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conferencereport uploaded a new video
(7 hours ago)
Some of the experiences which structure our sensory engagement with the ...
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Some of the experiences which structure our sensory engagement with the world seem to me to be more or less prototypical, and these recurrent features accumulate a certain weight of poetic baggage as a result of this prototypicality. Within the organisation of the visual sense for example we are exposed repearedly to objects and phenomena which appear as verticals, perpendicular to the equally typical horizontal that bisects the visual field. I feel that these verticals, trees, telegraph poles, electricity pylons, buildings, and especially people, somehow carry with them the entailments of verticality, most particularly entailments suggesting temporality, resistance, negative entropy, liveness. To move down is to go with the force of gravity towards one's final resting place; to move up is to strive against the pull of the earth in the quest for light and vision that comes with elevation; and it is between these movements that the vertical dimension is drawn. Assaults upon the symbols of verticality, most specifically the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001, are also attacks on these values and qualities.
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conferencereport uploaded a new video
(7 hours ago)
A lot of the reading I've been doing lately stresses the poetic nature o...
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A lot of the reading I've been doing lately stresses the poetic nature of cognition, both conscious and non-conscious. Our thinking is rife with metaphor, metanymy, and all of the various tropes more usually associated with poetry and this style of thinking is revealed in the language we use, the gestures we make and the objects we construct.. This is the case even with the most straightforward and apparently transparent piece of non-literary writing, including much of physics and mathematics apparently. (Which is not to say that the findings of physics or the axioms of mathematics are any less true, only that what constitutes the understanding and expression of that truth needs to be reinterpreted as a kind of shared, collaborative poem, or as Richard Dawkins puts it 'science is the poetry of reality'). For me this begs the question, if all writing is to a large extent 'poetic', reflective of the poetic cognition which produced it, then what is the status of that form of writing which we have traditionally referred to as 'poetry'? I would guess that the only valid way to approach that question would be to talk about contexts and about categories of experience; a piece of writing can be viewed (sic) as poetry if it gains access to the domain of practice and knowledge that we understand and categorise as poetry.
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conferencereport uploaded a new video
(7 hours ago)
I've talked before on here about the ways in which the structure of phen...
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I've talked before on here about the ways in which the structure of phenomenological experience as organised according to the functioning of the different senses provides templates for the structuring of other concepts which does not actually appear within the senses but is fundementally abstract. I'm just wondering whether this idea might not be extended such that the structures that we use to act within the world might also provide conceptual framework for abstract thought. We engage with the world through a number of different channels which maybe these can be thought of as 'action modalities' complementing the 'sensory modalities' of hearing, sight, touch etc. The ones I would offer as suggested 'action modalities' are language, motion, haptic manipulation, and the construction of objects, although these are just preliminary guesses unsupported by any serious research.
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conferencereport uploaded a new video
(1 day ago)
This is kind of a follow-up to my last video when I was talking about th...
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This is kind of a follow-up to my last video when I was talking about the way that metaphors drawn from the different sensory modalities; sight, hearing, taste etc. are used in an organised way to refer to different ways of understanding and expressing ideas. One aspect of this which is exercising me at the moment,(literally and metaphorically), is the role of motion as a part of our sensory engagement with the world. In order for any of the senses to operate at all the body must be moving. The eyes saccade in order to gather the 'news of difference' that underpins seeing; feeling the hardness or the texture of a surface requires the hand to move against or across it; hearing consists of the movement of tympanum, bones of the inner ear, fluids in the cochlea, etc.
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conferencereport uploaded a new video
(1 day ago)
As professoranton rightly points out, the way the sensory modalities of ...
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As professoranton rightly points out, the way the sensory modalities of sight, hearing, touch, taste etc operate is very different for each of the senses. Sight is very perspectival and 'linear' (in the sense that there is a clear and necessary 'line of sight' connecting the organ of vision to the object of perception. Hearing, on the other hand, is barely perspectival at all and sounds wash over and around us in a way which is not linear at all.
I find it very interesting that these differences in the structural logic of the different senses is used to provide the structure and logic to abstract concepts through the application of different sensory metaphors. Knowledge which we wish to understand and express as scientific or empirical uses metaphors of sight, including clarity, illumination, and ideal (elevated) viewing position. When we want to talk about emotional information we resist visual metaphors and rely instead on those of touch and the proximity and contact which touch requires. Taste is something else again.
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