Lyotard on why poetry and art matters

Just a I finished writing my essay about how my research is finding designerly value in arts and humanities education, I was randomly reminded of Jean-Francois Lyotard's brilliant "download your brain onto a hard drive and blast it into space" fable. I'll use this at the start of my thesis:

"One of the characteristics of the open systems the fable calls “liberal democratic” is to leave open certain spaces of uncertainty that are apt to facilitate the appearance of more complex organizations, and this, in every realm. What we call research is a case, become trivial, of these spaces freed for invention and discovery. The case is itself the sign of a superior development, where necessity and chance are combined not only in the epistemological order, as Monod saw, but in the reality of a new alliance, in the terms of Prigogene and Isabelle Stengers. The alliance is not that of the objective with the subjective, but that of rule and chance, or of consecution and discontinuity." (Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, 1999: 94)

The idea of using Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity (on autopoiesis in chemical and biological systems) with Prigogene and Stengers' Order Out of Chaos (the physics of self-organising systems), is irresistable.

Robert O'Toole : 11 Nov 2010 00:54 |  Tags: Inspiration |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Time, change, the collective and the individual

Here's my model of personal and social morphostasis and morphogenesis:

A hybrid (or perhaps a mash-up) of various ideas, coming from Bruno Latour, Maragaret Archer, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (and more).

Add to this notions of energy, sustainability, entropy and difference.

Robert O'Toole : 02 Nov 2010 07:02 |  Tags: Ideation |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Conference proposal on Open–space Learning in Real World Contexts

Open-space Learning in Real World Contexts

An Embodied, Mobile and Ubiquitous Challenge to the Reproduction of the Same

Open-space Learning (OSL) is a theatre-inspired approach to collaborative learning and working, more appropriate to 21^st Century lives.

The most pressing problems today (e.g. the banking crisis) are rapidly evolving, complex, and distributed. They unleash unforeseeable waves of chaos, spreading-out and feeding-back with an immediacy accelerated by networks of data, goods, people and capital.

Such problems are best addressed with agile acts of creativity, invention and enterprise, undertaken by teams that bring together the necessary diversity of interests and capabilities with immediacy and urgency. However, fast intellectual action tends to reproduce well-established assumptions and stereotypes, as participants fall back upon hierarchies, patterns and disciplines, throwing us back into the past and its repetition (our first and most familiar space).

OSL is a powerful means by which learners and collaborative agents can force themselves to “break the discipline”, to “bracket-out” assumptions and representations, envisaging different futures (the second, radically unfamiliar space). It provides a pared-down open third space in which to confront the affordances and constraints of the now, virtual futures and our embodied singularity.

In order to fulfil its revolutionary potential, OSL must become more open and mobile, capable of enactment and adaption whenever and wherever required. Combining new technologies with the context-sensitive power of a “ubiquitous” approach makes this happen.

Find out more on the Open-space Learning web site.

Robert O'Toole : 31 Oct 2010 18:24 |  Tags: Ideation |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem