All posts by anomalogue

National make-up sex

Some couples seem to fight all the time because they’re addicted to make-up sex.

Similarly, I think a big chunk of the USA scares the shit out of itself to experience the intoxication of feeling galvanized as One Nation in the face of a terrifying enemy.

That’s the best I’ve come up with to explain the strange combination of terror and palpable giddiness that dominates Fox News.

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Then there’s the fact that emergencies demand hypocrisy: We have to be (temporarily) unfree to be free; we have to close ranks and be dittoheads if we want to preserve individualism against “liberal fascists”; we have to fight protracted wars if we ever wish to have lasting peace. The list goes on and on.

If your temperament is utterly misaligned with the values of the tradition to which you are committed, emergencies are the most expedient way to resolve the self-conflict.

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Come to think of it, Borges observed the terror-giddiness combo back in the 1940s… Continue reading National make-up sex

Unknowns

From John Law’s After Method: Mess in Social Science Research:

Presence is, obviously, what is made present or (as I shall sometimes say) condensed ‘in-here’. … these are presences enacted into being within practices. Some are representations while others are objects or processes. Presence, then, is any kind of in-here enactment.

Manifest absence goes with presence. It is one of its correlates since presence is incomplete and depends on absence. To make present is also to make absent. …

Otherness, or absence that is not made manifest, also goes with presence. It too is necessary to presence. But it disappears. Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting while it goes on routinely… Perhaps it disappears because it is not interesting… Perhaps (though no doubt this is an overlapping category) it disappears because what is being brought to presence and manifest absence cannot be sustained unless it is Othered…

It follows that method assemblage is also about the crafting and enacting of boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness. These boundaries are necessary. Each category depends on the others, so it is not that they can be avoided. To put it differently, there will always be Othering. What is brought to presence — or manifest absence — is always limited, always potentially contestable. How it might be crafted is endlessly uncertain, endlessly revisable. Normative methods try to define and police boundary relations in ways that are tight and hold steady. An inquiry into slow method suggests that we might imagine more flexible boundaries, and different forms of presence and manifest absence. Other possibilities can be imagined, for instance if we attend to non-coherence.

I hate to affirm a neoconservative’s thought process, but these correspond to Donald Rumsfeld’s distinctions between known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and honestly Rumsfeld’s articulation is much clearer:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

But, as Yogi Bera said:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Though Rumsfeld was absolutely clear on the fact that unknown unknowns exist, his approach to his work precluded any practical relationship with them. This is because he was so occupied with his knowns (his facts and his explicit questions) that anything that threatened the integrity and clarity of his knowns had to be Othered — until that otherness was able to overwhelm his sense of certainty.

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Camper Van Beethoven – “Sweethearts”

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It’s easy to admit that there are questions we cannot yet answer and to acknowledge that there are questions that we cannot yet ask, because they have not yet dawned on us. But it is completely another matter to live one’s life prepared to allow new questions to dawn on us.

And to be completely frank, this is because we think we already know what a new question dawning on us feels like and feels like, and what the open state of mind looks and feels like — and we are utterly wrong about it.

We think it just comes upon us like some glorious transfiguration of the problem from everyday dullness into some sort of brilliant eureka moment. We think the insight will hit us like a brand new set of opinions about the world we’re already seeing. These are the fantasies of people who have never lived the reality of radical thought, largely because their ignorant preconceptions preclude the reality.

Fact is, a fresh, new question in your mind feels terrible. It feels like shit to begin to have a new thought. It feels as terrible as going into labor.

It takes a long time to come to terms with the agony, to work through it and to process the just-detected-but-as-yet-still-unknown unknown into a feeling of new potential, of intellectual expansiveness and inspiration.

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To learn the answer to a known unknown, simply ask the question that fills in the gap in your knowledge. Ask the sorts of questions that elicit a factual response, the kind of question that begins with “what”, “how”, “who”, or “why”.

One strategy for uncovering an unknown unknown is to learn from other people: invite another person to relate a story. Instead of asking an explicit question, ask for a story or ask the person to tell you about some area you are interested in.

The more you request instruction instead of asking for answers to questions the more able you will be to learn something you didn’t anticipate and were unable to anticipate prior to the encounter.

 

Doing what we are supposed to

When things go wrong we assume people have not done what they know is right. Sometimes this is true.

But sometimes things go wrong because people want to do exactly what they know is right, when the reality they are acting into does not afford such exactitude.

Out of a desire for moral clarity, for clean definition of right and wrong, for unambiguous, algorithmic rules of conduct — upstanding citizens can become fanatics and reduce reality so far that it becomes brittle. It becomes necessary for such people to aggressively shut out all sources of ambiguity. It is necessary to close their ears to the full testimony of their senses, to the ramifications of reason, and to the objections and appeals of their neighbor — and in effect, they make the mind a place of its own, a heaven-fortress of faith which protects the faithful from everything that conflicts with it: the realities that transcend the facts of the faith.

 

Tralfamadorians

Blame John Law (and his reckless linking of ethnography to fractal geometry) for the following spew of unrefined semithoughts, which is really an unsuccessful attempt to digest what I’ve just read.

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There is no space in life. Everything happens in points on lines.

All of life happens on a single point in time that is sometimes a recollection of memory or an anticipation of some possibility or an absorption in a moment. That point projects time. And in the point is a point where we are. That point comes and goes and roams about with our attention, but it is always projecting space. And then there’s that weird thing we call “others”. In each other we project projections that sort of overlap with our own in some incomprehensible fashion. And when we try to imagine all these dots on all these twisting curving lines all together in some vast tangled-together unity, and we try to comb it all out, twist the threads together and try to make them interweave in some orderly textile pattern, we invent 3rd person reality, where everyone lives without anyone living there, really. We live on our thread, conceptualizing our contextile life-fabric. (By the way, that style of 3rd person conceptualization understood as somehow more real than the 1st person experience of conceptualizing it is the essence of metaphysical thinking. The reverse practice, of reducing the 3rd person to the 1st — describing the process by which 3rd person conceptions are produced and leaving alone the question of what-is-made-out-of-what — is phenomenological thinking. Or that’s how I understand it, anyway.)

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History is the 3rd person account of what nobody ever experiences except as an account of what happened. Yet most people experience history as the template for what might be happening now or in the future, though such things never ever happen. This is why we never feel a part of history.

And science is exactly the same way. Science happens on the thread, too, to individuals. Science, too, projects a contextile into which we imagine ourselves and all things woven.

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I think nothing feels truly real to us until it is ethnographed back into the 1st person realities we experience. To make them relatable, we have to take these amazingly ingenious abstractions we’ve made — things like great events, physical laws, economies — and show how each and every one of them occurs on the thread of a life, by relating them narratively, as events in someone’s life.

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I’m sorry about this post, but I’m not deleting it.

Horizon anxiety

Every time I use the word “horizon” I experience a pine-mouthy aftertaste of anxiety.

This anxiety always means the same thing: the wrongness of a conception has fully ripened, and it is time to stop thinking through it — by way of it — and instead to try to step outside of it in order to discover its inadequacy.

The spatial model of knowledge with a point-of-view, a perspective and an outer-limiting vanishing point, might render some important conceptions inconceivable.

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By the way, anxiety is grossly underrated as an intellectual tool. People who listen to that hippie dolt Joseph Campbell and “follow their bliss” journey straight up their own assholes.

If you want knowledge, head in the opposite direction and follow what displeases you in ways you can’t articulate.

If you do that and then accidentally blunder into some bliss, you’ll discover sweeter, more enduring and productive delusions — what we euphemistically refer to as truth.

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I’m perpetually dissatisfied because that’s good method.

 

According to wikipedia:

A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error in which “things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another”, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. All (propositional) mistakes involve some sort of misascription of properties, so in a sense any mistake is a “category mistake”: putting a thing into a class to which it does not belong.

I think we often make category mistakes in our conversations, ascribing to communications communicative purposes other than those intended.

Since different kinds of communication require different modes of participation, the results can be quite violent.

Consider this partial and random list of communication events:

  • Dialogue
  • Assertion
  • Argument
  • Lecture
  • Story
  • Diatribe
  • Interview
  • Imitation
  • Interrogation
  • Debate
  • Dispute
  • Presentation
  • Flattery
  • Joke
  • Appeal
  • Demonstration
  • Proof
  • Critique
  • Trial
  • Ritual
  • Protocol
  • Proposal

To respond to one of these communication types as if it is another will cause misunderstandings of a kind we are not used to resolving.

It causes misunderstandings that arouse anxiety and hostility.

We might not be used to resolving such misunderstandings, but that does not mean we are not used to having them — inflicting them and suffering their consequences.

 

Blurry vision

You can live your whole life with blurry vision, and never notice it until you put on glasses.

You can live your whole life talking to people who don’t want to hear it but who listen out of charity or politeness, and you’ll sort of assume that’s normal until one day someone listens because they’re interested in what you’re saying.

 

Pro-lifer

There comes a point when how you think imposes tangible limits on what you can think.

A problem is recognized — felt — but when you try to think it out, you arrive at the edge of thinkability. You cannot resolve this problem with the intellectual moves that ordinarily work to resolve your everyday problems.

If you are precise and honest with yourself, you will realize something disturbing: at this point what you most painfully lack is not an answer, but a clear question. You cannot even articulate the problem.

Our minds do not know what to do with such a situation. We don’t even know how to talk about this experience. We are completely oriented by metaphors of objects existing positively in a negative space that’s given: and this space is reality itself.

But here, the very space for the problem is lacking. Our minds boggles at this, just as it boggles when we try to contemplate what stands beyond the limits of space, or what occur beyond the limits of time. It is literally inconceivable.

Such situations are not uncommon, even in the flatlands of business. So we might as well agree on some vocabulary for this situation:

  • An inarticulate problem that remains inarticulate because it stands outside the current limits of thinkability is a perplexity.
  • The distinctive, painful feeling that accompanies perplexities is anxiety. This feeling is always uncomfortable, but when it is accepted as the birth pangs of genuinely new idea it becomes a far more acceptable part of the labor and delivery of innovations.
  • The limits of thinkability in a particular approach to a problem is an intellectual horizon.
  • Perplexities are resolvable by the peculiar and perpetually misunderstood activity known as philosophy.

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What? Philosophy useful in business?

Ask a dozen people to list the ten most useless things any person can do, and philosophy will top the list. When an exasperated project manager exclaims “We don’t have time to philosophize!” nobody questions the wisdom of such practical thinking — or its practicality.

However, it is precisely here, when a group faces situations it does not know how to think out — where people become most anxious and most impatient and most inclined to just pick something and go with it — that philosophy is most useful and is in fact the very cornerstone of eventual success.

According to Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.” Is this not exactly when a company goes outside and hires someone to help it find its way out of a problem it doesn’t understand?

Yet, even consultancies — companies whose very purpose is to help other companies in this situation — are stuffed with anti-philosophical “pragmatists” whose life purpose is to simply get things done. Under the stress of anxiety such people reject the very thing that will bring them success. They stop thinking, stop listening and put their noses to the millstone.

This is how most of their projects go. Most of their projects turn out pretty unspectacular, but since they’ve never experienced a spectacular outcome, and because spectacular outcomes are uncommon, anyway, nobody blames them, nobody blames their client for their unspectacular, unlovable, unexceptional non-success, and nobody gets fired — so good enough. And emails go out calling the bunt a home run, and an assemblage of best practices an innovation, etc., etc. etc. and this is what makes corporations so damn corporate. But at least they didn’t have to confront anxiety.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” — Wittgenstein

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The reason few companies innovate is not that they lack intelligence or ingenuity or ideas — it’s that they are organizationally unprepared to face the perplexities and the anxiety intrinsic to innovation.

They misdiagnose the painful feelings of things going right as something going dreadfully wrong, and inadvertently abort the innovation process.

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Most people, most of the time will try to make the absence of a clear question go away by making up things that resemble answers, that seem more or less related to what the question could be or ought to be. As long as the answer fits the shibbolethic standards of the culture to which it is addressed (that is, it has an appropriately truthy consistency) and does not offend or impinge on anyone (inconsequentiality is the surest strategy for accomplishing this), it is generally accepted as an answer.

Truth and cooperation

Different thoughts require different degrees and kinds of cooperation to be understood at all.

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If you think true thoughts are self-evidently true — not only requiring no cooperation but actively overcoming all resistance and doubt by virtue of their truth — you’ll be protected from all truly new thoughts.

And also, if you believe that a thought that requires cooperation is necessarily delusional/ideological, you’ll also never learn anything outside of your own thought schema, which, by the way, includes your conception of truth as self-evident…

Too busy

I’d love to occupy myself with fun activities, games, travel, etc. but I am too busy reading and thinking. If I had as much free time as you, maybe I’d do all that stuff.

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Fact is, I don’t do any of those things people do for fun because I don’t love any of it.

And you don’t read and think as much as I do because you don’t love it. And that is OK.

What is not OK is acting like the only reason someone might spend time reading and thinking is that the person happens to have a surplus of free time — which is probably gained at someone else’s expense.

The story goes like this: “We’d ALL love to sit around dreaming up great ideas, if we weren’t so busy. Lucky you, dreamer. Wish the rest of us were so lucky.”

Bullshit.

Busy people are always inventing pleasurable hassles for themselves — fulfilling, entertaining or distracting complications to fill in the gaps between duties — and they never, ever have free time. They don’t permit the time to free up, because they don’t want it free. And for the same reason, they don’t define it and defend it and keep it free.

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Busyness is a taste that some have and others lack, just like what time of day you like most. Morning people are no better than anyone else — and busy people are just busy people. It’s nothing to be proud of or ashamed of.

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We make time for what we care about.

We can’t decide to care or not care, love or not love. We can try to cultivate caring or love or to starve them in the hope that they atrophy, weaken or die. But caring and love are living, growing things.

We can’t expect anyone to miraculously produce love or care for anything ex nihilo, but existent love will sometimes try to cultivate new loves for the sake of a beloved person. And according to most, in word and resounding action: sometimes won’t.

Author etymologies

Actor – ORIGIN late Middle English (originally denoting an agent or administrator): from Latin, ‘doer, actor,’ from agere ‘do, act.’ The theater sense dates from the 16th cent.

Author – ORIGIN Middle English (in the sense ‘a person who invents or causes something’): from Old French autor, from Latin auctor, from augere ‘increase, originate, promote.’ The spelling with th arose in the 15th cent., and perhaps became established under the influence of authentic.

Authentic – ORIGIN late Middle English: via Old French from late Latin authenticus, from Greek authentikos ‘principal, genuine.’

Authority – ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French autorite, from Latin auctoritas, from auctor ‘originator, promoter.’

Then there’s the word augur. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary:

…augur, a religious official in ancient Rome who foretold events by interpreting omens, perhaps originally meaning “an increase in crops enacted in ritual,” in which case it probably is from Old L. augos (gen. augeris) “increase,” and is related to augere “increase” (see augment). The more popular theory is that it is from L. avis “bird,” since the flights, singing, and feeding of birds, along with entrails from bird sacrifices, were important objects of divination (cf. auspicious). In that case, the second element would be from garrire “to talk.” The verb is c.1600, from the noun.

 

 

Firmest truths

Science produces the firmest truths we have, not because its methods provide us the best access to reality, but rather because it is the most social approach to truth that humankind has devised.

By “most social” I mean that the scientific ethic includes (at least) three ideals friendly to the establishment of shared sense of reality among the members of a community:

  1. Science pursues universal agreement about a world understood as a universe: an out-there world, shared by all people, about which universal agreement is possible.
  2. Participants in science expect to (and are expected to) communicate their findings to the larger scientific community, and to respond to challenges and criticism from that community, and to accept the larger community as referee of the proceedings.
  3. The process of sharing truth is mediated by empirical phenomena and logic, which, of our myriad modes of understanding (sense-making of the world), are the most universally accessible.

Each of these ideals can be attacked, and the attacks are in fact valid ones. However, the social consequences of these attacks are dire:

  1. Whether or not a universe of the kind assumed by science exists or not, and whether or not it can be proven finally to exist, the concept of universe is conducive to pursuit of agreement. (One source of anxiety over relativism is the abandonment of pursuit of agreement, and its political consequences.)
  2. Whether the larger community is in fact always an unbiased, competent and univocal referee is debatable, but its assumed legitimacy and respect for its office is essential to the scale of scientific collaboration. The community must be taken to be one’s jury of peers and not a litigant against whom one is appealing to some higher judge — most often some political or religious faction, or a vindicating, enlightened future more receptive to one’s own version of the truth. In science, contempt of court is punishable by excommunication (in every sense of the word, including deprivation of any intellectual afterlife).
  3. Since the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s landmark Structure of Scientific Revolutions the philosophical world has become increasingly sensitive to the roles modes of understanding outside simple empiricism and rational thought play in science. Prior to Kuhn, even the staunches advocates of such extra-rational/empirical modes of understanding tended to exclude them from the realm of science. After Kuhn, the line between natural and social sciences appeared blurrier. However, as important as these other modes of understanding are — the practical consequence of taking empiricism and rationalism as not only absolute but supreme places emphasis on what is most sharable gives science its universalist trajectory.

Notice, every point I’m posing here supports science, but not from an epistemological foundation, but a social and pragmatist angle.

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For fun: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=293&act=3

Spacious life

Youth tends to be all about production and reproduction: putting new beings into the world.

And our youth-cult culture is also entirely oriented toward products, productivity, and production on ever-increasing scale.

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When the youthful mind thinks about the new, what is conceived is a novel thing that nobody has seen before. There might be a sense or full awareness of some visionary difference, but that difference will be expressed and encountered as a new product of some kind that coming from some new “place”, and capable of leading a receptive soul there.

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Middle age is (for me, anyway) about the recognition that every production comes from and appears in some sort of intellectual/spiritual space — but also that space can be generated or it can atrophy. Some situations are ontologically expansive, accommodating many kinds of being and presenting opportunities for them to interact. Other situations are ontologically constrictive, admitting either one uniform kind of being, or a strictly defined system of types that interact in prescribed ways. And the same situation can move back and forth between these poles, expanding and contracting in response to its inner and outer workings.

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Imagine what a life dedicated to space-creation might look, sound, speak and act like.

Parents: Do not do your best

One take-away from these interviews I’m doing: If you are a parent, please don’t “do your best.” Be so urgently concerned with your child’s well-being that you reach beyond what’s reasonable and possible. In other words: love your children.

Fight for your entitlements

What’s the difference between a right and an entitlement?

Next time you find yourself claiming a “right” to something, substitute the word “entitlement” and see how your claim sounds.

Feeling-type-in-training

I think I’ve become a feeling-type-in-training. It’s annoying to be a beginner, to have to bungle things, and always, necessarily, in front of at least one other person. It’s like learning a foreign language or karate.

When you’re an “objective” rationalist you can explain other people’s emotions away as subjective and irrational. Give up that little baseless prejudice, you realize there is in fact a better and worse to interactions that has little to do with easily argued they are.

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Does this midlife development represent a reversal of my old convictions? Not at all. It is a continuous development from my old position, which led from a monistic conception of The Truth which is discovered rationally, to pluralistic truths which can humbly coexist in semi-rational relation to an inaccessible Truth, to a social conception of thought, which replaces rationality and logic — which governs thinkability, but not reality itself — with reason, which is using thinking as a bridge between the thinker and the social and natural world. Once you arrive at this point, you start to understand what feeling types seem born knowing: that each person has one’s own experience, and that experience is at least as real as a brick hurtling toward your head, thrown by an indignant anti-solipsist.

And I hope feeling types will see this and ask: What’s the analogous experience for a feeling type? What’s thinking-type-in-training look like? Hint: It’s one thing to respect another person’s experience and its another to grasp its inner logic… Can you really claim to love someone if you don’t really try to know who that person is? And can you really claim to have tried to know who a person is if you haven’t tried to understand how that person thinks about things? And how is that accomplished except by trying (even unsuccessfully) to follow their thoughts?

In the end, thinking and feeling are inseparable.

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Perhaps this is why the androgyne is a traditional symbol of unity and unification on either side of differentiation.