Hi, All,
I can’t make it today. I’ll watch the replay though and jump in for the next call! Hope you have a good discussion!
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FYI: for anyone who’s interested, I uploaded my “introduction/overview” of our reading to the “Context, Backstory, and Related topics” section of the page, above.
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Thanks Ed. As Ewere and others mentioned, it was perfect. Perfect in the sense of ideal for our conversation. We wouldn’t have expected anything less (or more) than perfect from you.
I was a bit distracted at certain parts, in part because I had company. My office chair, comfortable and chair-like, had become a wall of a “cat house,” as Vincent calls his cozy abodes, created typically by couch cushions, in this case by said chair and blankets. I mention this because of John’s comments on the dynamics of chair semantics . . . and because I will be processing the recording soon (hopefully tonight) to review those parts in which I was pleasantly distracted.
And welcome to the forum @edoubleoo. Your insight and unique perspective during the Cafe call was admirable. We look forward to future conversations with you. If you find the forum difficult to navigate (as many others have noted at some point) you can reach out to Marco @madrush or I for technical support.
A great start to our Langer sessions! Thanks again, friends.
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Thanks again to everyone for taking up Langer. I feel the Cafe continues to be a hang out for organic intellectuals. Its about falling in love with ideas, isn’t it? There is a great pleasure in bringing the idea you have a crush on and exploring current infatuations. Currently I am indulging in McLuhan and his tetrads, a fun method for initiating gestalt shifts which I rehearsed yesterday. Thanks again for everyone’s kind attention… Perhaps we can do an essay by Mcluhan after Langer? I am studying The Laws of Media which is mind boggling. There is a pdf available if anyone is curious… I really love how we are integrating models, moods, intensities, paradoxes, pragmatics . I’m very grateful that we have learned how to co-regulate in a public forum. Creating flow states in a group is increasingly important in our turbulent times. I want to share this video with Merlin Donald, as he compliments what we are doing with Langer, Some of us studied Merlin’s essay in the Axial Age study group. Can we re-humanize?
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McLuhan is an interesting fellow; I wouldn’t be adverse to looking at something by him. So, yes, I’m curious.
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The chapter on Terads is pragmatic. You can use the tecnigue for revealing the wierdness of any human artifact. He draws upon Formal Cause and the interplay of the sensorioum, illuminating just how non linear our perceptualizing capacities are. The final chapter is on Poetics of Media and as we are focusing attention on Aesthetics this might be another turn to take on the magic mountain.
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I was intrigued by some of the work the McLuhan Dynasty (father, son, and grandson) has done on the senses—especially those beyond the standard 5. From one of my favorite podcasts, I found this to be a compelling way into the McLuhanverse:
https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/eric-mcluhan-marshall-mcluhan
However, I have not read McLuhan proper on the media… an area of study I’ve been wanting and meaning to get around to. I wonder if that would be a good focus of study for the Café after Langer during the winter months in the northern Hem (4 sessions in Jan-Feb)…
Eric McLuhan was also the author of The Sensus Communis - Synesthesia, and the Soul. (BPS Books, 2015) Which I do not have and have not read; but it is a book I would be interested in checking out.
In this essay of extraordinary scope and depth, Eric McLuhan explores faith as a form of knowing. He does so against the backdrop of preliterate man’s concrete, bodily submersion in the putting on of poetry and drama (the practice of mimesis) and post-literate man’s bodiless submersion in electronic communication, in which sender and receiver are everywhere and nowhere at once. In traversing the Aristotelian and Medieval concept of sensus communis, he examines synesthesia as, in effect, its operating system and charts the modern and contemporary mandate to embrace the discarnate. He washes up on the shore of religion as he uncovers a trinity of knowledge, that is, three kinds of sensus communis - the five physical senses, the four intellectual senses of Scripture (historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical), and the three theological senses (faith, hope, and charity)-each of the three complete in itself yet interacting with one another. A fascinating odyssey that will dazzle the senses.
And I wonder how Susanne Langer’s thinking may inform us on (or prepare us for) the journey…
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I found it to be a crushing disappointment. After two very good chapters ( with large quotations from Jaques Lusseran) he goes into a prescriptive mode, outdoing Jordan Peterson’s rants, waging war upon feminism and GBLTQ and the woke left.Sex, accoding to him, is about a woman getting pregnant. That is her essence. A man’s essence is to fertilize her. His dogmatic Catholocism is on display. The Church miltant. His straw man arguments and snarky comments are pretty absurd. He has clearly not integrated the Post Modern which he labeled and dismissed. Postmodernism had already fizzled by the 90s, so I find this rant a bit over the top. Like Nihilism, you have to go through Post Modern to get to the other side. Those who claim never to have been Postmodern could be right. Chances are they are still in some form of PreModern mixture as Eric was. A devout Catholic, he would love to re-instate the sodomy laws and ban abortion. .
His co-authored work with Marshall has none of Eric’s posturing. I just read Media and Formal Cause which is short and sweet but Laws of Media goes really deep , overlapping Gebser in interesting ways, as does Merlin Donald’s work. The Exterior Sensorium is still where they place their attention but they both recognize the need to develop the Interior Sensorium, their tecniques are still in an efficient mental structure. Marshall and Eric do not develop the Interior Sensorium in my view. The materialist paradigm is crumbling and so now is the time to use all of our models and use all of them well. I am meeting Seth tomorrow to work with Clean Language and the Tetrads. If we find some way to combine these approaches, I believe we would have a very good direction. I will let you know if we come up with anything.
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Oh, that is sad. But thanks for the report. I could hear in his voice, in the Entitled Opinions interview shared above—no doubt using one of my subtle senses—that Eric had something of an arrogant and know-it-all demeanor, even as he clearly does know a lot about cultural history and a set of strong interpretations about how it all works.
Just on the face of it, I question whether the “laws of media” are really “laws”—what does that even mean on a rhetorical level?
So perhaps let’s focus on Marhsall, then. Then. I would like to stay with the thread of Langer’s work at the moment. I am still feeling my way in to her notion of feeling; the relation of feeling to mind/consciousness; and how all this logical wrangling and disentangling plays out for a vision of art.
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They have a justification for that, borrowing from Popper and Kuhn. I find Charles Sander Peirce more convincing. And where do Laws come from? Do Laws change? Peirce concluded that they do. He said there are no laws of the universe but just habits. This is a very postmodern notion! We may have an essence but no one can decide for us what our essence is. I am reminded that Terrence McKenna admired McLuhan enormously. He also warned us that Culture is not your friend.
" I have been too far out all my life
and not waving but drowning"-Stevie Smith
If you re-embody the yin yang symbol and appreciate that the human is the waving line that differentiates light from dark then you are no longer drowning. You are swimming.
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This was also the view that Wilber came to in his early-2000s “excerpts” from the yet-to-be-published 2nd volume of his Kosmos trilogy. He combined this with Whitehead’s notion of the “prehension” of actual occasions and creative advance into novelty to argue that what are called “laws” are actually just especially durable (maybe for entire universes) patterns of prehension; regularities of process.
Wilber added that the repetitive, deterministic nature of these patterns could be equated with karma, and that novelty-generating aspect could be referred to as creativity. Higher-level holons are capable of more creativity and are less subject to karma—they have more freedom—whereas lower-level holons are more strictly determined, however, never absolutely so; rather, as modeled by quantum mechanics, it is probabilistic how exactly a holon will behave.
Here the “level” is a technical descriptor for the inclusivity of the holarchy we are referring to. E.g., Humans include atoms in their makeup; but atoms do not include humans. Humans are more free than atoms. If I decide to move my arm, all the atoms in my arm must move along with it. However, the higher holon is still dependent on the lower. If all my cells get blasted with nuclear radiation and die, I will die along with them.
Arthur Young, who we studied a while ago, describes how higher level entities gain dimensionality and degrees of freedom. His view of evolution traces the emerges of greater-dimensional entities from the quantum realm through animals and plants to humans and what might be beyond us. These ideas are correlated.
Terminologically, “pattern” would seem a more accurate word than “habit” to describe a universal observation, since one can, with some will, change a habit, but a pattern could be innate to the phenomenon. It would be weird to say, for example, that gravity is just a habit that the cosmos is keeping going, which it could change if it really wanted to. What McLuhan calls “laws,” from what I gather from my perusing so far, could just as well be called “regularities” or “principles for the study of”; which, the latter, I think is the more to the point.
But who am I to quibble with a Law? These are perhaps ‘merely’ matters of semantics. Yet Langer has inspired me to take my logical sieve out of storage and sharpen my analytical word slicer-and-dicer. For this is how we tidy up the language of the tribe, one meaning at a time.
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Maybe There’ s Something In Culture to Be Cultivated from the Compost
That Seems to Be A Happening No Matter the Space-Time Dimension,
One is Awaring,as long a Felt-Grounding with “Ever Present Origin” or “Always Already Present”…(I am Just a Poor Soul Who Doesn’t Want to Be Misunderstood)?
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Your body will die with the cells. “I” is both within and beyond the holonic structure. Each cell may have a version of “I” as does that which wakes up when your body goes to sleep at night. The five senses plus the trans-physical senses carry foward an " I " in loose consortium of intelligences. Remember the wavy line that differentiates the light and the dark in the yin yang symbol? Thou art that. A consciousness first paradigm has no problems with this. We are gestalt shifting between dimensions
St. Joseph’s levitations were beheld by high ranking educated persons who swore under oath what they saw. Of course, it might be rare ( thank God) but anti-gravity objects ( UFOs and UAPs) that defy the laws of our physics are now well studied by the Military and a report of these effects are in the public domain. In lucid dreams gravity is an option. It may be that there is a spill over effect on occassion with some atypically organzied persons. The sampling size we have of of the laws of physics is quite small…No science can claim it has absolute truths. Beware of premature cognitive commitment.
We are pattern detectors. Laws of Media attempts to apply Popper’s demand that scientific statements must be falsifiable. Under that constraint, he and Eric came up with four laws, no more, no less. I worked with Seth yesterday on his tetrad model It has a poetic structure., both visible and invisible, figure and ground. It’s a lot of fun. Many deny that Popper has an adequate theory of what science does. Eurekas are not produced by Popperian styled practitioners. Scientists are notoriouusly lax about applying falsifiability.
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That is a good point.
And gravity is a story we tell‚ a concept we have in our culture, to name an experience we share and can observe and corroborate, namely of the ways bodies are attracted and can become stuck to each other, as if by an invisible force or pull, or move around each other in predictable ways.
It does not work in the same way in all spaces. So we would need a science that accounts for different kinds of gravity, not just the Newtonian or Quantum isolated versions (yet not discounting those stories either). However, I am not sure Consciousness First is a slogan I can get behind, since Consciousness is always also already consciousness of, with, in, behind, and beyond beings, which appear within consciousness. There is always something. There is not nothing. I think Parmenides got that part right.
Consciousness is consciousness of consciousness—itSelf—the I AM.
Yet I AM is also THOU ART—
And IT IS—And WE ARE BECOMING.
I AM is other than itself, with 1+2+3 to the X person-perspectives in play through its alterity.
This is the new key we might be playing in. There is gravity is gravitas, in age and wisdom, in the blues. And there is levity in youth—in sainthood apparently, and in the transport modes of other-dimensional intelligences with esoteric technologies.
Thus might we sing our own songs of Innocence and Experience. I am curious to hear more about your work with Seth, perhaps in another thread. A tetrad model with a poetic structure, modulating figure and ground, sounds like it could conjure an interesting space.
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Those who speak
Know nothing;
Those who know
Are silent.
Those Words ,I’m told,
Were uttered
By Lao-tzu.
If we’re to believe
That he himself
Was someone who Knew,
Why did he end up
Writing a Book
Of Five Thousand Words?
-Bo Juyi (772-846)
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