January 2022
The last months of 2021 were full of travels and travel arrangements. With further complications to my travel plan to Wolverhampton, this year is starting calmer. While I regret not being able to be in UoW in person, I am happy to have the time and space to do some well needed reading, and excited to take part in UoW’s events online. I recently successfully defended my project proposal in front of my academic committee and was recommended a wealth of references and lines of investigation that I am looking forward to pursue. While waiting for some books to arrive, I have been experimenting with diagrams as a method of thinking, writing and taking notes. I am hoping to develop a set of skills that will allow me to record my interaction with the works that I engage with it in a way that takes into consideration future shifts in my research that might transform the insights that these works might offer.
Until now I have been focused on one diagram in particular that attempts to explore the emergence of thought and the relation of matter to representation, the relation of the body to transcendental thought, and the relation of chaos to unity. In short, the diagram that you can check on this link (https://www.clauden.com/ontodig), is an attempt to better understand the ontology that underlies my work in order to uncover the ways the concepts I use interact with each other in space/time which then allows me to have stable yet interactive concepts.
Diagrams and diagramatic thinking play an essential role in arguing that cognition extends beyond arrangements of linguistic representation. While diagrams in an academic context are usually used to illustrate already phrased ideas and processes, I attempt to explore diagrams as a way to put concepts in a spatial conversation with each other. By inserting diagrammatic thinking at the core of knowledge production, instead of simply being a tool of illustration, the relationships that emerge while plotting the diagram, are intentionally allowed to shape the definitions of its concepts according to how they relate to each other.
I found it helpful to make use of digital tools of symmetry to illustrate the multiplicity of subjective emergence, how multiple subjectivities interact to form a world, and how different worlds can coexist, intersect, and overlap. I need more time to write about what’s happening in the diagram and to understand how such ontology can interact with the work of writers I engage with.
Until now I found it interesting to note two main points according to this arrangement: First: transcendental thought is seperated from the body by the subject; While transcendence can think the body, it does so only partially through the subject that is available to the body in a particular world. Second: even though matter or more precisely the body is the common aspect between multiple worlds and multiple subjects, the subjects are the point of reference/center of each world, making each world/system of significance appear unified, whole, and isolated to the subject that experiences it.