Engaging Momentum
I sit on
the stairs of the forest theater contemplating scale, risk, the practice of
monitoring & evaluation, self-organisation, Turkana, hurricane Floyd, and burgundian
climatology. I use twigs and get nowhere.
Decide to get up and go. In the car on the way to
"Carole's
and Rob's excitement about my baseline paper had something to do with the
empowerment to say something against measurement paradigms. 'So
what if you created a baseline?' The issue of importance is momentum. Carole has given me the
momentum to see in a certain way. I have been developing a research
perspective, not a topic."
I follow my notes.
Momentum:
Because
consciousness is like a river
We awake in its
currents,
swim
and leave behind our stories.
The
problem of choosing an effective scale of analysis is not devoid of momentum,
it is about understanding the flow of momentum. Momentum is where the power
goes. Where attraction occurs. Hierarchy and heterarchy are mere results of the momentum that life
carried within. They are our reactions against the momentum in which we were
all thrown at birth, from which we awoke when consciousness developed
self-reflexivity.
Those
scientists creating their models are impacted by it as well. Being a scientists is creating a certain type of academic
momentum. How long has it taken me to become that "academic"? When I
am selected to be a co-investigator, I am adding the reference to my momentum.
It might change my course, or perhaps just strengthen earlier arguments. The product
of my academic work builds on my past references. These products themselves
engage reality as brokers of momentum. They create their own momentum by
providing ideas, which create publications, which circulate, and eventually
influence and possible channel momentum somewhere else. I have had to build my
reference by presenting papers, getting grants, publishing,
to show my momentum, to show where
the ideological and political direction of "my work" is going, to
show I did not sit still to look at the stars and produce nothing. When I do
nothing, the momentum slows down to the point where life stops. Without
momentum, there is no life.
One
could go as far as to suggest that what culture is, is
momentum: the momentum of our mass hypnosis of interpretation, which we carry
forth every day when we reawake from a night's sleep. We are only free to make
decision within our context. We can not erase our context. And our context
flows with us in the same river. Changing, never standing still. Momentum
provides a conservative evolutionary necessity to our behavior which has to be
adaptive in moments of crisis, when momentum suddenly shifts. In a sense, it
feels as if the momentum I am talking about is structuralist.
We are all affected by it, and there is not escape from it. It is our own
collective memory embedded in the landscape, our institutions and laws, our
fears and hopes, the stories from the past that define our identity. Trying to
understand the momentum we construct histories and future scenarios. As
prophecies proclaimed by the scientists and planners we take on a religious
fervor which merely reflects the image which we carry of ourselves through the
momentum that directs us. Momentum is carried forward through our culture,
expectations and selective perceptions, these conservative beasts, which combine
with chaos, surprise and disturbances to guide and inform our expectations and
the representation in which we believe.
Momentum
is multiscalar, yet carries within it the guiding
principles of the past. It is has to be a key concern within a cognitive historical
ecology. Momentum is what makes history socially relevant. Movement does not
imply inheritance, since it can hypothetically start at that same baseline we
reject epistemologically. Momentum however carries within itself the historical
agency. That is why the concept is so powerful. It transforms historical
analysis from a stuffy irrelevant archive of the past into the social memory
that carries us through every day.
Momentum
is what brings aesthetics. The tempo, kadanz, and
rhythm of life is what brings us music, art, love,
healing, and beauty. The momentum we give in to and follow us is one that
attracts us in it. Attraction is what guides our behavior. The momentum we
create with our own action in the end becomes self-organizing. It makes us conservative
by the time we are old.
An anthropology of momentum can cross-cut many themes. It can be
informed by the works of Foucault, Bourdieux, and Latour,
it can be applied to anything that exists, since it is phenomenological as well
as ecological. An archaeology of discourse is the
historical retracing of linguistic momentum. The practice of improvisations is
the river in which we swim. The connectivity and construction of networks which
organize us are informed by momentum within. Momentum can be an explanatory
concept, a tool for inquiry, because it allows the past to speak into the
present.
Who are
the people without momentum? Where are the structures without momentum? How can
a method of analysis be constructed which informs the momentum we seek to
understand?
Momentum is not new. From a 2001
lecture on communication:
"Addition to Hymes:
temporal rhythm of a place
When you finally adapt to
Bring it closer to home: code switching example: changing
your accent pattern depending on the context
Cadanz = temporality, nuance: rural
south versus urban
Thus, by staying in