Dear David,
I would like to rephrase Wittgenstein’s afforism number 287 in “On certainty:
"The squirrel does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions”.
by
"The kraken does not infer by induction that it is going to need stores next winter as well. And no more do we need a law of induction to justify our actions or our predictions.”
(you have to visualise this drawn by Gary Larson)
Being a little more serious, I must say that Analytical Philosophy has been, quite successfully, tackling riddles for the past (more or less) 100 years, without (very wisely comfortably installed in neo gothic buildings) tackling not one of humanity’s real problems.
But, I don’t want to get away from our (kraken) original attack on the vessel of well formulated, and analyzed ideas, which deals with knowledge … (and not with “knowing”).
I’m not trying to speak for Clive, with whom I agree, so I can only justify, why I chose that particular Agamben text on Warburg.
The thing that what strikes me on Warburg is his interest in pictorial works (Art, we might say) escaping from two strong paradigms of his time: One growing from Freud and Jung focused on the internal consequences of perceiving art as art (in the limit as mental disease). The other, focused on the tradition of purely aesthetical analysis conducting irrevocably to the notion of Style. (and also escaping from a sociological approach that would later explode in the Frankfurt School).
By doing this, Warburg was, indeed, metaphorically, creating a science with no name, but yet, by is own proposition, a science.
What strikes me more in Warburg’s Mnemosyne process is his genuine interest on things. His, probably schizophrenic based notion, that objects (of art) could bear elements, not of economical sort, not of aesthetical sort, not even of a communicational sort, that could be compared, allowing the objects to be related by “understanding” them. This process presumes the existence of latent qualities in objects ready to be understood (different from their value, different from their sensible effect on us, different from the “information” they carry). Cultural elements, one could, say, ready to be understood. What is even more striking is the fact that, although most of the objectes he studied were made to be in the world “as art”, the elements he tries to understand are not related with “being art” of these objects.
Because of the process of understanding involved, I propose that, in some cases, those (cultural) elements can be designated as “knowledge”.
Having this in mind, without any doubt I can state that the book: "On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition”, that I own and stands, now, inert in my book shelf, contains Knowledge (although of course, it knows nothing). This book was made specifically to contain knowledge and is culturally accepted to do so.
End of part one.
Back to the depth to meet my humboldt squid little friends.
Best regards,
Eduardo
Eduardo Corte-Real
PhD Arch.
Associate Professor
Professor Associado com Agregação
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Av. Dom Carlos I, nº4, 1200-649 Lisboa, Portugal
T: +351 213 939 600
> No dia 27/07/2017, às 02:32, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> escreveu:
>
> Clive wrote to Ken saying:
>> I am sorry to say that I found your last reply to Eduardo to be close to
>> being patronizing and borderline offensive…
> I did not find it so. But I did find your comments on Warburg intriguing, and I will follow them up. Thank you.
>
> But when you write:
>> The question is not "knowledge" but the relation between knowledge and
>> understanding and how it is that the artifacts we make (all of them, in
>> every guise) in different ways mediate this relation *simultaneously *with
>> how they mediate our relations to our (collective and individual) selves
>> and to the world.
>
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