I've been meaning to put up some of the experiments from Dodie's workshop for a while and am now finally getting to it. I will continue to update these as I did back through my emails and find old ones. I will also put up new ones from the fall workshop.
Dodie's Original Description of the Workshop
Most weeks students will be assigned a short take-home writing
experiment which they will share with the class the following week.
Assignments will range from cut ups to exploring bodily sensations.
Assignments are geared towards the class dynamic, so they may
eventually drop away or they may continue for the duration of the
class.
Some of the Assignments by Email Received Date
Nov 21, 2006 4:00 PM
Write your earliest memory/memories. You may do whatever you want
with this, but things to consider: what was your relationship to
language back then and thus your relationship to perception? Does
the memory have words or is it purely sensual? How does the memory
come to you? In clarity, flashes, blurry bits? Do you tap into an
earlier form of thinking? How solid is reality?
Slow down time. Take an event that happens very quickly and extend
the moment for one to two pages, double spaced. Bring copies for all.
raw data of sense experience I've attached the exercise again as a Word file, in case you misplace
the handout.
from
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/
Definition of qualia:
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers
over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem
to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases,
I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective
character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each
state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the
term 'qualia' (singular 'quale') to refer to the introspectively
accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.
Examples of qualia:
(1) Perceptual experiences, for example, experiences of the sort
involved in seeing green, hearing loud trumpets, tasting liquorice,
smelling the sea air, handling a piece of fur. (2) Bodily sensations,
for example, feeling a twinge of pain, feeling an itch, feeling
hungry, having a stomach ache, feeling hot, feeling dizzy. Think here
also of experiences such as those present during orgasm or while
running flat-out. (3) Felt reactions or passions or emotions, for
example, feeling delight, lust, fear, love, feeling grief, jealousy,
regret. (4) Felt moods, for example, feeling elated, depressed, calm,
bored, tense, miserable.
A tale about qualia:
The literature on qualia is filled with thought-experiments of one
sort or another. Perhaps the most famous of these is the case of
Mary, the brilliant color scientist. Mary, so the story goes (Jackson
1982), is imprisoned in a black and white room. Never having been
permitted to leave it, she acquires information about the world
outside from the black and white books her captors have made
available to her, from the black and white television sets attached
to external cameras, and from the black and white monitor screens
hooked up to banks of computers. As time passes, Mary acquires more
and more information about the physical aspects of color and color
vision. (For a real life case of a visual scientist (Knut Nordby) who
is an achromotope, see Sacks 1996, Chapter 1.) Eventually, Mary
becomes the world's leading authority on these matters. Indeed she
comes to know all the physical facts pertinent to everyday colors and
color vision.
Still, she wonders to herself: What do people in the outside world
experience when they see the various colors? What is it like for them
to see red or green? One day her captors release her. She is free at
last to see things with their real colors (and free too to scrub off
the awful black and white paint that covers her body). She steps
outside her room into a garden full of flowers. "So, that is what it
is like to experience red," she exclaims, as she sees a red rose.
"And that," she adds, looking down at the grass, "is what it is like
to experience green."
Mary here seems to make some important discoveries. She seems to find
out things she did not know before. How can that be, if, as seems
possible, at least in principle, she has all the physical information
there is to have about color and color vision -- if she knows all the
pertinent physical facts?
One possible explanation is that that there is a realm of subjective,
phenomenal qualities associated with color, qualities the intrinsic
nature of which Mary comes to discover upon her release, as she
herself undergoes the various new color experiences. Before she left
her room, she only knew the objective, physical basis of those
subjective qualities, their causes and effects, and various relations
of similarity and difference. She had no knowledge of the subjective
qualities in themselves.
Attached Assignment
From Aesthetics to Politics: Rancière, Kant and Deleuze
by Katharine Wolfe
http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=382
In the Critique of Pure Reason, as Daniel W. Smith explains, the form given to the phenomenal through reflection of the transcendental is what Kant calls the "object = x."[8] This is an empty form that only receives qualitative specifications when related to a multiplicity of phenomenal qualia held together through mental operations. White, thin, and sheet-like bark, dark-black knots, and a thin trunk, for example, are synthesized together mentally to form the object known as a birch tree. Moreover, Kant claims it is such a synthesis that allows the various qualitative impressions had of the birch tree, the sun, one's own hand, and more to be shared between the various faculties. It is because of this synthesis that the same qualia present themselves when, for example, I imagine a birch tree as when I conceptualize one. Pushing Kant's claim further, it might be posited that this synthesis is also what allows each of our various senses to present the same object to us such that when I put my hand to the white sheet-like bark of the tree, the feel of the bark indicates it is a birch tree I am touching, just as the visual appearance of its knots and leaves likewise indicates.
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Perception's requisite of a sensible unit of measure, encountered in the aesthetic comprehension of the beautiful, sets up a path to the sublime. This two-way relation between the mental faculty of imagination and the sensible world opens sense experience to constant variation as new units of measure emerge. Thus the constancy of a shared sensory world is called into question. In a sensible world of constant variation, what could be constantly the same not only everywhere and for everyone but even for our own senses and faculties? Here, the sublime comes crashing in. The sublime is a mode of aesthetic comprehension occurring precisely when one experiences the harmonious relation between one's various faculties and senses being overturned. Indeed, an experience of the variation of a sensible measure is only a minor form of such loss. It can happen not only that sensible units of measure vary in accordance with the phenomena but, moreover, that for a particular phenomenon there is no commensurable measure. Further still, insofar as it is a sensible unit of measure that is necessary for the synthesis of empirical parts in accordance with an object-form, an experience of the sublime is one in which there is no synthesis. The parts cannot be counted, and a form cannot be produced.
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According to Deleuze, it is from these ashes that arises the new kind of relationality indicative of James' radical empiricism. Whereas a traditional empiricism understands the empirical as the domain of discrete parts, at the heart of James' philosophy is the contention that relations are not derivations of a mental operation upon the raw data of sense experience, as Kant asserts by way of his account of syntheses. Rather, relations are themselves immediately sensed. Indeed, they are only sensed. Brian Massumi captures this insight in James: "relationality… registers materially in the activity of the body before it registers consciously" and thus "we do not run because we are afraid, but we are afraid because we run."[31] Immediately sensed relations, then, are of a world wherein, to follow the terms Rancière takes from Flaubert, the pearls not only individuate themselves but string themselves together.
Indeed, the pearls only individuate themselves in this very relationality. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is helpful here. He offers as exemplary the phenomenon of two contrasting colors appearing side by side, each intensifying each other and generating their value in this, such that, as Claudel writes,"a certain blue of the sea is so blue that only blood would be more red."[32] Deleuze himself offers just the image Rancière employs to crystallize his reservations about the political potential in Deleuze's philosophy; the image of a wall composed of 'loose, uncemented stones.' Such an image emphasizes the import of interrelations to the being of the phenomena, yet these interrelations do not form a whole fusing parts into a proper and immutable place. Rather, they form a whole world of individuations existing only in relation with others.
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A wall of "loose, uncemented stones," in contrast, is a whole world outside this domain insofar as to divide these stones from their relations is to alter their nature. This world is the world of the percipiendum, that which must be perceived. Just as yellow and blue vanish from sight upon reaching a critical point of proximity with one another, changing in nature to produce green, relations of critical proximity produce every discrete element available to perception. 'Imperceptible' individuations constitute the perceived, and the perceived here forces itself upon our body just like a color so bright one cannot turn one's eyes from it.
September 17th 2007
Again--here is our assignment. It's based on our very interestingdiscussion we had at our last session. Kevin's theory that all great
writing is reacting against something. Masha's discussion of writing
against various popular lesbian modes. This will be a two part
assignment. Here's the first part. Think of some writing that you
hate/dislike/that bugs you and write a page or two as much as
possible *in the mode* of what you dislike. The point is to explore
what you dislike from the inside. I'll give the second part of the
assignment on the 25th.
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