To call an unexpected fact (or worse, an expected fact) an insight is the kind of crude leveling-down that deprives subtler thinkers of distinctions.

An insight is only an insight if it effects a perspectival shift in how one sees a situation.

Of course, now I have to explain that a perspective is not merely an opinion. To call a mere disagreement of opinion a different perspective, is yet another leveling-down of language. A perspective is how one approaches a question — what relevance is seen in what features of a problem — and this is what gives rise to opinions.

One’s perspective is directly related to vision, another term that suffers from leveling-down. A vision is not figments of an executives imagination (whether this figment is an ambition or a goal or an offering of some kind). A vision is that way of seeing that makes fresh imaginative images possible.

And vision drives strategy — which is not merely a plan of action for meeting a goal…

And so on.

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There’s a pattern in all these levelings-down. They’re the product of minds that conceive the world as an aggregate of objects which one acts upon — and cannot conceive the world as an environing and participatory whole. It’s precisely the distortion fundamentalist religion inflicts on the host religions it infects.

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Reading Ingold’s Being Alive, I’m excited to see that Ingold made the same observation as I did about transitive and intransitive verbs and what they imply about one’s conceptions of reality.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of verbal reductionism, but I’m considering changing it to transitive reductionism.

“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.'” — Wittgenstein

“The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.” — Nietzsche

The desire to see the world from above and contain it in outline is attracted to maps.

The desire to orient oneself within the world and engage it in detail is attracted to compasses.

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When a compass is interpreted as a comprehensive map, religion is inverted into fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is a form of ideology that converts religious symbols of orientation into objective images.

Fundamentalism is the idolatrous form of the religions it claims to epitomize.

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Fundamentalism is so literal that it does not realize that an image does not have to be a literal image. It is completely possible to make an intellectual image of “God” in one’s mind.

Coherence in the what: System.
Coherence in the how: Fluency.
Coherence in the why: Grace.

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Complete coherence is as unobtrusively present as reality itself, because it is reality itself.

Incomplete coherence is perceived as a breaking up or darkening.

Complete coherence is blindness void even of darkness.

The emergence of coherence is ex nihilo appearance.

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Coherence is only perceived as coherence it is when it is changing: when coherence is caught between states of imperceptibility: on one hand being not-there-enough, and on the other, being all-too-there.

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Coherence tries to preserve itself, at the expense of other coherences.

“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

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“Abram” – Jose Gonzales

Barthes: “It would be good to imagine a new linguistic science that would no longer study the origin of words, or etymology, or even their diffusion, or lexicology, but the progress of their solidification, their densification throughout historical discourse; this science would doubtless be subversive, manifesting much more than the historical origin of truth: its rhetorical, languaging nature.”

Did anyone ever develop this science? I want to study it and apply it.

This morning I added this quote of explanation to my wiki’s home page.

The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’etre in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. His ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses. To the extent that an accompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it in such a way as to preserve “the intention of such investigations,” namely, “to plumb the depths of language and thought … by drilling rather than excavating” so as not to ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection.

I also connected this:

All socio-ideological analyses agree on the deceptive nature of literature (which deprives them of a certain pertinence): the work is finally always written by a socially disappointed or powerless group, beyond the battle because of its historical, economic, political situation; literature is the expression of this disappointment. These analyses forget (which is only normal, since they are hermeneutics based on the exclusive search for the signified) the formidable underside of writing: bliss: bliss which can erupt, across the centuries, out of certain texts that were nonetheless written to the glory of the dreariest, of the most sinister philosophy.

with this:

From time to time there comes to them — what it will certainly be hardest to concede to them but must be conceded to them nonetheless — a moment when they emerge from their silent solitude and again try the power of their lungs: for then they call to one another like those gone astray in a wood in order to locate and encourage one another; whereby much becomes audible, to be sure, that sounds ill to ears for which it is not intended. — Soon afterwards, though, it is again still in the wood, so still that the buzzing, humming and fluttering of the countless insects that live in, above and beneath it can again clearly be heard.

And I connected this:

Reading a text cited by Stendhal… I find Proust in one minute detail. … Elsewhere, but in the same way, in Flaubert, it is the blossoming apple trees of Normandy which I read according to Proust. I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one. I recognize that Proust’s work, for myself at least, is the reference work, the general mathesis, the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony — as Mme de Sevigne’s letters were for the narrator’s grandmother, tales of chivalry for Don Quixote, etc.; this does not mean that I am in any way a Proust “specialist”: Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an “authority,” simply a circular memory.

with this:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem, ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is the every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant.

As I index Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text in my wiki, I’m picking up some really useful words. I’m going to add them to this post as I find them, and wherever possible I’ll link them up to wikipedia:

• Atopy/atopic: Atopy (Greek atopia – placelessness, unclassifiable, of high originality; Socrates has often been called “átopos”) describes the ineffability of things or emotions that are seldom experienced, that are outstanding and that are original in the strict sense. The term depicts a certain quality (of experience) that can be observed within oneself or within others. Application: some of the most important qualities of a design are atopic (have je ne sais quois). The same is true of the qualities of situations and informants in design research (you just have to be there to really get what it’s like). Finally, the most compelling aspect of brands are atopic, and exist despite formal brand identity guidelines and the brand cops who enforce them. But, because business is so objective, explicit and verbal, and because the majority of interactions in the business world are mediated entirely by explicit language and numbers, especially across hierarchical strata in an organization, the atopic realities that make the difference between “eh” and “awesome” are lost, strained out or dismissed).
• Sociolect: In sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language (a dialect) associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc. Application: one of the major obstacles to inter-disciplinary collaboration is difference in sociolects, which at best introduce a learning curve, and at worst constitute professional shibboleths. Also, an organization’s sociolect sometimes differs from that of its customers — which, again, at best interferes with understanding, but at worse marks company and customer as belonging to two different worlds of meaning, which alienates.
• I wish I had a third. A two-item list is really lame. This line is here solely to create the illusion that there are three items in this two-item list.

I was on the verge of writing Barthes off forever, then I hit a couple of good parts.

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under cover of an art de vivre shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse.

Then, later:

On the stage of the text, no footlights: there is not, behind the text, someone active (the writer) and out front someone passive (the reader); there is not a subject and an object. The text supersedes grammatical attitudes: it is the undifferentiated eye which an excessive author (Angelus Silesius) describes: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

Apparently Arab scholars, when speaking of the text, use this admirable expression: the certain body. What body? We have several of them; the body of anatomists and physiologists, the one science sees or discusses: this is the text of grammarians, critics, commentators, philologists (the pheno-text). But we also have a body of bliss consisting solely of erotic relations, utterly distinct from the first body: it is another contour, another nomination; thus with the text: it is no more than the open list of the fires of language (those living fires, intermittent lights, wandering features strewn in the text like seeds and which for us advantageously replace the “semina aeternitatis,” the “zopyra,” the common notions, the fundamental assumptions of ancient philosophy). Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body. The pleasure of the text is irreducible to physiological need. The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas I do.

I think this one is final:

I’ve got a whole mini-slide show that goes with it, which I plan to develop into a presentation on verbal (or factual or objective or explicit?) reductionism.

Nice distinctions from Norman Blaikie:

• Logic in use: practical thinking used while action is in progress
• Reconstructed logic: articulate interpretation of past action
• Logic of anticipation: thinking out future action

I am training myself in three intellectual habits:

1. Set context! — Never launch into talking about an idea without setting context first. If the thought has a purpose or possible application, give that first. Maybe provide a little back-story on the genesis of the problem.
2. Provide examples! — Any abstract concept must be accompanies with concrete applications, preferably presented narratively. The main purpose of examples is not to establish the validity of the concept, but to establish its very meaning (a.k.a. give people a hint of what the hell you’re even going on about.)
3. Name concepts! — A concept only becomes fully real when it has been named. Until that point it is only an analogy or worse a tacit perspective. Naming things makes them real to people. It makes ideas into objects that can be thought about.

“Let’s agree to disagree” can mean more than one thing. Perhaps no statement has a broader span of consequential meanings. Here’s a few:

1. Alienation: “Let’s agree to abstain from all encounters.” This means living in complete intellectual isolation from other individuals. Through destruction of communication – through taboos, unclear habits of speech, favoring forms of etiquette that undermine dialectical exchange, and reforming/deforming forums where true encounters might occur and replacing them with counterfeit forms of parallel talk – people become unable to disagree with one another enough to feel  the presence of a mind that is different from one’s own.
2. War: “Let’s agree to settle this on the battlefield.” This means closing the embassies, sending the diplomats home, and ending attempts at mutual agreement. Each side makes an all-out attempt to forcibly impose their own perspective on the other. Rarely does this form of disagreement announce its intentions. In fact, nearly invariably, it marches in waving both the flag of peace and of unyielding principle – as if it can serve both these causes.
3. Competition: “Let’s settle this on the playing field.” This appears to be an agreement to disagree, but in fact it is making a far deeper agreement — an agreement on rules of engagement in cases of disagreement. This, in turn, is founded on an even deeper agreement: that local principles to which we are loyal should be tempered by a higher order of principles that preserve a kind of unity and order within the profoundest diversity. Nietzsche observed that competition (agon) was the kernel of Helenic values, which is hardly surprising considering the structure of Greek religion, where each individual, and each polis maintained its allegiance to one or two gods, but even deeper loyalty to the Olympian order. The Greeks maintained this deep order of local conflict against barbarism, which knew no order above the either-or of violence and isolation.

It should be kept in mind that coming to agreement on valid principles of competition is not an easy matter. The task goes far deeper than merely formulating rules of competition. Of course, precisely for this reason the majority of people will want to cut directly to mere formulation of rules as if the principles are a self-evident matter of nature – if they even get as far as thinking in terms of rules. Most will prefer to limit disagreement to matters of fact. The expectation is that facts, once established, will “speak for themselves” and will dictate to us, in clear and unambiguous language, the entire rulebook of reality.

Competition is not a silver bullet solution, and to choose it as a way out is simply to acknowledge the true scope and depth of the problem of rising above the barbarism of alienation or war.

Reading up on Theodor Adorno in Wikipedia I saw this:

“What I mean by reified consciousness, I can illustrate – without elaborate philosophical contemplation – most simply with an American experience. Among the frequently changing colleagues which the Princeton Project provided me with, was a young lady. After a few days, she had gained confidence in me, and asked most kindly: “Dr Adorno, would you mind a personal question?”. I said, “It depends on the question, but just go ahead”, and she went on: “Please tell me: are you an extrovert or an introvert?”. It was as if she, as a living being, already thought according to the model of multi-choice questions in questionnaires.”

A nice passage from Crotty’s Foundations of Social Research (emphasis is mine):

A first way to approach texts might be described as empathic. This is an approach characterised by openness and receptivity. Here we do more than extract useful information from our reading. The author is speaking to us and we are listening. We try to enter into the mind and personage of the author, seeking to see things from the author’s perspective. We attempt to understand the author’s standpoint. It may not be our standpoint; yet we are curious to know how the author arrived at it and what forms its basis.

There can also be an interactive approach to texts. Now we are not just listening to the author. We are conversing. We have a kind of running conversation with the author in which our responses engage with what the author has to say. Dialogue of this kind can have a most formative and growthful impact on ideas we brought to the interchange. Here, in fact, our reading can become quite critical. It can be reading ‘against the grain’.

Then there is the transactional mode of reading. What happens in this mode is much more than refinement, enhancement or enlargement of what we bring to our engagement with the text. Out of the engagement comes something quite new. The insights that emerge were never in the mind of the author. They are not in the author’s text. They were not with us as we picked up the text to read it. They have come into being in and out of our engagement with it.

These are all possible ways of reading. There are others beside. And we are free to engage in any or all of them. These various modes prove suggestive and evocative as we recognise research data as text — and, even before that, as we take human situations and interactions as text. In this hermeneutical setting, ways of reading are transfigured as ways of researching.

I see this book as a natural continuation of Richard J. Bernstein’s excellent Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. The biblio-fetishist in me wants to shelve them together.

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One more nice bit from this chapter, a quote from Stanley Straw:

In contrast to conceptualizations of reading built on the communication model, transactional models suggest that reading is a more generative act than the receipt or processing of information or communication. From the transactional view, meaning is not a representation of the intent of the author; it is not present in the text; rather, it is constructed by the reader during the act of reading. The reader draws on a number of knowledge sources in order to create or construct meaning.

This is the goal of generative research: not to understand “the user” (as UCDers think) in order to provide what is needed and desired in the most convenient and comprehensible form possible, and even less, to use an understanding of “the customer” (as ad folks think) in order to manipulate perceptions and behavior — but rather to use divergence of perspective as material for dialectical synthesis of entirely new opportunities for offering-mediated relationships between organization and customer.

Critics who call for readers to engage the text and freely construct their own meanings independent of authorial intent have inspired me to read their works as calls to pursue the author’s intent, to respect the content of the text as a means to extend the reach of what I can construct. And despite what they would say, I am pretty sure they agree with me.

Seeking courageous, imaginative, practical, intensely dissatisfied optimists.

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