If you watch people draw, it is apparent that most of them aren’t drawing as much as writing in some 2-dimensional hieroglyphic language. I suspect something similar is going on with visual perception. When non-visual people look out on the world they don’t see the world, they read their environment. They recognize and label what’s … Continue reading Wordworlders
Living in a wordworld drives our attention on tracks to this and to that but not to the other. The tracks may be intricately dense, but the spaces between the tracks are infinite. No, I do not mean the spaces between one noticing and another, along our sporadically unconscious and conscious lines of thought. No, … Continue reading Wordworld
Design is tacit value proposition. * [That’s all I meant to say originally, but then this came out…] * Proposition. As if value is something we talk about. The greater the value, the more words fail us. The best design has je ne sais quoi. The best in life is je ne sais quoi. Value … Continue reading Wordworlds
Nothing is improved when we replace worldviews with wordworlds. To paraphrase Bernadette from the Jerk, “It’s not [the meanings] I’ll miss. It’s the stuff!” Our problem is not metaphysics. It is metaphysical reductionism. And specifically metaphysical reductionisms that allow us to be individually solipsistic with our eyes, or collectively solipsistic with our ears. If we … Continue reading Wordworlds
An edited version of a comment to a friend at work who is reading Campagna’s Magic and Technic: My concern with the state of service design is this: The whole power of design is that it goes to the rough ground of apeiron — to true material, as opposed to scientistic thought-about material — as … Continue reading Talking at my designer friend
Many of us are like lovers of maps and mapmaking who have never traveled outside our own room. We pore over our maps and draw up our own atlases, but we have never seen any place that wasn’t presented to as an image as flat as a map. Our maps are made out of words, … Continue reading The cartophiles
Heraclitus: One should not act or speak as if he were asleep. The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own. Representational thought — our system of beliefs about the world, meant to mirror reality — is a prolonged, elaborate waking dream. When we are … Continue reading Representational eclipse
“Pictures or it didn’t happen.” In business: “Numbers or it didn’t happen.” Only what is quantifiable is real. For wordworlders: “Explicit language or it didn’t happen.” Only what can be said clearly and argued is real. For scientism: “Repeatable demonstration or it didn’t happen.” Only what can be technologically reproduced is real. But even deeper, … Continue reading Ontic filter
The wisest thing Yogi Berra never said was “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.” Those who have pushed theory to its limits, and subjected all values to critical interrogation will tell you also that in theory there is no better or worse, beautiful or ugly, good … Continue reading The servant of practice
Following is a selection of comments Hannah Arendt made about cliches, culled from Eichmann in Jerusalem. The highlights are mine: The German text of the taped police examination, conducted from May 29, 1960, to January 17, 1961, each page corrected and approved by Eichmann, constitutes a veritable gold mine for a psychologist –provided he is … Continue reading Eichmann and cliches
When I was first taught how to draw, the first lesson was showing us how us to slow down, attend closely and really see, instead of merely looking (as most of us do most of the time). What is meant by this distinction between seeing and looking? Looking is visually scanning our environment and categorizing … Continue reading Hieroglyphia
Wherever I read “the unconscious” and its implications of thoughts concealed beneath the surface of the mind, I intercept it and substitute ‘the unsayble”, implying that it is perfectly conscious, but just not yet intuitively disciplined and equipped with language. To people for whom thinking is a word manipulation affair, the unconscious is beyond the … Continue reading Inner-leftism
My McLuhanite friend has been talking to me about “Gutenberg Man” — a species of human consciousness shaped by a society saturated with and shaped by the printed word. Wikipedia says: McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls Gutenberg Man, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the … Continue reading Gutensperger
Here is where I am right now: I want to integrate polycentric design practice (design for multiple interacting participants in a defined social system) with my philosophical project, which reconceives philosophy as a genre of design — a genre of polycentric design. This integration of practice and theory yields a polycentric design praxis. This polycentric … Continue reading Polycentric design praxis
We apprehend that something is, but we may not comprehend what it is. “Apprehending that” establishes something’s existence. “Comprehending what” establishes its conceptual relations within our understanding. Sometimes (often, in fact) we apprehend something, but we cannot immediately comprehend it. We either ignore it as irrelevant, gloss over it, or are forced to figure out … Continue reading Second verse, same as the first
(I’m trying to get back to publishing my ideas, even when they are far from perfect. For some reason I’ve been inclined to leave most of what I write private, but I’m going to make myself start putting things out there again. ) My immersion in the philosophical work of Jan Zwicky has given me … Continue reading Re-cranking the writing machine
A series of passages from Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy isolates the central problem I have had with Rorty, and with other thinkers I have admired, who live such an academically-conditioned existence that they have lost contact with the tacit world, and inhabit instead what I have called “wordworld“. Such people are so verbal they have lost … Continue reading From Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy
I read strangely. When I read, I work hard at understanding the material, but I do not put much effort into retaining the material. Rather, I use the effort to understand to repattern my conceptions. As I read, I look for signs of textual attunement or misattunement. I pay close attention to when I am … Continue reading Dematerializing
Our world has been volatilized into stories. We inhabit wordworlds made of stories about people telling each other about people telling each other about other people.
One of the great pleasures of reading Richard Rorty is experiencing his precise neglect of nonhuman actors. The man lived in a wordworld of free-floating humans whose sole purpose was conversation. It helps make what I learned from Bruno Latour extra tangible, that what we converse about is rooted as much in our tacit interactions … Continue reading Rorty’s wonderful omissions