This first class and all its material
I've so far experienced have moved and unsettled me deeply, in ways which I am not fully able and willing to translate into words.
“There is no knowledge without
categories.” Those were some of the first words of a white, male
professor giving us student a traditional lecture – this was on the
day right before our class, last week. This statement said with such
authority in his voice really frustrated me, my eyes were screaming,
my mouth stayed shut. I have always had a form of fear of the
conventionality and im-mutability of words, as I have often
experienced them as oppressive ways to communicate things that cannot
be communicated or so simply categorized.
Excess of words
fewer words
please
more silence
more feeling /touching/ listening
more resonance )))))))))))) ) ) ) ) ) )
The contrast with this class couldn't be more flagrant. I felt at home.
Erin said “ Neurotypicals categorize.” But none of us experience/perceive life as categories.
Yet I ran back to books full of words
of others. L'intelligence d'une machine, Jean Epstein (early film director and theorist
who speaks of the clairvoyance of cinema). Deploring our tendencies
to categorize - what I think of as a fearful desire to create
contained and hermetic taxonomies of knowledge as a desire for an
improbable stability - Epstein writes about the potential of cinema to
uncover underlying abstractions/realities. Talking about the ability
of cinema to modify our experience of time (slow-motion,
fast-forward, inverse) he says (and sorry I only have this in
French): “Tous les systèmes compartimentés de la nature se
trouvent désarticulés. Il ne reste plus qu'un règne: la vie.”
(Epstein, L'Intelligence d'une machine (1946) in Écrits sur le cinéma, tome 1, p257). A disruption of our
illusive hierarchy of things, that brings us back to life
itself, to experience.
(More words, again) To go back to
education, Ingold also deplores this categorization of knowledge, he
writes: “the distortion that comes from isolating the
informational content of knowledge from the life-experience through
which, and only through which, it can take on any kind of meaning” (p.3).
Life is constant movements / shifts /
common-ing / interactions / conversations (as A M Baggs says it in our language, “a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment”) that
cannot precisely be measured, quantified, or cleanly categorized. It
is messy. It is scary. But “if it isn't intimidating than thinking
is not happening at the limit” (Erin). I need to turn my head back towards what escapes me/what I escape from. Listen to what can't be heard.
Transmission according to Dewey, as I
understand it from Ingold, is when cartographies overlap. When watching In My Language, my cartography briefly overlapped with A M Baggs'; I felt a common-ing that also paradoxically brought forward our contrasted life experiences (her oppression/my privileges). I feel a yearning to learn from them,
it makes much more sense in a way. Let's focus on other
ways of knowing that might not be framable by language or our conventional categories. We are lacking. They are not. A M Baggs says: “I find it so
interesting by the way that failure to learn your language is seen as
a deficit but failure to learn my language is seen as so natural that
people like me are officially described as mysterious and puzzling
rather than anyone admitting that it is themselves who are confused”.
Enough words for tonight.
Alessandra
"Let's focus on other ways of knowing that might not be framable by language or our conventional categories." - reminds me of Professor Manning's comment about "how do you know they are learning"...
ReplyDeleteIn Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky writes: "Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame. Just as from the quivering of a reed you can tell what sort of current, what pressure there is in a river, in the same way we know the movement of time from the flow of the life-process reproduced in the shot. [...]
ReplyDeleteSculpting in time!
But the deliberate joining of shots of uneven time-pressure must not be introduced casually; it has to come from inner necessity, from an organic process going on in the material as a whole. The minute the organic process of the transitions is disturbed, the emphasis of the editing (which the director wants to hide) starts to obtrude; it is laid bare, it leaps to the eye. If time is slowed down or speeded up artificially, and not in response to an endogenous development, if the change of rhythm is wrong, the result will be false and strident.
Joining segments of unequal time-value necessarily breaks the rhythm. However, if this break is promoted by forces at work within the assembled frames, then it may be an essential factor in the carving out of the right rhythmic design. To take the various time-pressures, which we could designate metaphorically as brook, spate, river, waterfall, ocean — joining them together engenders that unique rhythmic design which is the author's sense of time, called into being as a newly formed entity."
Tarkovsky's words came to me in relation to your moving wor(l)ding because for him there is rhythm in the world, and it is this rhythm the film catches.