All posts by anomalogue

The Eighth Day Adventist

Fables, myths & parables

The theologian began with the assumption that humankind is created in God’s image, and proceeded to reverse-engineer God’s being from the psychological image of mankind.

He concluded that the Seventh Day was the most strenuous day of all for the great workaholic God. On the Seventh Day God constrained Himself from further creation and thus created stability.

The theologian dreaded the coming of the Eighth Day, the day that God would resume His ex nihilo creation with renewed enthusiasm.

He reflected on the last 5,700 years of reality in stasis, and humanity’s struggle to understand it. He tried to imagine humanity’s first Monday morning on the job, against the background of what had been from a cosmic perspective, an idle afternoon.

Humanity would wake to a new reality that would change faster than our collective capacity to learn. We would think, but the thoughts would not work, since they pertained to a nature superseded an hour ago (in part by the act of thinking). We would manipulate the world with increasing skill and shape it to our satisfaction, with growing dissatisfaction. We would explain the world with increasing precision, but the explanations would fail to explain the manifest inexplicability of the situation: that our helplessness grows with our expertise, as if the two were grafted together. Maybe they were never separate.

Like an infant we would stare out into a swirl of progressive chaos. New beings would appear out of nowhere, but, having no words for them, we would be unable to recognize them as real or distinguish them from fantasies or memories. Our knowledge would smash into these beings, break into conflicting opinions, and in churning debate, grind each other into powdery silt before disappearing under the foam. Our sense would make no sense. Gradually we would grow oblivious even to the possibility of making sense. Only a dumb awareness of an absence would remain, and that would disappear, too, negated by the self-evident fact of nothing missing.

God would press ahead, dividing, reunifying and articulating — all the while declaring His every act “Good!” in a language humanity will never learn.

The theologian feared that we would never emerge from our second infancy. In rude moods the theologian referred to Eighth Day humanity as the Great Idiot.

The death and life of philosophies

Ideas

Ideally, we would all have a place in the world. What each of us is (role) and who each of us is (way of perceiving, conceiving, feeling and acting) would coincide enough that the world would give us a purpose as it took from us our kind of service.

Because of the implicit philosophy we have inherited from three centuries of alienated thought, we no longer have any expectation that this is possible or permissible.

We’re all social deists. We believe that the clockwork of “how things are” will — and must — play itself out according to its own mechanical principles. We’re all as skeptical as scientists with no trust in good faith, but only in inescapably compelling proofs. We believe only when someone is able to force us to believe.

The fact that a moral vision of life cannot be formed in these conditions only proves that moral visions are merely subjective imaginings.

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People who hate philosophy hate it because they are loyal to a philosophy.

Hostility toward philosophy is actually hostilities of philosophies, in the plural.

(Actually, a philosophy that exists without awareness of other philosophies is not really a philosophy, but a totalistic conception of experience, a pre-philosophy.)

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A philosophy is a totalistic conception of experience that knows that it is a totalistic conception of experience, and which, therefore has a transcendent background placed behind it: the possibility of consequential otherwise. Out of concern for this otherwise, it self-examines and attempts to make itself explicit.

A totalistic conception of experience that does not know that it is a totalistic conception of experience — or suspecting it may be, does everything it can to suppress full recognition of the fact — and which grasps no background beyond itself: the universe.

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A philosophy that exists without knowledge of other philosophies is as real and invisible as a subject who exists without knowledge of other subjects.

An autistic person is unaware of subjects beyond himself because all that exists to him is his own subjectivity, and this results in a world of objects.

The Enlightenment was the submergence of humankind in collective autism.

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Around each philosophy is a stretch of hellish oblivion known as perplexity.

Part of why we do not want to acknowledge other philosophies is out of fear of perplexity.

Perplexity corresponds to the state of chaos into which each infant is thrown at birth, which slowly articulates into a world.

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Babies are born into perplexity. That is why they cry.

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If someone claims enlightenment or rebirth or being “born again” ask what their death was like, and about the limbo they endured as they emerged from chaos into this new world they inhabit. Because this is how to distinguish transfiguration of the world and subsequent metanoia from a mere change of opinion about the world and how one ought to behave in it.

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We cannot live as human beings until we transcend the vision of the Enlightenment.

We cannot transcend the Enlightenment until we become willing to endure perplexity.

But we will not become fully perplexed until we start listening to one another and learning. Learning means to redraw the outlines of our knowledge: to reconfigure our gists.

But according to the Enlightenment we already know all we need to know in outline. And to believe this is to preclude learning. This is the circular life of the Enlightenment, and of all stable philosophies.

Provocation

Ideas

Every thought thinkable by a solitary individual has already been thought. Future thoughts will arise from the efforts of individuals thinking beyond their own limits with others, and those thoughts will not be comprehended by any one individual. The thought will be something in which the individual participates, and its knowing is one of knowing how to participate in the thought, in it is not graspable by the five fingers of the mind.

Powers of ten

Ideas

Break us down to the infinitesimal element, of which all thing are constituted, we are alike. Take us together as constitutive of infinity, we are one.

We identify with extremes of scale when we feel overtaxed and weary and need need relief from incessant betweenness. In our mind, which is a place of its own, we burrow into dust to dissolve among quarks or to fly into heaven and see ourselves converge to zero from the vantage of beyond. Both are ways to desituate ourselves; to stand apart from where we always are.

The same operation can be performed with time, identifying with the deep past and distant future, and again with our existence between the chthonic animal instincts at our roots and the transcendence of mundane life.

We become escapees and exiles from the center, our prison home.

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None of us live at extremes of space, time or self. We can’t even touch them. We are suspended between them, and experience them purely through their tension.

For us, there is only tension, and from that tension fixed points are interpreted.

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Reality is not in entities but in relations. The entities follow from the relationships, but the mind seizes them and commits its characteristic ontic error. They are thinged.

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An object can be comprehended. Our participation in the world is incomprehensible.

A short-lived fashion from the turn of the millennium?

Anthropology, Design

At the end of her 2000 article “Ethnography in the Field of Design” Christina Wasson issued some warnings:

Although ethnography enjoys a great deal of popularity in the design field at present, I want to close with a cautionary eye to the future. Observing a similar phenomenon in CSCW, Hughes et al. (1994:437) noted: “Ethnography is currently fashionable in CSCW, but if it is to survive this kind of attention then it is important that the method find an effective voice rather than remaining content with ephemeral celebrity.”

. . .

Ten years from now, will ethnography be regarded as a short-lived fashion from the turn of the millennium? Its staying power depends on its ability to accurately purvey a unique kind of useful information to designers. And while the details of design firms’ ethnographic practices may not be public, there is a widespread sense among anthropologists in the design community that the quality of these firms’ research varies widely. The popularity of the approach has led a number of design firms to claim they offer “ethnography” even though none of their employees has a degree in anthropology or a related discipline. Sometimes researchers trained in cognitive psychology adopt observational methods; sometimes designers themselves do the observation. Such design firms are not necessarily averse to hiring anthropologists; they may have been unable to find ones with an adequate knowledge of the private sector.

As a consequence, the concept of ethnography has become a “pale shadow of itself’ (Wasson n.d.). In its most emaciated form, the term is simply used to refer to a designer with a video camera. Even in somewhat richer versions, the term has become closely identified with the act of observing naturally occurring consumer behaviors. The need to analyze those behaviors and situate them in their cultural context is poorly understood, even though these activities are essential parts of developing a model of user experience that leads to targeted and far-reaching design conclusions. The anthropological apparatus that stands behind ethnography — the self-reflexivity of participant observation, the training in theory that enables fieldworkers to identify patterns — these are poorly understood in the design field. Indeed, the association between ethnography and anthropology is not widely known. The term “anthropology” is almost never heard. Even Chicago’s Institute of Design, whose faculty has a fairly sophisticated understanding of the topic, describes ethnographic observation merely as “a method borrowed from social science research” on its Web site (Institute of Design 1997).

The tendency for design firms to skimp on analysis is due in part to financial pressures. It can be hard to persuade clients to fund adequate labor time for researchers to develop well-grounded interpretations. Merely claiming to do ethnography costs little; actually conducting substantive anthropological research is much more expensive. Clients are also chronically in a hurry and press for immediate results. Nonetheless, my worry is that the design firms that skimp on analysis will tend to produce less interesting results. In the long run, this could lead to the perception that ethnography doesn’t have much to offer after all. If that should happen — and I certainly hope it does not — an opportunity for anthropologists to help construct the world around us will have been lost. Those of us who are active in the design field can address this issue in several ways. First of all, it is my hope that the mechanism of the market may actually be of use and that anthropologists can create positive publicity for themselves by doing good work on their projects. It seems possible, at least, that clients will realize, over time, that the findings of design firms engaging in richer forms of ethnography outshine the findings of other firms. E-Lab/ Sapient’s continued growth is a hopeful sign. . . .

 

Active business, passive science

Ideas

This morning I shared an observation with a friend of mine who teaches women’s studies: business language tends to reduce relationships to the form subject + transitive verb + direct object. A management consultant never refers to something; he references it.

She pointed out to me that this is the inverse of what happens in science writing. Scientists are encouraged to write in the passive voice, in order to minimize the role of subjects and subjectivity in the content. In science the agents recede as far as possible behind the words in order to focus attention on the objective matter at hand.

Despite the obvious divergence, a commonality exists here: a preference for separating as completely as possible the active role of agents and passive roles of the recipients of action. It is possible to see these two linguistic styles as reflecting a shared preference for exaggerated difference in status between agent and object. This allows business and science to snap together into a complementary system. In business (and technology) an agent performs actions on objects. In science objects are acted upon and observed. In scientific modes of understanding, all entities whether human or material are understood objectively, which means as objects receptive to an agent’s actions.

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It is interesting to note that traditional religious symbol systems invariably assign to the masculine the status of the active and temporal, and to the feminine the passive and spatial.

It is also interesting that conservative political movements tend to idealize highly differentiated sexual roles, where progressive political movements idealize androgyny.

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The real struggle now is not between the powerful few and the powerless many. It is between those who affirm hierarchical power orders where the powerful act upon the less powerful (embraced equally by the powerful and the loyal powerless who identify with those who command them) and those who oppose such hierarchies and who instead prefer a complex matrix of power relationships, where roles of agency and receptivity are variable and contextual.

 

Thoughts on ethics

Ethics, Metaphysics

An ethic supports a particular ethos. Behavior is judged ethically according to the ethos promoted or undermined. Ethics is relative.

Morality transcends ethics, and judges ethos and ethics.

According to this view, it is possible in principle to be ethically immoral by participating in bad ethos.

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Relativists believe morality is an illusion produced by ethical provincialism.

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Some kind of analogue exists here:

ethics : morals = phenomenon : noumenon

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My three most fundamental ethical principles:

  1. Listen to appeals.
  2. Keep your promises.
  3. Repent when you err.

Insight-driven design

Ideas

Some designers focus their attention on the artifact they’re crafting, and believe their craftsmanship will naturally result in an artifact people will love. This type of design is driven by invention. The primary source of inspiration comes from the possibilities of the medium.

Some designers focus their attention on the people for whom the design is intended. The entire activity is oriented by awareness of the person who will experience the artifact. This type of design is driven by insight. The primary source of inspiration comes from shifts in perspective effected by understanding other people.

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Until recently, the invention-driven approach was the most common and readily recognized one. It fits cleanly into the 20th century ideals of objectivity and individualism.

In recent years it has been challenged by the insight-driven approach. However, the insight-driven approach is immature, and still encumbered and distorted by objectivist thinking. Specifically, the methods employed often feel less inspiring than restraining. People who have been exposed to UX methodologies sometimes come away with the feeling that the process makes the design process dryer, more mechanical and less likely to produce brilliance. There is a perception, unfortunately sometimes true, that UX wants to conform designs to the expectations of users, and since these expectations are usually pretty banal, the whole approach is at cross-purposes with innovation and brand differentiation.

But, while this perception is no doubt valid, based as it is in experience, it does not reflect insight-driven design at its best. Research is somewhat similar to design, in that some researchers are better than others, and among the good ones, each had different strengths and weaknesses. An engineering team gains little if a mediocre designer is added to the mix. And if they’ve never worked with a good designer, engineers often do not know how to evaluate designers, and might even prefer mediocre designers, because such designers are less likely to “interfere” with the engineering process by trying to influence it at a fundamental level. They stay at the surface level, making surface improvement to a pre-formed solution, sanding off the rough edges of usability problems, and adding a shiny coat of desirability.

The same is true of design researchers. The best researchers fundamentally change how a design team thinks about the problem it is solving. The research doesn’t diminish the need for craftsmanship or inventiveness, and the insights do not replace designer’s intuition. However, the aims of the craftsmanship, inventiveness and intuition are changed, and when done correctly actually stimulates them.

In this sense, design research parallels brand strategy. The best brand strategists/planners empower the team to innovate meaningfully. Their brand documents are inspirational and not essentially proscriptive, even when they introduce constraints. But when people think about brand they often think about “brand cops” and restricting brand identity manuals. Unfortunately, the latter is much more common.

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The best design research and the best brand strategy sublates the conflict between invention-driven and inspiration-driven design.

Design and the social system

Anthropology, Design

Talcot Parsons, from The Social System:

Reduced to the simplest possible terms, then, a social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the “optimization of gratification” and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.

This is practically an inventory of the elements uncovered in design research.

  • Actors (which Parsons divides into ego, equivalent to “the user” in UX parlance and alter, which UX treats as elements of social context.)
  • Social context (relationships between actors)
  • Physical context (environment)
  • Needs (a.k.a. “optimization of gratification”)
  • Behaviors (involvement with events and artifacts in physical context)
  • Interactions (involvement with actors in social context)
  • Mental models (the defining/mediating symbol structure)
  • Signs (I’m adding this one: affordances that link mental models with real-world events and artifacts)
  • Symbols (I’m adding this one, too: indicators of the value-significance of real-world events and artifacts)

 

Best and worst

Ethics

I often find myself recalling Yeats’ famous lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

It seems it is precisely the ones least entitled to it who have the firmest faith in their convictions and the strongest self-confidence? It seems that beyond a certain point of gross ineptitude the Dunning-Kruger effect is actually a competitive advantage.

It seems people are more concerned with whether a leader believes he is right and behaves accordingly than whether it turns out that he was actually right.

Maybe truth serves the same purpose as the trappings of a wedding. What  is decisive is how the bride feels about the wedding — and that is why the dress, and the flowers and the location all have to be just right.

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So what about those who have a strong intellectual conscience and find belief difficult and sometimes impossible? How do we give full justice to reality while maintaining firm enough horizons to act decisively and resolutely — especially when the suspicions of skeptics turn out to be true, again and again? Perhaps having the truth is less important than living according to what truth seems to be. But then we observe the victims of Dunning-Kruger, and we know we cannot choose that path.

Asymmetrical disagreements

Ideas

Reading Difficult Conversations, it is apparent that navigating differences in opinion is difficult. People perceive situations differently and these divergent perceptions require divergent responses. Letting go of the bottom line result of these perceptions and responses, and examining the subjective factors and processes underlying the differences requires respect, patience and philosophical flexibility. It is unsurprising that constructive conversation often fails to occur.

To make matters worse — and more interesting — I do not believe most conflicts have this symmetrical opinion versus opinion structure. I believe the deeper disagreements are radically asymmetrical, and take the form of formed opinion versus inchoate intuition.

Opinion-versus-opinion as a norm leads to the systematic advantaging of conventional (and non-innovative) thinking. One person has a positive plan and the other has only criticisms of things other people have come up with. The former is ready to get to work and start producing work products while the other is in “analysis paralysis” lost in abstract concepts.

The tactic employed at this point is to impose a line of questioning that reinforces the assumption that conflicts are necessarily between opinion and opinion: “OK, then. You think my opinion is inadequate. Do you have something better?” Or another way this is stated: “Don’t come to me with problems. Come to me with solutions.” The dissenter is framed as a mere malcontent, content to criticize other people’s ideas, but unable or unwilling to advance one of their own.

The implication of all this is that groups cannot explore questions together. It is up to the isolated individual to produce an alternative. In other words, critique and dialogue is ruled out on principle. (This tactic is often used by husbands on  wives to shut down discussion. Because this type of disagreement is difficult to conceptualize — especially in the heat of argument — the wife will leave with the feeling she has been treated unjustly, but in a way she cannot explain. If she raises further objections it only leads to more of the same: “You don’t have a point.” Further, focusing attention on the way the discussion is happening, rather than on the content of the discussion, can be taken as changing the subject from the factual matter at hand, and making things personal and subjective. For whatever reason, women seem more inclined to come to a shared understanding before taking action, where men tend to fight for dominance in order to personally determine the course of action.)

And things are such in many organizations that the positive something always overrides the negative possibility — that is, the group automatically seizes on the first viable concrete option that appears, with the faith that dissatisfaction is in details that can be ironed out. And because this is the only way things are permitted to happen, there is no counter-example available to show the relative ease of proceeding according to a clear vision, versus a muddled attempt to construct a vision piecemeal.

The key to resolving this problem is raising the conflict from the level of opinion versus opinion to the level of method vs method. Of course, the former, who already holds an opinion will argue that no argument is necessary since the group already knows what it ought to do (a.k.a. has an opinion to work from), but at least now the conflict is framed in more positive and symmetrical terms.

 

Vision and voice

Hermeneutics, History, Judaism

People love to watch an artist draw. He draws a line and slowly it becomes a shape. He adds more lines, and introduces shading. So far, the relationships are all within the page; a composition takes form. But the drawing suggests that it is a drawing of something — but of what? Here is where the suspense is concentrated. The interrelated elements on the page taken as a whole point beyond themselves, to realities beyond the page. In figurative art, the reference is to physical objects. But this is only the basest reality. Beyond it is mood, and the mood is connected to the figures. And beyond that, there are layers of symbol, starting with shared cultural meanings, proceeding onward to more obscure and personal intimations.

I think storytelling is a mode of speech that imitates drawing. Human beings are predominantly visual, and whatever modes of thought make use of the visual modes of thought gain an advantage.

Maybe objectivity is preferred over subjectivity because objectivity is more optical. When we don’t want to follow some involved line of thought, when we don’t want to reach the conclusion by the path of personal realization, but just want the bottom-line result, what do we ask for? A synopsis.

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Martin Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

More and more, I am understanding Judaism to be a perpetually developing religion of time and speech subsuming space and sight, eternally at odds with the eternalizing religions of space and sight which look forward to the end of time (which entails an end to speech). Jews hear truth and say truth. In the process truth is revealed. Truth is a relationship. “Gentiles” see the truth and assert the truth. Truth is a thing.

To flatten the history of the Jews into a series of factual ethical assertions strung together on a thread of narrative is to misunderstand it (almost) completely.

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Here’s the Ricoeur passage that set me off on this line of thought:

…polysemy is the pivot of semantics. …we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this process presents itself as a convergence of two factors, a factor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the cumulative process… the word tends to be charged with use-values, but the projection of this cumulative process into the system of signs implies that the new meaning finds its place within the system. The expansion, and, if the case obtains, the surcharge is arrested by the mutual limitation of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limiting action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion, which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the law of our language. Words have more than one sense, but they do not have an infinity of meanings.

This example shows how semantic systems differ from semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any reference to history; they are intemporal systems because they are potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the binary oppositions between distinctive units play a role. In semantics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-sections in the process of sense, in the process of nomination.

We then understand what happens when the word returns to the discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greiman calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word volume will be interpreted as a body in space; if the theme concerns the library, the word volume will be interpreted as designating a book). If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run together in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More than one interpretation is then justified by the structure of a discourse which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be realized at the same time.

In short, language is in celebration. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered and deployed; but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic discourse, and the polysemy itself of our words results from the concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action of the semantic field.

 

Imitating best examples

Ideas

What most people call “best practices” have nothing to do with practice, but with the concrete results of practices. A more accurate term would be “best examples”.

The practices followed by innovators — those who generate original, exemplary work —  differ entirely from the practices of those who like to build up solutions out of best examples. Let’s call them refining imitators.

Innovators take the necessary steps to redefine the problem they are solving, and only afterward dedicate themselves to solving it. They find a new problem space and then settle it, which is why innovation is spoken of in terms of pioneering. The solutions that emerge from this process are fresher, simpler, more focused, more purposeful, more exciting and more soulful than solutions that are pieced together from old solutions. This is why they are imitated.

Refining imitators do not revisit or redefine the problem. If the problem is thought about explicitly, it is accepted as given as the starting point for production of a solution. Thinking is for deciding what to make, planning how to make it, comparing and analyzing best examples, and inventing ways to recombine them and make something better. The focus is entirely on the production of tangible things. The fact that this approach never produces innovation is ignored.

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It’s a genotype/phenotype issue. Best practices are genotypically similar: set generative processes that reliably produce unprecedented forms. Best examples attempt to create phenotypical similarities: the focus is to reproduce a precedented form, by a process different from that which originally generated it, that is through imitation rather than innovation.

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Oddly, the word refining imitators use to describe themselves is “practical”, but that is a misnomer. A more accurate term would “thingly”. A practical person thinks in terms of practices, which necessarily differ according to the task at hand. A thingly person knows only one practice suited to one task: the building of things — assembled piece by piece, in a linear progressive manner. It is a classic case of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If the task is to produce ideas or understandings, the task is conceived in the terms of producing documentation, because that is the one aspect of the work that has the quality of a thing and lends itself to a thing-building approach. Ideas and understandings are abstract and they’re not built up in a linear piece by piece fashion, and so are treated as secondary.

Thoughts on double meanings

Ethics, Etymology, Hermeneutics, Philosophy

I’m thinking out loud here, so please forgive the tedium and unclarity. I’m also traveling, and that always messes me up pretty seriously. Just to get these thoughts out, I’m saying what comes to mind and not worrying excessively over how much sense I’m making much less how persuasive I’m being. So there’s even less reason to read this post than there usually is, so I encourage my nonexistent readership to ignore this post with redoubled nonawareness of its existence.

I just finished Ricoeur’s essay “The Problem of Double Meaning” from Conflict of Interpretations and this is my attempt to digest the material. Here is (in slightly streamlined form) the conclusion of the essay:

It seems to me that the conquest of this deliberately and radically analytic level allows us to better understand the relations between the three strategic levels which we have successively occupied. We worked first as exegetes with vast units of discourse, with texts, then as lexical semanticians with the meaning of words, i.e., with names, and then as structural semanticians with semic constellations. Our change of level has not been in vain; it marks an increase in rigor and, if I may say so, in scientific method. … It would be false to say that we have eliminated symbolism; rather, it has ceased to be an enigma, a fascinating and possibly mystifying reality, to the extent that it invites a twofold explanation. It is first of all situated in relation to multiple meaning, which is a question of lexemes and thus of language. In this respect, symbolism in itself possesses nothing remarkable; all words used in ordinary language have more than one meaning. … Thus the illusion that the symbol must be an enigma at the level of words vanishes; instead, the possibility of symbolism is rooted in a function common to all words, in a universal function of language, namely, the ability of lexemes to develop contextual variations. But symbolism is related to discourse in another way as well: it is in discourse and nowhere else that equivocalness exists. Discourse thus constitutes a particular meaning effect: planned ambiguity is the work of certain contexts and, we can now say, of texts, which construct a certain isotopy in order to suggest another isotopy. The transfer of meaning, the metaphor (in the etymological sense of the word), appears again, but this time as a change of isotopy, as the play of multiple, concurrent, superimposed isotopies. [See comment 1 below] The notion of isotopy has thus allowed us to assign the place of metaphor in language with greater precision than (lid the notion of the axis of substitutions…

But then, I ask you, does the philosopher not find his stake in the question at the end of this journey? Can he not legitimately ask why in certain cases discourse cultivates ambiguity? The philosopher’s question can be made more precise: ambiguity, to do what? Or rather, to say what? [See comment 2 below] We are brought back to the essential point here: the closed state of the linguistic universe. To the extent that we delved into the density of language, moved away from its level of manifestation, and progressed toward sublexical units of meaning — to this very extent we realized the closed state of language. [See comment 3 below] The units of meaning elicited by structural analysis signify nothing; they are only combinatory possibilities. They say nothing; they conjoin and disjoin.

There are, then, two ways of accounting for symbolism: by means of what constitutes it and by means of what it attempts to say. What constitutes it demands a structural analysis, and this structural analysis dissipates the “marvel” of symbolism. That is its function and, I would venture to say, its mission; symbolism works with the resources of all language, which in themselves have no mystery.

As for what symbolism attempts to say, this cannot be taught by a structural linguistics; in the coming and going between analysis and synthesis, the going is not the same as the coming. On the return path a problematic emerges which analysis has progressively eliminated. Ruyer has termed it “expressivity,” not in the sense of expressing emotion, that is, in the sense in which the speaker expresses himself, but in the sense in which language expresses something, says something. The emergence of expressivity is conveyed by the heterogeneity between the level of discourse, or level of manifestation, and the level of language, or level of immanence, which alone is accessible to analysis. Lexemes do not exist only for the analysis of semic constellations but also for the synthesis of units of meaning which are understood immediately. [See comment 4 below]

It is perhaps the emergence of expressivity which constitutes the marvel of language. Greimas puts it very well: “There is perhaps a mystery of language, and this is a question for philosophy; there is no mystery in language.” [See comment 5 below.] I think we too can say that there is no mystery in language; the most poetic, the most “sacred,” symbolism works with the same semic variables as the most banal word in the dictionary. But there is a mystery of language, namely, that language speaks, says something, says something about being. If there is an enigma of symbolism, it resides wholly on the level of manifestation, where the equivocalness of being is spoken in the equivocalness of discourse.

Is not philosophy’s task then to ceaselessly reopen, toward the being which is expressed, this discourse which linguistics, due to its method, never ceases to confine within the closed universe of signs and within the purely internal play of their mutual relations?

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COMMENTS:

  1. This accounts for why many Nietzsche scholars miss Nietzsche’s most interesting philosophizing. They discover a single isotopy, which works at the sea-level level of explicit assertions, and they fail to notice the layers of isotopy beneath the argumentation, despite numerous explicit assertions that these levels do exist and ought to be sought.
  2. This is a fascinating question, and it connects directly with why I began to study hermeneutics. I didn’t know how to think about the kind of truth experienced through understanding of symbols.

    The understanding of symbolic works depends entirely on a reader’s ability to recognize in a symbolic form an analogous form which is indicated obliquely. The reasons for oblique indication are numerous, but the most compelling reason is sheer impossibility of direct expression, which means they refer to what we call radically subjective experience. The subjective experiences I’ve encountered are sometimes unprecedented emotional states, a sense of concealed possibility, novel intellectual “moves” (dance imagery is frequently used), and metaphysical noumena of various kinds (which I am reducing to “experiences of”, or what a friend of mine calls “exophany”, but in the spirit of phenomenological method, which means to defy reductionism: I find disbelief and comprehension of metaphysical reality equally impossible.).

    The effectiveness of radically subjective symbols presupposes the existence of subjective experiences the symbols indicate. A peculiarity of many of these experiences is their utter ephemerality. It appears they are remembered very differently from objective facts, over which we have a higher degree of command, and therefore can prefer to such a degree that we wish to deny the existence of anything but objectivity. A fact or image can be summoned from memory at will like a servant who is normally obedient. But a mood or insight or spirit has a mind of its own, and must be recalled in an almost petitionary attitude: we recollect images and facts and try to create conditions upon which the experience can (to use Octavo Paz’s word) condense, almost as if they are offerings or a home made hospitable for a guest. I think this is actually the importance of prayer. We recall a forgotten spirit, in the hope we will be inhabited once again, and that once present, we will not be abandoned.

    Other double meanings (which I prefer not to call symbols) indicate things that could be very easily expressed in objective language, but which are socially prohibited. The reason “that’s what she said” works so well is because of the legacy of sexual taboo, where all the objects and activities associated with sex were veiled in innuendo. Puns are similar; it is the exercise of the facilities involved in symbolization, but connecting banalities. This is the core problem of very clever people: their activities fail to deliver insights, and are performed only to demonstrate skill.

  3. More and more, this is the difference I see between science and philosophy. Science works within a fixed horizon, analyzing and synthesizing within a framework that is presupposed and not treated as problematic, because it is simply taken as reality itself. This does not only apply to scientific paradigms, but to the metaphysic of science itself which appears in most cases to be entirely innocent. Philosophy, however, concerns itself with the horizons, and attempts to transcend their limits, a process which takes place within the very limits to be transcended.

    It is also ethically significant that philosophy attempts to move outside the closed circle of language. More and more, my own conception of evil is bound up with the refusal to acknowledge being beyond one’s own conceptions of reality. One limits reality to that which one is capable of intellectually mastering, which is objective knowledge as framed by one’s own subjective perspective and which excludes the possibility of subjectivities, particularly super-individual forms of subjectivity that threaten to expose individual intellect as an organ of greater scales of intellect, which include at minimum family, culture and language. Evil is rooted in the attempt to make the mind a place of its own, far from that which challenges its absolute sovereignty over its private universe.

  4. This reminds me a lot of a diagram I used to draw to show the relationship between synthesis and concept. Synthesis means “put together”, and I classify systematization of wholes constituted of atomic elements as a type of synthesis. However, the synthesis reflects another order of reality which is concept, which means “take together”. I think this corresponds to a mememe — an indivisible unit of meaning which is spontaneously grasped as a whole, or gestalt (or to say it in nerd, the whole is “grokked”). It might make sense to see the activity of trying to understand as systematizing and resystematizing parts until they are arranged into a form that is recognized by the intuition as a concept, at which point the understanding occurs. I may need to return to this thought, because it really is relevant to design.
  5. I suspect the desire to locate mystery in the words themselves rather than in what the words indicate is one more manifestation of preference for objectivity. The words are fetishized as the locus of the mystery, which is a form of idolatry. Idol, after all is derived from the Greek word eidos ‘form, shape.’ The formula: the ground of reality of which we are made entirely, in which we always participate, but which surpasses us and moves us is impossible to think about in objective terms, and for this reason we reduce it to objective terms. To put it in the language of Martin Buber, the ground of reality is related to in terms of I-Thou, but we reduce it to terms of I-It. And other people, with whom we exist in relationship, as part of the ground — we prefer to relate to them also in terms of I-It — for exactly the same reason. We want to elevate ourselves above participatory relationship which involves and changes us, and instead to look at others across an insulating distance that promises to preserve us inert.

Ricoeur

Hermeneutics, Holarchy

I am beginning to really like Ricoeur:

Let us look once more at the functioning of ordered polysemy, which we considered earlier with field theory at the level of language. Then it was a question of limited polysemy; ordered polysemy is properly a meaning effect produced in discourse. When I speak, I realize only a part of the potential signified; the rest is erased by the total signification of the sentence, which operates as the unit of speaking. But the rest of the semantic possibilities are not canceled; they float around the words as possibilities not completely eliminated. The context thus plays the role of filter; when a single dimension of meaning passes through by means of the play of affinities and reinforcements of all analogous dimensions of other lexical terms, a meaning effect is created which can attain perfect univocity, as in technical languages. It is in this way that we make univocal statements with multivocal words by means of this sorting or screening action of the context. It happens, however, that a sentence is constructed so that it does not succeed in reducing the potential meaning to a monosemic usage but maintains or even creates a rivalry among several ranges of meaning. Discourse can, by various means, realize ambiguity, which thus appears as the combination of a lexical fact — polysemy — and a contextual fact — the possibility allowed to several distinct or even opposed values of a single name to be realized in the same sequence.

I’m picturing this thought as a venn diagram. The first word in a sentence is a vast circle of possible meanings, but as more words are spoken, more huge circles are added to the diagram, and the overlap shrinks. With each word, the overlap is eaten into until the overlap is no more than a point. Or… even better one finds no overlap at all, or multiple convergence points, and the listener/reader is forced to revisit each of the word-circles to see if one has neglected a dimension of meaning which is the key to understanding. This is why, when reading I always read with a dictionary at hand. I do not gloss over unfamiliar words or attempt to grasp the gist of their meaning contextually. It is precisely the unfamiliar words (and the familiar words used in an unfamiliar way) that challenge the assumed context by which one understands.

Coming to understanding something someone says means changing the very context one by which one understands. And, just to make it personal, understanding what someone says is the same as understanding that person. The ability to merely describe repeating behavioral patterns (even if those patterns make a person’s behavior predictable), or even to explain behavior in psychological terms (even if those explanations make people’s behavior in general explicable or even predictable) is not to understand them, but to bypass understanding them as people and instead to understand patterns or explanations. Most people find the latter much much more comfortable, because it fits neatly within an existing understanding, and therefore is a science and not a philosophy.