Category Archives: Philosophy

OPP

ANT, Pragmatism

Obligatory Passage Point (OPP) is going to be a useful concept. From Wikipedia:

Obligatory passage points are a feature of actor-networks, usually associated with the initial (problematization) phase of a translation process. An OPP can be thought of as the narrow end of a funnel, that forces the actors to converge on a certain topic, purpose or question. The OPP thereby becomes a necessary element for the formation of a network and an action program. The OPP thereby mediates all interactions between actors in a network and defines the action program. Obligatory passage points allow for local networks to set up negotiation spaces that allow them a degree of autonomy from the global network of involved actors.

To put it in Jamesian language, the “cash value” of all ideas involved in a social situation transacts at the OPP — for a social scientist, at least, who is interested in accounting for the transpiring of events. Is there any perspective deeper than that? (I’ll leave that question open.)

From, for and within

ANT, Pragmatism

Just as science is not really a body of knowledge on what is true about things, but rather the record of disciplined interactions human beings have with things, with a focus on the patterns that predictably occur when certain conditions are in place… philosophy is not really the truth of how human beings necessarily relate to existence (“the human condition”), but rather the record of individuals (who belong to societies) trying to make coherent and comprehensive sense of their own experience, as defined by what they take to be relevant, which is intimately connected with what that individual wishes to do in the world. Existence might be conceptualized in thingly objective terms, or psychological, intellectual, logical, political, experiential, moral, etc. terms.

And because what people take to be relevant varies from person to person — (and perhaps varies most dramatically between the type who decides to conceptualize his experience versus a type who simply interacts with whatever he encounters) — different people will have different philosophies, which will enable them to interact with the world in some very particular way, perhaps as a scientist or a philosopher, but maybe as a salesperson or a respiratory therapist or a concierge or a politician.

So, both science and philosophy attempt to relate to the whole of reality, but always from, for and within some purpose, outside of which there is nothing but the mystery of the possibility of learning and changing. In any intellectual activity an actor is always someone relating something, whether the emphasis is on the someone or on the something and even if that something is taken to be fellow someone/something actors.

I think my use of this approach to relating myself to existence, which includes as a consideration other people approaching existence differently from myself makes me a pragmatist. Never forget: American Pragmatism was a response to the experience of the Civil War.

Crediting James

ANT, Pragmatism

Graham Harman, from Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics:

We are now amused to think that there used to be two kinds of physics, one for the earth and one for the sky. But it is equally absurd that we still recognize two different kinds of reality: one for hard scientific fact and another for arbitrary social power. What exists is only actants: cars, subways, canoe-varnish, quarreling spouses, celestial bodies, and scientists, all on the same metaphysical footing.

I’ll say it again: as far as I can tell Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is nothing more than the most radical form of Pragmatism, which has advanced from its humble clean, abstract, conceptual infancy to a truly radical maturity, which for Pragmatism means a dirty, concrete mess of real life observations and real life applications of the understandings so derived. The most radical form of Pragmatism is practical Pragmatism.

The concept of “actant” is an ontology of Jamesian “cash value”, with all (other?) metaphysics (as such) bracketed — not negatively, but positively as something with force of some kind. When Latour uses accounting language — “I am perfectly happy with the resonance of the word [accounting] not only with Garfinkel’s accountability but also with ‘accounting books’, since the weak but essential link of accounting with economics has been one of the most productive, and unlikely, domains of science studies.” — it seems to me that it is precisely this pragmatic cash value inhabits the cells of the ANT spreadsheet. And really, money is a very human thing, and is embedded in the etymology of some of our most exalted words. It seems that extreme love or hatred of wealth seems symptomatic of of an individual’s rejection of being human.

 

Some advice from the past

Ethics

Worth some reflection:

A [crazy person’s] feelings are nearly always essentially right, but her
interpretations of her feelings are nearly always substantially wrong.
She knows what she feels, but not why she feels.

The single worst thing a [sane person] can do is to dismiss an intelligent
[crazy person’s] feelings because her theories on her feelings are ludicrous.
When an intelligent [crazy person] seems stupid or crazy, desperation is the
cause — the magnitude of the need to do something about her feelings is
overwhelming her intellectual integrity.

The more fantastic the explanation, the more serious the situation.

This means that a [sane person] ought to respect a [crazy person’s] feelings as
legitimate, and as something for which he is responsible — but he must
reserve the right to reject the [crazy person’s] explanation of her feelings.
(To openly reject her explanations, however, is rarely a good idea. It
is best to quietly take them with a grain of salt.)

Correlatively, the [crazy person] is far better off not demanding that the [sane person]
accept her explanations of herself. Rather, she should veto his
interpretations — with punishments proportionate to his apparent
wrongness.

If the [crazy person] does continue to demand acceptance of her explanations
and suffers painful consequences for doing so, the [sane person] should expect
even crueler punishments for not putting a stop to her demands. And if
the [sane person] believes her explanations… it’s over.

I’m laughing, but I am not joking.

Theory-choice

Fructivism, Ideas

Kuhn’s criteria for theory-choice:

Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation.

Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories.

Broad Scope – a theory’s consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain.

Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam’s Razor.

Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena.

But as Mitch Hedberg said, “There’s more to it than that!” Here are some additions, and I believe there are even more:

Meaningful – the theory’s compatibility with the theorist’s grounding orientation to life.

Contiguous – the theory’s capacity to integrate with an existing body of theory.

Intelligible – the theory situates the theorist in a world whose relevant features are intelligible.

Congenial – a theory should employ the theorist’s cognitive natural/acquired intellectual strengths.

Social – a theory’s reinforcing affirmation by a community with whom the theorist identifies, or, antithetically, it’s reinforcing rejection by a community against whom the theorist has defined himself.

Applicable – the existence of opportunities to use the theory practically and to develop the tacit intellectual practices (know-how) inherent in all practical application of theory

Concrete – the number of concrete examples available to 1) explicit demonstrate how the theory is practically applied and 2) to demonstrate its applicability

Spontaneous – a theory’s ability to shed conscious interpretation and to disappear into the phenomena themselves.

Do you consider yourself ‘broken’?

Biography, Ethics

From the Asphodel blog:

Question: “Do you consider yourself ‘broken’? What does broken mean to you?”

Response:

Until March of this year, I did. I was.

Until May, in fact, I was still in deep torpor of pain from it, but, looking back I can see where the cries became something more like “this hurts so much” than “I just want to die fuck me fuck you fuck life kill it all drown it in the boiling shit it loves so much”……

My will was broken – I was ready to accept antidepressants and keeping my head down as a new way of life – I wanted nothing more than to disappear into bed and sigh away the rest of my life thinking about how unfair and wretched people are, what liars they are, what a waste human flesh is. My capacity to love was broken, had been for a year or so.

I can’t really be certain what changed, precisely, but I healed. I’m scarred. It’s stronger and my emotions, though still extreme and dynamic, are smarter for it.

In my lexicon, a broken person is traumatized past the point of being productive (pleasing and useful to one’s self; CF below) and has given up on being pleased by living. Failure does it – the failure of love, personal failure, professional / artistic failure of the essential mode of existence that gives purpose to human existence can break us. Some recover, some do not.

Someone who has not ventured a great attempt is not broken, though.

Strength is a bizarre thing; it can’t be assessed from a distant vantage. Human strength, spiritual / emotional / personal strength, is subtly different from ‘fortitude’ (endurance of suffering or loss) and ‘power’ (the ability to effect change) yet it incorporates those qualities – and strength can certainly come from having been broken. In any case, no one can be certain of their strength until the threat of being broken has been faced. It’s far worse than anything I’ve experienced otherwise. My back broke in 2005; that causes me sometimes excruciating pain and it certainly takes a great deal of my strength to cope with it every day, but I do, and the awareness that I can makes me aware of what I’m capable of, and shows me why I was successful at this&that endeavor as a younger person: it wasn’t just drive, or charisma, or natural ability that made things happen; it was centrally and most importantly the willingness to risk being broken that made good things occur in my life.

Far worse than my back breaking was the surprise divorce sprung on me by a woman I trusted, cherished, and adored. It would be an even longer response to go into much detail there, but I was so devastated that I – a moody and occasionally very dark person to begin with – reached a new low of personal strength. My spine breaking was truly nothing compared to the horror and pain that gave me.

That, too, scarred me deeply. The scars are stronger than the unbroken heart was, and there’s no question that I lost something bright and vital then – but maybe it’s something I needed to lose. My heart is smarter now. My core is not nearly as likely to be threatened, and so my usefulness and my ability to please others (thus myself) is not as weak, not as ephemeral as it was before.

So much I want to relate. I’ll have to think about it. For days, most likely.

I thank you deeply for the question, because answering it makes me consciously aware of it and more comfortable with it. I feel more able to take on the rest of the risks I’m facing, now, in the understanding that if I become broken again I won’t be as likely to just crumble and moan over it, wasting precious life on misery spent obsessed with ugliness and loss. I’ll remind myself to keep aware of this response and to live up to it.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism

ANT, Pragmatism, Synesis

Extending my post from a couple of days ago, “ANT = Practical pragmatism”:

When you are temperamentally theoretical, it is tempting to stop at theorizing about practice, and never to practice anything but theorizing.

When pragmatism begins to apply its insights to practice — that is, to a study specific situation with an aim to understand it in pragmatic terms (which will always turn up unexpected theoretical problems which must be resolved) — pragmatism becomes Actor-network theory.

Actor-network theory is practical pragmatism.

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As an experience researcher and strategist, this passage from Latour is galvanizing, because it articulates what I do, and what I’ve had great difficulty communicating to clients and colleagues who still live in an essentially objective world inhabited by opinionated, emotional and behaving subjects:

Even once reality has fully set in, the question of its unity is still pending. The common world has still to be collected and composed. As we shall see at the end of this book, this is where the social sciences may regain the political relevance that they seem to have lost by abandoning the ether of the social and the automated use of the critical repertoire that it allowed.

That idea of “collecting and composing” a shared understanding of the world is what I’ve called synesis. I believe this involves a mode of thinking which goes beyond the algorithmic ideal of business thought into the specifically philosophical mode of intuitive thinking, dialectic.

Then things can be taken even further by modifying the network through the act of design. Maybe this is the best definition of design: intentional modification of actor-networks?

 

 

Anthropology = empirical metaphysics

Anthropology, Hermeneutics, Synesis

From Reassembling the Social:

What ANT does is that it keeps asking the following question: Since every sociologist loads things into social ties to give them enough weight to account for their durability and extension, why not do this explicitly instead of doing it on the sly? Its slogan, ‘Follow the actors’, becomes, ‘Follow the actors in their weaving through things they have added to social skills so as to render more durable the constantly shifting interactions.’

It’s at this point that the real contrast between sociology of associations and sociology of the social will be most clearly visible. So far, I might have exaggerated the differences between the two viewpoints. After all, many schools of social science might accept the two first uncertainties as their departure point (especially anthropology, which is another name for empirical metaphysics)…

Fighting words from Latour

Phenomenology

From Reassembling the Social:

…Sociology has been embarrassed … by the prejudice that there exists a privileged locus in the social domain where action is ‘concrete’: ‘parole’ more than ‘langue’, ‘event’ more than ‘structure’, ‘micro’ more than ‘macro’, ‘individual’ more than ‘masses’, ‘interaction’ more than ‘society’, or, on the contrary, ‘classes’ more than ‘individual’, ‘meaning’ more than ‘force’, ‘practice’ more than ‘theory’, ‘corporate bodies’ more than ‘persons’, and so on. But if action is dislocal, it does not pertain to any specific site; it is distributed, variegated, multiple, dislocated and remains a puzzle for the analysts as well as for the actors.

This point will help to not confuse ANT with one of the many polemical movements that have appealed to the ‘concreteness’ of the human individual with its meaningful, interacting, and intentional action against the cold, anonymous, and abstract effects of the ‘determination by social structures’, or that has ignored the meaningful lived world of individual humans for a ‘cold anonymous technical manipulation’ by matter. Most often inspired by phenomenology, these reform movements have inherited all its defects: they are unable to imagine a metaphysics in which there would be other real agencies than those with intentional humans, or worse, they oppose human action with the mere ‘material effect’ of natural objects which, as they say, have ‘no agency’ but only ‘behavior’. But an ‘interpretative’ sociology is just as much a sociology of the social than any of the ‘objectivist’ or ‘positivist’ versions it wishes to replace. It believes that certain types of agencies — persons, intention, feeling, work, face-to-face interaction — will automatically bring life, richness, and ‘humanity’.

Apollinian-Dionysian-tragic

Brand, Hermeneutics, Synesis

Though Nietzsche rarely spoke of Hegel, and when he did he treated him more as a cultural force than a source of valid ideas, it is clear to me, based on my own experience of reading him, that Nietzsche thought dialectically, in the Hegelian sense.

It is undeniable that the Birth of Tragedy has an explicitly dialectical structure, and Nietzsche’s later disavowals of the work centered more on their treatment of Wagner than in the Apollinian-Dionysian-tragic dialectic at the center of the book. Actually, that structure is the key to understanding the apparent self-contradictions that pervade the rest of his work.

Continue reading Apollinian-Dionysian-tragic →

Design thinking

Design, Ethics, Ideas

Design thinking, though slightly more expansive than typical management thinking, still remains within the horizons of utilitarianism. To put it in Hannah Arendt’s language, the designer type still falls within the category homo faber.

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There’s doing what’s always done. Execution.

There’s thinking about doing what’s always done. Management.

There’s rethinking what’s always done in order to find a better way of doing. Design thinking.

There’s rethinking our thinking: how we think about what we do…

There’s rethinking ought: why we do what we do…

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“There are so many days that have not yet broken”

Intimacy

Ethics

Discussing one’s life story, beliefs, hopes and loves over a candle-light dinner is far less intimate than collaborating on a shared practical life problem — which is why most people prefer the former to the latter, and it is also why soul-mates get divorces.

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Without active involvement in the world with others, subjectivity is limited to the self. This is why those who need to cultivate their faith withdraw from practical life.

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The collaborations that most demand intimacy are the ones that cause the most anxiety, and arouse the strongest aggressive impulses. In such cases, whoever is in a position of power will be faced with the temptation to impose his own vision on the situation and force others involved in it to accept it whether they like it or not.

 

Back to ethics

Ethics

Understanding of alterity — the understanding of that which is “not I”, whether it takes the form of intersubjectivity or of objectivity (which is, in my opinion, simply a form of mediated intersubjectivity) — is a crucial matter. However, it is just as crucial not to allow concern for “the Other” to drag a thinker back into the old antithesis of self-vs-other. That line of thought inevitably leads to the modern disease of spasmodically oscillating between the antithetical extremes of autism and borderline.

What each of us must do is relate our own experience as we really experience it (trickier than it sounds!) to that which points beyond it, without slipping from methodological “bracketing” into practical denial, and without sliding outward into self-alienation in the name of service.

This relating/integrating activity, the attempt to conceive what it is that makes knowing and living worthwhile, and considering how to actualize it practically and concretely, not shortsightedly, but in the longest terms possible, which means involving others in that actualization — (this is where alterity enters the scene) — is the practice of ethics.

Below is a series of passages offered as support for ethical remojofication…

Continue reading Back to ethics →

Thoughts on ethics

Ethics, Metaphysics

An ethic supports a particular ethos. Behavior is judged ethically according to the ethos promoted or undermined. Ethics is relative.

Morality transcends ethics, and judges ethos and ethics.

According to this view, it is possible in principle to be ethically immoral by participating in bad ethos.

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Relativists believe morality is an illusion produced by ethical provincialism.

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Some kind of analogue exists here:

ethics : morals = phenomenon : noumenon

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My three most fundamental ethical principles:

  1. Listen to appeals.
  2. Keep your promises.
  3. Repent when you err.

Best and worst

Ethics

I often find myself recalling Yeats’ famous lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

It seems it is precisely the ones least entitled to it who have the firmest faith in their convictions and the strongest self-confidence? It seems that beyond a certain point of gross ineptitude the Dunning-Kruger effect is actually a competitive advantage.

It seems people are more concerned with whether a leader believes he is right and behaves accordingly than whether it turns out that he was actually right.

Maybe truth serves the same purpose as the trappings of a wedding. What  is decisive is how the bride feels about the wedding — and that is why the dress, and the flowers and the location all have to be just right.

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So what about those who have a strong intellectual conscience and find belief difficult and sometimes impossible? How do we give full justice to reality while maintaining firm enough horizons to act decisively and resolutely — especially when the suspicions of skeptics turn out to be true, again and again? Perhaps having the truth is less important than living according to what truth seems to be. But then we observe the victims of Dunning-Kruger, and we know we cannot choose that path.

Vision and voice

Hermeneutics, History, Judaism

People love to watch an artist draw. He draws a line and slowly it becomes a shape. He adds more lines, and introduces shading. So far, the relationships are all within the page; a composition takes form. But the drawing suggests that it is a drawing of something — but of what? Here is where the suspense is concentrated. The interrelated elements on the page taken as a whole point beyond themselves, to realities beyond the page. In figurative art, the reference is to physical objects. But this is only the basest reality. Beyond it is mood, and the mood is connected to the figures. And beyond that, there are layers of symbol, starting with shared cultural meanings, proceeding onward to more obscure and personal intimations.

I think storytelling is a mode of speech that imitates drawing. Human beings are predominantly visual, and whatever modes of thought make use of the visual modes of thought gain an advantage.

Maybe objectivity is preferred over subjectivity because objectivity is more optical. When we don’t want to follow some involved line of thought, when we don’t want to reach the conclusion by the path of personal realization, but just want the bottom-line result, what do we ask for? A synopsis.

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Martin Buber: “The Greeks established the hegemony of the sense of sight over the other senses, thus making the optical world into the world, into which the data of the other senses are now to be entered. Correspondingly, they also gave to philosophizing, which for the Indian was still only a bold attempt to catch hold of one’s own self, an optical character, that is, the character of the contemplation of particular objects.”

More and more, I am understanding Judaism to be a perpetually developing religion of time and speech subsuming space and sight, eternally at odds with the eternalizing religions of space and sight which look forward to the end of time (which entails an end to speech). Jews hear truth and say truth. In the process truth is revealed. Truth is a relationship. “Gentiles” see the truth and assert the truth. Truth is a thing.

To flatten the history of the Jews into a series of factual ethical assertions strung together on a thread of narrative is to misunderstand it (almost) completely.

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Here’s the Ricoeur passage that set me off on this line of thought:

…polysemy is the pivot of semantics. …we there come marvelously upon what I have called the exchanges between the structure and the event. In fact this process presents itself as a convergence of two factors, a factor of expansion and, at the limit, of surcharge. By virtue of the cumulative process… the word tends to be charged with use-values, but the projection of this cumulative process into the system of signs implies that the new meaning finds its place within the system. The expansion, and, if the case obtains, the surcharge is arrested by the mutual limitation of signs within the system. In this sense we can speak of a limiting action of the field, opposed to the tendency to expansion, which results from the cumulative process of the word. Thus is explained what one could call a regulated polysemy, which is the law of our language. Words have more than one sense, but they do not have an infinity of meanings.

This example shows how semantic systems differ from semiological systems. The latter can be treated without any reference to history; they are intemporal systems because they are potential. Phonology gives the best illustration of this. Only the binary oppositions between distinctive units play a role. In semantics, in contrast, the differentiation of meanings results from the equilibrium between two processes, a process of expansion and a process of limitation, which force words to shape themselves a place amid others, to hierarchize their use-values. This process of differentiation is irreducible to a simple taxonomy. Regulated polysemy is of the panchronic order, that is, both synchronic and diachronic to the degree that a history projects itself into states of systems, which henceforth are only instantaneous cross-sections in the process of sense, in the process of nomination.

We then understand what happens when the word returns to the discourse along with its semantic richness. All our words being polysemic to some degree the univocity or plurivocity of our discourse is not the accomplishment of words but of contexts. In the case of univocal discourse, that is, of discourse which tolerates only one meaning, it is the task of the context to hide the semantic richness of words, to reduce it by establishing what Greiman calls an isotopy, that is, a frame of reference, a theme, an identical topic for all the words of the sentence (for example, if I develop a geometrical “theme,” the word volume will be interpreted as a body in space; if the theme concerns the library, the word volume will be interpreted as designating a book). If the context tolerates or even preserves several isotopies at the same time, we will be dealing with an actually symbolic language, which, in saying one thing, says something else. Instead of sifting out one dimension of meaning, the context allows several to pass, indeed, consolidates several of them, which run together in the manner of the superimposed texts of a palimpsest. The polysemy of our words is then liberated. Thus the poem allows all the semantic values to be mutually reinforced. More than one interpretation is then justified by the structure of a discourse which permits multiple dimensions of meaning to be realized at the same time.

In short, language is in celebration. It is indeed in a structure that this abundance is ordered and deployed; but the structure of the sentence does not, strictly speaking, create anything. It collaborates with the polysemy of our words to produce this effect of meaning that we call symbolic discourse, and the polysemy itself of our words results from the concurrence of the metaphorical process with the limiting action of the semantic field.