Knowing by Being-There Making: Explicating the Tacit Post-Subject in Use

some extracts from the original text of Tonkinwise

All making is a gift. As a materialisation, an externalisation, making gives something to the world, the world in which others live. So even if something is initially made just for oneself, it will be there available for others, to notice, to appreciate, to use.

The key difference between the knowing of making and knowing proper is universality. Knowledge not sourced from making is codifiable and thereby transmittable because it is universal; whereas the knowledge of making cannot be extricated from the specificity of its material context. Making might therefore be a type of localised knowing, but as non-abstractable, it must be kept distinct from the knowing that lies at the foundation of the university. If making involves searches and findings, these are not the equivalent of researching truths.

What is so refreshing about Material Thinking is that it explicitly sees its task as the generation of creative metaphors by which to access the research that is creative making.
institutionally delimited language of ‘research’ — much as I have been doing so far for example, with the linguistic chain ‘knowing, new, significant, justified, triangulated, sharable,’ etc.
letting the makingly knowing of each his co-creative cases guide him, theorising from the ground up, rather than fitting making into this or that theoretical frame about research, Carter is able to, and keen to, maintain a certain open-endedness or finitude in the poetics he develops.

Not needing to defend a thesis with regard to the knowing of making, Carter is able to develop more resonant ways of articulating that knowing, resonant in the sense of ringing true to the nature of practice more generally but also in the sense of amplifying those knowings so that they may begin to gain the attention of institutions arbitrating on what counts as practice-based research.
examples I’ve seen of descriptions of creative processes that remains faithful to the non-generalisable specificity of such material practices, using terms firmly located within the particular constraints of each project, whilst nevertheless generating notions that are applicable and extendable beyond the time and place and nature of each project, that are still knowledges in that sense.

Or, it is generative, able to be repeated but with difference rather than replicated; it is reproducible in the biological sense, as opposed to cloning. e., it is a different form of knowing — it is also not that of utter particularities — i.e., it is nevertheless still of the order of knowledge. It is sharable, and it is sharable because it concerns, if not rules, conventions, things that come together, regularly enough to be more than idiosyncratic.
Making can be accepted as research to the extent that it is uncovering things that are useful and insightful for some other situations, for some other places, times and practices.

this sort of general knowledge because his concern is place; not the specificity of place, but what place generates beyond its particulars, what is sharable about places.

It can be made explicit, or more precisely, it can be made less tacit, but such acts of explicitation demand more creativity than mere translation; a poetics is demanded to overcome some inherent resistances.

To know something is never to know something objectively, but to know it subjectively, that is de-subjectively, by being it, experiencing generally what it is by becoming it.

These are new ways of understanding a place, or a culture, or some texts, or some media or art practices. To this extent, Carter’s job of articulating knowing-in-making is actually easier than if his collaborations had been with designers, where the knowing at play concerns more ‘uses’ than meanings


An affordance is an ‘actual possibility’, a ‘promised action opportunity.’ Affordances are the result of interactional perceptions, seeing not just a feature, but a future way of making use of that feature. I do not see a shape, but a handle, or rather a 'handable'. I am here already interacting with what I am still only sensing from a distance.

Affordances are literally articulations, or joinings, material conjunctions of the capacity of tools and the skills of bodies. But for this very reason, they are constitutionally resistant to being articulated. To attempt to explain what a product knows about a body in such and such a situation, what it knows a body knows about what can and cannot be done with the things about it, is to either semiotise affordances, or to become mired in animistic relativisms.