Candice:
<snip>
"But what if one forgets about boundaries and responds instead to, say,
'desire'?" How can one? Desire itself is a response to boundaries, isn't it?
<snip>
Cage disagreed with Schönberg over whether the writing end or the erasing
end of the pencil was in practice the more important.
If I desire some of Mr Kripke's delicious fish and chips I don't invariably
and of necessity 'hurtle' myself against the boundary of my house, press my
ear to its borders or listen to its constraints, though all that remains an
option. Cage also said that we sometimes miss ideas because we lack the
language in which to have them. The idea of the door is one such and the
language we require in order to think it concerns itself with *access* (ie
with egress from the house) rather than with *obstruction*. So an emphatic
difference in emphasis, as it were.
<snip>
Aren't we always already _inside_ GSB's circle, while everything we want is
outside it and/or inside its own impenetrable membrane of another circle,
thereby doubling the boundary?
<snip>
It's the in-betweenness that's most interesting, the area of influence.
Pask's name comes up in, for example, discussions of how knowledge is
socially and continuously (re)constructed in educational contexts. And in
cybernetics, where he has a similar vision of transience: systems are open
rather than closed; they have underspecified goals and unpredictable
results. So unlike (say) a central heating system, or indeed how AI was
conceived, they don't maintain themselves in some sort of steady state but
may encounter other unstable systems with which they interact, learning from
the experience. You may be entertained by his *Colloquy of Mobiles*, part of
*Cybernetic Serendipity* shown at London's ICA in 1968. Other exhibitors
included Cage and, unsurprisingly,Tinguely and Nam June Paik. As a
demonstration of the 'cybernetic psychology of pleasure' five mobiles
interact. They are 'an aesthetically potent environment of a sociological
type' (a work of art, in other words) implementing technological *desire*
either independently or under the controlling influence of visiting human
beings.
Probably Pask is most well known (not that I'm much of a guide) for
developing Conversation Theory (*Conversation, Cognition and Learning*,
1975; *Conversation Theory*, 1976), a cybernetic approach to how individuals
and groups go about creating meaning (sometimes illusory) as a sort of
rolling consensus through interpretation and response. I think he's also
relevant for how artistic 'meaning' keeps changing as well as offering
(posthumously) an implied critique of how things like Facebook develop and
then get 'monetized' (horrid word!) as though they were lumps of passive
real estate, just as social knowledge in general has increasingly become
monetized over the years.
CW
_______________________________________________
'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
war if you can't sing any better than that'
- Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
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