What is?
Is a large question.
And how do we know?
Is equally burdensome.
We dove headlong into the subject of ontology in Tuesday’s class. I had the sincere pleasure of facilitating the day’s discussion with two blindingly intelligent and inspiring friends; Tom and Lucy. Our job was to tackle two works wrestling with the big-O (ontology, or the study of being). The first paper came from one of the founders of the resilience movement, C.S. Holling;” while the second was written by none-other than intellectual heavy weigh Bruno Latour, making a case for the “earthly sciences.”
I took the stage at first and opened with an examination of Holling’s initial claim in his paper that simple processes underly complex systems, and that these simple processes are not only understandable but communicable.
I challenged Holling’s notion of simplified, understandable and communicable complexity by arguing that complexity is complexity plain and simple; and that to claim otherwise is reductionist (big pejorative -ism there!). Further, how can we know how complex the system is that we’re trying to describe? Assuming that we are limited beings. Not only might we be incapable of understanding the complexity of the systems Holling attempts to describe, but how could we possibly communicate such complexity and intricacy even if we understood it when our very language is founded on metaphor? (The introduction of metaphor into my argument comes from the other readings the facilitators read, and is a meager attempt at including ideas from Wittgenstein’s Beetle Box and Derrida’s Signifier-Signified).
Next, Tom centered the discussion around an analysis of Holling’s Panarchy, and illuminated much of the work for our collective benefit.
We brought Latour into the ring near the end of class and contemplated the way Latour argues against traditional divisions, or categories, of relationships. Latour makes a plea for academics to understand interactions and relationships as defined by associated adverbs (i.e. politically, socially, economically), not as existing in one sphere of being (i.e. political [full stop]. social. ad infinitum).
Again, we encounter the problem of descriptive metaphors when trying to take Latour’s advice. And we encounter a new problem associated with the use of metaphor: power. Who’s power is it to define a relationship? Who benefits from framing relationships in certain ways? This portion of class was guided by certain Foucauldian notions of power/knowledge.
The next class discussion, facilitated by Mckenzie, Sarah, and Samson, had the class in knots trying to think about epistemology.
We read works by Wallerstein and Hayles and spent a while dissecting the razor sharp edge of Hayles’ cusp. Again, metaphor proved to be essential in cultivating an understanding of the cusp between the flux and reality and we roamed the landscape of Hayles’ piece like pubescent academic cowboys/girls on the backs of our skinny, wild cusp horses. I stopped at one point in our discussion to turn to my friend Tom and ask, “what the flux is going on?”
Towards the end of class we ran headlong into the problem of decision making by consensus and the complexity of pragmatism in knowledge vacuums. We discussed the “so what” part of the epistemological equation, and left feeling conflicted over carbon emissions.
I enjoyed our class’ discussion on KNOWING and thought that the week’s two conferences informed one another greatly. For how can you know what is without knowing and without there being anything to know?
Works of the week: