Environment

6.5.10



Some detailed reading of whitehead has seen me copying and pasting in the last blog from the website: whiteheadresearch.org


My understanding is still hazy and not all of it is obvious or useable to me. But the general slant is relevant. It’s about exacting precise connections or details of interest within a wider, broader, deeper context. About the specificity within an interconnection that brings these details to relevance but is itself occluded- at least by our magpie attentional gaze. Yet that gaze of selection and expulsion is the process itself of grasp- of working up contrasts whilst holding to a wide durational frame in an altogether indistinct manner.


This melting through or inter-penetration is what ultimately works up the contingent edges according to which we find our bearings from one moment to the next. This is never finished with. It is a pondering – a perplexion that we literally find ourselves in the midst of and yet, from one surface encounter to the next we work up the meaning of what that can be through the timing of this approach-a conjoint multitude of timings that come together and mesh to cohere into a grip or knot, a certain sense or value of what that event can be.


If this all sounds vague, well that is the point. It’s in the vagueness that the movement continues, sketching over and over the same ground until an agreement of what that something is that is recognizable, comes through. Already it is vanishing at the point where we entered it because it is only the limited encounter of where our interest is put, that a clarity patterns itself. That is the value that it then holds. A certainty that holds our integrity to that place at that time. Yet our experience is of cohesion through and through- because it is supported by a far wider environment- defined by the very nature of these expulsions that set into relief a certain level view.


For something to come through we must remain in this haziness- tolerate the messiness that brings up the tangible level. That level is never fixed- it is no bench-mark, but a wavering striking up of scales that hold together at that pitch but give way to another level of cohesion- a new grip of interest in which we strike up a resonance that expands. It expands because we have put ourselves into that constellation so that it becomes relevant and useable- apt and applicable in the humanness of our endeavour.


This would mean that abilities- physical co-ordinations, sensory perceptions, emotional certainties, gestures, utterances, signs, symbols are second order events bolstered by the intermingling of on-going re-workings.

Coming together and coming undone is about the timing of these multitudes that swarm in excess of any set border.

The borders upon which we feel a limit; measure a sensation, push against a surface, configure intensities of light or sound into recurrent recognizable patterns; make out of this the metaphors of our values, are only there within the process of these involved practices.


Values through and through penetrate our grasping and cohering of sense data, co-ordinate physical missionaries that we become. It turns out that it is the wide and unfathomable canopy of propulsive interconnections that never entirely close off to a further conglomerate- a further assemblage, that is the atmosphere of every distinct move or thought, utterance or decision upon which the facts of life are built.


We cannot get a hold of that canopy which houses us. It is our environment- our habitus and we as much as anything else grow like a crystal out of the medium of this chemical soup. But that is not something outside of our values, meanings, intentions and the coming and going of emotional states. These are active compulsive forces in the stirring of that mix- out of which our bodies in this specific faculty or that, come into a purpose of some sort, or dissipate in order to partially cohere- partially dissolve into another motioning- another matter of concern or of importance as Whitehead will call it.


From the sweep of a movement comes the possibility of placing a pause- of grasping an attention towards a specific notch of consideration; what we may come to call a substance. That substance is nothing but a cut, deep or shallow, variable in any case, in the process of this churning of possible admixtures. We articulate by building up movements in and out of phase with other revolutions- creating fixed holding patterns of recurrence through constraint, then loosening and widening the orifice of our attention- physically relaxing the grip of our own particular integrity in that one juncture; letting the net slip through our fingers- timing the catch. Not that fish, not that one, but there, now: hold, close for a moment. A quality of sensation- smoothness of a moist body writhing in our hands, before again the motioning continues, the fish jumps free. We are all slipping through one another. We are catchers and we are fish. Sensation is that- an attention and a going into the slow motion of an apprehension- what Whitehead calls prehension. It’s a quality of involvement- a quality of control or limit within the limitless; the infinitude.


This all seems vague and wide and non-committal except in purely philosophical terms. Yet Whitehead is clear to point out that it is the philosophic level that can address together, what in any era would be contradictory categories of attention that are already second order exclusions. At a more penetrative level those categories would create a working assemblage for prehension- pulsing on-off between an attentional pendulum that at a different speed of revolution would cohere into a unity; an on-going buzz or hum. In that sense philosophy is always an historical investigation and a practical investigation- it looks at the speeds of approach in which certain frames of reference cohere and others dissolve. It looks at the composite winding-unwinding motioning of our attention behind and yet giving rise to any specific details relating to facts as we see fit to describe them. It also forewarns against various closures that are taken as self-limiting prequisites for thought or functionality or humanness or emotion and situates these frames into a wider contingency that must be allowed to play out in order for a wider set of possibilities to play out.  It  performs these variable renditions that convert sameness to difference and back again testing the crackle and buzz of points of immanence as compositins slurr in and out of lucidity- a lucidity contingent upon the environmental factors of a particular period of time; the values that hold within that time-frame.


There is a danger- a real danger which Whitehead warns against- that definitions of what it means to be human or what it means to be aware- to hold to a conscious state, to bring forth language and to grasp emotional states, is ringed and cut out from a liveable context of eminence that actually drains the life blood of those particular states by recursively determining their credibility back on to these self-selected limitations. Yet the limits grow out of a wider circuit of coming and going- a pulsing configuration of this area of interest and then that. A process. In a very real sense language does not speak out of itself but out of all the acts and ways of being that did not make it to that particular table; because it was delayed or in a hurry or not invited. The same goes for physical co-ordination, intention, goal, sensory focus particularly in sight and sound. It is bolstered, partially submerged, buffered, propped up, limited and defined to that sliver of attention that sets it on a particular course by all the tactile, kinaesthetic, swaying and motioning dances that are not completely upright, not completely lateral but describe a spiralling winding and unwinding on the way through but never finally concluded in any set position. Somewhere in the interval between a beginning and an ending that is more an idea- a value than an actual place of permanent residence.


Yet learning is so often about abstracting these ideal places, states, forms. An autistic child is given a picture of a “happy face” and a “sad face” to teach them about emotion. Physiotherapy seeks to break into small parts the mechanics of knee bend and joint rotation in order to teach an injured or disabled person to take a step. Speech therapy creates exercises in which a person vocalises perfect OOOs and PPPs and feels their breath on the back of their hand or on a piece of glass as the sign of life. Reading programs create phonetic sound-bites then sewn together bit by bit into more and more complex units. Always the building blocks are taken as having an existence outside of the wider building or pattern in which ultimately they are placed like the missing pieces to an already existant jigsaw puzzle.


But what if we start with the idea of the building or the whole even outside of any material? What if the units only even exist as glints and shards where the light gets in or the shadow deepens within the complex of contrasts set into motion out of the idea of the whole? This idea is not something that can be sensorially integrated all at once because it opens out over time, in the process of various engagements and insertions and re-arrangements- almost as a domestic preamble. But there is something like an atmosphere or a milieu which is more like the Occasions that Whitehead describes in which varying concentrates emerge as contingent compositions that define and hold each other. These seize attention- they place us- they co-ordinate limbs and sensations. These vague atmospheres-a rising resonance that builds like a dissipative gas- is the canopy in which particular functions come together. It is a society of occasions, to use again Whitehead’s terminology in which we are all bound to exist in the only way that is possible right then.


What then is disability, social mal-function, disengagement, redundancy of purpose, - weakness in limb or mind. An inability to connect with others; autism, phobia, paranoia, panic, isolation? Perhaps again these are already second order semantic terms. It is more practical to look at the circumstances where these envisaged human foreshortenings that seems to be the validated symptoms of a diagnostic certainty outside of time and unaffected by situations, become something different- something unexpected.

All I can do is gather a selection of situations- random moment of noticing. A certain quality coming through in connection that creates different kinds of jointing through the body, between people, across the distances of rooms and through the separate episodes of different meetings strung out between school curriculums, bus-journeys, meal-times, home-times; conformities and non-conformities in short succession.


How to describe when something goes one way and then all of a sudden it goes a very different way. How to pin-point the cause, to reapplicate it, to create policy out of it, to communicate it, when it is the traction of both directions that count? What is noticed are moments of connectivity- where something disparate and uncoordinated; the flaying of limbs the scramble of words, the push and pull against bodies resolves or re-orders into something that seems impossible to have built out of the elements present. Yet it is out of those discrepancies- the pure text-book autistic spinning and flapping of limbs or words in repetition, the stiffened spasm reflexes of twist and jarring upon touch- the leaning forward and backwards above and beyond any gage of normal gait, the breathless breathing back and forth into gasps of air sunk down and bubbling up again, the scrambled story-book circular world that it would seem impossible to go beyond within the borders set out, the spinning of marbles until they jolt out of their container and launch themselves into the air. The eating of sand.


Surely this stuff is irrelevant. Un-useful and not to be encouraged. Yet it marks time; performs time in a particular way. There is push, shove, momentum, fall, spin and lift; a going down and a coming back up again. There is contrast. There is a certain gage between varying levels of intensity held open, played out. It is enough. There’s nothing in the details themselves to be saved for later. Nothing of value in the objects or even necessarily in the use they are being put to.

What is of value is the context for these occurrences- a context that does not exist outside of the actions- the stops and starts of this rhythm of action that plays out.

A process. The details cannot be itemized, taken apart. There is no choice to be made between this and that. Between the appropriate or educationally valid and the inappropriate- the autistic fragment that needs burning out to contain and secure the purity of good human contact; the real stuff of being human. It’s all muddled up together and so it must stay. The value is not in any portion just like emotion is not in the heart. But it is certain things that play out that come to mean or be valued as affecting the heart or as expressions of heart.

That also happens within these strange or classically pronounced sub-normal standards of behaviour. Another element arrives but it is dissipative- perhaps immanent to the very process underway- the rhythm of stops and starts that suggests a pulse that then further orders the actions until a certain interest and value is put on that procedure and it is carried further. It is the atmosphere of the sounds that are the peripheral or collateral offshoot of the actions. They then become the main thing. That then lends itself to a body motion and literally sends the body into a variously altering series of sways and staccato stops and starts. It is a dance. All the time, the objects like the beads looping through the hands of a Greek man are running and circulating- hardly counted, hardly positing a position in themselves, but running on, keeping a certain circulation of tempo, evolving a course of ;procedure that now and again is interrupted, sent back on itself. There is a running to and from between bodies- dispositions that are bleeding out of any containment yet defined and shored up into certain felt limitations by the presence of one another. A certain feeling of connection through the actions. A formality of environment that is neither yours nor mine but falls beyond, falls between. Co-ordination is this and the girl who splays and collapses and kicks out is charged through and through with the musicality of this encounter with another small autistic boy across the room. The blonde haired boy gazes into non-space and she catches and gathers these shards in the atmosphere through her lolling swaying gait. It becomes the resonance – the off shoot of every up-down motioning against floors, walls, bodies and with the use of the random objects- object against objects to rattle and tap and crash down upon one another.

The boy looks on. He listens with his eyes. He presses one foot down and then the other, compensating one drift with another, circulating around this rotational core between one kind of leaning and another. By lifting his arms up as he rocks, his body automatically turns- He falls into the turn and spins. His head moves forward as his body arrives. He is grasping the moment with his body. Here, then here, then here

The atmosphere is everywhere – the gaze, the attention-the entrapment, enchantment- the story told and the world lived in. It is everywhere. There is no specific place on the body and in the landscape for signal and reception. Yet out of this quality of dissipation- the non-verbal utterances that are textures spread into light-dark, on-off pressure, in-out breath, forward-backward motioning, some kind of transference occurs; something like a spin, a recursive seizure and back-thread, an assimilation and letting go. Recognition is there. Compassion, empathy, emotion. Happy-sad, yes- the emergencies of partial connections, incomplete, throttled, reattributed in their making, held open in their incompleteness. Harmony if it ever exists comes through on the rebound of all of its doubles- all of its shadow discordances.

If teachers don’t values this coming through, the conditions for this coming through will never occur- will never be held in place- will not cohere from one fraction of an occurrence to another. In other words the multitude beneath any situation of integrity will not be allowed to play out- or if it does so it will go unrecognized as if it never really happened. In that sense it will not have happened. How to describe an event that does not take place? Only in the negative- as a lack of individual functioning. For the environment in which it would play into a connective set of functions that cohere only through that assembly, is disallowed. Only the disassembly beneath the bounds of any held area of interest is seen and surprisingly seen to matter. This disassembly comes to define humans carried over like a loose number out of the context of any equation, in to a kind of negative equity.

Everything is worked out in one instance; seize the moment. All coheres around that point played up to a certain speed in which value comes through. That is something precious that is found in every moment and is only of itself- not a metaphor for something else.  It arises out of a context in which the peripheral and the central concern are one- like a moon travelling over the sun- the full impact of the sun is known at the edge of its occlusion. The edge is made useable - made to matter and regarded in thought, pattern and affect. That is how using the body as a timer for stops and starts of affect is an excercise in thought and value and attention in the very way that it becomes a discriminatory tool. The emotional and cognitive and perceptive and sensory state is not in an area of function or in a certain way of presenting or signalling. It is in how we use these timings to discrimminate and to connect. The practice of those timings brings up or foreshadows other faculties by degrees and in stages like filters that affect a generalised character that fine-tune endlessly sets of characterisations acting on one another. These dispositions are open networks that work on and off further connections and further foreshortenings. The life of these medleys is more vital than any one point of interest though it gives life and vibrancy to every point of interest. We embody different facets of that pulsing interest in life and death choices and reconfigurations of how we positon ourselves between such  extremities. What we experience is never either/or. We embody the admixture of abstract opposites lived out and being alive by their very incompleteness. Movement is the momentum and backlog between the pull and break of these forced out opposite states. We fill a vacuum of our own making.

Creating the conditions for that vacuum or entropy is what causes the rush of filling. That 's how we seize the moment- between emptiness and fullness collapsing one into another continuously- moulding possibilities- turning through straight lines and the near or actual collisions that these bring- bouncing out of jams caused by limiting sums and eroneous calculations that add the impetus. Re-inventing space by envisaging lines of traction through our body's instantaneous affects upon the surfaces of this environment. An environment that we lay out through our conjoint actions. That we dance into credibility