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.

Some are overwhelmingly egoistic, while others are insatiably nobody.

At first thought, you might think the egoist should occupy the world most vividly and unforgettably. But think in terms of need rather than capacity: Who needs to be seen — and by whom, and as what…?

How is there not a Third Day Adventist Church that believes that everything hangs on what happens between Great Friday and Easter Sunday? That’s an inexcusable empty tray in the steam table of our denominational buffet.

(Sorry, I’m reading theology these days…)

In work and in religion, we paint in a constricted ontological palette. That is, we acknowledge certain ways in which an entity can be, and neglect or deny others.

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Facts, knowledge . . . doctrines, “faith” as beliefs.

Techniques, methods, processes . . . traditions, customs, rituals.

Things, artifacts, outputs, products . . . holy places, relics, books.

People, roles . . . leaders, authorities, fellow believers.

Ethics, manners, prudence . . . morality, laws, acts.

Plan . . . destiny, providence.

Objective . . . judgment.

Brand . . . symbols.

Feelings . . . passions.

Career path . . .  spiritual path.

Self . . . soul.

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These thingly things I’ve listed — things we can “wrap our minds around” and comprehend — ideas, methods, products, people, ethics, growth, plans, goals, selves, etc. — all orbit about an essential “one thing needful”, and it is that thing that invests what orbits them with coherence and meaning.

This is not to denigrate things. They are important. We need things in all their variety. But when we fret exclusively over the periphery of thingness, the center vanishes, breaks up, dissipates and loses its capacity to pull the myriad things of the world into relation.

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“The Second Coming”

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

– W. B. Yeats

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Even our religion is industrial. Or was our industry formed in the image of what religion has become? Assembly-line ontology.

Back in high school my art teacher used to tell us that the reason our cadmium red, ultramarine blue and cadmium yellow acrylic paints wouldn’t produce a decent violet or green was that they were not “spectrum” red, yellow and blue, which were impossible to produce with paints. I was also mystified at why red and blue-green seemed to vibrate more against one another than red and green.

Then in physics class I discovered the difference between additive and subtractive color mixing, and everything became clearer. I tried to explain it to my art teacher and she didn’t want to hear it.

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For anyone who sat in my room with 25 years ago while I twiddled dimmer switches on red, green and blacklight bulbs and raved inexplicably about cyan and magenta and the nonexistence of pure spectrum pigments — here’s an attempt at an explanation: This turned out to be the prototype for my typical of conflict: “You aren’t approaching this problem from the right angle.” They say: “No, we are. Our materials/facts/data/procedures are not pure enough, and if they were my formulas would miraculously work for a change.”

Arvo Part always sounds amazing in autumn.

• Fratres
• Tabula Rasa – 1. Ludus
• Tabula Rasa – 2. Silentium

Just because all the nonsense you’ve spouted has always turned out to make perfect sense in hindsight — it does not follow that the nonsense you are spouting now will eventually make sense.

Whenever I breach etiquette, and do what everyone knows better than to do, and in the course of normal conversation actually make reference to religion or religious symbols or concepts, I sometimes pay the steep price of being asked if I am religious, or, worse, if I’m Christian. I find I just can’t answer that question. Or at least I cannot answer that question as asked. My views on what religion is (and what religion is supposed to do) have moved so far from the common ground of believers and atheists that my “yes” cannot mean the “yes!” I mean, nor can my “no” mean anything that should earn me an ally or enemy.

This is why reading Bruno Latour’s Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech is a relief. At least I know I’m not alone in this difficulty. And maybe I’ve never been, but that’s part of the difficulty… Continue reading The torments of religious speech →

One key purpose of qualitative research is to help us recover philosophical problems in what seem at first glance to be technical problems.

I am leaning toward calling my book The Ten Thousand Everythings.

I am going to return the term “chaos” to the fractal geometers, mythologists and the general public. Chaos is experienced disorder, with many possible metaphysical underpinnings.

My own underpinning for chaos, which is speculative and entirely unprovable, but nonetheless believable and useful, is what I’m calling Myriadex: the simultaneous presence of too many orders which must be filtered down to a manageable subset of systematic, harmonious or at least non-conflicting orders if we wish to experience them as order. Chaos in my view is not ten thousand things waiting to be ordered, it is ten-thousand everythings talking at once in innumerable languages about all things at once and creating intolerable cacophony. We just want reality to speak one truth at a time, so we can hear what the hell it is saying to us.

We tend to think most about what we think best, and this is why so many people love to think in terms of things that are easily quantified. The mind can wrap itself around such things pretty comfortably.

I think this is why when people think about economies, distribution is thought of in terms of material possessions. Material possessions is certainly important, but it is not the only thing at stake in an economy. Another important consideration of distribution that is rarely discussed is personal choice. Really, who would dispute the claim that power is one of the primary “goods” distributed by an economy?

If you look at things in terms of possessions, the problem of poverty appears relatively small. Most Americans are doing very well, even if some have much less than others.

But if you look at distribution in terms of personal choice — how much control people have over how they spend their time — this is where you see extreme imbalances. This is not a matter of quantities of leisure time. It has to do with meaning each person derives from activities, and the control a person has over the decision of which activities to perform. A person who spends 80 hours a week doing something he loves is far freer than a person who

This is the best reason why left-leaners should harp on economic equality: without it, freedom is a mere political theory, not a reality.

Philosophies, like everything, can be designed for usefulness, usability and desirability.

Propaganda is philosophy designed for popular adoption.

Brand is private-sector propaganda.

To wish away politics is to wish away others, and to wish away others is to wish away the world transcending one’s own horizon.

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A widespread cynical rejection of politics as essentially base and unworthy of respect is a symptom of collective solipsism.

In philosophy, finding a new frenemy is the best thing that can happen to you. As the significance and value of the ideas deepens and intensifies, so does the uncertainty of whether your own activation of these ideas will harmonize with the hopes of the author. This electric sense is what jolts me out of bed to read at ungodly hours of the morning.

The horizon is what makes philosophy such a perpetually humiliating discipline. Schopenhauer said it most succinctly: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Nietzsche also spoke of the horizon myriad times in myriad ways, but always with fathomless irony: “One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.”

This passage from Mouffe’s Agonistics is a beautiful and useful thought-jewel:

…We argued that two key concepts – ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’ – are necessary to grasp the nature of the political. Both pointed to the importance of acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity that manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism. This dimension, we proposed, impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power. This, in turn, requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order. In our vocabulary, this means recognizing the ‘hegemonic’ nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. We call ‘hegemonic practices’ the practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed. According to this approach, every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always be otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. Any order is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices. It is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that is exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices that attempt to disarticulate it in an effort to install another form of hegemony.