3.1 Methodology Problematic : Why it’s difficult.
Methodology is problematic for arts such as poetry. Spontaneous, intuitive, immediate, often un-anticipatable, and emotional, poetry does not seem a good candidate for enclosure within a rigid methodology. All systemic methods threaten to inhibit the fragile process of authentic inspiration, or to be built yet hold nothing: wind cages, light enclosures, wave locks.
Seeking consensus amongst diverse practitioners, distils method into aphorisms that guide approach to the work: listen to the inner voice, be true to your heart, speak honestly, strive for simplicity, express the inexpressible.
Such phrases are evidently contentious and problematic within the confines of academia. Their explanatory power is marginal. Too often they become the refuge of solipsistic refusals to listen to any criticism. Yet the history of art is based upon outsider exiles who voyage beyond received wisdom. Holderlin wandered in a schizophrenic daze over the alps muttering to himself, returning with fragments that continue to be analyzed and discussed today. This thesis is intended to navigate the delicately actuality of art-making and the demands of scholarship, providing an introduction to an artistic practise that straddles reason and irrationality, interface design and art, science and folklore, and heart, brain and body. It offers an epistemological challenge to the norms of how we consider knowledge to be generated and shared.
Proposed: Knowledge is the glistening atmospheres that envelops all matter. Language is demarcated at every interface. Recursive consciousness permeates all forms.
Labels: arts, methodology, research
[+/-] 'being available' : a methodology for poetics The process of writing art and making poetry is a discipline obscured by a diversity of practices. Each artist follows an idiosyncratic path toward optimum creativity. Along that path are predecessors whose practice resonates with their own. For myself, I find resonance in the methodology described by the esteemed biologist-poet A R Ammons (1926-2001), who, in his poem named "Poetics", says:
"not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours."
There are many implicit threads evoked by this passage relevant to the evolution of a poetics methodology that is not constrained by the idea that the artist/poet knows in advance what it is they must do. The methodology for making art/poem espoused by Ammons involves the artist/poet allowing themselves to be "available". This availability is evocative of shamanic processes where the artist becomes conduit for a collective self. Matter (or form as "shape") is attributed with the capacity to summon the artist; that which summons suggests that which is sentient; therefore shape itself becomes a terrain of needs and a site of desire which controls the artist.
Now a rationalist may object that this is mere poeticized language, anthropomorphic projection, and an inversion of the actuality of what actually occurs. Cognitive science studies into confabulation and human perception have repeatedly established that sane humans are capable of delusional states; and that the human cognitive apparatus is prone to false attributions.
These objections cannot be answered directly, except to point out that the existence of delusional states does not necessarily mean that any cognitive activity that seems delusional to normative consciousness is necessarily a delusion. No scientist method exists for unequivocally establishing the absence of intentionality in matter or form. Even at the level of the human organism, the notion of autonomy is contentious and neurologically non-localizable.
Additionally, numerous philosophers (predominantly from the continental tradition) have challenged the epistemological framework on which the prior objections operate. Richard Rorty (who studied at Yale under Hartshorne a noted advocate of panpsychic philosophy) developed the notion of ‘epistemological behaviorism’ which stresses in a post-modern way how knowledge is a construct created in the context of society. Throughout his work, Rorty challenges the deeply ingrained tendency of the arts to emulate the dominant methodological discourse of scientific rationalism. "Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behaviorism,’ an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." [Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).p.174]
As the late director of The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College put it, "With Richard Rorty, I believe that it is not arguing well but speaking differently that changes a culture. Poetry is the place where speaking differently is most prevalent."
If poetry is as Ammons states
"riding horseback between
the obscure beginning and the unformulated conclusion"
then artists must allow themselves the opportunity to challenge conventionalized notions of knowledge creation and develop strategies appropriate to their inherent constitution.
A. R Ammons, "Essay on Poetics." Selected Longer Poems (New York: Norton, 1980). p. 35.
Labels: methodology, poetry
