Internet cafes: the new salon?

In the eighteenth century, the salons of Paris became famous as the hotbeds of political and social debate. There collections of usually wealthy Parisians gathered to discuss, argue, polemicise, interrogate and dispute over a whole range of issues that had previously been reserved for the royal court. The salon did a lot towards democratizing French politics.

It also initiated a more important, albeit informal and indirect, role for women in policy formation. There is a more recent example of a similar phenomenon. In the 1970's Phil Donahue, or rather his audience, revolutionised the American political scene, by broadcasting the opinions of everyday women in suburban USA. Talk-back radio is another example.

Despite the tremendous impact of (almost) universal education, women's suffrogacy, broadcast television and talk-back radio, in the early part of twenty-first century, the greatest political problem we face is political participation. It seems that all these advances have shown us is the size of the gap between the democracy we represent and the democracy we actually have. Policy is not set through participation in the broadcast media, but more often by the owners of those media. Traffic has become one-way, and when the flow is reversed, it tends to take the form of Orwell's one-minute hate.

If the key task before us is to reinvigorate our political environment, then we must recognize that democracy means more than freedom of expression, or access to the means of expression. It must also include the accessibility of means of collaboration.

People often complain about the dumbing-down of the electorate, and long to relinquish authority to an expert elite. Alternatively, they address the electorate as though it were an idyllic community of experts already.

Both approaches are flawed, but we can see a way past them if we recognize what they have in common. Neither view imagines that the electorate can teach itself anything. Both right and left seems to imagine a body politic that is less-than-human, because it is not capable of learning.

Educators have for some time realised that there is a serious distinction to be made between deep learning and surface learning. I would suggest that, where there is an education of the electorate, it takes the form of surface learning. It is entirely passive, there is no emphasis of helping each other understanding, or, for that matter, on employing the knowledge being distributed - through print, radio, television, the web - in any way.

I think that a deep approach to political education - one that emphasizes collaboration, active choice (say about which issues, about what form, about when to consider them etc) and producing something for others - could address both the issue of participation and of education at the same time. A political education directed toward social ownership of the issues - and not solely reactive responses to the issues - is what is required.

How do we do this? There may be too many possible projects to enumerate here, and please add a comment if you think of any, but for starters we could begin by recognizing this:

The web is not solely a space for opinion, or comment. It is also a collaborative space, a space for the collective production of considered responses, among people who need have nothing in common but a concern and a desire to participate (though not necessarily by leading or even speaking).

We have the technology to establish minature political spaces, random and momentary collectives, whose only purpose is to briefly further the debate, and to think through their desires, their differences of opinion, together, for each other and for others (who knows who?).

It's time for us to combine our best learning practices with our varieties of political expression. Society is our assignment. It's time to transform our politicians from arbitrary, power-driven, lecturing decision-makers, into the moderators and facilitators of an interrogating, imagining, collaborating and ultimately learning body politic.

Why bother with insect intelligence?

This most delicious comment comes from slashdot. For someone who's spent five year reading embodied, embedded cognitive scientists congratulate themselves on absolving their intellectualist tendencies and discover the concrete, this is pay day!

A taste:

Every year we generate many millions of the most perfect and adaptive biological being the world have ever seen... babies...humans. Yet most of them get nothing but shit and are doomed to live on a dollar a day for their entire lives.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122121&cid=10272822

Reading spaces = thinking room?

I was just thumbing through Robert E. Horn's tome Visual Language (MacroVU Inc., 1998) and came across this little gem:

Leaving spaces between words: reinvented during Charlemagne's reform of writing, the leaving of spaces between words enabled many readers to switch from reading aloud (which was the common way to read during the Middle Ages) to reading silently. Franc, c. 800CE.

What I find fascinating about this fact is the kind of mental space that silent reading allows. Pragmatists, like Wilfred Sellars and impressed by Wittgenstein's argument against private languages, have emphasized the need to see thinking as development from speaking, i.e. as the internalisation of a communicative function. This is opposed to a more classical view of speaking as derivative from thinking - as the expression of a thought that precedes the locutive performance.

The pragmatist approach subordinates theories of mind to theories of social practice. Minds are the kinds of things we have by virtue of our participation in a sophisticated social community.

Pragmatists regard traditional theories of mind, which take an individual's cognitive relation to a value-neutral world as primary, to be beginning with the wrong question. They see the development of the notion of an objective, mind-independent natural world in terms of its particular social function.

So far so good. Pragmatism works well as a criticism of traditional epistemology. However, I'd prefer to avoid a pragmatism that sees everything in terms of social values, because I think people are capable of disputing and interrupting social values in many ways. I also think that much of that resistance to social norms - which ultimately gives those values their normative significance - centres on the anomalous subject's embodiment.

Now, a full blown critique of (the strictest forms of) pragmatism would need to show that the development of the very social practices to which pragmatists appeal cannot be understood except via an account of corporeal embeddedness.

And this is where we come back to the spacing of words. What is the relationship between the spacing of words and the internalization of communication as thought? Charlemagne was responding to the capture of literacy by the priestly class, and proposed no less than a revolution in communication through the different corporeal stance toward a text. Charlemagne's reforms traded on the Gestalt properties of vision to break the connection between text and speech. These Gestalt properties cannot be understood in terms of social practices.

In the case of Charlemagne's reforms, it is the Gestalt character of the perceived world that acts as the hinge around which the reform of social convention occurs. Social change involves exploiting aspects of a presupposed embodied relation to a pre-social world (pre-social in the sense that the social conventions that determine the meaning of the text do not determine the limits of this relation as well).

It is through our bodies that social conventions get a grip, and it is through exploiting the ambiguity of embodiment - it's ability to escape being comprehensive controlled through its actual performances, because it maintains around it an aura of possible performance - that we can modify and affect the character of our social world.

So, our embodied perception of gestalts allows for thinking room between reading and speaking. Merleau-Ponty says that vision is thought within a field. Here the field (room) for thought is the space between words.

Corporeal Schema

It's just hit me.
A corporeal schema is not a structure, it's a background - as MMP says, it is the flip-side of the projective activity that leaves objects round about it as traces of its acts and at the same time uses them as springboards to future acts.
Existence is not any particular structure, it is a movement from contingency to necessity (sedimentation) and necessity to contingency (innovation).

Our discussion of boundedness is meant to reinstall the subpersonal in a situation, but this situation is never entirely biological.
Merleau-Ponty was concerned to oppose a Kantian transcendental ego that constitutes its world in its entirety. But he would also be opposed to a pan-biologism that sees on biological situation, and which recognize no dialectical relation between this biological situation and a personal one.

But how are we to think of the influence of the personal on the biological?

The idea of the discussion of boundedness was not to trace prepersonal commitment to biological structure, but to interpret those structures in terms of that commitment, i.e. in terms of existence.

We do not exist in a purely biological situation, in fact, it takes incredible suffering to remain in such a situation for any extended period of time. The objection to Kantianism is that the organism is never entirely incorporated into our personal life. But the reverse is also true. Our personal life is rarely lived in that prepersonaltime of pure sensibility.