Syncretism: Becoming Water

The founding motivation of E is to use digital media to create an interface capable of mapping the dispersed and fragmented specialized disciplines of the university onto the holistic tangle of problems in the lifeworld (as noted on our website).  We illustrated the incommensurability of these two conditions (the academy / lifeworld problems, such as “water”) with the images of (respectively), the “silos” of an organizational chart, and a Jackson Pollack painting.

It is important to note a further difficulty faced by our interface project, which is that these two images represent two different metaphysics, distinguishing Western and Asian worldviews.  In his study Art and Time, Philip Rawson described the difference between West and East using similar images to those we used to distinguish academic knowledge and the ecology of problems (the West as grid; the East as tangle).  In his context Rawson characterizes the two orders in terms of synchronic segmentation (sequence and change) versus diachronic flow (duration and continuity).

The relevant point for us is made clear in Rawson’s further specification of the Asian metaphysics by means of the image of water.  His entanglement diagram “illustrates the duration of happening through time as a function for the continuous linear flow of energy.  This appears similar to branching and joining streams, resembling the channels in a huge river delta.  They connect what we conventionally  think of as chains of separate forms linked by complex cause and effect.  We can call this the water image of time.  Certain peoples have built their cultures around this water image, and it has profoundly affected their artistic expression:  the Chinese in particular.”  The West, in contrast, analyses time (universal flows of every sort) “according to static and abstract grids of pigeonholes.”

Rawson’s observation helps clarify the larger challenge of our project.  The obstacle preventing the holistic organization of academic knowledge is not “just” bureaucratic or institutional, but metaphysical.   Part of our project, then, must include the invention of a syncretic consultancy, hybridizing the virtues of Western and Eastern apparati.   It is not enough to know water (the Western manner); we must become water.

Water as Figure

What is water within the disciplinary discourse of media studies? It is a figure. A figure appropriates for its signifier or vocabulary some first-order information (word, image, sound, scene) and operates it rhetorically, to say something else. A figure relies upon AS the way concepts rely upon IS. For example, the water works by Roni Horn.

Consilience and Conduction

Pondering our collaboration, and wanting to open a second front, while Howard tinkers with his tool. (Howard, anything to report?)
Reading Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998). The term was coined in the 19th c., to name the continuing Enlightenment ideal (dating back as well to the first philosopher, Thales of Miletus, in Ionia), of a unification of all knowledge. Wilson notes the same fragmentation in the academy that is our own point of departure, and acknowledges the loss of the Enlightenment belief in progress in knowledge (and in society). He asserts the need to recover this lost momentum and trajectory, and proposes that as hybridizing of disciplines develops, all learning will devolve into two (interdependent) modes: natural sciences and creative arts.
A point of dialogue, to be tested in our electrate context, is a difference or distinction between Wilson and E (the difference made by taking into account the apparatus shift into electracy). Here is Wilson’s summation of the origins and meaning of the term.

“William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis __The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences__, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory, across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “the consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs” (Wilson, 8).

The theory informing our experiment (since I am the theorist!) relocates the site of correlation. The shift does not contradict the spirit of consilience as a term, which, as Wilson notes, is an extension or stronger, more precise sense of “coherence.” Electracy adds to the cycle of inference (abduction deduction induction) a fourth mode — conduction– to describe the kind of coherence found in the arts: a holistic interdependent aesthetic internal organization of a complex heterogeneous collection of materials. “Vortex” is Ezra Pound’s name for this mode of order (anticipating the effect of self-organization in dynamical systems). In the imaging technologies of electracy, the vortex becomes a better candidate for supporting consilience than is similarity or analogy of inductions.
This claim remains to be made precise and tested in our collaboration. To appropriate and revise the original definition of consilience:
“the consilience of Conductions takes place when a signifier, obtained from one disciplinary discourse, coincides with a signifier, obtained from another different disciplinary discourse. This consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs”
A preliminary convergence to scan for coincidental signifiers that may jump together:
WATER as…
figure (media theory)
site (architecture)
number (mathematics, statistics)
code (computer programming)
resource (agriculture engineering)

E
glue
(aka the little red hen)