Suddenly and miraculously, three people find themselves sitting together in a room, conversing. Moments before, nine people sat alone in three rooms, talking.
All posts by anomalogue
Combat myopia
In combat, good soldiers forget about causes and fight for one another.
Bad and meaningless causes count on this siloing instinct.
Vision and voice
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.
Imitating best examples
What most people call “best practices” have nothing to do with practice, but with the concrete results of practices. A more accurate term would be “best examples”.
The practices followed by innovators — those who generate original, exemplary work — differ entirely from the practices of those who like to build up solutions out of best examples. Let’s call them refining imitators.
Innovators take the necessary steps to redefine the problem they are solving, and only afterward dedicate themselves to solving it. They find a new problem space and then settle it, which is why innovation is spoken of in terms of pioneering. The solutions that emerge from this process are fresher, simpler, more focused, more purposeful, more exciting and more soulful than solutions that are pieced together from old solutions. This is why they are imitated.
Refining imitators do not revisit or redefine the problem. If the problem is thought about explicitly, it is accepted as given as the starting point for production of a solution. Thinking is for deciding what to make, planning how to make it, comparing and analyzing best examples, and inventing ways to recombine them and make something better. The focus is entirely on the production of tangible things. The fact that this approach never produces innovation is ignored.
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It’s a genotype/phenotype issue. Best practices are genotypically similar: set generative processes that reliably produce unprecedented forms. Best examples attempt to create phenotypical similarities: the focus is to reproduce a precedented form, by a process different from that which originally generated it, that is through imitation rather than innovation.
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Oddly, the word refining imitators use to describe themselves is “practical”, but that is a misnomer. A more accurate term would “thingly”. A practical person thinks in terms of practices, which necessarily differ according to the task at hand. A thingly person knows only one practice suited to one task: the building of things — assembled piece by piece, in a linear progressive manner. It is a classic case of “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” If the task is to produce ideas or understandings, the task is conceived in the terms of producing documentation, because that is the one aspect of the work that has the quality of a thing and lends itself to a thing-building approach. Ideas and understandings are abstract and they’re not built up in a linear piece by piece fashion, and so are treated as secondary.
Thoughts on double meanings
I’m thinking out loud here, so please forgive the tedium and unclarity. I’m also traveling, and that always messes me up pretty seriously. Just to get these thoughts out, I’m saying what comes to mind and not worrying excessively over how much sense I’m making much less how persuasive I’m being. So there’s even less reason to read this post than there usually is, so I encourage my nonexistent readership to ignore this post with redoubled nonawareness of its existence.
I just finished Ricoeur’s essay “The Problem of Double Meaning” from Conflict of Interpretations and this is my attempt to digest the material. Here is (in slightly streamlined form) the conclusion of the essay:
It seems to me that the conquest of this deliberately and radically analytic level allows us to better understand the relations between the three strategic levels which we have successively occupied. We worked first as exegetes with vast units of discourse, with texts, then as lexical semanticians with the meaning of words, i.e., with names, and then as structural semanticians with semic constellations. Our change of level has not been in vain; it marks an increase in rigor and, if I may say so, in scientific method. … It would be false to say that we have eliminated symbolism; rather, it has ceased to be an enigma, a fascinating and possibly mystifying reality, to the extent that it invites a twofold explanation. It is first of all situated in relation to multiple meaning, which is a question of lexemes and thus of language. In this respect, symbolism in itself possesses nothing remarkable; all words used in ordinary language have more than one meaning. … Thus the illusion that the symbol must be an enigma at the level of words vanishes; instead, the possibility of symbolism is rooted in a function common to all words, in a universal function of language, namely, the ability of lexemes to develop contextual variations. But symbolism is related to discourse in another way as well: it is in discourse and nowhere else that equivocalness exists. Discourse thus constitutes a particular meaning effect: planned ambiguity is the work of certain contexts and, we can now say, of texts, which construct a certain isotopy in order to suggest another isotopy. The transfer of meaning, the metaphor (in the etymological sense of the word), appears again, but this time as a change of isotopy, as the play of multiple, concurrent, superimposed isotopies. [See comment 1 below] The notion of isotopy has thus allowed us to assign the place of metaphor in language with greater precision than (lid the notion of the axis of substitutions…
But then, I ask you, does the philosopher not find his stake in the question at the end of this journey? Can he not legitimately ask why in certain cases discourse cultivates ambiguity? The philosopher’s question can be made more precise: ambiguity, to do what? Or rather, to say what? [See comment 2 below] We are brought back to the essential point here: the closed state of the linguistic universe. To the extent that we delved into the density of language, moved away from its level of manifestation, and progressed toward sublexical units of meaning — to this very extent we realized the closed state of language. [See comment 3 below] The units of meaning elicited by structural analysis signify nothing; they are only combinatory possibilities. They say nothing; they conjoin and disjoin.
There are, then, two ways of accounting for symbolism: by means of what constitutes it and by means of what it attempts to say. What constitutes it demands a structural analysis, and this structural analysis dissipates the “marvel” of symbolism. That is its function and, I would venture to say, its mission; symbolism works with the resources of all language, which in themselves have no mystery.
As for what symbolism attempts to say, this cannot be taught by a structural linguistics; in the coming and going between analysis and synthesis, the going is not the same as the coming. On the return path a problematic emerges which analysis has progressively eliminated. Ruyer has termed it “expressivity,” not in the sense of expressing emotion, that is, in the sense in which the speaker expresses himself, but in the sense in which language expresses something, says something. The emergence of expressivity is conveyed by the heterogeneity between the level of discourse, or level of manifestation, and the level of language, or level of immanence, which alone is accessible to analysis. Lexemes do not exist only for the analysis of semic constellations but also for the synthesis of units of meaning which are understood immediately. [See comment 4 below]
It is perhaps the emergence of expressivity which constitutes the marvel of language. Greimas puts it very well: “There is perhaps a mystery of language, and this is a question for philosophy; there is no mystery in language.” [See comment 5 below.] I think we too can say that there is no mystery in language; the most poetic, the most “sacred,” symbolism works with the same semic variables as the most banal word in the dictionary. But there is a mystery of language, namely, that language speaks, says something, says something about being. If there is an enigma of symbolism, it resides wholly on the level of manifestation, where the equivocalness of being is spoken in the equivocalness of discourse.
Is not philosophy’s task then to ceaselessly reopen, toward the being which is expressed, this discourse which linguistics, due to its method, never ceases to confine within the closed universe of signs and within the purely internal play of their mutual relations?
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COMMENTS:
- This accounts for why many Nietzsche scholars miss Nietzsche’s most interesting philosophizing. They discover a single isotopy, which works at the sea-level level of explicit assertions, and they fail to notice the layers of isotopy beneath the argumentation, despite numerous explicit assertions that these levels do exist and ought to be sought.
- This is a fascinating question, and it connects directly with why I began to study hermeneutics. I didn’t know how to think about the kind of truth experienced through understanding of symbols.
The understanding of symbolic works depends entirely on a reader’s ability to recognize in a symbolic form an analogous form which is indicated obliquely. The reasons for oblique indication are numerous, but the most compelling reason is sheer impossibility of direct expression, which means they refer to what we call radically subjective experience. The subjective experiences I’ve encountered are sometimes unprecedented emotional states, a sense of concealed possibility, novel intellectual “moves” (dance imagery is frequently used), and metaphysical noumena of various kinds (which I am reducing to “experiences of”, or what a friend of mine calls “exophany”, but in the spirit of phenomenological method, which means to defy reductionism: I find disbelief and comprehension of metaphysical reality equally impossible.).
The effectiveness of radically subjective symbols presupposes the existence of subjective experiences the symbols indicate. A peculiarity of many of these experiences is their utter ephemerality. It appears they are remembered very differently from objective facts, over which we have a higher degree of command, and therefore can prefer to such a degree that we wish to deny the existence of anything but objectivity. A fact or image can be summoned from memory at will like a servant who is normally obedient. But a mood or insight or spirit has a mind of its own, and must be recalled in an almost petitionary attitude: we recollect images and facts and try to create conditions upon which the experience can (to use Octavo Paz’s word) condense, almost as if they are offerings or a home made hospitable for a guest. I think this is actually the importance of prayer. We recall a forgotten spirit, in the hope we will be inhabited once again, and that once present, we will not be abandoned.
Other double meanings (which I prefer not to call symbols) indicate things that could be very easily expressed in objective language, but which are socially prohibited. The reason “that’s what she said” works so well is because of the legacy of sexual taboo, where all the objects and activities associated with sex were veiled in innuendo. Puns are similar; it is the exercise of the facilities involved in symbolization, but connecting banalities. This is the core problem of very clever people: their activities fail to deliver insights, and are performed only to demonstrate skill.
- More and more, this is the difference I see between science and philosophy. Science works within a fixed horizon, analyzing and synthesizing within a framework that is presupposed and not treated as problematic, because it is simply taken as reality itself. This does not only apply to scientific paradigms, but to the metaphysic of science itself which appears in most cases to be entirely innocent. Philosophy, however, concerns itself with the horizons, and attempts to transcend their limits, a process which takes place within the very limits to be transcended.
It is also ethically significant that philosophy attempts to move outside the closed circle of language. More and more, my own conception of evil is bound up with the refusal to acknowledge being beyond one’s own conceptions of reality. One limits reality to that which one is capable of intellectually mastering, which is objective knowledge as framed by one’s own subjective perspective and which excludes the possibility of subjectivities, particularly super-individual forms of subjectivity that threaten to expose individual intellect as an organ of greater scales of intellect, which include at minimum family, culture and language. Evil is rooted in the attempt to make the mind a place of its own, far from that which challenges its absolute sovereignty over its private universe.
- This reminds me a lot of a diagram I used to draw to show the relationship between synthesis and concept. Synthesis means “put together”, and I classify systematization of wholes constituted of atomic elements as a type of synthesis. However, the synthesis reflects another order of reality which is concept, which means “take together”. I think this corresponds to a mememe — an indivisible unit of meaning which is spontaneously grasped as a whole, or gestalt (or to say it in nerd, the whole is “grokked”). It might make sense to see the activity of trying to understand as systematizing and resystematizing parts until they are arranged into a form that is recognized by the intuition as a concept, at which point the understanding occurs. I may need to return to this thought, because it really is relevant to design.
- I suspect the desire to locate mystery in the words themselves rather than in what the words indicate is one more manifestation of preference for objectivity. The words are fetishized as the locus of the mystery, which is a form of idolatry. Idol, after all is derived from the Greek word eidos ‘form, shape.’ The formula: the ground of reality of which we are made entirely, in which we always participate, but which surpasses us and moves us is impossible to think about in objective terms, and for this reason we reduce it to objective terms. To put it in the language of Martin Buber, the ground of reality is related to in terms of I-Thou, but we reduce it to terms of I-It. And other people, with whom we exist in relationship, as part of the ground — we prefer to relate to them also in terms of I-It — for exactly the same reason. We want to elevate ourselves above participatory relationship which involves and changes us, and instead to look at others across an insulating distance that promises to preserve us inert.
Ricoeur
I am beginning to really like Ricoeur:
Let us look once more at the functioning of ordered polysemy, which we considered earlier with field theory at the level of language. Then it was a question of limited polysemy; ordered polysemy is properly a meaning effect produced in discourse. When I speak, I realize only a part of the potential signified; the rest is erased by the total signification of the sentence, which operates as the unit of speaking. But the rest of the semantic possibilities are not canceled; they float around the words as possibilities not completely eliminated. The context thus plays the role of filter; when a single dimension of meaning passes through by means of the play of affinities and reinforcements of all analogous dimensions of other lexical terms, a meaning effect is created which can attain perfect univocity, as in technical languages. It is in this way that we make univocal statements with multivocal words by means of this sorting or screening action of the context. It happens, however, that a sentence is constructed so that it does not succeed in reducing the potential meaning to a monosemic usage but maintains or even creates a rivalry among several ranges of meaning. Discourse can, by various means, realize ambiguity, which thus appears as the combination of a lexical fact — polysemy — and a contextual fact — the possibility allowed to several distinct or even opposed values of a single name to be realized in the same sequence.
I’m picturing this thought as a venn diagram. The first word in a sentence is a vast circle of possible meanings, but as more words are spoken, more huge circles are added to the diagram, and the overlap shrinks. With each word, the overlap is eaten into until the overlap is no more than a point. Or… even better one finds no overlap at all, or multiple convergence points, and the listener/reader is forced to revisit each of the word-circles to see if one has neglected a dimension of meaning which is the key to understanding. This is why, when reading I always read with a dictionary at hand. I do not gloss over unfamiliar words or attempt to grasp the gist of their meaning contextually. It is precisely the unfamiliar words (and the familiar words used in an unfamiliar way) that challenge the assumed context by which one understands.
Coming to understanding something someone says means changing the very context one by which one understands. And, just to make it personal, understanding what someone says is the same as understanding that person. The ability to merely describe repeating behavioral patterns (even if those patterns make a person’s behavior predictable), or even to explain behavior in psychological terms (even if those explanations make people’s behavior in general explicable or even predictable) is not to understand them, but to bypass understanding them as people and instead to understand patterns or explanations. Most people find the latter much much more comfortable, because it fits neatly within an existing understanding, and therefore is a science and not a philosophy.
Seven capacities
The capacity to describe a situation in all its factual, practical and meaningful dimensions, doing justice to the full experience of the situation is one thing.
The capacity to explain the situation by modeling it as a dynamic with particular causes and effects, inputs and outputs is a second thing.
The capacity to assert an ethic, an meaningful (or emotional) stance toward the situation, which permits evaluation of the situation and its constituent elements, and which orients oneself to the situation is a third thing.
The capacity to envisage an ethic that is not merely a response to a situation, but an independent ideal capable of serving as a positive goal for overcoming an undesirable situation is a fourth thing.
The capacity to discern an ethical vision from an idealized, emotionally-satisfying situational image is a fifth thing.
The capacity to apply an ethical ideal in concrete situations in a way that can, in concrete reality, actually change the facts, dynamics and meanings of the situation from an undesired state to a desired one is a sixth thing.
Finally, the capacity to keep the faith — to cultivate and adhere to a positive ethic — while navigating undesirable situations which compel negative ethical responses which conflict with and threaten to distort or obscure one’s positive ideal is a seventh thing.
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Unfortunately, people do not distinguish these abilities, and the consequences are often disastrous.
Exercise of the first capacity, the ability to empathize, makes people feel understood, and gives them a sense of solidarity with those who share their experience. Exercise of the second capacity, the ability to produce an explanation, makes people feel clear. Exercise of the third capacity, the ability to give someone a feeling of moral orientation toward a problem, makes people feel resolve.
By this point, people stop paying attention to consequences, and begin to simply act for the pleasure of acting with a feeling of solidarity, clarity, and resolve they lacked before. And the action produces all the ideals and images — and eventually, fabricated facts and derivative explanations — to justify, perpetuate and intensify its action.
Every ideology proceeds along this path, winning generic credibility, lower capacities one to create an impression of higher capacities. It all works because all who believe, are invested with the qualities they believe in, and in the belief that these capacities are not only sufficient, but comprehensive.
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This line of thought is similar to the one behind my criticism of the Peter Principle.
To put it simply: We tend to flatten qualitative difference into quantitative degree.
This tendency reduces greatness into double-plus goodness, genius into double-plus smartness, leadership into double-plus administrative competence, etc.
Real difference means we actually need each other’s strengths in order to develop our own and to apply them to greatest effect.
Pressurized freedom
What creatives need is pressurized freedom.
The element of pressure comes from the deadline. — The deadline is not merely the point where the activity must end. The deadline charges time with creative urgency. If you puncture the vessel of creative time with interruptions, the creative pressure is lost, and replaced with frustration and fear. Fear and urgency are both uncomfortable, but they differ in that urgency is productive and fear is depressive. To plan a creative process with frequent checkpoints to ensure steady linear progress toward a goal is like making an aerosol can out of wire mesh.
The element of freedom comes from the design brief. — Freedom is acting according to one’s own judgment. But judgment is only as good as one’s knowledge. The design brief empowers creatives to exercise judgment, by providing them all relevant knowledge needed for making good judgments, even (and especially) outside the realm of the precedented, where real innovation occurs. A creative team who has not been authorized to judge the new will forced to fall back on imitation of the old, which is better known by the euphemism “best practices.” Best practices produce at most extremely competent mediocrity.
Just to screw up the tidiness of this line of thought, pressure also comes from the design brief. The best briefs inspire. The inspiration creates positive pressure which presses against the limits of the deadline. (Consider the etymology of inspire. It literally means “breath into”, which suggests pumping air into a tank.) Inspiration comes from vision, and the most reliable source of vision comes from insights into brand and audience — and that comes from qualitative research.
Protected: Peter Principle
Q&A
Sometimes, what’s needed is not more detailed answers but a completely different question.
Objective world
The objective world can be one of two things, depending on how the concept of objectivity is used:
It can be the factual common ground upon which understanding of other people and of the world can be built.
Or it can be the truth about reality, which, once known, makes further discussion of opinion unnecessary.
Understanding what, understanding who
To misunderstand, to refuse to understand something deemed irrelevant, and to treat something as impossible to understand — all three excuse us from understanding.
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When we understand something someone tells us, what is understood appears to be the subject matter of the speech. In fact, much of the substance of the understanding is the speaking subject, and the subject matter is the medium that makes this intersubjective understanding possible.
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When a person seems hostile to reality, this indicates hostility toward alien minds: minds who make themselves known through new understandings of reality.
Explaining away
Worldviews include within them accounts of alien worldviews held by others. These accounts sometimes also include reasons for why these alien worldviews are invalid and do not require consideration and understanding.
Such invalidating accounts protect one’s worldview from the consequences of understanding rival worldviews and experiencing their validity. It is as if worldviews have life of their own that they preserve as biological organisms do, protecting their outer skin, taking in only that which it can digest and incorporate and repelling everything else.
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Monism, the belief that there is a singular and ultimate truth to be found, inclines people to assume that if something appears self-evidently true, that whatever appears to conflict with it is necessarily false. It is the casual and mostly unconscious tendency of people who have never experienced a shift in worldviews. But those who have experienced a single shift are the fiercest adherents of monism, because they’ve experienced this shift as a conversion from a world of illusion to one of overwhelming truth, which is taken as a discovery of the true world. This discovery is not experienced as the acquisition of new facts about the world, but as a transfiguration of the world itself. The experience is so deep and so dramatic (and pleasant) that is often fails to occur to the convert that the process could occur again, re-transfiguring the transfigured, so the convert fails to look for clues that this is the case. If it does, another conversion is likely to occur: from monism to pluralism.
Pluralism lives on practical terms with the properties of worldviews — the fact that they have “horizons” of intelligibility (which can be characterized as the set of questions the worldview knows how to ask), that they project specific patterns of relevance and irrelevance onto phenomena and fact, that the perspective by which the worldview sees always appears absolute and self-evidently right, and most importantly that worldviews naturally and perhaps inevitably generate misunderstandings which can only be detected with effort.
Consequently, a pluralist always harbors a certain amount of suspicion even toward pluralism, which inclines a pluralist to respect even monistic views, and to attempt to learn from them. But again, pluralism is practical, which means it lives on terms with reality as it experiences it, with the understanding that the surprise of transcendence is a permanent possibility, and that there is no way to predict when such events will occur and what will result from them. Pluralism, unlike skepticism, doesn’t throw up its hands, saying “what can I know?” It doesn’t think of learning as a means to the end of final knowledge. (Arendt identified orientation toward means-and-ends as belonging to the middle stratum of active life, which she called “work”, whose primary activity is the fabrication of artifacts. The stratum above work is “action”, the realm of politics which both presupposes and preserves pluralistic conditions. See Arendt quote below.) What matters, rather, is the desire for particular kinds of knowledge, which signals the next intellectual development, both for individuals and groups of people.
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Arendt, from The Human Condition:
With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.
Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself.
Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness.
Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam — of all political life. … Action would be an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior, if men were endlessly reproducible repetitions of the same model, whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing. Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.
All three activities and their corresponding conditions are intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality. Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the species. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. However, of the three, action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality; the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting. In this sense of initiative, an element of action, and therefore of natality, is inherent in all human activities. Moreover, since action is the political activity par excellence, natality, and not mortality, may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought.
Generative versus informative (again)
Re-summarization of an old idea:
Both pre-artifact and post-artifact research turns up two kinds of findings: facts and insights.
Fact is observational data, the reporting of attributes and behaviors, from the perspective of the observer, without anthropological thickness. The interpretation is left to the intuition of the observer.
Insights, on the other hand, uncover the perspective of those being researched, and yield new modes of interpretation, new fields of relevance and significance: new ways to understand what otherwise appears self-evident.
Most UX professionals call all pre-artifact research “generative” but the generative value of pre-artifact research lies in the insights it turns up, not the facts it gathers. The facts are valuable, and do guide the design, but the facts themselves do not inspire innovation. The factual dimension of pre-artifact research is better characterized as “informative” research. And likewise, post-artifact research, known as “evaluative” tends to focus on the suitability of the artifact — a sort of QA process. But post-artifact research is also a test of a team’s understanding of its users. Every tested artifact is a hypothesis: “If I understand you, this design will make sense to you, be valuable to you, speak to what you care about, and resonate with you.”
Both are needed, but due to the ontic (objective, thingly) orientation of the average non-philosophical mind which predominate in most business settings, only the factual is recognized. “Insight” tends to be dismissed as “bullshit,” “fluff,” and the like, or it is reduced to synonymity with mere fact.
And for this very reason a lot of what has been passed off as “generative” research has in fact been nothing but informative research, which is experienced by designers as “dry”, and which has done nothing to inspire innovation.
This does much to explain the current trend of dismissing generative research as passe. Nonetheless, to anyone experienced in doing or consuming real generative research this whole meme is nothing more than the opining of the ignorant to one another. People never show their blindness quite as starkly as when they parade their cynicism and tell “the Emperor wears no clothes” stories.
World-alienation
One last passage from Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future:
The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world — the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history — has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.
Reality-creation community
Another passage from Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future:
In my studies of totalitarianism I tried to show that the totalitarian phenomenon, with its striking anti-utilitarian traits and its strange disregard for factuality, is based in the last analysis on the conviction that everything is possible — and not just permitted, morally or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilism. The totalitarian systems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis and that, in the course of consistently guided action, the particular hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality. The assumption which underlies consistent action can be as mad as it pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then “objectively” true. What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in the course of consistent action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved. In other words, the axiom from which the deduction is started does not need to be, as traditional metaphysics and logic supposed, a self-evident truth; it does not have to tally at all with the facts as given in the objective world at the moment the action starts; the process of action, if it is consistent, will proceed to create a world in which the assumption becomes axiomatic and self-evident.
Arendt is clearly someone who would have been a member of the reality-based community.
Meaning, means and ends
From Hannah Arendt’s Between Past and Future:
Marx’s notion of “making history” had an influence far beyond the circle of convinced Marxists or determined revolutionaries. … For Vico, as later for Hegel, the importance of the concept of history was primarily theoretical. It never occurred to either of them to apply this concept directly by using it as a principle of action. Truth they conceived of as being revealed to the contemplative, backward-directed glance of the historian, who, by being able to see the process as a whole, is in a position to overlook the “narrow aims” of acting men, concentrating instead on the “higher aims” that realize themselves behind their backs (Vico). Marx, on the other hand, combined this notion of history with the teleological political philosophies of the earlier stages of the modern age, so that in his thought the “higher aims” — which according to the philosophers of history revealed themselves only to the backward glance of the historian and philosopher — could become intended aims of political action. …the age-old identification of action with making and fabricating was supplemented and perfected, as it were, through identifying the contemplative gaze of the historian with the contemplation of the model (the eidos or “shape” from which Plato had derived his “ideas”) that guides the craftsmen and precedes all making. And the danger of these combinations did not lie in making immanent what was formerly transcendent, as is often alleged, as though Marx attempted to establish on earth a paradise formerly located in the hereafter. The danger of transforming the unknown and unknowable “higher aims” into planned and willed intentions was that meaning and meaningfulness were transformed into ends — which is what happened when Marx took the Hegelian meaning of all history — the progressive unfolding and actualization of the idea of Freedom — to be an end of human action, and when he furthermore, in accordance with tradition, viewed this ultimate “end” as the end-product of a manufacturing process. But neither freedom nor any other meaning can ever be the product of a human activity in the sense in which the table is clearly the end-product of the carpenter’s activity.
The growing meaninglessness of the modern world is perhaps nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in this identification of meaning and end. Meaning, which can never be the aim of action and yet, inevitably, will rise out of human deeds after the action itself has come to an end, was now pursued with the same machinery of intentions and of organized means as were the particular direct aims of concrete action — with the result that it was as though meaning itself had departed from the world of men and men were left with nothing but an unending chain of purposes in whose progress the meaningfulness of all past achievements was constantly canceled out by future goals and intentions. It is as though men were stricken suddenly blind to fundamental distinctions such as the distinction between meaning and end, between the general and the particular, or, grammatically speaking, the distinction between “for the sake of…” and “in order to…” (as though the carpenter, for instance, forgot that only his particular acts in making a table are performed in the mode of “in order to,” but that his whole life as a carpenter is ruled by something quite different, namely an encompassing notion “for the sake of” which he became a carpenter in the first place). And the moment such distinctions are forgotten and meanings are degraded into ends, it follows that ends themselves are no longer safe because the distinction between means and ends is no longer understood, so that finally all ends turn and are degraded into means.
In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience from historical consciousness — by no means restricted to Marx in particular, or even to pragmatism in general — we can easily detect the age-old attempt to escape from the frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making.
It seems obvious to me that most people — or at least most people one is likely to encounter in a corporate environment — think exclusively in terms of fabrication.
Tweaking our way to greatness
Mere competence cannot surpass mediocrity, no matter how perfectly it achieves its goals.
This is because mediocrity conceives of excellence in negative terms: as an absence of flaws.
Excellence, however, is a positive matter, and it consists in the presence of something valuable.
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The frank display of flaws can be a way to flaunt excellence.
The excellent, despite being deeply problematic or grossly distorted, is always preferable to those things about which nothing bad nor good can be said.
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Many romantic relationships persist unhappily for the sole reason that nobody produce a flaw sufficiently terrible to justify it.
Thwarted fault-finding produces even deeper contempt than successful fault-finding.
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Mere competence results from seeing only the commonplace, commonsense questions.
The questions are barely even noticed. Usually they are simply taken to be self-evident — implied by reality itself.
All effort is put into re-answering the questions a little better than last time. With each recitation, the answer is tweaked, refined, polished, paraphrased, flavored or garnished a little differently — but the answer is substantially the same, which is why it finds easy recognition.
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Innovation doesn’t come from inventing better answers; it comes from discovering better questions.
Few people seem to know how to discover new questions, and this has much to do with the aversion most people have to the conditions necessary for finding them. People go about things in ways that actively prevent new questions from arising. Everything presupposes the validity of the old questions, and reinforces re-asking and expert re-telling.
We don’t actually love the old questions and we’re not really that enamored with the answers we produce. We only like the predictability of it all.
But is it that we hate new questions? Actually, no. As a matter of fact, once a new question is posed clearly, people love it. The essence of inspiration is feeling the existence of a new question.
What people really hate is the space between the old and new question — the space called “perplexity”, that condition where we are deeply bothered and disoriented by a something we can’t really point to or explain. We cannot even orient ourselves enough to ask a question.
This is the space Wittgenstein claimed for philosophy: “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.'”
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How do we enter perplexity? By conversing with others and allowing them to teach us how their understanding differs from our own. What they teach us is how to ask different questions than we’d ordinarily think to ask. But before we can hear the questions they are asking –usually tacitly asking — we to quiet our own questions. (Interrogations are only good for getting answers out of people.)
How do we avoid perplexity? By not allowing the other to speak. Instead we observe their behaviors, look for patterns, impose different conditions and look for changes. We may feel puzzled by the behaviors we see, but we can answer this puzzlement by trying out one answer after another until one turns out good enough, like a child trying to hit upon the correct multiple choice answer to a math problem without really understanding the material.
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It appears that generative research has gone out of style. There’s a widespread belief that assembling a frankenstein of best practices parts and subsequently using analytics to detect and correcting all the flaws will somehow produce the same results, but more cheaply and reliably — and less harrowingly.
But, here’s the question: Can anyone produce even one example where tweaking transformed something boring into something compelling?
And then consider how many times you’ve watched something compelling tweaked to mediocrity.
Behavior tweaking
In general, people’s interest in one another is practical and behavioral. The minimum knowledge required to elicit desired behaviors and to prevent undesired behaviors from occurring is about all people want.
If we feel we have to understand a person’s experiences to accomplish this, we will make the effort, but otherwise, we will avoid these kinds of questions, because understanding experiences requires a kind of involvement in the other’s perspective resembling immersion in literature, where one’s own worldview is temporarily suspended and replaced with another. And sometimes we don’t come back, fully. Something of the literary world stays with in our own, and we see things differently. An understander stands a good chance of being permanently and sometimes profoundly changed by such modes of understanding.
What most people prefer is the kind of relationship scientists have toward matter. The behaviors of objects are observed in various conditions from a distance, and the knowledge is factual: when this happens, this follows. The matter doesn’t explain itself to the observer: the observer does all the explaining. Whatever intentional “thickness” is added to the behaviors is taken from the observer’s own stock of motives. This kind of objective knowledge doesn’t change us or how we see the world; it changes only our opinions about the things we observe.
For a brief moment, the business world felt it needed to understand other people as speaking subjects as opposed to behaving objects. And for a brief moment it appeared that business itself could be changed through the experience of this very new kind of understanding. But now analytics has developed to such a degree that businesses can return back to their comfort zone of objectivity, and tweak human behaviors through tweaking designs, until they elicit the desired behaviors.
Parental authority
Parental authority stands on two conditions: 1) the parent’s actual possession of superior knowledge of the child’s needs, and 2) the parent’s intention to apply that knowledge to benefit the child.
Parents sometimes use coercion outside of parental authority, often for the sake of the smooth operation of the household. This in itself is not illegitimate. The problems start when coercion is confused with authority. The primary perpetrators of this are those who actually do not know the difference, and therefore lack authority.