All posts by anomalogue

Irreductions

ANT

From the introduction to Latour’s Irreductions:

…We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.

One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing? Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.

One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.

So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.

No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …

This text follows one path, however bizarre the consequences and contrary to custom. What happens when nothing is reduced to anything else? What happens when we suspend our knowledge of what a force is? What happens when we do not know how their way of relating to one another is changing? What happens when we give up this burden, this passion, this indignation, this obsession, this flame, this fury, this dazzling aim, this excess, this insane desire to reduce everything?

Supposing truth converses…?

ANT

More attempts to internalize the ANTsy moves:

Today, physicists never discuss a matter without allowing the matter to participate in the discussion.

Physicist’s experiments always ask leading questions. The questions have a clear, coaxing thrust, and the matter in question cooperates or frustrates the hopes implicit in the line of questioning.

Much of physics is hammered out through competition between conflicting leading questions. Physicists approach a matter a make conflicting propositions. They compete for the right to speak for the matter. The matter rewards the one who understands the best with a fickle faithfulness.

‘That is wrong’

Ideas

From Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks: “A new way of thinking — which is always a new way of measuring and pre-supposes the availability of a new yardstick, a new scale of feelings — feels itself to contradict all other ways of thinking and, resisting them, continually says ‘That is wrong’. Looked at more subtly, such a ‘That is wrong’ really only means ‘I feel nothing of myself in it’, ‘I don’t care about it’, ‘I don’t understand how you can fail to feel with me’.”

 

Conditions of self-respect

Ideas

For some people self-respect is conditional, and for others self-respect is absolute.

Some people self-determine the conditions for their own self-respect, and others never give it a thought.

Some people set difficult conditions for self-respect and work hard to win it, while others just respect or disrespect instinctively or indiscriminately.

Some people prefer to respect, and others don’t.

Some people like it that humanity self-invents. Others prefer to see the changes humanity undergoes as natural mechanics, or as the unfolding of a predestined plan, or as a process of degradation, or as wrestling with a riddle, or as a chain of necessary accidents. Other people deny that significant enduring change happens. Others just live their lives.

Interview with a quark

ANT, Ideas

If a physicist could talk directly with a quark to get hints from it that would help the physicist invent new productive theories and experiments, most physicists would get to work scheduling interviews with any quark willing to talk with them.

Unfortunately, this is impossible, so physicists must rely solely on quantitative methods.

*

So far physicists have found the material world to be composed of entities that can be taken as identical, so that what is learned from one example of a type can be applied to all other entities of the same type. Entities recognized by physics do not harbor dissenters. Or maybe dissenters exist, but are rare, uninfluential and reducible to noise.

*

When we say the entities of physics are identical, do we know what it means? In respect to the interactions we have with these entities — experiments — they behave predictably.

*

The periodic table is a segmentation of substances.

A book describing each element is a sort of catalog of personas.

*

(This has been an attempt to dance the ANT.)

Epistemological, ethical and ontological pluralism

Ideas

Epistemological pluralism situates human beings in a world that can be known only partially. And one’s partiality determines one’s focus of attention and one’s experimental activities. The truth one finds in the world and integrates as a body of knowledge depends entirely on how one lives out life. Different ways of living necessarily yield different and often conflicting bodies of partial truth. The more faithfully, comprehensively and rigorously we pursue, observe and order truth, the more it will diverge.

Ontological pluralism adheres to a taoist metaphysic, though not necessarily a taoist ethic (te).

Ethical pluralism ethic asserts that the testimony of different conceptions of truth ought to be treated as valid.

*

My own ethical pluralism aims at a world where I and those around me share a world we can comprehend, act within, and care about.

That last point: creating a world we can care about together is the cornerstone of this ethic.

*

The world can become many things to us.

We can make it explicable or mysterious.

We can make it an epic project, or an endless game.

We can make it something  we love, or we can make it into something we endure.

We make what the world becomes, and we make who humanity becomes.

Humanity is always the child and parent of humanity.

*

Human nature is artificiality.

The only question that matters is the quality of our art.

Migrating

Ideas

To Michel Serres and to all
of those who are crossing
his Northwest Passage

– Inscription from Latour’s Pasteurization of France

*

What is Serres’ Northwest Passage? From Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour:

This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage … with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable … It’s more fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had.

*

The dualism of material and mind which has been productive for centuries has led the Western world into paralysis. We can’t resolve it by simply denying the fact of the duality, because even if we negate the What of the thought, the How of the thought survives it in our way of doing our thinking. We have to find new mind-movements — dances — that permit new lifeworlds (or networks of lifeworlds) to arise.

But we cannot understand these new movements by our old movements. We have to stop for a moment, then start in a different direction, with different movements. Groping, stumbling, stammering, in a shifty, shadowy terrain, guided by our fingertips and the star of perplexity. That’s how it’s done.

Genius, ingenuity and the vitality of art

Ideas

The perceptible forms of art are the last step of a much longer process of intellectual-spiritual transformation and discovery. This process often feels like pure shit, and sensible people avoid it. But an artist who aspires to create something unprecedented cannot avoid this ordeal, because this is the only way to discover a new way to perceive and live out life.

This — and nothing else — is what genius is: the discovery and development of new forms of life that naturally and urgently externalize themselves through creation of forms.

Whoever it was who re-assignment of the word “genius” to high IQ did our culture a disservice. Genius cannot be measured, only detected, because it is always hits us from an angle we don’t know how to expect. What IQ measures is not genius, but ingenuity, our ability to manipulate systems of objects, which includes not only physical objects but intellectual ones as well, such as concepts, techniques and stylistic elements.

For the last 30-some years art has tried to get by on mere ingenuity. Ambitious artists play archeologist and anthropologist, digging and rummaging through other times and places for exotic influences to excite their ingenuity.

This method reliably yields recombinations of stylistic elements useful on making things that might be perceived as new or at least fresh by an audience bored with the artistic products they’ve been consuming — but this approach cannot make the audience itself feel new and see life as new.

And even this modest accomplishment has an expiration date. Sooner or later, the limited spiritual resources of history will be depleted, and a sense that everything that could be has been sets in and we suffer an Ecclesiastes effect.

Until artists learn to find the world beyond art interesting, the world of art will grow less and less interesting. Until artists find meaning in engaging in the whole of life and struggling with it, their art will engage nobody, because it will present no challenge worth a struggle.

Questioning Levinas

Ideas

I’m starting to disbelieve in the common belief that Levinas is the heir of Buber, who has somehow made Buber obsolete. I don’t believe they share moral vision. Maybe the most important evidence is the experience of reading them, which could not be less similar despite their common material. Buber is an electrifying read, where Levinas is crushingly heavy and darkening.

Part of me enjoys thinking of Levinas as unbearably good (as a representative of Paul’s notion of the impossibility of Law), but another part of me thinks he is unbearable because his moral vision is ruinous.

Levinas might be the foremost advocate of the process by which the best are stripped of all conviction leaving the worst unsupervised and prone to unscrupulous conviction violent intensification.

The Other is indispensable to the central self, but that does not give it precedent. This might shed some light on the ancient insistence in Chinese thought that heaven must outrank earth (to put it as acceptably as possible).

Smuggled ethics

Ideas

Ideologues make Trojan horses of factual account packed with ethical valuations.

Once you learn to open the horse and force out the passengers, you can accept gifts from your enemies.

*

While all religions attempt accounts for the same metaphysical sphere of reality — at least to the degree of acknowledging its existence — they assume sharply divergent ethical stances. Religions seem alike only when lumped together and opposed to strictly scientific accounts of reality, similarly to how all classical music sounds the same to ears accustomed to popular music.

Perhaps there’s another stratum of truth above ethical principles where variety converges again into unity. Even if this is the case, it does not serve the purposes of the perennialist peacenik crowd who plaster their vehicles with “coexist” bumper stickers, reject the hard-edged formalities of religion in favor of a nebulous spirituality of passive vegged-out bliss.

*

Denial of difference does not accomplish peace.

Treating peace as something that should already be, and would already be if it weren’t for the viciousness of our neighbor, is violent and will incite violence.

If your neighbor thinks a point of disagreement is important and you disagree, you have not settled the disagreement, except in your own mind. You have deepened and intensified the disagreement through disrespect. Respect requires belief in what stands beyond your own mind and its current horizons.

Respectfully acknowledging differences, taking them seriously, working with them, learning from them, changing in response to what we learn — that is how peace is accomplished.

*

Peaceful unity is accomplished through working together toward a permanently transcendent universal.

Walk

Fructivism, Ideas

We cannot directly control our perceptions. We can partly control our attention.

Perceiving is passive; attending is active.

*

Relevance does not actually belong to perception. It belongs to attention.

We do not perceive irrelevance in another person’s argument, but, rather, refuse to attend to the argument in a way that reveals its relevance.

*

A permanent couch potato, who sits in one spot as if chained in place, cannot tell the difference between the arrangement of his room, and the view from where he sits. To him, they’re the same thing. If he wants a different view, the room must be rearranged.

*

“Sitting still is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only peripatetic thoughts have any value.” — Twilight of the Idols

*

There’s a distinct feeling associated with dropping intellectual resistance and opening. It is an event that exists independently of agreement, though agreement depends on it entirely. Until agreement begins to form, however, this opening is entirely formless.

It feels exactly like forgiveness.

*

Martin Buber, from Between Man and Man:

My friendship with one now dead arose in an incident that may be described, if you will, as a broken-off conversation. The date is Easter 1914. Some men from different European peoples had met in an undefined presentiment of the catastrophe, in order to make preparations for an attempt to establish a supra-national authority. The conversations were marked by that unreserve, whose substance and fruitfulness I have scarcely ever experienced so strongly. It had such an effect on all who took part that the fictitious fell away and every word was an actuality. Then as we discussed the composition of the larger circle from which public initiative should proceed (it was decided that it should meet in August of the same year) one of us, a man of passionate concentration and judicial power of love, raised the consideration that too many Jews had been nominated, so that several countries would be represented in unseemly proportion by their Jews. Though similar reflections were not foreign to my own mind, since I hold that Jewry can gain an effective and more than merely stimulating share in the building of a steadfast world of peace only in its own community and not in scattered members, they seemed to me, expressed in this way, to be tainted in their justice. Obstinate Jew that I am, I protested against the protest. I no longer know how from that I came to speak of Jesus and to say that we Jews knew him from within, in the impulses and stirrings of his Jewish being, in a way that remains inaccessible to the peoples submissive to him. “In a way that remains inaccessible to you” — so I directly addressed the former clergyman. He stood up, I too stood, we looked into the heart of one another’s eyes. “It is gone, ” he said, and before everyone we gave one another the kiss of brotherhood.

Rudeness of thinkers

Ideas

Because people who love to think rarely interact with others who love to think, many thinkers fail to cultivate their social-thinking graces. If the thinker is authentic, he behaves inconsiderately. If the thinker actively attempts considerateness he easily falls into thought-obstructing social conventions such as meeting etiquette, or  jokey banter, or polite pleasantries.

Because of this, thinkers often continue to think in isolation, even if they know other thinkers.

Why I care about business

Ideas

There are two reasons I care about business:

  1. My circumstances make engagement in business non-optional, and I have to care in order to engage.
  2. Business is the sole remaining opportunity in our society for sustained collaborative thought.

I have to find opportunities for sustained collaborative thought in order to engage and function and preserve my circumstances. I’m not one of those lucky people who can function just because they have to, or who can care because caring is expedient.

I care by figuring out how to care.

When business does not provide opportunities for sustained collaborative thought, my life becomes precarious.

Meditations on the rough game

Ideas, Judaism, Philosophy

“Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and a trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the rough game…”

*

The difference between simple animal pain and human suffering is the element of perplexity. Pain is mere sensation. If we let pain just be bare pain as the Buddhists advise and refuse to compound that pain with interpretation and conceptualization, we can withstand extreme pain with the dignity of a house pet.

Suffering is pain interpreted as an insight into the human condition, a certain foresight that is actually fore-blindness, an intellectual analogue to the discovery of the ever-present/ever-absent scotoma in our field of vision.

*

Philosophers are perverse people who, upon detecting perplexity, instead of evading it like a normal person, go straight into it, and through it, in order to come out on the other side of it with something deeper and more comprehensive.

*

There is nothing more natural than to detest philosophy. Without this natural impulse there would be no culture because there would be no stability.

But when stability is not advantageous, and deep disruption desired, nobody is better for the job than a philosopher. A philosopher will rip down a system of thought and replace it with another that was inconceivable while the old system reigned.

That’s why once a satisfactory system is put in place, the philosopher who established it should be given the post-war Churchill treatment.

*

The best simple insight I’ve heard in the last year is that chaos is not the vacuum of order, but the simultaneous existence of far too many orders.

In respect to the genesis of a world, there is no ex nihilo.

The particular is articulated from infinite mess, speaking metaphysical perspective is chaos, and experientially, perplexity. To be philosophical is to willingly return to that mess and to allow it to re-articulate differently (for the sake of who knows what).

*

Innovation is rough. That is why it rarely really happens.

People who want to invent without destroying have no choice than to be trivial.

 

Answering Bruce Nussbaum

Ideas

I have mixed feelings about Bruce Nussbaum’s “Design Thinking Is A Failed Experiment. So What’s Next?”

On one hand, I agree with every word of it. For instance, this statement is dead-on: “Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.”

Design thinking more or less had to bow to the business management mindset and its demand that all practices be limited to techniques arranged in sequential processes. When such practices yield success or failure the outcome is attributed to the efficacy of the techniques and processes.

Nussbaum continues: “There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.”

What Nussbaum is pointing out is a bit taboo: even when the design thinking process seems to work, it is not the process that produces the innovations. Something else smuggled in with process does the real work when innovation happens. And if that active ingredient is missing, the process produces only trivial, incremental advances.

Nussbaum then gives a name to this active ingredient: Creative Intelligence or CQ.

Nussbaum presents CQ as a faculty which can be cultivated. “Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space–our lives today.”

The faculty is bound up with the ability to see problems from multiple angles, and to discover new practical responses: “At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned.”

I agree with Nussbaum that some of the abilities he associates with CQ are rooted in capabilities of individuals, some of which is based in talent and much of which can be cultivated. Some individuals have a tendency to reflect on problems and look at them from multiple angles, find it natural to experiment with different approaches to solving them. These are the people who get reputations for being “creative thinkers” in an organization.

However, I still think much remains to be done at the level of management to support CQ beyond what has been covered by Marty Neumeier, Tim Brown and especially Roger Martin in their books on design thinking.

Especially neglected is the work around problem reframing, and also the ways organizations accidentally discourage it — and not only for the usual reasons (unpredictability, inefficiency, etc.).

*

Here I will transition to a post I am considering putting on the LinkedIn Design Thinking group:

A week ago Steve Sato asked an interesting question: “If Systems Thinking optimizes for the whole and part, then what does Design Thinking optimize for?”

What makes the question interesting is that it cannot be answered as asked. Design thinking does not optimize for any particular thing, but for many things at once in response to what the problem requires.

Design thinking re-opens the question: “what are we optimizing for?” and includes all stakeholders in reformulating the question and answering it.

This open-endedness is what makes DT so unnerving to so many professionals. It creates enormous anxiety to suspend one’s own ideals and to pursue a new one that is inconceivable right up to the second it is conceived.

We don’t mind not having the answer to a question. We do mind — intensely — not having a question to work at answering. (For Thomas Kuhn fans, this is the difference between normal and extraordinary science.) Another name for this state is perplexity.

Anxiety and perplexity is the cause of tension in creative teams. Far too often it is misdiagnosed as unhealthy conflict. When the perplexity is foreclosed (usually in the name of time-urgency or team harmony), it destroys a team’s ability to find deeply creative solutions to problems.

Back in April, Bruce Nussbaum wrote a provocative little article publicly declaring the death of design thinking, and isolating the true active ingredient of design thinking: CQ, or creative intelligence, “the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions.” Exactly.

CQ is bound up with the ability to let go of an older conception of a problem, to immerse in perplexity and, never looking back, to navigate to the other side of it to an unprecedented solution.

I think Nussbaum overstated his case to stimulate conversation, so I won’t take the bait and try to argue that design thinking is still relevant and vital. Instead, I want to try to outdo Nussbaum by unmasking CQ for what it really is. Quoting Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ “If you want design thinking to produce deep innovations, try putting a philosopher on your team.