All posts by anomalogue

Dialogue: art-work, design-work, artisan-work

Design

S:

My view is that art is made without reference to the receiver.
It is entirely ego-centric.
It is thrown out into the world and if someone understands and desires it, it’s a miracle.
Design is made with reference to others — which is why real design is human-centered design.
I want my art self-centered and my design human-centered!

J:

I wouldn’t say, “miracle.”
What would commissioned work be? Artisan work?

S:

Depends on the benefactor
If the benefactor sees the artist’s vision and identifies with it (through that “miraculous” congeniality), it’s still art…
…but if the benefactor doesn’t know how to let the artist do the art, or the artist doesn’t know how to defend the art from the benefactor’s attempts to control the art, it becomes artisan work.
and here’s a new thought…
If a client doesn’t know how to let a designer do human-centered design or the designer doesn’t know how to defend the design from the client’s desire to control the design — what gets done is artisan work.

****

Update May 21, 2017:

3 types of participants in a creation:

  • The producer – the party producing a work.
  • The sponsor – the party funding the production of a work.
  • The consumer – the party enjoying the benefit of a work.

3 categories of production:

  • Art-work – In art-work, the producer produces work guided primarily by the producer’s own judgment, with less concern for the personal standards of sponsor or consumers. The artist produces as if for himself as consumer, and the work is chosen or accepted by the sponsor, almost as if intercepted, as an artifact manifesting the artist’s personal judgment. In art, the producer (artist) has final judgment.
  • Design-work – In design-work, the producer produces work guided primarily by the consumer’s judgment, with deliberate deemphasis on the personal standards of producer or sponsor. The active judgment in design is empathic judgment: quality of judgment is ability to overcome personal judgment in order to judge by the consumer’s standards. The one using has final judgment. In design, the user (consumer) has final judgment.
  • Craft-work – In craft-work, the producer produces work guided by the sponsor’s judgment, with deliberate deemphasis on the personal standards of producer or consumer (assuming the consumer is not the sponsor). The craftsperson produces for a sponsor to the satisfaction of the sponsor. In craftwork, the sponsor (the one paying for the work) has final judgment.

Much pain in production arises from ambiguity or disagreement over the category of production. A sponsor believes what he is commissioning is primarily craftwork, being produced to his own personal satisfaction, when the producer thinks what is commissioned is either design or art. (A sponsor who lacks pluralistic awareness, due to autistic, narcissistic or naive realist tendencies, will not understand the difference between craft-work and anything else. It will simply become a control issue or clash of wills.)  Or a producer is hired to work as a designer, but sees himself as the final judge of the work. (This is inevitable when the producer lacks pluralistic awareness).

Of course, most work is a hybrid of all three, located in the middle regions of a three-axis gamut stretched between art-work, design-work and artisan-work — but even minor disagreements in the balance point can generate strain.

 

Procrustean skull

Judaism, Philosophy

People who hate the infinitude of reality have procrustean skulls. What refuses to fit inside the mind is chopped to fit or pulverized and poured in. (Transcendence is an experience — an intuition  of otherness or beyondness they’ll tell you.) …Or exiled and attacked as an enemy, because you can have your enemy …Or exiled and worshipped, because you can have your religion, and your object of worship, too …Or dominated and trained to stay curled up tight in a brain-sized ball …Or failing these: annihilated.

Look where the violence is directed, and there you will find God. Look into the origin of the violence and there you will find the mind who needs to be the know-all, be-all and, if necessary, end-all.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.
— Milton

Machloket

Judaism, Philosophy

Since last Saturday I’ve been obsessing on the concept of machloket, “sacred arguing”. I haven’t been this happy since I learned the word “agonism”.

Anyone who knows me well, knows that I hoard ideas. This is the root of my terrible book problem. Many of the books I’ve collected are really just husks for a single gorgeous statement. Certain ideas make me so desperately happy that I try to anchor them to this world in every way I know how. I buy books that properly express and enshrine the idea and then I put the book in its place in my library. I scan passages (and often entire books) into my wiki, cross-referencing, thematizing and weaving them into the rest of the electronic fabric I use to augment my brain, which is inadequate for my purposes. I write about these ideas, sketch diagrams of their structures, and honor them with geometry and typesetting. I buy up domains. I know I do not and can not possess them, but I try anyway.

I just had to stock up on machloket books.

Newish political model, v.3

Philosophy

This is a rambling mess, but I wanted to get the idea out… it probably should have gone into a private diary, but if you saw my traffic stats you’d understand that this blog pretty much is a private diary.

*

Inspired by feedback I have received, by recent events and by books I’ve read on the varieties of authoritarianism, I have been rethinking my old “newish political model” with new simpler language and with the addition of a third dimension.

In my new model, the dimensions are liberty, equality and fraternity — three of the four active ingredients of the famous battle-cry of the French Revolution, minus the last “or death” which was wisely dropped after the Reign of Terror.

This framework is rooted in the same Enlightenment values from which the American and French revolution grew, and makes no pretense of neutrality. But it has learned something from history about revolutionary extremism (even/especially extremism in service of liberal values) and has found guidance in the two sayings inscribed at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. “Know thyself” (because are all susceptible to self-privileging, especially when we appoint ourselves the enlightened dismantlers of it!) and “Everything in moderation” (which include even our own values!)

These values structure a political agenda, and despite the agenda’s principled modesty, it is not lukewarm. It is uncompromisingly moderate, because these values can only co-exist and co-flourish in moderation.

This framework is offered as a tool — an ideological lens — for seeing the world in a centrist liberal-democratic way. Someday maybe it will be a partisan tool for an as-yet unformed party who represents citizens holding a political position that has not yet found articulation or self-awareness.

As a partisan tool, it is not meant to do justice to all possible political positions. It is meant to strategically build bridges between previously separated positions, to drive wedges between previously allied positions that no longer share the most important values, and to encourage new alliances which have been obscured by how we define our current political positions, framed by the libertarian-biased and suddenly profoundly obsolete Political Compass model. (Seriously, where would you plot Bannon on the Political Compass? Or that other nazi wannabe guy who’s always prancing around with his Weimar hairdos, Roman salutes and “sly” Goebbels references? Authoritarian Left? Come on.)

The purpose of this model is to rally centrists committed to liberty and justice for all against those committed to liberty and justice for few at the expense of all others. Anyone in the latter category should definitely object to this conspicuous biases of this model. It does not do them justice, because it is not meant to, because I’m not interested in extending justice to illegitimate positions. It is meant to drive illiberals back into the margins, and, if possible all the way back into their moms’ basements.

I don’t know how to draw this, yet. For now I will describe the three axes that define the conceptual space within which political positions are situated.

As this is a highly-biased Centrist model, the extremes of each axis is cast as either  +) untenable or -) evil. The 0) point is defined as the most desirable point sought between the extremes.

Liberty (individual autonomy): freedom of individuals versus authority of collectivities. Who determines how an individual is to think, feel and act?

+) an individual alone determines individual being;

-) the collectivity determines individual being;

0) at the center an individual determines individual being within reasonable limits set by a collectivity.

What kinds of collectivity are we talking about? According to this model any group capable of imposing its will on an individual is considered a collectivity capable of curtailing individual liberty. This differs from Political Compass, which views liberty as curtailed primarily by the federal government.

And what are reasonable limits? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Equality (power distribution): desirability of equality versus desirability of rank. How much disparity of power among individuals is acceptable and ideal?

+) each individual is given the same power and resources as every other;

-) each individual is given different amounts of power and resources according to rank;

0) at the center every individual is guaranteed a fair opportunity to acquire power and resources.

What kinds of rank are we talking about? According to this model every value system ranks differently and imposes rank according to its own logic. Societies can rank-stratify by family, class, wealth, race, education, talent, temperament, party membership — anything to which the word “deserve” can be applied. This differs from Political Compass, which casts equality issues in terms of government regulation.

And what is fair? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

Fraternity (scope of obligation): universalist/globalist obligation versus tribalism/nationalism obligation.
+) in-groups and out-groups are abolished and moral obligation is extended to all of humanity (or even all living beings);

-) in-group membership is sharply defined and moral obligation is confined to the in-group;

0) at the center in-groups and out-groups are defined and moral obligations exist for each but in differing degrees.

How are in-groups and out-groups defined? According to this model in-groups self-define according to whatever criteria seems most relevant to the group. Examples of in-group determinants include place of origin, place of residence, citizenship, race, class, religion, ideology, party-membership. Political Compass does not consider the dimension of fraternity, because fraternity is largely invisible unless one is denied obligation due to out-group status.

And what are the in- and out-groups, and what is our degree of obligation to them? That is a matter of perpetual debate and dialogue to be continuously re-determined by Centrists.

50 words for snow

Philosophy

For the last several months I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s epic The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a three part work that begins with histories of both antisemitism and imperialism, which set the stage for her analysis of the phenomenon of totalitarianism.

It has taken me a couple of months to get to the third part. (I actually started the book mainly for the first. Long story.) What stands out most is how nuanced Arendt’s vocabulary is around tyrannical forms of government. For her, totalitarianism is different from dictatorship, despotism, right-wing authoritarianism, and others I havent bothered inventorying (yet). I feel like an Ecuadorian learning the 50 Eskimo words for snow.

It has made me realize that we Americans are so anxious about our freedom that we “other” all illiberal forms of government into a giant miscellaneous category of unfree political orders which we label with more or less synonymous pejoratives, all of which threaten us with a variety of terrifying impressionistic possibilities drawn from books, movies and History Channel specials. Most of us have vague (and, I am realizing mythologically deformed) understandings of how these various forms of government look (even from the outside, much less from within!), how they emerge and develop, or what specific factors and conditions support their rise or suppression. Nor do we understand the psychology of the various types of actors who collaborate and clash in these situations.

Yet, somehow — everyone thinks they do already know, at least in outline. Nobody can be told anything that runs counter to their gut sense of reality. Everybody is busy, needs to keep their heads down, needs to tend to their own lives… I’m learning from Arendt that this is part of the phenomenon.

A thought experiment for Christians

Philosophy

Are you an especially righteous Christian? 

Try this thought experiment: Read your own scripture and ask yourself “What if I’m on the wrong side of these stories…?” 

Have you ever done this?

Some wooly minds instantly seize and balk at making this move. They cannot even ask the question hypothetically. They are flooded with dread, and dread is proof that some serpent is whispering in their ear. No, God fills them with certainty that they know good from evil. 

*

Here is the problem with unprincipled people: Inevitably, they muster principles to justify whatever they want to do as Righteous Acts, but these principles shift incessantly to support the impulse of the moment.

So, when unprincipled folk need to be a flock, they bleat meekness, decency, forgiveness and love. But when the weather changes their wooly coats fall away, and now they’re howling the opposite values — greatness, lustiness, vengeance, rage — and they’re far too blood-drunk to worry about hypocrisy.

Then the hangover comes. They crawl back under their sheep’s clothing, pull the wool back over their own eyes, and spend the rest of their lives spinning lies about who they were in history. 

But the disguise is only for themselves. Sheep don’t growl. 

Reenlightened or Snuffed

Ideas

Here is our choice: 

a) Update how we as a species think, act and feel so we can finally reach some fundamental agreements that permit us to continue to enjoy the fruits of our blessed artificiality…

or

b) Refuse to update — making agreement and coordination impossible and a new profound Dark Age inevitable, starting with a violent thinning of the herd by the most brutish, backward and “natural” half of the species, and concluding with the snuffing of the survivors by Earth herself.  

*
*

Humankind is not the species it was 50,000 years ago, and if the last 200 years of progress is amputated from our history, it would be better described as decapitation. 

*

Fundamentalists are slaves of symbols they cannot understand. 

America is philosophically diseased

Chord, Ideas, Philosophy, Politics

America is philosophically diseased.

Most Americans perceive, believe and intuit using 19th and 20th century modes of understanding which are 1) are incompatible and irreconcilable with the others, 2) mutually hostile, and 3) inadequate for making theoretical, practical and moral sense of the realities we face.

And every one of these obsolete and broken-down philosophies assures the mind it binds that there is no need for philosophizing. Doing, not thinking, is what is needed now! Thinking is useless enough, but thinking about thinking? — That is the most pointlessly abstract, idle and meaningless thing any person could do.

The only way out of the crisis we face — (a crisis much worse than an unphilosophical mind can know how to know!) — is to learn to conceive truth very differently than we do today. We are desperate for a new popular philosophical platform, not to make us all come to the same conclusions, but to support our differences and to help us navigate them peacefully and productively.

We need, at minimum, an upgrade in a) our epistemology (and ontology), b) our ethics (and metaphysics) and c) our political practices. My own prescription is a) Bruno Latour, b) Emmanuel Levinas, c) Chantal Mouffe. But before we can build we need demolition (Friedrich Nietzsche) and ground clearing (Richard J. Bernstein).

I look at this list of thinkers, and I love seeing them together like vertebrae in a backbone.

Here is a suggested core curriculum for regeneration of philosophy for our times:

 

The truth about fundamentalism

Philosophy

We need to stop indulging the Fundamentalist Christianist conceit that their “religion” is a branch of Christianity. They are a denomination of Fundamentalism, which is not even a religion but a philosophical autoimmune disease.

As a religious person, I am very tired of seeing Fundamentalism mistaken for a religion. Religion is about transcendence. Fundamentalism is about preventing transcendence at all costs, including murder if necessary. As long as we cooperate with the confusion that Fundamentalism is religion “gone too far” rather than religion aborted, we will help spread the infection.

It is pure geographical accident that American Fundamentalists use symbols stolen from Christianity. If their mothers had extruded them onto a different patch of dirt they’d have seized different symbols but they would have handed those symbols over to that same master all Fundamentalists of all denominations* worship.

–

  • Yes. Islamists, Christianists, Bolsheviks and Nazis all belong to the same worldwide anti-religion, Fundamentalism. They are denominations of one and the same spasmodically violent worship of graven mental images. For these ideo-idolators, religion is belief, faith is beliefs, and killing and dying for opinions makes blessed.

Fall in

Philosophy

The gathered sheep fall into formation, and behold: the flock is now a pack. And the pack snarls “Let us prey!” Whoever keeps their wool is devoured with the others.  

There is no shock of Revelation, no disturbance of conscience, no lost sleep. 

Today is today. Yesterday is a wooly memory. 

Tomorrow will be tomorrow. If forgiveness is needed it will be taken. 

All will be forgotten in the retellings of the tale.

We were the good guys.

We are diplomats

Ideas

Whether we like it or not, when we act as the individual Who we know we are, we represent a What others believe we are. 
Each of us is a diplomat of the categories we are to others. 

Hannah Arendt said “No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men in classes and prescribed types. This necessary classification is the basis for all social discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, is no less a constituent element of the social realm than equality is a constituent element of the political. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of what he is — as distinct from the question of who he is — which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless.”

Liberal tension

Philosophy

The left-liberal soul is torn between left and liberal. To the left stands sensitivity to every power imbalance, from the grossest violence to the gentlest manipulation — all inequalities threaten the freedom of the individual to be who she or he is meant to be. All inequality must be eliminated before individuals are truly free. Comprehensive freedom-from is the feeling of freedom for the left gone illiberal!

The right-liberal soul is torn between right and liberal. To the right stands the longing for human accomplishment, from success in business to building great empires — all limits to what we can accomplish together threaten the freedom of the individual to participate in something greater than the self. Limits to accomplishment must be removed before a people is truly free. Unlimited freedom-to is the feeling of freedom for the right gone illiberal!

In the painful tension between individual freedom-from (which requires collective effort to protect all) and collective freedom-to (which requires individual sacrifice and participation) writhes liberalism, essentially middle, essential tense, essentially compromised. 

The privileged SJW

Politics

From my own experience, privilege manifests primarily in two ways, which apply equally to all people of every demographic:

  1. Incuriosity: Not feeling obligated to understand what your fellow citizens are trying to tell you. “I see clearly that I see things the right way, and that your view is distorted.”
  2. Imperiousness: Not feeling obligated to win the assent of your fellow citizens before doing things that affect their lives. “I don’t have to convince you.”

Privilege is not something that automatically deludes certain categories of people, nor does disprivilege enlighten other categories.

The epistemological and ethical self-privileging of our own inexhautibly irritable illiberal left fringe was in fact an effect of privilege (or perceived privilege). A set of folks thought they possessed sufficient political power (due to numbers and the thrust of history, not to mention the overwhelming privilege of the social status one gains from a degree from an elite university) to steamroll anyone who disagreed with them. They “checked their privilege” when “dialoguing” with token representatives of their favored categories, but when talking to examples of “privileged” categories, took the most privileged position possible and condescendently lectured them on how great they actually had it compared to other unfortunate categories. Or they just discharged their resentment on any demographically qualified human lightning rod that happened to be handy when it was time for lightning to strike.

Our illiberal Left did not care how people felt about “finally having the tables turned on them.”  They didn’t bother listening to opposing views because their vulgar marxoid false consciousness theories explained away the objections of dissenters to their own personal satisfaction.

The sole difference between this gang of ideologues and any other gang of conspiracy theorists is that this gang sort of favored the same people and policies we left-liberals did. Their passion was useful, so we accepted them as allies. We ought to feel ashamed that fewer of us called out their “calling out” — until it cost us what might be the most important election in this nation’s history. Now we are full of remorse and desire to self-reflect on what we were doing wrong. A year ago this self-scrutiny would have gone much further.

So we can complain all day about the Right not being vocal enough about denouncing their fringe, but how did the Left do when we felt secure in our power?

If the Right stands up to marginalize the KKK, they will have demonstrated true moral superiority to the Left, who did far too little to marginalize our SJW.

 

When a thing is new

Philosophy

You may have seen this well-known quote attributed to 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.”

This quote is probably a distillation from a passage in James’s classic lecture “Pragmatism”:

 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.

There is no pursuit more subject to retroactive obviousness than philosophy.

Philosophy is the design of the very conceptual apparatus used to understand all experience, and this includes the experience of our own memories. Once we start thinking with a new philosophy our old thoughts are subsumed by the new philosophy and re-understood in its terms. We unconsciously dissociate from our old self, treating that old self like someone else.

It is extremely difficult even to return to old philosophies we once used but abandoned, and it is even harder yet to return to older and more primitive philosophies that were blind to experiences which, to us, are impossible to miss.

We tend to either find these older philosophies obsolete, and fail to appreciate the role they played — and continue to play! — in our present philosophies. Or we thoughtlessly do our best to believe what the older philosophies say in the terms of our new philosophies and do severe violence to both the old and the new.

Here is how I understand it: We develop philosophies we need but do not yet have with the philosophies we do have but need to leave, which in turn were developed with philosophies we used to have but left.

It is like making new tools with worn-out tools which were made from old, now broken tools. No — actually, it is not like this. It literally is this.

The big difference is that when we think of tools, we tend to view them as objects we use. Philosophies are subjects we use, and in an unnerving sense those subjects are our subjectivity.

By many, possibly most, popular philosophies, there no distinction is made between one’s own soul and our deepest subjective tools, which are not only the contents of our beliefs, but our very believing of those beliefs: our faith.

When our subjective tools begin to malfunction, we feel that we ourselves — our very souls — are breaking down. We lose our faith, and we want it back.

To be continued.

 

Alternative wisdoms

Ideas

The wisdom of the romantics: “Close your ears to distracting and deceptive voices and obey your heart’s commands.”

The wisdom of the liberals: “Listen to the voices of the others around you and educate your heart before you trust its commands.”

The wisdom of fundamentalists:  “Listen only to us who know and love the Truth, train your heart for obedience, then with ears closed to distracting and deceptive voices, execute righteousness.”