectively supporting institutions that in turn nourishes
> artifacts selectively." Maybe a theory (or a word) is a momentary
> artifact
> or maybe it is an institution like a language that can evolve and
> transform
> within the constraints imposed on it by its users (and itself).
> Collaborative design thinking can create a coherent mental or physical
> artifact. How does or could "bricolagees" do so?
>
> I'd be really interested to "see" where you take this artifact of our
> conversation.
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Chuck