Radically distinct and inter–dependent modes of thinking–acting

Follow-up to Research pitch slides from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

I'm re-visitng Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? so as to get a better understanding of the "radically distinct modes of thinking-acting" described in my first conjecture. WiP? explores how the three disciplines of art, science and philosophy are constituted as radically distinct responses to the chaotic and disruptive reality of time and events. For example, on poetry:

In a violently poetic text, Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent - Wordsworth's spring or Cezanne's apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 203-204)

This often violent injection of chaos into sense, in the case of poetry, translates into practices of creative thinking-acting that work with words, meaning, rhythm etc as their materials so as to intensify sense through a kind of tension. Painting, as descibed in Deleuze's Logic of Sensation, similarly belongs to art, but operates in chaos with different materials and methods. Philosophy and science, however, have a different relation to chaos - but always one founded in an empricism.

The three disciplines advance by crises or shocks in different ways, and in each case it is their succession that makes it possible to speak of "progress." It is as if the struggle against chaos does not take place without an affinity with the enemy, because another struggle develops and takes on more importance - the struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 203)

So each discipline must in some way expose itself to chaos, to disruption: a necessity for risk encountered by each student when faced with the cognitive shift necessary in mastering a dicipline's "threshold" concepts. The modes of thinking-acting performed within a discipline work to open and close the gash in the umbrella of certainty, and to propel the individual and the collective forwards.

Does art provide the means for disrupting science and philosophy? Does science disrupt art? Philosophy science? For example, the Open Space Learning pedagogy introduces modes of thinking-acting from the theatre to scientists.

So the first conjecture becomes:

Intellectual activity consists of a set of radically distinct and interdependent modes of thinking-acting (implemented through varying disciplinary or private practices).

Robert O'Toole : 19 Nov 2009 07:19 |  Tags: Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem