Abstract: Participation Triple-Video Art Installation and Theory, examining The Meet-Up World.
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ART INSTALLATION: PANEL DESCRIPTION
It is a long story. An occasion for a face-to-face chat, where human beings can touch. Neville socially on a Sunday afternoon (I thought it was Saturday):
Well, no wonder, “Poor, Ruth!”
Take it as a Digital Art Installation: “The Message…Alone and Disappointed.” I am happy to tell you the story one day over coffee. Just ask me, engage a conversation…
Oh, yes, it is Sunday, not Saturday. How the weekend just blurs together!
Second last attempt and that is it…(yes, it is Saturday night now)
For two weeks I invited 676 subscribers of the site to join me and tell me what activities they want me to schedule. No one turned up again. Last attempt and that is it. Socials on the Southside are cancelled, and you can complain about “cancelled culture” as much as empty rhetoric can take you.
I given three chances at three different times of the day and three different days. And three different locations across Brisbane Southside.
I started this process on 17 February 2024, by taking up the role of the new organiser for Southside Social, by default. In the Meet-Up architecture the revised group is now part of the Brisbane World Readers Bookclub, which includes the Brisbane Meetup Intellectual Network.
Lastly I organised informal chat, BOTH in-person and online, for the next Friday late morning (March 1); I needed persons to put their hands up to share what they want and how they can personally help.
The Meet-Up group needed participants, not merely subscribers. The Southside Social has 676 online subscribers, and we only need a small portion of those subscribers, locals, to go off screen and assist by participating. This was the last chance, and nobody else arrived at the hybrid meeting. Socials on Southside are cancelled.
The last video of the installation is called, “Neville Socially on a Friday Late Morning.” It hones into the theory (below) There is several conversations. First, with the Grill’d local manager on the problem of technology design for the company, and, secondly, an explanation to the camera on the key problem of the Information Technology Companies.
THEORY
The last video in the installation shows me having problems with the technology, in the task to order a meal:
- I could not obtain a web link from Table Order image;
- The website only gave me the option for “Takeaway” and “Pickup”, no Table service;
- I had to wave my hands like a lunatic to get the Manager to resolve the technology issue. A person trumped the machine.
Hence it goes to the intersection of personalism and philosophical (post)-structuralism. At a business lunch yesterday (29 February), Dr Neil Peach and myself discussed this subject against the multidisciplinary fields, and what it came down to is personal participation and understanding rationality. Dr Peach is a scholar of Bernard Stiegler and wrote, “In Search of the Idiotext’s Future: Is the Idiotext a Sense – ual Encounter?“. It is an effort to begin the understanding of the philosophical misstep in understanding rationality. I had been coming to the same types of conclusions and common outlook from my historiographical work and educationalist (cognition) theories. Dr Peach found connections between Bernard Stiegler’s idiotext and Alessandro Pizzorno‘s concept of Participation.
Our stating point, in the discussion, was the work of Alessandro Pizzorno on the Participation as the precondition of rationality, and framing the matter from Bernard Stiegler and continental historiographic and philosophic tradition of the 20th century. Using an uncited extract, a book chapter called, “Alessandro Pizzorno: Participation as the precondition of rationality” we worked on the ideas. The book is called “The Meaning of Method”, but the technology could not deliver the right hit in a Google search: idiotext and idiocy. If you find the citation, let me know. So the practical problems of the I.T. is never far from the philosophic insights.
From this extract, I took the following notes:
- Participation is a necessary exploratory for rationality.
- Starting Point in Hobbesian Self-Preservation Dilemma.
- Principle of Reciprocal Recognition.
- Paradox of Individual and Distinction.
- Naming Social Actors.
- Weberian Principle: Assign Meaning to Acts Performance.
- Koselleck (2004): ‘horizon of experiences’.
- Testing of explanations by internal meaning.
- Social foundations are rooted in theatricalisation.
- System Thought errors are:
- Positivism
- Instrumental Rationality
- Analytical Philosophy without the synthetics.
Understanding rationality falls into place in the continuing examination:
- This blog piece is Participation as a necessary exploratory for rationality.
- In my major academia.edu internationally-tracked article: “Finding Peace from the Culture-History War: A Historiographical Message for the Times“, I concluded the piece by saying,…
A scholar can accept the hobbesian point that there will always be those who control the agenda, whether for peace or war, as the leviathan permits it, but, as with Locke, we, as individuals, have a certain power to control the agenda for benet of the social contract. A regulated democrat state is better than tyranny – in whatever form. If the intellectual history of politics were taught on various platforms and schools, we could untangle the conflict, and, while we all still disagree, the warfare would not be necessary nor desired.
- I use the mirror metaphor in my work many times, but significantly in the message that the machine is a reductive Reciprocal Recognition: ” A machine is no more intelligent than the mirror used in the bathroom. It is the human who mistakes the image in the mirror for something intelligent.”
- My historiography and sociology is all about Individual and Distinction.
- The social actors are mapped out in my essay, Research Note: Anglo-American Major Belief-Doubt Systems.
- My work includes Weberian “foundational” considerations on bureaucracy and institutions.
- Koselleck’s (2004) ‘horizon of experiences’ is well-aligned with my Horizon Worldviews Thesis.
- My discussions on internalism relates the Mapping Locations on the Mind-Brain Belief Spectrum Thesis in the Philosophy of Mind.
- Semantics is a big part of my work, and I explain what the concept means in the applied context, and what it does not mean.
- Many times I have examined performance, as in theatricalisation, and much of Education is Performance.
- My work frequently substantiates the criticism of positivism (in education), instrumentalism (in terms of the book industry), and analytical philosophy without the synthetics (synthetic critiques across my teaching projects). And Critical Theory is what I usually turn to.
Together we can understand the cognition background to those players in the Information Technology Industry who are committing many errors in their planning and design due their indoctrination into hard rationalism — hard incompatibilism (see the damming critique from the Rationalism-in-Politics thesis).
A book called The Mystery of Rationality, Mind, Beliefs and the Social Science, in its introduction speaks to what I see, as a historiographer, as the educational background problem for the hard rationalist I.T. players:
Explanation/interpretation dichotomy. According to some authors, such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce, rationality, understood as an explanatory assumption, is inconsistent with the principle of causality. This is because explaining the motivation of an action requires understanding its meaning by `re-experiencing’ the thoughts and feelings of the agents. This empathic view of understanding, which supports a radical difference between the methodology of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences, is rejected by Carl Gustav Hempel and other authors. The latter argue that explanations in terms of rationality are, like explanations in natural sciences, causal explanations based on the deductive-nomological model. According to this anti-dualist epistemology, understanding the reasons of action presupposes the use of the causality principle and the determination of a cause-effect relationship through covering laws. Hempel and the other supporters of the unity of science stress that the covering laws used in the social sciences are usually commonsense laws about human behavior that are, like some laws employed in natural sciences, probabilistic rather than deterministic.
The Explanation/interpretation dichotomy in most I.T. conversations are false binaries of one sort or another. Explanation/interpretation needs to get together, not separated out. It is here that we see the faulty positivism, instrumentalism, and analytical philosophy without the synthetics. It is Critical Theory that brings together the different solutions: in putting interpretations back into explanations, and explanations into the interpretations (meaning/semantics). This is already being done, and done for centuries in the field of Hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation.
The reason why corporations in information technology cannot see these solutions is the unfortunate bias in the attitudes of positivism, instrumentalism, and analytical philosophy without the synthetics. Anne C. Dailey’s “Striving for Rationality” in the Virginia Law Review in the year 2000, examined the philosophic psychotherapy in Jonathan Lear’s works. Dailey had a good critical review of Lear, but the depth of the philosophy has not been grasped that Lear draws upon; in a “post-dualist” psychology, meaning rejecting the reductive scientism for the mind-brain schema of Buch (2019). Jonathan Lear, the philosophic psychotherapist, is to Wilhelm Dilthey and Benedetto Croce, the historiographers, in the attitudes to law, history, and psychotherapy, as the I.T. critics is to Carl Gustav Hempel. Hempel has many truthful insights but his positivism is not one of those industry insights; in fact, the positivism diverts from the fuller understanding of the industry problems.
It may be said to be ridiculous for information technology players to have this knowledge, but what this essay demonstrates is that, unless the information technology leadership does take on the education, such persons will continue to be puzzled and unable to untangle themselves from the problems of communicative action (Jürgen Habermas).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
?. “Alessandro Pizzorno: Participation as the precondition of rationality.”, The Meaning of Method.
Dailey, Anne C. (2000). Striving for Rationality, Virginia Law Review, Faculty Articles and Papers. 392.
https://opencommons.uconn.edu/law_papers/392
Buch, Neville (2019). Mapping Locations on the Mind-Brain Belief Spectrum, Dr Neville Buch ABN 86703686642, September 27, 2019, https://drnevillebuch.com/mapping-locations-on-the-mind-brain-belief-spectrum/
Koselleck, Reinhart (2004). “Space of Experience” and “Horizon of Expectation”: Two Historical Categories, in Futures Past: On the Semantics
of Historical Time, Columbia University Press.
Pickering, Michael (2004). Experience as horizon: Koselleck, expectation and historical time, Cultural Studies, 18(2-3):271-289.
Steinberger, Peter J. (2015). Rationalism in Politics. The American Political Science Review, 109(4), 750–763. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24809508
Featured Image: Neville & Ruth on Neville’s 30th.
Neville Buch
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