WORK

WORK

Indo European werg ¹ “to do”
Greek: ergon: work, action, urge,
energy, liturgy, surgery. organnon:
organ, orgia (secret rites, worship)
orgy, orgasm

I got scolded by a former dean for
saying we don't have an “academic”
program here. A work program?
Sure.

Academic WORK
Work WORK
Service. WORK

WORK: the dominant program & our.
Integrated Triad: WWC: We Work
Constantly.

Just had a conversation with Dong Ping.

Is AGONY a “given” or flaw & sign of
error? The generation GAP: given or
mistake to be rectified? Social norms
& obligations: Primary? Secondary?

Our collegial converse: Are we At Work
or just Fooling Around?

Been reading senior letters. One woman
said she avoided philosophy courses like sin.
Another claimed a Sam course the most
infuriating time she has ever spent in the
classroom.

It makes sense. Imagine paying to attend
a concert, and the pianist sits on the bench
motionless. No apparent work going on.

What?
What the?
What the hell?

Gregory Bateson studied dolphin behavior
in order to distinguish levels of 1) learning,
2) learning to learn, and 3) learning to learn-
to-learn; he noticed that he could teach them
to do a trick if he gave them a fish for their unique
performance..

And sometime after the triumph of learning
their trick, the trainer could withhold the fish
and the dolphins would become frustrated
—infuriated. as you can imagine..

He eventually wanted them to graduate:
to learn not just to do a trick, but to be tricky!

Big difference. A difference in logical type:
like learning a specific subject-matter on one
hand and learning COURSE-TAKING on the
other hand: jump a level l—meta-learning.
Give them a story or teach them how to
make their own.

Some dolphins got depressed: no fish no
matter how often they did their trick:
“danced their did, sang their didn’t” .

But one showed-up so infuriated that she
broke the rules and busted out an amazing
spectrum of tricks, a repertoire: a WORK
of trickery. Organnon.

Got her fish and realized (presumably) that
the game now was not a specific trick but
tricky business.

Eureka.

Level jump from a specific learning to
learning-to-learn. From a particular
to a class action or whole.

An AGONY; however.
Prerequisite for a level jump in
learning is a kind of bottoming
out an exhaustion of resource.

Aporia, the Greeks called it: no pores,
no opening, no exit— no fish no matter
how often I do my trick. What worked
no longer works no matter how I
work it.

The temptation, Bateson, writes, is for
the trainer to ease the dolphin’s pain
by tossing an occasional fish: dolphin
trying hard to please & who wants to
break a dolphin spirit, frame of mind
and world view? .

But exactly that premature matriculation
(“from the matrix”) retards the process,
impedes, blocks, softens, ameliorates—
reinforces old habits with sporadic
reward as if there could be an easy
transition to a quantum leap in
learning, so to speak.

An agony all around.
Novum Organnon:
any new work program.