Sensemaking and the literary underground

One of the examples of paragogy is personal life. How many times have you had a relationship where you said "Well at least it has been a good learning experience!" Probably the other party felt the same way.

How do all of these little pieces of life fit together? This is something that philosophy looks at a lot. And art too: "Bits and pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole" - artwork by Lawrence Weiner on display outside of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

I am right now thinking of various "non-human peers" coming together in the form of assemblage or montage. This is a technique that is used in literature as well, with examples ranging from Faulker's "Wild Palms" to Burroughs's cut-ups. It happens in everyday life when we look at things like photo albums or scrapbooks or even a diary. The way a "whole" arises out of parts is the major idea in Gestalt philosophy and psychology. It's a bit like the "illusion" that makes a sequence of pictures appear to move at the movie theater.

So, in personal life, a personality "emerges" out of patterns in various interactions. "The fundamental principle of gestalt perception is the law of prägnanz, which says that we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple." This expands into different sub-principles or "gestalt laws": closure, similarity, proximity, symmetry, continuity, and common fate. These laws are criticised on the basis of not being explanatory.

Nevertheless, if we talk about something general like "pattern", or even "shape", presumably it has to do with some of the gestalt laws. Thus for example, coming back to revisit a given theme again and again relates to both similarity and symmetry. Objects "hang together" at the very least through proximity, and then we come up with stories to explain why they are together; in other words, we describe them in terms of their "common fate".

One of the interesting things is that story-telling is a basically social phenomenon. If we are able to put something into words, then we are, at least at a basic level, ready to share the story with other people. So the ways in which we "make sense" of perceptions already functions in a space that could potentially be described as paragogical.

This is interesting partly because of the normative aspect. Something that doesn't make sense is problematic. If we can't find a way to relate it to what we know, it either must be assimilated or gotten rid of. (Cf. "The Gods Must Be Crazy".) This has both a productive aspect -- storytelling -- and a destructive aspect (getting rid of the problematic unexplainable thing). It isn't clear to me which of these two forces is usually on top.

Anyway, maybe this brainstorm can be useful for coming up with some questions (see Question Pool) to use during interviews about paragogy. Asking people how they make sense of new events, for example, we might pick up on some ways in which storytelling functions to build new culture. It would also be interesting to look a little at the things that get swept under the rug. What sorts of issues get tabled? What topics are people less willing to think about? What excuses do they make so that they do not have to pay attention to problematic sore points (even if those things are staring them right in the face)?

It is also interesting to look at how cultural formations like pedagogy or andragogy may suppress paragogical sense-making behavior. For example, consider the autocratic parent who says "it is like that because I say it is like that, and that is all you need to know". Questioning or dissent won't work as a sense-making strategy in this sort of regime, or else it has to "go underground".

This brings to mind another type of questioning, aimed at discerning "paragogy" as an "exceptional" way of thinking and criticizing the regimes in power -- something like the cloud of electrons around the nucleus of an atom. How do people form a sense-making network that opposes or goes beyond the "official" word; for example, consider how people might use Sina Weibo to generate new cultural formations despite censorship and blacklisting; or the historical example of Samizdat literature in the USSR.

Indeed, we could look for a parogogical pun on the term Samizdat ("Myself by Myself Publishers") and look for publications "By the people, for the people" (like PlanetMath!).