A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a “single-question magic interview“. Placing this question between two genuine interlocutors really does something astonishing, important, rare and rarer by the day.
It made me want to letterpress print this question.
I love words that act directly on a souls.
Whenever I find such words, I want to sink them deep into the surface of paper.
This is my letterpress impulse.
I am now interested in instaurating more single-question interviews. I want to collect and print them.
I will, of course, do this work in faithful, observant service to design praxis, which is sacred and therefore not to be used, but the everse of using. Faithful, observant service to praxis means giving ourselves to our praxis and allow ourselves to be used as its agent, or (as Latour put it) the actant of praxis.
I have a big fear mitigated by some hopeful hypotheses.
My fear is that an increasing number of people have unwittingly been taken by ideological faiths — what some have called “political religions”. Religion, though is not only a misnomer, but a category mistake of the highest pragmatic consequence. Ideologies are fundamentalisms.
Fundamentalism is not religion taken too far, but religion aborted and never reborn in a barren soul.
A fundamentalist faith is (I believe this also came from Latour?) a distinctive attitude toward beliefs. It could be called a belief about beliefs — beliefs being objective facts taken as true.
A genuine religion tries to transcend factual beliefs. It does so by way of a different attitude toward truth, a different mode of of believing, a different configuration of soul, which has believes on a trajectory beyond conceivability, toward “something” ungraspable by the objectively comprehending mind. (See “Religious notes” below for more.)
To a religious soul, fundamentalism is ideo-idolatry, a confused reduction of an essentially inconceivable, incomprehensible reality to a comprehended concept. The fundamentalist worships something that is inside their own heads, and part of themselves. We do this all the time, even in mundane life, when we love an idea of a thing and forget that the idea indicates a reality beyond that idea, whose value is precisely what the idea cannot capture. We confuse mental categories of groups for real persons and love or hate the mental image. We confuse stories for the complex polycentered unfoldings of real events. It’s just how we are, especially when we forget to try to be otherwise.
So — An interview with a fundamentalist, whether that funamentalist adheres to a right-fundamentalism of mis-taken religion or a left-fundamentalism of scientististic psycho-social-political beliefs is unlikely to reveal anything beyond more and more belief system content, which never touches the eclipsed host of these believed-in beliefs.
But it is precisely and exclusively this eclipsed being — this unique intuitive living in the heart of each soul — I want to coax out in these single-question interviews.
Here is where I permit myself the mitigation of hopeful hypotheses.
First, I hypothesize that any apparent soullessness is only apparent, and that what actually happens is only eclipse. A person’s weird, intuitive uniqueness never stops existing, however much it is occluded by opaque belied-in factual content. A belief-system is its own place, which makes heavens of hells and hells of heavens, but these places are not the souls who become imprisoned within them by identifying with what holds them captive. Someone is in there to be sprung.
Second, I hypothesize that the path to an occluded soul (the exit from the cell) is craft. Craft is where a person engages a reality unmediated by language, skin to skin. Where are they blurring the boundaries between their soul, their body, an instrument, and an emerging work in music or visual arts or other flavor of alchemy? Where have they become someone new with someone? Where are they losing themselves in physical exercise? Where do words fail them, precisely where their bodies and souls succeed? I need single questions that puncture belief-systems and get at these experiences.
Third, to get there, I might need to abandon the limitations of conversation. I might need to adopt some of the most radical practices of design research, which preclude the asking of questions. For in generative research we are not interested in answers to our own questions. We are after the implicit questions constituting the subjectivity of our research participants. What questions are relevant to them? To get there we do not ask direct questions, we request lessons. We ask them to teach us about their lives. This is why our research briefs are not defined by questions to answer, but areas of inquiry to learn about.
So the obvious single-question interview about craft might be neither a question, nor an interview. It might simply be:
Please show me your best craft.
In research, things never go as expected. It might be a finished artifact, or it might be a demonstration of doing the craft. Either way, I will have to go to the participant’s place.
The research will have a dual-nature. I am doing the research in order to produce a learning-teaching event, and it will be iterative prototyping testing of the research protocol itself.
The final deliverable of the research will be one or more short, letterpress printable prompts.
These will be used to make some kind of beautiful sacred printed objects, maybe a booklet, a set of cards, a small poster or reference sheet or some combination of these.
A good friend of mine suggested another question:
What is the worst thing that ever happened to you, and how did you benefit from it?
If any researcher or interviewer or front-line service provider or talented conversationalist happens up this, and has a soul-coaxing prompt or question that has worked for them, I am collecting them.
Anyone who contributes a prompt will get a copy of whatever gets printed.
Religious notes:
1.
Generally, fundamentalism believes that a belief system and sound life practice is constructed upon a foundation of concrete fact.
Religion senses a divine ground beneath all objectivity, supporting it, though less solid than water, or even aether. But without this grounding, all fact disintegrates into isolated grains of truth, unable to support even humble truth constructions, much less towering edifices of fact meant to penetrate the ultimate.
2.
Religion believes toward … Toward what is essentially inconceivable, and is not what, but someone who is better but not perfectly characterized as Why or Who. An interrogative combining Why, Who, How, What, Where, When would approximate it better than any one of them. But perhaps refusal to name this interrogative mystery … or even to invent a category for … is a better response. Perhaps we just address … with a simple situating of Nefesh-Ruach in I-here-now: “Here I am.” To say “Hineini” is for Neshamah-Chayah to inhale the pneuma of Nefesh-Ruach into itself, like an atmosphere receives back a lungful of exhaled breath.
3.
All this, of course, is said in the language of my own chosen faith, or, rather, the faith who chose me. Speaking of which, much has been made of the expression “chosen people” but this expression is rarely heard oriented by the best question. It is natural for any envy-inclined mind to hear in this a response to “Which people were chosen versus which other people who were not chosen? A better question would be “Which people made a choice of faith, and which people were made by being chosen by a faith?” Chosenness does not signify a status: chosen versus unchosen. Chosenness signifies only who chose whom.