Extract from the beginning of the critical essay:
Embodied Practice: How tacit knowledge constitutes a greater understanding of ‘being-in-the-world’.
Preface
“Personal knowledge… It commits us, passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality… It is an act of hope, striving to fulfil an obligation within a personal situation for which I am not responsible and which therefore determines my calling. This hope and this obligation are expressed in the universal intent of personal knowledge.”
(Polanyi, 1958, p. 64-65)
‘Being’, the validity of existence and the proof of consciousness. The functions of which are not limited to a confined structure of modern culture but instead live within the rules of ecology and ultimately, to function in harmony within the system of the biological kingdom of life; a silent yet enormous entity that does not boast the expansion of intelligence, but instead embodies the grand scheme of a perfectly engineered system of co-existence.
Our modern-day problem however comes from our capacity as an intelligent life-form. Unfortunately, our resourceful capability to advance our living conditions to the highest possible quality of comfort and efficiency is now becoming our inevitable downfall due to the limited resources that are available to continue the production of modern commodities. This technological world is the product of knowledge and “knowledge is power!” (Bacon, 1597). However, power is subject to the limits of land and money that is controlled, and because of this, we forget that our existence is to function as part of an ecological system, and not to hover over it on our sofas of earned comfort, looking down on other natural entities as though we stand on a different level of being.
We are missing a connection which grounds us back to our real substance. This substance has been taken away from us by concepts which function only as comforts which don’t hold any importance other than trying to anchor us into a society of conformity. Because a cake is not a “cake”, cake is the product of eggs, flour, butter and sugar. Eggs are not “eggs”, eggs are the product of an unfertilized embryo in a shell. And an embryo is not an “embryo”, an embryo is the metamorphosis of being. We only understand the world through the man-made concepts that have developed through. But because of the distractions of modern culture, we no longer need to know the beginnings of our existence. It is the atomic mass that makes us and all other entities on our planet that embodies the sense of unison that is mentioned by Maurice Merleau-Ponty as “an embodied vision that is an incarnate part of the flesh of the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 121). Without this understanding, the constraints of living in an organized society, allow you only to focus on invisible parameters that constitute: being employed, being in a family and being wealthy, instead of merely being.
Introduction
In this dissertation I aim to use the process of making to address the issue of “being-in-the world” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 64) and to focus on the existence of tacit knowledge, whilst commenting on the way that conceptual language aims to define entities within the parameters of a capitalist environment. The process involved in making itself will be the focusing point that links our modern reality of conceptualised meaning back to a more embodied way of experiencing our world, through the interaction with its materials. I will also investigate how, through this interaction, we gain a more specified variation of knowledge that’s directly taught through physical handling.
The verbalisation of this variation is defined as ‘Tacit Knowledge’ (Polanyi, 1966, p. XIII). Originating from the philosophy of Michael Polanyi, it describes the silent teachings which cannot be articulated through academia and lecturers, but instead originate through the body, and specifically from the handling of materials. The premise of tacit knowledge however is problematic due to its lack of direct visibility and proof. I will combat this by addressing the limits of explicit knowledge and the problematic roots of academic thinking and research in the technological era we live in. This will be supported by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who used the term ‘true nature’ (Heidegger, 1953, p. 53) (of a material), to explain how the formal properties of a material are fundamental to understanding it by its nature rather than through the premise of “justified true belief” (Heidegger, 1953, p. 31), where “truth” is conceived as one of the conditions of knowledge.
I aim to use the appropriate definitions of knowledge to question the silent nature of this concept by using the work of key practitioners from the contemporary art period to shed light on how their process of making gives access to a more embodied way of knowing. Through the critical theories of philosophers such as Michael Polanyi and Juhani Pallasmaa, I will further interpret the work of these artists to suggest how the construction of their work informs a wider understanding of what constitutes “being” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 64).
The question of knowledge in the context of a technological culture will form my opposition argument. I will consider how living in an era of technology contributes to the numbing of the existence of tacit knowledge, and instead only processes entities through the factual evidence that is seen through eyes that can’t see beyond their cultural boundaries. By considering also that communication does not primarily manifest itself through spoken and semiotic language, I will investigate the assumption that what is visible is all there is to know about being. Polanyi articulates this well by stating that “we can know more than we can tell.” (Polanyi, 1966, p. 4) and it is this silent knowing that I will argue to hold the direct correlation between our consciousness and the structure of our molecular existence.
Emma Denby 