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

[Anthony Stephenson]

> 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 inte
>  rface 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.
>

I liked where your interest in alchemy might have brought you. I once
had an epiphany of the living materiality of the moving ores beneath
us. Your citing of the the “material complex” echoes the recent
philosophical trend of New Materiality & OOO.

And with Abiogenesis, you can see a correlation with other current
ideas such as Emergence Theory and not only philosophy’s Assemblage,
but bio-physics’ Assembly Theory.

-- 

- Anthony Stephenson

http://anthonystephenson.org/