Magnolias, Dogs Making Mistakes, Microbrains and Freeing the Imagination
I've been thinking about this still from a video of a magnolia for several years. It seems both complete and incomplete - about to perish and still becoming. It is nature unfinished. William Connolly has remarked that “nature itself is unfinished and full of micro-differentials that periodically accumulate to generate new things” ... It seems to me to be thinking - and it reminded me of Deleuze and Guattari when they write that “everywhere there are forces that constitute microbrains, or an inorganic life of things” (What is Philosophy?: 213). For me, this series of events - the magnolia itself, its further mediation in video, the way it has opened up many of my thoughts about cognition and also education in productive ways - has led to many questions. One question that interests me is how such a micro, differential, inorganic life of things - as in this magnolia event series - challenges the contemporary politics of cognitive models (by which I mean the way in which models of thought that do not often begin relationally seem to invade more and more of contemporary culture, and not without political impact). Whitehead puts this in terms of dogs, not flowers, when he he accepts even the value of error (in symbolic reference) as something that can free the imagination. "We all know Aesop's fable of the dog who dropped a piece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water. We must not, however, judge too severely of the error .. error in symbolic reference is the discipline which promotes imaginative freedom. Aesop's dog lost his meat, but he gained a step on the road towards a free imagination". Looking forward to dropping the meat (luckily there is a very good vegetarian restaurant nearby), trying to grasp the reflections in the water, making mistakes in symbolic reference and freeing the imagination at Dancing the Virtual.
posted by Ib at 4:44 PM
2 Comments:
having dealt with plants and animals, one can also add minerals. Here Deleuze and Guattari write of the "empiricist conversion", something akin to James' radical empiricism. The empiricist conversion concerns, in short,
"one who believes in the world, and not even the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks."
11:05 AM
On the question of error, Deleuze has some interesting things to say - although what Deleuze says about error shows us the difference between his approach to thought and Whitehead's (and indeed the different perspectives that each takes on a number of issues). For Deleuze error is a kind of false recognition which feeds back into the forms of common sense. Like Whitehead, it is the result of a "false distribution of the elements of representation" (DR:147), but Whitehead does not oppose the common and the generative (the genital in Deleuze's terms) as markedly as Deleuze and perhaps sees more possibility of exchange between them ... perhaps this is a question of technics
11:47 AM
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