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.

Architectural Diagrams - 2

 

Architectural Diagrams - 1

 

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.

Word Cloud

Patronizing

adjective

(used of behavior or attitude) characteristic of those who treat others with condescension
Synonyms: arch, condescending, patronising

Sentence:

No country in the world today shows any but patronizing regard for the weak.

adjective 

कृपा करते हुए विनीत

Patriarchal

adjective
characteristic of a form of social organization in which the male is the family head and title is traced through the male line
relating to or characteristic of a man who is older or higher in rank

Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage.

adjective

पितृसत्तात्मक
पुरुष-प्रधान
कुलपति का
आदरणीय वृद्ध पुरुष का

Feudal

adjective 

Feudalism was a combination of the legal, economic, military, and cultural customs that flourished in Medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships that were derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labor. Although it is derived from the Latin word feodum or feudum (fief), which was used during the Medieval period, the term feudalism and the system which it describes were not conceived of as a formal political system by the people who lived during the Middle Ages. The classic definition, by François-Louis Ganshof (1944), describes a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations which existed among the warrior nobility and revolved around the three key concepts of lords, vassals and fiefs.

adjective
सामंती
सामन्तवादी
सामन्ती
जागीर संबंधी

SOURCE:

https://www.shabdkosh.com/

The Dancing Spider

This morning as I chose to listen Shivranjani over Bhoop,
I saw a tiny spider dancing in front of my eyes
First I thought it was flying
But as I transfixed my gaze upon the floating creature
I realized it was holding on to a strand of invisible web
perhaps one that he himself spit
under the fan, as I looked up to him
his body appeared and disappeared to the blades in the background
only as I got closer to being anxious if he would fall 

on me
I decided to trust him

that he will reach where he wants to

Thus redirecting my gaze

Into the screen
I began to write
this poem, 

which I meant to be prose
changed tone just like with the shift of a single key

the sharp 'ga' of milan into the flat 'ga of virah

bhoop transformed into shivranjani

and that was the music I decided to play.

Times, Lines, 1989s

Exhibition at Khoj International Artists Association. Delhi
February 2020

IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

Madan Mahatta Archives, Randhir Singh
IIT Delhi: A Modernist Case Study

exhibited at Photoink, Delhi

Jan-Feb 2020

This photographic exhibition brings together a contemporary study of the campus of Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi - designed by architect J K Chowdhary and engineer Gulzar Singh. IITs were the key spaces to produce engineers for building modern India. These were state education campuses of science that got built during the period of Nehru government during the 1960s when the spirit of scientific temper was fresh and the mood for a modernizing nation. The exhibition "IIT Delhi - A Modernist Case Study" brings together photographs by Madan Mahatta and Randhir Singh in a dialogue with each other. 

Mahatta's photographs are mostly black and white, taken during the time the campus was freshly inaugurated. The photographs take us back to a time period when it was till not fully inhabited, the trees wait to grow, and signs of life wait to adapt to a modern institutional space. Randhir Singh's photographs, mostly in colour bring to us the life of the campus in its humanised reality today. In Mahatta's photographic documentation, the campus emerges as an edifice of scientific ambition and achievement - architectonically as well as spatially. Here we see the emphasis on its stark forms, empty corridors with sharp shadows or the craft of be-jeweling the architectural object. Singh's photographs bring to us a softened landscape of the campus, in its diffusions produced by humans, greenery or even light forms. 

Looking at the photographers who document the same space through eyes distanced by more than 60 years, one is constantly caught up in the then & now of both, the life of the campus, as well as the way in which one would like to make sense of its historical projection. What does one make of an institution today? How secular does the space remain? What political forces lie embedded in the disposition of this space? These are question, I am certain, the contemporary artist grapples with while framing the building for the present generation. Where does one place the values through which the campus was once conceived, and how does it become a photographic inquiry? Randhir Singh's photographs balance the dilemmas of modernism today quite artfully. 

The strategic display of photographs within the gallery space work with the sharp sightlines that the campus's modern vocabulary embues. Viewers are forced to readjust perspectives while aligning their sights within the gallery space. The curation constantly creates different levels of intimacy through the sizing and placement of the photographs on the wall. The couplings of photographs are not literal (before after), rather, each try to extend their time into one another, producing an intermediate haze / blur within which the question of then and now doesnot resolve into a moral position, rather offers a considered empathy. Thus, changes, adaptations or appropriations of the campus as sometimes seen in Singh's photographs donot necessarily put us in comparison, rather, bring us in a continuum.

It is this aspect, that was finely achieved in the photographic case study of the IIT Delhi.

Dreaming

On what we call "classical"

Its wonderful to open a day with some beautiful music. The last month has been has been heated up on the debate of nepotism after the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput - a young Indian actor with a short career in the Hindi film industry. Subsequently, the entire film industry has begun to reflect, reorient and rethink their relationship and terms of engagement with the industry as well as its production and consumption. One of the most interesting moves I observed was by a very young Delhi-based vocalist Maithili Thakur who runs a YouTube channel of her own, where she sings for her audiences rendering classical, folk and sometimes Bollywood song covers. In support of the debate, she announced on her channel her decision to not sing any Bollywood songs henceforth. Her action was soft, generous and compelling, giving way to so much folk, and classical music that often doesnot reach the audiences in the opacity of Bollywood. Moreso, Bollywood has begun to claim its territory in laying claim to their production and disallowing people to make it their own by any means of reproducing and making their own versions. Such acts infringe, today, copyright laws and are subject to legal action. Smaller, competent artists who often draw ideas from these large institutions (like music companies and production houses) for their everyday survival feel threatened today. Maithili - the young singer (who has earlier participated in a TV singing show) found her way out taking pleasure and solace in limiting her self to classical and folk songs from around. It is here that I began to think of the how a classic liberates itself from authorship and gets assimilated within the everyday.

There are clearly two attitudes to the "classical". The first always tries to fight the classical, which has consolidated itself into a tradition, and becomes the benchmark and yardstick for evaluating aesthetic taste within a culture. Newer productions are often judged in the background of these, and often such basis of comparisons are dismissed and denied in order to make place for the "new". The second attitude is to reach towards this classical, to become as perfect as the work of art that has been set in history. To be sure, the "classic" here is a certain state of pleasure that everyone ought to become sensitive to, or rather experience. It is a function of high taste, and connoisseurship to be able to even appreciate and enjoy these forms. Two problems arise here. First, the presumed intellectual inaccess to this "craft" and second, its association subsequently with "class" (hence classic) that becomes an easy critique of the classical. In any civilization, the "classical" work of art is assumed to have been produced through a an act of patronage by the upper class - one that also enjoys its own place in history because of its economic privilege and the one that sustains culture through economic support. The "classical" is assumed to be desirable for it could become a symbolic means for appropriation of class through adoption of taste. However, when seen as a pursuit of the individual who want to transcend the earlier boundaries of any craft, the dimension of class doesnot necessarily stand legitimate. What I mean to say is that a fine artist would still produce something far more sophisticated even if the patronage was not available. Ghalib, the poet, who for a very long time did not receive any audience because of the profound intellectual depth and craft of his work. (One could still say that the institutionalization of their histories do bring them cultural privilege through discourse, which works towards their validation). But in addition, since these works require a heightened engagement of the intellect - those which may be enjoyed in the luxury of absence of survival exigencies - they are often relegated from direct assimilation in everyday life, and distanced from the popular or folk. In other words, to understand these would require some effort to get into the knack of the artistic innovation in them. This is necessarily a disciplinary aspect. The everyday consumers, whom we often call the "laymen" find themselves drifting faraway from the classic because they often do not have the same luxuries to afford the investment in these arts. Often thus, they turn to create something of another order for pleasure in their cultural life.

The bigger point however regarding any "classic" is the fact that it now belongs to no one. Classical songs, for example do not necessarily claim any territory through copyright laws. Classics attain the status of a theorem in a society, available to all. Most classic songs emerge from folk traditions - which have been sustained through patronage. Would this not be important to recognize before labelling them to belong to a class. What I am essentially proposing is this: that classics do not necessarily belong to a class, but must also be considered i within the private domain of its creators, where they are building up a way of appreciation irrespective of class patronage. Such a personal engagement makes us realise the unique potential of art that takes shape through the medium of the artist. Much of these classics were produced in an environment of healthy exchange of cultural ideas, where the notion of authorship was submitted towards pushing the limits of craft itself. However, in the absence of the modern day legal framework, these never bounded themselves to be not reproduced. Today, as Maithili decided only to sing classical tunes from the past, there is no way she can reproduce the original, rather, render in her own way. The classical, thus reduced to certain principles, becomes a much sustainable framework. This dissolution of authorship in the formulation of the classical must be recognized. On the other hand, in order for something to become classic, its access must not be limited, rather widened. In our cultural practice, the generosity of exchange and reproduction must be valued. Modern modes of art making privilege the rejection of the past, and avoid reproduction. The act of copying is considered profane.

In eastern cultures, for example, copying and reproduction has remained the principal way of passing knowledge. We can not say these have not evolved, or have not been critical. Rather, the evolution of these crafts have been so subtle that it becomes extremely difficult to trace the moment of shift. Chinese paintings, for example are taught through the tenet of rigorous reproduction. Indian miniatures were a well oiled guild system where there were specialists to make each stage of painting. Similarly, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music depended on a tradition of riyaz, where repetition was a means for sustained meditation - a process through which one could forget, and even forego authorship to the discipline itself. These aspects of one's engagement with one's art are often completely overshadowed in their evaluation as feudal. The modern society dubs these practices of the past as those that are patriarchal, shaping under a clear hierarchy of the master. What was relevant however, in this hierarchy was the privileging of the craft rather than its consumption. To be sure, have hierarchies not existed even today, those which have merely translated into the economic order? To critique the past in this light of its feudal hierarchies seems shallow. Yet, this is not to say that access to the guru, and therefore the art was not an issue. (It certainly ways, seen in the fables of Eklavya or even the recent filmic adaptation of Katyar Kaljyat Ghusli.) However, what these tales tell us, essentially, is that perhaps that unacknowledged learning was a threat, for the guru may not be aware of the critical orientation of the silent learner. The criticality of passing of art was embedded in the practice of copying itself - one that needs to be recognized and unpacked. Copying, in the logic of capitalism has reduced itself merely to reproduce pleasure at first sight, whereas, perhaps, in the past, the mode of copying carried with it, its own critical component, enmeshed in the diversified instructions and observations of the teacher.

The pressure of the original and anxiety of reproduction in the cultural sphere has kept me disturbed for a very long time. The poet and literary critic Harold Bloom has a sharp analysis called 'The Anxiety of Influence' that articulates these ideas within the context of some renaissance works of literature. It opens up a discussion on the moral foundations of cultural production, and makes worthwhile arguments. It is only imperative that we do not outrightly reject "classics" as productions of class societies, rather acknowledge their cultural values. However, there may be several more dimension to the production of value towards the making of a classic that must be investigated with more time and patience. What I do appreciate is the ease with which classics are able to lend us the means for contemporary cultural production. And for now, I will leave it at that.