Hi all with Alan's permission ( indeed encouragement!) I'm forwarding an exchange we had about my art and knowledge piece, posted here and accessible to... er... *some* :https://rdcu.be/7BPg ( Wiley helpfully got in touch to say that they're 'working on' the fact that whether their read only version works is dependent upon 'device and browser.' FFS!)
If anyone did want to see it and can't get to it through the Wiley link give me a shout and I'll sort something.Anyway, this the first of three: ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Alan Sondheim To: Michael Szpakowski Sent: Wednesday, October 3, 2018 2:52 PM Subject: Re: your article!, response Hi Michael, I read your article, far too quickly; I'm short of time, I do have some comments about it, and I wonder if there is something about quoting Ryle, etc. that speaks to British thought; I tend to work more out of deconstruction, and people like Alphonso Lingis for example. I'm not sure what research is, what knowledge is, for example. I wouldn't use those terms. I'd turn more towards Mikel Dufrenne who, in his phenomenology of the novel, talks about the world of the book, which relates to diegesis on one hand - that might relate to your knowledge-with, and I think an irreducible on the other. I've also used Bourdieu's Distinction, which talks about artworlds and their relation to the social, and I think of art especially, through Foucault, as a discursive formation - the object or process or performance, the focus in a sense or punctum or plateau - is only part of a discourse which us all over the place, sloppy - for example imitations and influences on other artists, precedents, reviews, angry looks, appreciations, idle talk in and out of the gallery if there is a gallery, etc. I think it deeply resists definition (for example of _any_ sort of knowledge-x) and instead might be considered in terms of tendencies, gatherings, plateaus, those discursive formations, idiolects, and so forth. This to me is where the energy and resistance and value lies, in its incapacity for fundamental (ontological, epistemological) focusing, its doing of something, anything, including indefinable fields, its insistence, in a sense, on a problematic which at its very core is irreducible. Even art "research" - or maybe especially art "research" is a trap, just as for me "experimental" is a trap; art is a doing which may or may not participate in research one way or another. And art as increasing knowledge? How is this conceivably defined? Even in mathematics - does coming up with a newer largest prime really increase knowledge? I do think on the other hand, the sciences are vastly different, and that difference lies in the difficult ontology and epistemology of mathematics, and mathesis in relation to experiment. I think hard knowledge does result out of this, and on a low level, technology is the result. Understanding the workings of a neutron star (which are far more complicated than I thought) is a good example - there is no way humans can approach one (for that matter, can we approach an atom? a quark? certainly not a neutrino - you see where this is going), but we can begin to understand the unbelievaly 'foreign' (to us) dynamics of the star through a combination of distant observation and mathematical modeling. For me, I've always felt that science is "that thing" or process among any others that has an uncanny relationship to fundamental truths about the world. Finally, I think that identity politics and their instantiation in works of art definitely gives background and depth to your deployment of knowledge-with; this has to do with, among other things, who the "with" are, what sort of social is implied, and so forth. And here art supplies a didactic function that is almost uncanny; it relates for me to mirroring and mirror neurons between one and another body, between and among bodies, and the problematic, critique, and celebration of that... If you think it's useful, please send this on to the netbehaviour list; I wanted to send it directly to you, of course. Best, Alan, hope it's a bit useful. - -- =====================================================directory http://www.alansondheim.org tel 718-813-3285 email sondheim ut panix.com, sondheim ut gmail.com =====================================================
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