I poked around in Durkheim’s Suicide yesterday, to see what he had to say about anomie. I do not want to discount the magnitude of his theoretical breakthrough, which was mere foreground to his deeper methodological breakthrough, but the theory does suffer a bit from retroactive obviousness. That is, his concept of anomie is more … Continue reading Anomie and misnorms
A few times I’ve watched right-wing friends take a sudden and obsessive interest in a scientific controversy. Two big ones are climate change and covid. They decide to do their own research, and dive into the literature. By “dive”, I mean they will closely read one paper or maybe two, followed by a numerous skeptical … Continue reading Misnorms abound
When people have a distorted image of a discipline, and harbor a detailed misunderstanding of how that discipline achieves its results, this can result in a “misnorm”. A misnorm combines a fanciful picture of what a discipline really accomplishes, how it functions at the micro and macro-level, why it has developed its various practices, and … Continue reading Coinage: misnorm
The main thing I’ve noticed working as a designer in project teams is the decisive difference between people who take nothingness at face value, and those who know better. The people who take nothingness at face value are inferior collaborators because they kill possibility in the cradle. They “take absence of evidence as evidence of … Continue reading Coaxing bolts from the blue
Scholem: “While Christianity and Islam, which had at their disposal more extensive means of repression and the apparatus of the State, have frequently and drastically suppressed the more extreme forms of mystical movements, few analogous events are to be found in the history of Judaism.” Judaism was too weak and unimportant to effectively persecute its … Continue reading Hermetic design
Premise: Designers philosophize all the time. It is part of our job, and for many of us, it is the best part of the work, and the part of the work that generates the most valuable change. But it is also the part that is hardest to explain, the hardest to tame and the hardest … Continue reading Intro to a philosophy of design of philosophy
DISCLAIMER: This post is a big mess (which is why it’s been hidden from November 2020 until today March 31, 2021), but it’s got a lot of good, useful stuff in it, so I’m making it public. ================= In the winter of 2002, I developed a new life-changing habit. I began waking up early in … Continue reading Design Pragmatism
In the 20th Century everyone aspired to be scientific. Unfortunately, the image of science and scientific knowledge was distorted by rationalist fantasies, and attempts at scientific practice were encumbered — and, in fact, sterilized — by misnorms. In the 21st Century we we are off to a good start, aspiring to be designerly. However the … Continue reading Approaching the designerly
I think my “Coalition of the Unique” post might be the core of a Liberal Manifesto chapbook. Susan’s and my strategy has shifted over the last several months. Rather than attacking illiberalism, we’ve chosen instead to find more beautiful reconceptions and redescriptions of Liberalism to help people understand and to feel why Liberalism is precious and worth … Continue reading Stuff I’m going to write
When we say we know what something is, or know how to do something, or know why something is valuable or worthless we implicitly assume we understand what it means to know these things. But how sure can we be of this? Are we sure we understand exhaustively what understanding is and can be? Are … Continue reading Wordless ground of meaning
I had insomnia again last night and put on the audiobook of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. The best history is always disorienting, and this is premium disorientation, on the order of Inventing the Individual. According to Anderson, nations and nationalism are a modern phenomenon which uses the past to construct an imaginary present outfitted with … Continue reading Epiphany-effects
One of the great pleasures of reading Richard Rorty is experiencing his precise neglect of nonhuman actors. The man lived in a wordworld of free-floating humans whose sole purpose was conversation. It helps make what I learned from Bruno Latour extra tangible, that what we converse about is rooted as much in our tacit interactions … Continue reading Rorty’s wonderful omissions
Rereading Richard J. Bernstein I can now see clearly why my first encounter Beyond Objectivism and Relativism was such a revelation and relief to me as a designer: But we must realize that “individually the criteria are imprecise: individuals may legitimately differ about their application to concrete cases.” Furthermore, when the criteria are “deployed together, … Continue reading Scientism vs designerism
Between conceptual understandings that describe the same phenomena lies a gap of unintelligibility: an interliminal vacuum. Within this space we do not know how to make sense of what we experience. We don’t know what is what, we don’t know what to make of things or how to respond, and our feelings are unstable and … Continue reading Interliminal vacuum