Note: This post was originally written in July 6, 2010, but left in draft form. I was digging through my writing to see when I first defined craft as material dialogue, and this is the earliest form of the concept I can find. I’m publishing it now in raw form, so please excuse any typos or weird anachronistic outbursts.

When a situation we face is palpably problematic, but we do not know what to do with it, what we face is not yet a problem, but a pre-problem: a perplexity.

What does it mean, to “not know what to do with it”?

Obviously, part of the trouble is a lack of clear definition of the problem. We cannot explain what is wrong, or what needs solving, or what a resolution would look like. The whole problematic situation is just “wrong” and a resolution is imagined entirely negatively: the perplexity must go away.

But there is much more to a perplexity than inability to think or speak clearly about it. We resolve problematic situations all the time without thinking or speaking. We intuit our way through things, wordlessly, and usually with great success. (It might even be the case that we only think explicitly when our intuition fails us. See note below.)

When we fall into perplexity, our intuition is paralyzed. This is usually where we fall back on explicit thinking. We think about what we should do next. But in a perplexity, we find nothing in our intellectual repertoire to help us. But it doesn’t even end there.

The worst part of a perplexity comes when we grope for an approach to think about our situation and our intuition fails us again. Not only do we lack any sense of what to do; not only do we lack thoughts to help guide our action — we have no feel for how to go about thinking about it.

We do not understand how to understand the situation.

(Note on tacit action: This certainly appears to be the case with most tools we use. If you have to verbally recall how to use a piece of software — or any tool — in order to use it, the tool feels “unintuitive”. We want to be absorbed in dialogue with the artifact we are crafting (craft is dialogue between creator and creation), but the dominates the conversation with incessant interruptions. Dialogue can only happen when the medium of conversation is not itself a distraction. This is why people instinctively impose linguistic constraints around subjects they wish to make undiscussable.