All posts by anomalogue

Chord: substance abuse

Chord

Borges:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. … Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep.

Geertz:

There is an Indian story — at least I heard it as an Indian story — about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked… what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.”

Latour:

Every instance of continuity is achieved through a discontinuity, a hiatus; every leap across a discontinuity represents a risk taken that may succeed or fail; there are thus felicity and infelicity conditions proper to each mode; the result of this passage, of this more or less successful leap, is a flow, a network, a movement, a wake left behind that will make it possible to define a particular form of existence, and, consequently, particular beings. … [T]he grasp of existents according to the mode of reproduction is not limited to lines of force [“inert matter”] and lineages [“life”]; it concerns everything that maintains itself: languages, bodies, ideas, and of course institutions. The price to pay for the discovery of such a hiatus is not as great as it appears, if we are willing to consider the alternative: we would have to posit a substance lying behind or beneath them to explain their subsistence. We would certainly not gain in intelligibility, since the enigma would simply be pushed one step further: we would have to find out what lies beneath that substance itself and, from one aporia to another, through an infinite regression that is well known in the history of philosophy, we would end up in Substance alone, in short, the exact opposite of the place we had wanted to reach. It is more economical, more rational, more logical, simpler, more elegant — if less obvious in the early phases owing to our (bad) habits of thought — to say that subsistence always pays for itself in alteration, precisely for want of the possibility of being backed up by a substance. The landscape discovered in this way seems surprising at first glance, but it has the immense advantage of being freed from any ultraworld — substance — without loss of continuity in being — subsistence. There is nothing beneath, nothing behind or above. No transcendence but the hiatus of reproduction.

Anaximander:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

Reflectivity

Philosophy

We can’t see seeing.

We can’t hear hearing.

But, we can know knowing?

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By watching and listening and reflecting it to some degree it becomes possible to assess whether another person sees, hears or knows.

The same is true of one’s self. When we do not know whether to believe or eyes or ears, we want testimony from other senses. But knowledge always says” “trust me.”

Senses only come to know themselves through the dialogue known as common sense.

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Faculties are caught in action, listened to, interpreted, spoken about, coordinated and disciplined.

 

Difficult works

Philosophy

Some philosophical works do not build part by intelligible part to an intelligible whole.

They begin with a not-yet-intelligible whole (that is, an intelligible whole that has not yet become intelligible to the reader), and barge forward not-yet-intelligible-part by not-yet-intelligible-part, seemingly to nowhere — until the reader finally finds a way to understand it so whole, parts and the relationships that connect them suddenly and all-at-once become intelligible.

This understanding, however, cannot be conveyed explicitly. Certainly, there is an explicit understanding to be had, but it is a side-effect of understanding. The real understanding is tacit know-how that guides the use of concepts. The intellectual moves are the true substance of such philosophy.

In a sense, these works must be read forward but understood backwards. They are exercises in patience and anxiety tolerance. They are difficult.

The Maker

Philosophy

This passage from Latour’s Rejoicing recalls the original title of Borge’s oddest little book, inexplicably called Dreamtigers in English, but in Spanish, El Hacedor.

There is something disheartening, we must admit, about this dependence of the word on the present day, on the current conditions of utterance. All the more so as all the efforts at apologetics, over the course of time, have been directed against that very dependence. Torrents of sermons, thousands of volumes have been poured out to see to it that the ‘existence of God’ does not depend on the word, on the will, on the goodwill of human beings. And, conversely, it is precisely the ‘enemies of religion’ who have, always, had a field day with this obvious fact: human beings make the gods in their own image. And now, I’m hoping to use relativism to reclaim that critical vocabulary to record religious speech piously and faithfully? Mankind, that god-making machine. It’s insane. Or else, what we’re dealing with here is an apologetics even more perverse than the rest, a cleric’s ruse.

Continue reading The Maker →

Interviewing brand strategists

Philosophy

If I were interviewing brand strategists, I wouldn’t even let candidates into my office until they answered one question asked in the lobby: “Have you ever had a conversion experience?”

Any applicant who does not say “yes” and and then, unbidden, continues to elaborate until suddenly stopping, embarrassed — anyone who answers factually about an opinion switcharoo or making a decision to take a different path — gets sent home.

The story can be about any conversion, any shift, however superficial. But the story must have some pain and bewilderment in it. And other people, too — at the very least, an author. There must be unaccountable epiphanies and telltale hand gestures of speechlessness with too much to say. It must be a story of inhabiting one world as one person then finding oneself in another world as another.

Am I setting the bar too high or too weird? Too bad. These are the qualifications.

 

Industrial-strength religion

Philosophy

In work and in religion, we paint in a constricted ontological palette. That is, we acknowledge certain ways in which an entity can be, and neglect or deny others.

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Facts, knowledge . . . doctrines, “faith” as beliefs.

Techniques, methods, processes . . . traditions, customs, rituals.

Things, artifacts, outputs, products . . . holy places, relics, books.

People, roles . . . leaders, authorities, fellow believers.

Ethics, manners, prudence . . . morality, laws, acts.

Plan . . . destiny, providence.

Objective . . . judgment.

Brand . . . symbols.

Feelings . . . passions.

Career path . . .  spiritual path.

Self . . . soul.

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These thingly things I’ve listed — things we can “wrap our minds around” and comprehend — ideas, methods, products, people, ethics, growth, plans, goals, selves, etc. — all orbit about an essential “one thing needful”, and it is that thing that invests what orbits them with coherence and meaning.

This is not to denigrate things. They are important. We need things in all their variety. But when we fret exclusively over the periphery of thingness, the center vanishes, breaks up, dissipates and loses its capacity to pull the myriad things of the world into relation.

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“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

– W. B. Yeats

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Even our religion is industrial. Or was our industry formed in the image of what religion has become? Assembly-line ontology.

Spectrum red vs magenta

Philosophy

Back in high school my art teacher used to tell us that the reason our cadmium red, ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow acrylic paints wouldn’t produce a decent violet or green was that they were not “spectrum” red, yellow and blue, which were impossible to produce with paints. I was also mystified at why red and blue-green seemed to vibrate more against one another than red and green.

Then in physics class I discovered the difference between additive and subtractive color mixing, and everything became clearer. I tried to explain it to my art teacher and she didn’t want to hear it.

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For anyone who sat in my room with 25 years ago while I twiddled dimmer switches on red, green and blacklight bulbs and raved inexplicably about cyan and magenta and the nonexistence of pure spectrum pigments — here’s an attempt at an explanation: This turned out to be the prototype for my typical of conflict: “You aren’t approaching this problem from the right angle.” They say: “No, we are. Our materials/facts/data/procedures are not pure enough, and if they were my formulas would miraculously work for a change.”

 

The torments of religious speech

Philosophy

Whenever I breach etiquette, and do what everyone knows better than to do, and in the course of normal conversation actually make reference to religion or religious symbols or concepts, I sometimes pay the steep price of being asked if I am religious, or, worse, if I’m Christian. I find I just can’t answer that question. Or at least I cannot answer that question as asked. My views on what religion is (and what religion is supposed to do) have moved so far from the common ground of believers and atheists that my “yes” cannot mean the “yes!” I mean, nor can my “no” mean anything that should earn me an ally or enemy.

This is why reading Bruno Latour’s Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech is a relief. At least I know I’m not alone in this difficulty. And maybe I’ve never been, but that’s part of the difficulty… Continue reading The torments of religious speech →

Painting blue

Fables, myths & parables

A painter had three colors of paint: black, white and what we would call “red”. Red was the only hue he knew about, so he he just called it “intensity”. He described the colors he mixed in terms of their relative lightness, darkness or intensity.

The painter worked in a studio and never left it. Everything in his studio was some shade or tint of red or gray. (Scholarly note: Some theorists have speculated that the reason all the objects in the artist’s studio were red and gray was that the artist himself had painted them all with the same paints he used for his paintings.)

The artist would compose these red, pink, black, gray, mauve and white objects into monochrome still-life scenes and paint them perfectly photo-realistically in red, pink, black, gray, mauve and white.

One day the painter’s assistant burst into the studio babbling excitedly about a new blue paint he’d seen at the market.

“Blue?” The painter asked him to describe where it fit in the range of colors. How light was “blue”? How dark was it? How intense was it?

The assistant tried to explain it. The painter could tell that what his assistant was describing was nothing more than plain-old intensity. And being a no-nonsense, plain-spoken man, he said so.

The assistant told him that wasn’t right. “Blue” really was different from normal “intensity”.

So the painter challenged him to show him what this so-called “blue” was. “It is easy to talk about theoretical new intensities,” he said, “but it is a whole other thing to actually mix a color. Produce this ‘blue’ for me.” The artist handed the him his black, white and red paints.

The assistant sat down at the easel and began painting the color blue. Or trying to. He mixed up a million permutations of red and black. Then black and white. Then red and white. Then he tried mixing the three pigments together in varying proportions, until he finally found the right combination to make blue.

Seeing blue with his own eyes for the very first time, the artist was amazed. He realized in hindsight how narrow his pink-and-gray studio-enclosed world had been. He spent a few days experimenting with his improvised and somewhat imperfect blue, and decided it was time to leave his studio, and venture out into the world to buy himself some real blue paint.

After this, the artist’s paintings acquired an entirely new depth of richness and expressiveness. His career entered a new stage, and it was only at this point that he became the legendary figure we remember today.

The end.

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The moral of this story: Anyone who wishes to introduce a completely new concept to another person must start where the other person is. We cannot ask anyone to come to us — not right away.

Instead we should explain the concept simply, using only familiar terms that the other person understands. And we should show the other person how this new idea will work within his existing way of doing things.

Once we’ve done that, the other person will understand us better and trust us more, and be far more willing to take the next step in exploring the matter to its depth.

This is how the world changes.

Good luck!

The Ten Thousand Everythings

Philosophy

I am leaning toward calling my book The Ten Thousand Everythings.

I am going to return the term “chaos” to the fractal geometers, mythologists and the general public. Chaos is experienced disorder, with many possible metaphysical underpinnings.

My own underpinning for chaos, which is speculative and entirely unprovable, but nonetheless believable and useful, is what I’m calling Myriadex: the simultaneous presence of too many orders which must be filtered down to a manageable subset of systematic, harmonious or at least non-conflicting orders if we wish to experience them as order. Chaos in my view is not ten thousand things waiting to be ordered, it is ten-thousand everythings talking at once in innumerable languages about all things at once and creating intolerable cacophony. We just want reality to speak one truth at a time, so we can hear what the hell it is saying to us.

 

Distribution of what?

Philosophy

We tend to think most about what we think best, and this is why so many people love to think in terms of things that are easily quantified. The mind can wrap itself around such things pretty comfortably.

I think this is why when people think about economies, distribution is thought of in terms of material possessions. Material possessions is certainly important, but it is not the only thing at stake in an economy. Another important consideration of distribution that is rarely discussed is personal choice. Really, who would dispute the claim that power is one of the primary “goods” distributed by an economy?

 

If you look at things in terms of possessions, the problem of poverty appears relatively small. Most Americans are doing very well, even if some have much less than others.

But if you look at distribution in terms of personal choice — how much control people have over how they spend their time — this is where you see extreme imbalances. This is not a matter of quantities of leisure time. It has to do with meaning each person derives from activities, and the control a person has over the decision of which activities to perform. A person who spends 80 hours a week doing something he loves is far freer than a person who

This is the best reason why left-leaners should harp on economic equality: without it, freedom is a mere political theory, not a reality.