[ba-unrev-talk] Towards a participatory world
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~mnspwr/Papers/participationwritingcarvingteaching.htm (01)
"Over the past few months I have been using freefall writing as a
discipline to explore and attempt to deepen my experience of living a
participatory worldview. In freefall, one ‘writes without a parachute’,
allowing the process of writing to unfold. I know when I have dropped into
the freefall mode these days, as I feel a Zen-like sense of calm and
spontaneous deliberateness, letting go of control and settling into what
Natalie Goldberg (1990) describes as ‘wild mind’. At these times I notice
acutely how the pads on my fingertips make good contact with the keyboard
and enter a moment of time when I can directly experience the words coming
through my bodymind and onto the screen.
....
How can we think about participatory mind? Are there some intellectual
handles which can help us understand these participatory practices? James
Ogilvy (1986) suggests that paradigms consist not simply of intellectual
frameworks, but of moods, myths, models, and metaphors. To this I want to
add ‘methods’, the practice dimension of paradigms, how they infuse
everything we do. I have often thought that the way we think is made
concrete in our practices, and even more in our engineering and
architecture—our straight line thinking is made manifest in the sewers
which take our shit out to sea; our hierarchical thinking in the straight
lines in which we fix chairs in lecture rooms, all facing the lecturer." (02)