Dear Organlearners,
Steve Eskow <dreskow@magicnet.net> writes:
> In his intriguing message At assumes, as do most of us, that speech is the
> natural and first form of human communication, and writing came later, and
> records what comes to us first in the form of speech.
>
> I'm not sure if the so-called "deconstructionists" have yet had any impact
> on the "learning organization" movement, but they certainly have been
> changing the theory and practice of philosophy, literary criticism, and
> other academic disciplines.
>
> Jacques Derrida, who coined the term "deconstruction," maintains that
> writing precedes speech, which certainly seems counterintuitive.
>
> He means by "writing" something other and more than the usual meaning and
> use of the word.
>
> Freudian analysis illustrates his use.
...snip...
> Don't know if there is any value in all that to "learning organization"
> theory and practice: I'll leave that for all of my colleagues here to
> decode!
Steve, let us begin with your last comment. Anything which helps us to
understand learning should be valuable to "learning organisations". The
question now is: what can we learn from Derrida's viewpoint on language
with respect to learning. I think there is an answer and that the concept
of "tacit knowledge" is a key to the answer.
You assume that I assume that speaking comes before writing. I do not
assume it. It is a demonstrateable fact of languages the past 2500 years!
But it is not a demostrateable fact for earlier languages, especially the
hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt. First of all, we have insufficient data to
demonstrate the fact. Secondly, we do not take "tacit knowledge" into
consideration.
What does tacit knowledge amounts to? It is a difficult question to
answer. It is like asking me to give an account of my prenatal learning.
Well, I can shrug you off and say that during the first 9 months of my
life I was sinply a differentiating, growing piece of protoplasm. But then
I make myself available for an abortion which I abhor. So, let me try to
explain it.
I first became sensitive to "tacit knowledge" (mine and that of my fellow
humans) in the early seventies. It was wierd to speak of something which
other people could not think of. I tried to name this "tacit knowledge"
and eventually ended up with the name "Meta-Epistemological Base". Using
this this MEB drove others up the wall - speak of chaos, the first
manifestation of entropy production!
Then, one day in the early eighties, I read the book "The Tacit Dimension"
by Michael Polanyi (1967, Routledge, London). He was not only a physical
chemist like me, but in that book he articulated much about my MEB! His
definition of tacit knowledge is very simple: every person has some
knowledge which that person has not yet articulated in words before. The
only problem was that I saw it in a much more general sense: every person
have "that kind of knowledge" which that person has not yet expressed in
an accepted FORM of knowledge such as language, art, science and religion.
That is why I used the name "meta-epistemological base".
Today I think that we should use Polanyi's term "tacit knowledge",
remembering that the "tacit" should not be taken literally, but
figuratively in the sense that it begs any kind of formulation and not
merely linguistic articulations (speach and script). From this "tacit
knowledge" emerges "formal knowledge" by virtue of our creativity. I would
never use the word "informal knowledge" for "tacit knowledge" because
tacit knowledge itself is rich in form. Its very form is a result of its
emergence from experience. In other words, I recognise that my tacit
knowledge by virtue of its richer form is not the same as my experiences
(conscious and subconscious).
I am not sure whether I can call my experiences themselves also knowledge.
If they are, then they are the first level of knowledge so that tacit
knowledge becomes the second level of knowledge and formal (cognitive)
knowledge the third level of knowledge.
What happened in the case of the ancient Egyptians, as far as I understand
it, was that they began to formulate the complexity of their tacit
knowledge in a variety of forms: speach, clothes, buildings, paintings,
statues, protocols, rituals, etc. Then they began to make connections
between speach and paintings, thus developing their complex hieroglyphic
language. In other words, for them neither speach came before script (the
usual assumption), nor script became before speach (Derrida's assumption),
but they emerged simultaneously and only then fused into one - the
emergence of language (speach and script). The latter is not my
assumption, but my conclusion based on dissipative self-organising
systems.
If we carefully observe young pre-scool children, they do very much the
same thing when they play creatively, especially in solitude. They will,
for example, take a piece of clay (plasticene), begin to shape something
out of it to express (formalise) some of their tacit knowledge. They will
also speak to themselves, expressing the same tacit knowledge into speach.
Thus the opportunity arises for their speach and clay models to connect
and thus emerge into a "language" (speach and clay-modellling).
Five days ago, my granddaughter went with me to spend the day at my
nursery (succulent plants). It was very hot. I filled a big, flat tub
(which I use to wet the seed trays from below) with water for her to play
in. She began to play with three BRICKS in the water. They became her
children. She took it upon her to bathe the children, speaking all the
way. While doing it, she came up with the following piece of wisdom: "It
is a good thing that boys cannot have babies because they cannot even care
for girls".
If we carefully observe the increasing use of technology in our society,
the same thing is happening on an increasing scale. It is as if the
Egyptian renaissance is repeating itself. Take for example computer
technology and the "window" interface on the computer screen. What we do
with the icons is very much the same as what the Egyptians did with their
hieroglyphs.
The more I observe around me what is happening and think about it, the
more I become convinced that we are rediscovering emergent learning.
Learning a language (speach and script) has much to do with emergent
learning. The meaning of a word do not emerge when we commit speach to
script, but when we connect speach or script with the world outside us, or
speach and script with each other..
Steve, there is also another thing which we can learn from Derrida. We
are so keen on equating creativity with constructionism that we have no
room for destructions in our account of creativity. It is as if we
consider destructions the most uncreative things to happen. But this is
altogether another topic to discuss.
Best wishes
--At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za
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