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De-textualizing knowledge
By K B Jinan
K B Jinan is an activist-designer who has helped revive the traditional artisan community in North Kerala. Aruvacode is a small village near Nilambur famous for its potters. These potters had all but lost their traditional skills with the influx of cheap industrial substitutes. Led by a movement by K B Jinan, the potters explored the possibilities of terracotta. Kumbham is a result of this revival in artisanship. Kumbham is hailed as a rare instance of a traditional artisan community rehabilitating itself. More information about this group can be found on www.kumbham.org.
Paradigms of knowledge
The whole tragedy of modernity, represented variously as alienation, boredom, etc., is a direct result of textualization of experience. For knowledge accumulation, autonomy of senses is very important. Knowing is an act of constructing knowledge and all attempts in ‘teaching’ takes away ‘knowing’, however sensitive the ‘teacher’ is. Text makes sense as a tool of experience instead of being otherwise. The digital age is reorganizing knowledge to suit its paradigm vis-à-vis ‘software-ability’ and ‘organize-ability’.
Knowledge and process of knowing has undergone three fundamental cognitive shifts depending on the process of creating knowledge. The three paradigms of knowledge creation are experiential, textual and, most recently, digital. The knowledge in these three paradigms — experiential, textual and digital — are very different from each other even though for the people belonging to these respective paradigms their knowledge is very much real.
This very clearly shows how helpless human beings are in terms of their cognition and hence their knowledge. With each paradigm shift there is reorganization as to what constitutes knowledge and hence experience itself is altered and this further leads to further cognitive shifts. Some experiential modes are dropped and new ones are added.
Many years ago there was a shift from the experiential paradigm to the textual paradigm that went unnoticed. Textualization of knowledge altered the notion of what constituted knowledge. When knowledge got textualized, feelings and emotions were dropped. The word, intuition, was out of use for many years and it came back a few years ago when textual cultures started addressing its fragmentation, alienation and the feeling of ‘rootless-ness’.
The over-use of reason and logic and the neglect of intuition is due to textualization of knowledge and, by extension, to the corresponding experiential mode it created. Imagination is a word over-used by textual cultures as text demands imagination; whereas in experiential cultures, the reality is always present.
The textual experience is linear and fragmented, which is the only way text can convey. At several levels one can see the fragmentation in textual cultures. The self is fragmented as male and female, as body and mind and as childhood, youth and old age. Textual experience being personal and independent of others separated the self from community.
This internal fragmentation has led us to compartmentalize and reorder the world to suit our textual notions about life. Thus beauty and knowledge are divided into art, science and language, and into artists and scientists. Politics, ethics and religion were also separated. Spontaneous activities were broken up into planning and doing and entertainment and boredom have become the new dichotomies.
Education – Tool to textualize
Education has been the most powerful tool to condition and colonize the people as it has completely overturned the worldview of the so-called educated people of the world all over. It just replaced religious superstition to scientific superstition. It turned us into believers of a different kind. It turned us from active creators and inventers of knowledge to passive believers of text and experts. We no longer use our senses and feelings and experience to know the world. We are taught about everything—including beauty. Beauty is the most fundamental thing of human existence and makes one authentic. Beauty is what binds us to the external world. Beauty is what creates culture, architecture, music, artifacts, various dance forms and agriculture. Even beauty which is an exclusive domain of the senses and experience got textualized and it became a matter for intellectual activities.
Textual experience is an abstract one. Experience (by senses) is authentic and original. It cannot become second-hand. Text by very nature is second-hand. Our relationship to the unknown which was of awe and wonder probably changed with textualization as the knowledge is acquired within the comforts of the non-threatening text.
The same must be the case with “controlling” nature. The spiritual state of being here and now became impossible with textual culture. A total act of being in the present encompasses both past and the future. Our relationship with the text is itself an absence of the present. Textualization removes the present and creates only the past or the future. Modernization and mechanization brought in alienation even at the level of one’s activity completing the disconnect between the person and the external world.
Children because of their natural tenacity remained outside the textual world; so did most women. The crisis in modern schooling is precisely due to this conflict in these two (experiential and textual) paradigms. Education is attempting to textualize children as early as possible. This can also be seen as a conflict in intuition and reason. It is no wonder that there are no truly children’s books today.
With the removal of unknown from our experience predictability / planning and reasoning became the dominant relationship to the outside. Many people belonging to the textual culture do realize this crisis and are also coming out with several solutions but are unable to break free as all these solutions are textual. Approaches like systems thinking, holistic methods, their engagement with spirituality, etc. are attempts in overcoming this crisis.
The solutions to make the learning holistic is by adding more ‘sensitive’ subjects like ecology, gender, study of other cultures, etc. The whole is not a result of adding fragments. The infinite is not the addition of finites. This is the quality of the mind which is holistic, spiritual, in communion with beauty all the time.
De-textualizing
De-textualization is essentially recovering the autonomy of the senses and experience. It is a reconnection to the life-sustaining knowledge accessible only to selfless minds.
If we consider knowledge to be a biological response to sustain life, then the present level of estrangement between man and nature is unimaginable. How could knowledge and destruction go hand in hand to the extent that the very survival of the earth now edges on the brink of cessation? Knowledge, devoid of the biological content, fostered the grounds for depredation.
Knowledge as a biological response to sustain life is inbuilt in the knowledge of experiential cultures. Indigenous knowledge is the result of collaboration between people and their surroundings guided by nature’s need to preserve all life. The biological element in knowledge is what has led the indigenous communities to create ‘life-sustaining’ knowledge, guided by the autonomy of the senses. The so-called indigenous knowledge (a term invented by the textual world) is knowledge of the experiential paradigm.
For over a decade now—since 1988, to be precise—I have been in a process of unlearning, and creative engagement with the rural and tribal artisan communities. The unlearning process I am involved in is intended to scrub off the western influence that I had gathered through the years of “learning” in the alienating environs of some of the elitist institutions in the country. In 1991 or so I decided to stop reading altogether as I was only building on the already formed framework of the western knowledge.
In order to see clearly and authentically I felt the need to clean myself of all “isms” that dictated my cognition. After years of spending time with the rural tribal communities who were still free from modern schooling and were still very much part of the “indigenous knowledge” system I began to see the fundamental difference between the two knowledge systems.
Once, a few years ago while I was in the process of developing exercises and activities to help children learn pottery, I was intrigued by the way in which the master potters arrive at a form. I wondered how the things they make could be so beautiful. I was keen to know what guided them to arrive at a particular form. Mulling over it for several days I realized that there is a biological assistance that guides our sense of beauty. People undefiled by modern ways are far more open and receptive to this biological guidance.
This internal capacity and the external natural systems collaborate in some manner to produce a distinct aesthetic quality to their lives. The rural, tribal or nonliterate communities seem to act holistically, endowing an aesthetic quality to their every act. What we understand as culture is a result of this collaboration. In a profound sense, it is a community’s sense of beauty that delineates its culture.
The classical forms in human culture came about by this process. The pyramids, the tombs, the ancient places of worship all over the world, the folk dances, traditional music, and traditional healing systems have all evolved by a very different process than that adopted by modernity. These must have been the intuitive leaps of humanity. When a society or community loses its authentic sense of beauty or subjugates its sense of beauty to the corruption of alien influences, it loses its authentic culture.
Children in natural learning cultures are like any other newborn animal. Nature has its ways to make them grow and all the skills of an adult world are introduced in the games they play, the toys they make. They explore the world of senses by interaction with nature, and the world of nature through the senses. Senses are a two-way tool to know outside and inside.
The latest shift in knowledge creation
Now with information technology, text is being replaced by computer. The computers’ criterion for dropping various elements from textual knowledge would depend on manageability and software-ability. Like text it would also bring in new elements to the realm of what they claim as knowledge.
The comfort in seeking knowledge is far greater and they can also fake part of the reality though miniaturized and frozen images. This could altogether remove imagination and bring in surety as they did see the event however miniaturized or unreal it may be.
The following is a quote from Human Nature and the Digital Culture: The Case for Philosophical Anthropology by Dennis M. Weiss of York College of Pennsylvania: “Where this world is chaotic and difficult to comprehend, the computer offers us the image of a world of order, logic, reason, and transparency. While we may have lost our osmological map in this world, the computer offers us a ready replacement: the pristine, orderly lines of the flowchart, which becomes the new image of an orderly and computable nature. …..They assure us that we too may once again master the world and hold it in our hands. …… While we may have little control over the world around us, we can define the world and our links to it via our own home page.”
The calamity of this virtualization of knowledge will be far more destructive and elusive than the textual paradigm. The ultimate loss is that of human creativeness and life at large. If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be distorted and destructive.
Conclusion
The natural state of being is to be creative. And in the creative state one is authentic and original, to be inventing all the time, to be discovering all the time and to be new all the time. This brings in concrete and first-hand experience as the basis for what is knowledge. Senses are tools that connect us to the concrete experience as well as our inner nature. This demands then we sharpen or sensitize our senses as those are our primary tools for knowing. Beauty seems to be the spiritual way of relating to nature. Sense of beauty is experienced when the experience and experienced become one, however momentarily. It happens when all over senses are awake and we receive life in its totality.