[Xmca-l] Re: Notes on Blindness

[Larry Purss]

Greg,
Memory as requiring the process of reduction of the manifold of experience
does seem to an interesting question which may offer a possibility for
further expansion. I mean this metaphorically as a reciprocal "dance" of
reduction and expansion.

The "reciprocal" awareness that possibly not only memories but also our
theories and our conceptions may be relying too much on the processes of
memory [after the fact] and therefore loosing sight of the multi-modality
of experience as it unfolds.
Greg as you point "out" - to be seen is to be made (cf. Bakhtin's notion
of "consummation").
Your insight where you say that filling the whole of the audible
environment is an experience of beauty, which has something to do with the
complexity of the image  in  motion, alive, moving, unfixed, with shades
and textures constantly
changing.
Instead of being isolated, cut off, preoccupied, internally, you are
presented with a world. You are related to a world. You are addressed by a
world.
Robert Nichols in exploring the meaning of freedom and recognition  says,
"To stand in a 'free' relation to the world, to oneself and one's ethical
commitments, is to know that one's standpoint does not exhaust the total
range of meaningful, viable, and worthwhile possibilities."  For Robert
beauty as 'being-in-the-world' depends on the "extent" to which we actually
"embody" the world through receptivity, fragility, indeterminacy, and
interconnectivity. [similar sentiments to the notion of "surrender" or
"acceptance" as an ethical commitment]
Robert Nichols perceives an ethical commitment that emerges within an
awareness of how one cares for the world and how one has an "attachment" to
existence.

Greg, is it possible that memory, and theory "about" how one re-members and
re-cognizes and re-presents and re-duces and then articulates the world as
the "truth"  contributes to being isolated, cut off, preoccupied.  The
world foreclosed.

Requiring that "we" once again  turn [or re-turn] to being within the world
as situated presence. The musical resonance of "attunement" within the
world prior to re-collecting and re-ducing the world through memory which
highlights the salient features.


On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 8:20 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Annalisa,
> Yes, you said it very well, much better than I did in my prior post which
> was a bit intellectually garbled (and I missed the article that went along
> with it, so thanks for pointing that out!).
>
> But I do think that there is an interesting point to be made about the
> importance of the reduction of the manifold of experience that is essential
> to memory.
>
> I once assembled a paper that argued that forgetting should be seen as a
> tool of ethnography since when one reduces one's experience to what is
> remembered, one has gotten to something that was somehow important.
> Reviewers thought it was just an excuse for doing lazy ethnographic
> research. Perhaps it was...
>
> What ever happened to that paper?
>
> I can't remember...
> -greg
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > Greg!
> >
> > Yes the piece is really great and well produced!
> >
> > If you read the article that accompanies the video on the Times page, the
> > writers indicate that over time as he adjusted to blindness, he came to
> > revel in the other senses to the point that when he was helping with the
> > movie, he'd forgotten that he'd gone through that painful time, and
> > apparently wasn't happy to revisit the memories. I think that is the
> point
> > of the last scene with the rain (inside), to show that he began to "see"
> > differently, with sound. Maybe? At least, that is how I interpreted it.
> >
> > I also thought, as you, it was remarkable that he remembered photographs,
> > maybe these map in memory differently? Like you say because of reduction
> of
> > modality?
> >
> > What also seems significant is that if we don't use those organs of
> > perceptions we lose memories of those perceptions. Which may mean that
> > memory is something that must be reconstructed with the organ somehow,
> even
> > if we aren't using the organ to perceive externally while retrieval of
> the
> > memory? I'm not sure I explained that very well…
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> > Annalisa
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>