Politics can be base, and usually is base, but it does not follow that politics is essentially base.

It is very important to resist cynical tolerance of base politics.

The following two statements provide clues for finding a dignifying conception of politics:

“Action… 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.”
– Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition

“Only in politics are people willing to talk of “trials of strength.” Politicians are the scapegoats, the sacrificial lambs. We deride, despise, and hate them. We compete to denounce their venality and incompetence, their blinkered vision, their schemes and compromises, their failures, their pragmatism or lack of realism, their demagogy. Only in politics are trials of strength thought to define the shape of things. It is only politicians who are thought to be dishonest, who are held to grope in the dark. … It takes something like courage to admit that we will never do better than a politician.”
– Bruno Latour – Irreductions

 

Goffman, from Presentation of Self [bulleted formatting added]:

In previous sections of this chapter some general characteristics of performance were suggested:

• activity oriented towards work-tasks tends to be converted into activity oriented towards communication;
• the front behind which the routine is presented is also likely to be suitable for other, somewhat different routines and so is likely not to fit completely any particular routine;
• sufficient self-control is exerted so as to maintain a working consensus;
• an idealized impression is offered by accentuating certain facts and concealing others;
• expressive coherence is maintained by the performer taking more care to guard against minor disharmonies than the stated purpose of the performance might lead the audience to think was warranted.

All of these general characteristics of performances can be seen as interaction constraints which play upon the individual and transform his activities into performances. Instead of merely doing his task and giving vent to his feelings, he will express the doing of his task and acceptably convey his feelings. In general, the representation of an activity, especially when this representation is socialized in accordance with interaction standards, will vary in some degree from the activity itself and therefore, in a certain sense, will inevitably be a misrepresentation of it. And since the individual will be required to rely on signs in order to construct a representation of his activity, the image he constructs, however faithful to the facts, will be subject to all the disruptions that impressions are subject to.

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As I read this, it occurred to me that if Goffman had written this book today, he would have needed a chapter on the role of producing data as part of our everyday performances. (We even call it “performance data”.)

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For administrators, the effort of capturing data is incredibly light. The burden falls on those who report to them (a.k.a. their “reports”).

The effort for administrators comes mainly with analysis, which can be deferred indefinitely, with no weakening of justification for the data-capture requirements. Administrators have no practical burdens to restrain their data-capture requirements, and so the requirements are largely unrestrained.

Administrators generally deny that activities and performances are separate things, and assume they are one and the same. It is understood that data measures what the reports should be doing anyway. Therefore, reports have no valid reason to resist measurement — otherwise they appear to have something to conceal, or they are just whiners or grumblers. So administrators encounter no real resistance in their quest to gather comprehensive data by which to evaluate the performance of their reports.

Finally, the object of scrutiny is objective data, which — unlike subjective impressions — cannot lie, and therefore cannot be blurred, squirmed around or contested.

The situation creates an intensified and extensified panopticon effect, where the guard has the power not only to look where he chooses, but also when, and with digitally augmented intelligence, to analyze with superhuman speed and thoroughness, and issue incontestable judgments.

Eventually, when administrators have the means to extract 100% performance from their reports, there is no time nor energy left for effective action. The system begins to fail. More data is gathered in an effort to identify the cause of failure, and to root out nonperformers…

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If you want to control both means and ends, you have to really understand what is going on, and that means forgoing two of the greatest pleasures of authority: 1) being lied to and 2) despising philosophy.

There’s far too much discussion on how to measure, and far too little on what to measure and why.

Positioning means creating substantial, defensible, perceptible, significant, credible difference.

1. Being substantially different means your differentiation is actualized in offerings that differ from others on the market. The difference is real.
2. Being defensibly different means your differentiation is so difficult to imitate that your competitors will have to weaken their own positioning to copy your key offerings. The difference is enduring.
3. Being perceptibly different means that a customer considering your offerings and competing offerings will see differences. The difference is obvious.
4. Being significantly different means that people care enough about your difference that they will pay for that difference, either with money, effort, time or risk. The difference is important.
5. Being credibly different means that people have faith that your difference will make a difference in their own lives. The difference is believed.

Reason is the synthesis of pluralism and logic.

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Science at its best is the synthesis of reason and intentionally formatted empiricism, but when it lapses into positivism it is merely the synthesis of logic and naively formatted empiricism.

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Reason becomes second nature to someone who must constantly persuade.

For those who are isolated and need only convince themselves, or those who are in a position of power and need only command, or those unable to think creatively who crave a single coherent perspective — logic appears to be perfectly sufficient.

Intuition is selective seeing — an implicitly managed selective ignorance — which assigns relevance to some beings, irrelevance to others, and, even more importantly fails to perceive some beings at all, and just looks past or through them.

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Freedom is living according to one’s intuitions.

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Everyone is at some point required to think through whatever is deemed relevant by another’s intuition. Everyone must sacrifice some freedom in order to live socially — at least to the degree one lacks the power to impose one’s intuitions on the less powerful.

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Intuitions are personal. They are preferred or hated according to how natural they feel to an individual’s mind. Or, as we say, how intuitive they feel.

An intellectual discipline that feels unintuitive might eventually come to feel intuitive, at least to some degree, but prior to its becoming intuitive, practicing that discipline requires an enormous sacrifice of energy. And it might be that such disciplines always operate in the red, and always require a sacrifice of energy. You can be sure that somewhere, someone who finds the discipline more intuitive is actually acquiring energy practicing it.

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A person who finds natural the intuitions of the most powerful strata of society will find it easy to gain power.

First, when such a person adopts the intellectual and practical norms of the powerful, this is a cultivation of his nature. Conformity with the norms is empowering and pleasurable, even if it is involuntary. Others, however, experience the same norms as alien, its concepts and practices artificial, its imposition oppressive, and its effect is to make life more arduous, tedious and less spontaneous. In other words, the norms favor some temperaments and cripple others.

Second, people who share intuitions are natural allies. It is by our intuitions that we are friends or enemies.

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Reason is the commitment to discover new ways of understanding that accommodate more and more intuitive natures. Reason is guided by the pluralistic faith that there are many possible ways to conceive and perceive — many possible lifeworlds — and each of these lifeworlds favor some intuitions and hinder others. The ideal we will never reach but must always pursue through constant transcendence of intellectual comfort for the sake of others, is the lifeword that is natural to all people.

When I read about philosophical, sociological and physical scientific attempts to root out metaphysical thought, this passage Borges’ “Funes the Memorious” comes to mind:

It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.) Toward the east, in a section which was not yet cut into blocks of homes, there were some new unknown houses. Funes imagined them black, compact, made of a single obscurity; he would turn his face in this direction in order to sleep. He would also imagine himself at the bottom of the river, being rocked and annihilated by the current.

Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

In my wiki I just cross-indexed the passage above with Heraclitus: “The waking have one world in common, whereas each sleeper turns away to a private world of his own.”

I read Leibniz’s Monadology this morning.

Leibniz is well-known for being one of the inventors of calculus. However, I was not aware that he also anticipated the fundamental ideas of fractal geometry, and precisely the ones that make fractal geometry beautiful.

In philosophy, logic is good craftsmanship.

It is possible for art without craftsmanship to be great, but art that is only craftsmanship can never be more than good.

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Reason is always logical, but logic is not always reasonable.

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I probably shouldn’t post stuff like this on facebook:

Some arguments are not meant to win the other over, but rather to wear her resistance down, to the point where she is ready to do or say anything to get relief from the harassment.

When the arguer finally gets his way, he credits his superior position or logic, when in truth he just used argumentation as a sophisticated form of whining.

If you find yourself getting more and more tired engaging in an argument with no escape apart from surrender, consider the possibility that you are not actually being reasoned with.

4 Indian blind men and 7 Chinese brothers: my superstitious numerological instincts kick into overdrive…

The world makes more sense once you realize that for the vast majority of people a question is nothing more than the painful absence of an answer: A question is a hole in the side of the intellect to be plugged with an answer — any answer — before more chaos can flood in.

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Wherever the seal of reality holds, no question exists. When the seal breaks, any answer-like material of the right size and shape nearest at hand will be jammed into the question to plug it up.

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It might be that we focus our “faith” (in the popular sense of “willfully believing”) on the scars of poorly plugged questions. Apologetics is the art of patching over the plugs and making them less visible.

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Skeptics run about under the waterline with drills, boring holes here and there to show themselves and everyone else that reality is just an artificial wall.

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Excessive patching, boring, re-patching results in a vessel that can only float in gentle weather.

The majority of people only experience a generative idea through the concrete ideas it generates. The generative idea is too abstract and insubstantial to perceive as real and actual; the mind can’t wrap itself around it, like it can a generated idea. However in every generated idea the generative idea to which it belongs resonates and makes a person respond emotionally.

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Innovation gurus make loads of money promising executives and managers that anyone can innovate. They may be right, but if they are, they always neglect to mention that anyone who does wish to learn to innovate deeply will have to undergo an intellectual metamorphosis most will be unwilling to accept.

That metamorphosis involves learning to orient oneself to generative ideas as well as the more familiar generated thought we celebrate as objective fact. It involves rethinking what subjectivity essentially is, and recognizing that objectivity does not, for a finite human mind, contain it.

“What verse is for the poet, dialectical thinking is for the philosopher. He grasps for it in order to get hold of his own enchantment, in order to perpetuate it. And just as for the dramatist words and verse are but the stammering of an alien tongue, needed to tell what he has seen and lived, what he could utter directly only through music or gesture, just so every profound philosophic intuition expressed through dialectic and through scientific reflection is the only means for the philosopher to communicate what he has seen.”

A generative idea is worth much more than a generated idea.

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Generative ideas are perceived only indirectly in the ideas they generate — if the generative idea is perceived at all. Most people only see and celebrate only the final output, and the “doing” that produced it. The rest is “just thinking”.

It’s as if, observing a birth, they honor only the birth canal, and forget the womb, let alone the egg.

And forget the seed — the code — (that abstract element that breeds with distant possibilities, and actualizes diversity and prevents in-breeding, genetic defects and degeneration).

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Heraclitus: “Asses prefer straw to gold.”

Some mythical thoughts on the number myriad…

Continue reading Myriad →

Reason is pluralistic logic.

A passage from Ingold’s Being Alive linked into a 20-year-old chain of thought this morning.

While walking side by side, pedestrians can remain aware of and coordinate each other’s gait and pace through peripheral vision, which is especially sensitive to movement, even though they may not ‘see’ one another directly (on the role of peripheral vision in the detection of movement, see Downey 2007). In a recent study of pedestrian behaviour on the streets of the city of Aberdeen, in north-east Scotland, Lee and Ingold (2006) found that side-by-side walking was generally experienced as a particularly companionable form of activity. Even while conversing, as they often did, companions would rarely make direct eye contact, at most inclining their heads only slightly towards one another. Direct face-to-face interaction, by contrast, was considered far less sociable. Crucially, in walking together, companions share virtually the same visual field, whereas in face-to-face interaction each can see what is behind the other’s back, opening up the possibility for deceit and subterfuge. When they sit and face one another, rather than moving along together, conversers appear to be engaged in a contest in which views are batted back and forth rather than shared.

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First, Rilke. This passage has oscillated between inspiring and bothering me since a friend gave it to me typewritten on a slip of paper at a critical moment in the autumn of 1989. If he hadn’t done this, I wouldn’t be married now, and my two daughters would not exist. Though my assessment of its truth changes constantly, my assessment of its value as a meditation never changes. Here it is:

A merging of two people is an impossibility; and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky.

The essential question is: “merge how?” And also: in what respects and to what degree is the other’s subjectivity an object to us?

I think the answer to these questions actually changes over times, rhythmically and cyclically, and this is what causes my opinion of the passage to oscillate.

Here is where my oscillation has brought me today: 1. To the degree a person wants to merge into one with the other without remainder, that person’s love has not transcended the drive to possess and subsume (or the passive complement, to be possessed and subsumed) and to annihilate otherness (which is to say it is mere lust). 2. And to the degree a co-subjective merging has not occurred, love is still only a possibility.  3. Further, that possibility exists only if there is both lust and resistance-to-lust powerful enough to force dialectic and consequent transcendence. If lust and resistance-to-lust is missing, and co-subjectivity has stagnated, yet the couple still wants to persist in couple-hood, what you get is a not-at-all-wonderful side-by-side arrangement: a modern marriage. It might be assigned official marriage status, but even if it is blessed by the Pope, the Dalai Lama and every other marriage-blessing authority on Earth, practically and actually, it will never be no more than civil union, or an uncivil one.

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The second passage is C. S. Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed”, a short essay I’ve attacked, refuted, ridiculed, and defeated in my own mind dozens of times, only to have it return a few months or years later, all fresh and compelling — and irritating.

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

But this is only a very simple example of the difference between looking at and looking along. A young man meets a girl. The whole world looks different when he sees her. Her voice reminds him of something he has been trying to remember all his life, and ten minutes casual chat with her is more precious than all the favours that all other women in the world could grant. He is, as they say, “in love”. Now comes a scientist and describes this young man’s experience from the outside. For him it is all an affair of the young man’s genes and a recognised biological stimulus. That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it.

One thing about this analogy has always seemed very strange to me. Lewis looks at the beam of light (or rather the reflection of dust in the beam) from the side, and he also steps into the beam and looks straight up into the source of light — but he never steps into the beam and looks along its beam toward the illuminated objects. To my perhaps too-literal eye, this seems to ignore biological design. The eye clearly is not meant to stare into the sun, but to look at what the sun illuminates.

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There’s more to seeing than looking-at and looking-along. There’s also looking-along-toward and looking-along-with. Lewis entertains only looking right into the glare face-to-face like Rilke’s infatuated gazing lovers.

It seems both Rilke and Lewis could learn something from Ingold’s strolling Scottish companions.

And even with this expansion, we are still inside the little world of optics. There’s far more to life and truth than seeing, metaphorically speaking.