Asphyxiating

Autobiography, Design

The little air remaining in the field of design — after its professionalization, after its submission to technicity, and after its deemphasis and almost complete abandonment the first-person perspective at the heart of its work — has been sucked out by the myriad promises projected upon AI by terrified, ambitious, manic managerials.

Intuition has been squeezed out of design, and what remains is calculation, explication, prediction, profusion of words.

The workworld is closing in on me and I can no longer breathe.

Younger design professionals seem perfectly fine with this evolution of the field.

And now I am recalling a passage from Richard Rorty said about institutions:

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm.

This state of soul is found in the teachers of literature in American colleges and universities who belong to what Harold Bloom calls the “School of Resentment.” These people have learned from Jameson and others that they can no longer enjoy “the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other.”

They have also learned that hero-worship is a sign of weakness, and a temptation to elitism. So they substitute Stoic endurance for both righteous anger and social hope. They substitute knowing theorization for awe, and resentment over the failures of the past for visions of a better future.

Although I prefer “knowingness” to Bloom’s word “resentment,” my view of these substitutions is pretty much the same as his. Bloom thinks that many rising young teachers of literature can ridicule anything but can hope for nothing, can explain everything but can idolize nothing. Bloom sees them as converting the study of literature into what he calls “one more dismal social science” — and thereby turning departments of literature into isolated academic backwaters. American sociology departments, which started out as movements for social reform, ended up training students to clothe statistics in jargon. Ifliterature departments tum into departments of cultural studies, Bloom fears, they will start off hoping to do some badly needed political work, but will end up training their students to clothe resentment in jargon…

Because my own disciplinary matrix is philosophy, I cannot entirely trust my sense of what is going on in literature departments. So I am never entirely sure whether Bloom’s gloomy predictions are merely peevish, or whether he is more far-sighted than those who dismiss him as a petulant eccentric. But in the course of hanging around literature departments over the past decade or so, I have acquired some suspicions that parallel his.

The main reason I am prey to such suspicions is that I have watched, in the course of my lifetime, similarly gloomy predictions come true in my own discipline. Philosophers of my generation learned that an academic discipline can become almost unrecognizably different in a half-century — different, above all, in the sort of talents that get you tenure. A discipline can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome.

Bloom is to Jameson as A. N. Whitehead was to A. J. Ayer in the 1930s. Whitehead stood for charisma, genius, romance, and Wordsworth. Like Bloom, he agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings. Ayer, by contrast, stood for logic, debunking, and knowingness. He wanted philosophy to be a matter of scientific teamwork, rather than of imaginative breakthroughs by heroic figures. He saw theology, metaphysics, and literature as devoid of what he called “cognitive significance,” and Whitehead as a good logician who had been ruined by poetry. Ayer regarded shudders of awe as neurotic symptoms. He helped create the philosophical tone which Iris Murdoch criticized in her celebrated essay “Against Dryness.”

In the space of two generations, Ayer and dryness won out over Whitehead and romance. Philosophy in the English-speaking world became “analytic,” antimetaphysical, unromantic, and highly professional. Analytic philosophy still attracts first-rate minds, but most of these minds are busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole. This may be the fate that awaits literature departments.

I long for the days of mere claustrophobia, when I could still sneak a breath of inspiration and now and then make a leap of intuition, provided that upon landing I pulled on my Hermetic cowboy boots and carefully backtracked from where I arrived, paving a path of logical footsteps. +O(

Intellectual sacrifice

Everso, Judaism, Philosophy, Religion

From Charles Stein’s Light of Hermes:

Mathematics as sacrifice: one sacrifices one’s woolly fantasies for the orderliness of collective positivity. But the sacrifice is only satisfied or completed when the entire mathematical project becomes a noetic mandala and one’s sacrifice is of one’s phantom apparencies only as requiescent unto Being. What one believes or supposes to be real is accepted only in so far as it can be relieved of its ontological positivity which it offers up to unique, undivided Being itself.

My interpretation of this passage: Mathematics is a kind of tradeoff, or exchange. Give up personal, idiosyncratic, intuitive knowing and in return, receive a more disciplined, shared, public knowledge. But this tradeoff is only an intellective gain if we fully understand — (I would argue in a different, everted mode of metaknowing) — that all these various ways of knowing, these subjects (each with their own special objectivity) together belong (as all things do, including ourselves) to Being, who can be approached numerous ways but never reached and possessed in the form of positive knowledge.

In this everted metaknowing we situate ourselves… as comprehended by infinitude. And it is our situation we comprehend, not the comprehension itself. — This is suprehension: everted metacomprehension of comprehension.

Mathematics is one sacrifice to public life.

Another is exalting liberal democratic order above our own policy preferences and passions. Out of loyalty to our way of self-governing, we champion another citizen’s right to slander what we hold sacred, or we uphold a law we abhor because that law was established lawfully.

Jewish law is yet another. It is beyond silly to refuse to eat a cheeseburger in order to be neurotically certain we are not accidentally eating a baby goat that was cooked in its own mother’s milk. But we decided this matter together and that sacralizes the decision and makes it the furthest possible thing from silly. (This being said, I do not observe this particular prohibition.)

But I gladly make Judaism’s highest and most sacred sacrifice — the sacrifice that replaced the bloody, smoky, visceral Temple sacrifices, and founded rabbinic Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the first Temple and subsequent Babylonian bondage. This is the sacrifice called Machloket L’Shem Shamayim — sacred conflict.

In Machloket L’Shem Shamayim, we vigorously argue our side against another, while suprehending that a higher truth always and eternally transcends my side and yours. I’ve heard this expressed as “The argument itself is truer than either side.”

Above our own certainty is agreement, but not mere compromise for the sake of practicality, but dedication to Being who permanently transcends any single truth, and ultimately all truth.

Those mystics who sneer at liberalism, believing they are wise to it, and in fact superior to it, demonstrate by this attitude that they are not even equal to liberalism — much less to their own religious tradition.

Higher sacrifices are sublimated Golden Rule, carried far beyond rule of computation, law or ideal — the metaprinciple of principle.

I, like you, am finite and limited in some unique way.

I, like you, am limited, but situated at the I-point heart of the world, which is one enworldment.

I, like you, cannot help but believe what seems most true to me.

If we can know this together we can dwell together in holy irony of comprehension within suprehension.

The fruit is restored to its orchard.

Instaurated istaurateurs

Religion

Another book for the reading queue, Herbert Guenther’s Matrix of Mystery: Scientific and Humanistic Aspects of Dzogs-chen Thought:

Whether or not the so-called “insights” of any tradition are essential, will be determined by the extent to which they are, firstly, comprehensible to whomsoever chances to focus on them and, implementable, that is experientially accessible, so that they may become relevant to one’s own life by allowing for the means by which those who seek a more satisfactory, and less fragmented mode of being, can open up their limited and limiting perspectives regarding what is, in fact, experientially possible. With respect to comprehensibility this means that the language used to explicate such putatively essential insights must be culturally consonant with both the cognitive and aesthetic complexities of the person trying to probe these insights. In addition, the process of making comprehensible such insights necessarily entails a concerted confrontation with the pregiven prejudices that have sedimented — and continue sedimenting — into and as one’s “natural attitude” toward both what “we” are and what the “world” is supposed to be.

One cannot implement or experientially access that which one does not understand (is not made comprehensible). Although implementation necessarily lies outside the scope of this book, the fact that comprehensibility is so closely intertwined with implementation, makes reference to the latter unavoidable. Here, however, only a few general remarks need to be made. It is a mistake to assume that accessing in the light of a new perspective can occur in isolation, for man by his very nature is always situated with-others and hence “experiences” (even himself) in the midst of and in relation to others. Any attempt to artificially fabricate a lifestyle that would cut one off from social situatedness is based on a lack of comprehension of what the tradition under consideration regards as valuable and healthy. This does not mean, however, that one will have to continue being enmeshed in a social situatedness with one’s natural attitudes intact. Indeed, it cannot be emphasized enough, that to comprehend essential insights means, at the very least, to be forever severed from one’s former (natural attitude. It is equally, and perhaps even more damagingly, a mistake to assume that accessing the essential insights of a tradition means fixating one’s activities on another person judged (more properly speaking, prejudged) to be the locus within which such insights inhere, and that accessing these insights will occur merely by being in the presence of such a “special” locus. These two mistaken approaches to the problem of “how to” access the value and meaning of a tradition are, in fact, avoided only to the extent that one has honestly and carefully acknowledged what is and what is not comprehensible in the light of one’s own experience, for it is only in the light of such sincere acknowledgment of one’s own engagement with the task of opening up that one becomes sensitive to, and can thereby accurately identify, those growth-enhancing patterns which are reinforced by other like-minded individuals. It is only when such sensitivity begins to stir that one finds the “seemingly” inner dimension of spiritual growth “outwardly” mirrored in others and recognizes this mirroring as an incentive to further accessing. Indeed, it is the community of such individuals, sensitively attuned to the essential insights of a tradition, who sustain, by having become the existential embodiment of that tradition, that ongoing process which, like a beacon light, guides man in his measure and value of being human.

Service design’s core mission

Design, Pluricentrism

It is a terrible thing to be prevented from giving what you were born to give, and, instead, to be forced to give what you don’t have.

It is the gift of gifts to give what you were born to give to others who need and value it, and, in exchange, to receive what you lack but badly need.

And one of our greatest needs is to give.

The mission in the heart of service design, buried beneath mechanical rubble and organizational slime, is a holy thing.

From Fundamentals of Qualitative Mathematics

NOTA

This morning, for no reason in particular, I decided to browse my copy of the classic qualmath textbook, Fundamentals of Qualitative Mathematics, and it proved surprisingly relevant:

The towering edifice of qualitative mathematics is constructed upon a pair of simple axioms. First: Everything is something divided by nothing. Second: Each thing is a zillionth of everything. From this axiomatic pair, the gazillion deformulae of qualitative mathematics are derived.

It feels almost as if this was written in response to what I was already thinking.

Returning to some enworldment design themes

Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Extended Self

I’ve said it before, but why not say it again? Take this as attention sustained for decades — as evidence of an enduring soul…

A better distinction than technology (or artifice / artificiality) versus natural is what we experience as natural versus what we experience as unnatural. That turns it into a matter of design quality. What artifice lends itself to second-naturalness, and what stays unnatural? We’ve used fire and language for so long they seem like part of nature to us. What other artifices can we add to the world to make the addition — and the world — and ourselves feel natural?

This standard, by the way, pushes Liz Sanders’s classic useful / useable / desirable framework to new levels of aspiration.

Useful is not only just having needs met. Useful means reducing or eliminating unnatural-feeling tasks required to meet our needs, or to change tasks into more natural and meaningful ones. “Do it for me, or allow me to do it myself in a less painful, more meaningful way.”

Usability is not just a matter or reducing frustrations, but also the need to figure things out at all. The goal is to make natural extensions of our thinking, our perceiving and our doing. “Afford me direct intuitive connect with the world.”

Desirability is not merely about aesthetics or entertainment, but about affirming what makes us love the world and our own lives together. “Inspire me to feel more value and more gratitude for our life.”

Phi print

Letterpress

Yesterday, I went back to the letterpress studio to print my latest project: Phi (the golden ratio) to the myriadth place, printed with golden ink — a blend of glow-in-the-dark and gold, mixed, of course, in a golden ratio — set in a golden ratio text block on a golden ratio sheet of paper — paper and block in golden ratio to each other — with golden ratio margins above and below the text.

Intro to a philosophy of design of philosophy

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Philosophy

Premise:

Designers philosophize all the time. It is part of our job, and for many of us, it is the best part of the work, and the part of the work that generates the most valuable change.

But it is also the part that is hardest to explain, the hardest to tame and the hardest to protect. This is intrinsic to philosophical work.

This inability to explain and protect — even to gain personal clarity on what is happening — prevents designers from securing the conditions needed to do design’s most important work. And it impedes design’s expansive development into new fertile regions.

“What?” you might say at this point, “I don’t recall doing philosophy at work.”

Most have some notion of what a philosophy is. According to Wilfred Sellars, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Let us adopt this as our definition of philosophy, as thing, as noun.

But far fewer of us understand philosophizing as an activity. We understand it so little — or worse, misunderstand it so much — that we do not recognize what is happening when we find ourselves in a philosophical problem. We imagine that doing philosophy is like arguing or constructing a theory or indulging in abstract speculation. These, however, are merely using a philosophy to do thinking — to produce complex thought systems. Any designer knows, using a tool and making a tool are different matters.

Philosophy means immersing in a philosophical problem, of the form, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it “I don’t know my way about.” Which is to say it is not even yet a problem and what it lacks is precisely form. That is, it is an aporia, a perplexity, also known in the field of design as a wicked problem.

But simply naming it is not the same as knowing it. It locates it on a map, but it does not convey how it is to be in the place depicted on the map. It presents it objectively, in a comfortable third-person perspective. But philosophical problems a subjective crises, experienced from inside it, from the first-person. And this experience is not merely uncomfortable or ambiguous. They are often uncanny, unnerving, infuriating and excruciating. And not when the process is going wrong. They are this way precisely when they are going right.

But people hate this feeling. They feel hellish heat, and if they are in a position to do so, shut down the kitchen.

Design is hard to do because philosophy is hard to do, and we lack norms to help us discern healthy pain (like morning sickness, labor pains, growing pains) from unhealthy pain (infection, malnutrition, organ failure, death pangs). As soon as any pain happens, out comes the anesthesia, anti-anxiety medicine, quarantine, scalpels — whatever makes it go away. And as with many ill-chosen medical interventions, the pain is not alleviated; it is exchanged for some variety of numbness, and often some future health failure. It is not dealt with, head-on and directed toward recovery of health, much less growth and flourishing.

Promise:

By understanding the role philosophy does play and can play in design, design can escape the tyranny of misnorms (application of the wrong set of norms to a situation, which prevent the situation from developing toward improvement), and work more effectively in its current spheres of activity, and, better, expand this its domain to areas where other ways of working have failed to produce positive change, or even failed catastrophically and made matters worse.

Anatomy of a shattered soul

Philosophy

Show me a calendar with each day bricked up solid with hour and half-hour meetings, and I will show you a vivisected soul.

Our souls are made out of attention. That attention has scope, density and duration, and these grow together, shrink together, deteriorate together, shatter together.

A person who is unable to sustain attention longer than 30 minutes, who is forced to shift focus dozens of times a day, cannot maintain a self.

That person will slip between selves each day and each week, and year over year it will self-estrange. By the time it has become a perfect stranger to itself, it will lack the enduring presence to notice.

Anomalogy, vertiphor, symbol

Philosophy

To what may we compare infinitude? To what can we, within the all-inclusive exteriorless One, make comparison with One?

An analogy compares two like things, side by side. “This is like that, in this specific way.” It is metaphoric.

An anomalogy compares someness to Allness. “This is both of, but exceeded by This, in an inconceivably universal way.” It is vertiphoric. It is a species of symbol.

Pearls and Shells, reinvocation

Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism

In earlier invocations of the “Pearls and Shells” anomalogy, the pearlescent element, nacre, insulated the subject from the object and environment, and allowed these not-self beings to peacefully neighbor or environ the self.

This individuating substance was imagined to be mind: We coat whatever realities we cannot incorporate into our own selfhood with intelligibility. Mind helps us cope with not-self, also known as alterity.

The earlier anomalogy goes like this: An oyster inhabits an existence suspended between two alterities. The first alterity, the outer alterity, is the all-encompassing ocean. The second alterity, inner alterities, is whatever particles from the ocean get inside the shell with the oyster. The oyster responds to both alterities the same way. It secretes its own selfhood, its mind-nacre, and coats the offending alterity, layer upon layer, until the alterity is smooth, lustrous and undisturbing. The particles are painted smooth and round and become pearls. “Good fences make good neighbors.” Now the oyster can live side by side with these irritants, because they are comprehended with nacre. The ocean, too — the dread source of all irritants and inexhaustibly teeming with existential dangers — is coated with layer upon layer of protective nacre. It is painted on all sides, repainted, innumerable times until it is thick, smooth and protective. The oyster coats the ocean with nacre, and the inner surface of the shell, the mother-of-pearl lining makes the ocean habitable for the oyster and its treasure-house of pearls.

The nacre substance is the same in both alterities, and its function is the same — insulation, protection, self-preservation. What differs is the topology — the situating curvature. Pearls are convex and are comprehended by the oyster. The shell is concave; it comprehends the oyster. Flip your shell inside-out — that is, evert it — and you will find yourself holding a pearl. Evert a pearl, and you will find yourself held within a shell, or rather, the shell will find you held within it.

Lately, I have noticed that my thinking has moved to a new standpoint.

The next invocation of “Pearls and Shells” goes like this: Perhaps the nacre with which we paint the defining boundaries between selfhood and otherhood is not mind, but something beyond mind that conditions and enables it. Perhaps nacre is the principle of “not” — nihilitude.

Nihilitude belongs to infinitude, and is inseparable from it. Nihilitude generates and sustains finitude within infinitude, without disturbing the all-inclusive purity of infinitude with even a trace of exclusion. Indeed, exclusion of nihilitude from infinitude would be an abhorrent exclusion.

Perhaps nihilitude is the substance the ocean self-secretes into itself in order to allow a spark of itself to be an oyster, liberated to be not-the-whole-ocean, through imprisonment within a mother-of-pearl vault. The vault fills with ten-thousand pearls, each of which, touched by the oyster’s tender midas flesh, is counted among its pearly hoard.

As behind, so beyond. And so thrice-present between.

I object!

Philosophy

I object to the idea that absolute truth is objective.

I refuse to be subjected to this unacceptable and arbitrary constraint!

I am vexed by the unconscious prejudice  that knowledge is a system of defined convex entities locally and causally connected with one another, like words in a sentence, or parts in a machine.

I will not cave on this point!

(I’m a granddad. Suffer and like it.)

Nihilism pandemic

Design, Exnihilism, Philosophy

In our time, and in all times like this one, nihilism is in the air.

I do not only mean that nihilism is in the news or in art, or in the nihilistic blending of news and art. Each time some lost youth commits a politically-charged murder, but their ideology cannot be pinned down because — let’s be real — these young pale criminals are barely able to think, much muster the integrity to believe anything whole-heartedly or whole-mindedly, which is the crux of the problem! — and it appears they are caught in the nowhere between the extremist poles of the horseshoe. where the only possible point of agreement is hatred of this world, whatever has produced such a world of which they are both product and victim (and, of course, inevitably whatever hydra head of Jew-hatred is in fashion, whether anti-Pharisee, antisemite, anti-Elders Cabal, anti-Zionist).

Such amorphous hatred craves an object upon which it may condense and have form — a thing to vent itself upon, and justifications for the venting and its object. A universal loathing — ressentiment — precedes all ideological justification. But the theories, the alleged causes, the expressions, the abuse are only stations on the way to fully embodying the nihilistic impulse in consummating acts of annihilation.

The ideologies, manifestos, memes and suicide notes are not the logic behind such murders. They are the final sputters of failing language on the way to the ultimate expression of nihilism: murder.

But again, the nihilism in the air is not only, or even primarily, the topic of nihilism or nihilism as diagnosis.

Rather, nihilism in the air is the rebreathed bad breath we draw into our lungs wherever a critical mass of people at some time or place is meaning-starved.

I have been in a great many corporate headquarters. In some, I was disturbed by an odor of fear. In others, I have choked on despair. We can also sometimes smell negativity (detect “bad vibes”) in retail spaces (especially big box stores and malls), cultural events, political demonstrations, places of worship, and, let us not forget! — schools. Anywhere that people of similar disposition gather, the air carries a spirit, a breath of some kind, most noticeable to outsiders.

People who breathe fumes of fear, despair, disregard, contempt, absurdity — if they are not of the kind who actively exhale that kind of air — are enervated by it, and gradually, passively lose their taste for life. They lose hope. They stop caring about the future because they cannot even feel the possibility of future meaning. They do only what they are forced to do, by others or by themselves through that internalized slavery we call “self-discipline”. And they do not much mind the idea of the world being destroyed, if it spares them the wearying prospect of being at work tomorrow. They might even siphon a little energy from counter-nihilists who hate the order in which they are trapped. “The enemy of my enemy” might not be my friend — in fact, the enemy might despise passive complicity even more than their active enemies — but from a safe distance and through a shielding screen, the destruction of my own oppressors (by potentially worse ones) emits heat, noise, flashing, vengeance, pity-fodder and moralistic escapism.

And the products and services of such unhappiness is the same kind. If these brand emanations are not energetically negative, they are energetically nil — that half-pointless, half-phony charade we call “corporate”. Abandon all hope, employees and vendors who enter here, physical or metaphorical. And consumers of their productive output beware.

All this together — the strip-mining of human souls to extract depleted psychic resources — a world overflowing with unlovable and meaningless consumer products, supported by listless, robotic, over-scripted services — education optimized for life in these conditions, in schools that epitomize these conditions and suck life, hope and enthusiasm out of children and replace it with meaning-depleting ideological mechanics — entertainment-news media whose message is inattentive, flitting and spastic consumption — produce conditions ideal for active annihilation — righteous violence, vengeance, martyrdom of self and others to causes that justify it. We know victory by the enemies of our enemies will be even worse than what we have, but at least we can indulge a moment of schadenfreude watching our despised tormentor suffer and perish a few moments before it is our own turn.

Here we are.

But this can be reversed. Or rather, eversed. And the passage is precisely where we least expect it: nihilo.

And our best access is, believe it or not, design. Not the kind of servile and domesticated corporate consultant “design” optimized to meet or exceed the expectations of C-suite sociopaths and their demoralized drones — but rather design which challenges the hegemony of technik.