The Space of
Creativity:
Hypermediating the Beautiful and the Sublime
_____________
A Dissertation Submitted
to the
Division of Media and
Communications
of the European Graduate School
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
______
By John Toth
September 2005
ABSTRACT
The Space of Creativity:
Hypermediating the Beautiful and the
Sublime
John Toth,
September, 2005
This thesis will consider the creative
process of the arts as a life method that awakens an awareness that develops
thinking, aesthetic inquiry, creative activity and heuristic reflection of the beautiful and the sublime. The argument of this thesis situates
lifelong learning as a creative approach (endorsed by Ramon Cortines) to
fulfillment that wages battle with conformity, conventionalization and
politicization (Margaret Spellings and NCLB) at the expense of emancipation.
What does it mean to be a lifelong learner who contributes as a citizen in the
year 2005? The argument for this question will consider the space of the
sublime as the place of learning.
This thesis begins with two leaders in the field
of education who comment on the current role of education in the United States,
Ramon Cortines and Margaret Spellings. Central to this argument is an examination
of the disparate views between leaders in the field of education that pit logic against imagination and creativity and of
the differing views held by various philosophers, thinkers and educators
throughout history as to the objective of education and the means by which we
achieve knowledge. Martin Heidegger suggests the need to understand the
historical past and remove any decisiveness from the subject. Plato contends
that education is about lifelong learning as citizens who contribute to their
world. Creation myths are considered as the framework for our contemporary
understanding of the creative process of learning. Kant posits that the way we
reach creative understanding is through the analytic and synthetic judgment,
both of the beautiful and the sublime. Schirmacher stresses the importance of
the thesis - antithesis approach to knowledge.
The way we communicate is first an act of choosing
our own medium of expression, be
it words, facial expression, body language, image making, dance, logic or
thinking in virtual reality. This chapter moves from Platos notion of medium
as substance to Deweys understanding of medium as an agent of artistic
expression. Merleau-Ponty suggests that we are in a relationship with medium
that IS our world. While aesthetics refers to the beautiful to most people the
sublime introduces abject media and unconventional methods which open new
possibilities for conceptualizing media into knowledge. The electronic
apparatus opens new ways of learning through hypermedia that suggests a shift
from the age of literacy to the age of electracy.
This investigation will pursue a
philosophical orientation of the creative space and its relationship to the
process of lifelong learning. Education systems should prepare individuals to
creatively choose their own path towards fulfillment. A decision to act toward one's own fulfillment is what
Badiou calls a superposition of a fiction of knowing and a fiction of art.
Assessment as a proving ground for educational success pits philosophy against
ideology. Ronell speaks of the impossibility of excellence through the test,
while Schirmacher says that freedom of failure is what makes art possible.
However, Agamben describes the opposite effect when artificial ideals emerge in
a state of exemption, that arises when a political system thrives in an
unending state of emergency.
Badious remedy suggests a fidelity to an event as ones own ethical
assessment. Aesthetics opens a space for learning through the arts by bridging
imagination and reason. The argument concludes with Derrida, Walter and Ulmer
considering a rethinking of the Greek concept of "chora" as the
creative space of learning.
Appendix
Dissertation Project
- Light & Shadow: The Pan American
Exposition 1901-2001. Dissertation
Project, Video installation with 45:00 min. DVD. 3 video projectors. 3-D
virtual reality.
Table of Contents
0. Introduction: Starting from a Void 7
1. Creative Process 13
Education: Creativity
and Knowledge 13
Question Strategies:
Maps of Approximation 18
Creativity &
Symbolic Language: Transforming the Medium of Earth 21
The Myth about
Creation: Creativity and Reason 24
Curas Creative
Orientation 26
Creativity &
Imagination: Kants Analytic and Synthetic Judgment 29
Play: Creativity in the
Arts 30
Creativity in Science
and Technology: Invention 34
The Camera: Scientific
and Creative Process 36
Another Side of
Creativity: Antithesis 37
Abject Creativity 39
The Re-Created Body as
Art 40
Politics and Creative
Learning 43
Defining a History of
Creativity 47
2. Media: From Raw Material to Medium to Media to
Virtual Reality 50
Medium 50
Medium that is Present:
Tangible and Intangible Objects 52
Generating and
Assessing Media 57
Medium Becomes
Aesthetic Media 58
Choosing a Medium to
Live In 61
Vital Interest of
Medium 63
Transactional Agency of
Media 64
Merleau-Ponty: A
Relation With Self In the World 66
The Sublime: Art Media
as Doubt 69
Abject Media: 73
Electronic Media Across
Modalities 76
Hypermedia as
Apparatus: Media Literacy 78
Hypermediating the
Image 80
Artificial Media:
Cinema 83
Defining the Medium of
Hypermedia 85
3. The Spacing of Creativity 87
Creating the Space for
Living 87
Learning as a Fiction
of Knowing 90
Creating a Political
System of Learning 92
Developmental Methods
for Modalities 94
Assessing the Gold
Standard 96
Weapons of Mass
Deception 99
The Test Drives the
Method 101
The Dubious Duplex 104
Constructing a Fidelity
to an Event 107
A Language for What Has
Yet to Come 109
The Art of Active
Reflection 109
Imaginations Method:
The Beautiful and the Sublime 110
The Method of Situated
Place 113
Virtual Politics: The
World Wide Web 117
Testing the Fidelity of
the Event: Aesthetic Reflection and the Sublime 118
4. Conclusions 122
The Unknown:
Hypermediating the Sublime 122
Questioning Questions. 123
The Creative Space: The
Haptic Joining of Terms 125
The Sublime: Letting
Beauty Fail 127
Abject Materials 128
Choosing a Medium to
Live In 128
Media that
Communicates: Going Underground 130
Education as a
Minimalist Work of Art 131
Assessment: Pedagogy of
Doubt 134
Fidelity Based Living 134
Hypermedia Exposition 135
5.
Bibliography 137
Appendix 146
6.
Media and Communication Project: Light & Shadow 146
Project Objective 146
Exposition as a Method
for Discovery 146
Inquiry 149
The Space of
Creativity:
Hypermediating the
Beautiful and the Sublime
This thesis will consider the creative
process of the arts as a life method that awakens an awareness of our world
which induces philosophic thinking, aesthetic inquiry, creative activity and
heuristic reflection of the beautiful and the sublime. The argument is towards rethinking the place of the sublime in
aesthetics as having a vital role in the philosophy of learning through the
arts.
Aesthetics can be thought of as an
awareness of something beyond sense and reason that describes the boundary of
learning. A beautiful sunset or the horrors of 9/11 are examples of the kind of
range that expresses the sublime[1].
The arts as an aesthetic process offer an approach to learning that allows a
playful way to explore learning actively. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten[2]
first coined the term aesthetics but it was Friedrich Schiller[3]
who described aesthetics as the condition where sense and reason are active at
the same time causing a mid disposition where the psyche is free to explore
without constraints. Aesthetic
character for Schiller was free from compulsions while being compliant to laws;
openness, but not anarchy. Aesthetics for Schiller allows an individual to
educate his or her whole self: health, understanding, morality and taste.
Aesthetics can then be said to open the possibility of an ethical
self-assessment that poeticizes lifelong learning.
Immanuel Kant further builds on
aesthetic theory considering reflection of the beautiful and the sublime[4].
The question must be asked: how does the creative space of the arts, through
one's understanding of the reflection of the beautiful and the sublime, become
a conducive ground for engaging the senses to make decisions that construct
ideas that can be synthesized into knowledge?
How we think about the space of learning
should include creative exploration and acting on choices that model the
freedom that all citizens share. Action and aesthetic reflection of the
beautiful and sublime allow experience to embrace the limits and the
limitlessness of our own creative self in a search for fulfillment. How we
embark on this journey of self creation follows a process that is both open to
possibilities and, conversely, framed by demands that make
up daily living in a post modern world. Learning to understand contradiction is
as important as learning facts. Dealing with contradiction is understood within
the first few moments of being born:
with our first cry, we learn how to breathe and for the next two decades
we are schooled, educated, trained and formed into citizens.
For Plato the goal of learning was to
produce an informed citizen who debated meaningful issues of the day, using the
method of rhetoric. Platos method of dialogue and disputation of life was a
process of resolving differences through thinking, problem solving and thoughtful
argument. Plato first defined the
word citizen to
describe a freeman of Greece who was educated in the methods of becoming an
ethical contributor to their utopian society. While the postmodern condition
has resolutely attacked any possibility of a utopia, it has also restricted
learning goals through the systemizing of education methods and ideologies that
limit the objective of learning to excelling at tests.
The argument of this thesis situates
lifelong learning as an approach to fulfillment that wages battle with
conformity, conventionalization and politicization at the expense of
emancipation. The philosophy that leads an individual to be a lifelong learner
who contributes,
finds in aesthetics a condition that lacks external judgment thereby opening a
space for free experimentation. This also describes aesthetic education as a
model for learning. (See research appendices; Partnering: Theory and
Practice; Curating
Art: Lessons for the Classroom Teacher as Curator).
Aesthetic education has around since the
1970s and Lincoln Center Institutes pioneering work in aesthetic education
had from its beginning the guiding philosophy of Maxine Greene whose theory
traces itself through John Dewey, Immanuel Kant, Paolo Friere and Ivan Illych.
Greene suggests that what aesthetic theory provokes in the classroom is engaged
perceivers acting on behalf of their own choices in determining outcomes[5].
The implicit social justice evoked by the above philosophers establishes
learning as a process of emancipation; Dewey presents art as ones own
experience, Kant presents aesthetic critique and ethical self-judgment, Freiere
teaches the oppressed compasinos to read and recognize their plight and Illych exposes the
negative agenda of curriculum as an instrument of conformity. The implication
of aesthetic education is that learning is in the hands of the student. Other
early progressive education programs like Montessori,
the Lincoln School
at Teacher College, A.S. Neills Summerhill
School, and the Waldorf School had
philosophies that considered the education of the whole, integrated life. While
many progressive schools have a place for the arts in student learning,
aesthetic education places the arts at the center of learning through the
creative process that is led by aesthetic judgment. How does aesthetic decision
open a space for learning?
The first chapter of this thesis begins
with two leaders in the field of education who comment on the current role of
education in the United States. Their comments about education can be compared
to Plato who contends that education is about lifelong learning as citizens who
contribute to their world by generating something new. Another objective of
this chapter is to consider an historical perspective on the creative process
and its role in generating the world we call humanity. This thesis will
consider the role of the arts as an integral foundation to acquiring literacy,
critical thinking and a sense of fulfillment. Also, the arts go further by
opening a creative space for an awareness that speaks to Platos idea of constructing
lifelong learning.
Creativity as an individual and public
event is expressed in Chapter One as an active process. In Chapter Two a new
question must be addressed as to the substance of knowledge that is
communicated: what is the significance of medium in the creative choice of
expression? Heidegger, Kant, Merleau-Ponty, Dewey and Ulmer frame a perspective
of medium in the creative process that shifts from literacy to electracy. Electronic networks of hypermedia, such
as, the Internet, e-mail, RSS feeds, blogs, instant messaging, satellite
broadcasts and public forums require new ways of thinking about what makes
communication medium. How do electronic technologies enable creative thinking,
heuristic activity and aesthetic reflection?
In Chapter Three the notion of the
creative space of learning is considered through education systems that shape
and determine how most people feel and think about knowledge. What contributes
to a creative space of learning that fulfills life learning? Where is the creative
space of the twenty-first century learner? The need to understand multiple
learning methods that reach a world citizenship requires a look at modes of
communication that have changed since the advent of the electronic age. The
topology of this new global communication cannot be understood by words alone
and demands a rethinking of the methods that communicate the potential of this
new electronic medium with its icons and hyperlinks. A philosophy for this
innocence of becoming requires a space for creativity as the subject of
aesthetic reflection of the beautiful and sublime. While the current state of
aesthetic education addresses the aesthetic reflection of the beautiful it is
the aesthetic reflection of the sublime that exposes the limits of conventional
knowledge and opens a creative space for learning.
Media Project: Light & Shadow
This thesis also includes an Intermedia
artwork titled Light &
Shadow which creates
the space for a hypermedia exposition. The task of
this project was to infuse philosophy into the artistic, curatorial, musical,
educational, historical and personal aspects of the artwork. Not as a limit but
as another way of making new associations. Walter Benjamins concept in his Passagen-Werk was to rethink history through a
presentation of dialectic
images that change our interpretation of history. Alain Badious definition of
philosophy suggests we construct a fiction of knowing and a superposition of
a fiction of art. This
hypermedia installation uses images from the Pan American Exposition of 1901 as
a fiction of knowing (a socio-historical exposition portrayed through the diary
of a young girl who traveled to Buffalo in 1901 from Saegertown, Pennsylvania)
and a superposition of a fiction of art (the diary of an artists journey to
Buffalo from Chester, New York in 2001). Badiou
suggests that a void is opened in the gap between these fictionings where truth
is seized. As such an experiment
begins to awaken the possibility of noticing the space that opens between
historical events and an individuals place in the present as the creative
space of learning. An intermedia performance allows perceivers to experience
words, images, icons, sounds and animations as an environment of individual
meanings orchestrated into networks of different points of view, all available
for inquiry: knowledge is actively experienced as hypermedia rather than a
linear reading of a text.
An educational component to this project
meant partnering as a Teaching Artist with four school districts in Buffalo
which also created artworks that related to the theme of the anniversary of the
Pan American Exposition of 1901. Each school district chose one class with
students participating in art, technology, photography, painting and sculpture.
Students were asked to make an artwork that represents their generations
contribution to the world. The students created their own curatorial staff that
organized a Youth Pavilion art show that was presented alongside Light
& Shadow at the
Burchfield Penney Art Center.
Let me show in an image how far our nature is
educated or uneducated
Plato, The Republic
How nations educate their young has a direct
association to the openness or narrow mindedness of the people of that nation.
However, better teaching may not be the answer; something else emerges when we
start thinking about learning rather
than teaching. Learning through
the arts opens a space for creativity that is conducive to understanding the
beautiful and the sublime of education?
In the January 2005 edition of Education Update,[6]
Ramon Cortines, chancellor of New York City schools
from 1993 to 1995[7] was
interviewed by Pola Rosen.
When asked what his goals for the school districts were his response
was, Education is about creating a community of contributing citizens.
Cortines describes his teaching method as an investigation into the inner lives
of his students: finding out what they are good at and calling attention to the
value of a students response. This education practice is considered to be
student-centered because it relies on a students own motivation for
learning. Cortines calls himself a
co-learner and suggests a variety of methods that provide individualized
instruction through an interactive process that opens students to a larger community,
and to the joy and spirit of the community. Cortines continues – all
those things come through the arts.
He also identifies the obstacles to achieving these goals. Cortines
contends there are numerous programs and standards that are suppose to address
learning objectives, but teachers have very little time to work together at
linking objectives across disciplines. Consequently there are few people who
know how to connect the dots between the complexities these programs address.
He suggests that it is critical for teachers to be able to have an
understanding across disciplines to see that math is literacy. That is, numbers are a language that allows us to become mathematically or logically literate. Cortines states that the other obstacles for
teachers today are the heavy demands of meeting the
requirements of getting the test scores up.[8]
When Margaret Spellings was sworn in to her new post
as secretary of education in January of 2005 she repeated the mandates of the
Bush administrations education reform law, No Child Left Behind
(NCLB). The law demands yearly tests to track
progress in reading and math as measured by test scores. If students do
not pass the tests they are left behind to repeat the grade level the following
year. Schools that fall short of these mandates are penalized by cuts in
funding. Spellings says When you [President Bush] signed the No Child Left
Behind law three year ago, it was more than an act - it was an attitude. An
attitude that says its right to measure our childrens progress from year to
year.[9]
Spellings means of assessing this goal is the test. The method of the NCLB law is defined as learning
through the rigor of scientific logic.
For teachers this law means lesson plans are restricted to meeting these
new standards and in many schools the bulk of learning time is devoted to
preparing students for math and literacy tests. The demand on students to past
these tests begins at eight years of age and this practice is extended through
high school. Schools are asked to assign only teachers who are trained in the
field of study for each subject under study. Put simply, tests are consuming
the space for learning.
Both
of these education theories share a common goal of
preparing children for a future world. The mandate of NCLB certainly suggests a
desire that every student move on to success. Cortines community of
contributing citizens not only expresses a desire for a learning community,
but also for students to become
contributing citizens. However in some significant ways the two educational
theories are also conflicting. Cortines theory starts with the needs and
desires of a student as the entry into learning and Spellings theory starts
with a desired outcome that is method driven. In other words, one theory is student centered while the other is curriculum centered: the former theory trains students to
think independently; the latter trains students to follow the rules. Clearly there is a dilemma in deciding
the process of education. While
the test is easy to quantify, what does it reveal about understanding and
application to life? What kind of future does the test prepare someone for? How
do the arts address a holistic method for student learning? Cortines is quite clear when he states
that the arts are a good means of realizing these goals. He goes on to say that
social and cultural issues are important in developing young citizens and play
an important role in his education goals which address the whole child, not
just the intellect. How does someone assess the interdisciplinary learning that
comes through the arts? Cortines admits that assessment of this creative
process is lacking because teachers have not learned to make connections that link
multiple disciplines. Spellings NCLB mandate demands higher math and language
scores and little attention goes to the arts. Einstein once said, it is the
supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. What can a teacher do to awaken the joy
of learning?
Perhaps Plato can shed some light on the
contradictions in the world of contemporary education. What comes to mind in Cortines
comments about a community of contributing citizens is its relation to
Platos notion of developing citizens. Platos The Republic is said
to be the first example of education method and frames our own contemporary
educational and democratic process.
Plato constructs an image of the ideal state in which freedom, justice,
knowledge, imagination and education co-exist. What is the task of education
and what is the measure of its success? Plato states that the first
responsibility of leaders of the ideal state is to focus on education, not only
for the young, but also for everyone, as
learning does not end in childhood but continues through life. It is Plato who
first imagined a higher level of learning through the arts and sciences.[10] In Platos time art and science (ars sciens)
was not independent, but fused theoretically. For example a sculptor needed to
know how to produce bronze to make a casting of his created form.[11] A question might consider how the arts
can be used in such a way as to restore the unity between logic and expressive
medium: thinking in paint or math literacy.
How does creativity open a space for awareness and
action that presents unexpected encounters with self and the world? What is the appropriate method of
creating good citizens? Plato is considered by many to be one of the greatest teachers throughout history. As a student
of Socrates, Plato uses his mentor's question strategies[12]
to get at the heart of knowledge along with argumentation and demonstration
called rhetoric. At the time of Plato the distinction between the creative
process of the arts and the logic of science was fused within the term ars
scientia (art science). Platos
method moves his dialogues forward through the art of careful questioning he
calls the Socratic
Method. Plato masterfully weaves questions that draw out specific details
and considerations that synthesize understanding into knowledge. However, later in his life, Plato began to develop his own theory of idea or
forms[13]
and his method of delivery shifts to a more logical
critical philosophical examination or exposition. What we see here are two
important techniques in Platos method.
First, questions form the basis for a dialogue between him and a small
group of students. This dialogue is kept going by further questions[14]
that are directed towards reason and intelligible understanding. Second, once
Plato creates his own theory, his method of teaching is transformed to a
style of exposition through a self-critical examination or dialectic.
How can philosophy guide the construction
of an education method that considers thinking and knowledge acquisition across
intelligence domains that foster reason and imagination? In
the words of Plato, seeing is one of lifes
greatest assets. The sight in my opinion is the source of the greatest benefit
to us, for had we never seen the stars, and the sun, and the heaven, none of
the words which we have spoken about the universe would ever have been
uttered.[15] Plato gives
homage to the relationship between seeing and knowledge:
But now the sight of day and night and the months,
and the revolution of the years, have created number, and have given us a
conception of time, and the power of enquiring about the nature of the
universe; from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater
good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.[16]
The
source of our knowledge is that we notice the things in our world. The intuition of our noticing he suggests
gives rise to our reason that constructs knowledge.
Plato says that seeing gives rise to language;
noticing the revolution of years gives rise to numbers or math/logic and
inquiry about the universe gives rise to science. Plato also presents the
notion that the method of seeing is not accidental but led by inquiry. It is noteworthy that Plato presents
the sense of seeing as a vital
link to the creation of language as communication. Noticing is a
kind of seeing over time that discovers logical patterns, relationships and systems.
Noticing occurs when seeing becomes transactional seeing, which happens over time. For Plato questioning the nature of the universe imparts scientific knowledge.[17] Platos process reveals a method for
creativity where noticing and thinking are a give and take experience that leads to a
productive understanding of the world. Plato suggests there are multiple
intelligences and learning modalities at play in this understanding which is
made possible by noticing. From the earliest examples of Greek philosophy we
find a method for knowledge based on observations or empirical knowledge which
gives rise to analysis or logical knowledge. And we
can finally deduce first causes.
The Socratic Method that Plato engages in
is more in line with Cortines process of a student centered approach to
learning that encourages students to become contributing citizens. By contrast,
Spellings NCLB method is driven towards passing the test or following
instructions.
Martin
Heidegger suggests that a question must be able to understand itself as being of its own historical
past. To start with a question on creativity it is necessary to consider the history of the
subjects within this subject: creativity, invention, art, self, media,
philosophy, interdisciplinarity, method and communication.[19]
The outcome of these questions will suggest a mapping or network of ideas that
approximates an understanding of the idea of a creative learning space.
What kind of question strategy would isolate the
critical categories that reveal what it takes to create a self that is both
oriented to the possibility of imagination (arts and
sciences) and the necessity of reason (mathematical and linguistic) in the
pursuit of fostering citizens who contribute?
Heidegger
contends that the nature of question strategies and the historical past of this
subject matter should stake out the positive possibilities of the tradition
that this question explores and at the same time uncover the negative side of
the idea under study through a destruction [that] does not relate itself
towards the past: its criticism is aimed at 'today' and at the prevalent way of treating the
history about an ontology.[20]
A first question should consider the
history of the subject of creativity through a timeline that may reveal periods
in history where creativity and invention occur. This question on creativity should be addressed to
interdisciplinarity where evidence can be seen through multiple disciplines and
systems of beliefs from cultures around the world. This timeline will allow us
to locate the positive aspects of creativity across disciplines as we consider
the development of a contemporary definition of creativity. In science a positive outcome of
creativity is seen in the invention of new technologies. The camera and optical
sensors create eyes into areas of nature that were unimagined a century
earlier: sonar, radar, laser and optics. In art the invention of the camera
opens new possibilities in visual ways of communicating: film, movies and
digital imaging. In communications
a global network opened through invention and discovery: radio, telephone, TV,
teleconferencing and the Internet.
Heidegger suggests that the negative side
of the results of this creativity should be uncovered as it influences our
current history. Heidegger
maintains in principle, we carry out this destruction only with regard to
stages of that history which are in principle decisive.[21]
So a question on creativity would certainly need to shift focus to a variety of
situations that are decisive and influence creativity. Good social programs, like the GI Bill,
equal opportunity and human rights programs opened the door to higher education
without the decisive training that was mandated during the Cold War that only funded education
programs that contributed to the war effort. It is this framing of knowledge
that narrows the way in which we view our world. It is only this predetermined
framing by politics, religion and culture in the present that must be removed
so that openness can allow for a
new understanding of the subject at hand.
Documentary filmmaker Joan Grossman explores history by suggesting, one
thing I have examined in my work was the way in which history continues to
arrive always open to reinterpretation, never fixed in the past.[22]
Furthermore, Heidegger requires that our
question consider the temporality of our being in the present: Entities are
grasped in their Being as presence. [23]
This means that entities are understood with regard to a definite point in time--the present. Lastly, Heidegger states that the nature of this question
should have a relationship to the method of investigation, i.e. a
phenomenological investigation. Heidegger continues, Thus phenomenology means
to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way it shows
itself from itself.[24] By removing the decisive we can truly
notice what is there. This is a call for a method that favors an ethical logic
as opposed to a moral judgment or a judgment of taste.
Wolfgang
Schirmacher, in his article Homo Generator: Media and Postmodern Technology contends, Revealing deconstructs, opens up, tears the fabric
of the known.[25] Heidegger
suggests that truth is not about being right or wrong but about accepting
aletheia, the powerful interplay of revealing and concealing, that shapes
humanitys destiny.[26]
Heidegger defines the concealing as the undiscovered, the buried, the disguised, or the accidental concepts that must be drawn from the primordial sources.[27] The desire to understand requires a
disposition that is open to contradiction. Discovery distinguishes itself as a
process whose root meaning is the opposite of covering or hiding. It positions itself in a relationship with an
opposite. Discovery must be open to possibilities of success and failure.
The question remains: How does education
prepare citizens to uncover the buried truths that are hidden by decisive
judgments? In formulating a question strategy we must define the subject (the
creative self) and its surrounding elements (the world we live in). As such,
the questions of this thesis must accomplish a variety of tasks:
1.
What is creativity? Define the what, when, where and why of
creativity as a space for learning. How
do reason and imagination relate to creativity?
2.
What is the
medium-meaning of life? Present a philosophical focus on a self that is in relation to a present world, that is, a self-created world of media.
3.
What is the space of creativity? What is the creative space of the moment? How does someone go about
creating a space for learning that also allows for something to be contributed?
Why the arts? Within the space of
learning Aesthetic Education can be a model for exploring choices in
constructing worlds. What is a proper assessment tool for creative learning?
4.
How does intermedia art
open a philosophical exposition? Present the theory and practice of intermedia
exposition: Light & Shadow; 2001, DVD, an intermedia video and fabric art
installation that layers personal histories that coincide with the 1901 Pan
American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Furthermore, a philosophical question
becomes an Intermedia artwork when it opens possibilities that awaken noticing,
creating an aesthetic transaction between self and the world.[28]
The important thing is not to stop questioning
Albert Einstein
Creativity and Symbolic Language: Transforming the
Medium of Earth
A timeline of history can be used to measure the
development of human creativity through artifacts, inventions, artworks[29]
and evidence that reveals philosophy, knowledge and behavior. Just as the Stone Age tools developed by early
hunter-gatherers were an advantage over bare hands, the metal of the Bronze Age
made possible harder, sharper, more durable tools that were an even greater
advantage. From these earliest times we
discover branches of knowledge that are revealed in the images of a world
directed by a creativity that is driven by immediate needs (food, water, shelter, tool) and desires (dreams, imagination, myths). The connection between
knowledge and medium has been closely linked throughout history.
Some of the earliest examples of human creativity can
be seen in Stone Age tools, pottery, sculptures and cave paintings with designs and symbols that suggest a visual
language. The birth of the first
representations is somewhere around 40,000 BC. One of the first examples of
European art is Stone Age sculpture that represents figures and symbols. Art historian Helen Gardner
in her book Art through the Ages suggests a thoughtfulness in these
early creations: By this original and tremendous feat of abstraction,
Aurignacian and Magdalenian men were able to fix the world of their experience,
rendering the continuous process of life in discrete and unmoving shapes that
had identity and meaning.[30] An example of this early communication
through art is found in a cave in Northern Spain.[31] Gardner suggests these early
representations of hunting scenes showing cows and horses, along with shapes
and symbols and oddly enough human hand prints,[32]
reveal concrete thinking about the world as well as a symbolic presence of
self. Our ancient ancestors
left a visible mark on a cave ceiling that reveals a 30,000-year-old visual
language that suggests creative action and thinking.
The history of creativity will begin with Plato and
highlight the significant philosophers that shaped our thinking towards a
contemporary understanding of the issues around the notion of creativity. A
question that considers creativity over time would have to compare
inventiveness across disciplines to develop a broad definition.
Archeologist Denise
Schmandt-Besserat explains, Mesopotamia provides data that illustrates the
step by step evolution of data processing from 8,000 BC to the present. Clay counters of many shapes – tokens
– were used to count goods; cattle, grain, oil and textiles.[33] Early accountants used pictographs to
identify merchandise. Shippers
could press a cut reed into a soft piece of clay and leave a series of marks
that represented an image of an item being shipped and a second image of the
destination. Labels attached to Egyptian pottery and merchandise identified
what was shipped up and down the Nile.
The early use of pictograms predates language by many
millennia. However, there is a moment in time where pictograms were not
descriptive enough to communicate more complex relationships. Gunter Dreyer describes a clay tag that was different in that it was inscribed with
two symbols, that of a stork (ba) and a chair (fet). This combination did not
make sense when literally interpreted. However, there was phonetic significance
of Ba-fet, a city on the Nile delta. The pictograms combined in phonetic
syllables show an early stage of language where the sound of the inscribed
image equals one syllable in a two-syllable name[34]
or as Schmandt-Besserat suggests, personal names could not easily be written
logographically without the risk of overburdening the system. In order to solve
the problem, the accountants resorted to writing an individual's names
phonetically.[35] This system
of combining images develops the cuneiform syllabaries (one sign = one
syllable). The creative process of inventing language may very well have been
motivated by an accounting problem. What we see in this early example of
iconographic language is a transformation of a domain of knowledge. Isolated
symbols are synthesized into a new domain (literacy).
The need to trace the history of creativity comes
largely from Heideggers mandate to find and remove, that which is decisive in the thinking of
creativity. Heidegger considers
Lucius Annaeus Seneca,[36]
who lived from 4BC to 65AD and defines the early nature of creativity:
Among the four existent Natures (trees, beasts, man
and God) , the later two, which alone are endowed with reason, are
distinguished in that God is immortal while man is mortal. Now when it comes to
these, the good of the one, namely God, is fulfilled by his Nature; but that of
the other, man, is fulfilled by care (Cura).[37]
God is fulfilled in himself and man is fulfilled in
his ability to act on his care.
Fulfillment, or perficit in Latin, also means to cause, carry out, achieve and finish, or create. Heidegger qualifies this care as having two dispositions; carefulness (devotion)
and anxious exertion. Cura also has as its definition an object of love and as such becomes an icon or curio. In this way we could conceive that
creativity describes more of a process of carefulness or anxiety in bringing to
an achieved finish an object of love or hate. It is this disposition to
carefulness that makes us think of the skills of the builders of the great
pyramids or paintings of the renaissance.
We may be mindful of the anxiety and destruction of fascism, terrorism,
conventionalization and spin that produces a veil of ignorance.
Heidegger translates care as mans perfection in
being free for his own possibilities (projection) through care and at the
same time primordial care determines what is
basically specific in this entity, according to which it has been
surrendered to the world of its concern (throwness).[38]
We will then take as a disposition of our ability to create our freedom to
choose and act on our possibilities. At the same time, this anxious disposition of care that inhibits and disrupts our
ability to act on our possibilities may also become the source for creativity
that challenges what has been surrendered. Dada, Surrealism, satire and
Solidarity have generated art out of an anxiety of what has been surrendered to
a decisive power.
History reveals another early example of creativity
that displays a disposition of care.
Heidegger calls attention to an ancient fable about creativity that reveals a
well-grounded construction of ontology,[39]
that interprets self as being
immersed in care. [40]
Once when Care was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully took up a piece and
began to shape it. While she was meditating on what she had made, Jupiter came by.
Care asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she
wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this and demanded that it be
given his name instead. While Care and Jupiter were disputing, Earth arose
and desired that her own name be conferred upon the creature, since she had
furnished it with part of her body. They asked Saturn[41]
to be their arbitrator
and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: Since you Jupiter,
have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at death; and since you
earth, have given its body, you shall
receive its body. But since Care shaped this creature, she shall possess it
as long as it lives. And because there is now a dispute among you as to its
name, let it be called homo, for it is made out of humus (earth).[42]
What emerges in this early fable is a glimpse of
creativity in action: the task of crossing the river (a problem or unit of
activity) causes one to notice
possibilities that move toward an outcome, in this case, crossing back onto dry
land (clay). Care, in thoughtfulness, picks up the medium (clay). How do materials-at-hand play an
important part in creative shaping?
It is possible to question the relationship between thoughtfulness and
noticing or thinking and perceiving. What role does the choice of material have
in shaping the object of creation?
Another aspect of the creative process suggests that
Care meditates and reflects on the object of creation and finds the need to collaborate with Jupiter. The
creative process that Care engages in is not complete at the finish of the object
of creation: Jupiter is called upon to instill spirit (love,
style). The object of creation is not an end in itself but an exposition that
mediates a reflective experience. And lastly, we find that creativity is only
fulfilled after an arbitration by Saturn (Cronos) who is a judge, authority and
a philosopher, and whom we could also call the curator, critic or someone who
understands the social implications of the act of creation.
This fable presents a variety of categories, qualities, methods, contexts,
reasoning and dispositions that define a historical orientation of creativity, which will be considered as a context for a philosophical
definition of creativity. Also,
Curas creative orientation crosses a variety of knowledge domains. This fable
reveals the kind of decisive
thinking that Heidegger warns us to look out for: social structures with
hierarchies that limit perception. Additionally, a thoughtfulness becomes an
urge[43]
to create. There is a choice[44]
and a selection of clay or medium-at-hand.[45]
The artist & viewer share in an aesthetic
experience of reflective consideration of the output of creativity which has a
communicative nature. Another
aspect of the creative process implies there is a judgment or critique by an intermediator who understands the social and historical relevance of the object-of-creativity. Also, there
are methods used in the
creativity process: Care shapes clay. Where is the space or place of
creativity? It is where you least expect it: in the sublime.
In Heideggers essay, The Origin of the Work of
Art, he characterizes creation as
the following: to create is to let something emerge as a thing that has been
brought forth. The works becoming a work is a way in which truth becomes and
happens. [46] In this way
creativity reveals the hidden truth in a mode of knowing that the Greeks called
alētheia, (the revealing of
beings). As creativity opens a
space for a truth event, identity awakens to its becoming. For Heidegger art
is the creative preserving of the truth in the work. Art then is the becoming
and happening of truth.[47] Heideggers essay maintains an
adherence to logic as he deconstructs creativity, medium, equipment, subject
matter, ideas, being and truth and he concludes that art is a poetic mode of
knowing that opens a place in whose openness everything is other than usual.[48]
Although Heidegger maintains a logo centric bias towards poetry when he speaks
of the arts, he does convincingly reveal a philosophy of knowledge inherent in
art. What is surprising about Heideggers analysis of Vincent
van Goghs painting titled Shoes is that he only analyzes the work of art through an
empirical narrative rather than addressing the pure intuition of the form, which would address the unusual colors
and space that van Gogh employs to create his transformed shoes. It is the way
that van Gogh paints that sets thinking into action and reveals the identity of
the artist and the shoes simultaneously. Van Gogh signifies his point of view
about the world in which he lives through the shoes. Van Gogh is free from the
pure representation of shoes by using them as a vehicle shaped by paint to form
his own language, just like Care.
In the 18th century Immanuel Kant, in his book Critique of Pure Reason, addresses any aspects of the contemporary worlds understanding
of how knowledge is acquired and how art is
discussed. Kants theories have an effect on our world in a variety of ways
that influence the way we think about freedom, opportunity, learning, judgment
and identity. Kant disagrees with Platos notion to treat ideas as substance or reality
and writes about the impractibility of
such an existence. Kant calls for a milder interpretation of Platos ideas on
knowledge. He suggests intuition and imagination play an important role in how we acquire knowledge.[49]
For Kant, the way learning occurs first
involves an action of the faculty of the imagination which analyzes two
different individual representations, and in an act of synthesis constructs a new understanding of an objects
reality. Children learn to analyze
the different letters of the alphabet and then synthesize the letters to
construct words that represent meaning. This may also be why children can learn
languages best while their imagination is open. The imagination is responsible for forming concepts to be considered
for knowledge.
Kant
does however agree with Plato that knowledge is the ultimate goal: how you get there is another matter. Kant suggests a constitution allowing the greatest possible
human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to
be consistent with that of all others.[50]
For Kant it is the restrictions imposed by these laws or rules that assure
freedom, like a social contract. For the issue depends on freedom; and it is
in the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit.[51] This ability to go beyond the specified
limit is precisely the measure of creativitys freedom in the arts and
sciences. Maxine Greene calls
this thinking outside of the box.[52]
Kants placement of imagination as having
the ability to lead us to understanding also pertains to the creative process
of the arts; art is a creation of ones
own action constructed by the imagination. As such, aesthetic reflection in
the arts offers a twofold method for determining understanding: aesthetic
reflection of the beautiful and the sublime.[53]
By introducing the notion of imagination as a faculty of knowledge, Kant acknowledges a relational development of
knowledge that moves through the whole of self. Although reason confers the most thorough judgment on an idea, it is
imagination that supplies reason with the substance and material for reason to
consider. Imagination was considered by Plato to be impure because the
illusion of the senses is free to play with possibilities in an open or
heuristic way. However, even the truth of ideas begins with intuition which
leads the imagination to construct and synthesize concepts through reason. This
means reason is restricted by a
self-critique that has at its end a construction of knowledge. The law
(critique) that Kant describes is one that preserves freedom for
everyone. Kant demands freedom
that is checked by a law that preserves freedom. This creation of knowledge
does not become an end in itself, but it must reflect back into life in a
practical way. What good is the truth in philosophy if, after discovering
knowledge, it does not have an influence on the life reflected.
Another condition of creativity that leads us to a
more contemporary definition is that of play. The ontology of the work of art for Hans-Georg Gadamer
starts with the notion that the concept of play has a major role in aesthetics.
Gadamer states in Truth and Method:
in connection with the experience of art, we speak
of play, this refers neither to the attitude nor even to the state of mind of
the creator or of those enjoying the work of art, nor to the freedom of the
subjectivity expressed in play, but to the mode of being of the work of art
itself.[54]
Gadamer
continues by saying that play has a relationship to what is serious. Play
fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. It is not that
relation to seriousness which directs us away from play, but only seriousness
in playing makes the play wholly play.[55] Gadamer looks at play etymologically
linked to speil (German, dance)
and considers the compossible uses: the play
of light, the play of waves, and even the play of words. He concludes that the
essential characteristics of its origins involve the to and fro nature of
movement that implies a choreographic spacing. This backwards and forwards
movement is his example of the nature of play in games. It is within this
medial sense of play that Gadamer connects the work of art. Friedrich Schlegel
concurs that even in the sacred games of art are only remote imitations of the
infinite play of the world, [within] the eternal self-creating work of art. [56]
In this way the dancer does not create the work of art, but the dancing creates
the art.
Howard
Gardner,[57] in Creating
Minds, suggests that the artwork plays
with the world as we know it. Gardner defines creativity in an excerpt from
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as having three nodes that are important: (1) the
individual person or talent. (2) The domain or discipline in which that
individual is working and (3) the surrounding field that renders judgment about
the quality of individuals and products.[58] Gardner continues saying, in
Csikszentmihalys persuasive account, creativity does not inhere in any single
node, nor, indeed, in any pair of nodes. Rather, creativity is best viewed as a
dialectical or interactive process, in which all three of these elements
participate.[59] For example, we could say a filmmaker
like Peter Greenaway has a talent for directing and creating films that is
recognized by critics, artists, philosophers, peers, and a public.
The nature of creativity has been a
source of interest for artists,
teachers, scientists and philosophers throughout time. Howard Gardner who has
long been an advocate of aesthetic education defines another example of
creativity though his own background in biology, sociology and epistemology.
Gardeners definition of a creative person is one who solves problems, makes
products or defines questions in a domain that is thought of in an innovative
way.[60] Gardener cites these three features of
creativity as more commonly accepted definitions of creativity, but he also
suggests four other more revealing features that are cause for scrutiny. First,
creativity may exist in only one
domain and not across all learning domains. Someone might be creative in dance
and not so creative in math or language and still be considered a creative
person. This has vast implications on how students should be taught but at the
same time is a limiting view that dismisses the possibility that creativity in
one modality might influence someone one to be more creative in a second
modality. An example is using the arts to promote literacy. Secondly, a
creative person must display
regularity in being creative. Creating a single work of art is not enough. In
Gardners definition, a creative person wishes to be creative and as such organizes his or her life
in such a way as to encourage further creativity. Gardners second feature
directly relates to the notion that a creative space can be a constructed
environment that favors innovative exploration and creativity. In a perfect
situation this seems true; an artist sets up a studio that is conducive to
making art. However, there is an idealism in Gardners stance that dismisses
outsider art, street art, prison
art or art of the sublime that
happens anywhere, and sometimes because the conditions
for making art are oppressive. Art and creativity can happen despite less than
ideal conditions. Thirdly,
Gardner adds that creativity involves the making of new products or the discovery of unknown issues or ideas for fresh exploration.
While the making of new products certainly implies a creative process and a
critical thinking model where something new is constructed from or synthesized
from experience. The discovery of the unknown that Gardner adds is just as
likely to be accidental and not creative.
Lastly, Gardner suggests that nothing is, or is not, creative in
itself.[61] For Gardner
creativity is inherently a social or cultural judgment that clarifies art
production. The most one can say about an entity before it has been evaluated
by the community is that it (or he or she) is potentially creative. It is
here where Gardners definition of creativity fails in important principles
that should be further considered. First, it is absurd to suggest that
creativity needs an authority for conferral. Aesthetic reflection of the
beautiful, in and of itself, is limited by the judgment of taste which Gardner
suggests. History has proven all too often that the critics and audiences have failed to understand the significance of creative works
that fall outside the bounds of traditional taste. This nearsighted condition
is precisely the reason why the aesthetic reflection of the sublime is critical
in defining an aesthetic means of assessing that which falls outside the
boundaries of what should be considered in the creative process. Creativity is
realized in the process and reasoning of the creator. Yes, creativity finds fulfillment as a social phenomenon,
but in no way is creativity dependant on anyone but the creator. George Dickie,
Arthur
Danto [62] and Richard Wolheim also express this notion about
creativity. We can then say that creativity is much more akin to a process that involves action
and reflection of the beautiful
and sublime.
So what Howard Gardner offers to this
thesis on creativity is the view (or belief or theory) that knowledge occurs across learning modalities. One of the methods of inquiry of this thesis is
the employment of an interdisciplinary approach to investigation. History
reveals a mosaic of cultural artifacts and evidence that reveal and
frame beliefs about creativity. The history of creativity can be seen across
disciplines (see
timeline) through discoveries, inventions, ideas and works of art. This investigation will continue into
areas of creativity in other disciplines that might reveal different aspects of
creativity not mentioned above.
The camera obscura is the first example of an image producing
phenomena. Camera obscura literally means darkened vault and evokes a
connection to Platos cave. Artists from the renaissance used this technique to
sketch complicated perspectives of cityscapes and landscape. All the windows of
a room would be tightly sealed so as to make the room
totally dark. A very small hole would be made in the masked window, acting as
an aperture. This hole would allow light from outside to produce an image on an
opposite wall of what was outside the hole, upside down, in reverse order and
in color. However, there was no way of capturing the image except by tracing the
image with chalk onto a canvas, paper or board. The camera obscura was a discovery of something that already existed as a phenomenon.
The camera is not an invention or creation - it is a discovery. It is
conceivable that this phenomenon could occur accidentally
from a hole in the ceiling of a cave projecting a photographic image on
the floor of the cave. We can also say that the artists who controlled the
phenomenon of the camera obscura created an instrument for sketching images or a creative process. Eventually
a smaller portable box was used with an actual lens to enlarge and focus the
projected image. However the invention of the camera as an instrument could not
have existed without the creation of film by Nicphore Nipce.
The first photograph[63]
was taken in 1827 by the French physicist Joseph-Nicphore Nipce who used
resinous bitumen and oil of lavender to permanently capture a camera obscura image on a glass plate. Nipce created the art form of
photography by creating something
that never existed before: the medium to receive an image. In this situation creativity is the result of a
problem that needed to be solved. This problem took understanding across a
network of disciplines, where an understanding of physics, chemistry and optics
were needed to discover a medium
to record an image. What is significant about Nipce is his understanding as a
physicist of substance and the properties of elements that are affected by
light. Playing with the medium of science and physics Nipce discovers a way to
receive and capture light on photographic plates. But more importantly he creates the space for a new art
form, photography.
What is
interesting about the modern day camera is the number of inventions that can be
connected to an endless series of other inventions that are embedded in the
hundreds of other components that make up the camera and photography. In this
context creativity is often the result of a new invention that comes about by
the collaboration[64]
of individuals across a network of disciplines. This aspect of creative
inventiveness across disciplines is a good example of interdisciplinarity.
After thousands of years of painting, drawing and sculpture, the camera changed
the way people thought about image making as an art form.
The instruments of learning can be rethought through
a topistics[65] understanding that restores
the decayed intelligence between medium and creativity. The history of
creativity in modern science is often made up of inventors who pushed
experimentation into new territories of thinking about the world. As
technologies developed through the late 1800s, new discoveries and inventions
gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. Advances in one field of study would
effect another field of study through a process of building on the success of
earlier inventions. Some inventors like Thomas
Edison, understood a variety of disciplines. He not only understood the
physical properties of materials and media, but also had the ability to
conceptualize his inventions in relationship to a market and economy. The kind
of thinking that is necessary for hypermedia to carry knowledge is
embodied in the range of possibilities that Edison considers in the
transformation of material into instruments that are turned into methods which become a means of production that run economies.
Thomas Edisons understanding of multiple disciplines
(electricity, light, sound, culture, and economics) gave Edison an ability to
see, think and create in new imaginative ways that took him beyond a single
frame of reference. The photograph restructures and transforms our way of
thinking about art, science, astronomy, sociology, chemistry and space/time. By understanding across disciplines Edison made new
associations that link a variety of practices, thereby expanding the concept of
interdisciplinarity beyond simply joining two or more knowledge disciplines. His
invention of the camera opens new ways of considering visual communication. A
new poetic language emerges with film and subsequently with digital hypermedia,
while science uses photographic technologies to reveal objects beyond the human
visual range of seeing. With the
event of photography, media becomes a powerful social record that defines a new
space for communication.
Up till now we have addressed ideas about creativity
that describe Western culture. A critical analysis of creativity
needs to also consider other cultures. Creation myths in many non-Western
cultures express a range of possibilities that often reveal creativity
as a divergent process that goes beyond the conventional notions of good and evil.
Viewed locally, a creation myth is often taken as truth that describes the
order of a non-manifest world underlying everyday
experience (remember Platos intelligible world) which requires a
conformity to an ideal or belief. Other myths introduce contrary beliefs
evidenced by a god who creates mistakes (Slavic), a god who creates and
destroys (Hindu), a god who is half man and half woman (India), a god who
creates ignorance (India),[66]
gods who are transformed animals (Hindu), a god who is a woman (Hopi), creation myths and twins (Nigeria), a
god who creates by vomiting the sun, moon and stars (Boshongo) and oddly enough, a god who advocates
freedom. Other creation myths
involve absurdity, mischievousness, treachery, murder, dismemberment and humor.
Many of these creation myths describe
beliefs that are contradictory to Western beliefs. Many acknowledge the
struggles, the ugly, the bizarre and the seemingly objectionable (abject)
aspects of life, as necessary and a vital function of the creative act.
Many Eastern cultures consider dynamic forces rather than dual forces:
the I-Ching, the concept of yin/yang, mandalas and feng-shui address issues of
balance and harmony. This viewpoint of creativity introduces a dialectic that
considers these forces as a synthesis rather than in opposition. Schirmacher
describes dialectics as an attempt to deal in a positive manner with the
contradictions and struggle which are typical of real life. The dialectics[67]
process of investigation understands negation as the force of development, says Schirmacher,
thesis and anti-thesis address the necessary contradiction (negation) in the
same phenomenon and life situation. Synthesis is a solution to this
contradiction, no longer situated within the context from whence it derived.
This synthesis integrates two opposing
representations into a new object that redefines the object's reality. Creation
myths become a cultural source for understanding a dialectic on creativity and
a source of diversity.
John Bierhorst states in his book The
Mythology of North America, each continent has its own mythological imprint that reflects
the desires and fears of distinct peoples, granting them trusteeship of the
land with the consent of unseen powers.[68] What creation myths teach us is the
range of the imagination to embrace the possibility of the unknown
(sublime). Our imagination finds a
relationship of understanding from the total experience of possibilities.
Creativity leaves a historical cultural imprint on each part of the land that
is peopled. Bierhorst adds that different people may come and go but the
original imprint of the creative myth remains. Its no surprise that creation
myths have a direct relation to the natural forces of a place: Vulcan and Pele
are gods associated with volcanoes.
Creativity plays with everyone. The trickster is just
as creative as the genius. Creativity may be better defined as a great
contradiction. When touted by educators as an imperative to a community of
learners, the arts may really not be the cozy place that promotes congruity. If
creativity is free we would have to expect its opposite:
the trickster. It is only when we have synthesized this opposition that a new
representation is achieved. In
this way the arts create and destroy. The co-existence
of these generative and destructive forces can be understood as a method where creation and
destruction are joined in a new synthesis. The
dialectical argument transforms contradiction into a pure empirical thought.
While the Renaissance in art and
literature is recognized to have been an era of beauty and poetics, beauty's
creative counterpart, the grotesque, was equally in vogue. Imagination loves to
play. Leonardo da Vinci had a lifelong
preoccupation for painting both the beautiful and the grotesque. Carmen C.
Bambach writes in her essay Leonardo da Vinci on Beauty and Ugliness,
In his role as a theorist of painting,
da Vinci repeatedly stated that the two most formidable challenges facing the
good painter were the portrayal of man and the intentions of the mind. [69] This is deduced from a direct quote
from da Vinci that was written underneath a sketch of an old hag, a beautiful
thing that is mortal passes and does not last beauty (bellazza) and ugliness
(bruttezza) appear each more powerful when seen in contrast, one with the
other.[70]
Clearly da Vinci understood the dialectic in art and found power in the
synthesis of two oppositional realities. He also was concerned with addressing
the relationship between the physical representation and his desire to
communicate through a painting not fixed on an ideal but more concerned with a
deeper understanding of life's nuances.
Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism introduced the arts
to contradiction, absurdity, distortion and the sublime of an art of the
dialectic to an extreme. Dada was
an expression of frustration and anger, writes Dawn Ades, in her book Dada
and Surrealism[71].
She continues, Dada turned in two directions, on the one hand to a nihilistic
and violent attack on art (abject) and on the other hand, to games, masks,
buffoonery (sublime).[72]
The artists of Dada, angered by the atrocities of
World War I, applauded the rebuff of logic, and turned to satire (John Heartfield, George Grosz
and Otto Dix). Their contempt
was for the hypocrisy of the art world itself (Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and William
de Kooning) and its fixation
on the bizarre (Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and Ren Magritte). The art of this
turn-of-the-century movement (Dada) imposed a critique on the values that
produced the great horrors of modern civilization and World War I, through an
indictment on culture. Dada forced a new dialectic on aesthetic value. In a
world capable of such violent destruction beauty can no longer be an end or
goal within the arts. A conceptual framework now supercedes external
appearance.
If we are to succeed in answering the earlier
question of the place of creativity
and logic in the process of learning it becomes clear that we cannot proceed by
forcing an oppositional relationship between Margaret Spelling or Ramon
Cortines, but must try to synthesize a new understanding that considers
creativity and logic as a dynamic interplay of life that transcends appearance.
If we are to accept that learning and understanding
in education should produce contributing citizens we should consider what it means to construct the identity of an individual
who is free to contribute. But we must first consider the deeper question about
what it means to create a citizen. Again, creation myths provide a rich
starting point for an understanding of creativity as being at the core of all
cultures. We can also see that some cultures regard the identity of the
individual as being in a state of constant recreation. Many creation myths speak not only of recreation[73]
of individuals, but recreation of the world as well.
Robert Brain in his book The Decorated Body considers the
anthropological significance of body
decoration/recreation through mutilation, scarification, tattooing and various
other alterations. Brain describes Australian aboriginal initiation rites that
involve circumcision and subincision of young men. Brain elaborates on the ritual: this mutilation of the body
symbolizes the rebirth of the initiate into a new world of adult men.[74] As boys are changed into men and the
girls into women, they become permanently and painfully aware of their new
role.[75]
These ceremonies of recreation are not simply acts of fashion but acts that imprint a new status on the individual
and at the same time serve to introduce him [or her] by degrees into the mysteries
of the social organization of a group.[76] Brain concludes by saying these
recreations of the body serve as a kind of language or code that can justly be
called a fine art. The cultural imprint on people from around the world reveals
acts of human recreation in various ways. Foot binding, neck stretching and
head deformation represent some historical alterations, while contemporary
recreations of physical identity often happen on the operating table with
plastic surgery, breast implants, facial augmentation and gender alterations
(transsexuals).
There are a number of creation myths from around the
world that introduce unexpected transformations. A creation myth from India describes a god who splits in
two, to form man and woman. In the Dhammai creation myth the lord of the
universe created Brahma who transformed his body into two parts; one half was
male and the other half was female. Brahma creates a male in his female half
named Viraj. In this way a god can generate new forms by recreating himself
into a transgender (or a trans-genre says Sandy Stone in her essay The Empire
Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto. Stone suggests using the term genre (instead of
gender) to describe a transsexual, or just another kind of sexuality. She
suggests, constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic third
gender, but rather as a genre—a
set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured
sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.[77] What Stone
seems to suggest is a synthesis of possibility in sexuality that is directly
suggested in the creation myth as just another possibility of creation. In
other representations of Vishnu, the god has eight arms; perhaps possibility
nurtures synthesis.
In another interpretation of this creation myth Kalkinath
suggests that Brahma, having discharged Ardhanarishwara from his brow, Brahma performed a similar operation
on himself, dividing himself into a progenitive couple, Manu [man] and Satrupa
[woman], whose issue represented the various conditions, qualities and
activities of the total human condition.[78] Kalkinath seems to agree with Sandy
Stones, spectra of desire, as he links lust and desire to the god Kama. In
the creation hymn of the Tg Veda, Kama (desire) is the first seed of mind from
which came the entire Creation. It is the arrows of Kama which in the
primordial beginning, inspire Brahma with the passion and lust for creation.[79] Kama is the primal urge of life that
becomes the embodied form of Ardhanarishwara.
It is not the intent of this thesis to debate or
argue the truth or validity of creation myths but rather to consider them as
indicators of the multiple ways of constructing an understanding of creativity
(construction) and, its
antithesis, destruction (de-construction),
as a stereo synthesis where the positive and negative interplay provide the
vital energy of life in phusis.
Creativity begins long before knowledge emerges. Creativity stimulates the
imagination with choices in relationships between the differences,
similarities, diversity and complexity in our extended world and constructs a new synthesized idea or
concept.
What remains are the present creation stories. This
creative present is too new to be called a myth and its too real to be called
a dream. The desire to create a cloned human may be the ultimate act of
creation, but perhaps the greatest conflict of such a creation would be the
implications of what name to give the creator of such a human clone. The
ancient myths would call such a creator a god, but what scientist would assume
such a name? Could it be that all humanity has been in an act of
self-recreation for eons? Is it not reason and imagination that synthesize
unexpected connections that change our way of being?
We construct our own physical and mental being in
every creative act. The moment we create we interrupt the instinctual automatic
cycle of life. Creative thinking breaks out of the conventional understanding
of nature as fixed, and opens the possibility of finding and creating ones own
self-awareness. We create and destroy our bodies in a lifespan of exposure to
daily circumstances that range from eating and
breathing to hearing, drinking and touching the substances of the
world we live in. Reflective thinking allows creativity to sense our place in
the world as a sphere of life media,
that is, the world around us is inseparable.
When Ramon Cortines suggests we teach children to
become contributing citizens, he evidences a
desire to initiate learners into a social order (that of becoming a citizen of
a democracy in the United States of America). From a
Platonic standpoint, a citizen is
a free human being living in a democracy where each citizen is guaranteed
equality, liberty and justice. Rousseau
later considered living in such a democracy a social
contract that requires one to surrenders some freedoms for
the guarantee of a good government.[80]
The mandates that Margaret
Spelling advocates in the No Child Left Behind law go beyond a social
contract, by restricting freedom of
citizens to choose their own method for learning. Margaret Spelling articulates
a demand by parents to hold teachers accountable for the training of their children. Teachers are restricted by the NCLB law
to improve reading and math scores by narrowing the curriculum to the logic of
the test. Arts and creative exploration are largely ignored in this curriculum.
Ignoring both of these social objectives reflects a
societal condition in which parents, teachers,
administrators and politicians battle over the purpose of existence. In sending their children to school what rights do
parents forfeit so their children get a good education? What should be the
objective of learning and how broad should be the perspectives that teachers
present? (remember the story of Siddhartha) Education, as a social contract,
would have to state what good understanding really means. Who would doubt that
reading and math capabilities are not important or that sociability is not a
desired disposition. The freedom to agree and disagree indicates a healthy
relationship in a democracy. The acquisition of knowledge through a national
education system must be defined by an objective that represents a
world-of-people and a world-of-beliefs that are capable of synthesizing
multiple possibilities of existence. What should education provide its
becoming-citizens? If teachers are responsible for student learning, then there
can be no rational answer that does not consider the kind of world that young
learners will be growing into: the world of a future-present that occurs within the creative moment projecting new
possibilities for life to act on.
As citizens what rights and freedoms do children have to choose and
create their own world that goes beyond local beliefs and myths and understands world learning?
Jean-Luc
Nancy in his book The
Sense of the World presents yet another possibility, a non-political
structure. Nancy questions what it means to be an individual within a group or
community: This sort of configuration of space would not be the equivalent of a political
configuration (fiction, myth). It would trace the form of being-toward in
being-together without identifying the traits of the towards-what or towards-when, without identifying or verifying the to what end of the sense of
being-in-common – or else, by identifying these traits as those of each
one: a different
'totality,' a different unicity of truth.[81] For Nancy the only hope is in accepting the singularity of a self that remains
one's own, even within the group.[82]
Nancy suggests a certain anonymity of "being in
common" rather than the identification of sovereignty: in a sense,
we are alone together. Because the
group is comprised of individuals with indeterminate ties, this uncertainty
cannot be a totality. The crisis for democracy, says
Nancy is a crisis of sense. For Nancy, being-in-common is a transitive state
rather than a static state. In a way we are in flux with each other rather than
drones in a collective, such as the single minded behavior of bees in a hive.
If, as Nancy suggests, our sense of self is all
that remains our own, then in considering the role of education we must also
consider the balance between self and community. Teaching children to
become good citizens presents then a mythic wish.
Nancy seems to suggest the impossibility of citizenship being the nexus of
community but instead of community more as
the place of being in common.[83] What we confront in the being with
others is the contradiction between one and the other. The creative place of
the arts in the classroom should then be a place of one's
own destiny. The importance of the arts in pre-school education (two
through four years of age) lies in a young learners freedom to create a
self-generated visual language that is his or her own. Through the arts young
children begin to represent their world symbolically,
which is instrumental in developing the thinking skills required for synthesis
and language acquisition. In the
world of early education (five through eight years
old) children suddenly find themselves in the
world of a social contract that sacrifices certain freedoms in the name of a
good education. Community as a
bound nexus or as a shared creative space presents an argument. On one side of this argument we find
young children at play in their own world, representing the most tangible
example of freedom and unfettered by adult intervention. At the other side of
the argument we find children bound to the rigidity of a determined social outcome. The balance
between self and society can be considered in our early upbringing as a battle
between work and play. There is a
need to distinguish a self that is independent of the
group but is at the same time part of the group. How best to
create an atmosphere that fosters the development of such a balance must be a part of the consideration for any
educational system.
The kind of democratic citizen that Plato envisioned
in The Republic was a
citizen whose voice and opinion was expected to be
heard; citizens were expected to debate their ideas with reason. In a democracy we should expect
to find citizens who are trained from the beginning to voice their own ideas and hold the laws and social contracts accountable to
protect the freedoms of all people. Education, as a social contract, should protect the freedom of the individual to define and
pursue his or her own potential. In the world of education, language and
math are measured by the logic of the test that has a predetermined answer that
conforms to an idealized standard. Art education measures success through a
portfolio that reveals the change and growth in the development of life skills
and dispositions that influence creativity, imagination, thinking, expression,
reflection, presence and ability to dream.
Knowledge of the
world must be taken as a particular, that when shaken by its opposite reveals a
momentary glimpse of a creative self. Creativity synthesized describes the
enduring possibility that exists between construction and destruction.[84]
Imagination lets us put the parts together and take them apart in an endless
process, repeating but always becoming anew. In a very real sense, we must
create our own selves every day.
Where is the final resting place of creativity in a
21st century learning environment? What is to be created by a citizen who
contributes to a post technological age? What kind of life are teachers
preparing their students for? Schirmacher, in his article Homo Generator in
Artificial Life , traces a lineage of philosophers[85]
that draw out and map a thinking process about creativity which moves from the
age of technology to the post-technological horizon through a leap into
artificial life.[86] Schirmacher describes his
understanding of artificiality in
this founded sense [through Edmud Husserl who] is charged with determining
the constitution of the human life-world, whose nature has always been and is
completely engendered by us.[87]
Artificiality describes everything we have created because all human
expression, be it physical or conceptual, is a transformation into media that
defines our understanding and feelings about our world. Communication is a
symbolic language and not a one-for-one equivalent of what is going on in our
mind. The leap into artificial
life is not just a whim but a life changing commitment to openness. It is
Sren Kierkegaard who in the 1840s, at the
end of the Age of Reason, first proposes a leap into faith from reason into
uncertainty. Reason had reached a limit for Kierkegaard who suggested an
alternative way: An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation
with the most passionate inwardness, is truth, the highest truth there is for
an existing person.[88]
Logic alone does not profess a truth without a connected inner sense. How we
come to knowledge matters. For Schirmacher the leap from the age of reason
into the post-technology age describes a leap into artificiality whose understanding today is limited to the sense
of the fabrication and imitation.[89] Schirmacher describes the term "artificial
perception" as a result of
going beyond the traditional intuitive and rational ways of orienting concepts
through a transformation and suggests a new art of
perception that can address a contemporary need to find fulfillment in
infinite and diverse perspectives.[90]
The implication for education is that the achievement of knowledge as a goal
suggests a method that calls upon multiple methods and approaches to
learning. Teaching individuals to
create themselves requires a student centered approach to learning (Eisner,
Kindler, Colbert) that would explore multiple learning methods,
interdisciplinary skills and assessment methods to identify student potential.
Education should be considered as a creative act of the individual who chooses
to present and participate in creating
his or her own world. Our task is to create ourselves and by doing so we
also create the world we live in.
Schirmacher says, This creation is by no means purely cerebral neither
is it limited to the realm of perception, but concerns the whole person and
embraces embodiment and communal action as well.[91]
Schirmacher also makes reference to Sren Kierkegaard
who, in his book Either/Or, speaks of the self who ethically chooses its self concretely: The individual, then,
becomes conscious as this specific individual with these capacities, these
inclinations, these drives, these passions, influenced by this specific product
of a specific environment for he chooses himself as a product. And this choice
is freedoms choice in such a way that in choosing himself as product he can
just as well be said to produce himself. [92]
What seems to emerge out of this questioning process
is that creativity itself is less action but more a process through an unknown
space between reason and sense. The disposition of this process affects our
action that shows itself as care (projection) and anxiety
(throwness). While much is said about
creativity as a thesis, little is said of creativity as an antithesis. The
antithesis, as we see in the sublime artists of Dada, took on the disposition
of satire, the bizarre, the pedestrian and destruction as a means of forming a
new synthesis of the world. We do not act creatively but
choose to enter the process and space of creativity. Creativity means being present. To create describes a
process and presence of openness that allows for
investigation and experimentation and makes discoveries of the world that are not in
themselves creative acts, but lead to the possibility of creativity. What also
emerges is a definition of creativity that suggests an interplay of choice
making and acting on one's own world through a
decision of ones own.
Creativity is motivated by an urge to generate and a
desire to reflect on its actions. Creativity is conferred or acknowledged by an
audience and as such is a public event.
Creativity can be described as a disposition of play, discovery and
inventiveness. Creativity requires a choice of the medium to hold our image a
thought, a word, a poem or a song. Creativity as a process is a natural
pedagogy.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by
the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The
creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
The way we communicate is first an act of choosing
our own medium of expression, be
it words, facial expression, body language, image making, dance, logic or
thinking in virtual reality. Through a process that involves intuition and
reason we form the substance that becomes knowledge. That we choose a specific modality to communicate through
suggests our unique learning style, that is, one needs to communicate in
numbers when filing a tax return.
Competency in multiple learning modalities can open new pathways for
learning.[93] Arts, science and humanities mark and
record a history of communication in the world of medium/media. The cave
paintings at Lascaux represent an ongoing exploration in choosing medium
(paint) and techniques (painting skills) to visually represent a world. Some of
the early bison paintings are actually painted on rock outcrops that resemble
the animals spatial forms. This is an early example of media and
communication by artists who
generated knowledge of their world through a medium that communicates.
HYPERLINK What is
medium? The idea here is not to deconstruct the term medium.
Lacan, Derrida, have taught us well the limits of language that has been
squeezed through the analytic press. It is necessary instead, to trace the
forms that are evoked by the term's network of
meanings. The word medium has multiple definitions that are linked to specific
fields of study and knowledge domains.
Medium n [the
middle, neut.]
The term medium has specific meanings to physicists,
chemists, philosophers, linguists, artists, spiritualists and chefs. Text in blue
describes the learning or knowledge modality that is associated with the
various meanings within parenthesis, to show how the word medium can represent a variety of knowledge
domains. That the word medium shifts between subject and predicate suggests there
is a transitory nature to the term and to language. How people define the
relationship between materials and medium must be grasped physically and
conceptually. Medium can be understood as the subject of a statement; the medium is the message[94]
and the term medium can be indicated as
a predicate; paint is a medium. What is the significance of
the choice of medium in this creative expression? Each domain favors its own
definition of medium so that
mathematics defines its medium as
numbers, symbols and shapes; a musicians medium is sound, rhythm and silence
and a scientists medium is agar.
The definitions of medium can be as different
as an artists raw materials, the
occult, a scientific technique and a form of communication. Is there a process
of association that binds these possible meanings?
How have translations of the word medium changed through time? Plato in his dialogue Timaeus introduces the
idea of ούσία; ouisa (that which is ones own,
ones substance, property), to
describe the stuff that makes up the world. In the Aristotelian tradition it is
usually translated as substance, ouisa, a noun, derived from one of the stems used in conjugating the
irregular verb ούσία, (to be). Substance is
something present-at-hand. For the
early Greeks all matter was made
of some combination of the four elements; fire, water, earth and. (even Plato makes
mistakes). Plato questions further though, saying we must know how an element
IS itself and not some other element. This idea of wanting to know what
something IS occupied the minds of philosophers, scientists, artists,
politicians, doctors and children. Plato
elucidates, Anything which we see to be continually changing, as for example,
fire, we must NOT call this or that, but rather say that it IS of such a
nature.[95] Noticing observable characteristics and
relationships reveals a cause and effect which separates the accidental
features from true substance. However, Plato also said that substance is not
permanent, because it is always changing its form: old/young, new/old,
growing/dying, construct/deconstruct.
In Aristotles
Categories
he implies that substance is that
which has an independent existence.[96] The substances that make up the world,
according to Aristotle,[97]
have a number of characteristics
that can be tangibly described: substance, quality, quantity, relation,
place, time, position, state, action, and affection. These characteristics can reveal the nature of a
substance. From the earliest times in Greek philosophy there has been a great
distrust in gaining knowledge from the senses, because substances or the
objects of the world are always changing, there is no stability to judge their
true nature. Therefore knowledge may only be grasped through the logic and
reason that yields ideas. For Aristotle the world of the mind and ideas was the
only truth.
Bertrand
Russell in his book History of World Philosophy describes Ren Descartes' contribution to philosophy in his book Meditations
as a restructuring of knowledge, The Cartesian system presents two parallel
but independent worlds, that of mind and that of matter, each of which can be studied without reference to
the other. That the mind does not move the body was a new idea. In Descartes
words, I am a thing which thinks. [98]
Remember it was Socrates who first said that man is a substance.
Martin
Heidegger in his book Being and Time is not content with Descartes' concept
of substance: Sometimes this expression means the Being of an entity as substance, substantiality; at other times it means the entity itself, a
substance. That substance (Greek substancia) is used in these two ways is not accidental; this
already holds for the ancient conception of ouisa (substance, presence). [99]
Heidegger continues to suggest that substances become knowable in their
attributes and that every
substance has some distinctive property from which the essence of the
substantiality of that definite substance can be read off. Extension -- namely in length,
breadth, and thickness -- makes up the real Being of that corporeal substance which we call the
world.[100] Heidegger
further separates substances into two categories: extension and modes of extension. The modes of extension do not make up the real
properties of a substance but are the attributes that can be taken away. Thus color, shape, force, motion and so on
are modes of extension that do
not determine what the Being of
an entity really is. Heideggers conclusion is that:
In any corporeal Thing the real entity is what is
suited for thus remaining constant,
so much so, indeed that this is how the substantiality of such a substance gets
characterized.[101]
The
distinction that Heidegger brings to the argument on substances is to separate
that which is constant and real from that which is changeable and illusory.
That water is a solid, a gas, or a fluid does not change its lasting quality as
being a compound of hydrogen and oxygen or H2O. The logic of science
in this case reduces substance to its elements, stripped of its changeable
characteristics. Science chooses a medium that is measurable, predictable and
discernable by a measurable logic.
Heidegger suggests
that ouisa is to be thought of as
synonymous with the derivative noun
αρούσία, being at, presence.[102] In this way media has a presence
that goes beyond its accidental appearance. But where should all this talk
about substance take us? We know all too well. Philosophy from Plato to
Heidegger is only concerned with ideas, and the substance of the world only
introduces variables of change that cannot undergo the test of reason. Since
antiquity it was reason that was considered to be the method of a higher
understanding of the world that is hindered by the senses. However, it was
Plato who said that seeing gives rise to language; noticing the revolution of
years gives rise to numbers or math/logic; and inquiry about the universe gives
rise to science. It was Plato who also criticized the senses as only an
illusion and the only true knowledge is that which is gained by intelligible
reason. How can sight give rise to knowledge modalities and at the same time
give rise to illusion? Is there possibly another way of viewing the senses in a
relationship to knowledge?
First off, if we look at science, which achieves
knowledge by logic and reason as the absolute of knowledge, we will surely be
misled. After all it was Aristotle who believed all the laws that governed the
universe could be understand by thought alone. It wasnt until a thousand years
later that Galileo demonstrated that Aristotle was wrong when he observed that
bodies of different weight fell at exactly the same speed.[103]
The senses may play a far more important role than is currently acknowledged.
In the world of learning, the senses are all we have, at first. If seeing and
naming the things of the world gives rise to language and observing the stars
gives rise to science, then science by the concepts that it observes creates a
body of understanding for reason to organize towards knowledge. Knowledge
cannot be an end in itself, as new observations, calculations, and criticisms
reveal flaws in existing knowledge that must be adjusted. The possibility of an
absolute truth may be beyond reason. For the life-long
learner, the notion of finding truth in substance can only reveal a transitory knowledge.
There are examples in history of scientists who mediated their own creative space outside the
conventional methods for gaining knowledge. Albert Einstein, Hendrick Lorentz
and Henri Poincar are all credited with developing the theory of relativity,
however, not jointly, but each through his own
proposition, method and creative disposition. That philosophy is embedded in
the place of learning is no
surprise.
How fortunate it was for the physicist, Albert Einstein,[104]
to be born and trained in Germany during the Golden Age of German mathematics. Although Einstein was not
known for his expertise in math during his early years, he wrote about his love
of mathematical thinking but identified his imagination and practical ability
lacking. However, his famous thought experiments,
inspired by a dream he had when he was 16 years old, were based on intuition
and imagination rather than laboratory work. This dream image was instrumental
in helping Einstein understand the problem in defining the relationship between
space and time
as being relative.
Jules
Henri Poincar[105]
was born in France and trained by his gifted mother and father, who was a
professor of medicine. Poincar was considered a mathematics genius, not
because of his great memory or logic, but for his unique ability to visualize
what he heard proved. Despite his poor eyesight,
he was able to visualize relationships by a method of linking the ideas he was
synthesizing. Poincars logical-spatial understanding indicates an interdisciplinary
understanding that allows for an interplay to occur between imagination and
logic.
Hendrick
Lorentz[106] was born
in the Netherlands and at the age of twenty-two received his Ph.D. in
mathematics from the University of Leyden. Lorentz is particularly well known
for his tenacious method of completing the unfinished work of his predecessors,
preparing the ground for Einsteins special theory of relativity.
There is an interplay of media,
modalities and creative application that delineate ways of knowing outside the
limits of the traditional method of discovery. Einstein considered space time
as largely a problem of physics, through the understanding of light. Poincar
saw the problem as being mathematical and Lorentz considered it a problem of physics, through the understanding of electromagnetic forces.[107]
Throughout the eons creativity has left its mark
throughout the disciplines and fields of knowledge. Philosophy, theology,
science, the arts and technology, to name a few, have all had creative
individuals who have moved the understanding of life in new and previously
unexplored ways by using their intuition and reason.
Knowledge must be reflected back into the world of
senses as a proof of its legitimacy, otherwise knowledge becomes ideology.
Philosophy is an historic
reminder (a memory) of a moment of truth in a specific moment in time. While
knowledge is constructed by reason, beauty is formed by the senses. In 1750 Alexander
Buamgarten tried to raise the rules of the treatment of the beautiful to
the level of the rules of science.
Immanuel Kant describes
Buamgartens attempt as fruitless because the rules areas regards their chief source, merely empirical, and consequently can never
serve as determinate a priori laws
by which our judgment of taste must be directed. Kant suggests, our judgment
should be the test of the correctness of our rules.[108]
Philosophy reflects back to the mind a critique of the process that yields a pleasure or
displeasure. In this way aesthetics is an appropriate philosophy for
considering medium, because of its sensual
properties and for its conceptual properties.[109]
It is interesting that in Kants second version of
his Critique of Pure Reason, he chooses to modify his text by adding chief as a qualifier of source
so as to suggest a relation with the other source. Kant also adds determinate to qualify a priori laws, which by distinguishing itself from indeterminacy. This edit between the first addition and second
edition may suggest that Kant doubts the finite conclusion and suggests a
new influence by media that is beyond taste or some other contingency. How does
media hold knowledge? How does medium communicate its own content? What is
smart media?
What is the medium of learning? How does philosophy direct education into practices that construct
knowledge? What role do the senses
play in the acquisition of knowledge?
Kants notion of a framework for the senses contributes a higher order
reason on its path to knowledge. This framework may shed some light on the
conflict that seems to exist in contemporary goals for education.
Kant presents the idea of The Transcendental
Doctrine of Elements. Kant presents two ways of thinking
about objects through transcendental aesthetic and transcendental logic. Instead of pitting logic against the senses, Kant
acknowledges the senses as the starting point of any search for knowledge:
Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition
without concepts, can yield knowledge. Both may be either pure or empirical.[110]
First we will step back and consider some of the key
ideas that are presented in this last statement. Kant suggests that any manner
of gaining knowledge that relates to objects is done so by intuition.[111]
Intuition allows us to perceive specific properties of objects through our
sensibilities that receive
objects. A certain kind of receptivity is required for perception. And a certain kind of projection is required for expression. Kant suggests that the
faculty of the imagination
is responsible for forming concepts
out of the manifold of intuition
to be considered for knowledge.[112]
That is, as intuition senses the
properties, dispositions and relationships the imagination forms concepts to
consider for knowledge. In the quest for life long learners it is the prolonged
noticing, reflection and generative transformation that reveals differences,
similarities and growth through a network of experiences. Intuition takes
place only so far as the object is given to us.[113] That something is given to us means
that we are receptive to the
representation through our sensibility. Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions: they are thought
through the understanding, and
from the understanding arise concepts. [114] In regards to our question about
learning, we could say that learning does not occur when our sensibility is not receptive to the objects of a lesson. Our faculty of sensibility allows us to receive objects so long as they are intuited or sensed.
Kant is also careful to point out that our sensibility is not just a
physical feeling but also a mental understanding, as such we find that our
sensibility relates to our self and the world around us. This sensibility is accomplished from physical and mental sensations
through our outer sense
(perceived in space) and inner sense (perceived in time) that intuit objects.[115]
Kant continues, intuition which is in relation to
the object through sensation, is entitled empirical, [and] the undetermined object of an empirical intuition is entitled appearance. [116]
An object of experience which corresponds to sensation refers to its matter and is empirical and that which cannot be determined
describes the variations of appearance that refers to its form.
The physical appearance of matter is given to us a posteriori and limited to the senses while the appearance of form
is given a priori in the mind,
ready for knowledge. Because form is represented prior to the senses, Kant
calls this form pure (in a
transcendental sense). The pure form of sensibility may be called pure intuition. [117]
The science of all a priori
sensibility, Kant defines as transcendental aesthetic. One
can begin to see how the world of appearance can embrace the sensibility of experience and how the form of the subject encourages pure thought. Kant
summarizes the transcendental aesthetic this way:
The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only
through their union can knowledge arise.[118]
The importance of these differences that Kant brings
to the notion of intuition and imagination is crucial. Applied to a work of art, such as Alberto
Giacomettis Three Men
Walking, the conflict arises
around an issue that directly relates to Kants understanding of the role of intuition
and imagination. The conflict often goes like this: on one side, a viewer is
commenting on the nature of the sculpture's matter
or material of the work of art as
representing a skinny, frail, bumpy, stretched-out,
boney, emaciated, skeletal body. This is a good phenomenological or empirical
description of the physical appearance of the sculpture. The next viewer notices a conceptual understanding of
the sculpture's form that communicates an idea. By concretely reading the
characteristics of the sculpture's outer
appearances, the viewer's intuition limits understanding till it becomes an
object of imagination. On the
other side of the argument are viewers who use their imagination to interpret
the form of the sculpture. Here students will synthesize meaning based on
associations between the figure's
authoritative body language, psychological expression or sense of urgency.
These forms trigger a conceptually intuited response. Both the intuited
topology and the imagined forms are conditionally correct. The true genius of
Giacomettis sculpture is in the presentation of two diametrically opposed
understandings of these differences. The imagination synthesizes this complex
relationship between the intuited
understanding of the material nature of the sculpture and its conceptual
counterpart that projects its contradiction
into the present life of the viewer.
This intuition of the chosen material plays an
important role in the life of contemporary art that places significant
importance on the agency of material in
relationship to a concept or idea under exploration. R. G. Collingwood in
his book The
Principles of Art comments on this act of synthesis that is behind
every thoughtful spoken word, Every utterance and every gesture that each one
of us makes is a work of art.[119] While it may seem extreme for
Collingwood to suggest the term work of art in every action, Kants theory of
synthesis, clearly suggests that our every word and gesture is an act of generation / creation.
The end of the 19th century marks the
beginning of a new way of thinking about art making. Maurice Merleau-Ponty
calls attention to the philosophy which animates the painter – not when
he expresses his opinions about the world but in that instant when his vision
becomes gesture, when, in Cezannes words, he thinks in painting.[120]
The birth of Modernism calls attention to how we express an artistic vision. The place of materials
in the creative process of modern
art can be seen as taking a new direction and replacing the romantic
representational painting and sculpture of past generations with
experimentation that encouraged new ways of generating art through non-art
materials. Found objects had associations to a prior history that interacts
with interpretation. The materials of art acquire an agency that goes beyond the
surface of appearance: camera / film, Dada / machines, cut-ups,
poems, Pollocks drips, medium as the message and virtual reality.
Acts of creation require some thing to hold the expression, be it words for thoughts,
sounds for music or materials for art. John Dewey in his book Art
as Experience insists,
Only where material is employed
as media is there expression and
art.[121] The artist converts oil and pigments
into paint and produces a visual image of an imagined experience. However, it
is not the mechanical production of materials into expression, but the manner
in which the materials are used. Dewey continues, Everything depends upon the
way in which material is used
when it operates as medium.[122]
A house painter may share with the artist many of the techniques and a
similar understanding of the medium of
paint, but for the artist the role of paint is as an agent of expression and communication. The purpose
of the paint for the house painter is for the paint to be noticed, while the
purpose of paint in an art work is not to be noticed, but to disappear into the image or representation of the
communicated expression, that is the painted work of art. This transformation from medium to message
occurs, in Deweys words, Because
objects of art are expressive, they are a language. Rather they are many
languages. The individual character of each
language shows, not necessarily in its unique content,
but in the combination of the feel of the medium with the act of the
expression. This is not to be misunderstood as an attempt to anthropomorphize
artistic materials, but rather to indicate a certain agency of the materials
toward s a given expressive language. Dewey suggests, For each art has its own
medium and that medium is especially fitted for one kind of
communication. Poetry, art,
science, philosophy, music, dance, and theater use
media that are conducive to each unique expression. Dewey continues; Each
medium says something that cannot be uttered as well or as completely in any
other tongue.[123]
The relationship of art forms to
medium is interesting because it is really going
through a kind of change from the generation of natural materials to a
generation of processed media. Currently, the new media is virtual and
artificial media. Dewey suggests a decisive hierarchy of knowledge modalities
that still exists. Dewey
criticizes the cultural implications of language and math as the sole
indicators of intelligence. This limited notion narrows the expressive
potential of individuals by forcing a preconceived outcome. The materials are
not anthropomorphized here; rather, media becomes the vehicle and agent for
human expression.
Vital Interest of Medium
Deweys notion of the arts as an agent of communication suggests that
medium has a relational
affect on the choice of artistic discipline. Conversely, the generation of art
is impeded by a facilitator dictating the choice of
an art medium that is alien to the artists manner of working. At first glance
the choice between different kinds of artist paints (oil, pigments, egg
tempera, gauche, acrylic) might seem to be a choice of mere appearance; but because material becomes media (language) in the
artist's hands, it is formed with a touch that marks or records an
artistic thought-gesture which links a certain physicality with a certain
conceptuality. It is not a clich to suggest that each artist must find his or her medium
because in our global world it is necessary to communicate in multiple mediums
and in divergent languages.[124]
Often in school art lessons young
students are restricted in their choice of medium and led by
instructions that frame or determine a project outcome. Dewey points out
another important relational characteristic of art material:
whatever narrows the boundaries of the material fit
to be used in art hems in also the artistic sincerity of the individual artist.
It does not give fair play and outlet to his vital interest. It forces his
perception into channels previously worn into ruts and clips the wings of his
imagination. [125]
Literally
taken, vital interest implies the
life between the becoming or a
claim to life. For Dewey the vital interest
of the medium suggests that the materials have something that matters on
behalf of life. This does not
necessarily mean that materials need to be sophisticated, but that they fit the
message. Dewey continues, the universality of the art is so far away from
denial of the principle of selection by means of vital interest that it depends upon interest. [126]
This implies a relationship between media, the artist
and the generated expression idea. It quantifies and qualifies in a dynamic
moment held in mediation by the agency of materials that fit or do not fit.
Some artists use materials and media that suggest an antithesis. Materials may
intentionally NOT fit, as is the case of Marcel Duchamps, Bicycle Wheel or Mret Oppenheims Object, fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon.[127]
Our choice of materials for expression, whether words, symbols, images, sounds,
objects, numbers or raw materials is itself a creative act.
Dewey is largely instrumental in articulating the
agency of media in the arts, however Louise Rosenblatt in The
Poem as Event takes Deweys concept to describe further the transactional
agency between the poem and the reader. Rosenblatt researches the process by
which readers arrive at interpretations of unfamiliar poems. Focusing on the
paths to interpretation in unfamiliar territory. Rosenblatt forces her readers
to discover and grasp for a framework that leads to meaning and interpretation
of a text. Rosenblatt considers this process of discovery a situation between
the reader and text. Rosenblatt calls this situation the event of the poem
and continues, The relationship between reader and text is not linear. It is a
situation, an event at a particular time and place in which each element
conditions the other. [128]
The reader conditions the poem and the poem conditions the reader. That this process is ongoing suggests
an experience over time where the readers intuition, imagination, thinking and
reflection act upon the text, and in a non-linear method the words, relationship
of words and the poeticism of the words present and re-present themselves to
the reader. Rosenblatt continues,
Transaction designates, then, an ongoing process in which the elements or
factors are, one might say, aspects of a total situation, each conditioned by
and conditioning the other. [129]
Dewey rejected the simple stimulus response theory in the 1890s and suggested a more complex
relationship. An important part of
Deweys transactional view, says
Rosenblatt, is that in
a sense the living organism selects from its environment the stimuli to which
it will respond.[130]
Dewey speaks of the transactional experience of the artist in choosing a
material to produce a work of art that fits his or her vital interest: We select what we want to be stimulated
by. Dewey continues,
Something, not yet a stimulus, becomes a stimulus by
virtue of the relations it sustains to what is going on in this continuing
activity, It becomes the stimulus
in virtue of what the organism is already preoccupied with.[131] (Habits, conventions, assumptions,
expectations; framing)
Conceived
as a whole, our making language and reading language form a total communication
event. The possibility is that we are stimulated into conventions or we are stimulated into new
understanding.
At the end of the 19th century and into
the 20th, the view of the world was beginning to change in many ways due to a
variety of inventions and theories: DNA, quantum theory, Nietzsches
pespectivism, Einstein and Poincars relativity, Impressionism and Edisons
movie camera all point to radical new ways in which we create and reflect on
our world. Our place in space time becomes the new media.
Maurice
Merleau-Ponty in his article Eye and Mind[132]
suggests that we need to address any study of humanity as being seated in the
world.[133] Being
seated in the world implies a positionality and point-of-view that is unique to
a self that is in access to the world that indeed can be taken as a self that
is in a close relationship to the world as medium. So we will continue with the
role of medium in creativity as having various dispositions inclined to choice
making, interaction with thinking and fulfillment of a vital interest.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that it is Rene Descartes who situates our presence of body as against the
external world, A self whose hand defines itself, not by its touch of the
world but by how it deposits itself.[134]
As such, it is the way that Jackson Pollock
deposits his medium of paint that opens new possibilities. For Pollock, even
the canvas is situated in a new way, no longer on the easel, his canvas is on
the floor. Pollock stands above, and on the canvas, depositing paint with
sticks, pouring paint from buckets, ashes dropping from his cigarettes onto the
canvas, beer tabs embedded in the paint. Gravity becomes a part of the creative
process as painting is replaced
with trajectory on to canvas.
Pouring, dripping and flicking paint are unexpected descriptions of Pollocks
method. The canvas becomes the world that receives Pollocks deposited world.
Merleau-Ponty describes a relationship between self and the world that is the place of painting where Pollock intuitively
deposits himself and his nails, keys, tacks, buttons, cigarettes, matches and
of course, paint (see Full Fathom Five, 1947). Merleau-Ponty continues to
address the limits of this world:
It is a space reckoned starting from me as the zero
point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior
envelope; I live in it from the inside: I am immersed in the world. After all,
the world is all around me, not in front of me.[135]
Although
Descartes presents an awkwardly deterministic characterization of this
experience of being in the world, Merleau-Ponty reframes the notion of place by emphasizing the connection
of perception in its relationship to
a lived body in access to the world.[136] This access to the world, Ponty suggests, is an active
relationship to the world that affects a variety of circumstances ranging from
needs to desires.
However, in Pollocks hand, the medium of paint is a
matter of vital interest. The
media of paint is liberated. The very nature of the media of paint can now be
what it really is liquid, fluid, dripping, spraying, deposited and expressing
its gravity plus the flotsam and jetsam of daily living. The materials of art
are intermediated by the directed VITAL gesture of the artists body/mind, arm,
hand, fingers, and brush of the artist acting and being in time. When Jackson
Pollock painted One (Number31)
and Autumn
Rhythm (Number 30) in 1950 he freed paint-media from representation and
opened a new kind of space for our imagination to consider.
It is interesting to note and compare how the paintings of Jackson Pollock were made prior to
his revolutionary drip or pour paintings of the late 1940s early 1950's. Even in his
earliest painting with drips, Full fathom Five, Pollock was painting with extremely thick layers of paint
that were compressed into small vertical
rectangles of stretched canvases. The splatter and drip technique of painting, that made Pollock
famous, was actually invented by the painter David Alfredo Siqueiros, who
in the late 1940s taught a technique workshop that was attended by Pollock.
While Siqueiros used this technique in mid
1940s paintings, the new technique in Siqueiros painting, Collective Suicide, is used as a small visual element in a larger
pictorial narrative. This technique in Pollocks hands opens a new way of
thinking about painting and becomes the central characteristic of his art.
Marshall McLuhan
coined the phrase the medium is the message,[137]
which is a good way to think about the means that allows the artists known as
Abstract Expressionists to use paint in a
manner that is said to make paint the subject of the painting. In a film by Hans
Namuth,[138] Jackson
Pollocks Composition: One, could
be understood as a choreography of paint. What one sees in this film is
Pollocks kinesthetic gestures as he creates his art with dripping brushes and
thrusts of pouring paint. Ivars Peterson goes further, to show how Pollocks
paintings are two dimensional maps of his three dimensional movements around
his canvas. In this way it could be said that the paint embodies Pollocks
movements. Pollock describes his process in the Namuth film as being embedded in the paint, the way I paint is a
natural growth out of the medium.[139] Paint reveals the kinesthetic dance of
the artist-painter through the physical properties of
paint as pigment, fluid and oil are layered, dripped, poured and splashed reveal
process as content rather than narrative as content. When studied by physicist Richard
Taylor, Pollocks movements around the painting are
analyzed in such a way as to reveal a fractal nature that resembles
the kinds of patterns and repetitions that are found in nature.[140]
Paint, freed from the task of mimesis and representation can show its own true
nature; fluidity, flow, pattern and gesture. Alain Badiou[141]
takes this idea further as he considers the poem [or paint] freed from
philosophical poeticizing; paint represents
itself as presence. This leap outside calculable interests[142]
is precisely the kind of leap that Pollock makes into the world of paint. Pollock
presents the presence of paint as media.
It is here at this split between reason and
imagination that the medium of the world slips into the media of the sublime,
where the concept of ideas consumes the practical limitations of material
substance and focuses on a noticing of life media. It is the creative space of
the sublime where things start to happen. This is the place where imagination
and reason reach their limit, as was discussed in Chapter
One. In John
Tancocks article, The Influence of Marcel Duchamp, he describes the
shift in the 1960s when he begins to doubt the self-expression of Abstract
Expressionism and its reliance on the artist's
hand and the physical purity of
painting. Tancock sees Duchamps attitude in a non-messianic manner, as if he were directing a new
vanguard. However Duchamp describes his
attitude as Doubt in myself, doubt in everything. In the first place, never
believing in truth.[143]
Marcel Duchamp was one of the earliest, more philosophical new media pioneers, who
understood the Kantian concept of the sublime. Duchamp invents a method he
calls Readymades, to indicate that the medium of
the art is already made. Duchamp merely arranges the parts in such a way as to
create a new context. His new artworks begin to present a conceptual
point-of-view that prompts Duchamp to say, art is non-aesthetic,[144]
that is, the traditional sense of beauty is in the content or context of the
artwork. Duchamp also presents a philosophical disruption of conventional
logic, and says, I would much rather breathe air than make art.[145]
Duchamp attacks the history of the idea of beauty and in doing so introduces a
dialectical aesthetic through Readymade artworks that juxtaposed media in
unexpected ways that evoke the sublime. In the light of this new aesthetic,
beauty is no longer an end but something that emerges through the process of
considering its antithesis. In this case we can call it a confrontation with an
unknown or the sublime. By rejecting the notion of beauty as an absolute, the
work-of-art is more able to address the ideas of divergent and more complex
issues. Art is free to address new issues: absurdity, humor, contradiction,
satire trickery, jokes and parody.
Duchamp prefers a methodical doubt, writes Michel Sanouillet in Marcel
Duchamp and The French Intellectual Tradition. Duchamp introduced an art
that doubts the conventional tradition of aesthetics as beauty in the eye of
the beholder and interrupts our way of experiencing a visual event. Duchamps
concept of the Readymade
questions the logic of an image that does not transmit a stimulus to the senses
but to the mind. Sanouillet portrays this eloquently:
Duchamp seemed to those around him an intellectual,
that is to say, an individual passionately interested in the adventures of the
mind, in the cerebral play of thought and the delights of pure intellect.[146]
This
notion of logic and play introduces a learning method of a higher order. The
philosophical imperative to doubt
means accepting contradiction as an interplay: a momentary truth that should
not be taken as an absolute truth. What can lessons on the sublime teach us
about the world we live in? For Duchamp the difference between painting and
writing was non-existent. Both are
optical stimuli that are received by our senses as the play of color, shapes and
forms that must be deciphered by our mind through the presented signs and
codes.[147] While someone might expect that
Duchamps propensity for intellect would favor written language, he had a
strong distrust for the literary tradition of his day which abhorred the
lyricism of the Romantic Age; instead, Duchamp sought to intellectualize
painting and sculpture.
Duchamp introduced
an anti-aesthetic message to the art world that was
in direct opposition to the remaining vestiges of 19th century
Romanticism and embraces the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Nude
Descending a Staircase was
painted in 1912 and reveals Duchamps visual understanding of the synthetic
space of Matisse, the analytic cubism of Picasso and the futuristic dynamism of
Boccioni. While the objectives of Futurism were largely an effort to
anthropomorphize the dynamics of the machine,
Duchamps approach was more of a conceptual artifice of the modern world that
caused him to define the term Readymade. Tancock suggests that Duchamp immediately shifted to collage as a
medium because the anonymous mechanically produced photographs used to make a
collage, removed the trace of the individual
and called attention to the context of art. In
1913 Duchamp created his first Readymade, (so called because the medium of art is manufactured).[148] Duchamps move to Readymades was mostly a result
of his disinterest in the aesthetic implications of painting. A year later
Duchamp says, I want something where the eye and hand count for nothing.[149]
Forty-eight years after making his first Readymade Duchamp defined their characteristics: No beauty, no
ugliness, nothing particularly esthetic about it.[150] Here Duchamp seems to step outside of
art. The normal procedures for assessing and judging art depended on a product
to reflect on, through a visual literacy of line, form, color and mostly, a
pictorial narrative. Duchamp, by removing the attraction or
repulsion of taste, epitomized a Kantian shift from the aesthetic of the beautiful
to the aesthetic of the sublime.
It could be said that this shift beyond the knowable, beyond the senses,
is just the place where thinking enters a quiet space that for a moment
experiences the removal of self as a means of communication.
Sometime during 1916 Duchamp reproduced Bicycle Wheel [151]
and posed a question about the meaning and
relevance of the terms original and unique in regard to a work of art that is a copy. The significance of Duchamps question pre-dates Walter Benjamins
philosophical exposition on the copy in The Work of Art in The Age of
Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin questions the philosophical legitimacy of
the concept of an original in
defining the value of a work of art. For Benjamin, that which is constructed is like a montage in which fragments reveal an
understood whole. At the same time montage has a critical destructive dimension that interrupts the conventional concept
of the image.[152]
Technology in the 21st century requires
certain shifts in thinking about communication. Electronic media can be
generated many times to produce exact clones. A digital artist can construct a
virtual art object that exists as electronic signals, manipulated by the
choices of the instrument's operator.
Instead of painting on a canvas, a computer artist moves a mouse to create
electronic data or optical signals that are burned onto metallic disks. The
development of electronic technologies has pushed the arts and education into
new territories. The
transformation of media from analog to digital brings about a change in the way
we think about communication.
Klaus Ottmann
considers the place of the abject within the genius through the writing of
Julia Kristeva who says Abject is the ambiguous; it lies in-between,
between inside and outside, It straddles the Imaginary and the Symbolic. [153] Kristeva situates the abject
... at the limit of primal repression in the drama that unfolds in Lacans Mirror Stage: As in Joussance where the object of desire,bursts with the
shattered mirror where the ego gives up its image in order to contemplate
itself in the Other, there is nothing either objective or objectal to the
abject. It is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become
alter ego, drops so that I does not disappear in it but finds, in that
sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.[154]
This
may also be why Duchamp told Andy Warhol, that the
only way for an artist to create something significant was to go underground.[155]
Although Warhol didn't really seem to understand what Duchamp meant by this, it
seems Duchamp had already made it clear in his Readymade art in stating his desire to remove himself from the art
object. That is, Duchamp rejected the I as an I-deal, that is always fixed on the other: Instead, Duchamp
seemed to understand Lacans infans
stage, which discovers an I that frees itself from the image of its other,
hence Duchamp suggested that real art must go underground (the sublime alienation).
Duchamp consciously shifted
his medium to collage so as to remove the traces of human personality and
entered the world of the abject. The ideal identity of the artist disappears in favor of an I that does not grasp the whole. In Network of
Stoppages, Duchamp used collage as a process that associates fragments
into layers of networks. Abject diagrams, numbers, mechanical symbols and
graphic designs appear layered over a (Cezanne like) aerial impression of a
forested landscape. This technique is achieved through a deconstruction of an image that is cut up into fragments, as in
collage or in film where montage images are superimposed or reconstructed into
a new fragmented whole, and speaks to the dialectic nature of a knowledge system
that considers the interplay of thesis and antithesis in the
forming of its truths. This process destabilizes the narrative interpretation
of an image and refocuses attention on noticing undiscovered associations
between events. By cutting away and removing a part of an image, there is an
accompanying urge to ask about what was cut away and why. Because each layer of a montage has a
unique history, any one narrative could not express a sense of a whole event.
Instead icons, sounds, animations and networking speak to multiple
interpretations. This kind of thinking process becomes a key feature in the computer
icon which becomes a carrier of
multiple banks of images or information. Instead of a hierarchy of the images,
Duchamp presents a multiplicity of decisions.
Marcel Duchamp may
be the best known artist for defining the early process of conductive thinking
that is facilitated by the network logic of an electronic media. The logic of a
network allows for a global awareness that reveals unexpected associations,
redundancies, poetics, strengths, flaws and unknowns. That Duchamp was comfortable in a
variety of experiences suggests his practical application of network thinking.
His work explores a variety of languages and mediums across disciplines:
Duchamp embodies the imagination of an artist, the logic of a chess player, the
eye of a filmmaker, the intrigue of a poet, the playfulness of a trickster, the
discernment of a curator, the skills of a graphic designer and the disposition
that is open to a dialectic. As a writer Duchamp was best known by the
pseudonym, Rrose Selavy, his trans-identity. The epitome of abject media for
Duchamps public was his Fountain,[156] a mens urinal bought at Mott Works company,
signed R. Mutt. Fountain was
rejected by a jury-free exhibition as being immoral; Duchamp defended his
creative process in 1917:
Now Mr. Mutts fountain is not immoral, that is
absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture you see every day in
plumbers show windows. Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain
or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life and
placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and
point of view—created a new thought for that object.[157]
Kristeva
further defines the dispassion of the abject it dissituates, it
deterritorializes. it is a present out of place,_a nonsite [158]
Duchamps placing of the fountain in a horizontal position de-territorializes
its common use. Its situation shifts from the bathroom wall to the gallery
pedestal were it straddles common sense.
Electronic technology opens the arts to another way
of thinking about the art of communication. Duchamp inspired a network of
artists around the world who developed a new art form called Intermedia art. The
instrument of this new art form today is mostly the computer. Electronic
technology opens new ways of thinking about how, why, where and when knowledge,
meaning or expression is transmitted: The process of this new media is called hypermedia, because it is media that has the capability to link
to related contextual sources. Hypermedia is embedded in technologies such as
e-mail, electronic data bases, virtual reality games, word processors,
spreadsheets and numerous electronic technologies. Using hypermedia requires
new systems of logic that are discovered beyond the bounds of the traditional model of literacy. Hypermedia is a form
of intermediation that facilitates the process of integrating multiple
knowledge modalities.
Duchamps numerous experimentations with media,
diverse ways of thinking and facility across disciplines epitomizes
interdisciplinarity. Thinking in a variety of media, Duchamp maintains a sense
of play as he hones a visual idea: All media is subject for thought, from
physical properties to four dimensional
theories on space/time that Duchamp
understood through conversations he had with his close friend Maurice Princet, a
mathematics theorist. Duchamps visual understanding of space/time is apparent
in his 1913 painting, Nude
Descending a Staircase. Through
transparent and opaque repetitions of fragments of a body, the illusion of a
person moving through time is presented.
Duchamps painting, Network of Stoppages is another good example of Duchamps experimentation
with space-time reality in which a
diagrammatic schemata (matheme) of a four dimension space/time situation is
presented. In his Readymade
artworks the four dimensional space/time situation occurs in the mind and
lingers in play like the strategic thinking one engages in during a chess game.
In 1968 Duchamp collaborated with John Cage in creating an
electronic chessboard that triggered sounds as each chess piece is moved. The
chess game becomes a musical score. To record his chess games Duchamp made
little stamps to print the game moves in his notebooks. Duchamp reveals throughout his life the
ability to shift between knowledge modalities so as to create and transform his
art through an interdisciplinary process.
Collaboration of this sort is not just a purely intellectual experience
because the thinking is seated in an active medium. The context of medium for
Duchamp and Cage, on the other hand is a matter of thinking that is set into
play by imaginatively considering new relationships in the elements across
disciplines.
Music composer John Cage's a fascination for numbers
occurs from chance operations and indeterminacy. Cage found
in Duchamp an artist who could think outside the elements of his domain,
thinking through media outside the conventional methods of a discipline.
Cage would organize sound with
the throw of a dice or a computer program that generated
random numbers. Chance operations as a compositional choice, allowed Cage to explore networks as a compositional
process. HPSCHD[159] by John Cage and Lejaren Hiller utilized multiple
concurrent harpsichord performances through a large environment of projection
screens displaying 50 simultaneous films and 50 sequencing slide projectors
with images generated from NASA and public media. Many artists from Dada, Surrealism through the 1950-60, have pioneered electronic artworks
that generated collaborations across modalities. For more examples of
Intermedia artists on the Internet you can hyperlink to John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Alwin Nikolais, Fluxus, The Wooster Group.
The book as a media system introduces us to the term literacy.
How do systems of learning transform over time? Prior to written languages,
dance, music, drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture signified the
knowledge and history of the past.
When spoken language was first recorded it was scribed into pictographs
that symbolically reflected a history of experience. Prior to written history,
the way knowledge was transferred from generation to generation was by oral
recitation. It took a thousand
years for written language to become available to the masses. How did the
invention of the printing press affect literacy? How does the mass ownership of
books by individuals affect social relationships? Through Guttenbergs printing
press the great books of knowledge could be copied or translated to multiple
languages and be sold across the world. World knowledge was available in a new
way.
Hyper-literacy in the 21st century
provides a new world perspective that is immediate and lived in the moment
through a new electronic apparatus.
How does the use of electronic media, further transform literacy?
Literacy as we know it is being transformed by electronic media. A professor of
English, Gregory Ulmer has a name
for the new literacy called electracy and in his book Heuretics: The Logic of
Invention he describes how knowledge is transmitted through the medium of
electricity. This novel way of approaching knowledge requires some new
considerations. The invention of the camera becomes the apparatus that begins
to displace literacy. A picture is worth a thousand words, makes such a
claim. Ulmer believes this shift does not replace literacy but exists alongside it. Or perhaps we are living in a hybrid
state: electracy as a process of knowledge uses computers as a means of
generating a virtual or hyper reality. The letter is to literacy as the e-mail is to hypermedia. Hypermedia as such is different
from the letter in that the letter takes days
to deliver through manual carriers, while the e-mail is sent, for all practical
purposes, instantly. The medium of hypermedia is electrons, particles and light
but its real contribution as a knowledge system is that it has as its main
property an ability to explore knowledge instantly: hypermedia is present and
available through the internet. The disadvantage of
this new media, however, is that it brings with it problems: issues of privacy, identity theft, worms, bugs,
security and loss of data.
Ulmer suggests that the use of the image carries an important role as an icon in the language of computer technology. Ulmer is
seeking to define a method for creativity in Benjamins work, specifically The
Arcades Project. Ulmer's search for a creative method considers
Benjamins notion of the composers card box[160]
which Ulmer sees as a pre-writing database:
the user of the
database . . . encounters in principle the full paradigm of possibilities
through which a multitude of paths may be traced. Ulmer describes academic writing, largely, as a cause and effect logic of argumentation that follows a linear path towards a deduced,
right answer. With hypermedia, a database or information is organized in a network, and meaning is
constructed through a conductive associational logic that occurs through a
non-linear method. In hypermedia
there are usually many solutions to a problem;
the truth in any one given interpretation destabilizes any totality and what
remains are multiple points of view that realize a moment of truth. Academic
literacy favors the product and hypermedia favors the process
Because each layer of a hypermedia is a unique
history, any one narrative could not express a sense of a whole event. Instead
icons, sounds, animations and networks of different points of view are
available for inquiry: knowledge is actively experienced in hypermedia rather
than merely described as in a lecture on knowledge.
In his book One Way Street Benjamin attacks the notion of
languages as the best choice of medium for communication. His inclination is towards the image rather than the text:
Only images in the mind vitalize the will. The mere
word, by contrast, at most inflames it, to leave it smoldering, blasted. There
is no intact will, without exact pictorial imagination. No imagination without
innervations.[161]
This
mental image of new possibilities is precisely what happens when we read books.
We picture in our mind with great detail what the language evokes. The
development of the use of image in the 19th century through photography led Benjamin to
consider the possibilities of a history of communication through photographic
images. Susan Buck-Morss presents Benjamins theories in his Passagen-Werk.
Benjamin uses historical images to construct philosophical ideas.[162] Benjamin presents an
historical construction of philosophy that is
simultaneously (dialectally) a philosophical reconstruction of history, one in
which philosophys ideational elements are expressed as changing meanings
within historical images that themselves are discontinuous - such a project is
not best discussed in generalities. It needs to be shown.[163]
This
description is such a good example of the internet's
global network of histories, all simultaneously
transmitted as little packets of binary data expressed as 1s and 0s.
Like Duchamps world, Benjamins media also acts like a montage, activated by the
associational noticing through the network of thought images.
Ulmer says this shift is a destabilization of language
as literacy that is comprehended in
a linear method in contrast to the way we experience literacy in hypermedia in a non–linear
method. However, text and hypermedia coexist as carriers of knowledge in hypermedia. Just as oral history as a carrier of knowledge was
not replaced by written history, there is just
a certain practical advantage to written history. Discovering associations from
the multiple perspectives of a network of experiences, the conductive logic of
hypermedia supplements the coherency of the narrative logic of academic
literacy by opening unexpected relationships and discoveries. Through the
internet and electronic technologies distance is relative. Space and time are
open to the present knowledge in a new virtual way. But it is not enough to
gather knowledge; one must generate something from this knowledge.
The real issue is having something to say;
understanding how and why we choose literacy (words) or hypermedia (icons) for
generating communication. New technologies of the twenty first century will
certainly continue to become more computerized, more networked and more
virtual. The media of this electronic age is termed hypermedia and its thinking process involves a conductive
method of association. Hypermedia is said to jump to new destinations over a network. The process of
hypermedia is like Kierkegaards leap into the faith of the event. Hypermedia has its own vocabulary that
facilitates a global thinking construct. Single words become icons that
indicate more than they say. With a dialectical disposition, the philosophy of
the utility program reminds us of the duties of each software command. Words as
icons have hidden loaded suggestions: FILE, get in line; EDIT, get it right:
TOOLS, get to work, WINDOW, change your view; and HELP, get the method. Or
hypermedia becomes a process for opening a space for media communication. The
internet is the most sensible and direct interface to structure and use
hypermedia as a process for connecting to our world.
The resistance to hypermedia is that literacy is
being sacrificed because of electronic
entertainment. There is a
relationship with play and learning that should not be dismissed. The motto,
the sum of the parts is greater than the whole may describe a philosophic
point of view for the mid 19th century. The motto for the product-oriented
Industrial Revolution would be, many interchangeable parts equal many
wholes. In the 21st Century this motto might be revised
to, the wholes make up a part of a network. This more ephemeral understanding of our place in
nature presents to Friedrich
Nietzsche a self that
proceeds playing the wicked game and feeling both the duty and burden of
lifes temptations, [164] while to
Heidegger an intellectual self that thinks
by letting curiosity fabricate something new.[165]
An example of someone who considers the way wholes
become networks is James Burke. What Thomas Edison is to the aesthetics of
science, James
Burke is to the sublime of science. Burke is known as the historian who produced and hosted the PBS program
Connections. [166] Burke explores the surprising connections among the
seemingly unconnected people, events and discoveries that have shaped our
modern world.[167]
Burke considers an object, such as an automobile and traces all the inventions
that are associated to its own being invented. A network of creative inventions
emerges across seemingly divergent fields of discipline. The linking of diverse
inventions form a network of interconnections that challenge reason. Burke's ability to
connect history to our present situation is a prime example of hypermedias
conductive relevance. One of
Burkes recent hypermedia projects is a interactive teaching tool called KnowledgeWeb Project, that can navigate
in an on-line 3-dimensional journey made up of 2,500 world personalities that
are interlinked in 20,000 ways. In this way hypermedia opens history to being
reinterpreted in the present.
The Age of Communication[168]
brought other ways of thinking about creative individuals who blur the lines
between media, disciplines, methods and social study. Jonathan
Crary [169]describes
Edisons unique objective to his invention of the camera,
One of the places where this particularly modern
system of perceptual mutation can first be located is in the work of Thomas
Edison. Edison stands not simply as a participant in the making of cinema but
for a specific swerve that separates earlier nineteenth century techniques of display,
exhibition, and attention from what would follow in the twentieth For Edison, Cinema had no significance
in itself – It was simplifying one of a potentially endless stream of
ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized,
activated.[170]
Edison
saw the market place in terms of how images, sound, energy, or information
could be reshaped into measurable and distributable commodities, and how a
social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly
separate and specialized units of consumption. The task of media for Edison was
to generate production; however the end result
of this production is that everyone can now
own a camera. In an instant, anyone can create a picture. The photographic
picture marks a kind of beginning and end to the issue of rendering by hand
what could be achieved in a mechanical snap-shot. The more difficult skill of
rendering images with oil paint took time and money. The camera as an
instrument and a method allows anyone to take a picture that could be used for
art, science, news and media. Edisons first movie camera was made in 1891 and
quickly became a prime instrument in recording the history of merging nations
into big cities, like New York. The photographer was there with a camera at the
beginning of the twentieth century to witness and record the event of
electricity, the light bulb, the Great World Expositions of the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth century and the atrocities of world wars. In an odd
way, the camera was capable of filming its own history and, as such, asserts
the visual domain as a cognitive and reflective eye on the world.
Edisons understanding of the power of an image also had a political and
economic significance that became a new means of effecting public opinion. The
creations and inventions of the twentieth century challenged passivity and
fostered a new age of attentiveness towards novelty. This swerve that Crary
describes represents a kind of crossing that interrupts the conventional flow
of perceiving and creates a new space for learning and creativity.
The camera as a creative instrument changes the art
world and invents new art modalities: photography and cinematography are born.
The picture and subsequent moving picture transformed the very nature of how we
know and think about our world. The camera also becomes the instrument that
transforms culture through media. This is a time where the creative space of
cinema was explored by George
Melies, D. W.
Griffith, Fritz Lang,
Jacob Riis and Sergei Eisenstein.
What is the relationship between idea and
materials? This chapter has
considered the process of creativity as it encounters a variety of modalities
that transform materials to medium, and from medium into media and lastly from
media to hypermedia. We generate our experiences with a choice of medium/media[171]
from the world in which we live (materials-at-hand). Further, we generate media
through multiple modes of knowing (Heidegger, Gardner, Higgins) that make possible a choice of medium/media: words/poetry, paint/art, numbers/logic,
emotions/body language, sound/music, movement/dance, economy/politics,
film/photography and clay/architecture. As philosophical curators, we gather
media and present expositions through hypermedia. Choosing a modality that fits
our interest is our first priority as artists, teachers and learners. Knowing
why we choose to communicate in one medium over another is rarely questioned but questioning it should
be the first objective.
Education priorities in
Western culture have had a bias towards
limiting knowledge modalities to language-literacy and math-logic. The
relationship between media and multiple learning modalities should be
considered more carefully in any education program. How do systems of belief infringe on personal choice?
Methods, hierarchies and systems of belief can frame learning in ways that
restrict and limit our vital interest. Choosing a
path must begin at an early age and be accompanied by an objective ethic that
places responsibility next to emancipation so that the desire to learn is
self-motivated. In the 21st century people read and write less and
rely on electronic media more and more for their information. This conventionalized view rarely
questions choices outside the range of set defaults or standards. A creative world seeks ways to open
new possibilities: a heuristic method of inclusiveness instinctively generates
media for noticing.
What is the future direction of media? Bio-media
replicas, human cloning, organic machines are all realities in the twenty first
century. How does media become an agent of life? Deciphering the human genome sequence of a Homo sapiens
revealed the early development of our own cells that learned how to replicate
better as a result of an invading virus (viruses are experts in cell
replication). Scientists using DNA (as the
latest media) have cloned animals and in many situations scientists have
altered the DNA of plants to create new hybrids that have been transformed to
be more adaptable. What does the future have in store for sublime creations,
which may be stirred by memories of the strange world of Doctor Moreau? Terror
or bliss.
What this may suggest is that we learn best for
survival. Our bodies not only adapt they assimilate the process of our world.
Insects and animals assimilate the patterns and textures of their surroundings.
Is it a hunting method that creates a certain advantage; as life learners this
may suggest that we situate ourselves in a medium that stimulates our
assimilation. An associational curriculum would have to have the ability to
stimulate hypermedia into a hypertopia or a topistics mindscape. The landscape of virtual reality already supplies
the hyperspace for the placing and spacing in time within the medium of
technology. The assimilated transmission of knowledge receives and sends
simultaneously like the creative space of chora.
Every creative act involves a new innocence of
perception,
liberated from the cataract of accepted belief
– Arthur Koestler
Creativity represents a
miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child
with its apparent enemy, the
sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence
Norman Podhoretz
This chapter will start by hinting at a philosophical
orientation of the creative space and its relationship to the process of lifelong learning. The power of educational systems
to prepare individuals to creatively choose their own path towards fulfillment
or to submissively follow instructions and orders from above requires a
questioning of the process and methods of educational truth procedures.
What are the truth procedures in learning? Philosophy
can trace a network of theories on the process and methods of knowledge
acquisition. Often there are many different procedures for achieving the same
objectives but how we come to a truth matters. Alain Badiou in his book Infinite
Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy calls for a rethinking of the
concept of truth. He argues that philosophy is
prescribed with several conditions that can be said to be truth procedures.
These types of truth procedures are science, art, politics and love. Badiou
suggests that in each of these types of procedures truth unfolds through a
modality of knowledge: science is understood most faithfully through the
matheme; art proceeds through the poem; politics' method is emancipation; and love more
precisely, the procedure that makes truth out of the disjunction of sexuated
positions.[172] How do we identify these truth
procedures? It is through philosophy's seizure
of the truth that resides in the difference between (the style of
argumentative exposition) and (the style of persuasive exposition). That is, we
understood from the earlier chapters that we not only create something in our
expression but it is presented in a certain way. Badiou defines:
Philosophy, as discourse, thus organizes the
superposition of a fiction of knowing and a fiction of art. In the void opened
by the gap or interval of these two fictionings, philosophy seizes truths
philosophy declares that there are truths, and ensures they are seized by the
there are.[173]
What
happens in this void for Badiou is a movement from one logic to another logic.
This is where philosophy seizes truth. Badious truth procedure produces a
unity of thought that is a fiction of knowing where philosophy imitates the
logic of mathematics, a fiction of art that is represented in the poem, in the intensity of an act, that is like love without the object and it is like
a political strategy without the stakes of power. These 4 four procedures
can be thought of as methods and modalities that become the measure of a truth
procedure for all to proceed from that all may be within the seizure of the
existence of truths.[174]
This is the real effect of truth process. It is thus necessary to explain what a
logical transformation is when you move from one logic to another logic. Badiou
suggests that the logic of a situation of logic [school] is between classical
logic and intuitionist logic.
Again we see the thinking of Kant, at play. As such a truth is a
transformation of the articulation of the multiplicity of the situation –
its logic – and this transformation is linked to contingency, both of the
event and the situation.[175]
What emerges here are three orders that must be
considered: 1) that the space/medium is active and participating in the
creative process 2) that being in the creative space is interactive and 3) that
becoming occurs in the medium of the creative space, all towards the idea
(intelligible) being made into actuality (sensible).
Gregory Ulmer considers Jacque Derrida in seeking a
translation of Chora, the space of creation, who advises:
If it must be attempted, such an experience or
experiment (experience) is not only but a concern for a word or an atom of meaning but also for a whole
topological texture, let us not yet call it a system, and for ways of
approaching, in order to name them, the elements of this topology.[176]
Before
Derrida presents a translation of Chora he defines the conditions of Chora as
belonging to experience which demands a reflective understanding and of
experiment which is an active understanding. As such, he alludes to the
interactive condition of reflection and action. Derrida continues:
Whether they concern the word Chora itself (place,
location, region, country) or what tradition calls figures - comparison,
images, metaphors - proposed by
Timaeus (mother, nurse, receptacle, imprint-barer), the translations remain
caught in a network of interpretations.[177]
But perhaps it is in the dilemma of a search for interpretation
that Derrida places on doxa or opinion that reveals the true nature of this creative
interactive space of creation, in our desire to seek the creative space. Further, Derrida refers to the metaphorical texture
that Plato uses in describing Chora and the difficulty of locating a meaningful
word that embraces this ambiguity. Both of these analogies do however describe
a spatial relationship
that has contingent interactions. Or we could rethink the process of the
creative space as a spacing of ideas over a network of experiences.
Education theorists are more inclined to consider the
cognitive, social, emotional and artistic development of students through
exploration and discovery that yield new associations to a lived world
(Kindler, Greene, Dewey). Learners need to be cognitively and physically
present in a world that offers a range of mediations for life. Medium and media
allow our intuition to construct a creative outcome. This associational relationship
gives rise to art, which IS the creative process of learning and is evidenced
not solely in a finished product but in a series of projects that can be
assessed in a portfolio, journal, video or other examples of the ongoing
process. Learning does not necessarily happen
in the place of school, but more when the medium~media of a subject (past or
present) communicates to the space of the world in which we live. What is the
ethical responsibility of any education system in selecting a curriculum that
addresses a diverse world population?
What is truth in learning? What interferes with the creative space of
learning? And what do we really desire as an outcome of education? John Dewey
begins to answer some of these questions: Education is a social process.
Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is
life itself. [178]
The terms process and method need to be defined more clearly. Although many dictionaries choose to
interpret these terms as synonymous, there is a distinction that needs to be
made. The contextual definition of
the term process from the Greek
term prokope, suggests
proceeding through the course of time with an effort, a journey or
progress, so that learning is not seen as a finite product but rather as an ongoing
journey of progress that is worked on. The term method
on the other hand, derives from the Greek term methodos,[179]
which means to follow after, and more accurately describes a procedure,
system or mode of inquiry having a predetermined outcome and therefore
cannot be described as a process of generation but as
the use of acquired information or technique.
An example of this distinction between process and
method can be understood through an interview with jazz musician James Emery
who talked about his process both as a composer and teacher of jazz music.
Emery indicated a relationship between his creative process of improvisation
and his method of developing skills and techniques. Emerys thinking process
considers the great musical forms created through history as a starting point
for improvising his own expression. The gathering of these forms, says Emery,
is a life long process; the forms that Emery speaks of are often comprised of
historic signature riffs or phrases and passages (from music legends) that
evoke a style, disposition or place. Emery choreographs improvisational
expression from one musical form to the next. Each historical form becomes a
unique method that requires unique skills and techniques that make up a palette
of sounds and textures that become choices within his creative improvisational
expression. Emery is clear in saying that his skills [method] are merely the
vehicle for carrying his improvisational expression. As a teacher Emerys own
creative process is also a good example of an interdisciplinary pedagogy
through his associational bridging of history with music.
Someone cannot be taught how to generate creative
expression, only the space of learning can be created for that subject. In
other words it can be said that the space of learning requires a place that is
conducive to the subject of investigation. To facilitate the learning of art
one must go to the space of art
(the museum or an artists studio). To create the space for artistic
communication, the place of the classroom must be transformed
into an art studio by bringing in the medium of the art studio, by teaching art
skills and encouraging expression and experimentation that is conducive to each
students unique style, personality or comfort level. Artistic communication is
an act of creation that goes beyond the skills and method, and generates one's own expression.[180]
What is the objective of learning? To be a lifelong learner does not necessarily mean going
to school or having to know something about education methodologies. It simply
means to be present in the process of living. However, because educational
systems have a profound influence on many lives it is necessary to consider their effect on outcomes. Are these outcomes
decisive or do they emancipate?
The place where knowledge is acquired was
once the classroom, but gradually it has shifted
to a virtual place, the internet and is experienced at
home or in the office as well as
the classroom. What is the role of
the teacher in this new age of information and technology? Is a teacher
necessary when the internet provides more information than any one teacher
could possess? The Greek philosopher Heraclites
knew this well 2,500 years ago when he said, Much learning does not teach understanding.[181] Does the
teacher have the capacity to transform information into the understanding that
Heraclites espouses? What motivates the synthesis of information into
knowledge? The need is for a philosophy for life learning that addresses the
diversity of the whole world. Some adjustments will be required to embrace new technologies
brought about by the electronic age. We are seventy years into the Information
Age and it is ironic that information
no longer seems equivalent to knowledge.
It is the task of philosophy, then, to
challenge those practices that are satisfied with learning-without-understanding and instead put forth the concept of information as
creative material to set mental powers into action.
The contrast in theory between Margaret Spellings No
Child Left Behind law (2000-2005) and Ramon Cortines (1993-2000) presents two
different objectives in education. Consider the difference between a student
centered approach and an approach where information is disseminated from an
authority. Consider the difference between hands-on personal interaction and
being lectured to. The outcome of Cortines approach may also be described as
a creative process because something new is generated along the way, as the
subject of study becomes an expressive communication within a learning populus.
Cortines approach to learning involves a variety of knowledge models that
greatly resemble the Greek concept of paideia:
Content/Basic Thinking, Blooms Taxonomy, Critical Thinking, Aesthetic
Education and Creative Thinking models. These philosophical methods have been
carefully developed over the centuries from Plato to the present.
Is it common for the government to
support or control education? The
original Department of Education was created in 1867 to help states develop
more effective systems. The Smith-Hughes Act of 1917 focused on vocational
training for high school students in agriculture, industrial and home
economics. These programs helped the country fulfill a demand for trained
labor. The 1944 GI Bill funded college for its veterans offering deferred
tuition in any field of study. The Office of Education often catered to the
needs of its citizens and made adjustments to its policies and goals that
reflected the change and conditions of the times. The 1958 National Defense
Education Act is the first comprehensive Federal Education program that was
stimulated by the Cold War. Incentives to learn technology, science,
mathematics and foreign language were used to train students to be better able
to defend their country. In the 1960-70s the Department of Education developed
an equal access mission that concentrated on a variety of human rights issues,
anti discrimination by race, gender and disability and aid to the disadvantaged.
The content of this political history is from the U.S. Department of Education
web site, but oddly the history ends after 1980. While the earlier history of
the Department of Education appears to support the development of education as
a support for life skills, the more current history
suggests an agenda that trains individuals to be in service to the demands of
political needs; war.
Hyperlink –
History of Education from 1980 through 1999
1983-
A Nation at Risk
1994-
Contract with
America
How
does learning evolve? Modern theorists have been
aware for some time of the need for a pedagogy that understands the capacity
for learning in specific modalities that are linked
to cognitive and physical development (Vigotsky, Piaget, Dewey, Greene,
Eisner). Methods for gaining knowledge remain age dependent
throughout our life. Even after going through school we devise new ways of
doing and thinking about our world and as we age we devise even more ways of
admitting or rejecting the inevitable: death.
The real test of a method or methods is in the fidelity between the care and
anxiety of Heideggers notion of creativity. The ancient Greeks had many
words for describing a variety of methods for life learning, greatest among
them, rhetoric.
Another Greek term for process is oikononi and refers to giving directions. Creating the space for learning at home may come naturally for many parents who navigate the process of facilitating
language, speech, kinesthetic development and social behavior of their children,
sometimes with the help of a parent, grandparent or a book. No parent
goes to school to become a parent, but for better or worse, most parents teach
their young for at least the first couple of years by their own devices. The
creative space of learning at home would have to be defined by each individual
who reads this. How much freedom did you have to explore and what did you
discover?
From the age of two to four years, young children
experience a creative process that the Greeks called heurisk or a heuristic process. This is defined as a process that discovers, finds, gets for
oneself, devises and invents. Pre-schools create the space of learning by using
socialized learning centers with medium/media that favor a variety of learning
modalities. Through play medium is used to explore and discover subject matter.
Painting becomes art, books engage literacy, mixing and measuring sand involves
logic and motor skills and computer games prepare for hypermedia.
Pre–school methodologies largely favor a variety of modalities that let
young learners explore and open their world through hands-on activities across multiple modalities
(Kindler, Colbert, Greene).
In the best situations children at the age of five
enter a more formalized education system.
This may look like the Greek concept of paideia that literally translates to urge on children and refers to a broader system of training, coaching and instructing learners to
communicate publicly about the value of our world. The optimism of elementary
school creates a space for learning that is open to understanding the world.
The world must be understood in two ways: that is, space/place. Place refers to
the locus of perception (reflection) and space refers to the process of spacing
(action) or choreographing one's places. While
the term paideia was used to indicate a process or system of education, it needs to be stated that the outcome of this
process according to Plato was to produce the skills and techniques necessary
for entering and participating in the fullness of the Greek culture. For Plato
learning had little to do with preparing oneself for a job and more to do with
preparation to enter Greek utopia.
At the age of eight years old young children enter
the world of testing. Here the space of learning is a classroom that is
mandated by law and that is administered by the U.S. Department of
Education. The No Child Left
Behind law requires going back to the basics of reading and mathematics,
through the logic of scientific method or the Gold Standard of assessment. In
her inauguration address, Spellings remarked on a number of striking
dispositions of the NCLB law: learning is mandated; yearly progress is
demanded; schools are penalized for poor test results; merit is measured by
test scores; and the teacher disseminates information from above. Spellings
approach to education is to carry out a government mandated curriculum that
requires teachers to train students to pass standardized tests.
How do we assess children's
learning? The scientific method behind NCLB is not a learning process, but a
form of assessment that seeks strong evidence [182]
of learning through testing so that intervention can be prescribed. Robert Boruch, the
principle designer of the assessment method that is mandated in NCLB presents
the strategy in his book Evidence Matters: Randomized Trials in Education
co-written with Fredrick Mosteller. In the December
issue Yvonna S.
Lincoln reviewed his book in Academe, and discloses some of the issues that are raised by his assessment
method. At the heart of this matter is the question, what constitutes
objective knowledge about social life and the social world. [183] The
obstacles begins between
scientist and researchers who, on one side, maintain that research and
evaluation projects may support multiple views of knowledge and multiple
research strategies to obtain that knowledge. The NCLB method ONLY accepts
evidence that provides objective knowledge through the assessment using these
randomized field trials, in which participants, in a natural, everyday context
such as a school, are randomly assigned to receive different treatments or
programs.[184]
The question of who gets the good treatment and who
gets the bad treatment brings to mind the work of Giorgio Agamben who condemns
the social contract that produces a homo sacer or sacred man.[185]
Agamben rethinks the translation of this ancient Roman enigma that is
resonate with the religious category of the sacred when this category
irrevocably loses its significance and comes to assume contradictory meaning.[186]
The designation of homo sacer was given to a condemned man, who could not executed by the state. However any citizen could kill this man without legal
ramifications. This situation, Agamben says has to do with the
misguided interpretation of sovereignty that is suspended in a state of exception, that is, instead of the
killing of a man as being a natural violence it is displaced in a state of exception as a sovereign
violence. This same misguided interpretation is being enacted
through NCLB and the Department of Education in a state
of exception. Here we can substitute homo sacer with infans
sacer or sacred child who has failed the test under the law of NCLBs gold standard of assessment.
Lincoln suggests that
NCLBs limited view of science has dire consequences for research in the
social sciences because methodologies such as phenomenological work and the
work of critical theorists are dismissed for
funding, despite the claim of the philosophers rejection of the possibility
of genuine objectivity and the existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting,
epistemologies. Lincoln also describes The National
Research Council committees directive to determine what is science or what is
not science and dismisses postmodernist theories in spite of the contribution
that several methodologies, rather than a single model,
have on comprehending the complexities in a variety of social and
educational contexts. NRC provides the guidance to the Scientific Research in
Education defining what is in the domain and what is
not, what gets funding or not and what is taught in the schools or not.
Mosteller and Baruchs intent, says Lincoln, is
to address a concern about ideology parading as intellectual inquiry placing
randomized experiments as the gold standard that solves the problem of
ideology, relevance and intelligibility of results. [187]
However, sociologist Thomas Cook disagrees with the assumption being made by
these authors because their gold standard for scientific research proceeds
from a methodology that was developed as a medical, clinical and
pharmacological model for drug testing of adults and agricultural applications,
which does not guarantee its appropriateness as a methodology for education.
Lincoln ends her critique by stating that the worrisome aspect of this book is that their
research emanates from the federal government which has usurped the roles of
professional disciplinary committees, that in the past were made up of experts
in the field. The effects of the NCLB method have effectively limited what is
considered knowledge to what a small band of
federally approved reviewers say it is.
Looked at from the perspective of
Lincoln's review, the methodology of the No Child Left Behind
law can be seen as an intervention program
that assesses students through randomized field trials that measure learning through the test. Critical of the narrow definition of what is determined as
to be an expectable method of knowledge, Lincoln sees qualitative assessment as a necessary and
vital instrument for determining
the outcome of education practice in general.[188]
The same demand that Heidegger places on the need to
attack the bias of decisive influences on history is what Walter Benjamin understands as the
need to attack the bias of culture in the present. Benjamin is critical of culture because it largely presents the ideas of the ruling
class as a form to be emulated, usually at the
expertise, toil and efforts of others. Benjamin criticizes
the romanticism of intellectuals who mimic the proletariat culture: In
truth, it is far less a matter of making the creative person of bourgeois
background into a master of proletariat art than to
deploying him. [189]
The power of the government to control
education can only succeed as an act of emancipation. Knowledge and learning
cannot be conceived as an end in
itself but must truly open the potentiality of the learner through a
means that fulfills his or her potential to be a free contributing citizen.
When learning is forced into ideological standards there is displacement in the
construction of event of truth, because knowledge-as-truth needs to be
equivalent to the facts-as-truth. There is no politics of emancipation in
restricting ideas to an ideology. Absolute persuasiveness is not the objective
for our own ability to receive knowledge. Truth appears in spite of our own
imperceptible trace of uncertainty in becoming. However, all media, as a form
of expression and communication, can only be understood or learned as truth,
through our own constructing of a fidelity to an event.
Those who control the media,
however, shape their own kind of news
event. Robert Morlino describes how the media influenced public opinion in 2004. The Fox
Media Empire has a history of buying broadcasting stations in all the major
cities of the world, going back to William Fox who owned his
first stations in England during the 1890s. The Sinclair Broadcasting
Company (owners of Fox Media) reaches 25% of all households in the US. In
1996 Sinclair created its own news channel and reporting staff that delivered
its own content. Sinclair also contributed 89% of all
contributions to the Republican Party from the years 1996 through
mid-2004 (from The Center
for Public Integrity).[190]
The power that media wields over the world cannot be over estimated. What
emerges in the twenty first century is a vast empire of media moguls who
control the content. These large media corporations
create their own political fiction of knowing, however news as truth needs to be equivalent to the facts as truth; there is displacement in the construction of a fidelity to
an event of truth. However, all media, as a form of communication, can only be
understood as truth through our own constructing a fidelity to an event.
Absolute persuasiveness is not the objective for our own ability to receive
knowledge. There is no politics of emancipation in restricting ideas to an ideology that breeds fear and
anxiety.
In interview with Ulrich Raulff,[191]
Giorgio Agamben describes another paradigm that he sees used in the political
arena today, that of the State of Exception. This
is a kind of procedure that in the past was used when a state of emergency was in
effect, for a limited amount of time.
Agamben says a historical transformation has occurred that makes the State of
Exception a norm and establishes a hidden but fundamental relationship between
law and lawlessness. For Agamben
this opens a void between liberty and security that tests democracy.
The rigor of the test is nothing new. Modern
scientists since the days of Newton have tested their own theories by proof.
Those theories are then tested by peers or experts in the field of study who review the facts and repeat the
experiment to confer a truth in the process. And then
those peer assessments are considered by professionals in the entire field of study. Consensus is very rare but
a degree of reason remains.
According to Avital Ronell, we live in a
world that has always been tested (Yahwehs testing of Abraham, Nietzsches
loyalty test, and Blanchots trail of experience). Ronell calls attention to
the German word versuch that
unites test with temptation that
frazzles the subject. Ronell is particular concerned about the continuous
demand of testing and its history. The devil is the visible mark of a
permanent testing apparatus,[192]
she says and is historically marked by the experimentation of Nazi Germany. Ronell cites Nietzsche who
understood the concentration camp as the most unrestricted experimental
laboratory in modern history, a part of the will to scientific knowledge.[193] This kind of test that fails to recognize its subject, in pursuit of
knowledge, must be checked by an ethic that considers what it means for
humanity. Ronell describes the urgency and concern that Hegel and Husserl
sought to address, not the scientific character of sciences but rather what
they, or what science in general [including scholarship], had meant and could
mean for human existence.[194]
What kind of objectives would prepare a student to
prosper in life in the year 2005. What skills would become useful in the
future? How would these techniques be used as a means of communicating more
effectively? What kind of future world do you see before you? Is it simple or
complex? How do you
create a place that is most conducive for future learning to thrive? What kind of goals should a Federal Department of
Education have for its citizens? Ronnel agues that any time the government is
involved in testing, screening, standardizing and intelligence there is a
selective invention of stupidity that involves a social rigging. All that
these assessments accomplish is to label certain students as stupid and deficient. While the objectives
of the NCLB claim accountability for learning, its methods fail
through the test and reduce the learner to an object. What kind of methods
would encourage creative learning and what is the measure of a more open
approach to learning?
The demand for excellence was questioned by Christopher
Fynsk who was interviewed on the Culture Machine web site. He commented on the appeal to excellence in academia as a kind of pseudo-foundation, a
simulacrum of self-identification that could be discarded and replaced at any
moment.[195] Fynsk attacks the philosophy associated
with the notion of excellence as an artificial
ideal, without doubt and without choice. Fynsk regards this term as a corporate slogan, and suggests that:
Excellence is nothing but a place holder for an
earlier self-grounding claim to a civic function or a role in Bildung whose structure does indeed call for a reference to
the metaphysics of subjectivity and humanism.[196]
Education
systems have taken on this corporate identity with excellence which Fynsk
acknowledges by adding, Excellence is a delicate state of being; it must be
continually recreated.
There is another idea brought to this interview by
means of the writing of Sam Weber who considers a generative side to doubt. He
writes,
Excellencedivests itself of all content in order
thereby to demarcate its own self-identity, henceforth to be determined in
nothing but the process of representing as such, which is to say, in the process of doubting as
opposed to the determination of that which is doubted.[197]
The
former refers to the kind of disposition of the test and later refers more to the exploratory process of
the arts. Weber continues, As its name suggests, doubting is duplicitous. It
doubles and splits itself off from what it doubts and, in so doing, establishes
a purely formal relation to its own performance.[198]
For Weber doubt in its splitting behaves
as a type of action/reflection: the simultaneous sending and receiving
constructs a new fidelity to this event.
The philosophy of a learning system should be in the
measure of its ability to create and recreate knowledge through interplay of
doubt and reason. Wolfgang Schirmacher takes this notion a step further by
pressing doubt with failure. He contends that it is the FREEDOM of
failure that allows ART to change us (and the world).[199] Adding to the argument, Klaus Ottmann identifies failure's
place in the postmodern condition and suggests, Only a decision unto failure
is a postmodern decision, as failure is immanent in the definition of the
postmodern. Otherwise it would be modern or anti-modern.[200]
Methods are like a duplex system. A duplex refers to a house divided into two apartments or a duplex can refer to
a single system that channels multiple communications through a single conduit.
Some methods act like a duplex where an authority above gives instructions to
those below. Other methods act like a duplex system by opening communication
channels that share the same event.
Every method has its agenda and limits that express a dialectic point of
view. The spacing of these two perspectives is another way of thinking of the
creative space of learning.
Badiou indicates that philosophy
has geographic orientations that imply
the space of learning is conditioned by locality. In Badious summary of current
philosophy he states that these three philosophical orientations correspond to three geographic locations, each having
its own school of thought: The hermeneutic, the analytic and the postmodern.
The hermeneutic
orientation, also called the German School, aims to undo the open and closed givens of the world through interpretation, but this vocation has
largely favored a devotion to openness and is at odds with philosophy. This
devotion develops an unrealistic positivists agenda.[201] This orientation was founded by Hans-Georg Gadamer and can be traced through
Friedrich Schliermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger. According to
Schirmacher, hermeneutics deals mainly with the unavoidable limits of our
world view. [202]
Schirmacher contends that we are both enlightened and limited by the language
and history of world. What hermeneutics brings to education is the power of
describing our placement in a lived world, but at a price of limiting the
horizon of the individual. (Schirmacher, from notes) The question becomes, how
can interpretation attend to both the open and closed nature of givens?
The analytic
orientation aims to define the rules that state the truth or fallacy of any
statement. Here, Badiou describes that the task of analytic philosophy is to
discover the rules that assure an
agreement about meaning, that is guaranteed by the rules of language, by
isolating that which does not have meaning.[203]
This style of thinking relates to the Austrian School
and describes the system of logic that is prevalently used in the Western
educational system where rubrics and tests make up the system. Richard Rorty contends that analytic philosophy has
not lived up to expectations.
By giving up the quest for apodicticity [a quest for
the absolute] and finalityand by finding new reasons for thinking that the
quest will never succeed, it leads us past scientism, just as the German idealists
cleared a path that led us around empiricism.[204]
Rorty
concludes by suggesting that the methods of knowledge are always undone by the
limits set on each succeeding mode and that someday we might find something
complimentary about each method.
Philosophy is also like a duplex system of communication where messages can be sent
simultaneously in opposite directions over a single circuit. Postmodernism
philosophy seeks to deconstruct the idea of
totality and by doing so calls into question many of the great constructions of
the nineteenth century that do not consider the plurality of thought and action
of a diverse world. Postmodern philosophy suggests that this multiplicity
cannot be captured in a totalized idea. Jacque Derrida, Jacque Lacan,
Baudrillard and Jon Luc-Nancy are those French philosophers who have largely defined postmodern thinking.
These philosophers challenged the logic of any singular truth by deconstructing
language in a world that is open to multiple cultures, experiences and
interpretations. The post-modern condition identifies with the multiplicity of
thinking by realizing the limit of language as it collaborates with other art
media. Badiou suggests that the inclusive process of postmodernism destabilized
the very nature of philosophy which:
. . . might be called mixed practices, de-totalized practices or impure
thinking practices. It situates thought on the outskirts, in areas that cannot
be circumscribed, In particular it installs philosophical thought at the
periphery of art, and proposes an untotalizable mixture of the conceptual
method of philosophy and the sense oriented enterprise of art.[205]
But
the most enduring attributes of postmodernism might be its openness to
contingencies. Which method is most appropriate for learning? [206] Heidegger suggests:
. . . method is based
on viewing in advance in an appropriate way the basic constitution of the
object to be disclosed, or of the domain within which the object lies. Thus
any genuinely methodical consideration- which is to be distinguished from empty
discussions of technique- must likewise give information about the kind of
Being of the entity which has been taken as our theme.[207]
How does truth survive the multiplicity of a world of
people with different beliefs? At best, method
takes us up to a limit. In the previous chapters it was discussed that
creativity in the process goes beyond method only at the point where some new
synthesis of understanding generates one's own
expressive communication that reveals the application of methods. The outcome
of this is a concept of truth. This outcome of truth must not be mistaken for
an ideological positivism because
everyone makes mistakes. Joshua
Micha Marshall[208]
contends that a deception is inherent in everyone.[209]
There is then a need for an ethic of self-assessment and a test for those who
write the test.
How is a learning space/place created? Alain Badiou
calls for a rethinking of the concept of truth. For Badiou, sensing the
distinction between truth and knowledge is essential. Kant understood this as the
distinction between reason and understanding and Heidegger saw this distinction as between truth (aletheia) and science (techne). Badiou suggests that the essence of truth remains
inaccessible through the analytic tradition. However, it is just at this
juncture where science discovers the limitations of its own methods, that faith-based
organizations claim that the truth lies in intelligent design. "Intelligent design" is a theory that states life is too complex to be
explained by evolution and therefore must have been created by an absolute
designer (God). The co-opting of
truth procedures by faith-based science is not enough to convince any critical
thinker. The lack of any evidence raises ethical questions in regard to what
truth is law. Badiou would suggest another means of constructing truth:
We must conceive of a truth both as the construction
of a fidelity to an event, and as the generic potency of a transformation of a
domain of knowledge.[210]
Badious fidelity is more like the Greek word pistoo (to be made trustworthy) and suggests
that the term fidelity is
an achieved process,
as apposed to an ideology given without questioning or an act of blind faith. Truth is something that requires the
diligence of effort to understand and the thinking behind the process of
truth-building assures this fidelity. However there is a negative effect of
trying to construct this truth:
All categories by which the essence of a truth can be
submitted to thought are negative: undecidability, indiscernibility, the
generic not-all, and the unnamable. The ethic of truths resides entirely in the
measure taken of this negative, or in other words, in the limitations placed on
the potency of truth by the hazards of its construction.[211]
One of the ways to handle these negatives
is, as Heidegger understood, is to remove any phenomenon of the truth
from the proposition: In becoming a property of the proposition, not only does
truth displace its locus; it transforms its essence.[212]
The effect of this process is, A language that is related, not to
things already presented, but to things which have not yet arrived.[213] For Heidegger this comes in the form of
a poem, for Nietzsche in the form of music, and for Badiou in the form of art. It is
the medium of language itself that may be the problem.
The uncertainty of describing human experience in
words can be seen as a part of a condition that William Carlos Williams [214]
speaks of, Now I am not what I was when the
word was forming to say what I am.[215]
(The condition, of always becoming must be considered as something about to be
given. It is necessary to recognize the
uncertainty that accompanies our understanding. The ethical test of reason may
be as simple as sensing while thinking,
or asking; how does this idea feel?
How does reflection create an awareness of this process of accumulating
experiences? How does process
construct meanings? How does a period of activity and production interface with
reflection and what are some criteria for evaluation? Deconstructionists pose the problem as a void that is
created in language as it is over analyzed. Walter Benjamin hints at a
suggestion to shift knowledge modalities,
Only images in the mind vitalize the will. The mere
word, by contrast, at most inflames it, to leave it smoldering, blasted. There
is no intact will without exact pictorial imagination. No imagination without
innervations.[216]
Aesthetic Education since the early 70s has placed
philosophy at the center of its pedagogy. Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, Elliott
Eisner and Maxine Greene have all spoken of the relationship that the arts
create between reason and imagination.
Aesthetic reflection sets
mental powers into action by the medium/media of the work of art. As a
space/place of learning, aesthetic education may provide a more philosophically
diverse process that opens new associations between concepts and artistic
methods through a close study of a work of art. Action and reflection, through
art activities and inquiry, focus both on the thinking process and the technique process in a way that clarifies multiple
potentiality in the work of art,
allowing new associations to be made
between the elements that make up the language and the way different
dispositions create meaning. This is a process where imagination and method are in the fidelity of
a shared event.
When Socrates [217]
says the life, unreflected, is not worth living, what does that suggest about
life in early Greece? The
pedagogical test of process can be traced by reflection of portfolios, logs,
diaries, anthologies, databases, etc.
The work of art provides the medium and contextual media for reason and
imagination to consider. Skill and knowledge become vehicles
that open a space for learning. The question of how we measure learning
in a system where there are so many unknowns would also then require that a
certain amount of life would have to be lived before reflection and evaluation
could begin. When Schirmacher[218]
says, Get a life, then get a philosophy, he suggests that theory comes out of
life and not the other way around.
What is the space of creative learning? Our imagination plays with the elements of the artworks
which draw us in. Immanuel Kant in his book Critique of Pure Reason
first theorized that the faculty of the imagination is responsible for forming concepts to be considered
for knowledge.[219]
Kants placement of imagination as a power to form understanding of content also
describes the creative process of the arts as something generated from media,
created by the imagination. As such, aesthetic reflection in the arts offers a twofold
method of determining understanding: aesthetic reflection of the beautiful and
the sublime. The beautiful reveals on the basis of interpretation that perception
becomes an act that makes things
determinate[220]
and ultimately undecidable as truth. Badiou continues,
Because the feeling of the beautiful
results from a form, which is a limitation, its affinity lies with
understanding Because the sublime feeling can be generated by a without-form,
it lies with reason.[221]
The difference between the beautiful and the sublime is linked to
the difference between the limited character of the object and the
without-limit of the objectIt is the limit itself that understanding cannot
conceive of as its object. This is not just a difference between reason and
understanding but the limit is its method: all categories of understanding are
the operators of determination, that is, limitation (or failure).
However, Lyotard goes further to say that
this limit is not an object for understanding but a method for determining
understanding.[222]
This method of determining understanding involves the heuristic power of
reflection, says Lyotard and is particularly useful for noticing the materials
that set mental powers into motion.[223]
Traditionally, the sublime was
experienced in nature: the vastness of the ocean or the night sky often evoke
the sublime. In architecture, the Pyramids of Giza are said to evoke the
feeling of the sublime. Often the sublime appears in dreams.
Bruce
Chatwin considers the ancient ritual created by the Australian Aboriginals
in his book Songlines.[224]
This ritual, known by the Aborigines as the Dreaming, can be seen as a historical pedagogy that involves
walking the migration paths of their ancestors. The Dreaming is rooted in the legacy of the primordial ancestors who roamed
the land. Every step of the migration has a verse in the Dreaming that records the knowledge of the place and content
of a location through the landscape. The Dreaming also serve as hypermedia in that the objects in each
locality act as maps, icons or symbols for learning. In a very real way these
Australians carry the knowledge of their world in every step they take. The
language of their knowledge is deposited in a
footstep that is accompanied by a line of
song. As such, the Dreaming
describe a process that requires an awareness of place that has an association
to an ancestral site. Knowledge was held within the place (chora) with an outcome for learning the ways of
their culture. The Dreaming is
not choreographed, as Westerners would write notes on an eight bar music scale,
but rather the subject of the song is revealed in the passage through their
ancient migration route. The Dreaming also reveals an interdisciplinary method that combines music,
geography, ecology, social beliefs and oral history that are understood as
making a up a network of site
specific places of knowledge. This knowledge of the Dreaming is captured in a carving called a tjuringa, a carved wood or stone plaque that is covered with
patterns representing the wanderings of the
owners Dreamtime Ancestor. Dreaming as a method, teaches those present how to notice in their own world
the ways of their ancestors.[225]
E. V. Walter calls the Aboriginals'
Dreaming a topistics consciousness that constructs a relation between topic and
space:
. . . for the Aboriginals, physical nature is a domain of located
experience. Moreover, the dramatic history of the ancestral spirits--the great mythic persons of the dreaming-- is also the grand design for nature, society and place, all
contained within a spiritual-physical unity. The Aborigines cannot separate
their way of feeling from their way of thinking about places. The Dreaming, like Platos open-eyed dream
vision of chora, grasps the nature of place holistically as a unified location
of forms, powers, and feelings.[226]
The Dreaming of the Aboriginals may
contain a clue for the rethinking of the creative space of learning. Walter
suggests that this, Haptic [grasping] perception reminds us that the whole
self may grasp reality without seeing, hearing or thinking. It calls attention
to a primitive way of knowing that resembles mythical thought, in contrast to
the analytical stages of seeing, thinking, and acting-- a unified structure of
feeling and doing.[227]
Walter suggests that the Australian aboriginals are one of the few remaining
examples of topistics unity and that perhaps, exploring the roots of renewal
may be nourished by a restitution of decayed intelligence.[228]
What kinds of places are conducive to building a
creative life? If we are to consider process as the measure of the creative
space then it is necessary to consider an inquiry of the terms space (chora) and place (topos).
Gregory Ulmer cites a variety of sources who have dealt with the
understanding of this association between topos and chora. He continues, Derridas effort to extract chora from the tradition of Platonism is shared by E. V.
Walter, who distinguishes it from topos by noting that the former term names a grounded mode of thought that
was available in Plato but has been buried.
[229]
What was going on in Greece at the time of Plato that required a new
distinction in defining a difference between place and space?
One can begin to see how science in Greece, after
Plato, began to change its way of gaining
knowledge to an analytic method based on a collection of common topoi or places
that became the focus of a subject or topic of discussion. The concept of topos referred to a grounded way of thinking of a
determined place that formed the rules of science which could be measured,
while chora, which describes the
spacing or choreography of
everything that is to take place, becomes a
neutral vehicle. Walter continues, rather the task is to rethink the
association of invention with place before place was split into topos and chora.[230] This
fusing of chora and topos may be thought of as a time when place became so
infused with content that place became a
symbol or icon that represented something beyond its medium. Walters desire is
to restore an association between topos as topic and place fused by the
transactional interplay of choreography. This is the same kind of association
that Kant brings to the process of intuition, imagination, reason and
reflection. Derrida also rethinks a new space-time communication that finds fulfillment in the saturation of
associations. Walter also suggests that this early Greek understanding of chora was frequently associated to a sacred place. Ulmers
interest in this aspect of chora is to establish a creative method for
hypermedia, based on the rethinking of chora.
Walter anticipates the possibility of a hyper-rhetoric in which the places of
invention are figured not as topoi
but as chora. Grounded Platonism, according to E. V.
Walter:
would rely less on mathematical rationalizations
and more on the topistics of expressive intuitions: a haptic rather than
analytic mode of thought. Topistics replaces problems, arguments, solutions
with a choral 'dream reasoning' of riddles. A place is experienced
wholistically as a riddle understood in terms of a ker, ghost, or bogey associated with the energy of space
as an active receptacle[231]
Becoming occurs in the medium of the creative space, all
towards the idea (intelligible) that is made into actuality (sensible). Is this the new kind of being
that Plato describes, the receptacle that nurtures generation? If so, then in being the one who facilitates anothers possibility,
one chooses to become the medium for another. The space of creativity is the
process that is being nurtured by an imperceptible facilitator. Viewed in the present day light of stem cell research, it
is interesting to see that Plato
describes a womb-like place for generation. This can be likened to a stem cell that can replicate any gene with the right
genetic prompting. This is
a place of phusis, where growth becomes spontaneous. In this way perhaps the
proper medium allows someone to become. Young children have an imaginative
capacity to reshape their image of the world into varied and imaginative
constructions.
The Dreaming of the Australian Aboriginals may be
compared to Christos Gates in Central Park. The artwork
presents a topistics method that creates the space for learning, through its
experiential dimension. The Gates
are like the Songlines in that
they are understood as a place for a stroll, a
mediated space that is chora. The
installation was designed as a series of objects that cause the viewer to
experience and walk in real time through and around the art/park. The choice of
a gate as a metaphor of passage might at first imply a sense of keeping out, or locking in. However, Christo choreographs people's
movements through his placement of individual gates that provide a
network of archways of passage, encouraging a flow from place to place. This makes possible a
process of experiencing through time, the space and place of the art and park.
The art experience becomes a series of places along the journey through the
artwork that evokes different interpretations of each local place
along the way (like the Aboriginal Dreaming). The Gates in Central Park actually force an awareness of the park, its curvy
paths, its layers of concentric pathways and its
rarely explored corners. In a very real way the work of art, made of PVC, nylon
and steel seemed consciously chosen for its industrial, mundane
characteristics. However the situated placement and spacing of these units
communicate a desire to flow along their physical placements and at the same time encourage a
new awareness of our everyday world. This calls attention to a topistic method
that designs associational relationships that are not bound by framed ideology
but rather start with a medium which creates a spacing of media that reawakens an active place (chora). This enables to occur a
process of placing and spacing oneself along the web of paths where choosing one's
direction yields a new association of space/place. The method of the Gates could be described as a physical action experienced
as an analog hypermediation in space time. A conceptual method unfolds by
constructing associational relationships with each new placement within the
space/place. This presentation of The Gates in Central Park, reveals a process that actively moves its viewers
through a pathway that leads into a participatory journey of discovery. This
process suggests a pedagogical question that relates to the early question in Chapter One about defining creativity in the process
of learning. How do students carry their learning through their life? If
Christo is capable of creating the space for New Yorkers to take a long walk
through Central Park in February and have an
aesthetic experience, then how can teachers create a place/space that
transforms the classroom into a work of art? Here the medium/media becomes the
subject of study that allows for choices that do not end in an answer, but
awaken new associations to ones own world and time through a continuation of
discoveries.
Are we rethinking ourselves
as a result of using electronic media? If so, then communication and literacy
may be undergoing a change too. The
space of learning for the next
generation occurs in a virtual classroom where the world is noticed in
real-time through a gateway
called the Internet. Electronic
technologies require new methods and new ways of considering the world. The
method for learning through computers and the Internet is called
hyper-mediation. Clicking on web pages, downloading music, checking on-line
grades, responding to e-mails, blogging friends and answering instant Messages
are types of hypermedia that require knowledge of a variety of methods to use. Often these skills are
learned and attained prior to acquiring language, through playing games on a
computer. At other times these skills are learned by watching others at home.
New technologies supply the product and the process for communication. In hypermedia the objective of hyper-communication is to make
associations across a network of domains or users. The saturation of ideas
described in Chapters One and Two suggests
that creativity is a process of discovering associational relationships (within
the interplay of care and doubt) with our world, that yield some new
communication through media by action, transaction or reflective action. When
intuition is in action, the choice of medium is transformed into a concept of
media. This also compares with the notion of selecting the right materials for
the job. For the attentive mind, a
transactional understanding of
media happens by noticing new
relationships between the imagined world and the sensed world; this gives
rise to discovering new ideas, problem solving, satisfying curiosity, quenching
an intellectual desire and most importantly, creating ones own meaning. In
matters of reflection, philosophy critiques the present condition by attacking
the bias of history through multiple perspectives so that a new awareness is
attained.
How can art media open a space for learning that
creates a unity of thought? Badiou suggests through the interplay of politics,
art, science and love. Philosophy continually reflects back on life. In 1987, Jean Baudrillard described another possibility for the ways we think
about the barrage of information we encounter everyday. In The Ecstasy of
Communication he suggests another reality:
Not into nothingness, but what if the modern
universe of communication, of hyper-communication, had plunged us, not into the
senseless, but into a tremendous saturation of meaning entirely consumed by its
success – without the game, the secret or distance.[232]
This
kind of being in the present is just the kind of experience that is required
for the lifelong learner who contributes something to the world we live in.
Keep in mind this is the kind of relationship Gadamer constructs between the speaker and the partner, that defines the process of communication. This is to suggest an
associational, conversational or transactional nature of place/medium and the
choral inter-mediation of the creative process of composing. Baudrillard
reconfigures the process of thinking through media, much like Peter Greenaway
who fulfills our sense and imagination, through his performances where multiple
layers of film screens create a space for dancers, actors and musicians.
How can art curate a world of possibilities for
learning? The pathway
to knowledge that was founded by the early Greeks was situated in science and
logic as the prime source of truth. But Schirmacher says it is Heidegger who voices a suspicion, pressing it into a certainty
that leads to the crux of our present problem.[233] Schirmacher continues by saying that it
is Heidegger who succinctly puts the cause on the enframing of modern technology. Heidegger describes this
condition in The Danger, his
lecture from 1949: Enframing: the gathering together of the setting-upon in
the sense of entrapping and ordering. Schirmacher continues, The ubiquitous
machinery of technology and the scientific standards mutually secure their
stock of nature, their standing reserve, and have unceremoniously
standardized human beings as well as things, reducing them to calculative
terms. The philosophy of the current system of education fails the test by its
standardizing methods that do not generate knowledge only a vacant artificial
excellence. In the words of Schirmacher this condition is called artificial
life. As the only life we know,
we proceed with a simple shift in thinking, some imperceptible unfolding like
Schirmachers understanding of a fulfilled self,
Missing a note, fading away, overcoming, blurring and
letting be are imperceptible perceptions in which the art as well as the artificiality of our culture work together at their most intense
level and generate an innocence of becoming.[234]
How much freedom is in the creative space of
democracy, education, business, art?
Only through ones own decision to act. How does a philosophy frame
issues about creativity and learning? As aesthetic reflection, Kant suggested
our senses provide the medium for our reason to construct knowledge. Jean-Luc
Nancy suggests that, Sense makes sense only in the space of philosophy as it
ends by opening up the world. What does it mean to open up the world? This is
also what Raymond Cortines calls for through an interactive process that opens
students to a larger world.
The task of learning can then be said, to seek new
associations for individuals to pursue there own becoming. The place of
learning for
Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaire and Henrdrick Lorentz was a personal
space, somewhere between thinking and intuition, that led each of these
learners to construct the infamous
theory of relativity, each through there own unique situated position.[235]
What caused these men to search and learn is not limited to what happened in
their schooling but more about their imaginations putting into play their
expression of an idea into a community of ideas.
Jean-Franois
Lyotard compares the sublime and taste through the production of the work
of art. He concludes by summarizing a synthesis of Immanuel Kant and Edmund
Burke;
Genius is thus declared to consist in a happy
relation[236] in the
sense that we speak of the joy of hitting on the expression[237]
that is suited to find out ideas [by imagination] for a given concept [by
reason]... [that] may be communicated to others. [238]
At best a learning community emerges, not necessarily in agreement or
disagreement, but an agreement between reason and intuition to becoming.[239]
Klaus Ottmann
considers this as an aesthetic decision, citing Jean-Luc Nancy, philosophy and
its freedom do not coincide in a subjective presence and that every
philosophical decision is delivered to itself by something that, unknown to
it, has already been raised into thinking Thinking [i.e., aesthetic decision]
does not appear to it self in a subject, but receives (itself) from a freedom
that is not present to it. Ottmann describes another kind of autonomous art
that only represents itself as itself.
We can set ourselves up for creativity by
constructing a space in the medium that is conducive to our Becoming (the
creative space). Creativity requires the freedom to make choices (free of decisiveness)
that affect an outcome, where new relationships unfold and open unexpected
possibilities. This is often difficult for teachers who want to predict the
outcome of lessons rather letting students seek their own path. This kind of exploration allows
individuals to construct their own meaning. When students reflect on their own generated actions they
identify with their own place in a self-constructed world. Communicating the
experience of being is a politically creative act that emancipates knowledge.
Creativity lets ideas emerge. Creativity happens in the event of our own
becoming.
Vision shows forth more than itself,
Merleau-Ponty
The argument of this thesis has laid out a series of expositions that
present a philosophy for life learning that considers the creative process
associated with the arts as a space for learning. This haptic process is understood as the aesthetic
reflection of the beautiful and the sublime. Within the creative process, media
is generated as a result of a decision to act on a choice of medium that
receives an image, sound, word or idea.
The generated work of art can be understood through aesthetic reflection.
Reflection on a work of art involves noticing unexpected associations within
the elements of the art. Aesthetic reflection of beauty is derived from our
sense of taste or judgment, and develops from an early phase of describing
likes and dislikes found in the work of art. A more developed phase of
reflection of a work of art develops a more curatorial interpretation that
plays with multiple meanings.
Aesthetic reflection of the sublime, on the other
hand, describes a void that forces a seizure
of both sense and reason. This
marks the spot where learning begins. The learning process happens in the event
of the sublime through an act of reflection. The act of learning occurs as an
act, in a spontaneous action-reflection to an awakened discovery. The word
sublime in ancient Greek is agnos
and translates to a situation where the senses fluctuate between passive and
active. We approach the sublime, as an agnos infans or quivering infant whose ideal image of the world is shattered by the
sublime: sense and reason fail to know. There is nothing for intuition to give
to reason for synthesis and there is nothing for reason to reflect on that
would suggest any similar event for reason to compare. As an act of creation
the sublime is the creative space for generating learning. Because of the
seizure of sense and reason the first action that precedes the sublime
experience reveals a subliminal reaction in the face of the unknown, the first
step towards knowing.
What kinds of methods emancipate life learning?
Multiple lines of inquiry have directed this thesis so that the arts,
education, history, science and philosophy may be layered and combined in a post modern way and map
a trajectory into the future. How we form philosophical questions that open
possibilities is of critical importance. Questions have long been the starting
point for science, philosophy and the arts as a source for penetrating the
unknown. The distress occurs when faith based questions (ideal, absolute, etc.), that cannot be answered by empirical
investigation, are presented as facts. The shift during the late 20th
century from mysteries of faith to faith as intelligent design is such a case
of co-opting empirical science in the name of ideology. The blind faith of
ideology is quite different from Kierkegaards
leap into faith. A leap into faith is a life process that proceeds as a
fidelity that is developed through an ongoing
process of becoming. This
fidelity comes through an ongoing effort in a practice that searches for
unknowns. This is the kind of fidelity that goes beyond the skill to find yet
another discovery.
Question strategies should confirm what is already
known and challenge conventional beliefs. Aesthetic reflection requires
questioning that addresses the process which allows us to sense and understand
truths as conditioned by the moment rather than carved in stone. In hypermedia
question strategies do not require fixed answers but allow multiple choices
that have answers that present one's own
possibility for fulfillment.
Asking questions requires a leap into imagination on
the part of teachers. Teachers
must draw upon their capacity to imagine the lives of the learners they work
with, and take their points of view in listening to what they say. Responding to questions that provoke
thinking requires that children's imaginations be engaged as well. The questions which provoke the most
excited conversation in the galleries and in the classroom are those which
stimulate thinking, challenge assumptions, draw upon the viewpoints and
contributions of others, and connect to learning in the various
disciplines.
Asking someone a question, can be an invitation to
take that first step in a journey. Cultivating and articulating these questions
can open doors that reveal pathways for learners. By the
teacher's calling attention to the
details of an art work, students are drawn to see a connection with their own life
experiences through what they observe. Questions become a method that supports
good learning practice and connects ideas to
learning modalities.
Asking questions that heighten noticing can be
refined to address the aesthetic reflection of the beautiful and the sublime in
a variety of ways:
Another outcome of this thesis suggests a need for
lifelong learners to discover a
variety of terms that are pertinent to the creative process and suggests a need
to link concepts that were broken in early Greek history when the sciences began
to separate from the arts. One of these breaks is between chora and topos /
space and place. For the arts this unity was never broken: dance, music,
theater, poetry and the plastic arts all require an understanding of a unity of
space, time and place. Beginning students in drawing classes frequently
describe a transitional experience when they realize that drawing is not
thinking or sensing, it just happens. This is the
kind of response that suggests someone whose eye-hand coordination is now functioning.
Or this may be the kind of creative space that Alain Badiou describes that is
saturated by its own normalcy.
The creative process involves an interplay between
sense and reason / activity and reflection. A haptic method is one that grasps
both physically and conceptually. This is also the kind of experience that
defines the philosophy of aesthetics as traced through a lineage of
philosophers: Burke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger, Benjamin,
Derrida and Greene.
The haptic method of the Australian Aborigines is yet another example of an analog hypermedia. The Dreamings function at the level of hypermedia where the spacing of places serves as vehicle containing the ethos of the people. Each element in the landscape is conceptually grasped
