Iain Cameron's Diary
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2005-05-26 - 10:06 p.m.

See KK News under the Music for the Highveld button above for important news item about rate of increase of HIV cases in India - now the nation with the largest HIV population. Also NO CURE poem from the anthology which arrived yesterday.

I have been thinking about Amin and Cohendet on the governance of knowledge communities - sounds boring but is actually very important. A&C have come to the conclusion that valuable knowledge emerges best in communities of people who have a particular set of interests and ways of working and communicating. Sometimes these communities have to get involved in governance issues - matters of integrity in control and direction. For example if public funding is an issue. How do you run the governance without messing up the informality which is most productive in terms of having good practicable new ideas? To some extent this is the general topic which engages us in the motorsport project. I am hoping that something called the Demming Loop can help solve this specific situation.

Finally managed to get my Tesco Value Microwave out of the boot of my car and into the kitchen - deployed it on beef strips with beans and mushrooms in redwine cheese and bacon sauce. I am having a consumer durable month - what with my new battery electric mini-carpet sweeper. I have decided I will keep some of the dust as it almost certainly has metaphysical properties.

Went to the BMW plant on the River Tame for a curriculum meeting with the Auto Academy and did some stuff with GG from FMC on workforce development. I have relocated Simon Godards commentary on the Smiths and reread the section on How Soon Is Now which I have been listening to in the car - but now I have switched to side 2 of the Jackson Browne compliation.

I have been reading about Fred Orton. I have his book on Johns which I find very hard to understand - so difficult that I can�t remember quite where I have put it. But a commentary on radical art crit of the last 20 years arrived. It shows that you can see Orton as an alternative to Danto and the art world. In the Danto model the artist works alone and generates stuff - the meaning is created by the community of art critics and dealers - in gossip, articles, reviews, catalogues etc. Orton has another approach - the meaning is created earlier - by the artist and a long term bunch of mates.

In the Johns case it is clear that there was a long term relationship with Merce and Cage - also earlier with Rausch. I have a book by Merce-Cage-Johns about the collab. Also a major retro catalogue on Rausch. But how do you work back from such material to how it was between the chums when any specific work was created? That�s with a work maybe 30 years old - impossible to do this with (say) a Joshua Reynolds.

Still working on the Kant model. Kms started as looking like mental models but in 20C this viewpoint seemed out of date. I think with the aesthetic model might be usefully seen in the old way. In the aesthetic experience there are two stages - the sensory and the judgemental - and there is a relationship between the two that enables the judgement to some gain purchase within the sensory - Kant calls this relationship �accord� - I am suggesting that Gentners repertoire of models might help flesh out the accord.

Two further thoughts. De Leuze has a good thought when he talks about insensities. The sensory side of the aesthetic experience is an intensity - not the only kind of intensity but obviously an important subgroup. On the sensory side the reaching out to engage the judgement is via the intensity - it�s the intensity that grabs you. Possibly the intensity throws down the challenge to the judgement - you are challenged to answer the question why that sensory episode is so intense and compelling. Suddenly you hear a new song on the radio and it stops you in your tracks.

In the Km the aesthetic kicks in not when you are stopped in your tracks - but when you engage the judgement and try to find reasons why. In Km its all about giving reasons and attempting to show others what is going on in the intensity.

The other thought is that the Km might be iterative. Iteration is a key concept in chaos theory - and elsewhere. Iteration is about inputs and outputs. You start with an input and derive an output. When you iterate you take the output and feed it back to the input.

So in the Km the idea is that a judged aesthetic work - an output - the result of the intensity and the reasoning can itself be an input to aesthetic judgement. So the sensory manifold might not be the raw experience - suddenly I went round the corner in the gallery and saw this amazing Vermeer picture of a girl and I was transfixed. Rather it might me the manifold and the judgement. Suddenly I turned the corner in the museum and I saw that Vermeer that I had read so much about. I think the aesthetic might loop on itself in that way.

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