----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
so much of this seems bad abstraction, yet I'm drawn in by Johannes's
image to say, the stories we tell make up the body - but I don't like
stories so perhaps I should say, the plots we make thicken as the body -
since we don't yet know what a body can do...
On 04/07/13 17:08, Johannes Birringer wrote:
----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
dear all
following up on Terry Flaxton's postings, especially his suggestion to give emphasis to
"practical investigations of consciousness"
rather than resist the increasing uselessness (?) of theory and ratiocinatory
construction (obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic
cataloguing of meaning),
may I ask about how Terry understands the exogram or the exogrammatic?
You write that cognitive neuroscientists claim
the human project [that] began simply by panto-miming to exchange information
that would be remembered within the brain (engramatically) and eventually
export all of human memory outside of our own minds into surrounding reality.
Initially this was through a simple exogram like a storytelling, a henge, a
pyramid, a book, a film and then recently, telematically.
But with the advent of computers and data (big or small, it doesn't matter)
then the human exogramatic project was coming to its conclusion - everything
has been placed outside of ourselves into surrounding reality...
is not the exogrammatic an import, rather than exported? is not exogrammatic
knowledge and memory and kinetic and symbolic forms continuously re-adapted by
the bodymind in our movement through the world, by necessity, as the
unconscious, or engrammatic information, might be error prone to some extent,
or overloaded, if it is true that the essential elements of our sense of the
self – of the propensity for action and our memory – act at an unconscious
level, not in the sense that they regard something being suppressed, yet in
the sense of a functional unconscious situated beyond the boundaries of
awareness for purely operative reasons? I read somewhere that if all mental
operations were carried out under the control of consciousness, human beings
would be overloaded and therefore incapable of action.
May I shift momentarily from ISEA context to a small Montessori school in
Houston, where yesterday by fluke if accident, I was invited to teach a dance
class to 4 and 5-year olds? The teachers there had told me that by age three,
much of the child's development is in place, and by age six, there isn't too
much more that can be affected and changed anymore as developmental pattern or
identity has been set in motion (through the mix of genetic information,
learning, the sensorimotor functions, language acquisition and environmental
influence). I had not known really that our bodymind is shaped crucially at
such an early stage, and am ignorant of developmental psychology.
But I was experiencing the beauty of, if you want, the pantomine and the
analogical imagination in the young children, as they went through a series of
exercises with me culled from Yoga, sports, dance, vocal training,
improvisation, music, rhythm, and the realm of kinaesthesia that I think has
not been addressed yet in Terry's postings and the responses. I noticed that
the children had no preconceived ideas of dance, but they enjoyed enacting all
kinds of movements, also inventing motion on the spot or finding comparisons to
what they saw others do (this is group learning, we were 18 people in the
room), so external information is adopted and also internal information may not
be cognitively known except in terms of motorsensory experience as well as
through memory? When I asked the children whether they had seen dance, only
three or four said yes (some just looked at me curiously in silence, smiling),
and each of them had something different in mind, one young girl mentioned the
dance she remembered seeing in an animation (film) - and Terry, since she had
no theory or concept of dance (of film for that matter) in the sense that her
thinking mind got in the way, she was processing something (moving images or
moving bodies). I don't know what.
Fascinating, however, was the teachers' quiet instance on observing the children (this month's theme in the
Montessori school is "insects") and letting them try out, and this practical investigation of
"dance", that we engaged, was to a large extent kinetic or kinaesthetic-playful (how does this
connect to what you call entrainment?), and they did not necessarily follow the instructor, which I enjoyed
much. I have not idea whether "programs" were running already, but I sensed that nothing about the
new paradigm (big data, everything placed outside) you evoke mattered here, we were still inside the group of
shared activity, face to face, physically close, a good old paradigm. I am also of course thinking of
remembering information through the body here. The stories we tell each other return to body.
with regards
Johannes Birringer
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