In reading William James’ description of the continuous relationship between experiences and the experiencer there exists an interesting notion that in order to fully experience the real the experiencer must also be able to understand and experience the discontinuity or “disunion [in order] to make our merely experienced disjunctions more truly real.” The dialectic of discourse is inherently given to this notion of opposing relationships which rely upon one transition of experience to another. It is the form of these relationships that I find the most problematic. In artistic practice how do we apply this to form? Does the separation and the disunion that James talks about act as magnetic fields of discourse in which the image is the mediation of these paths of discontinuity?
I find this very interesting and have found myself searching for the metaphorical image appropriate to James’ philosophy.
I find a correlation between this dialogue with the text entitled “The World as Power: Power as Matter.” This text is a study of Vedantic philosophy through the lens of scientific and rational empiricism written by Sir John Woodroffe in 1923. Woodroffe writes about a modernization of Hindu philosophical and spiritual achievements of thought whose “general tendency is now towards some form of radical monism as a result of greater and greater co-ordination and unification of sciences and of science with Philosophy and of Philosophy with Religion.” He then points to dynamism as the essence of matter which is not said to be “merely occupying space but essentially dynamic with mobility as its fundamental trait.” Woodroffe puts forth a similar set of cognitive relations between the knower and the known similar to those of James:
“All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. Either the knower and the known are:
(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are
(2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or
(3) the know is a possible experience either of that subject or another, to which the said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged.”
Woodroffe puts forth these two stages in the experience of perceptual matter:
“(1) The original, intuitive, alogical experience of Matter apart format he incidence of the thought-forms: this is Matter as we actually feel or apprehend it.
(2) Then we have that original datum of experience as treated by the Subject with his thought-forms: this treatment giving us what we believe, think and describe as the Matter of our perception.”
In trying to tie these texts together I am struck with the desire to find the IMAGE that seems to be lacking in the rhetoric. Both James and Woodroffe describe the IMAGE as a sort of intermediary point between experiences describing what is perceived within the mind’s eye of one individual and another. These two individuals cannot be certain that the shared experience of ideas and formations of relations between themselves are actually real until the image has been terminated through the act of experience through knowledge. What you see and what I see are obviously different things. But the search for how this is rendered in artistic form is intrinsically important to the discussion.
In James’ philosophy on these experiences I find it very difficult to “see” any forms other than through language and space. His writing is evocative of musical composition in which our experiences are made possible through movement through language, a step to step, letter to letter, voice to voice etc… Is the voice of the human being, the search for music, for sound the ultimate experience that human bodies are capable of experiences as shared knowledge? Is music an art form quite different in origin that other visual art forms?
Jacque Ranciere discusses some interesting ideas regarding these questions in his book, “The Future of the Image.” He discusses Adorno’s aesthetic notions of the separations and differences between the “verbal, plastic, sonorous” or other art forms and how the rationality of their existence is separated by a bond and a difference in communication. “Therein artistic modernity represents the conflict of two separations or, if one likes, two forms of incommensurability. For the rational separation between spheres of existence is in fact the work of a certain reason — the calculative reason of Ulysses which is opposed to the Sirens’ song, the reason that separates work and pleasure. The autonomy of artistic forms and the separation between words and forms, music and plastic forms, high art and forms of entertainment then take on a different meaning.”
And suddenly this is all starting to look like an airport to me. An airport wherein travelers of knowledge or ideas and experiences are constantly be routed between one destination or terminus to another without an actual end in mind. Whether or not these experiencers and experience bodies actually relate to one another in any actual meaningful way is difficult to say. And here they go, in groups and but as individuals, across large expanses of space in which other experiences are creating continuous relations. The airport is the main metaphor that comes to mind. A bastion of hope, business, fear, and most of all through commodity. The commodity of the exchange of bodies of experience is termed a “hub.” A hub of experience which brings me to the exchange of ideas through technological interfaces. Without these interfaces how does the discussion abut the experiences between the the known and the knower take place?
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Another quote in Woodroffe’s book if you feel compelled to read more:
“Scientific or conceptual matter as now understood in the West is reduced to electrons and protons or units of electric charge which again are, according to some, strain forms in, and of, an ultimate substance or Ether, and which in any event are forms of Universal Energy. But what we objectively perceive as Energy is subjectively Will….What we cal Matter is then the Self as its own object. The Self is subject and the Self is object. The object or matters is not, as in the case of the limited centre, something other than, outside of, and separate from, the subject….Matter then is eternal, though it has two forms as seed and fruit. The seed is tendency iin the supreme and infinite Reality to appear as Matter to the finite centre. The fruit is that tendency realized as Matter and the Mind which experiences it. It always is as the power to become of Being, and recurrently exists as that Power manifested as psychic, vital and physical Energy in the form of Mind, Life and Matter.”
“The World as Power: Power as Matter,” Sir John Woodroffe