Subjectivity

It may be useful to remind ourselves here that when I am referring to the organization of knowledge I am not talking about taxonomies, indexes, cladistic disciplinary structures, or allocations of library shelf space.  The topic of that knowing; its content; what programme of study it might form part of or what occupation it might prepare one for is not relevant at this point.  What is important is that there are apparent differences in the forms that this knowing takes, with corresponding differences in perceived value, application, and transferability.  The organization I am talking about here is that which arranges knowledge into the various types I indicated at the top of this writing; ‘objective’, ‘subjective’, ‘tacit’, ‘implicit’, ‘carnal’, ‘occult’, etc.

When we use conceptual metaphors (of perception, object manipulation and bodily movement) to organise these types of knowledge spatially or geographically we seem to use one of two possible maps corresponding to very different metaphorical spaces.  Sometimes we use a cartographic projection which is oriented on ourselves, placing our own experience at the centre of epistemological organization; elsewhere I referred to this as ‘Subjective Space’.  At other times and in other contexts we use a different map and a different space, one more akin to the intersubjective space that gives us the ‘view from nowhere’ that Thomas Nagel refers to.  What I want to outline initially is the experience of knowing that emerges from the first of these spaces, that of subjectivity.

This type of mapping is the most literal and (probably) the most intuitively obvious.  After all, our phenomenology is configured such that we experience our bodies as existing at the axis of a circle of vision, with the significance of objects being largely determined by the degree to which they loom in our presence.  A glance around the room or the view over the landscape tells us that those objects which are closest to us are also the largest and most imposing, (with the grandest being our own body; the hand held up against the sky that blots out the sun). Also, the nature of our situated embodiment as figures in that landscape allows the more remote objects around us not only to diminish in size but also to suffer occlusion.  Our singular viewpoint geometricises the space around us and the objects in that space are prey to the logic of that geometry.  The close obscures the distant and the man walking his dog some way up the path ahead is rendered invisible and irrelevant by the rapidly approaching cyclist who has overtaken him and is now not only blocking him and his dog from view, but also has a dangerous salience that  commands solid attention.  Our embodied experience constantly reminds us that proximity is a measure of this salience, and those objects, entities, and events which appear closest to us are the most actual in terms of their (possibly literal) impact on our lives.

Not only is the stuff which is closest to us larger and uppermost in our perception, but it is also that which is most likely to hurt us, kill us, feed us, have sex with us, or otherwise affect our well-being, and we would be well advised to give particular attention to those approximations.  We hold such entities, important as they are, in the light of necessary constant awareness, since neglecting their presence is likely to be costly.  They do not seep in and out of consciousness the way that more remote phenomena do; the shops and houses that flow past the vision of the driver whose firm focus is on the child who looks like they might step out into the road just up ahead; the church tower and the mobile phone mast on the horizon, tiny and vaporous and partially obscured, if noticed at all, are barely remembered.  Within the ongoing cartographic imagination such peripheral entities barely exist at all.  They are intangible, ineffable, at the edge of sight and almost out of mind.  They have the impermanence of wind, blown by cherubs at the periphery of old maps. The conferring of salience upon those objects which loom and snuggle, on the other hand, gives them a permanence and definition which is absent from these more distal visions.  They are assertively, undeniably solid, and you’d better believe it.

So the subjective arrangement of objects in space around a phenomenal centre brings with it a corresponding set of relationships to do with size, visibility, contact, affordance, substance etc. and such arrangements also correspond with personal salience.  This arrangement then forms the basis for the metaphorical schema which organises knowledge around our subjectivity, and these relationships carry over as entailments of the metaphor.  Objects of knowledge which we consider to be close to our personal centre of being have priority over those which are less intimate and pressing, regardless of any ‘objective’ status such knowledge might have.  A critical word from a loved one, which might have little relevance or status outside the confines of our own small area of knowing and being, may be experienced as huge and imposing, dominating the conceptual landscape and hiding any prior compliments in its shadow; as solid and factual as a slap to the face or a punch to the gut.  The converse of this is the apparent irrelevancy and evanescent vagueness that more apparently ‘distant’ knowledge displays.  Our newspapers carry facts about climate change, diminishing resources, over-population, and the rest, but there is little impact.  These are the church towers and the mobile phone masts that we drive past unaware.  The man walking his dog is obscured by the approach of the cyclist.

This arrangement of epistemology according to the logic of the spatially located being may be the default setting for how knowledge is evaluated and awarded substantial status, at least to the extent that it seems explicable in terms of evolutionary history and current embodiment.  And  given this natural propensity that we have to orient experience around our own phenomenal centre of existential gravity, a tendency built into the fabric of our embodiment and hence into the architecture of our understanding, it is pretty remarkable that we are not entirely locked into this solipsistic viewpoint (at least those of us who are not teenagers).   We do not habitually adopt only an epistemological position on reality which parallels the geographical position we uniquely occupy.  Whilst we are undoubtedly objects apparently located in three-dimensional space; and whilst we have organs of sense and organs for processing that sense which mediate that space in specific ways, and whilst we are (made) subject to the defining logic of this condition with its concomitant features; horizons, perspectives, occlusions, movements toward and away from, front/back distinctions, etc; we also seem to be able to adopt other conceptualizing positions.

Most of us would be uncomfortable with the idea that the status of any particular article of knowledge was entirely dependent upon its perceived salience or metaphorical proximity to any one individual, including ourselves.  We recognize that, whilst some knowledge is appropriately located using this phenomenological map, (insults and compliments for example), it would not be right to follow such idiosyncratic organization for all elements of knowing.  We like there to be such things as ‘objective facts’; knowledge objects which don’t go away when you stop looking at them and which have a permanence and solidity which is not dependent upon their transitory appearance within the phenomenology of any one individual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYmp93vQ3uA