imudu idumu pt.2

 

Mudu - manage, handle, afford.

Dumu – last a long time, be permanent.

Mudu is an anagram of Dumu.

Dumu is the state of permanence while Mudu is the action that goes into ensuring permanence, that is, management.

Management involves the control and direction of cycles. In the scope of civilizations, these cycles are ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’. Immanence is the state of foundational existence while transcendence is the state of contingent existence. Immanence is maintained by tried, tested and established well-formed ideas based on reality. This immanent state experiences entropy and decay over time, and at that point, transcendentalism is induced, which energizes the move into another cycle of immanence. To induce transcendentalism (not usually nor necessarily a deliberate process), a communication model develops that appeals to base personalities for ‘connection’ and starting a sequence of motivation phases. An example of this is the “Process communication model” PCM.

PCM is a managerial communication model that is based on behavioral assessments for effective communication. That is for the purpose of individually tailoring “connection” and “motivation”, to build trust and rapport between the messenger and the recipient. Connection is the first and base stage while motivation is a consequent transitory element used for transcending to higher stages.

PCM is based on profiling individuals or groups in categories according to how they are assessed to: 1. Perceive the world; 2. Ways in which they communicate; 3. Ways in which they learn; 4. How they are motivated; 5. How they behave when in distress. This model presents the communicator with tools to deal with questions of “so what?”, “now what?” from the recipient.

Profiling categories are labelled “personality types”. Tools to handle communication with these “personality types are applied in a range of contexts including sales, business, education, medicine, recruitment, politics, religion, parenting, and personal relationships. The most dominant personality type expressing itself in an individual is taken as the basic level for communication. And it is from this basic level that the most appropriate channels and perceptions are used to “connect” with that person or group. The base personality state is the point of connection.

Once this connection is achieved, other higher personality states expressing themselves in the individual or group may be transcended to in a transitory manner. This is the concept of what and how to motivate a person or group. Tools to handle this are applied with the aim of satisfying the psychological needs and desires of the person or group.

Appealing to the base for connection (babbles, coos, doodles)

After the arousal of skepticism in established immanent ideas, appeals to base personalities of people are done to connect with them. In contemporary history, the most popular term used to describe this has been ‘avant-garde’. In the realm of music, the pentatonic scale which appeals to base tonal senses is used in making ephemeral pop music that passes transcendentalist ideas. Linguistically, words that appeal to base personalities are like ideophones, international words, and baby words (babbles & coos). Babbles and coos form the basis of several words used internationally that have meaning or appeal in many different languages without necessarily being cognate nor borrowed. Examples are like baba/papa, dada, mama, tata, kuku/coocoo, dudu/doodoo, lala, lulu, bubu/booboo, waa, gaga, coco, cola and so forth.

A popular example of this is the ‘dada movement’ that arose out of the despair that followed World War 1. The Dada movement consisted of artists who rejected the logic, reason, and aestheticism of modern capitalism, instead expressing nonsense, irrationality, and anti-bourgeois protest in their works. The art of the movement began primarily as performance art, but eventually spanned visual, literary, and sound media, including collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and sculpture. Dadaist artists expressed their discontent toward violence, war, and nationalism. There is no consensus on the origin of the movement's name; a common story is that the artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife randomly into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", a French term for a hobby horse. Others note it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group. Still others speculate it might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism.

The roots of Dada lie in pre-war avant-garde. The term anti-art, a precursor to Dada, was coined by Marcel Duchamp around 1913 to characterize works that challenge accepted definitions of art. Cubism and the development of collage and abstract art would inform the movement's detachment from the established immanence of reality and convention. Many Dadaists believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality. This is an expression that appears quite ironic and counter-intuitive but shows how highly assumptive but insufficiently developed immanent ideas induce emotional/reactionary opposition.

References & further reading

Budd, Dona (2005). The Language of Art Knowledge Cards. Pomegranate Communications.

Ian Chilvers; John Glaves-Smith, eds. (2009). "Dada". A Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Art. Oxford University Press. pp. 171–173.

Middleton, J. C. (1962). "'Bolshevism in Art': Dada and Politics". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 4 (3): 408–430.

Motherwell, Robert (1951). The Dada Painters and Poets; an anthology. New York: Wittenborn, Schultz.

Richter, Hans (1965), Dada: Art and Anti-art, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press

TUKI (2001), Kamusi Ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza; Swahili-English Dictionary. Published by Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (TUKI), Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.