Dear Maxine,
Thank you for your response. I’m grateful for the reference you gave to your work on music, which I will read. I found it interesting that in responding to my question about “what do we do when we describe something”, you pointed to the phenomenological method. I think this amplifies my question rather than addresses it. It also raises further questions about ‘coherent scientific discourse’ (the really important thing here is ‘coherence’). The attraction of ‘pointing at the method’ is that we can get coherence by indexing the stages of the method: first we do ‘bracketing’, etc. Everyone who’s studied Husserl, even (or particularly) at a basic level, can agree. As simple steps to go through it perhaps isn’t controversial – until we ask about what bracketing is, or the nature and locus of the structures of consciousness which are revealed, or whether bracketing is possible at all... Husserl accepted that consciousness was intersubjective, but his understanding of the Other in intersubjectivity was restricted to what Eugene Fink describes as “Others as are present to me in person (gegenwärtig anwesenden Anderen), that is to Others who stand in my near-field, in my perceptual field” (Fink's commentary on Schutz's paper 'The problems of Transcendental intersubjectivity in Husserl') Fink goes on to say “his analysis limits itself to explicating this Other as being present in a body, as having a body and, to this extent, not differing much from cats and dogs. And if having a body should serve as a sufficient indication of a transcendental fellow-subject, then one must consequently conclude that cats and dogs are also transcendental subjects.” That then leads on to a lot of problems in comparing cats and dogs to humans, amongst which are the ways that descriptions are made. Acts of description, and acts of phenomenological reduction, occur in a world of Others. The question is, What conception of this world-of-others do we have, and how do different conceptions affect our description? I think the question is about codification and abstraction. Phenomenological reduction is a codified method shared among academics. For each academic, it is a communication in the “world of contemporaries” – Schutz’s term for the intersubjective relations between people who are remote from each other but live at the same time. Academic papers, books and perhaps email lists are the general medium. But saying to somebody in a face-to-face situation “I feel really sad right now” is an intersubjective domain that Schutz calls a “pure we-relation”. (Incidentally, Realist philosophers have recently picked up on relational sociology and borrowed the term “we-relation” with quite a different meaning – see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Relational-Subject-Pierpaolo-Donati-ebook/dp/B00Y37ZK9M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456523972&sr=8-1&keywords=archer+and+donati ) The point is that descriptions are relational, and the kinds of relation depend on the intersubjective context. Interestingly, different kinds of description cross over different kinds of relation: to express a description codified in the “world of contemporaries” in a pure we-relation setting is a moment of didacticism (education is full of this!); to ask “how do you feel?” in a pure we-relation is a moment of empathy, or maybe therapy. In my experience asking academics to say “how do you feel” in the context of formal discourse, if a response is forthcoming at all, it is likely to be couched or masked in formal academic language which reveals little authenticity about feeling. Dance, however, like music, can make a kind of description as a pure we-relation (Schutz wrote about this in his paper “Making music together”). This relational nature of description is, I think, important when we think of science, discourse and academia. Darwin’s is an interesting example of descriptions within the context of many kinds of relation. Today’s world of online education also provides some interesting case-studies for exploring this. I mention all this partly because my interest in information lies in the hope that we might find better ways of understanding and studying relations and ecologies. Understanding description is key to this. best wishes, Mark p.s. I think the link between dance/tango and information comes through the Latin root of 'conversation': con versare - to "turn together". I think Gordon Pask was the first to talk about this in his cybernetic "conversation theory"; his pupil Ranulph Glanville used to talk about a lot. On 25 February 2016 at 06:33, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone <m...@uoregon.edu> wrote: > Response to Mark Johnson: > > ?What are the conditions within which a coherent scientific discourse can > address the phenomenon of dance (or music)?? > > > Studies that recognize the essentially dynamic nature of movement > can offer a "coherent scientific discourse" on movement, but not > on dance as a formed and performed art. One may well pursue a coherent > scientific discourse on non-art forms of dance (social dance, folk dance, > for example)in terms of kinesiology, psychology, and even physics--all > such studies being centered not directly on dance but on the movement > that makes dance possible and on the people who are moving. > > As for music: May I refer you to a 2014 article of mine in the journal > Mind, Music, and Language (pp. 1-12). the article originated in a keynote > address at the first international conference on Emile Dalcroze, a > musician. > The title of the article is "Dalcroze and Animate Life." > > I suspect Maxine is right to point to Darwin's 'descriptive' process. So a > sub-question is: > > "What do we do when we describe something?" > > In phenomenology, we begin by "bracketing" all assumptions and beliefs, > and, > in Husserl's words, turn "to the things themselves." In so doing (and in > the common way of specifying what one is doing), we are making the familiar > strange. We are thus not clouding our description with prejudices of any > kind > but hewing to what is there, sensuously present in our experience. > > I hope the above sketches are sufficient beginning answers your questions. > > Cheers, > Maxine > _______________________________________________ > Fis mailing list > Fis@listas.unizar.es > http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis > -- Dr. Mark William Johnson Institute of Learning and Teaching Faculty of Health and Life Sciences University of Liverpool Visiting Professor Far Eastern Federal University, Russia Phone: 07786 064505 Email: johnsonm...@gmail.com Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
_______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
