Jul 14
eldonlanguage and culture identity, intertextuality, knowledge, meaning
my research for the common implications for the title of the midnight oil song, lead me to the original book of the almost same name, by noted geologist, J.W. Gregory, who made an expedition to Lake Eyre and surrounding districts in 1901.
google books did not have a review of the book, but google did provide me with a link to a wonderful online copy courtesy of openlibrary.org.
and, they _share_
furthermore, and most interestingly, if not ironically, his account begins with a chapter which describes the originary stories of the region as told by the local aborigines, who describe creatures called the Kadimakara who used to come down from the firmament of clouds which used to be supported by three very large gum trees. when these died or were killed, the other trees in the area also began to thin, and the sky opened up completely into what they called the ‘puri wilpenina’…
our recent trip there was in the air-conditioned comfort of a 4WD, in winter.
an image for you:
Sep 12
eldonepistemology, language and culture genes, interaction, knowledge
determining who is the writer of the following should be a little more difficult than for the previous excerpt… obviously the ‘random’ is in the finding, not the posting. i’d kept this quotation on file since i read the book at the end of last century.
for those who enjoy playing, the book from which it is taken was published in 1997. recognise the writer?
The odd balancing act of belief and knowledge that is diagnostic of fetishism, along with the related cascade of mimetic copying practices that accompany fascination with images, is evident in many of the biotechnological artifacts that pepper [this book] — including textbooks, advertisements, editorials, research reports, conference titles, and more. Belief in the self-sufficiency of genes as ‘master molecules’, or as the material basis of life itself, or as the code of codes, not only persists but dominates in libidinal, instrumental-experimental, explanatory, literary, economic, and political behaviour in the face of the knowledge that genes are never alone, are always part of an interactional system. That system at a minimum includes the proteinaceous architecture and enzymes of the cell as the unit of structure and function, and in fact also includes the whole apparatus of knowledge production that concretizes (objectifies) interactions in the historically specific forms of ‘genes’ and ‘genomes’. There is no such thing as disarticulated information – in organisms, computers, phone lines, equations or anywhere else. As the biologist Richard Lewontin put it, ‘First, DNA is not self-reproducing, second, it makes nothing, and third, organisms are not determined by it” (1992:33). This knowledge is entirely orthodox in biology, a fact that makes ‘selfish gene’ or ‘master molecule’ discourse symptomatic of something amiss at a level that might as well be called ‘unconscious.’
May 29
eldoneducation and academia, epistemology, systems and logical typing context, knowledge, system
excerpts from the introduction to
System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange.
Second edition
ANTHONY WILDEN 1972 & 1980
INTRODUCTION • XXIX
The reader will already have noted that, if there is one constantly recurring question for a critical and ecosystemic viewpoint, it is the real and material question of context. Obviously, the academic discourse, as well as the dissenting academic discourse, has signification only in terms of the real context in which it occurs. As has been pointed out, the systemic characteristics of this context, with its recognized and unrecognized codings of goals, are ultimately dependent on particular types of socioeconomic organization in history.
One hypothesis of these essays is that the assumption or goal of ‘pure’ knowledge is an outworn rationalization. ALL KNOWLEDGE is INSTRUMENTAL. In the terms of modem communications theory, information (coded variety) is everywhere, but knowledge can occur only within the ecosystemic context of a goalseeking adaptive system peopled by goalseeking [individuals] required to ask how the knowledge has been coded and filtered; and what it is being used for, and for whom.
Thus one of the contexts of knowledge is the temporal context: past, present, and future. But the ideology of pure or objective knowledge to which the academic is expected to owe allegiance – besides protecting teachers and researchers from questions about the actual use value of their work – cannot deal adequately with time and place. It is an absolutist, non-contextual, non-temporal morality akin to that of a fundamentalist religion.
This is a fundamentalism that depends first on the misconstruction of closure and context; second on the correlative lack of understanding that contexts have levels; and third on its inability to deal with the real questions of logical typing in biological and social systems.
For example, the necessary abstraction of a system from its context in order that it may be studied – which should of course be accompanied by an overt attempt to avoid decontextualization by understanding the potentially paradoxical effects of such an abstraction – is quite commonly used, implicitly, to justify the pretended and actual abstraction or isolation of researchers from THEIR many contexts: from their socioeconomic status in a heterarchy of academic privilege, for example; from their actual functions in a system of liberal indoctrination; and from their spoken and unspoken commitments to ideological and political views – all of which the student may expect to find in one transformation or another in their work and in their teaching.
[…] We used to be warned by people who called themselves the ‘Old Left’ in the 1960s not to ‘politicize’ the university – a warning that made little sense to those of us newly arrived in the academic propaganda machine.
As has been pointed out in part, context, whether in theory or praxis, is a question of punctuation or closure – both AT a given level of relationship and, more importantly, BETWEEN levels of relationship.
Moreover, besides its historically peculiar attempts at closure from its real context and indeed from and between many of its own parts, the scientific discourse appears to have been composed by the inhabitants of Flatland (Abbott, 1884). We know that the discourse displays a dogged incapacity to deal adequately with system-environment relations (both practical and theoretical), even when they are considered on a single plane. But this incapacity becomes almost insignificant when understood within the context of the extraordinary ingenuity with which the scientific discourse persistently fails to recognize the realities of LEVELS OF RELATION and of RELATIONS BETWEEN LEVELS in open systems, in their environments, and, above all, between system and environment.
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