Tuesday, July 15, 2014

on 'knowing' versus 'knowing about' + haptic epistemology

In considering hands-on work and haptic intelligence, both in a lab and creatively, I've been thinking about the difference between knowing something, and knowing about something. I'm concerned with knowledge generation, or as it is known in academic circles, epistemology. My thinking around epistemology is along the lines of contact, touch and working with something in a practical, hands-on way as a way of knowing something versus reading about something and thus knowing about it. I see a problematic highlighted by this distinction, and that is the problematic of certain educational approaches. In academia, far too often I think, students know about things because they read about them, but don't often know things in the sense that I'm referring to: not haptically nor experientially. A different educational model, that of the technical/community college, the lab, or the art studio, where technical skill is valued and practiced, provides an opportunity for students to know something. I call this haptic epistemology. 
The difference between knowing (haptically) and knowing about can be illustrated thus: people read news or watch it on TV or read/watch it on the Internet. People learn about wars, strife, murder, mutilation, shooting sprees, etc. to know about them and what they do to bodies. But many of us do not know them because we haven't personally experienced these horrors. We do not bear the scars of flesh wounds or PTSD from the experience. I'm not advocating for knowing war, but I'm illustrating the distinction: we can't say we really know something when we haven't experienced it firsthand.

Likewise, a professor at UWA told me an anecdote recently about how he had to fail one of his students. The student failed his exam because he knew about the bodily systems he was working with as a medical student, from reading his text books. However, when it came to physically handling those same bodily systems, he didn't recognize them. He didn't know what he was holding and looking at, nor how to treat it. You see the critical difference.

Some artists have become the same. Art schools have all but been swallowed by academia, becoming mere departments in the overall academic system. I've seen far too many artists just stop making work and become enmeshed in philosophy and history of art to the extent that an art PRACTICE becomes utterly stunted and superseded by talking about art instead of actually making it. The conversation alone becomes the focus, instead of the work inspiring the conversation.
I want to give a practical example from my own experience. The recent funding I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada was based entirely on my ability to articulate in writing the philosophies and art histories supporting the work I wanted to do. I was not required to submit images of my previous or current artwork whatsoever, despite the fact that I'm working in visual art. I was not even required to address the materials I would use nor the objects that I would construct, in much detail. Materially and visually, it didn't matter. The framework for my proposal was scientific: evaluation methods and projected outcomes. Artists know that we don't really work this way. We don't necessarily work towards meeting a specifically-determined outcome but rather respond to materials and make adjustments along the way, with our final work often resulting from accidents, mistakes, and changing the approach.
This 'responding to materials' is a haptic process. It is an exploration of knowing versus a system of knowing about. Research methodologies are of two main kinds: bibliographical research (reading) and experimental (hands-on). The two can complement each other (and should), but I've demonstrated what happens when the research is top-heavy with bibliographical methodology and weak in experimental. Talking replaces doing.
As a person with a background in adult education, both formal theoretical training and (mostly) practical learning, I am a firm believer in hands-on learning, in not blathering on too much at students (the old 'open-head, pour-in-knowledge' model of the 'sage on the stage') but rather in providing students with opportunities for taking responsibility for their own learning, for doing their learning and then knowing something instead of just knowing about it.
This is an important argument to make for my current work, which engages with haptic intelligence, process and epistemology, from the perspective of generating knowledge through my own art/sci creations, as well as observing the knowledge and communication that happens in a biological system via cell culture. I'm not working alone in my projects - the agency of the biological systems to determine the direction in which they wish to grow, change shape, die and leave me with nothing is something I need to acknowledge, respect and know.


  


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