When I went to the Paula Rego exhibition in London the other month, something really struck me about what Rego said about her technique of "collage". She talked about the sensual energy of tearing into something - pulling things apart (I can't remember the exact quote). My own experience too has suggested to me that there is something about tearing things apart and reassembling them. In the Global Scientific Dialogue course I've been running in Russia this week, collage and energy has been something of a theme: breaking things and fixing them. Today the students made collages from objects they found around them (inspired by Andy Goldsworthy). I'll post some of their images when I have permission from them. Yesterday, I made the connection between tearing things apart and getting "stuck into" coding - breaking code and fixing it. There's more to be done with this, but it's all very promising.
A lot of our social media is a collage. That is basically what a Facebook or Twitter "feed" is. It has an energy, and the continual rearrangement seems to keep on regenerating this energy. Is this why we find it addictive? Of course, its not unusual for "cheap" sources of energy to become addictive... that's what keeps McDonalds and Coca Cola in business, after all. The energy of the collages we make ourselves is hard-won; the breaking-apart of things is a real agony, and the rearrangement is a discovery. This is where the learning is.
I've been reading Simondon's "Individuation in light of notions of Form and Information". There's a lot of stuff about energy there - both in physics and biology. Simondon goes back to the Aristotelian idea of "hylomorphism", critiquing the basic concept that in order to have any kind of "stuff", there must be some ideal form of the stuff to begin with. Hylomorphism was a doctrine to explain how it might be possible to get "something" from "nothing". The "idea" behind the thing was a way of explaining how this might happen.
Getting something from nothing is a problem that has preoccupied physicists for most of the 20th century. If there was a "big bang" for example, where did that come from? Is a singularity something or nothing?
I have been fascinated by Peter Rowlands's work because he turns this question around - it's not about "somethings" at all - everything is in a process of making successive "nothings". The algebra to support this idea derives from Hamilton's quaternions, and using this, it is possible to show how Einstein's mass-energy-momentum equation is really a Pythagorean triple, which factorises to zero. But more basically, if everything is about nothing, and it is nothing which drives the process of creation in search of nothing, then we have no need for hylomorphism.
But we do need energy. If E = mc^2, or rather E - mc^2 = 0, and this can be factorized into two expressions which represent "local" and "non-local" physical systems (whose product is nothing), then it might be possible to see how "tearing something apart" releases energy - the E in the equation. All as part of the continual process of resolving the tension between local and non-local to zero.
Is this the driving force behind biological systems and learning? Does this explain why we are curious to know more? Cell division is, after all, a cut in the system - the creation of an asymmetry, rather like the tearing into a picture to make a collage. Consciousness sits on cell division and self-organisation, local and non-local factors are mirrored in the relation between DNA and epigenetic marks.
The mark of learning is to tear into things - to break things as a way of seeing things new. In Vladivostok I hope I have been there to support people doing this, and maybe in a few cases, to pick up the pieces when the shock of breaking something is too much.
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