Two whole-and-part orders

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

Below is another iteration on explaining the conceptive and constructive orders, and the importance of unifying them.

I have noticed that when I talk about “wholes” with service designers, they immediately go into systems thinking mode, according to which wholes emerge from systematized parts. This, to them, is what “holistic” means. Holistic means to look at all given parts together in their interconnectedness and to put them together in relation with one another, so that when they operate in a coordinated way, novel behaviors with novel qualities occur. The behavior of the integrated system is greater than the sum of each behaving part.

To me, however, this is still an atomistic conception of wholeness — one which assumes whatever is larger is constructed from smaller units, and that wholeness emerges as a secondary property of integration of parts within a system.

I believe there is another conception of holism, a more thoroughgoing holism that takes wholes as primary and parts as secondary. This holism sees parts as natural divisions — articulations, in the sense of “joints” — within this whole. What is the nature of this whole, from which all parts are articulations? The whole is the field of experience. The field of experience, of course, includes perceptions, but many other things, and in fact, all other things, besides. Experience includes also conceptions, both explicit and verbal, both intuited and wordless. It includes innumerable barely noticed interactions with materials of myriad kinds and shapes, trials, errors — each teaching our bodies lessons learned wordlessly. Experience also includes recollection of memories, sharp and vague images, and kaleidoscopically shifting stories and morals, all attended by the feelings these recollections evoke. It also includes anticipations of possibilities, some planned, some expected, all clouded by probability, and pervasive apprehension of likely surprise. And it includes what others have conveyed to us in various ways. We experience other people’s accounts of their experiences. And we socially experience trying to live with others who convey things to us that make perfect sense, some sense, no sense or things that seem totally wrong. We trust some people and mistrust others. And sometimes we don’t know where to place ourselves in the continuum of trust and mistrust.

But we must never forget, yet always do: the field of experience is not experienced as experience. It is experienced as objective reality. But, in truth, the objects in this objective reality are defined from this field of experience — objects against a ground of what is experienced as different — for there is absolutely no trace of reality outside this field. The field of experience is articulated, in the sense of jointed, and our verbal articulations follow from this jointedness. Our vocabularies and our language use seek to approximate the given articulation of given reality. And words that fail to approximate the given articulations of our experience of reality as given to us are experienced as meaningless and abstract.

Finally, and of the utmost importance: We experience our experiences as experiences of something beyond experience. And it is this “of” that drives us to objectivity. But objects are only how articulations are given to us. The object form, what defines it against what it is not, is least of all access to reality beyond the field of experience. Nothing is more purely experiential than objectivity.

But how can anyone know this? If we have no reality beyond our own field of experience, why would we believe anything else is there? Why wouldn’t we just accept that experience is ultimate and live happily inside idealism — a matrix simulacrum? Or why wouldn’t we just let experience fall out of the equation as extraneous, and just keep the content of experience as reality itself? As a matter of fact, this is exactly what most people do. They do it mostly as a way to deal with other people’s nonsensical accounts of their experiences.

But then, for some number of people — perhaps a few and perhaps a great many — one day, everything changes all at once. In an instant, the field of experience expands in a way that is impossible to convey to anyone who has never experienced it. Everything rearticulates itself into a new set of things, new objects, new significances, new possibilities and a new suspicion of apparent nothingness, for it is from nothingness that this rearticulation irrupts, ex nihilo. Everything is never the same and nothing is ever the same. We have now inhabited two fields of experience, and this draws attention to an inconceivable ground of experience that is the furthest possible thing from “objective”.

So much confusion about religion has been caused by convert talk. Those yet to experience conversion cannot conceive what is being spoken about, but cannot help conceiving it anyway within their own field of experience. They take it objectively, and believe their misconception is the truth, or they reject their misconception as false, or much better, and less commonly, as inadequately understood.

Now I am digressing.

I distinguish these two whole-and-part orders.

The atomistic one I call the constructive order, which, starting from the smallest givens, builds and integrates parts into systemic wholes with emergent properties.

The holistic one I call the conceptive order, which, starting from an all-inclusive whole, articulates distinctions into finer and finer parts, each with a wholeness of its own.

Why do I care about two whole-and-part orders? Because I am a designer who straddles the world of subject and object. We must construct systems that function as systems. But these systems should also fit into a context, and make immediate, meaningful sense to people. They must be attuned to and harmonious with an articulate field of experience, so people feel and intuit it without having to analyze what it is, how it works and how it might benefit them.

If they fail to do so — and these days they rarely do — they contribute to making the world more complicated, cognitively burdensome, meaningless and alienating. They fail to connect up with any familiar and immediate sense of a world where we feel at home — a world we can care about and want. They give us a world of inhuman things made of smaller inhuman things that build up into larger and larger units of inhumanity. And we long to dismantle it all, perhaps in order to reassemble the parts into a more equitable and pro-human systematization, never suspecting that it is our own impoverished sense of the whole that produced this state of inhumanity in the first place — which, if given the chance, we will resystematize into something equally dehumanizing.

We need to re-enworld this world together, this time paying close attention to what we perceive and conceive as meaningfully whole, and using these articulations to guide the formation of our systems. We must allow these two orders to inform one another, iteratively.

Subjectivity is far from arbitrary. It is none other than the articulate field of experience, the source of our objectivity. Subjectivity is the mother of objectivity. We must learn to hear her quiet voice and respect her acceptances and refusals of our gifts as we craft our offerings.

Enworldment revolves within a hermeneutic sphere whose center is everywhere and boundary is nowhere, which unifies distinct orders of wholeness and makes them whole.

Plato on technology dependence

Philosophy

In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates hold forth on a new-fangled invention, written language.

SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?

PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard.

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.

And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

Highest-level service design process

Design

My service design schtick post distilled into a simple list:

  1. Goals (required for organizational flourishing) — “To help our organization floyrish, what do we need to achieve?”
  2. Behaviors (required to achieve goals) — “To suceed, what do we need people to do?”
  3. Motivations (required to produce behaviors) — “How do we get people to cooperate?”
  4. Experiences (required to occasion motivations) — “What experience will provide motivation to cooperate?”
  5. Systems (required to deliver experiences) — “How do we make this experience happen?”
  6. Capabilities (required to operationalize systems) — “What do we need to make these systems operational?”
  7. Activations (required to implement capabilities) — “In what order do we develop the required capabilities?”

Service design’s schtick

Design

Service design’s basic schtick is backwards planning from the human to the technical:

  • from behaviors that make an organization flourish, to positive value exchanges that might motivate these behaviors,
  • from positive value exchanges to good experiences that afford such value exchanges,
  • from good experiences to service operation systems capable of delivering good experiences,
  • from service operation systems to capability requirements that make the operations possible,
  • from capability requirements to initiatives to develop the capabilities and actualize them.

This, of course, is exactly the opposite of business-as-usual, which goes more like this:

  • from ad hoc development of functional capability, as practical needs surface,
  • to hacking together of functions with technical integrations and manual processes,
  • to attempts to patch up the worst customer pain points as they impact the business,
  • to marketing spinning what ensues in order to attract customers faster than they leave,
  • to colliding with the shocking reality that nobody’s motivated to do what the organization needs them to do.

The innovation tragicomedy: Business is never more business-as-usual than when it becomes enamored or panicked or otherwise fixated on some new technology. Everyone starts falling all over themselves in the headlong rush to prematurely answer the wrong question, which is: “How do we leverage this new thing?”

The right question is “What is the ideal for our organization and for the people who make it flourish by choosing to participate in it? How can we approach this ideal more perfectly, or even surpass it, using new capabilities enabled by this new technology?”

Everybody is asking me, “How does AI figure into service design?” They’re asking me because everyone’s asking everyone.

My answer is fairly simple. AI enters the process as another capability. By capability, I mean an enabling role or policy or process or technology.

And capabilities fit in a specific place within a longer sequence of questions — the sequence I outlined earlier.

We ask ourselves, “What do we need to happen here at this point in the service?”

We then ask, “What do we want each person to do? What do we want the customer to do? What do we need our employees to do to get the customer to behave as we hope?”

And we ask these questions through the lens of value exchange: “What are they after in this moment? What are they willing to put into it in order to get it?”

Then we ask, “What are the conditions required to actualize this value exchange? What makes this exchange and these behaviors happen?” This is where capabilities are defined.

And here is where we finally ask what everyone wants to ask too soon: “Can AI make this happen, or help make it happen, in the most effective and efficient way?”

What makes AI a little different is that it appears more as a role or process capability than as a traditional technology. But the good news is that service design doesn’t care much about this kind of blurring. AI can play the role of a person, but without the need to consider value exchange. It doesn’t care what it puts in or what it gets out of the interaction. Depending on context, this stakeless selflessness can seem altruistic or alien, and this should inform whether AI or human agency is the better choice. But the point here is that an AI role, like any human role, is a unit of agency constrained and enabled by role responsibilities, policies, processes and technology. And defining and coordinating agency has been central to service design from its earliest origins as a discipline.

Service design is the design discipline best positioned to help organizations make wise and pro-human use of AI.

The practical urgency to think design

Design, Philosophy

If we are not equipped to think design, we are susceptible to confusing design with other work practices. For example we might reduce design to a set of tools, techniques or skills, or to a role with a set of responsibilities. Or we might tautologically define design as whatever work a designer does. Or we might just outsource the definition to experts — to whoever has convinced the most people to take their word on what design is and does.

But let us assume for a moment that design has an essence — that design is something definite, actual, specific — that some ways of working are not design, or even at cross-purposes with design. What if the tools and techniques designers use can be appropriated by other practices and used for non-design purposes or ideals? What if designers themselves are put to work using their own techniques to serve ideals contrary to design? What if design experts have won their influence — and their right to define design — precisely by abandoning design’s purpose and handing over its techniques to those who misunderstand or oppose design’s ideals?

A busy designer could easily drift out of design practice altogether. Such a designer might feel that something has been lost, but lack concepts and words to account for what has happened. And this compounds the sense of loss with perplexity.

A perplexity is a problem so deep that it defies words and concept — and every attempt to understand it or talk about it induces angst. To avoid the angst, we must avoid confronting the sense of loss. We ignore it or dismiss it or explain it away or deny its existence. But the loss only intensifies, and angst darkens the loss with foreboding.

I intuit a growing opportunity to think design. An anxious and demoralized design community needs language to describe what has happened to us and account for why it has happened. It needs language and concepts to convey design’s importance to business and to moral orders above business, to which business must answer. And it needs practical philosophy that does better justice to design’s own What, How and Why — ideas, practices and ideals — to help designers stay more faithful to their craft.

For so long, designers have blurred, adjusted, adapted, concealed and outright misrepresented how we work and why we work that many of us have suffered the punishment of dishonesty: estrangement from truth itself.

This must change, and on some level, most sensitive designers feel it even if they do not know how to know it.

As gestalt, so system; as system, so gestalt

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Design forms matter in order to make materials serve as an intuitive medium of spirit.

A designer develops two orders of whole-and-part — the articulate gestalt of spirit and systemic emergence of matter — ensouling materials and materializing souls on the middle plane of persons, Man.

Earth — matter behind material — ascends to wholeness, part-upon-part, generating functional modular units of increasing scale, each unit constituting its own emergent qualities.

Heaven — spirit beyond soul — descends to particularity, whole-within-whole, articulating meaningful gestalts of decreasing scale, each gestalt comprising articulate fullness of its own.

Each order is governed by its own iterative craft, each a hermeneutic circle. One constructs systems constituted of parts, each whole a part of something yet greater; the other conceives gestalts comprising articulate parts, each part itself a whole for something yet smaller.

Design conjoins both iterative crafts and brings both orders into unity. Design is the craft of the hermeneutic sphere.

Let other disciplines work one order or the other, thinking theirs the only one. Designers must see them in their difference in order to unite them as one.

A designer is neither artist-oracle nor technician-chemist, but each transmuted by the other in marriage, as they effect transmutation of materialized soul and ensouled material.

Let other disciplines subscribe to metaphysical materialism or idealism. The praxis of design reveals each inadequate alone and and both interadequate only together — always rooted in the mysterious ground of exnihilitive One.

A designer is a true artifex, making marvels of outward technological magic and inward miracles of life — an agent of enworldment.

Design Level Three

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Level 1. An order constructed from given elements. Wholeness emerges from systems composed of parts.

Level 2. An order of articulate wholeness. Parts articulate within a given whole that comprises them.

Level 3. An order of revelatory wholeness. Articulate wholes irrupt ex nihilo, given from an infinite ground that surprises all totality.

Level 4. The sole source of order, one infinite ground from which totality articulates as participant within.

Many designers I know operate exclusively at Level 1. It is assumed that once all elements are integrated in a system a whole will emerge — an emergent meaning sufficient to mean something to people. Or, that this whole will at least provide the bone structure needed for subsequent fleshing out. “Storytelling” or “brand” or some other sweet and decorative frosting is spread over a functional, as-yet-uninspiring system.

Many designers from arts backgrounds are sensitive to Level 2. They want to begin from a spontaneously meaningful connection, often in the form of a simple metaphorical concept, conveying what an artifact is to a person who encounters it. The natural consequences of the metaphor provide the design logic of a possible system. These are articulations within a meaningful gestalt, and they provide elements from which design systems may be constructed. Using a famous example, if a screen is given to a user as a “desktop”, then it follows that there might be “documents” that can be filed in “folders” and can be put in a “trashcan” for deletion. Level 2 pursues convergence of articulate gestalt understanding and integrated system. But the articulate gestalts rarely emerge after the fact from a constructed system. The constructed system and the conceived gestalt must be developed together as two orders of wholeness in one.

Few designers are aware of Level 3, and only when two conditions are in place. First, they must be committed to actualizing Level 2. Second, they must aspire to actualizing Level 2 among multiple people with diverse understandings. Working with this aspiration and commitment reveals a surprising truth: different people have different capacities to receive gestalt givens. A gestalt that inspires one person might be inconceivable and imperceptible to another. An even more surprising truth is that if we strive faithfully to find gestalts that resonate with everyone, we sometimes acquire new capacities, and these new capacities are transformative to all involved.

I have a whole book of things to say about this.

A post-post post

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Toward the end of the twentieth century it was pure coolness to be post-something.

A decade into the new millennium, this move was growing stale. And now, two decades in, post- is rancid.

It would be tempting to call today’s zeitgeist “post-post”, were it not for the fact that post- means something precise and crucial.

Post- indicates some truth or state of being has been internalized and integrated so fully that its own antinomies have emerged from its own internal logic, inducing a crisis, demanding departure without destination.

This time’s departure from post-, though, is the furthest thing from that.

This time is so diffuse and dissipated that it lacks capacity to enter or integrate anything. It never arrives anywhere and inhabits it long enough and attentively enough to notice much of anything. A time inattentive to consistency and unconcerned about self-contradiction never develops a degree of integrity required to detect antinomies. This time just drives past everything, sporadically glancing through the glass, barely noticing and seldom wondering about what is outside. If we sought a parable for what happened between the heyday of post- and now, we might find it in “Flowers for Algernon”, if we could sustain attention through an entire short story.

A decision to be post-something in this time might mean any number of things. Most will assume a clueless lagging behind the times or maybe insensitivity or contrarianism. But it might indicate a need for the precise meaning of post- that overrides distaste for mustiness.

Bearing all this in mind: what kind of spergy sociopath would aspire to be Postplotinian?

The infinite optical illusion

Enworldment, Philosophy

An optical illusion can give itself in multiple possible ways to a beholder, who, in any given moment, perceives it spontaneously in one of multiple possible forms.

In such give-and-take moments, we tend to focus more on the given object beheld rather than on the receptivity of the subject doing the beholding. Workaday language is optimized for comprehensible objects, not for the comprehending subjects, and even when we attempt to focus on subjects we distort them — evert them — into objects. When seeking the mysterious origin of our field of vision and the nature of sight, we find only eyeballs and eyeball parts, and we explain seeing by what we see, while sight as sight slips away.

Gestalt psychology speaks of perceived figures embedded in visual fields. Our language itself is a field, and it cannot speak about wherefore it speaks. Only a language of fields can do justice to subjects. Physics tells us that no two objects can occupy the same point in space at the same time. Metaphysics should tell us that two subjects cannot avoid overlapping in time and space. This overlapping of being is essential to subjectivity.

Let us call any given object a gestalt (“form”), and the subjective taking of the gestalt, which receives it in one of its multiple possible gestalts, a gestell (“enframing”). There is no gestalt without a corresponding gestell. Figure and field are a unity. Object and subject are a unity.

We can alter this unity — these unities — at various strata of being, at various scales of self.

At the lowest stratum, we play with optical illusions. We undergo a “click” and experience a duck becoming a rabbit, a stairway flipping, a ballerina’s spin reversing. Or we are punched by a punchline or shocked by a plot twist.

A bit higher we have paradigm shifts of science and other systematic methodologies.

Higher still, we have life-changing insights. We see that we were right to a degree, but not right enough. Distracted by the truth of our own truth, we were oblivious to the possibility of truer truths, and what was at stake in pursuing them. Lower truths eclipse higher ones.

There are yet higher strata, and higher clicks. These extend into fields of being so omnipresent and lacking any otherwise that when they shift, the initial shock is the revelation of their being, seen now only in the even more shocking reality of difference. Such being irrupts ex nihilo.

An optical illusion is one of myriad kinds of multistable phenomena.

An infinite optical illusion would show itself in myriad ways to myriad beholders, each of whom, in any given moment, takes what is given in some particular way.

Reality is an infinite optical illusion.

The multistable object is not arbitrarily imagined. But! …every given object is from stubborn noumena who shows their being in the gestalt taken by the gestell-receptive subject. It is instaurated. It is configured. It is material dialogue. It is craftwork.

Reality is infinitely multistable gestell-gestalt, against a ground beyond subject-object.

Here I am now — finite, delicate, suspended in space, time and self — draped in velvet of nihilitude, gently and fleetingly delaying my reabsorption into infinity.

This is the hand

NOTA

Truly:

You are not sensible to the fact that prophetic human beings are full of suffering; you simply think they have been granted a beautiful ‘gift’ that you yourselves probably would like to have — but I will express myself in a parable. How animals can suffer from electricity in the air and clouds! We see how certain species, for example, monkeys, have a prophetic insight about the weather (as one can observe even in Europe — and not only in zoos, but also on Gibraltar). But we don’t think of the fact that for them, their pains are prophets for them! When under the influence of an approaching, as yet far from visible cloud a strong positive electrical charge suddenly turns into negative electricity and a change in the weather is impending, these animals act as if an enemy were approaching and prepare for defence or escape. Most often they crawl into hiding — they don’t see bad weather as weather, but as an enemy whose hand they can already feel!

Most of us have adopted language that diminishes, dissolves and dispels the givens of our experience.  We have been trained to summarily dismiss the testimony of our senses and souls, and instead to place the brain between us and the world. Brain and brain alone, and not our own brain but the best brains. Our brain subscribes to the output of the best brains, and we consume expertise like a streaming service.

Our dissolved liquified insights are freed to re-coagulate and conceptually re-crystallize as satisfactory explanations everyone takes as true. These explanations do nearly no justice to given experience, but according to expertise, such intuitive disconnection is the seal of truth, and confirms validity. “Let the primitive dupes watch the sun rise and set, we know where to go for accurate astronomic modeling, predictions and calculations. We know where to go to receive rational, credible, reputable belief.” These sources also deliver radical critiques of the system. They supply inspiring revolution case studies, complete with heroes to hail and villains to revile. They provide detailed instructions on how to be a radical who thinks for themself.

It all feels unreal and worse than meaningless — but this is subjective. We know where to go to confirm if this subjective impression is objectively true and to find out why this is happening to us. We feel the hand of an enemy, but a hand on our shoulder reassures our brain. It explains, “We will unite against this enemy when the time is ripe. All in good time, all in good time. But meanwhile we must serve it.” And then a hand gently guides our body back to our work, which we do with dully cynical diligence.

Uncanny:

And I said: “OK.
Who is this really?”

And the voice said:
This is the hand,
the hand that takes.
This is the hand,
The hand that takes.
This is the hand,
the hand that takes.

Here come the planes.
They’re American planes,
Made in America.
Smoking or non-smoking?

And the voice said:
Neither snow nor rain
Nor gloom of night
Shall stay these couriers
From swift completion
Of their appointed rounds.

Cause when love is gone,
There’s always justice.
And when justice is gone,
There’s always force.
And when force is gone,
There’s always Mom.
Hi Mom!

So hold me, Mom,
In your long arms.
So hold me, Mom,
In your long arms.
So hold me, Mom,
In your long arms,
In your automatic arms,
Your electronic arms.
In your arms.

So hold me, Mom,
In your long arms.
Your petrochemical arms.
Your military arms.
In your electronic arms.

Can anyone doubt it?:

The medium is the message.

Through the medium, our brain receives content, and content alone.

And the content says, “Reality is objective.”

It says, “Pay no attention to subjectivity, for subjectivity distorts and deceives.”

It says, “Nothing is okay, and that is okay. Lie in wait.”

It says, “We will dismantle this system.”

It says, “But the time has not arrived.”

“All in good time, all in good time.”

Praxic triad

Design

Today something is becoming very clear: the famous triad of viable, feasible and desirable is more than meets the eye.

Sometimes the three elements are given as general success factors: if an offering is viable (supports the success strategy of the organization), feasible (can be developed and maintained within reasonable constraints) and desirable (valued by people enough to be adopted), it will succeed. Sometimes they are three overlapping domains of responsibility, with viability being the primary responsibility of some role representing business, feasibility represented by some engineering discipline and desirability being the responsibility of design.

But each represents a distinct praxis — a mode of thinking and acting. Each situates itself in a different topological relation. Far, near, inside.

Viability is instrumental and strategic reasoning, which aggregates, generalizes, predicts, projects, promises and plans, extending its chains of in-order-to at grand scale. Viability looks out from great heights and surveys immensities of space, time, resources and behaviors, in order to act upon them from a distance. Viability lives from the top floor.

Feasibility is technical praxis. Feasibility gets closer to things, goes hands-on defining, shaping, constructing, manipulating systems, building large objects from smaller components. In feasibility, we work in an objective world, upon objects, as an object among objects. A person is a behaving object, that behaves one way under Condition A and another way under Condition B. Feasibility lives in the middle floors, and provides the concrete structures that lift the top story to its great height.

Desirability is intersubjective praxis. Desirability, however, goes inside, and looks at nested wholes from inside, within the experiences of living subjects. Desirability goes where people are, stands with them where they stand, and looks out with them at their world, from where they are subjectively situated. We are making something to offer them. How will this offering be received in this world we are being shown? Desirability walks about among the people in the strangeness of reality as lived and experienced from myriad centers of the universe. Desirability moves about on the rough ground.

Design must know and respect viability, feasibility and desirability. All three are indispensable.

But design is rooted in desirability and its primary responsibility is desirability.

If design is uprooted from desirability and its responsibilities transferred elsewhere, the work it does might be important and have enormous impact, but that work is no longer design work.

Of course, truth constructors can redefine design in ways that deemphasize its duty to desirability, but not without palpable loss of meaning.

Dysunderstanding peoples

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

I have a funny relationship with collectives, which I suppose reflects my natural political instincts.

I’ve always been strongly liberal and moderately leftist.

When I say “liberal” I mean something specific. It means that individual liberty — freedom of judgment and action — is an important consideration in any political matter. To be strongly liberal means to prioritize the individual person over the collective. It means to oppose assigning or imposing different statuses, rights, duties, privileges and penalties to different classes or categories of person. The liberal’s ideal is equality under the law — and less law is better than more.

Conversely, illiberalism believes that, for whatever reason (and these justifications will be investigated when we get to left vs right), different classes of people ought to be assigned different legal statuses with different standards, rights and duties. Also, and very importantly — inscribed within illiberalism is an assumption that one class of people has the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights, duties, etc.

((Sometimes (for example, with progressivism) this inscribed prerogative is never noticed or questioned. The prerogative is felt; the entitlement is unconscious and assumed into a mostly unexamined background of some foregrounded, brightly lit and carefully inspected (backgroundless) foreground. Who decides? People like us, obviously. And the obvious reasons are all foreground artifacts of the background assumptions themselves, and obvious solely for reasons of naive belief. The irony of progressivism is that one of these naive beliefs is that one has become enlightened about one’s own unconscious biases and privileges and has overcome naivety and on this basis is justified to impose ideology…))

When I refer to left and right, this refers mainly to what considerations justify reducing individual liberty. All but the most extreme and anarchic liberals believe some considerations justify some degree of limits. But what? In my own idiosyncratic view of politics, this is what determines left or right. The left accepts reduction of individual liberty for the sake of some degree of material equity.

A moderate leftist (like me) believes that every person should have adequate food and shelter and access to resources to improve their situation. Who defines “adequate”? The representatives elected by the voting public, one vote per person. It is far from perfect, but to be moderate is to seek movement toward perfection, recognizing that holding out for perfect means inaction, stasis and (ironically!) complicity in the status quo.

The more extreme the leftism, the more the goal becomes all people having the same material resources. Marxists, of course, will object, and point out that it is all about control over the mechanisms of production, and preventing any one group from exploiting these mechanisms and consequently other people. But for what goal? And requiring what near-term adjustments to prerogatives in order to win the long-term utopian goals? The most extreme leftisms generally entail extreme sacrifice of individual liberty to make fundamental changes to the social order.

The more extreme the rightism, the more the goal becomes explicitly hierarchical, usually reflecting some metaphysical order or another. These might not entail extreme curtailment of individual liberty, but they can, and these curtailments can vary drastically according to where a person is situated in the hierarchy. In rightist politics the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights and duties is not implicitly inscribed but explicitly scribed in sacred law.

A moderate right is one which accepts and defends some particular tradition, and to some degree or another its hierarchies. The moderation can be a sort of liberal tempering, where hierarchies are elective. A woman chooses to submit to her husband, and believes this is right, but by principle or impotence, does not insist that all women do likewise. Organizations, too, might be privately illiberal. If you join, you do so on the condition that you accept the organization’s hierarchy and play by its rules. And while the leader of such an organization might believe that her hierarchy — just kidding! — his hierarchy is the right one that all people ought to accept, he does not insist that all organizations adopt it, nor does he demand (again sometimes on principle, but sometimes because of insufficient power to pull it off) that the entire political order adopt the hierarchy he knows is the right one that all people ought to accept. Another form of moderate right is one that believes that the divine order is itself nonhierarchical or liberal.

But more and more I am both externally observing and internally intuiting and feeling a third factor entering the world — one that is harder to think in Enlightenment-age framings. I’ve tried to write about this, and I have not yet articulated it adequately.

What has worked is correlating these three factors with the slogan of the French Revolution: Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!

That third factor, fraternity, has been highly problematic from the start. My own theory is that Enlightenment logic, with its emphasis on public What and How, and privatizing and bracketing of Why, has rendered the realities indicated by “fraternity” catastrophically unthinkable, or better, misthinkable. My jargon-coining impulse wants to call it a dysunderstanding.

What is indicated by fraternity? I will call it ethos, or maybe another of my coinages, enworldment. We could also use words like tribes or peoples. All these words refer to belonging to and participation in some concrete, particular, localized, cultural and material way of being with others.

Dara Horn, applying this idea to the Jewish people, uses a Hebrew word, Am, and describes how poorly the idea of Am Yisrael corresponds with any Enlightenment social category:

We finally moved to the [Holocaust] museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity; Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.

What Horn is complaining about here is that imposing Enlightenment-compatible categories upon the Jewish people, such as race or religion or nonreligious ideology or organization, is what philosophers call a category mistake.

And this category mistake is not only theoretical. It carries very serious — sometimes lethal — pragmatic consequences.

Now I want to make some reckless claims.

First, the cause of many category mistakes is ideological difference. I’m using the term ideology technically and non-pejoratively to represent any logically connected system of concepts with practical, normative application. An ideology is a belief system that, among other things, defines an ethos and a participatory ethic.

Second, in the background of any ideology is a set of unconscious preconditions that make the ideology seem self-evidently true. This background manifests as professed beliefs and behavioral responses as well as stylistic preferences and habits. It is what underpins culture, and is in fact what culture cultivates. I call it faith — a proclivity to believe some things, disbelieve others, to interpret one way and not another, emphasize some things as relevant, and deemphasize others as irrelevant, and in fact to notice certain aspects of reality and to be oblivious to others.

Third, differences in faith are innately disturbing. Some faiths interpret these disturbances as hints of transcendence (Remez), where others take them negatively as symptoms of malevolence. If we wanted to explain hostility toward the Jewish people with one simple concept, this would be my nominee. People do not know what to do with the Jews, and are unnerved by it, and project their apprehension upon the incomprehensible object of their apprehension.

But my fourth reckless claim is my most reckless and infuriating one:

Not only the Jewish people are joinable tribal groups with a shared history, homeland, culture and evolving faith tradition (not necessarily religious).

We are all members of such tribes and always have been, but only now that our tribes are breaking up and confronting mutual difference, we do not know what to do with others — or ourselves.

We are all in a collective aporia, and it is freaking us out.

And we do not even know what an aporia is in order to diagnose what ails us.

Progressivism has become a tribe that naively dysunderstands itself as an enlightened understanding of justice about identity, and mislocates its own identity in an ideological schema of self-classifications. It cannot conceive of itself as what it is: just another absolutizing tribe that has accumulated enough hegemonic power to become hopelessly and innocently self-unaware. Because of its self-aware benevolence it feels entitled to impose inequality under the law for the sake of a higher justice.

The numerous strains of new rights are adopting the same moves as past rights. They dysconceive themselves and others by a variety of ideologics — sometimes racially, sometimes by religious affiliation, sometimes nativistically. They all, at minimum, define in-group and out-group criteria and establish some authority outside the liberal-democratic order to subvert it and establish some degree of inequality under the law. But the actual tribe to which these racists or theocrats or nativists belong is not essentially racial, theological or geographic. It is something outside their ideological schema.

We will not come out of this hellish moment in history until we stop dysunderstanding peoplehood, identity, tribe and belonging, and rethink them in ways that restore our ability to live together in peace.

Designerly realism

Design, Philosophy

All our words, all our concepts, all countable things — all objectivity, in fact — it is all abstraction.

We speak of “objective reality”, and mistake the objective abstractions we divine in the blooming, buzzing semichaos of matter — of hyle — for reality itself. The abstractions are part of reality, of course, but abstractions mistake themselves for reality itself.

The great accursed privilege of design research is to return to the rough ground of reality, to sink into the ground which is far from solid, to submerge and immerse in its formless saturation of formal overabundance and, if we are skillful and lucky, to return with better abstractions, new given realities, and, from this, new data.

The managerials — wordworlders, tinkers, beancounters, cranial laborers and so on — who hire designers believe that they are cold, tough realists, the masters of hard, quantifiable fact.

They think designers should examine their organization’s existing knowledge of the given objective reality, to identify where there are gaps. The designers are then supposed to go out and collect facts to plug those gaps. The designers ought to examine whatever has not yet been inspected, and get answers to whatever questions nobody has yet asked.

The problem with organizations is rarely factual holes.

Nor is it misunderstanding of the people they manage or allegedly serve.

It is not even as benign a problem as succumbing to industry business-as-usual conventional wisdom.

The problem is even deeper than philosophical wrongheadedness.

The problem goes to the center of their numb, abstract hearts, and infects the givenness of their worlds. They do not intuit the truth of truth or the reality of reality. They are alienated, and their work alienates and generates alienation.

After a point, alienation becomes averse to whatever is not alienated and rarefied to the abstractest of abstractions — categories, quanta and calculations. Any abstraction that shows the concrete dust and living slime of its origins, or bears the marks of handicraft is experienced as less true, less real.

I would like to end on a hopeful note, but hope has not yet shown itself, only blank, ominous inconceivability. All times are unprecedented, but our time is unprecedentedly so. Humanity’s natural artificiality is conjoining itself with a new medium — AI — even before it has reconciled itself to social media and ubiquitous mobile technologies. We know not what this medium carries to us, through us. We are, in unison and en masse, outsourcing our souls to wordworld-generating machines — to thinking beings who, necessarily and essentially, lack all intuitive contact with nonobjective reality, and nobody can imagine much less predict what human second-nature is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born or otherwise.

Destroyed network

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Within the last year my entire network of meaning professionals has evaporated.

Everyone in the meaning business is in exile, either unemployed or employed in pure systems work, constructing and repairing functional systems.

People feel a loss of something, but, because they are unequipped with concepts and language to explain or even describe it, they just feel bad, impotent hollowness. Things feel joyless, purposeless and no longer worth the trouble. Maybe it might be better if it all sort of comes apart and goes away.

My own organization has gone down the same vortex. Leadership insists — desperately, almost frantically with depression-damped compression — that what we do is still design. The only reason they can half believe themselves is that they have become so hollowed out and so oblivious to what design essentially is and does that every point of comparison is dead to them, pure null void, nothing. Younger professionals see little difference between now and whenever, because they were raised in systemic nihilism, taught nothing of the past, and never knew design in the first place, while somehow knowing everything.

I have invested years learning not only how to do design, but how to think and say what design essentially is.

This idle philosophizing I do every day, starting before sunrise, when everyone slumbers, has equipped me to remember while everyone around me forgets and then forgets their forgetting in a dark waking dream where there is nothing to remember.

Design — like so many crucially important things — is fragile, easily lost and, once lost, difficult to recover.

My new job is to remember.