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