Assimilation
Conformity
Compliance
Adherence
Coordination
Integration

Distillation process: Chaotic -> Complicated -> Complex -> Simple

Propaganda/advertising process: Chaotic -> Simplistic

Institutionalization process: Chaotic -> Complicated

Unexpected events can be painful — but they are also instructive.

Following the trauma and disorientation of unexpected events, we go into learning mode. We study the unexpected event, explaining how it happened, cataloging its characteristics, identifying the early signs that the unexpected was about to happen.

Now we know how to expect the unexpected. We stay alert and vigilant and ready to respond.

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Innovation is a kind of unexpected event, and learning from innovation follows a similar pattern.

We usually find innovations a little implausible or unrealistic at first. Being new and unprecedented they don’t yet belong to reality as we’ve known it. (Think about everyone’s favorite example of radical innovation — how much ridicule was heaped upon it by precisely those who now celebrate its success.)

The innovations we admire most are the “disruptive” ones — the deep innovations that disorient and reorient our perceptions of what is realistic.

These deep innovations are the most instructive ones. Though at first glance disruptive innovations seem to burst into the world whole in flashes of intuition, closer scrutiny reveals that they generally owe their success to readily-discernible principles that had eluded us in the past — probably because we’d become engrained in the established ways of doing things.

These principles can be distilled into best practices and leveraged to create fresh new innovations.

And because these new innovations are founded on proven, well-established principles, we can justify them to sensible people who reject the squishy and subjective mythology of intuition and insight, and who demand a more objective, systematic and responsible approach to innovation.

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From the liner notes of the first Coolies album, which consisted entirely of Paul Simon covers:

Q: “Don’t the Coolies perform any original songs?”

A: “We do! Just ask Paul Simon — he wrote most of them.

Voegelin, from Autobiographical Reflections:

“…I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian — not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bete noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably I have never answered criticisms of this kind; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry but they cannot be partners in a discussion.”

The practical danger of this type of statement (though it is undeniably true in some cases) is that it provides a ready-made attitude by which a conservative soul can automatically reject a whole swath of -isms (like Postmodernism) as suspected ideology simply for being associated (however loosely) with known ideologies, or to even dismiss a new and apparently non-nonsensical or irrational philosophical position that requires effort to understand.

This sort of out-of-hand exteriorized dismissal (as an object to observe and explain rather than  a fellow-I to hear out and learn from), is one of the most useful ideologist’s devices. And it prevents him from being a partner in a discussion because he’s too busy observing and inquiring into your true motives to hear what you’re trying to tell him.

Norms are ambiguous: they are observed as “is” and imposed/complied with as an “ought”.

In other words, they are treated as a hybrid of natural and moral fact, and it might be this that gives norms their power to shame us into conformity — into affecting the appearance that we are what we ought to be.

Click image for hi-res printable image.

Listen to the The Worst Mammal Overture. For maximum stupidity crank the volume.

I drew this picture somewhere around 1989. The Overture was recorded in 2003 as a sonic transcription of the visual image.

Three books in my library: After Method, Beyond Method, Against Method.

Missing are Before Method, Within Method, For Method.

What?, How?, Why? — these seem a natural triad of questions. Intuitively, the question Who? feels like a hybrid — an answer derived from the answers to these more fundamental questions.

I wonder what kind of metaphysical prejudice underlies this “naturalness”?

I’m trying on this on for awhile: Who?, How?, What? as primary, with and Why? as the derivative hybrid…

(No, we will not be having any quatrads on this blog, so don’t even try it.)

Some reasonable comparisons appear hyperbolic because of a hyperbolic understanding of one of the terms of the comparison.

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Such accusations preserve the hyperbolic understanding of the term — and help prevent the understanding from being revisited.

Some couples seem to fight all the time because they’re addicted to make-up sex.

Similarly, I think a big chunk of the USA scares the shit out of itself to experience the intoxication of feeling galvanized as One Nation in the face of a terrifying enemy.

That’s the best I’ve come up with to explain the strange combination of terror and palpable giddiness that dominates Fox News.

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Then there’s the fact that emergencies demand hypocrisy: We have to be (temporarily) unfree to be free; we have to close ranks and be dittoheads if we want to preserve individualism against “liberal fascists”; we have to fight protracted wars if we ever wish to have lasting peace. The list goes on and on.

If your temperament is utterly misaligned with the values of the tradition to which you are committed, emergencies are the most expedient way to resolve the self-conflict.

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Come to think of it, Borges observed the terror-giddiness combo back in the 1940s… Continue reading National make-up sex →

From John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Science Research:

Presence is, obviously, what is made present or (as I shall sometimes say) condensed ‘in-here’. … these are presences enacted into being within practices. Some are representations while others are objects or processes. Presence, then, is any kind of in-here enactment.

Manifest absence goes with presence. It is one of its correlates since presence is incomplete and depends on absence. To make present is also to make absent. …

Otherness, or absence that is not made manifest, also goes with presence. It too is necessary to presence. But it disappears. Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting while it goes on routinely… Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting… Perhaps (though no doubt this is an overlapping category) it disappears because what is being brought to presence and manifest absence cannot be sustained unless it is Othered…

It follows that method assemblage is also about the crafting and enacting of boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness. These boundaries are necessary. Each category depends on the others, so it is not that they can be avoided. To put it differently, there will always be Othering. What is brought to presence — or manifest absence — is always limited, always potentially contestable. How it might be crafted is endlessly uncertain, endlessly revisable. Normative methods try to define and police boundary relations in ways that are tight and hold steady. An inquiry into slow method suggests that we might imagine more flexible boundaries, and different forms of presence and manifest absence. Other possibilities can be imagined, for instance if we attend to non-coherence.

I hate to affirm a neoconservative’s thought process, but these correspond to Donald Rumsfeld’s distinctions between known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and honestly Rumsfeld’s articulation is much clearer:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

But, as Yogi Bera said:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Though Rumsfeld was absolutely clear on the fact that unknown unknowns exist, his approach to his work precluded any practical relationship with them. This is because he was so occupied with his knowns (his facts and his explicit questions) that anything that threatened the integrity and clarity of his knowns had to be Othered — until that otherness was able to overwhelm his sense of certainty.

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Camper Van Beethoven – “Sweethearts”

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It’s easy to admit that there are questions we cannot yet answer and to acknowledge that there are questions that we cannot yet ask, because they have not yet dawned on us. But it is completely another matter to live one’s life prepared to allow new questions to dawn on us.

And to be completely frank, this is because we think we already know what a new question dawning on us feels like and feels like, and what the open state of mind looks and feels like — and we are utterly wrong about it.

We think it just comes upon us like some glorious transfiguration of the problem from everyday dullness into some sort of brilliant eureka moment. We think the insight will hit us like a brand new set of opinions about the world we’re already seeing. These are the fantasies of people who have never lived the reality of radical thought, largely because their ignorant preconceptions preclude the reality.

Fact is, a fresh, new question in your mind feels terrible. It feels like shit to begin to have a new thought. It feels as terrible as going into labor.

It takes a long time to come to terms with the agony, to work through it and to process the just-detected-but-as-yet-still-unknown unknown into a feeling of new potential, of intellectual expansiveness and inspiration.

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To learn the answer to a known unknown, simply ask the question that fills in the gap in your knowledge. Ask the sorts of questions that elicit a factual response, the kind of question that begins with “what”, “how”, “who”, or “why”.

One strategy for uncovering an unknown unknown is to learn from other people: invite another person to relate a story. Instead of asking an explicit question, ask for a story or ask the person to tell you about some area you are interested in.

The more you request instruction instead of asking for answers to questions the more able you will be to learn something you didn’t anticipate and were unable to anticipate prior to the encounter.

When things go wrong we assume people have not done what they know is right. Sometimes this is true.

But sometimes things go wrong because people want to do exactly what they know is right, when the reality they are acting into does not afford such exactitude.

Out of a desire for moral clarity, for clean definition of right and wrong, for unambiguous, algorithmic rules of conduct — upstanding citizens can become fanatics and reduce reality so far that it becomes brittle. It becomes necessary for such people to aggressively shut out all sources of ambiguity. It is necessary to close their ears to the full testimony of their senses, to the ramifications of reason, and to the objections and appeals of their neighbor — and in effect, they make the mind a place of its own, a heaven-fortress of faith which protects the faithful from everything that conflicts with it: the realities that transcend the facts of the faith.

Blame John Law (and his reckless linking of ethnography to fractal geometry) for the following spew of unrefined semithoughts, which is really an unsuccessful attempt to digest what I’ve just read.

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There is no space in life. Everything happens in points on lines.

All of life happens on a single point in time that is sometimes a recollection of memory or an anticipation of some possibility or an absorption in a moment. That point projects time. And in the point is a point where we are. That point comes and goes and roams about with our attention, but it is always projecting space. And then there’s that weird thing we call “others”. In each other we project projections that sort of overlap with our own in some incomprehensible fashion. And when we try to imagine all these dots on all these twisting curving lines all together in some vast tangled-together unity, and we try to comb it all out, twist the threads together and try to make them interweave in some orderly textile pattern, we invent 3rd person reality, where everyone lives without anyone living there, really. We live on our thread, conceptualizing our contextile life-fabric. (By the way, that style of 3rd person conceptualization understood as somehow more real than the 1st person experience of conceptualizing it is the essence of metaphysical thinking. The reverse practice, of reducing the 3rd person to the 1st — describing the process by which 3rd person conceptions are produced and leaving alone the question of what-is-made-out-of-what — is phenomenological thinking. Or that’s how I understand it, anyway.)

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History is the 3rd person account of what nobody ever experiences except as an account of what happened. Yet most people experience history as the template for what might be happening now or in the future, though such things never ever happen. This is why we never feel a part of history.

And science is exactly the same way. Science happens on the thread, too, to individuals. Science, too, projects a contextile into which we imagine ourselves and all things woven.

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I think nothing feels truly real to us until it is ethnographed back into the 1st person realities we experience. To make them relatable, we have to take these amazingly ingenious abstractions we’ve made — things like great events, physical laws, economies — and show how each and every one of them occurs on the thread of a life, by relating them narratively, as events in someone’s life.

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I’m sorry about this post, but I’m not deleting it.

Every time I use the word “horizon” I experience a pine-mouthy aftertaste of anxiety.

This anxiety always means the same thing: the wrongness of a conception has fully ripened, and it is time to stop thinking through it — by way of it — and instead to try to step outside of it in order to discover its inadequacy.

The spatial model of knowledge with a point-of-view, a perspective and an outer-limiting vanishing point, might render some important conceptions inconceivable.

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By the way, anxiety is grossly underrated as an intellectual tool. People who listen to that hippie dolt Joseph Campbell and “follow their bliss” journey straight up their own assholes.

If you want knowledge, head in the opposite direction and follow what displeases you in ways you can’t articulate.

If you do that and then accidentally blunder into some bliss, you’ll discover sweeter, more enduring and productive delusions — what we euphemistically refer to as truth.

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I’m perpetually dissatisfied because that’s good method.