User:Robbie McClintock/project
Communication, Culture, and the Commons
Let's keep it simple. We create and use A Place to Study in a practical spirit to provide cultural resources to persons seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. We design and develop this effort instituting certain basic ideas about the uses of communication, culture, and the commons in the conduct of life. Here, we express these ideas, not to propound them as impersonal truths established as valid for all, but to make what we are trying to do and why we are trying to do it clear and transparent to anyone who might want to join in the effort. We are explaining an informed practical effort, not adding to the sum of established knowledge.
In declaring our intention in this way, we glide effortlessly over difficult and abstruse questions, not because we are naive and oblivious of their existence, but because we believe them settled beneath thickets of cultural lag that divert sensible attention to important questions. . . .
Most often with three topics such as communication, culture, and the commons, we think of them as juxtaposed areas, rather similar in size, like neighboring counties that together make up the region we plan to visit. In this context, explaining a practical effort, that's a bad way to conceive this trio. It's better to think of these three as occupying the same vital space — the realm of living agents — in which they successively emerge as possibilities, starting with communication, then culture, and finally the commons.
Let's start with the realm of living agents, Life, as distinct from mere matter and energy. Of course, as objective existences, the substantial existence of life consists of matter and energy, but we understand it to do so as an emergent system, a special configuration of matter and energy that presents capacities not evident in matter and energy
Practical efforts take place in the sphere of life — activity conducted by purposeful agents, who pursue intentions, cope with circumstances, push, enact, forfeit, adapt, duck and weave, maintaining their dynamic enterprise of life. With respect to the living agent seeking to act purposefully in the midst of circumstances, the occasion, source, or arche of communicating arises internally, an integral part of the effort to act, to form and implement an intention. In acting intentionally, the world enters the effort both as condition and as consequence; the agent must both perceive and execute. One without the other is a meaningless phenomenon — one hand clapping. Communicating links the two, perceiving and executing, in purposeful action. By communicating living agents link perceptive and executive capacities in intentional activity.
That said, we naturally ask an important question: how do living agents link their capacities for perception and execution? And taking agency to be what all living forms have in common, we infer from the variety of living forms that they can link perception and execution in many different ways. Now we might try to regress to the beginning when the first living agent emerged from the soup of the world