All posts by anomalogue

#

Ideas

In 6th grade science class my teacher, Mr. Mason, demonstrated the space-filling property of liquids by slowly pouring a drum of water into an eight ounce tumbler. The water overflowed the cup, and he kept pouring. As the puddle spread across the floor, to our desks and around our feet, Mr. Mason imparted the insight: “See? This water wants to fill up this container, our room.”

Of course, Mr. Mason was, like we were, much more fascinated by the vandalistic act of dumping large quantities of water on a fine hardwood floor, but it did leave an impression.

But Mr. Mason was just warming up. The scientific revelations that came later in the year were far more mind-bendingly spectacular. In one memorable lecture, he explained to us the purpose of the mysteriously useless pound and asterisk buttons on touch-tone phones. In 1980 the only buttons that did anything were the numbers, and we always wondered what the other two were doing there. When Mr. Mason told us he knew what they were for, he had our attention. In the not-distant future, they would be used by the government to stun people. Agents would call criminals up, hit the pound key to freeze them in their seats, and capture them without having to shoot them.

A holy diary

Judaism

It would be really interesting if a religion kept a chronicle of its own development from its own current perspective, never modifying past entries, but constantly reflecting upon and reinterpreting the older perspective in terms of the latest one.

(Imagine a collective version of a child writing a continuous diary, starting from infancy, each session reading the story so far, then continuing it.)

The chronicle might start of as a purely mythical self-interpretation of a mythical existence. Then it might progress to a more institutionalized state and formally self-interpret its formalization, and so on all the way to its development into an pluralistic interpersonal religion, and offer pluralistic self-interpretations of its own pluralistic existence and its harmoniously divergent views on its past and future.

The only drawback to the experiment would be if some reckless Prometheus-type were to hand the work to wild readers from a more primitive stage of development. Would they even grasp it as a chronicle? They might see it as a catalogue of true factual assertions. They might misinterpret truths they’re unprepared to grasp, like children attempting but failing to make sense of the adult world.

A They

Judaism

I cannot help but think that Heidegger’s understanding of social being would have been radically different if he had participated in a society that understood fellow human beings as gateways to divine being, instead of in a Protestant Christian milieu (which holds that others are, at best, superfluous in one’s own personal relationship with God) and had developed to a point where National Socialism could dominate it.

*

If you happen to believe other human beings are intrinsically part of one’s relationship to God you’ll consider the conditions for cultivating and preserving relationships sacred. You might occasionally go too far and idolize those conditions, but as long as the relationships are preserved it is possible to reawaken the spirit for the sake of which they are upheld.

*

My experience of social being is exactly like Heidegger’s.

However, I interpret the experience differently. I’d call it a “deficient mode” of inhabiting a culture. Heidegger’s existentiell relationship with his culture distorted his understanding of everyday Dasein — and consequently of Dasein.

Canny vs uncanny

Etymology

Uncanny – 1590s, “mischievous;” 1773 in the sense of “associated with the supernatural,” originally Scottish and northern English, from un– (1) “not” + canny.

Canny – 1630s, Scottish and northern England formation from can (v.) in its sense of “know how to;” lit. “knowing,” hence, “careful.” Often used superciliously of Scots by their southern neighbors, implying “thrift and an eye to the main chance.”

(From the Online Etymology Dictionary.)

The Oxford dictionary defines canny as “having or showing shrewdness and good judgment, especially in money or business matters” and Scottish & Northern English “pleasant; nice: ‘she’s a canny lass.'”

*

I nominate uncanny/canny for the office of Most Fundamental Ontological Category. The canny represents the principle of savvy niceness; the uncanny, occult weirdness.

Heidegger’s Te

Ideas

From Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction:

“A few days before his death, Heidegger penned a motto for his collected edition: “Ways, not works”. He explained this motto in some notes for a preface:

The collected edition should indicate various ways: it is underway in the field of paths of the self-transforming asking of the many-sided question of Being … The point is to awaken the confrontation about the question concerning the topic of thinking … and not to communicate the opinion of the author, and not to characterize the standpoint of the writer, and not to fit it into the series of other historically determinable philosophical standpoints. Of course, such a thing is always possible, especially in the information age, but for preparing the questioning access to the topic of thinking, it is completely useless.”

I also found out from Polt’s book that Heidegger worked on a translation of the Tao Te Ching, which makes perfect sense, especially when you consider what Martin Buber had to say about Taoism.

Returning to Being and Time

Ideas

I’ve made it through Division 1 of Being and Time. This is my first rereading of this book since 2006. It strange to return to this book because these ideas — especially the ethical themes — connect to memories from the time, almost like music or distinctive scents. Except with philosophy, what is recalled is a perspective — which is precisely what in memory is absent, supplanted by our present perspective, which re-orders past events into the perpetually arrogant “only now do I really understand” of the present mind. What rereading philosophy recalls is the meaning of a time along with its images and facts — and allows a self to return and to justify itself to the self it has become.

*

Philosophy has been called the queen of the sciences. It is also the queen of the arts.

The power to not care

Ethics

Freedom is the power to refuse to care about what you do not care about.

Very few people have this freedom. Few can even admit they lack it, because admitting it means conscious hypocrisy, which is much trickier to sustain and manage than self-delusion, a.k.a. sincerity. So most people go the sincere self-delusional route.

Refusing to care about what you do not care about releases energy for caring about what you do care about, which begins with feeling value, that is, knowing what you care about. Hypocrisy and self-delusion consume your energy and make it much harder to feel value, much less to act resolutely in accordance with what you value.

In unfreedom, valuing and caring is something whipped-up or faked but mostly longed for blindly, without even a concrete object of longing.

Two questions for neoliberals

Politics
  1. Is the Invisible Hand of the free market really able to regulate human life to the benefit of all involved if organized labor is excluded from the conception of the free market and seen as an alien threat to its operation rather than an intrinsic and necessary part? Is organized labor perhaps one of the fingers of the Invisible Hand?
  2. Is it true what Boltanski says of Adam Smith, that Smith saw empathy as a necessary condition for the proper social functioning of the free market? This means that the common belief that things will take care of themselves in the equilibrium of opposing tensions of ruthless self-interest is a distortion of the original idea, and the emergence of the user experience profession can be seen as a restoration of Smith’s ideal from its industrial-age social Darwinist distortions.

Centri-

Etymology

Centripetal – centripetus, from Latin centrum (see center) + –petus ‘seeking’ (from petere ‘seek’).

Centrifugal – centrifugus, from Latin centrum (see center) + –fugus ‘fleeing’ (from fugere ‘flee’).

Center – from Latin centrum, , from Greek kentron ‘sharp point, stationary point of a pair of compasses,’ related to kentein ‘to prick.’

 

Visions

Ideas

A vision is essentially holistic.

If one has a mental image of some new entity or some new situation that fits neatly and non-disruptively into the world as it is today, that is an idea, not a vision.

However, if one conceives a vision, ideas for new entities and situations will result.

Further, the only way to really convey a vision is to indicate it through entities and situations.

So many people cannot tell the difference between a vision and a bunch of ideas.

In form, vision and ideas are identical. They differ merely in essence.

*

This confusion of vision and ideas is also why people cannot tell the difference between a religion and a set of beliefs.

Fundamentalism is religion-like ideas without redemptive vision. Fundamentalism is not the extreme of religion, but anti-religion.

*

Ideas are derived from vision.

Most ideas we have and hear about are derived from the vision of life most of us casually hold and mistake for reality itself.

What is meant by vision is actually new vision, which serves as a contrast to the old vision, and highlights the difference between reality itself (which is mysterious and pregnant with surprise) and what we have made of it through vision and connected ideas and realizations intended to fend off surprise.

*

If we have real conversations, sooner or later we will be surprised. And if we are surprised enough we might undergo a change of vision. If we undergo a change of vision, new ideas and new aesthetic expressions will naturally emerge.

If we keep ourselves perpetually busy with tasks and entertainments, and communicate mostly through wise-cracks, gossip, and electronic messages of 200 or fewer characters, we cannot disrupt one another, we will never undergo a change of vision, we will never have deeply new ideas rooted in new vision. We will have to painstakingly create new ideas and new situations for ourselves, one at a time. We will have to tinker our way to art. And we will not even know why none of it any longer sustains or inspires us, because we haven’t even gone far enough to know the existence of vision.

Conversation and art live together and die together.

Impractical idealism vs practical realism

Fructivism, Ideas

Impractical idealism and practical realism: another of those mutually supportive antitheses united against an inconceivable possibility of a practical ideal that creates a new reality.

Impractical idealism plays the Alan Colmes to practical realism’s Sean Hannity, proving the suspicion that new ideals are essentially impractical and unrealistic because those who conceive them are unconcerned with what is possible and what is currently the case.

Practical realism sets itself up as the only possible alternative to such silliness, becoming the tough-minded champions of preservation of what has been established, or of expertly playing an absurd game one is powerless to change, or of making the humblest progress possible, and rejoicing in the very humbleness of the world’s possibilities.

And practical realism presents such a depressing image of smug complacence that anyone with a soul is repulsed. Faced with a choice between the practical realist’s mediocrity and sheer fantasy will choose fantasy and be tempted to make a display of principled quixotism or of making the most ludicrous truth-claims or obvious evasions.

Anyone intent on doing something new must not ally with either of these camps. We cannot be stupidly emotional and lose our concern for where we are, how we can move beyond it and what we can expect from our destination. But if we fail, we should not become champions of mediocrity invested in the belief that real change is impossible. Such stances are adopted by those fear that the impossibility of change lies not in the world but in their own impotence, and so they dedicate themselves to creating a world where nobody can succeed. And that is a shame because it is exactly those who are tempted to crush hopes who could help others bring hopes to fruition if they were willing to play their proper part, which is execution.

*

A word about execution.

Notice, every organization is run by people known as executives.

By definition, the executive role executes. “1. a person with senior managerial responsibility in a business organization; 2. the person or branch of a government responsible for putting policies or laws into effect.”

But execute what? That is where everything falls apart.

It is not enough for executives to know how to execute. They are also expected to come up with the plan. And just having a plan is not enough. It has to be an inspiring plan.

Executives are expected to have vision.

But is this a realistic expectation? — In fact it is a prime example of an impractical reality that most people stubbornly cling to.

Executives nearly never have vision – at least not one of their own. Executives are much less concerned with changing reality, after all, this reality already put them in a sunny corner office on the top floor of a skyscraper. What’s not to like?

What executives really want is something to execute. Any plan that will enable them to show off their powers of execution will do. A sprinkle of innovation is enough, if it produces the quantitative evidence of  executive awesomeness.

But no executive will admit this. Why? Because execution is only glamorous if what is executed is a vision.

But nobody wants to execute someone else’s idea. That feels like being a servant.

So executives present themselves as visionaries who happen to be able to get things done.

But what an executive calls “vision” is rarely vision. Sometimes it’s a goal. Sometimes it is ambition that galvanizes the whole company. Or electrifying enthusiasm. Usually, it’s just a plan. Whatever it is, it is draped with vague superlatives, buzzwords and snazzy graphics and presented as the vision. Look closer, though, and you will see practical realism candy-coated with impractical idealism.

If you want to know why corporations are so abysmally dull this is why: executives would rather do without meaning than to accept meaning from anyone besides themselves.

 

Fundamentalism

Ideas

Fundamentalism is a naive realist belief system which adhere to a moralism of adhering to 1) a truth which is reduced to a set of explicit truth assertions, characterized as one’s “beliefs” and 2) an ethic which is reduced to algorithmic practices, characterized as one’s “principles”.

To consider it a virtue to question or alter your beliefs and to always adhere to your ethical rules regardless of the consequences, and to call this virtue “faith” is to be a Fundamentalist.

*

We are mistaken when we take a fundamentalist form of a religion as its purest expression. On the contrary, the purity of any form of fundamentalism consists of straining out precisely the essence of religion and retaining only the formal aspects, which are valuable solely as practical supports for religious life.

Religion is rooted in the finite but is oriented toward in infinite. Fundamentalism is hostile to everything beyond its finite system, and in this respect it is anti-religion.

Real religions are intersubjective. Nothing disrupts the apparent finitude of reality than other person who sees reality another way, revealing both one specific otherwise and the principle than an otherwise is always possible despite all inconceivability. To assume on principle that this other way is factually or morally wrong is to insulate oneself against the essential infinite Subject of religion.

*

Every religion subjected to a Fundamentalist reduction ceases to be a form of that religion and becomes another denomination of Fundamentalism.

 

 

Other people

Ideas

First we learn that other people exist and that they have feelings, too.

Then we learn that those other people can feel quite differently than we do, even about the same things.

Then we learn that these different feelings other people have are rooted in how they conceive, perceive and inhabit the world; when understood this way, these differing feelings are revealed as legitimate and deserving of our respect.

Then we discover that listening and learning from those with legitimate different feelings can alter our own ways of conceiving, perceiving and inhabiting the world — or to put it more simply, can change our own experience of life.

From this we learn that the world is always infinitely greater than what we have yet made of it.

And the gate to this infinitude is other people, accepted as teachers.

*

Disclaimer:

Let’s not allow sentimentality to lead us astray. Learning is more than letting someone else have their turn talking. Learning requires that we discover our own ignorance and develop a sincere appetite for learning.

Complicating this situation is the fact that the ones most eager to be teacher are often the very ones who are too proud to be taught, and who therefore have little material to teach. Or you get the opposite situation: the “good listener”. The kind of person most eager to let everyone be their teacher are acting a role, mostly for themselves. They cannot be absorbed in their lesson because they are too absorbed in the activity of good listening.

It requires the involvement of at least two authentic participants for teaching to transpire.

Heidegger on the user

Design, Ideas

From Being and Time:

The work produced refers not only to the “towards-which” of its usability and the “whereof” of which it consists: under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it. The work is cut to his figure; he ‘is’ there along with it as the work emerges. Even when goods are produced by the dozen, this constitutive assignment is by no means lacking; it is merely indefinite, and points to the random, the average. Thus along with the work, we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Dasein’s kind of Being — entities for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-to-hand; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours. Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public world. Along with the public world, the environing Nature [die Umweltnatur] is discovered and is accessible to everyone.

 

Two entirely non-cynical statements about politics

Ideas

Politics can be base, and usually is base, but it does not follow that politics is essentially base.

It is very important to resist cynical tolerance of base politics.

The following two statements provide clues for finding a dignifying conception of politics:

“Action… corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life.”
– Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition

“Only in politics are people willing to talk of “trials of strength.” Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.”
– Bruno Latour – Irreductions

 

Performance, act and data

Ideas

Goffman, from Presentation of Self [bulleted formatting added]:

In previous sections of this chapter some general characteristics of performance were suggested:

  • activity oriented towards work-tasks tends to be converted into activity oriented towards communication;
  • the front behind which the routine is presented is also likely to be suitable for other, somewhat different routines and so is likely not to fit completely any particular routine;
  • sufficient self-control is exerted so as to maintain a working consensus;
  • an idealized impression is offered by accentuating certain facts and concealing others;
  • expressive coherence is maintained by the performer taking more care to guard against minor disharmonies than the stated purpose of the performance might lead the audience to think was warranted.

All of these general characteristics of performances can be seen as interaction constraints which play upon the individual and transform his activities into performances. Instead of merely doing his task and giving vent to his feelings, he will express the doing of his task and acceptably convey his feelings. In general, the representation of an activity, especially when this representation is socialized in accordance with interaction standards, will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore, in a certain sense, will inevitably be a misrepresentation of it. And since the individual will be required to rely on signs in order to construct a representation of his activity, the image he constructs, however faithful to the facts, will be subject to all the disruptions that impressions are subject to.

 

*

As I read this, it occurred to me that if Goffman had written this book today, he would have needed a chapter on the role of producing data as part of our everyday performances. (We even call it “performance data”.)

*

For administrators, the effort of capturing data is incredibly light. The burden falls on those who report to them (a.k.a. their “reports”).

The effort for administrators comes mainly with analysis, which can be deferred indefinitely, with no weakening of justification for the data-capture requirements. Administrators have no practical burdens to restrain their data-capture requirements, and so the requirements are largely unrestrained.

Administrators generally deny that activities and performances are separate things, and assume they are one and the same. It is understood that data measures what the reports should be doing anyway. Therefore, reports have no valid reason to resist measurement — otherwise they appear to have something to conceal, or they are just whiners or grumblers. So administrators encounter no real resistance in their quest to gather comprehensive data by which to evaluate the performance of their reports.

Finally, the object of scrutiny is objective data, which — unlike subjective impressions — cannot lie, and therefore cannot be blurred, squirmed around or contested.

The situation creates an intensified and extensified panopticon effect, where the guard has the power not only to look where he chooses, but also when, and with digitally augmented intelligence, to analyze with superhuman speed and thoroughness, and issue incontestable judgments.

Eventually, when administrators have the means to extract 100% performance from their reports, there is no time nor energy left for effective action. The system begins to fail. More data is gathered in an effort to identify the cause of failure, and to root out nonperformers…

*

If you want to control both means and ends, you have to really understand what is going on, and that means forgoing two of the greatest pleasures of authority: 1) being lied to and 2) despising philosophy.