>Dianne wrote:
>as i tried to perform in the enactment of everyday idioms,
>people "make sense" of what things mean,
>suggesting that meanings pre-exist the ways we "make sense" and i would
>reckon that "sense" here is some form of subjective
coherence
>
>-------
mike sez
>
>Sounds good to me, Dianne. Would it make sense to you, in your
>sense (!), to say that sense making, in so far as it is
>artifact mediated, is duplex process, ideality and materiality
>fused for the "purposes of the moment"? Part "reality",
>part illusion. Might the overall process be consciousness?
>mike
i thought a lot about this, and i suppose i have a different notion of what
constitutes consciousness; in that consciousness pre-exists language and
artefacts, that it
is pre-social, pre-cognitive, largely beginning with body-in-uterus-space,
largely
rhythmed and patterned to each individual's own particular patterns of
mind-body, rhythm, audition, feeling, texture, and other nonverbal
experience;
whereas coherence is more about organization, mind-working with realities
and phenomenons, memories, language, meaning, scripting a familiar pattern
of self-as-plural as a way to function in the dominant world of what is
assumed to be normal - much of consciousness is organized ideologically,
so much of the sense-making is tuned to that work, of making ideological
sense,
(which is why, say, gays are are not-normal and ought to be denied certain
rights) - of what something means (trying to pass a bill of rights for
gays)
sense-making is, i think, a work of conscious thought,
but by the same token, many are conscious and incoherent (mental illness,
for example, psychosis, schizophrenia) - Gertrude Stein was certainly
conscious,
and often incoherent to the normalized ear;
there is a relation, yes, a fusing of imagined and perceptual input, but
again,
as these are increasingly patterned according to the norms of the culture,
the sense
that is made of 'things' is a work of self-normalizing -
genital mutilation of young girls, for instance, is incomprehensible to me,
but it is perfectly coherent to the customs of the historical traditions
which
dictate the practice - it is part of their particular patriarchal ideology
-
i am not sure it is so simple as saying one process is what makes the
other,
so much as they are interconnected processes, part neurological, part
historical,
part body, mind, symbolic, cultural, and invariably negotiating a sense
within a
context of some sort of dominance...
i don't know if this is a coherent response, but it makes sense to me :)
diane
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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