Why do we fall in love with certain tropes, figures and symbols from literature, movies, e.g. and carry them with us, so that they are passed on to the next generation? Why do we pass symbolic meaning, figures and tropes from generation to generation?
Can we sense that they are important in regards to our working life and aspirations with regards to writing, thinking, reading and engaging in conversation and thereby hold on to them?
Is it because we always strive to make sense of things in our vicinity, unify things in seamless patterns that please our need for coherence and symmetry?
Is our affinity for certain tropes e.g. connected with our immediate lifeworld and knowledge horizon, for instance pop culture?
Does the figures, symbols and tropes on a deeper level carry meaning that reflect our inner desires or immediate needs?
What is left behind? The tropes, symbols and figures that aren’t malleable enough to adjust to the requirements of new generations?
I am currently involved in a project where a phase regarding documentation and communication of the project’s achievements is just starting up.
The group I am part of are having some very interesting discussions about what kind of knowledge and experiences to focus on, document and communicate to a wider audience.
We all agree on that it important to show off the things that work, that can inspire others to change their methods regarding teaching, planning and an organisation. Where the group is more in disagreement is when it comes to the things that didn’t work, the aspects of the various parts the projects that wasn’t living up to it’s intentions.
I am one of the people in the group that maintain that we have to focus on the not-so-successful. Mainly because those things are just as much knowledge that needs to be shared. Not only so others doesn’t make the same mistakes, but also so they and evaluate what went wrong, change things/aspects and perhaps try one more time to see if it might work.
Another reason, for me, to focus on the things that didn’t work is that the novel, the unexpected always comes from the new and unknown areas that we doesn’t visit very often. And most people shy away from things that in their experience doesn’t work, but seldom put enough time and effort into evaluating why they didn’t work, what aspects of it that didn’t work and how they might change that.
And that brings me to Serres:
“Creation invents new by recounting today what it didn’t know yesterday – my vocation consists of writing and saying not what I know, boring, dead, and past, more than perfect, pluperperfect, but, on the contrary, what I don’t know and will astonish me (…) toward the unforeseen of the artist, the unexpected and, strictly, the improbable.” (Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, p. 103-104).
Our successes are, in my line of thought in this post, “boring, dead, past, more than perfect…”. Instead we need to travel new places, immerse ourselves in new experiences.
And why shouldn’t some of those not be our failures?
Last night I was talking to a friend about what it is to write and have a reference point or a point of departure. The talk developed from an excerpt from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig that my friend is using in a design class as an example of finding a focal point when creating.
The excerpt is connected with my previous blog post with a quote from Serres, because it touches on the same ideas. To live and learn you have to move away from well-known strategies and routes and try the unknown. To depart from the well-known is to learn and create and innovate, produce something novel.
He’d been innovating extensively. He’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn’t. They just couldn’t think of anything to say.
One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.
When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.
He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn’t bluffing him, she really couldn’t think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.
It just stumped him. Now he couldn’t think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.
He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this.
He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”
Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”(Excempt from Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig)
The Lure of Whitehead is an anthology edited by Nicholas Gaskill and A.J. Nocek, comprising several authors’ angles, views and perception of Alfred North Whiteheads speculative philosophy. So far I’ve read the introduction by Gaskill and Nocek, and the chapter A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality by Isabelle Stengers.
The ‘lure’ of the book is two-fold in my perspective: first of all it comments on and breaks down the coherent and – to me – rather inaccessible philosophy and thinking of Whitehead. Secondly, it puts Whitehead into a larger frame of things, history of philosophy, creativity, language, coherence, contemporary theory and so on.
So far the book has made me think about thinking things through, dwelling on it, following patterns of thought, putting new abstractions forward, and generally, stay on a topic for a long period of time. To phrase the book, to have “adventures of hope”. (p. 9)
The book has also affirmed my conviction that no experience should be ignored (which, to me, fits in well with the concept of ‘thinking things through’, i.e. ‘hard thinking’) and that you shouldn’t divide experience in:
“…the really real world of primary qualities, molecules, and energy fields, and the only apparently real world of secondary qualities and sensory experiences, the embellishments of our minds make upon the world. Whitehead protested against this division as untenable and spent the rest of his career framing a system of thought capable of putting every aspect of experience – from the insights of science to the intimations of the poets – “in the same boat” (CN, 148)” (p. 3).As a general method of perceiving a coherent world and creatively creating modes of thought the philosophy of Whitehead is very usable, but I still cannot say with clarity how the book can be applied to my particular fields of interest: pedagogy, anthropology, organisational analysis and so on. I hope the reading of the The Lure of Whitehead – along with reading Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas (the two book by Whitehead currently on my shelves) will enable this application more clearly.
“The Holy Spirit thus proceeds, absolutely speaking: it leaves stabilities forever, including those of the balanced movement of circular history, to risk itself in the unstable motivity of deviations from equilibrium. That means that it never stops being exposed. It evolves and travels. Whence its eccentration, outside the stabilities of the first two persons; whence knowledge, whence time. Whence learning.”
– The Troubadour of Knowledge (1997), Michel Serres
