Maps

from Marc Schoonderbeek's lecture at SEA
on 26th Feb. 2021

Notes on Phenomenology

Seeds of phenomenology were laid in the 18^th century

Typically knowledge production is based on a Cartesian model, i.e. understanding world is made up of signs and symbols – the world in a semiological space – that which constructs meaning. (that the world is only constructed through the meanings we associate along with any definite order it might have/not have)

However, our understanding of the world is much more nuanced in the way we make associations even before the semiological apparatus comes into play. These associations are rendered through a very innate sense, through our cultural fragments.

The true meaning of the outside world (whole) are only descriptions by our emotional senses. This would be suggested by the Cartesian construct/apparatus. It assumes that the world outside our mind as a definite meaning, which we interpret imperfectly!

Phenomenology on the other hand says that meaning comes only with existence when the mind encounters the world. Thus, there is no meaning out there – it gets produced only through the intersection and interaction between the mind and the world.

Immanuel Kant made a distinction between the noumenal world of things in themselves and the phenomenal world of reality as experienced through our senses. (in philosophy, noumenon is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception.)

This was picked up by Hegel

Then developed by German philosopher Edmund Husserl – he was trying to develop an objective study of the subjective study and use systematic reflection to determine the essence of consciousness.

Understood as the careful description of experiences in which they are experienced by the subject to study, in Husserl’s words the whole of our ‘life of consciousness;

Although, Phenomenology was really shaped by Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time

And eventually that became the foundation of Sartre’s existential philosophy and that of Merleau Ponty

 

School of Phenomenology is dedicated to understanding consciousness in its raw form. It is an experientialist philosophy rather than a rationalist philosophy (rationalist meaning related to scientific  understanding of things).

Analysis of structure of self-experience

Husserl talks about ‘natural attitude’ – that the word is out there, relative to our experience, that it is just a belief

 

He asks what is the structure of consciousness? Proposes a theory called INTENTIONALITY – ‘aboutness’

Articulates that consciousness cannot be an isolated thing. It is always ‘about’ something. Intentionality is the interaction between the CONTENT of consciousness and the STRUCTURES of consciousness. (Structures of consciousness include perception, memory, protention, retention, signification, amongst many others.)

 

How is phenomenology mobilized> What is the methodology?

·        Bracketing: Remove all judgements, reduce all phenomena to its rawest experience

·        Eidetic reduction: Goal being to find the essence of the phenomenon. Separation of the necessary part of the phenomenon from its contingent part in order to truly understand the essence. For Husserl, the essence is the universal scientific truth.
This is what shaped the idea of Transcendental Phenomenology.

 

Heidegger was more interested in ontology, rather than universal essential structure.

He talks about Dassein – or the Being – a situated consciousness. This affects our absorption or interpretation of the world around us.

He believed that experiences cannot be separated from the context in which they arise. He proposed that phenomenology is not a science, but it is about understanding the being itself.

This is what is the foundation of Existential Phenomenology.

Curatorial Actions and Outcomes

 

Sourced from:

Jansson, Johan. “The Online Forum as a Digital Space of Curation.” Geoforum 106 (November 1, 2019): 115–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.08.008.

The Art of Tantra by Philip Rawson

notes

According the the Brahmin systems, when we manage to stay permanently in this state of attention, with our entire mind stilled and absorbed in the Ultimate, we may achieve Release. Our nature may cease to be human, so that we are converted into an all embracing Consciousness which is at once Being and Bliss.

pg 7-8 

On Glamour

a transcribed excerpt of conversation between Gautam Bhan and Paromita Vohra from Urban Lens Film Festival 2016. Access full conversation here.



Gautam Bhan: You know Paro[mita] one thing I wanted to ask you about is that - what, you said earlier in the point was to emphasize also the point about glamour, right, because I think it's really so important…because somewhere what we're also struggling with: see we from feminism we inherit these two traits of women and minority identity communities right which is the caution that shame, honor, tradition are born on the backs of women, right? and you have the narrative of partition and sexual violence and this constant notion that women are made repositories of moral culture, because of the power of patriarchy in our societies. But here is this other, and I think this is so part of your larger presence in the world with ‘agents of ishq’, with the column on love in the newspaper which is to say that you know, here is an identity associated with the community a minority religious community that in many places could have been a cause of anxiety. but it's actually a marker for pleasure, is a marker for desire. And it's not glamour in the way that women are just objects of male gaze but also ones that are self-fashioning their presence in the cities. So can you talk a little bit more about that notion of pleasure, desire, young people and agents of ishq…

Paromita Vohra: So I think glamour is the most… a very political kind of thing because glamour is a way of saying, “I'm here!” Right, it's like [saying], “You can't decide what I am, I'm going to decide what I am!” at some level. So I do think that - like I like certain kinds of people; people who will be playing in my films are always of a certain kind and I use the word “glamorous” at the shorthand, for what they are, because they all have a way of speaking, a turn of phrase, a way of presenting themselves - which I find very attractive, because they just do not fall into any binaries, right, not political binaries not binaries of gender or social identity or whatever; but they fashion that identity themselves. I don't think that those are the people who actually change the world in some way slowly… Because they give us a suggestion of how we can be; as easily as looking at somebody's clothes and saying - ‘hey, I like how she dresses, I am also going to do that.’ That kind of infecting the world through what you're doing, I think that's a very political thing, and that how politics actually seeds the world every day.

GB: ...and it’s so distinct from glamour as the possession of brand or consumption

PV: Yeah, so the thing is that post Rekha or maybe Madhuri Dixit, glamour has gotten converted into something that is easily consumable. But it actually is not because what glamour means is ‘I know that I am a story, but only I know what that story is. I'm not going to tell you.’ Right? So that control over your own narrative [is different from the one] which people like Rekha and others, who have mystique… Mystique is just really about saying, ‘I'm controlling the narrative.’ Whether you're really controlling it or not is the whole other discussion, but communicating that in all kinds of nonverbal ways is what I think [it’s about] and that's why I think you find it in certain kinds of spaces - like bar dancers, like movie stars of course, and I find it very intriguing how the figure of the Catholic woman actually just by being almost like a lace edging in a film had transmitted all that glamour right? Because all the women the you’re seeing in this film they are just like they are the backup dancers. They are not the people who in the front of the film but they are what actually gave films their glamour in an earlier time. And that glamour has gotten kind of subsumed under a mainstream identity, and we struggle right now to find a new place for that glamour.

On Aesthetics and Criticism

 

Notes from a lecture by Chaitanya Karnik
Academy of Architecture, 2012

Evaluating Automatic Thoughts

Notes from here and there

 "The structural transformation of the Public Sphere" by Habermas argues that from 19th to the 20th century, the change in public sphere involves a move "from a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that merely consumes it." In this process, the strictest separation of the public from the private realm gives way to a public sphere dominated by the mass media, in which public life is effectively depoliticized.

From Introduction, Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World by Carol Breckenridge & Arjun Appadurai

The body is an accumulation of the planet by means of the fruit and stuff you consume. You gather your body by consuming the planet. Thus you can never call it "yours"

(dont know the source)

The desire to have knowledge of anything necessarily has the desire to control it too.

Ranciere says that the language of speaking about something comes from its politics. The politics is what pushes artistic practices challenging through  / by deviating into a new language. Hence new aesthetic. Hence, the politics of aesthetics. Hence aesthetic is political. 

All language is signification of thought and, on the other hand, the supreme way of signifying thoughts is through language, the greatest means of understanding ourselves and others." then most remarkably, he (Kant) outlines a circulation of speech in and which thinking comes to pass: "Thinking is speaking with ourselves"

On Translation, John Sallis

Post Colonial Theory

 

The Middle Path

Buddha realizes that there ought to be a way of living between extremities of luxuries and mortality. One cannot submit life to the existential crises. To just live and accept yourself is important to be able to perceive others' thoughts and feelings. To be an ordinary human being is to be Buddha. Buddhism doesn't teach you to be special, but ordinary in a way that you are living with everyone else, not above or below. 

A string of sitar too tight will break while if too loose, will be incapable to produce any sound. In order to produce any music, the string has to be tightened just enough - that is the essence of the middle path. That one needs to know just enough to not hurt others, but unite with the rhythm of the universe in order to experience resonance and happiness.

American Beauty

Typography

The system of collecting - Baudrillard

The object deprived of its function becomes the locus of the subject. Functionality comes in when an object comes in a social world and objects utility is a function of social relations. This is how in a way and object becomes a matter of collection. What you collect depends upon these social relations. Object gets its objecthood only when it is deprived of its utility. Then is when it slips into an abstract autonomous realm. That's when you wonder why people wonder, if they have preserved some object, that have surpassed their use value. Then it is its destiny to be collected.

The need for validation of your world of collection isn't there before puberty. (Age of 12 to 13 years). Things become elegant after 40 years of age. the intermediate period is about transition and change.

on Monophobia

From Psychology Today dot com

Notes on Design Translation

Notes from Hegel

What is a "concept"?

Sometimes, when certain words are overused, one tends to blind to its meaning altogether. The currency for the word "concept" or "conceptual" in academia can have such an effect. When is something not conceptual, or when does something become conceptual? What can something be called conceptual, and how do we formulate concepts? Can the act of conceptualisation be taught? What are its pedagogical processes? Are we always aware when formulating new concepts? Are we not always suspended in some existing concepts? Is it possible to live a life without conceptual thinking? Or do we just occupy concepts that exist for us? Is a new conceptualization possible only through the interrogation of an earlier concept? Are concepts then merely interrogations? Are concepts mental, or are they material processes? Do new concepts necessarily change our everyday material conditions, or do they simply create new frames of reference? Are concepts instruments of the mind? Could then, existing environments simply be read conceptually afresh? Would one need to change anything material within them for them to gain a new conceptual charge? Or are they already suspended in multiple concepts and call for a reorientation of our encounter with them? Where does the concept lie then - in the reader or the material?

There can be further stream of questions that one can keep asking about this term "concept / conceptual". But what precisely is a concept? In order to have some clarity for my own self, I began looking at its definitions and etymological origins. Quite simply, "concept" is a conceived imagination. but then, such a root does not help our purpose. Hence I started looking at more elaborations, because often, the inter-related words "concept", "thought", "imagination", "idea", "theory" get mixed up in academic conversations which produces a conundrum in meaning formation. Dictionaries rely on each of these words for explaining the other. And therefore, the notion of "concept" gets further confusing. What is however important to use a word which is closest to the meaning that we want to convey, even if the meaning could be swerved for context. Rather than using the confusion (or the creation of it thereof) as escape to evade contingent parts of a conversation, it is worthwhile to build redirections of meaning consciously.

Having read and meditated on some amount of definitions and discussions, I have come to deduce that it is best to consider a "concept" as a "form of experience" - that it is an experiential space. In / for architecture, we could think of it as taking someone in a space of a particular / new experiential register. To "reconceptualize" thus would merely mean to rethink the experiential coordinates of an existing phenomenon or space (in architecture). For example, to rethink the hospital as a garden would give it an altogether new conceptual charge. However, here, "garden" is a notion that can itself be opened up in many ways, through many interpretations. But it shifts the idea of a hospital from an institutionalised medical facility that is situated in the seriousness of treating the ailing body, into its imagination as a landscape of strolling bodies which may be located in a more open environment. Such a restructuring of environmental imagination could have a material translation, or even remain as a textual reading.

Professors of higher education from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA, Anfara and Mertz (2006) mention that "Concepts are words assigned to experience. Concepts combine to form a "construct". Constructs form propositions. Relationships among propositions form a "theory"." What I understand from such a description is that particular forms of experience set the coordinates for the perception of an environment. The manner in which we come to inhabit this environment is the only way to thus live a concept. The particular feelings it produces, the values and modes of thinking it triggers are all embedded in such an environment. When a series of such experiences settle in our lives, they produce a trusted model for living-thinking. This model is an understanding retained in the mind where reason gets associated with it, and aids its solidification. (This reason is not necessarily same as the scientific notion of reason, rather it is a cultural mode in which the mind reconciles with several unknowns towards living a practical life. For example, the notion of 'respecting elders' is a conceptual idea that is not rationalised empirically, but culturally - for it may be believed that those who may have lived a longer life must have greater life experience, and therefore greater wisdom to act upon the eventualities one is faced with in life). This is perhaps why, concepts can be so hard to challenge, because it would mean the interrogation of very associations of acts through which one reason one's life for practical purposes. 

Thus, such a model of reason produces a construct. Since they are "trusted" now, they can be depended upon (they get solidified), and even proposed to someone else to achieve the respective mental / physical state. Thus, they can now be proposed as accepted modes of living. According to Anfara and Mertz, relationships between these modes of living, or propositions, form a "theory". This is something I will need to consider with more attention. I say this because I am trying to figure in my head the difference between "conceptual thinking" and "theoretical thinking". At this point, both of them almost feel the same. However, theory is understood as a framework to study a structure / phenomena. (framework is another word one must open up). It could be a model to even predict certain things. If theory too, is a model, how is it different from conceptual apparatus? Theory is also defined as "a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based." Another definition says  that theory is "a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained." Further, idea is "an explanation to describe something about the world that is not necessarily proven". This likens idea to a "hypothesis" - an informed guess, which may be disproven later by some formal investigation. 

Someone has straightforwardly said that a theory in its strictest sense is an underlying explanation of how something works. In this line of thought, theory is not integrally linked to experience, but a process. Either understanding processes helps us to troubleshoot a particular outcome, or it can be a way in which ideas or things may be "mobilised". To be sure, theory is based on empirical research, and got popular in the late 16th century as a mental scheme of something to be done. Theory may also thus be associated with the certain development of scientific thinking. While theory is a mode of contemplation or speculation, concept is closer to thought and imagination. Thus, theoretical thinking is processual, whereas conceptual thinking is imaginative and creative. The ontologies of both these modes may be quite different. For instance, while theoretical thinking may simply chart out a process of approaching the future without necessarily a "clear" picture of the future, conceptual thinking may conceive of an imagination of the future and attempt to reach it. While in the theoretical approach, method drives the act; in conceptual approach, act drives the method. Thus, in the first case, one arrives at the image of future, whereas, in the other, one departs from the image of the future.

more thoughts later.

Thoughts on the Archive

 'Archival remembering can never be separated from forgetting'

Do we archive to remember or forget? Do we write to remember or forget? There are things we write to remember, and there are things we write to forget. But what about the permanence of writing or the archive? What do we read off permanence? Does permanence tell us whether it means to remember or forget itself?

The escape / release of a trapped thought contained within the mind is no longer a part of the body once it is archived. The archive thus is a way of forgetting, created only in order for a provisional remembering when the body wishes to reoccupy that old time-space. A certain time can be reinvigorated back through the archive, or its consumption.

The archive simultaneously reveals and buries certain pasts.

'Art archives do not just construct, they also bury colonial pasts'

For everything archived, there is so much that is overlooked. The archive blinds us to many things behind its face.

Dreaming

In Praise of Copying

From: In praise of Copying, by Marcus Boon