[NetBehaviour] Tokarczuk's "Ognosia, " various "Experience" findings

[Max Herman]

"loose, organic network structure"

References to Leonardo in Ognosia, Flights, and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Blake

Experience

Jung and bridges

"In the social sphere, perhaps there will be a new and proper valuation of decentralized structures organized in networks"

"Today, that traditional, elaborate construction of man apart from the rest of the world is collapsing"

"Traditionally, great changes have followed cataclysms and wars."

"Undeniably, the pandemic turned out to be the black swan that—as happens with black swans—no one expected, the thing that will change everything."

"I believe that our life is not only the sum of events, but also the complex interweaving of meanings that we ascribe to those events. Those meanings create a marvelous fabric of stories, concepts, ideas, and can be considered one of the elements—like air, earth, fire, and water—that physically determine our existence and shape us as organisms. The story is thus the fifth element"

Kairos

"Eccentricity means a spontaneous, and at the same time joyous, contestation of what is pre-existing and considered normal and obvious—it is a challenge to conformism and hypocrisy, a kairotic act of courage, seizing the moment and changing the trajectory of fate."

"Universities have abandoned their proper roles, transforming into a grotesque pastiche of themselves—instead of creating knowledge and platforms of mutual understanding, they have shut themselves up behind their walls and portals, defending access to knowledge and jealously concealing the results of their research from each other. In competing for grants and lines on their CVs, scholars have turned into rival laborers."

"[Literature] Understood broadly, as broadly as possible, it is in its nature a network that connects and shows the enormity of the correspondence between all the participants of being. This is a very sophisticated and particular way of interpersonal communication, precise and at the same time total."

"Ognosia (French ognosie, Polish ognozja)—a narratively oriented, ultrasynthetic process that, reflecting objects, situations, and phenomena, tries to organize them into a higher interdependent meaning; cf. → plenitude."

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Orientation:

Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium (in which computers write our novels for us)
Walter Pater's "Diaphaneite," le paragraphe de La Gioconda, The Renaissance, Marius the Epicurean -- the keystone of experience, synchronized for 1873 plus a century and a half, alchemy
Leonardo -- his 500th the last year of travel before the Great Pandemic; mentioned everywhere by Tokarczuk as villain but perhaps also as Saint Hubertus?
Experience
Alchemy

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Other items:

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video about start of life on earth, and the "hard question" of neuroscience i.e. where does experience come from:  "Nick Lane: The Electrical Origins of Life"
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Book about experience, The History of Experience by Wolfgang Leidhold (2023)
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Book about experience and mind/hand knowledge balance: From Lived Experience to the Written Word, voted best history book of 2022, Pamela H. Smith (excerpt below)
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Student paper about Benjamin and experience/Erfahrung/Erlebnis: Walter Benjamin's Concept of Experience and His Literary Practice (escholarship.org)<https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6m5322tj>
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Oil painting Allegory of Experience by La Hyre, c.1650, Houston Museum
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Don Quixote quote "Experience is the mother of Science," Cervantes c. 1600
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John Redford c. 1540, The Play of Wyt and Science, with Experience as the mother of Science
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new website about democracy and experience at https://ExperienceDemocracy2024.org
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https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-06/ognosia-olga-tokarczuk-jennifer-croft/


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"In the waning days of 2023, likely the warmest year the earth has experienced in recorded history, nearly 100,000 people came together in the United Arab Emirates—one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers—to reach a consensus on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."  (Foreign Affairs, January 2024)

"A fracturing geopolitical landscape—as much as the growth in climate finance or even advancements in climate technology—will determine just how quickly (or how slowly) the transition to net-zero emissions proceeds."  (Foreign Affairs, January 2024)

Therefore, cultural communication which leads to political cooperation and peace is the best hope for the climate and the entire natural world, including the human.

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Excerpt from Smith book:

Conclusion

The global account of the metalworkers’ material imaginary I have provided here suggests that the lived experience of metalworkers in sixteenth-century Europe emerged from a long-term itinerary of materials and trade goods, such as pigments and silk. Over the long history of these goods and materials being cultivated and worked within different communities, a “material complex” of written texts and material practices—of making and knowing—formed around them and journeyed with them as they moved. What we see written down in the sixteenth-century European metalworking texts is just the tip of an iceberg in a process of knowledge formation. Following the processes of amalgamation and agglomeration by which such material complexes and their material imaginaries emerged can provide a new understanding of how human beings produce knowledge. By focusing on the material dimensions of the human engagement with matter over the deep human past, and by following the flows of material objects and techniques, we can delineate the formation of knowledge systems as they emerged from material, social, and cultural fields. A historical analysis that begins with natural materials, then follows them through their reciprocal interactions with human bodily practices into objects that are given meaning, used, consumed, desired, and studied by human communities, can be illuminating. Indeed, each of these stages—the materials, the human-material interactions via skilled practice, and the objects and their meanings in production, use, consumption, and in their afterlives—can form whole, self-contained sites of study and analysis. Today, researchers in different disciplines share the view that mind and hand are not separate in human cognition and action; however, we do not have a concept or vocabulary for the amalgam formed by the actions of brain, mind, and body. If we agree that making and knowing are an inseparable whole, then new accounts of where mind and hand intersect in the interface with the material world—material histories—may be able to bring them together to provide a foundation for thinking and writing in non-dichotomous ways about mind-hand knowledge and action.

As we have seen throughout this book, writing down craft and skill has been employed almost as long as writing itself has existed in order to make arguments about the relationship of mind and hand, as well as to argue ethical, political, intellectual, aesthetic, and economic positions. Besides being an account of the writing down of craft and skill, this book is also a recognition of the use of craft in making arguments of many kinds for the reform of knowledge and society. As such, I recognize that my call to question the binaries of mind and hand joins a long tradition. At the same time, I hope that one of the goals of this book—that of recognizing the amalgam of mind and hand in human actions and capacities, and working toward a fuller understanding of “thinking with the hands”—will be implemented, not just in university training, as the Making and Knowing Project has done, but also more generally in valuing, supporting, and celebrating the trades and training by apprenticeship as alternatives to the text- and test-based learning at present ascendant in our culture. Longue-durée material histories that use new sources of evidence and modes of analysis, in tandem with new pedagogical practices, can bring hand and mind together to attain a richer, more unified understanding of human experience and action today and in the past.

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Note:  in this diagram of abiogenesis short strands form longer strands, which become helical, and may then "bridge" or braid along with a cutting/sectioning function to other helixes, allowing repetition or pattern storage, finally becoming enclosed as if by a "garment" of lipid membrane traversed by ion flows, which then allows for the "feeling" or experientia by the inner life processes of the outer environment, translated in real time, as explained in the Nick Lane video re: "feeling," subjective experience, and the "hard question" of consciousness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#/media/File:Etls-2019-0024c.01.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

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