There’s something consummating about entering the Cyborg Manifesto into my wiki, my own dear spirit-prosthetic, who helps me recall myself when I’ve forgotten who I am trying to be/come.

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble quoted some passages from Elizabeth V. Spelman’s essay “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” that captured my interest enough that I found a copy and read it this morning. Here’s one of the finest zingers in the piece:

In this essay she mentions another unpublished piece I’d like to read, ‘Metaphysics and Misogyny’. The connection between religious faith, traditional metaphysical conceptions, preference for hierarchical power structures, aversion to matter and the senses, xenophobia, readiness to use violence and subjugation of women are becoming clearer to me.

The pragmatic formula for a role: “You are __________ , therefore you should __________ .” The question to ask is whether a role with an acceptable “therefore” exists and is accessible to the one who will be expected to fulfill it.

Soft systems are systems that include as part of the system human participants whose various interpretations and responses help regulate the workings of the system.

Hard systems are systems that do not include an interpretive human element and are assumed to be regulated entirely algorithmically.

Hard systems are engineered.

Soft systems are designed.

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The signature error of the 20th Century was to mistake soft systems problems for hard systems problems, and to attempt to engineer solutions where design was needed.

This bit from the introduction to Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is very exciting to me:

Chapter seven interprets the traditional distinction between the search for “objective knowledge” and other, less privileged, areas of human activity as merely the distinction between “normal discourse” and “abnormal discourse.” Normal discourse (a generalization of Kuhn’s notion of “normal science”) is any discourse (scientific, political, theological, or whatever) which embodies agreed-upon criteria for reaching agreement; abnormal discourse is any which lacks such criteria. I argue that the attempt (which has defined traditional philosophy) to explicate “rationality” and “objectivity” in terms of conditions of accurate representation is a self-deceptive effort to eternalize the normal discourse of the day, and that, since the Greeks, philosophy’s self-image has been dominated by this attempt.

“Abnormal discourse.” I like that term. Consider: anoma + logos.

There is more to reality than is speakable, and there is more to possibility than is predictable.

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Without the concrete-reality-between, each mind is solitary confinement.

Without experiment, reality lies on a linguistic Procrustean bed.

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The purpose of ethics is the preservation of a particular ethos, and its essence is making and keeping promises.

The purpose of morality is the valuing of existence, and its essence is transcendence (that is, the intuition that our experience shows us the surface of something that extends beyond experience).

To every perspective there belongs practical and factual intricacies which serve to reinforce the perspective by demanding full and exclusive participation in reality in its own terms, which induces what I will call, perspectival amnesia through occupation and displacement.

Full participation in any one perspective makes all other perspectives unintelligible. In fact, it conceals the phenomenon of perspective itself (pluralism), and reduces pluralism to mere diversity of opinion on fact, feeling, custom, temperament, moral character, etc.

Full participation in one perspective creates ideal conditions for naive realism, which is the environment most practical people need to feel safe and sane. Wherever you find compulsively busy people, compelled to play hard (or intoxicate themselves) the second they’re finished working hard, you are witnessing the mechanics of self-preservation.

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A perspective that develops into an ethos fully-equipped with an ethic, a language, a history and a catalog of categories, facts, techniques and well-worn paths of inquiry creates a pocket of stable naive realism. This is my cynical definition of a brand, and it is the goal of my work: to create nice habitable delusions for people who crave shelter from chaos, anxiety, perplexity and mystery. A deep brand is actually a philosophy pregnant with ethical, practical and factual possibilities, capable of creating fulfilling (fully-filling) social relationships between people and things.

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For all these reasons, I resist getting bogged down in the development of details. My job is to go in precisely the opposite direction from preservation and refinement. For the sake of creating concrete plurality, I try to navigate out of pockets of naive realism that belong to whole industries, in order to discover and stake out new pockets of naive realism that belong to smaller organization who which to differentiate themselves. But discovering and staking out is not the same as settling and establishing. Once a new vision has taken root, it is time for the next project.

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“Abraham”

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father’s house, in alien Canaan.

– Edwin Muir

I would love to have a metal 3D print of a hyperdodecahedron, but I’ll probably order one in plastic first. The reason I want it: it is a symbol, which, like the Mandelbrot Set, has been given to us by technology, both in its physical form and its precise meaning. Until recently it has been intuited darkly — that is, in magical terms.

It would be incredibly cool if the plastic had properties that allowed the to be hyperverted to permit each of its 120 cells to be outermost.

If you get mixed up in philosophy or religion, you’re essentially signing up for a perpetual crash course in what it feels like to be a Dunning-Kruger case. Tolerating it requires humility bordering on hubris.

Reading Julius Evola, the articulate epitome of a certain species of radical conservative, this passage from Beyond Good and Evil came to mind:

These words are so totally antipodal to my ears and habits that when I discovered them my immediate anger wrote beside them “the height of religious nonsense!” — until my subsequent anger actually began to like them, these words with their upside-down-truth! It is so pleasant, so distinguishing, to possess one’s own antipodes!

The funny thing is that I really do like Evola. I like him because, unlike so many of his type, he is very bold, unequivocal and clear, and that allows me to view in a glance all 360° of his cloudless horizon, as well as the moral kernel at the center that makes him turn about in such a hot little orbit.

The passage that inspired this post belongs in my wiki.

The passage below from the Gay Science is a declaration of concrete pluralism, and it encapsulates precisely what I care about in designing brand experiences: the discovery of a unique worldview ideally suited to the flourishing of a group (brand strategy), and its interpretation into a concrete participatory lifeworld (experience strategy) equipped with unique ways of conceiving, perceiving, feeling, acting and making — two thirds of which ought to be tacit tradition, animated by an intuited rightness (experience design).

Get on the ships! — how every individual is affected by an overall philosophical justification of his way of living and thinking — he experiences it as a sun that shines especially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him, it makes him independent of praise and blame, self-sufficient, rich, liberal with happiness and good will; incessantly it fashions evil into good, leads all energies to bloom and ripen, and does not permit the petty weeds of grief and chagrin to come up at all. In the end then one exclaims: Oh how I wish that many such new suns were yet to be created! Those who are evil or unhappy and the exceptional human being — all these should also have their philosophy, their good right, their sunshine! What is needful is not pity for them! — we must learn to abandon this arrogant fancy, however long humanity has hitherto spent learning and practicing it — what these people need is not confession, conjuring of souls, and forgiveness of sins! What is needful is a new justice! And a new watchword! And new philosophers! The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have the right to exist! There is yet another world to be discovered — and more than one! Embark, philosophers!

Simply coming up with declarations of who an organization essentially is, what it is essentially like, and outfitting it with a nice stylized look-n’-feel-n’-voice-n’-tone is no longer enough. For a brand to have teeth, the scope of the brand experience design must extend fully into the design of an organization’s offerings — their services and their products — and into the design of the business model itself. Brand is actualized when the “subjective” values of an organization first manifest as a different way of seeing, feeling and acting… then consequently as a different way of looking, sounding and serving… and lastly — very lastly — the way the organization talks about itself and stylizes itself.

We’ve been doing it backwards.

Subject: Conflicts
Date: Thursday 10/12/06 7:54:00 AM

A conflict divides the world into four halves.

An ideal “what” is realized; an ideal “how” is actualized; an ideal “why” is manifested. A brand is an organization’s simultaneous realization, actualization and manifestation of its own ideal.

From Being and Time:

Every science is constituted primarily by thematizing. That which is familiar pre-scientifically in Dasein as disclosed Being-in-the-world, gets projected upon the Being which is specific to it. With this projection, the realm of entities is bounded off. The ways of access to them get ‘managed’ methodologically, and the conceptual structure for interpreting them is outlined.

 

…the Objectivity of a science is regulated primarily in terms of whether that science can confront us with the entity which belongs to it as its theme, and can bring it, uncovered in the primordiality of its Being, to our understanding.

To understand a subject is to understand  objects as the subject understands them, according to that subject’s thematization, which means accessing the subject’s entities by that subject’s methods, and understanding according to that subject’s conceptual structure. This holds true equally for an academic subject as it does for an entity possessing subjectivity.

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“Theme”, “thesis” and the root -thesis are etymologically descended from the Greek word tithenai “to set or place.” Synthesis means “place together”.

The root -ject comes from the Greek work jacere “throw.” A project is “thrown ahead”. An object is “thrown in the way of”. A subject is “thrown under”.

Method is made up of meta- “above” and -hod “way”. (I like thinking of method as a meta-way.)

Concept is made up of con- “together” and –capere “take”. (Consider the contrasting meanings of concept and synthesis.)

According to Online Etymology Dictionary the etymology of “interpret” is inter- “between” and some other root of unknown origin. Maybe interpreting is a generic mediating of any two separated entities.

Speaking of “mediating” — “mediate”, “medium” and “media” all come from medius “middle”.

“Regulate” comes from regula “rule” – to “control by rules”. Something that is regular is behaves according to rules.

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When we understand a subject, we throw something under a situation upon which the entities thrown before us can stand and be placed together in such a way that we can take it together as a whole.

We do not say: “He really knows about what he is talking about.”

We say “He really knows what he is talking about.” And when we say this, we are making a tacit distinction between knowing and knowing about.

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If a person has been in a situation, wrestled with the concrete realities of that situation, particularly those that have resisted conceptualization and explicit language, and then subsequently reflected upon these realities and found ways to conceptualize this experience, this person knows what he is talking about.

And even if such a person is unable to conceptualize or articulate fully what he has experienced, he will be able to identify people who do or do not know what they’re talking about.

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Until a student of some topic has been in a situation and wrestled with the concrete realities of that situation and attempted to apply his acquired knowledge to act within the situation, he does not know to what degree he knows what he is talking about.

My own experience has shown me again and again that preparatory study of any area I am preparing to research in the field is merely preparatory, and that this knowledge will inevitably undergo deep and unpredictable developments. Only when I return from the field do I really know what I am talking about. This has happened to me again and again — I know what I am talking about.

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Were it not for the interpretive gap – that deep gulf between theory and practice that dogs the inexperienced – we would have no need to say “He knows what he is talking about.” The ability to talk about some topic would establish the fact that what needs knowing is known.

Maybe some people who say “he knows what he is talking about” are making a different distinction: that this person is relating facts that he really has learned by studying credible sources, as opposed to “making up what he is talking about.” But then we should ask: what makes a source credible? And we should also ask whether we would still say this masterful student knows what he is talking about if he is unable to apply this knowledge practically. He would be promptly re-classified as merely “book smart” or “academic”.

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There’s a huge difference between studying a subject prior to having experienced the realities it attempts to conceptualize and studying it after one has experienced them.

Reading is far more rewarding when you know you are reading an author who really knows what he’s talking about. It is not a matter of trusting the author and feeling confident that the author is both honest and well-informed. It is a matter of experiencing the truth of what is being said. This is true of all subjects, especially philosophy.

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People who know what they are talking about in one subject gain a certain kind of meta-knowledge about experience and expertise. Or, to put it more succinctly, they acquire bullshit detectors.