Dear all, 
 
I hesitate to get in the cross-fire again, after so many eloquent emails. Yet I am still troubled by this thread and the problem of what an aspirine-bottle knows about non-aspirinine bottles. As an anthropologist (perhaps even a human being) that is the only problem worth pursuing, as far as I'm concerned. Yet I rather pursue it outside academia, at least at the moment, because it makes the problem more interesting to me. 
 
Facing a difficult problem we can either multiply the evocations of different authors, ideologies, theoretical orientations or work collectively to see where these various distinctions collapse. My view, flawed as it may be, it that when you successfully manage to collapse analytical distinctions you get an insight into what the immediacy of human experience is about (I suppose phenomenology is very much about that); on the other hand, when you successfully manage to divide analytical categories further by bringing in new concepts, divisions, theoretical schools, authors, etc you get a view of what an analysis of human experience is. They are not the same: the former is generally the negative of the latter. Nor should they be the same, provided we acknowledge them as different. Yet what is a successful colapse of analytical categories in order to capture the immediacy of human experience or a successful sub-division of analytical categories in order to
 shed light on its analysis? And how does this relate to thinking through things and for things? And how does it relate to thinking design? Isn't this part of what we're asking ourselves in this thread? 
 
Professor Viveiros de Castro, an Amerindian anthropologist, after many years studying myths in Amazonia, described a complete different form of imagination of what 'things' are...in Amazonia. He argues that while in the West we are ridden by a Saussurean epistemology by which the point of view creates the subject, in Amazonia there is a form of human understanding by which the point of view creates the object. I thought of leaving you with a few excerpts of Professor Viveiros de Castro, hoping they will at inpire further thought while leaving a question to the group. What if thinking design is the exercise of thinking like an Amazonian in the West ? What if thinking design is, constantly daring to embark in a world where, unlike Saussure, the point of view creates the object? 
 
In my dreams I secretly embark in this world often (the world where the aspirine bottle knows something about you, as mentioned in previous posting). Wheather that helps me get to the kind of design anthropology pieces I am doing for the corporate world at the moment, I don't know yet. I know, however, that I am seldom bored by my imagination since I learned to embark in that world: a world where the point of view creates the object. Funnily enough, neither my teachers nor designers have taught me to imagine that world: psychotics did, when I worked with them in the past, as a psychologist. So, without further adue, here goes Viveiros de Castro's notes on the Un-Saussurean world of Amazonia: 
 
This article deals with that aspect of Amerindian thought which has been called its 'perspectival quality (Arhem 1993): the conception, common to many peoples of the continent, according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view. This idea cannot be reduced to our current concept of relativism (Lima 1995; 1996), which at first it seems to call to mind. In fact, it is at right angles, so to speak, to the opposition between relativism and universalism. Such resistance by Amerindian perspectivism to the terms of our epistemological debates casts suspicion on the robustness and transportability of the ontological partitions which they presuppose. In particular, as many anthropologists have already concluded (albeit for other reasons), the classic distinction between Nature and Culture cannot be used to describe domains internal to non-Western
 cosmologies without first undergoing a rigorous ethnographic critique (...) 
In sum, animals are people, or see themselves as persons. Such a notion is virtually always associated with the idea that the manifest form of each species is a mere envelope (a 'clothing') which conceals an internal human form, usually only visible to the eyes of the particular species or to certain trans-specific beings such as shamans. This internal form is the 'soul' or 'spirit' of the animal: an intentionality or subjectivity formally identical to human consciousness, materializable, let us say, in a human bodily schema concealed behind an animal mask. At first sight then, we would have a distinction between an anthropomorphic essence of a spiritual type, common to animate beings, and a variable bodily appearance, characteristic of each individual species but which rather than being a fixed attribute is instead a changeable and removable clothing. This notion of 'clothing' is one of the privileged expressions of metamorphosis - spirits, the dead and
 shamans who assume animal form, beasts that turn into other beasts, humans that are inadvertently turned into animals - an omnipresent process in the 'highly transformational world' (Riviere 1994: 256) proposed by Amazonian ontologies.(1) 

 
In Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, J Roy Anthropological Institute (N.S), 4, 469-488. 
 
Thanks, Pedro 
 http://appliedbusinessanthropology.blogspot.com/
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


--- On Wed, 24/11/10, Clive Dilnot <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


From: Clive Dilnot <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: whether a cell phone is knowledge
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Wednesday, 24 November, 2010, 22:24


Lubomir,
Your are right. So implicit was my sense that indeed "we have to research the artifact in order to "reconstruct" the knowledge embodied in it" that I forget to say it as such!.
So i will now say that is exactly what we have to do. But notice that what this opens to is not only the knowledge embodied but also (at least in part) the processes of translation and passage from understanding to its investiture in the object (configuration) and its consequent apprehension and appropriation (no matter how indistinct and seemingly instinctive/resistant to conscious thought such apprehension might be). 

Best wishes

Clive 



Clive Dilnot
Professor of Design Studies
Parsons School of Design/
New School University
Room #731, 7th Floor
6 E16th St
New York 
NY 10011

T. (1)-212-229-8916  x1481


>>> Lubomir Savov Popov <[log in to unmask]> 11/24/2010 5:01 PM >>>
Dear Keith,

I want to thank you for your concise and powerful remarks. And I would like to thank Cleve for a great post and a very eloquent presentation.

I don't know why people shy away of saying directly that we have to research the artifact in order to "reconstruct" the knowledge embodied in it. Clive practically said this at the very end of his post, but still shied a bit away from a strong statement.

The very idea that the artifact embodies knowledge is one beautiful metaphor. It is very useful for a number of purposes. But I would not use it to equate an artifact by itself with the knowledge embodied in it. I will evidently have hard time convincing the design world about this.

I have nothing against the idea of embodied knowledge if it is used correctly. I myself use it very often from a dialectical materialist perspective. There was a lot of talk in that paradigm about embodiment of knowledge and about knowledge. Actually, they were obsessed with gnoseology for a number of reasons. 

I consider several foundational problem areas when defending this position: the nature of knowledge, the dialectics of knowledge, the artifact as a natural object (when it is treated as an object of research), the dialectics of natural--artificial, and the dialectics of design--research. This can make a pretty nice essay, but unfortunately I work in a different area right now.

Best wishes,

Lubomir

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Keith Russell
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 3:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask] 
Subject: Re: whether a cell phone is knowledge

Dear Clive

a very fulsome and attractive account of knowledge and objects.

Could we simply say that for those who know how to translate the language of an object (or parts of the language) that the object embodies an amount of knowledge equal to what they can derive?

And

for those who don't know how to translate, the object of attention is like the coke bottle in The Gods Must be Crazy where basic utility functions (and mytho-poetic realisations) are derived but little else? 

Which kind of leaves us with what you know you know and what you don't know you don't know.

cheers

keith russell
from a wet Melbourne