All posts by anomalogue

Here, elsewhere, focused, scattered

NOTA

Susan said that she gets sad when she goes to a playground and sees parents sucked into their phones oblivious to their playing children.

She wondered if absorption in a phone is different from absorption in knitting or absorption in a novel. To her it seemed worse.

I agree.

Absorption in knitting is not total. Maybe another word than “absorption” would serve better — maybe occupation. Knitting occupies our hands, leaving us ambiently aware of our environment. We are still here, despite being focused on an activity.

Reading, ideally, is total absorption. A good book transports us elsewhere, to a fictional reality that holds our attention.

What makes phones different is that they transport us away from where we are, but not to another place, or at least not for long. Our attention is taken out of where we are, away from who we are with, and shattered and scattered. Five second blips of exposure to here and there, this image, that image, this feeling and that. Our attention disintegrates into disconnected stimuli. Our spirit is an atomized cloud of impressions and twitches dispersing into nowhere, whenever, no-one.

And this is what makes the playground phone use feel tragic. A parent reading a book seems like they’re enjoying a moment of their own. It is escapism to somewhere, but it leaves the child space for free play. A parent on a phone is just escaping from presence where their child is. They could be anywhere and do this, and it is likely their habit to do it wherever they are.

This got me thinking. If there is a focused elsewhere and a focused here, and there is also a scattered elsewhere, is there a scattered here? It would be attention scattered across an environment. It might be because the environment is overstimulating and chaotic (like an amusement park or festival), or it might be a distractible state of mind — or both at once.

Not to pull a stock consultant move, but I had to map it to a 2×2.

I realize I actually missed the subtle crux of what Susan said.

The thrust of it was more personal and less an opinion on parenting.

When Susan sees another parent (or grandparent) absorbed in their phone at the playground, Susan herself feels isolated from them. Why would she feel that way?

It makes perfect sense to me. Here I wax designerly, and reflect on our human need to share the world.

When parents gather at a playground with our children, we have important things in common. We are doing the same kind of activity, in the same place, with the same equipment. We have spaces and objects mediating experiences that matter to us. We also play a parenting role, and we probably share many joys, fears, hopes, concerns and other experiences all parents know. These things potentially connect us.

Humans need this connection to each other via the places and things of the world, and connections to the world via relationships with others. One core job of designers is to materially mediate these relationships.

As happens so often, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities comes to mind:

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, or authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.

They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.

Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.

Blind and deaf

Philosophy

A rock-tumbled Nietzsche saying: “When we see badly, we see less than what is there. When we hear badly, we hear more than what is there.”

Too often we fail to notice what others do for us, then resent them for not doing enough. Too often we hear more than what others mean in what they say, and then blame them for saying it.

On the matter of Nietzsche

Metaphysics, Philosophy

The first sentence of Beyond Good and Evil — the most electrifying in all of philosophy — proposes a thematic question:

Supposing truth is a woman — what then?

I have incessant asked and re-asked this line for over twenty obsessive years, and today I ask it like this: Supposing truth, of all things, is a woman?

When Nietzsche asked this himself, in 1885, what was the matter with him? Or better, where was the matter for him?

Some hints from the preceding book: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

And another:

Into your eyes I looked recently, O life! And into the unfathomable I then seemed to be sinking. But you pulled me out with a golden fishing rod; and you laughed mockingly when I called you unfathomable.

“Thus runs the speech of all fish,” you said; “what they do not fathom is unfathomable. But I am merely changeable and wild and a woman in every way, and not virtuous — even if you men call me profound, faithful, eternal, and mysterious. But you men always present us with your own virtues, O you virtuous men!”

Thus she laughed, the incredible one; but I never believe her and her laughter when she speaks ill of herself.

And when I talked in confidence with my wild wisdom she said to me in anger, “You will, you want, you love — that is the only reason why you praise life.” Then I almost answered wickedly and told the angry woman the truth; and there is no more wicked answer than telling one’s wisdom the truth.

For thus matters stand among the three of us: Deeply I love only life — and verily, most of all when I hate life. But that I am well disposed toward wisdom, and often too well, that is because she reminds me so much of life. She has her eyes, her laugh, and even her little golden fishing rod: is it my fault that the two look so similar?

And when life once asked me, “Who is this wisdom?” I answered fervently, “Oh yes, wisdom! One thirsts after her and is never satisfied; one looks through veils, one grabs through nets. Is she beautiful? How should I know? But even the oldest carps are baited with her. She is changeable and stubborn; often I have seen her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and a female in every way; but just when she speaks ill of herself she is most seductive.”

When I said this to life she laughed sarcastically and closed her eyes. “Of whom are you speaking?” she asked; “no doubt, of me. And even if you are right — should that be said to my face? But now speak of your wisdom too.”

Ah, and then you opened your eyes again, O beloved life. And again I seemed to myself to be sinking into the unfathomable.

If only Salome had accepted Nietzsche’s marriage proposal. The painful lessons she could have taught him!

It took a decade, but my own wife taught me this: She cannot be reduced to who I imagine her to be. She is perpetually surprising. We will never stop defying my understanding, and if I confuse her for my understanding, the defiance might not be polite.

From this I know that matter is not who physics theorizes her to be.

Supposing reality is a woman — what then?

Supposing truth is marriage —

Accusation in a mirror

Politics

According to wikipedia, accusation in a mirror is “a technique often used to incite hate speech, where someone falsely attributes their own motives or intentions onto their adversaries.”

If I ever planned to pull this move on my enemies, the first thing I would do is accuse them of doing it.

Woo-woo

Pluricentrism

I take books like drugs. Doubt me?

Chaos is not absence of order, but precisely the opposite – the presence of infinite orders. Each of us, sheltered in the shade of our own minuscule I-here-now, benefits from
sphere upon sphere upon sphere upon sphere of ontological filters — deflecting, transmitting, sky-glowing — each successively diffusing and reducing infinity infinitesimally. Each sphere bears its own portion of infinity. Each contains a holographic infinity, a jewel-node in Indra’s Net, conveying within itself the entire jeweled net, refracting and refracting and refracting and refracting to infinite density in one centripetally radiant photon of infinite, dimensionless magnitude.

From mid-ladder

Enworldment, Philosophy

If we imagine being as a ladder, we might situate ourselves at the base.

But what if we imagine ourselves elsewhere, neither at the base, nor at the top of the ladder.

Something is gained if we situate ourself at a permanent middle — metaxy, media res, thrown — with superscendent rungs always beyond the reach of our fingertips and subscendent rungs extending interminably below the soles of our feet.

No more tidy, enclosing heaven or supporting earth with humankind between. Here it is rungs and more rungs.

Wherever we climb, upward or downward, we reach from the heart — ex cord — arms above outstretched, hands groping upward to grasp whatever is graspable here, our feet below, seeking footholds, security, a supporting under-standing.

In this imagined situation, there is a point where we might climb — and we are here! — where we confuse our ideas about nature and our capacities to command and control it. Many of us were born on this rung, carved from a solid plank of a probabilistic swarm of subatomic particles. Our feet, too, were carved from this substance, and our hearts, too! We stand here, fused to our rung, groping above for the right political aspirations, oblivious to our footing.

But matter is not subatomic particles, though she might allow herself to seem so, when she feels cooperative. Matter sometimes deigns to cooperate with our laboratory play. But she reserves her right to turn on us arbitrarily, when we least expect it.

And physical matter is only one of myriad materials.

Material is any reality — physical or otherwise — that can take form, without itself being form.

And no material is pure. Any thing is a chaotic convergence of materials. And with each additional witness, materials proliferate. Instauration (revelation-creation) ex cord is difficult. Instauration ex con-cord borders on impossible. A designer knows this truth. Who else knows…?

Transcendence is not only ascension to ecstatic heights, nor penetration to fathomless depths. It does not leave or aspire to leave mundane life. It completes a circuit of behind and beyond. It stands mid-ladder, ushering lower angels upward, and higher angels downward. It circulates divine light so the bright blood bathes the tissues of matter, saturating matter with soul and form, then returns the spent light to the source for replenishment.

Chaos is not absence of meaning. Chaos is too many meanings. Chaos is hypermeaning.

Extreme white noise vanishes into blind ether, nothing-present-nothing-missing.

To a finite soul, infinity is nothingness; hypermeaning is meaningless.

The midpoint of unity and infinity is zero.

Absolute infinitude versus the infinite infinitesimals.

In the Metaxic Middle — Malkhut
in whom we are suspended
Ein Sof — Absolute Infinitude — One
meets
Shekhinah — Infinite Infinitesimals — Sparks
one spark of which is oneself
within One’s Self.

I have quite a heresy brewing here!

Craft as conversation

Design, Enworldment

To be alive to craft is to converse well with materials. Good conversation is reciprocal exchange — give and take, hearing and responding — within an event of emergent meaning.

Hans-Georg Gadamer said that in the best games, players are participants through whom the game plays itself, and, similarly,  in the best conversations, the conversation has itself through its interlocutors.

In craft, artisan and artifact, speaking a common language of materials — physical or otherwise — participate in the emergence of form.

This is your civilization on drugs. Any questions?

Enworldment, History

Postmodernism is civilization on acid.

Those bale-wire concepts that held everything together are snipped, and the whole is flying apart into mad coils of notional chaos. This wild profusion can eventually be gathered back up, after the unbound ideas release their spring energy in expansion and diffusion. 

Ontological veils

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.

Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.

Darkness conceals visibly.

Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.

According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from

revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.

If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.

My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.

The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.

In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.

Designerly metaphysics

Design, Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Before any beginning is infinitude.

Pure infinitude. Ein sof.

Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.

At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.

Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.

Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.

For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.

From within finitude, piercing of the cloak is ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.

Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.

Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.

Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.

Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.

In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.

The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.

The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.

The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.

And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.

Bright blood

Design, Esoterism, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Pluricentrism, Polycentrism

The weirdest, best insight I learned from Nietzsche is that our hierarchy of values more or less determines our faith and that this hierarchy guards itself through prohibiting questions. Defy those prohibitions, interrogate settled matters closed to inquiry, and all kinds of uncanny things happen. Valuing is inseparably soul-forming and world-forming. Any significant change in value hierarchy transfigures self and world together: a reborn I in a re-enworlded world.

If you are nodding along and think you already know and agree with this — has it ever occurred to you that many of these prohibitions are good and necessary and ought to be upheld? Most obedient young radicals have not. Nor have they had the courage to question — let alone challenge — anything outside of those pre-defeated values our own dominant value hierarchy demand that we ritually re-interrogate. We obediently perform the rebelliousness we are expected or compelled to perform, and rage against whatever exceeds the strict and narrow limits of our radical thoughts.

But back to value hierarchies. Within a range of diversity (a quite narrow, and necessarily narrow range!), each of us values different things. Some of it is circumstantial (we have deficits and gluts of goods) and some is essential (our taste prioritizes goods differently). And this is why we exchange value. We have too much of one good and too little of another. A situation creates momentary need of a good that makes other goods in our possession or capacity relatively dispensable. We find it easy to generate a good that others desire but cannot generate themselves. We sense ineffable sacred importance in one good and are unmoved by other goods held sacred by others. So we enter into exchanges.

If these exchanges are mutually beneficial, and conditions are such that they dynamically stabilize, an organization comes to life. Its lifeblood is the value, inhering like oxygen, in the myriad goods exchanged. The need for exchange — the needs and wants, the surplus and abilities — makes the goods circulate through exchanges — and causes an organization to live and act and to have real, living being. And we who participate — who act, who are acted upon — have actancy within our organization.

Reading Charles Stein’s extraordinary The Light of Hermes Trismegistus, I just learned a new word, thumos:

We are no doubt familiar with how English verbs are proxy for actions expressed either in the active or the passive voice, roughly approximating the difference between acts that one performs and those that happen to one. But there are actions where neither of these voices seem to apply. An action might not be the product of a person’s willful agency and still not be something that passively happens to him or her as if through an impersonal chain of causes. Poetic inspiration is a case in point. A number of recent authors have discussed the middle voice where it proves useful in the analysis of natural and linguistic phenomena because neither active nor passive constructions seem adequate. …

The Greek and the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language have, in addition to an active and a passive, a middle voice that, among other things, expresses the inspiration of the Muse and would be used wherever it seems that a god impels, instigates, induces, or inspires some action. The Homeric-Hesiodic dialect expresses the instigation of such action by saying that a god strikes the person in the thumos — an “organ” in the middle of one’s body that is activated in this manner. If Eros strikes, one falls in love; if Mars, one is impelled to rage, violence, or courage in combat; if Hermes, deeds of mind, cognition, planning, cleverness — all the devious and ingenious devices of the Hermetic character. The consequence of being struck in the thumos by the god is clearly not the work of one’s independent free will, but it is also not entirely a passive reaction to an external force. The god is not entirely external to one’s psyche, and yet he is external to it, too! … Zeus might actively strike your house with his lightning bolt, but the striking of one’s thumos is not quite like that. When Eros or Hermes touches this organ, it is the most intimate of phenomena. Often translators are forced to use such locutions as “love was awakened in his heart” — as if the response were passive. But it isn’t passive. It is an arousal at the very root of one’s powers of action; it is that which is not quite you but which activates what is active in you as you.

Thumos is the mythical organ of actancy — present but missing, like Da’at in the sefirot.

What does thumos do? I will venture that it governs intuitive participation in transcendent being. It receives and responds as an organ in a superpersonal organism. That superperson (egregore) might be, for example, an organization. Or some other enveloping being, like a friendship or marriage. (“In true love it is the soul that envelops the body,” says Nietzsche.) Or… a faith.

Regarding actancy, I learned the word actant from Bruno Latour.

What is a force? Who is it? What is it capable of? Is it a subject, text, object, energy, or thing? How many forces are there? Who is strong and who is weak? Is this a battle? Is this a game? Is this a market? All these questions are defined and deformed only in further trials.

In place of “force” we may talk of “weaknesses”, “entelechies”, “monads”, or more simply “actants.”

…

No actant is so weak that it cannot enlist another. Then the two join together and become one for a third actant, which they can therefore move more easily. An eddy is formed, and it grows by becoming many others.

Is an actant essence or relation? We cannot tell without a trial (1.1.5.2). To stop themselves being swept away, essences may relate themselves to many allies, and relations to many essences.

…

An actant can gain strength only by associating with others. Thus it speaks in their names. Why don’t the others speak for themselves? Because they are mute; because they have been silenced; because they became inaudible by talking at the same time. Thus, someone interprets them and speaks in their place. But who? Who speaks? Them or it? Traditore — traduttore. One equals several. It cannot be determined. If the fidelity of the actant is questioned, it can demonstrate that it just repeats what the others wanted it to say. It offers an exegesis on the state of forces, which cannot be contested even provisionally without another alliance.

If Actor-Network Theory (aka ANT, sociology of actants) is a social science, service design can be seen as its technology, although vanishingly few designers go beyond knowing about Latour, usually via a forced trudge through We Have Never Been Modern in grad school.)

Service design was the first explicitly polycentric design discipline. It is concerned with forming durable arrangements of value exchange among people, mediated by “things” in the broadest possible sense — both, human and nonhuman, alike, considered actants — interacting within an organization and around the organization within its ecosystem of customers, partners, competitors, regulators and other stakeholders.

The systematic interaction of actants, each participating as its own experiential-agential center within the system gives rise to a polycentric order — which service design views as an emergent order with its own kind of being: a service.

But no service is known from “a view from nowhere”. It is always experienced by someone, from some point in the system, holographically (the image of the whole subsists in each of its parts. Each participant in the service is a jewel in the Net of Indra, which experiences and acts from its own node. This multiple view-from-within is what could be called pluricentricity.

Service design is concerned both with the third-person / objective polycentricity of organizations and services and the myriad first-person / subjective pluricentricity of actants within organizations and services, and how polycentricity and pluricentricity mobiously, thumocratically (!) interform one another.

I’ve said before that I worship the distributed God. God’s distribution, of course, saturates all being equally, but to finite beings like ourselves it is concentrated in souls, the nucleus of which is thumos.

When I think about value exchanges I associate it with the circulation of the divine light in the sefirot.

(“Enlist every ounce of your bright blood, and off with their heads!” In Tarot, the letter shin is associated with Judgment. And here the Kahnemaniacs lose their last shred of patience. “Barnum!” Yes. But before you start stoning me with your cognitive bias accusations, ask yourself this: Do I know my own faith? We certainly know what our peers accept as true. We know very well what will get us ostracized if we voice doubt. Some of us know what we can successfully argue and defend. But do we know what truths we would bet our life on? I suspect not. No, no: We’re all post-truth now, especially those of us who insist on truth. We all suffer spurious ideas for the sake of identity. None of us believes three quarters of our “beliefs” and maybe least of all the ones we get emotionally worked up over. We think we’ve “done the work” of overcoming our biases, but we have not overcome the fact that we harbor extreme cognitive bias toward where our biases are and aren’t. We are blind to where our justice itself is most glaringly unjust, and if we refuse to acknowledge this… well, that is blindness doing blindness. If we are honest, which we are not, we will acknowledge that we have already sold ourselves out to pay admission to our social class. We are intellectually and spiritually insolvent. We have no personal integrity to preserve. So why not indulge the Barnum effect for the sake of serious, joyous play? Witness: if we are hospitable and entertain ideas that entertain us, we may receive invitations to higher worlds. The invitation is addressed to our thumos, and we accept with “hineini”.)

Liberal saint Richard Rorty famously taught “Anything can be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed.”

I want to redescribe design to make it look and feel spiritually important.

And I want to redescribe the spiritual to manifest its pervasive presence in the ordinary,

And I want to redescribe both together to accentuate our duty to shape our world and invest ourselves in it so the world manifests its spiritual provenance and destiny.

We are responsible for forming a world we can care about and willingly serve.

)O+

The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations

Chord, Design, Letterpress, Philosophy

I’ve said it and texted it so many times I assumed I must have posted it, but I can’t find it: The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.

Many clumsy verbosities have been massively improved by the battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding.

Two examples. First rock tumbled William James:

When a thing is new, people say: “It is not true.”

Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: “It’s not important.”

Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say “Anyway, it’s not new.”

The raw rock:

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.

Another is from Hannah Arendt. Rock-tumbled:

Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.

Raw:

Human action, like all strictly political phenomena, is bound up with human plurality, which is one of the fundamental conditions of human life insofar as it rests on the fact of natality, through which the human world is constantly invaded by strangers, newcomers whose actions and reactions cannot be foreseen by those who are already there and are going to leave in a short while. If, therefore, by starting natural processes, we have begun to act into nature, we have manifestly begun to carry our own unpredictability into that realm which we used to think of as ruled by inexorable laws.

But because I’m such a repetitious and arrogant person, happy to quote and requote myself poorly, subjecting my own clumsy words to “battering wear of bad listening, faulty memory, careless paraphrasing and aesthetic rounding” until they become nice smooth gems. For example, “The internet is the rock tumbler of quotations.”

I’ve been playing with the idea of making a letterpress book on design lifted from Jan Zwicky’s brilliant Lyric Philosophy and Wisdom & Metaphor. Each entry will be a quotation, accompanied by an extended reflection on how it illuminates some facet of design. I will be using the improved, rock tumbled version of quotations, not originals.

I love long collaborative traditions. No one person could have made anything as perfect as a bicycle.

Ordinances of time

Existentialism, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Philosophy

More than once, in the depths of hangover I have yogiberraed a lamentational oath: “I am never drinking ever again, for at least a week.”

The griminess suggests crass oxymoron, but beneath the grime is a Bergsonian paradox — a paradox of time.

Oxymoron and paradox are both species of irony. They are both operations of dual-meaning, whose duality introduces a third meaning.

What divides paradoxic irony from oxymoronic irony is that oxymoron flatly self-contradicts, where paradox finds truth in parallactic depth across planes of givenness. Paradox’s humor is comedic in the classic sense, which is conjoined with tragedy — and this irony stands at world boundaries as a herm.

This same lamentational oath can be meant with oxymoronic irony. And when it is meant this way, it speaks psychologically: we are absurd, our intentions are absurd, and even our most earnest words are spoken with forked tongues. We speak basely even when we aspire. We speak basely especially when we aspire.

Oxymoron ridicules the human condition, where paradox sublimates it. Dry ironic eyes do not twinkle.

Speaking kabbalistically, in paradoxic irony one voice instaurates meaning in pshat and another voice instaurates meaning in remez, and the difference announces together-across-planes sounds a chord, a sensus communis, a depth witness of drash. The chord may be consonant or dissonant, but it resolves in depth-sounding truth, an articulation, not only within, but across worlds.

Drash is parallactic witness, and within it each chronological moment is witness to past, present and future. Some moments look forward, and these moments are promethean. Some moments look backward, and these moments are epimethean.

Some moments are perfect in themselves. Some moments long impossibly for an infinite elsewhere. Speaking mythically, this longing is guarded by the Hespirades, who hold it futile. A scrubbed, polished and decharmed cousin of the hangover lament: We pine for fleeting moments of eternity. We miss most of all eternities we had and lost because we conflate eternity and permanence. We long to taste, once again, lost golden fruit we never tasted.

If a titan can ironize — and this is doubtful — the irony of Cronus would be the most oxymoronic.

How exponentially metaironic would it be to attempt a four-eyed ironic depth of playing oxymoron against paradox?

If anyone ever attempted such a thing, it would be Nietzsche:

To be sure, there is also quite another category of genius, that of justice; and I can in no way see fit to esteem that kind lower than any philosophical, political, or artistic genius. It is its way to avoid with hearty indignation everything which blinds and confuses our judgment about things; thus it is an enemy of convictions, for it wants to give each thing its due, be it living or dead, real or fictive — and to do so it must apprehend it clearly; it therefore places each thing in the best light and walks all around it with an attentive eye. Finally it will even give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted “conviction” (as men call it: — women call it “faith”), what is due to conviction — for the sake of truth.

One of my most rock-tumbled aphorisms: “Conflict divides the world into four halves.”

A few years ago, when the aphorism was still rough, I expanded this idea into an exegesis on the philosopher’s stone.

When conflict breaks out, we are shaken out of unity, and fall into the four-sidedness of conflict. There is [1] what I believe, there is [2] what you believe, there is [3] what I think you believe and there is [4] what you think I believe.(Naive egocentricity, of course, sees only two sides: what I believe and what I know you believe. Until one overcomes naive egocentricity and learns to see conflict as four-sided, progress is impossible.)

To begin reconciliation we try to go from four-sided conflict to three-sided disagreement, where there is [1] what I believe, and there is [2] what you believe and there is [3] our shared understanding of our disagreement.

But sometimes when we reach a shared understanding of the disagreement we realize that this shared understanding has transcended and absorbed our old conflicting beliefs. This new understanding is no longer an agreement about a disagreement, but [1] a new shared belief. The three-sided disagreement is now a more expansive and accommodating unity.

So it’s one to four to three and then back to one. Repeat, ad infinitum.

This post is now entirely out of control.

Axial myth

Fables, myths & parables, History, Politics

Axial Age as theory-myth (presented magisterially, with ascholarly recklessness):

In the period of the Axial Age, civilizational technologies (material, military and social) evolved to a point where those tribes who acquired these technologies earliest, were able, first to overwhelm their neighbors militarily, and, after, to manage and control conquered peoples, and to extract the resources of conquered territories. The Axial tribes that gained first-mover advantage transformed themselves through their own rapid spread and acquisition of power into empires of unprecedented scale.

These vast empires centrally managed peoples and resources through technocracy. The technocratic logic abstracted culture from society, two institutions that had, prior to this, been essentially identical.

The opportunity: how might an empire invest the least power and resources to conquer and control a territory, in order to extract the most power and resources, or order to accrue surplus power and resources to invest in further expansion — all resulting in exponential growth of territory, power and wealth.

The trick was to change conquered peoples as minimally as possible — to leave as much intact, especially those aspects of tribal life most valued by its members, so they would not revolt. This unchanged element became, under the abstraction of technocracy, culture. What was changed, and in fact, dominated by the empire, was society.

And this brings me to my point: Religion as cultural institution was an artifact of technocracy. Initially, tribal “cosmological” religion was a preserved remnant of tribal life under the domination of empire. But later, new self-contained, inward Axial religious forms developed. They grew out of these remainder religions, but they shed the cosmological roots, renounced all “worldly” ambitions, but compensated with universal spiritual aspirations.

Axial religions were less new limbs or outgrowths of the old plant than they were sprouted cuttings — rerooted traditional ruptures. They were born resigned to coexistence to empire.

Yet, paradoxically, these Axial religions proved ideal for empires. If an empire adopted an Axial faith, it could now replace native cosmological faiths with a state religion, which further eased technocratic burden. Conquered peoples could be dominated body and soul.

The next wave of empires were post-Axial empires, fervent to spread a universal religion as universally as possible. Islam is sometimes classified as the youngest of the Axial religions, and this is radically wrong. Islam was not an inward, unworldly Axial religion developed under dominance of an empire (later adopted by an empire) but rather a post-Axial empire fitted with its own hyper-worldly, universal, imperial religion.

Later still, in response to domination, first by Axial empires and then by post-Axial empires, the pre-Axial remnant religions evolved new depths of inwardness. They were still cosmological and tribal, but they also developed their latent esoteric universality, precisely that same heartwood life that was cut and rerooted in the Axial cuttings.

Post-Cosmological religions — Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, and I will anomalously include in this series a book, the I Ching — these have a cultivated commonality. Sophia Perennis is a theology concerned with heartwood faith. I share the Perennialist faith, but reject much of the theologic of tradition.

Now, today, everything is changing rapidly. Somehow, all these layers of Axial, Post-Axial, Post Cosmological and Perennialist religion coexist in a global social order — a new form of order radically different from tribe or empire — that is no longer compatible with any existing religion.

Diamond writing

Autobiography, Philosophy

Not long ago, I realized that none of the authors I love to read cut readers a break.

I love hard, compact, flashing books. Stand up and move around, strain and turn to find the correct angle, the light shines in. Sit dully in place, and you get less than nothing. You get flat, mystical gist.

I will make every effort to be clear, and no effort to be accessible.

Emanation?

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

If we understand that subjectivity and objectivity are preceded by something that is neither subjectivity nor objectivity but being that is both and more than both, how do we refer to such superjectivity? A Kabbalist might suggest “emanation”.

Notes on design esoterism

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.

Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.

Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.

Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.

And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.

And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.

To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.

(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)

Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.

Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.

Esoterism wants to materialize.

Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.

Exnihilism is at the heart of it.

New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.

Dreamt awakening

Anthropology, Enworldment, Philosophy

Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.

Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.

We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.

Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.

We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.

And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.

Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.

Monos

Fables, myths & parables

Speaking ethnologically, the most brutal titanic collective solipsism appears to its own initiates as the most elevated monotheistic universality; its innumerable agents pose as divine messengers bearing transcendent truths.

Now speaking mythically, would denial of monotheistic universality banish the titans of self-certainty? Or would it just invite in new titanic universalities? A myriad-eyed giant of relative values? Presided over by a benevolent value-neutral technocratic dictator?

Sloterdijk teaches us that an astronaut venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere must carefully envelop himself in portable atmosphere. Whoever ventures beyond Eden’s atmosphere must do the same. Perhaps a halo is an Edenic space helmet, an envelope of luminous everted fact.