Common Knowledge or cK
The garden(s) of cK are comprised of organs that are
largely traditional or informal, and often cultural or locally cultural
in basis. In proposing this we must remain cognizant that there
are many scales (sizes, forms, aspects, and ways of assembly) of
culture.
The elements and subGardens of cK are concerned with
knowing how to do, think about, and pursue the mundane, personal,
intellectual, creative and social activities that form the actual
core of most human lives. Local tradition has precedence in nearly
all terrains of human experience, sometimes more than any other
element.
Examples of cK are knowing how to converse with a
person, relate with food, or ‘obtain’ a ‘thing’.
Simple and complex simultaneously, Common Knowledge is, like the
informal counterparts of other knowledge-gardens — the actual
progenitor of all possible formality.
Obviously, this particular garden is the most venerable
of those we’re exploring, and even sPirituality would have
a difficult time asserting primacy over cK, since these two gardens
tend in history and experience to overlap in such a way as to render
them co-emergent.
sCience, pHilosophy and the aRts all deeply inform
the local and distributed character of cK in the human cogniscium
— yet the bond of emergence with sP vastly overshadows most
if not all other influences. This is true even of cultures without
sP or with an antithetical relationship with it: their active and
formal rejection shapes them just as ‘falsely’ as the
relation with a ‘false sP’ that they work to avoid.
Their ‘avoidance’ thus takes the place of sP in the
co-generation of any local or distributed cK garden.
Selected noticings about this garden:
cK tends to highly value distant experts and codicils,
placing itself generally beneath them in the position of ‘standing
under’. It thus is capable of valuing contact with new ways
of knowing, since it does not lay claim to much terrain of its own
— but acts as a filter or inspiration for knowledge and information
in general.
cK is something more like a tiny flower that is growing
everywhere — in every possible garden — at all times
— than it is a separate garden..
cK will surrender its own powers and knowings in favor
of agreement more than most of the other gardens.
cK is active in credentialing rulers and sovereigns
in the domain of ‘truth’ or ‘fact’.
cK tends to rely upon and found itself upon common
agreement and experience of encountering or repeating knowledge
(learning, gossip, speculation, falseLearning, propaganda, ‘news’,
etc).
cK implies and infers that it’s own position
is generally humble in relation to the entirety of knowledge, and
most of the other gardens as well.
cK is uncommonly capable amongst its peers of valuing
actual and temporally local experience over normative models of
expectation, or codicils of ‘what is correct’ or accurate.
It is not bound by formality so much as it is agreement and experience.
cK plays well with the other gardens, hoping to enjoy
and support their benefits — but can be very selective. Its
ways and populations tends to organize themselves in ‘tribes
within tribes’. Super and subgroups whose members define,
emulate, conserve and elaborate its many diverse organs. (organs,
transports, symmetries, participants, and modes) Subgroups in seemingly
unrelated supergroups can often spontaneously form ties, uniting
dissimilar symmetries unexpectedly.
cK has a profound and emergently co-formative relationship
with transports, media, art, and information.
cK is the most ripe of all terrain-targets for predatory
elements in other gardens. It is used to establish longevity and
resource-conversion — almost always in a way grievously detrimental
to the cK source: human cultures, communities, and individuals.
Families, cities — nations — a whole planet of terrain,
ripe for colonization. Not physical of course, but cognitive, active,
relational and intellectual terrains.
cK could be said to be ‘the goal of every conquest’
as well as ‘the source of every predator it must fall to’.
