Slutty costumes

THE PROBLEM OF NEW MEANING

RSVP

: Ivan Sonofabitch (10/22, 1:21PM)

Your attachment gives new meaning to the practice of cunnilingus but I’m not sure what that new meaning might be. The question, of course, relates to the concept of “new meaning” itself. How, in other words, can something be both new and have meaning? Aren’t the concepts mutually exclusionary?

Actually no. Take new discoveries in science, for example. How is a discovery made? Interestingly, my doctoral thesis on Michael Polanyi’s theory of “tacit knowing” and its relation to the British school of analytical philosophy bears on the topic. What is tacit knowing? (I say “knowing” because I am concerned with the process of coming-to-know and not so much with the resulting deposit of new knowledge.) For Polanyi, whose most famous work was of course “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy”(1962), there are two sorts of knowing, tacit and explicit. Explicit knowing is having a focal awareness of the object of knowledge under consideration. For example, when looking at a table I have a focal awareness of its existence. On that basis I can coherently say, “That is a table.” But in order to say that “That is a table” one must have a prior or tacit understanding of what it means to be a table, what a table is in the first place. The important point to understand is that this tacit understanding underwrites all our claims to know. Such tacit knowing informs ALL acts of coming-to-know. A wholly explicit knowledge, one without its tacit roots, was for Polanyi impossible.

However, we see the operation of tacit knowing most clearly in scientific discovery, at the level of “discovery science” and not just what has been called “normal science” which amounts to little more than scientific housekeeping. The background knowledge of the discovery-level scientist impels him toward the recognition of a new presence, a new meaningful coherence in reality. Such background knowledge is, of course, his tacit awareness which, being vectorial in nature, “bears upon” that meaningful entity in reality. He cannot sleep. His mind cannot free itself of the force of his tacit awareness of a new, emerging reality. Gradually the “clues” bearing upon that reality begin to become manifest. What was formerly tacit now becomes gradually, if only partially, an explicit knowledge but, of course, one with its roots still in tacit or “personal” knowledge. When it becomes explicit knowledge, one of focal awareness, then the scientist can “demonstrate” explicitly the truth of his discovery. It no longer is personal knowledge but becomes the intellectual property of the scientific community and of society in general. Galileo, Newton, Faraday and all the rest – all followed a similar epistemological trajectory.

So, how does Polanyi’s theory of tacit knowing bear upon my concept of new meaning given by your attachment to the practice of cunnilingus? At this point all I can say is that my understanding is tacit, that there exists a constellation of clues which bear upon that new meaning but which, at the moment, subsist only at the tacit level. In time one hopes that this subsidiary or tacit understanding will become embodied in explicit knowledge, amenable to explicit and incontrovertible demonstration.

: (10/23, 6:00AM)

I don’t have an up-to-date Adobe Flash Player and, in any case, I don’t watch that shit.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!