Rebellion seems to be losing its good conscience. It is palpably less socially acceptable to be socially unacceptable than it was a decade or two decades ago. With each passing year breaking taboos becomes more taboo. No wonder we require so much tolerance and permissiveness.

There is nothing more idiosyncratic than an individual burning with the need to develop a comprehensive and universal understanding of existence. But these freakish craftsmen are the manufacturers of common sense and it is by their products that you and your people make sense of the world.

The less completely we understand it, the more completely we want to control it.

Next time you are tempted to question the reality of some being with the question “does it exist?” or “is it real?” instead ask: “How might this entity in question exist? — and given this possible way existing how do we test its actuality?”

This is the kernel of the ontological work ethic.

*

Disbelief is just as hard as belief if one has an ontological work ethic. There are so many possible modes of existence one must eliminate before one can declare nonexistence of some thing. And to declare something nonsensical is in some ways even harder.

It is so much easier to begin with limited ontological repertoire — a set of templates — and to check any reality candidate’s qualification against the most approximate template: “If it is not real, it is, by definition, imaginary.”

It is so easier to start with simple criteria for what might be considered true, and refuse to even consider any truth that fails to satisfy these criteria: “If it is not true, it is, by definition, false.”

And of course, it is so much easier to question a person’s character than to question the things a person says. When facing a stranger’s strange claim, we prefer to examine the stranger’s head or history than examine his strange claim.

*

Real and actual are not synonyms.

Actuality is immanent. Reality is a metaphysical speculation derived from actuality: actuality’s transcendent cause.

I am tempted to try to find terms to correspond with each of my metaphysical axes.

Cosmos, time, awareness :: Real, actual… authentic? genuine? true? faithful?

For me, there are two modes of philosophy left, a sort of philosophical alpha and omega of starting thought and finishing it (in the sense of finishing furniture):

1. Wittgenstein’s formulation, “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’.” This I see as philosophy proper: thought seeking footing in chaos.
2. The design of a worldview — or better, lifeworld — rooted in explicit language (words, images, gestures: perceptible forms) and oriented toward a certain way of existing as a person. This may actually be the essence of religion.

Latour’s “pivot table” of modes of inquiry is made up of elements so deeply heterogeneous it feels like an anti-schema. The elements are included in the table specifically because they are “incommensurable” (though definitely relatable to one another), which means my usual geometrical mode of grasping schemas is useless. I’ve said before that unless I can draw something I haven’t understood it… this table is going to force me to find a new way/ways of understanding and relating ideas. It hurts in that way that raises my hopes.

A person who is esteemed too much is dehumanized differently but just as much as a person who is esteemed too little.

The damage of dehumanization has less to do with dignity or worth than the ability to enter into human relationships without prohibitive difficulty.

This might help explain why celebrities often go nuts.

From Latour’s Inquiry into Modes of Existence, a discussion on the concept of instauration (underlines added by me):

To say that something — a scientific fact, a house, a play, an idol, a group — is “constructed,” is to say at least three different things that we must manage to get across simultaneously — and that neither the formalists nor their critics can hear any longer.

First of all, it is important to stress that we find ourselves in a strange type of doubling or splitting during which the precise source of action is lost. This is what the French expression faire faire — to make (something) happen, to make (someone) do (something) — preserves so preciously. If you make your children do their vacation homework assignments, you do not do them yourselves, and the children won’t do them without you; if you read in your Latin grammar that “Caesar pontem fecit,” you know that the divine Julius himself did not transport the beams that were to span the Rhine, but you also know for certain that his legionnaires would not have transported them without his orders. Every use of the word “construction” thus opens up an enigma as to the author of the construction: when someone acts, others get moving, pass into action. We must not miss this particular pass.

Second, to say of something that it is constructed is to make the direction of the vector of the action uncertain. Balzac is indeed the author of his novels, but he often writes, and one is tempted to believe him, that he has been “carried away by his characters,” who have forced him to put them down on paper. Here we again have the doubling of faire faire, but now the arrow can go in either direction: from the constructor to the constructed or vice versa, from the product to the producer, from the creation to the creator. Like a compass needle stymied by a mass of iron, the vector oscillates constantly, for nothing obliges us to believe Balzac; he may be the victim of an illusion, or he may be telling a big lie by repeating the well-worn cliche? of the Poet inspired by his Muse.

We find the clearest instance of this oscillation pushed to an extreme with marionettes and their operators, since there can be no doubt about the manipulator’s control over what he manipulates: yes, but it so happens that his hand has such autonomy that one is never quite sure about what the puppet “makes” his puppeteer do, and the puppeteer isn’t so sure either. The courts are cluttered with criminals and lawyers, the confessionals with sinners whose “right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.” There is the same uncertainty in the laboratory: it takes time for colleagues to decide at last whether the artificial lab experiment gives the facts enough autonomy for them to exist “on their own” “thanks to” the experimenter’s excellent work. A new oscillation: to receive the Nobel Prize, it is indeed the scientist herself who has acted; but for her to deserve the prize, facts had to have been what made her act, and not just the personal initiative of an individual scientist whose private opinions don’t interest anyone. How can we not oscillate between these two positions?

We can break out of this oscillation by identifying the third and most decisive ingredient of the composite notion of construction. To say of a thing that it is constructed is to introduce a value judgment, not only on the origin of the action — double trouble, as we have just seen — but on the quality of the construction: it is not enough for Balzac to be carried away by his characters, he still has to be well carried away; it is not enough for the experimenter to construct facts through artifices; the facts still have to make him a good experimenter, well situated, at the right moment, and so on. Constructed, yes, of course, but is it well constructed? Every architect, every artist, even every philosopher has known the agony of that scruple; every scientist wakes up at night tormented by this question: “But what if it were merely an artifact?” (In this respect, at least, who doesn’t feel like a scientist?)

Here is an astonishing thing, which proves how hard it is, when one lives among the Moderns, not to be mistaken about oneself: none of these three aspects shows up in the use of the word “construction,” as it is commonly deployed in critical moves.

When someone asks the question “Is it true or is it actually a construction?” the implication is usually “Does that exist independently of any representation?” or, on the contrary, “is it a completely arbitrary product of the imagination of an omnipotent creator who has pulled it out of his own resources?” The doubling of the action? Lost? The oscillation as to the direction of the vector? Gone. The judgment of quality? Out of the question, since all constructions are equivalent. In the final analysis, the term “constructivism” does not even include something that the humblest craftsman, the most modest architect, would have at least recognized in his own achievements: that there is a huge difference between making something well and making it badly! With constructivism used this way, we can understand why the fundamentalists have become crazed with desire for a reality that nothing and no one has constructed.

What is astonishing is that the Moderns all live surrounded by constructions, within the most artificial worlds ever developed. Saturated with images, they are savvy consumers of tons of manufactured products, avid spectators of cultural productions invented from A to Z; they live in huge cities all of whose details have been put in place one by one, and often recently; they are dazzled with admiration for works of imagination. And yet their idea of creation, construction, production, is so strangely bifurcated that they end up claiming they have to choose between the real and the artificial. Anyone who thinks at all like an anthropologist can only remain dumbstruck before this lack of self-knowledge: how have they managed to last until now while being so badly mistaken about their own virtues? If we take the “fundamentalist threat” into account, we have to wonder about their chances of survival.

How can we decant into a different word the three essential aspects I have just listed, which the word “construction” no longer seems to be able to contain? When one wants to modify the connotation of a term, it’s best to change the term. Here I turn to Souriau once more: let us borrow the term INSTAURATION in the sense he gave it.

An artist, Souriau says, is never the creator, but always the instaurator of a work that comes to him but that, without him, would never proceed toward existence. If there is something that a sculptor never asks himself, it is this critical question: “Am I the author of the statue, or is the statue its own author?” We recognize here the doubling of the action on the one hand, the oscillation of the vector on the other. But what interests Souriau above all is the third aspect, the one that has to do with the quality, the excellence of the work produced: if the sculptor wakes up in the middle of the night, it is because he still has to let himself do what needs doing, so as to finish the work or fail. Let us recall that the painter of La Belle Noiseuse in Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” had ruined everything in his painting by getting up in the dark and adding one last touch that, alas, the painting didn’t require. You have to go back again and again, but each time you risk losing it all. The responsibility of the masterpiece to come — the expression is also Souriau’s — hangs all the heavier on the shoulders of an artist who has no model, because in such cases you don’t simply pass from power to action. Everything depends on what you are going to do next, and you alone have the competence to do it, and you don’t know how. This, according Souriau, is the riddle of the Sphinx: “Guess, or you’ll be devoured!” You’re not in control, and yet there’s no one else to take charge. It’s enough to make anyone wake up at night in a cold sweat. Anyone who hasn’t felt this terror hasn’t measured the abyss of ignorance at whose edge creation totters.

The notion of instauration in this sense has the advantage that it brings together the three features identified above: the double movement of faire faire; the uncertainty about the direction of the vectors of the action; and the risky search, without a pre-existing model, for the excellence that will result (provisionally) from the action.

But for this notion to have a chance to “take,” and to be invested gradually with the features that the notion of construction ought to have retained, there is one condition: the act of instauration has to provide the opportunity to encounter beings capable of worrying you. BEINGS whose ontological status is still open but that are nevertheless capable of making you do something, of unsettling you, insisting, obliging you to speak well of them on the occasion of branchings where Sphinxes await — and even whole arrays of Sphinxes. Articulable beings to which instauration can add something essential to their autonomous existence. Beings that have their own resources. It is only at this price that the trajectories whose outlines we are beginning to recognize might have a meaning beyond the simply linguistic.

On this account, the statue that awaits “potentially” in the chunk of marble and that the sculptor comes along to liberate cannot satisfy us. Everything would already be in place in advance, and we could only alternate between two bifurcated descriptions: either the sculptor simply follows the figure outlined in detail in advance or else he imposes on the shapeless raw material the destination that he has “freely chosen.” No instauration would then be necessary. No anxiety. No Sphinx would threaten to devour the one who fails to solve the riddle. This ontological status is hardly worthy of a statue, at least not a statue of quality; at most, it would do for molding a set of plaster dwarfs for a garden. No, there have to be beings that escape both these types of resources: “creative imagination” on the one hand, “raw material” on the other. Beings whose continuity, prolongation, extension would come at the cost of a certain number of uncertainties, discontinuities, anxieties, so that we never lose sight of the fact that their instauration could fail if the artist didn’t manage to grasp them according to their own interpretive key, according to the specific riddle that they pose to those on whom they weigh; beings that keep on standing there, uneasy, at the crossing.

As there is no commonly accepted term to designate the trajectories of instauration — Souriau proposes “anaphoric progression”! — I shall introduce a bit of jargon and propose to distinguish BEING-AS-BEING from BEING-AS-OTHER. The first seeks its support in a SUBSTANCE that will ensure its continuity by shifting with a leap into the foundation that will undergird this assurance. To characterize such a leap, we can use the notion of TRANSCENDENCE again, since, in uncertainty, we leave experience behind and turn our eyes toward something that is more solid, more assured, more continuous than experience is. Being rests on being, but beings reside elsewhere. Now the beings that demand instauration do not ensure their continuity in this way. Moreover, they offer no assurance regarding either their origin or their status or their operator. They have to “pay for” their continuity, as we have already seen many times, with discontinuities. They depend not on a substance on which they can rely but on a SUBSISTENCE that they have to seek out at their own risk. To find it, they too have to leap, but their leap has nothing to do with a quest for foundations. They do not head up or down to seat their experience in something more solid; they only move out in front of experience, prolonging its risks while remaining in the same experimental tonality. This is still transcendence, of course, since there is a leap, but it is a small TRANSCENDENCE. In short, a very strange form of IMMANENCE, since it does have to pass through a leap, a hiatus, to obtain its continuity — we could almost say a “trans-descendence,” to signal effectively that far from leaving the situation, this form of transcendence deepens its meaning; it is the only way to prolong the trajectory. …

In fact, this jargon has no other goal but to shed light on the central hypothesis of our inquiry: from being-as-being we can deduce only one type of being about which we might speak in several ways, whereas we are going to try to define how many other forms of alterities a being is capable of traversing in order to continue to exist. While the classic notion of CATEGORY designates different ways of speaking of the same being, we are going to try to find out how many distinct ways a being has to pass through others. Multiplicity is not located in the same place in the two cases. Whereas there were, for Aristotle for example, several manners of speaking about a being, for us all those manners belong to a single mode, that of knowledge of the referential type [REF]. The being itself remains immobile, as being. Everything changes if we have the right really to question the alteration of beings in several keys, authorizing ourselves to speak of being-as-other. If it is right to say, as Tarde does, that “difference proceeds by differing,” there must be several modes of being that ensure their own subsistence by selecting a distinct form of alterity, modes that we can thus encounter only by creating different opportunities for instauration for each one, in order to learn to speak to them in their own language.

What is interesting here is the anthropological consequence of an argument that would otherwise remain overly abstract: why have the Moderns restricted themselves to such a small number of ontological templates whereas in other areas they have caused so many innovations, transformations, revolutions to proliferate? Where does this sort of ontological anemia come from? Beings in the process of instauration: these are precisely what we have trouble finding among the Moderns, and this is why it is so hard for the Moderns to encounter other COLLECTIVES except in the form of “CULTURES.”

…We have seen why: either the Moderns find themselves face to face with obtuse raw materiality, or they have to turn toward representations that reside only in their heads. And what is more, they have to choose between the two: in theory, of course, since in practice they never choose; but this is exactly the split that interests us here: why is what is necessary in practice impossible in theory?

We can’t see seeing.

We can’t hear hearing.

But, we can know knowing?

*

By watching and listening and reflecting it to some degree it becomes possible to assess whether another person sees, hears or knows.

The same is true of one’s self. When we do not know whether to believe or eyes or ears, we want testimony from other senses. But knowledge always says” “trust me.”

Senses only come to know themselves through the dialogue known as common sense.

*

Faculties are caught in action, listened to, interpreted, spoken about, coordinated and disciplined.

If only it were as easy to agree on the truth as it is to know it.

Too few questions have been raised about why the Emperor’s subjects were so quick to lie and claim they could see his new clothes.

And for this reason, we are now far too quick to make claims about the nonexistence of new clothes. We lack a certain shame that we should be ashamed to lack…

Some philosophical works do not build part by intelligible part to an intelligible whole.

They begin with a not-yet-intelligible whole (that is, an intelligible whole that has not yet become intelligible to the reader), and barge forward not-yet-intelligible-part by not-yet-intelligible-part, seemingly to nowhere — until the reader finally finds a way to understand it so whole, parts and the relationships that connect them suddenly and all-at-once become intelligible.

This understanding, however, cannot be conveyed explicitly. Certainly, there is an explicit understanding to be had, but it is a side-effect of understanding. The real understanding is tacit know-how that guides the use of concepts. The intellectual moves are the true substance of such philosophy.

In a sense, these works must be read forward but understood backwards. They are exercises in patience and anxiety tolerance. They are difficult.

This passage from Latour’s Rejoicing recalls the original title of Borge’s oddest little book, inexplicably called Dreamtigers in English, but in Spanish, El Hacedor.

There is something disheartening, we must admit, about this dependence of the word on the present day, on the current conditions of utterance. All the more so as all the efforts at apologetics, over the course of time, have been directed against that very dependence. Torrents of sermons, thousands of volumes have been poured out to see to it that the ‘existence of God’ does not depend on the word, on the will, on the goodwill of human beings. And, conversely, it is precisely the ‘enemies of religion’ who have, always, had a field day with this obvious fact: human beings make the gods in their own image. And now, I’m hoping to use relativism to reclaim that critical vocabulary to record religious speech piously and faithfully? Mankind, that god-making machine. It’s insane. Or else, what we’re dealing with here is an apologetics even more perverse than the rest, a cleric’s ruse.

Continue reading The Maker →

If I were interviewing brand strategists, I wouldn’t even let candidates into my office until they answered one question asked in the lobby: “Have you ever had a conversion experience?”

Any applicant who does not say “yes” and and then, unbidden, continues to elaborate until suddenly stopping, embarrassed — anyone who answers factually about an opinion switcharoo or making a decision to take a different path — gets sent home.

The story can be about any conversion, any shift, however superficial. But the story must have some pain and bewilderment in it. And other people, too — at the very least, an author. There must be unaccountable epiphanies and telltale hand gestures of speechlessness with too much to say. It must be a story of inhabiting one world as one person then finding oneself in another world as another.

Am I setting the bar too high or too weird? Too bad. These are the qualifications.