I do agree that we are talking about things that are
difficult to put into words and formal sentences, maybe impossible, so we try
and use other forms of expression. And I agree that everything is one,
everything is part of the world... but I think we can more or less stop with
our own planet and not use physical theories that we have not really studied
(at least I haven't). As you say no one discipline can explain the world
and humans in the world, but I don't think physics is even trying! (Of
course, I may have really missed something not studying more physics) I know
we are all stuck with gravity, and we would probably like a little less so we
could fly, but I think, when we try to explain why we want to laugh or cry, we
don't need to bring gravity or electrons or black holes into it. And we
might get further from explaining what we want to other people if we
do.
Ruth
----- Original Message -----
Sent:
Wednesday, April 11, 2007 11:40 AM
Subject: Re: On
Ambiguity
Being the unknown
I love your writing Rakesh, it seems to capture the
magic of life in a real and simple way. Traditional scientific
methodology can’t capture this aspect. Thank you Juan I shall
look up Logiques du Mondes.
To respond to Tom:
From this perspective formless silence is the foundation of what you are and
yes it has no preference or predictability. To acknowledge the unknown
is to become it. From this point there may be an expanded greater view
of what I am than the traditional narrow view of being a separate entity in
a world outside ‘me’. You say this is unscientific, perhaps it is as
there is no known or documented method being used here and yet scientists
are coming to a similar perspective through analysis. I feel it is a
perspective valid of expression and recognition. There seems to be a growing
bridge between intuited sensing and scientific research. The building blocks
of reality have holographic qualities that mean we are not separate from the
world around us. There is no subject or object. The researcher
is also the researched. It is well documented that intuitive insight is the
break through of methodological enquiry, often in dreams. If something
is not observable with the eye do we have to throw it into the category of
religion? This seems unscientific and giving up because it is too
difficult. Yet artists and theologians and scientists have open dialogues
about the nature of life and seek to find a meeting place. No one is
suggesting trashing science but rather pushing back the boundaries.
Scientific approach must be appropriate to the field of study. We can
quantify or use qualitative enquiry. Our method may be narrative, but
the essence of life is beyond story so we need to push out the boundaries
again.
‘Every cell in our entire body enfolds the entire
cosmos’ To respond to Ruth, here the word everything is not vague but simply
means absolutely everything is interconnected, is one. Again this is
from the point of view of singularity and not duality. It is not
strictly ballroom and there is no single academic discipline that can
contain such an enquiry. Ruth writes that she cannot connect emotions with
physics and yet they are somehow connected. May be the old familiar boxes of
categorising do not help us here.
It feels Performative Arts can help us evolve into
the uncertainty and not-knowing. There is a far greater intelligence
than the intellect. Reason and logic are only surface enquiries. If we
cannot easily translate the unknown we tend to avoid it or deny it. My
project seems to shift beyond the boundaries of knowledge- sits silently
unknown until there is communication like this.
It is so difficult to find the words for any of
this, almost impossible and yet something energetically happens in the
communication, sometimes there is resonance, sometimes not and a lot of
anger usually arises in some apparent individuals, may be a poem would have
been better or silence…
Best wishes,
Halina
From:
Performative Social Science
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Tom Wengraf
Sent: 10 April 2007 16:39
To:
[log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On
Ambiguity
I find myself both moved and perplexed
by some of the ‘movements’ in the exchange over ambiguity. It seems to start
by a notion of ambiguity of the ‘perceived object’ that oscillates between
two clear ways of being experienced (either a vase or a pair of faces) and
currently seems to be a point of ‘darke Mysterie’ with formless silence in
which no particular way (or even two particular\ ways being oscillated
between) of experiencing the universe (let alone an image on paper) is more
predictable or more desirable than any other:
Every
little piece of knowing emerges to fall back again into the great
unknown. I like Jamie Sands comment that ‘Great Mystery doesn’t need
to be solved’. Life is free fall, the infinite pack of cards thrown up into
the air. There is no knowing where they will land
(Halina Pytlasinska).
From my point of view, the attempt at better knowing
(or less ignorance) that is embodied in the scientific project and the
project of science has come round to being trashed in the name of what feels
like an artistic ecstasy (quite legitimate as such) performing as if it were
a social science being performed.
A mode of work, it seems to me, can only claim to be
a (social or whatever) science if it attempts to improve understanding and
generate better knowing. This may certainly involve the non-hasty pursuit of
uncertainty (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle), sustained scepticism about
‘claims to certain knowledge’ (W.R. Bion and John Keats), but it does not
mutate into the celebration
of mystery as a good in itself. It certainly may attempt to render the
familiar strange (anthropologists working on their own society) but it does
so in conjunction with rendering the strange familiar or at least capable of
being made sense of. As a tactic, confounding commonsense
understandings by rendering the all-too-familiar as ‘mysterious’ is
perfectly legitimate and a powerful tool for advancing (eventual)
understanding; to make the goal of one’s activity the celebration
of mystery does not seem to be part of an activity hoping to pass as
‘science’: it may be crucial to art and religion, but that’s another
(however possibly more valuable) story.
Best wishes for the struggle against
mystification and a tolerance of mystery
Tom
24a
PrincesAvenue
Muswell
Hill
London N10 3
LR
UK
020-8883-9297
For a free copy of
the current 'Short Guide to BNIM (biographical narrative interpretive
method) research interviewing', please send me details of your institutional
affiliation and for what research or teaching purpose you might wish to use
BNIM. I'll mail you a copy right back.
From:
Performative Social Science
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of John J. Guiney Yallop
Sent: 10 April 2007 13:45
To:
[log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: On
Ambiguity
Halina writes "we
are a universe of strings playing the manifest world into being" and that we
are "also multi-verses to each other."
(Sometimes the performative calls forth
one-word responses -- sometimes silence.)
--
No virus found in this incoming
message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.446 / Virus
Database: 269.0.0/751 - Release Date: 07/04/2007
22:57
--
No virus found in this outgoing
message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.446 / Virus
Database: 269.0.0/751 - Release Date: 07/04/2007
22:57