Category Archives: Autobiography

On respect and design

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

A friend observed: “You have a serious problem with being disrespected, don’t you?”

That is correct. I definitely have a strong aversion to disrespect. Most people do.

But my aversion might be more intense than usual, and it is for a very specific reason that accounts for the intensity.

It is not that I need other people to esteem me.

I have a pretty clear sense of my value and also where I’m not valuable. I appreciate being valued, of course, if the value is genuine. If another person can inform my own judgments of me that is valuable — for instance, if they can perceive clearly, where I am unclear or oblivious. If a person has a negative judgment of me, but it is poorly informed, or their judgment is faulty, it only makes their negative judgment less valid than my own. It is unpleasant to be judged negatively, of course, but it doesn’t influence my own judgment.

My specific problem with disrespect is that it obstructs dialogical collaboration. And without dialogical collaboration, design problems can never rise higher than constructing uninspiring little systems of known bits.

And system construction is not what I do.

I am after shared holistic understandings. My work is to understand divergent perspectives, each from a first-person perspective, and then, through philosophical effort, transcend perspectival limits in order to find higher and more comprehensive understandings. These new understandings illuminate practical problems in revealing new ways, affording solutions that are both novel and valued together by a wider array of people.

I call this work precision inspiration.

If work offers a possibility for precision inspiration, every task associated with the work is charged with purpose.

If it does not, it all becomes intolerable, soul-deadening tedium.

Here is where respect becomes an existential issue.

Precision inspiration work can only be done in conditions of mutual respect. It requires people to actively care about what other people think, how they think, and why it matters to them. That is what respect is: being concerned about another person’s What, How and Why.

Disrespect is an attitude toward others that is averse or incurious to another person’s What, How and Why. It makes dialogical collaboration impossible. It makes epiphanies impossible. It reduces design to system construction.

This is why, for me, working in conditions of disrespect is an existential threat.

I’m cool with people not caring what I think. I’m used to that. My thinking is not for dull people, lazy people or people so ideological, or brilliant or narcissistic that they do not need to hear what you think. And sadly, under these political conditions, that is a rapidly growing majority of people. I’m not for people like that, and I don’t need to be.

But I cannot work with — and certainly not for — people like that. Wherever I work, I need conditions of respect, if I do not have them, I cannot work. Some people can. Some tough, combative types even enjoy it like a game.

Fighting to win respect from people who wish to withhold respect is not a game I will play.

Know thyself.

Hyperactive listening

Autobiography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Love, Polycentered design

Susan and I have a new method for fighting.

We start with her expressing what is pissing her off, stream-of-consciousness.

When she is done, I steelman her grievances, speaking as much as I can from her perspective — as her addressing me. I attempt to method act her point of view, adding sarcasm, emotional digs and expressive flourishes to indicate insight into her feelings as well as her thoughts.

Then she piles on, with additional points I neglected to mention, which I integrate into the overall argument.

Essentially, we collaborate on kicking my ass as thoroughly and brutally as possible, until she feels everything has been said as thoroughly, clearly and forcefully as possible. She says this process helps her feel thoroughly understood.

Only after she ratifies my understanding do I try to answer her points. Obviously it’s pretty easy to steelman my own perspective.

We try to do the same steelmanning and method acting of possible resolutions of our differences. Again, we collaborate on a shared perspective on how we want to proceed.

This is essentially polycentered design applied to domestic conflict.

I feel fortunate to belong to a two-person organization with this kind of collaborative culture.

Artificial style

Art, Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism

My friend Ash wrote a post on LinkedIn.

Artificial taste is not taste.

In fact, it reeks even more of ineptitude and forgery than Al hallucinations and tells. Hallucinations and tells are at least true reflections of their source.

The only thing convincing about work produced with “design like” and “write like” prompts is that it convinces the audience the creator has insufficient skill for the job and is trying to get away with something.

By the way, this perspective isn’t remotely anti-Al. It’s pro-creativity. I use Al every day in what I hope are creative and constructive ways.

I almost responded and then I got embarrassed for trying to speak philosophically in a professional setting.

I think you’re very right about this. Taste indirectly indicates a standpoint from which a first-person perspective potentially may be experienced. I think that is why genuine style innovations suggest unknown places or scenes where life is lived differently.

Counterfeit style promises a perspective but can’t deliver on that promise. Instead it serves up style schtick. It is a symptom of lack of integrity, sometimes so total that it isn’t even cynical, because the counterfeiter cannot even imagine a coherent perspective spontaneously experienced from an integrated personality. Style is just consistent decorative logic applied to the same-old here and now.

I remember at the dawn of adolescence, when I first experienced punk, I wanted to go wherever that was happening, and that place was definitely not rural South Carolina, where I was stuck. I had the same reaction to REM, and that was in a place pretty similar to where I was in most respects. But the style space was entirely new and promising, and that was where I wanted to go.

Punks always disparaged poseurs. Poseurs were happy staying right where they were as who they were, and they adopted punk stylings to continue playing the same boring prestige games.

It is essentially the same charge perennialists level against syncretists.

Note on my embarrassment: I wasn’t ashamed of my ideas. I was ashamed of placing them in the wrong forum. You don’t throw fancy-pants pearls into a practical pigpen.

Israel Sarug

Autobiography, Kabbalah, Letterpress

Israel Sarug is my kind of kabbalist. He is philosophically rigorous, but a factual trickster. To borrow from Werner Herzog, he cares little for the “truth of accountants” and will not allow factual trivia to obstruct his pursuit of learning or teaching. To borrow a related idea from another filmmaker, Jodorowsky, Sarug appears to belong to the long iffy line of “holy charlatans”, or to tone it back to archetypal semirespectability, the trickster tradition, driven to interweave factual, figurative and intellective truths, suspended in ironic tension.

On the whole, the spread of Lurianic Kabbalism was almost entirely due to the activity of another Kabbalist, Israel Sarug, who between 1592 and 1598 carried on a lively propaganda in the interests of the new school among the Kabbalists of Italy. He posed as one of Luria’s principal disciples, although it seems certain that he had no claim to this title and that all his knowledge of Lurianic doctrine was derived from those stolen copies of Vital’s writings which had come into his hands in Safed. A man of considerable intellectual originality, he conceived himself to have penetrated more deeply than Luria’s genuine pupils into the mysteries of the new doctrine. This fact probably explains why his missionary zeal led him to claim an authority which strictly speaking he did not possess. The deception passed unnoticed, and down to our own days Sarug has been treated both by adherents and opponents of Kabbalism as an authentic interpreter of Luria. The truth is that in certain essential points he gave an entirely new turn to Luria’s thought and enriched it by speculative ideas of his own with which I cannot deal in this context. They are to be found chiefly in his book Limmude Atsiluth [which I transliterate as “Atzilut”], “Doctrines on Emanation.” The essence of Sarug’s interpretation of Luria may be described as an attempt to provide a quasi-philosophical basis for Luria’s distinctly unphilosophical doctrine by injecting a species of Platonism into it, and the singular success his interpretation achieved was due in part to those elements of his teaching which were not genuinely Lurianic.

When I dug further into him, I found a paper called “God as a Printer: On the Theological Status of Printing in the Kabbalistic Tradition of Israel Sarug” by Eliezer Baumgarten.

Here is the abstract:

Recent decades have witnessed a broad scholarly discussion of the cultural influences of the printing press invention. The core of this revolved around the new technological influence on the concept of knowledge, its methods of dispersion, and on social changes that it engendered in the 16th century, when it became an affordable widespread technology. This article presents the way in which the spread of the printing press influenced conceptual paradigms of Kabbalists in general, and Lurianic Kabbalists from Sarug’s tradition in particular. These Kabbalists exchanged the traditional conception of creation as an act of writing, within the conception of the world as a written text, for conceptions of creation as a printing act and the world as a printed text. I show how the professional term ‘letterpress printing’ entered these Kabbalists’ descriptions of divine emanation, alongside their conceptualization of printing as a divine activity, as writing had been conceptualized previously.

Of course, as a letterpress fetishist, I adore this analogy, not least for its anomality.

A fascinating McLuhanian element to this story also appeals to me. I’m succumbing to a temptation to link this with the trickster angel of media and mediators, by whom truths are not only propagated, but configured.

Sarug could be called the Justin Sledge of the Gutenberg age, though it remains to be decided whether esoteric insight or something else is the message of the medium of streaming digital content. Many voracious consumers of digital esoteric content seem to me more like bus tourists in Yetzirah than emigres in higher orders, and whether they are seated to the right or left of the bus they more often become ex-patriotic illiberals than liberated expatriates. They are more individualist than individuated, more inclined to follow ideological trends than to loyalty to people or persons, more spiritually escapist than religiously responsible, more “not of this world” than “tikkun olam”… yet still so imprisoned within this sealed-off, air-conditioned sightseeing bus.

I’d have written a shorter book

Autobiography, Geometric Meditations, Kabbalah, Letterpress, The Well-Tempered Kabbalah

The internet has misattributed to Mark Twain a quotation: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” I first heard and anchored on it as “I’d have written a shorter letter, but I hadn’t the time.” To my ear, it has a nicer waltzier swing.

Ironically, none of the sources of this quote managed to say it as parsimoniously as the internet rock-tumbled version. Presumably, they hadn’t the time.

My first book took 16 years to write, and was nine pages long. My forthcoming book on Kabbalah has taken another six years, and it will be one page long.

Nobody can accuse me of failing to write a shorter book because I hadn’t the time.

Volume titles

Autobiography, Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Works

I’ve had many names for this book brewing in my head, each with its own thematic emphasis.

The book always concerns the relationship between design practice, our own personal and collective psychic-orders (faith) and our experience of the world. The core claim is always the same: our conceptions of design, of philosophy and of religion could benefit from a specific kind of revision.

Of course, each domain is fascinating and contested, and has undergone ceaseless revision since inception. And the intersections between the domains have been explored, often fruitfully, at least in pairs.

My tall claim is that if we shift our understanding of all three of them together in a particular way, they can be understood together in mutually reinforcing ways, that they gain clarity, relevance and inspirational force together as a metaphysical whole and separately as focused domains.

I have seen them this way for about two decades now, and this understanding has only strengthened, brightened and sharpened over the years. It has been uncomfortable, for it has misfitted me everywhere I would most love to belong, but these social costs are far outweighed by the practical, theoretical and inspirational benefits.

But these reunderstandings do not stop at theory. They have pragmatic and existential consequences. And the reunderstandings do not start with theory, either. What has necessitated the theoretical work has been the inadequacy of words and concepts to serve reality as directly intuited. The explanations we give for things we experience often neglect, dismiss, obscure, confuse the most important givens of everyday life.

So, while the medium of the work seems to be philosophical writing, its message points beyond philosophical content, and urges some revisions to the fundamental ontologic that shapes literally everything, sets relevance, affords and constrains possible responses, before it even occurs to us to think about anything.

So what is in question, although it is handled philosophically, and philosophy plays a central role, is not a philosophy. Nor is it an observation or a practice. It is all of these at once. And once adopted, it constitutes a different way to understand, inhabit, participate in and experience reality.

For that reason Enworldment has been a front-runner all-along, and the likely final title.

But Exnihilism is close, and it might split off into a short work of its own, perhaps a manifesto. Exnihilism will emphasize the uncanniness of revealed possibility, always from nothingness (ex nihilo); the harrowing ordeals a person must endure in order to receive such epiphanies; and the changed relationship with nothingness that such epiphanies bring, namely that nihilism becomes impossible. But revelation is not the right word. What is taken — received, perceived, conceived — is not just sitting there like some thing to grab onto and have. A person must go out and meet it, engage it, wrestle with it, collaborate with it, come to terms with its reality, make it one’s own. They are always part-created, configured, co-created, crafted in active-receptive participation. We will follow Bruno Latour, and call this kind of coming-into-being instauration. The experience of ex nihilo instauration leaves the one who undergoes it an exnihilist. The title might be a bad pun, but it is a holy bad pun, and it is charged with life, and it is the idea most needful in these dark times.

In the first half of the 2020s, Second-Natural was still near the front of the pack, and from time to time it took the lead. Second-natural addresses a long-forgotten goal of design — intuitiveness. Over the last fifteen years, designers have become increasingly enamored with systems thinking, so much so that construction of systems has eclipsed the matter of holism. When designers say “holistic” now, they tend to mean “all-inclusivity” and it usually refers to systems. A system that systematizes every relevant element is, to them, holistic. But the view is third-person perspective. Even subjectivities are understood in third-person. These are objective people, who have things called goals, needs, thoughts, feelings and so on. (This tendency is so pronounced, I have wondered if younger designers even mean the same thing as older designers when they say “empathy”. They seem to believe it a matter of having the same feelings another person has, which of course is impossible, but that is not what empathy does. Empathy does pluralism. Young empathy only states pluralism as a static fact, with each person isolated within one externally unknowable inwardness, and with everyone obligated to believe this and abstain from attempts to bridge these inward states and to see out from them, even if approximately. Empathy, like justice, is successful only when perfectly, indisputably and finally accomplished, and otherwise total failure.) Anyway — what is lost in all this third-person systemic holism is the first-person holism of gestalts.

The result of this is a philosophical shallowness that materially harms design practice, and consequently the world we inhabit. From a system-holism perspective, once an all-inclusive functional system is constructed and all relevant parts are incorporated, the work is done. For designers who still pursue gestalt-wholeness, this is only the cost of entry. The system must also be spontaneously perceived and experienced as a simple whole — a gestalt.

If we neglect this, our world is experienced as utterly overwhelming and our dealings with it exhaust us.

And if too many of us come to see truth as constructed — as factual systems built up into theoretical systems — but these truth systems are not received spontaneously as given, but, instead, intercept givens, and replace them with elaborate explanations — then we lose contact with the world, with our own intuitive sense of things, and truth becomes rote acceptance and conformity of ideology. A population in this alienated state is susceptible to mass manipulation.

Second-Natural proposes a goal of good truth design, that equips us with words and concepts that balance systemic thoroughness, completeness and integrity — systemic-wholeness — with gestalt-wholeness, so we can enworld ourselves intuitively.

Because philosophy is a genre of design whose materials are words, symbols and concepts, whose medium is understanding and whose goal is convergence of gestalt and systemic understanding supporting enworldment.

And this brings us to yet another title Everso. The premise of this work is that we misunderstand subjectivity in a topological way. We think of reality as essentially objective, and subjectivity as essentially emergent from objective processes. Everso everses this relationship — flips it inside-out. All perceived or conceived objects are artifacts of some objectivity, which belongs to some ontology in some enworldment or another. This does not imply metaphysical idealism, but it does imply methodological irreductionism. Reality is given in objectivity, but what may be given is limited by what a subject may receive. And this self-ordering of subjectivity — psychic order — is what I mean by faith. Faiths are changeable — radically so — but they cannot be changed arbitrarily. Faiths are instaurated, and the means of such instaurated changes (or instaurated maintenance of stability) are… philosophy, design and religion. And of these three means, religion is most focused on faith states. But faith is not strength of belief. And faith is not belief without evidence. Faith is that by which truths are understood in the first place, and that by which truth is experienced as true in everyday life. Faith is subjective form.

I will also note that a personal subject and an academic subject are essentially alike, and differ only in material form and scale. Many problems and confusions we run into in design, philosophy and religion are topological category mistakes.

I feel like I have four books in me, but none can be isolated, which I guess is what necessitates multivolume works.

The uncanny craft of parenting

Autobiography, Design, Love, Philosophy

For the last several years, Susan and I have been collaborating on a philosophy of parenting. It is an application of a more general philosophy, and that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment. (For background see the autobiographical endnote.)

This parenting philosophy (like the general philosophy and all its various applications) is a relationship-centered philosophy.

The job of a parent is the intentional development of a parent-child relationship from one of inequality and dependence to one of equality and independence. Within this relational matrix (the essence of matrix) — within this social womb — an adult personality takes form, in stages, from relative passivity to active partnership in configuring the relationship. Adulthood is achieved when from this process, a new adult emerges who is capable of equality relations with the parent and with others, and of performing the job of parent.

Parenting is a strange craft.

In every craft a crafter collaborates with a material until a work is formed and fully actualized, often, in the process transforming the crafter. But in parenting, what is actualized is a fellow-crafter. Parent craft begets parent craft.

What makes the craft of parenting so challenging, fascinating and unnerving is that the process of crafting iteratively changes its own conditions and inner logic, often radically. It is like a game whose object is to transform the game itself; and with with each move, the game and the rules by which the game is played are reinvented.

Susan gave this philosophy an elegantly self-descriptive name: Raise-to-Relate.

Autobiographical endnote:

“…that philosophy is the instauration of an intuitive faith which is the substance of our marriage — the heart of our shared enworldment.”

This enworlding faith began forming the minute Susan and I met and began fighting about religion.

I was a standard-issue spiritual-but-not-religious liberal materialist with a rebellious curiosity about religious understandings. I grew up in UU milieu. UUs prided themselves on religious tolerance, but that tolerance seemed both incurious and impotent. Even at ten years old, it was obvious to me that these UUs lacked all means of effective intolerance. Wherever they had the power to pull it off, they were more than eager to suppress opposition. The primary locus of this suppressive power, of course, was with youth. Even the faintest trace of intolerance would not be tolerated. And as I got older, beginning with a conclusion that religion is something to tolerate, and never seriously questioning or challenging that premise, struck me as a mark of shallowness, immaturity and boringness.

Susan was a lapsed Catholic on a mission to recover her faith and reenchant her disenchanted world. Growing up, she was a strange child, and was persecuted by scandalized nuns for the heretical mystical rituals she invented and taught on the playground. College shattered many of her naive beliefs about the world, and her religion shattered with it. She wandered into light libertinism for a few years, but quickly became disgusted and demoralized by it, and had begun systematically reforming her religious life to get back in order. Disenchantment is relative, though, and, by my standards, Susan was still so saturated with enchantment that her being hit me like a heroic dose of acid. Her weirdness and her discipline were magically alien.

Within our first half-dozen clashes she turned my own intellectual conscience against my facile utilitarian morality with a simple devastating appeal: “You can certainly argue utilitarianism, but does it account for the intensity of your disgust toward immorality? Do you really care that much about the smooth functioning of the social order? Really?” I was used to butting heads with philosophical opponents, but Susan hit from the heart. She won that round decisively and permanently.

We have been locked in machloket l’shem shamayim ever since.

Whatever I learn is set in our marriage crucible, and whatever I say or make pours from its lip. My philosophy comes from something deeper than philosophy. It can be expressed generally, but it can also be focused into defined domains of activity like design or parenting, and perhaps this is where it becomes most comprehensible.

The Yes on the bridge

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

My own philosophical development, guided by the problems I intuit and feel most urgently, has led me through but past the regions of reputability established by twentieth century academic philosophy. I carry with me the beautiful and indispensable insights of pragmatism, phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. But in the course of rethinking how I think, why I think also changed. My philosophical goals and ideals changed, and now returning to mere argument, accounting or even understanding as it is commonly understood is impossible. I cannot see it otherwise, now: the goal of philosophy is comprehensive transformation to self and world together. It is a change in attitude, disposition, inclination, sense of relevance that penetrates beneath the content of thought, beneath intellectual methodology, beneath habit, to the society of intuition known as “faith” in given reality, and given truth.

The always-elusive goal of philosophy is to assist radical change in enworldment, from intuited “worse” toward intuited “better”.

When I compare the aims of contemporary academic philosophies with the aims of pre-modern philosophies it is clear that I have arrived at a point of consanguinity with the latter, but having never reversed course, never forgotten what I learned on my way here, having never renounced any of it. I’m newly ancient, pure post- with no pre-. If I am not mistaken, I’ve done some sort of circumnavigation. But being me, I mapped my course very sloppily. My logs were haphazardly kept and provide only vignettes. There is nothing resembling a positioning system, let alone turn-by-turn directions.

I am not one to reject the Enlightenment. With its blessed artificial light we have been able to read twenty-four hours. We’ve pulled a three-century all-nighter, and we have gotten a lot of valuable work done that will continue to benefit us centuries to come. But we are tired. We are starting to nod-off and forget much of the knowledge we’ve crammed and the wisdom we’ve acquired — most of all that precious political wisdom called liberalism.

We are starting to slip into hallucinatory semi-dream and semi-nightmare. Or is it death? It has been so long since we’ve turned out the lights and allowed ourselves to sleep. When have we had darkness sufficient to see a star-filled heaven? We can’t find a place to stand and look out that isn’t covered over by the orange glare of burning gasses in space-time continua. We have shed bright, sharp, enduring, progressing, effective light on the What and How of the natural world, but at the cost of instrumentalist light pollution, which has obscured the Why at the heart of human existence. We have gone nihilist but no longer know how to ask Why. Instead we inquire into chains of causes and purposes that might retroductively account for the void in the core of our being.

Why am I saying this today? What is my purpose? What transformation am I trying to effect here?

With few exceptions, my morning writing has no instrumental purpose, and is free of all technik “in-order-to”. It is an artifact of transformation-in-motion, an expression made for no further reason than itself.

It is pure Why, and provides reason for everything else I do, chosen or compelled.

Years ago, when I’d undergone enough formation-world conversions to have undergone a meta-conversion to creation-world (what I now call “exnihilism”), I asked myself if I would continue philosophizing even with certainty that it had no practical purpose. The answer was whole-hearted, whole-souled, whole-bodied Yes.

This asking happened in a time and place. It was definitely mid-morning. I was definitely cycling over the Bill Kennedy bridge over I-285. I think it was spring, and it was either 2003 or 2004.

Saying Yes, two things happened.

First, I became aware that this impracticality had enormous practical value. It made everything else valuable. Whatever played a role supporting my blessed morning reading, now had a utilitarian purpose I could feel as real. I did it in-order-to do this useless reading. My chain of in-order-to was now charged with felt purpose.

Second, from that point on, my thinking did become useful, even though it didn’t have to be. It became useful for the How and Why design, for focusing design on generating that Why value in our shared world. This Why is perpetually threatened existentially by the nihilism of technicians, technocratic administrators, professional-managerials and other servants of technik — people unable to find positive motivation for action, and so instead motivate themselves solely with avoidance of negatives.

(I would not call this type my enemy. They tend to be the most conscientious, thorough, detail-minded perfectionists. They keep the world running efficiently and that is admirable, necessary and deserving of gratitude. We cannot do without these system builders. But this type drives blindly wherever it is pointed. People like this can serve a vital community or a thriving business, and drive both to success. But it can also be programmed with malevolent ideologies of whatever kind, and it will apply the same virtues to win successes here, too, of the darkest kind. Adolf Eichmann was a very successful man, and any business would have benefitted from his virtues. He judged himself just by the perverse justice to which he subscribed. Had he been American at the time he would have been celebrated today as a hero. If he were alive now, he would serve Progressivism, because, in this time Progressivism is the ideology of the successful and respectable. But this builder will construct with whatever bricks it is given, and it can get along perfectly well without any cornerstone Why. The construction will become increasingly hard to believe and even harder to love. These builders are the intellectual light brigade. Theirs is not to reason Why; theirs is but to do and die, with an intervening comfortable retirement.)

Back to the Yes on the bridge. It gave my life its Why, and provided a Why-grounded instrumental reason for my design work. I would call this my knitbone moment. This is when my taproot found its depth soil, and my leaf growth found its practical horizons: my meaning, my patch of garden.

I don’t know what to call myself. I am both post- and neo-. Post-respectable. Post-philosophical? Neo-mystical? Neo-sketchy?

Post- retains the treasures of the past, and avoids the universal sin of turning back famously committed by Mrs. Lot and Mr. Orpheus. Traversing post- after post- can bring us to the best kind of neo-.

I need to bring together the precise, empirically grounded, carefully reasoned philosophical work I’ve done with the reckless but fruitful intellectual leaps I’ve made.

Years ago, crafting myself design rhetoric to help win designers some space for design work in a technik-dominated environment unable to comprehend our methods, I gave this bridging work a name: “leap-and-creep”.

If designers allow ourselves to learn beyond our own limits — which is what the best design research does — we can gain insights that we can apply practically, long before we can articulate or justify them. We owe our organizations justifications and arguments, but these justifications and arguments should follow intuitive application in prototypes. If an intuition works in practice and shows promise, then a team can get to work accounting for why, and making arguments why it might also work “at scale”.

(This is why we have “premature” ideas in the field. Our conversations with our research participants reshape our general understanding of our problem space in elusive and pre-effable ways. With “new eyes” opened by rapport with our research participants, we catch sight of novel possibilities we were unable to detect prior to the change. We were blind to opportunities that we now very clearly see. I have a name for this, too: precision inspiration. “Rigorous” design technicians who know the correct techniques and recipes try to suppress these ideas. I view them as data. Rapport is the most important understanding we acquire in the field, and our “premature ideas” are often our first expressions of these otherwise inexpressible acquisitions.)

If we are required to justify and account for everything we intuit before we are allowed to try it — if we are required to creep bit by quant-backed bit to our bold innovative leaps — this limits a team to the tiniest and least inspired incremental steps. Anyone who works this way, or worse, imposes this way of working on designers, lacks insight into what design essentially is and does, or has forgotten this insight, lost their own craft, and, to put it bluntly, has sold their soul to technik.

This technical, soulless insightlessness is evident in most reports constructed by professional research teams at most corporations. The reports are stuffed with qualitative and quantitative facts. Some of the facts are formulated in industry-standard “insight” format, but these insights somehow never effect real insight, that is, shift the significance of the fact-set as a whole in some revelatory way. But approximately one-hundred percent of corporate researchers are technicians who see such matters as idle philosophizing, and a total waste of time. So research teams are burdened with the task of mastering enormous bodies of existing research content, and blocked from direct access to the people and realities that inspire new and meaningful interventions. But most large organizations have given up on all goals beyond fixing broken mechanical problems in their soulless offerings portfolio. They are in the chickenshit business, and they can add bullshit later, when the semi-functional boredom heaps are sent to advertising for its shiny coat of bullshit.

…but this is all epic-scale digression.

I have made some crazy philosophical leaps and landed on some sacred ground. I need to creep back so I can map it, pave it, and get some people to join me over here in exnihilism. I have some explaining to do!

Prototype archetype

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress

I was just poking through old posts looking for an old Rorty quote (roughly, “anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed…” when came upon an old post from July 2021, where I realized something simple and shocking: language is one prototyping material. And I will add now, it is often not the best one, but it is inexpensive. Talk is cheap. And anyone who sits in meetings all day will tell you, it is inexhaustibly plentiful.

Whenever I think about prototyping, the same image comes to mind.

It is a bad digital image of an improvised artifact someone at IDEO hacked together using whatever materials were sitting around to communicate an idea for a surgical instrument that could be gripped in a new way. They grabbed a cheap plastic clip, a 35mm film canister and a white board marker and hastily taped it together. The thing induced a collective eureka and eventually became a real product used by real surgeons.

In the Rorty / linguistic prototyping post I announced an intention to make a linocut print of the IDEO prototype.

Reading this today, I experienced a moment of smug self-satisfaction, for soon after I’d written this, I radically one-upped myself. It occurred to me that it would be even better to have a sculpture of that archetypal prototype! So I painstakingly tracked down the original materials and reproduced that prototype. And then I mounted the reproduction in a shadow box for display. I will not pretend I was not proud of both the idea and the execution.

My feelings toward this object are bittersweet. For years, when I still belonged at my organization — back when prototyping was central to our thinking methods — the prototype archetype reproduction was on loan to my organization, and sat proudly in our lobby to remind us of who we were and to provoke questions from visitors.

Now that everything we do is reports and words and talking and projections and plans and complicated system models, we are no more designerly and no less corporate than our clients. This symbolic artifact that once served as quirky evidence of who we were became a phony poseur prop, so I recalled it and moved it to a location where it was still true. It sucks to lose a home you helped build, furnish and ensoul. But, you know, this is how things go. This is why I always say: “Bros before cos.” Never trust an organization. Wah, wah, etc., etc. —

But enough crybabying. I have an idea.

I am returning to this idea of printing the prototype.

I am imagining a small card with a lino image of the IDEO prototype, with lead typeset slogans beneath it:

Stop talking. Start making.

or

Prototype it.

or

We think also with our hands and hearts.

or maybe an edition of each of the three.

Wow, I want this to exist.

I want to own it myself, and I want every designer who is still a designer to have one.

This is what I love most about letterpress.

I’m not in it to express myself or to strut around showing what I can do.

I am motivated by pure avarice. I want something to exist that doesn’t yet exist, so I can have it.

And then I become more generally offended at that thing’s nonexistence.

So I make it exist. And then I get to have that thing, and enjoy that thing’s existence.

There is a beautiful, true, dense and compact book that should exist.

It does not exist, and its nonexistence is my responsibility.

Its mysterious absence is increasingly obtrusive and painful.

I feel it like a futural phantom limb.

Let them eat slop

Autobiography, Ethics

Last night I was bellyaching to my friend Zellyn about everyday workplace hypocrisies. Stuff like when we are invited into a safe space to speak our truth, as long as everything said harmonizes with official lies everyone officially believes with all our line-toeing little sleeve-hearts. And how the high-flying bullshit spouted by managerials, and all the procedural chickenshit they impose is all just trifling nonsense. On and on I went. I have been severely STFU challenged of late.

And suddenly an apparition of Fish appeared in our midst.

And this is what he said: “Staylo, how is it that you’ve made it past your 50th birthday, still expecting anyone to say anything resembling truth with anything resembling sincerity?”

“This is all a game,” he continued. “Nothing about it is real, except the penalties for losing and the rewards for winning. Those alone are real.”

“And do you know the most reliable way to lose this game?”

“You lose this game if you forget it is only a game.”

That is what the apparition of Fish said to us. It was right in the middle of a vegan Indian restaurant, and it was awkward. But we had to give it to him. He had a point.

It’s an option, at least in theory. I’m not sure I could pull it off and stick with it.

It does have a certain appeal. I am no stranger to contempt. When forced to interact with people who refuse to be real, I have been know to make AI crank out fake sincerity for me. I don’t even read it first. Such people deserve neither reality nor my energy. They deserve only slop.

I could imagine aiming this same contempt at that non-consensual hallucination we call the corporate world.

I could enter this simulation as a player intent on winning.

But who am I kidding? I hate that shit. This soulless soul-grinder runs on “cynical reason“.

But it would be both cooler and funnier to win. And moralism is always the mark of the mark.

Is this even a question of morality? Is it more a question of style?

If only I had only one ear to hear only one voice from one shoulder. An ironist is damned to stereo.

Sinistre! Gauche!

Autobiography, Existentialism, Kabbalah

When sincere impious questing arrives at a conclusion, the conclusion must be accepted. Repetition is bad faith.

Questioning unquestionable truths, or transgressively experimenting where matters are settled, can under rare circumstances be necessary and good. Such things should be done only when answers and results are urgent, and when we are fully prepared to accept the response we receive.

Do not seek where you are unwilling to find.

This is an attempt to account for some of my early, shadowy wanderings along left-handed paths. I can neither regret nor condone what it took to get here.

Single-question magic interview

Autobiography, Design, Letterpress

Years ago, when I was refocusing my career from the doing of design (and design strategy) to design research, I tried to design a protocol for interviewing my friends.

Part of my motivation was to give my friends the experience design research participant have being interviewed by researchers who are urgently interested in what they have to say. Often they don’t want it to end. They say it is better than therapy. Yet they’re just talking about mundane experiences. Being listened to closely by someone whose entire attention is focused on what you are saying is apparently rare.

So I invented what I thought was a set of fascinating questions. But it sucked. It made people more confused or anxious than inspired. I kept tweaking and tweaking. The more ordinary the questions got, the better the responses.

Eventually, after much experimenting, one question stood out. No interview ever made it past this point. People would start talking, and then have an epiphany and try to answer in a new direction. They started playing and creating, and the responses were like a tour of their soul.

Some people told me that experience changed how they saw their lives and themselves.

The question is magic, and now I’m realizing I need to letterpress print it.

The interview is:

If you were to write
your autobiography,
what might be the
table of contents?

The key to the magic: the question invites a person to lay out their values architecture — to articulate the schema of what matters in their life.

Postperennialism

Autobiography, Esoterism, Religion

Perennialism (also known as Traditionalism and Sophia Perennis) compares traditional religions to paths up a mountain. At the foot of the mountain, the paths are separated by many miles. But as the paths ascend, they converge, until they meet at the summit. The lower divergent understandings of the tradition are exoteric. The higher, convergent understandings are esoteric. The higher and deeper an esoteric understanding, the more it understands its own tradition as one of multiple possible paths to transcendent unity.

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist. This idea of one summit with universally valid paths from diverse points of departure resonates with both U’s of my childhood brainwashing and with the universal tolerance gospel it preached. Perennialism, though, provides a depth, seriousness and respect for religiosity that I felt was lacking among the UUs I’ve known, and leftists in general, including religious leftists. The preachers of universal tolerance tend to unilaterally define the boundaries and norms of universality prior to doing any toleration, and will not abide any intolerable beliefs or deviations from its toleration rulebook. Thus, it excludes from dialogue anyone who might teach it anything it is not already prepped to relearn. Perennialism offered valuable modes of understanding inconceivable from within the narrow rigor of objective thought.

Integrated into Perennialism, however, are some doctrines that I cannot accept. The first of these doctrines is that no new legitimate traditions are possible. This appears to me to be a corollary to the Islamic belief that Mohammad is the last prophet. Guenon and Schuon, the fathers of Perennialism were both Muslim converts. Another doctrine is the eschatology of the Fall from God, which accounts for why no new traditions are possible. According to this belief, the world and humankind has fallen too far from God to receive any new traditions, and must therefore adopt an established one. Another doctrine is that only through prolonged strict submission to one of the valid religious traditions can esoteric realization be achieved. Because each path reveals its truth successively only through walking it, and at the foot of the path we are largely ignorant of what we are doing and where we are going, the early steps entail some suspension of personal judgment. Perennialists, though, seem eager to push suspension of judgment beyond provisional trust required for any deep existential learning into blind faith that keeps following authority until the initiate finally arrives where truth is seen. The principle is not wrong in theory, it is just a practical matter of degree, and to my liberal sensibilities, Perennialism not only permits, but virtually demands authoritarian politics.

Today I had an epiphany. Perhaps these Perennialist doctrines about esoteric truth are Perennialism’s own exoterism. Perhaps the troubling eschatology, historiosophy and practical prescriptions are not essential to the core esoteric doctrine. They are compatible, but that does not mean they are integral or necessary. I do not reject any of them entirely or finally, and it is possible that what makes them necessary might yet be revealed to me as I progress. But from where I stand now, these ideas seem like a horizontal connecting belt across converging but as-yet-unconverged exoteric paths, which ought not be confused with a crowning convergence at the summit.

I’ve said it before, so pardon the repetition, but that once glamorous prefix “-post” has gone musty.

But post- carries real meaning. It signifies the dialectical “right but not right enough”. It acknowledges both a debt and a departure.

I am indebted to Perennialism for insights that unlocked some of my best modes of understanding. But that debt will not be repaid in the currency of uncritical submission. I might trust, but I will never suspend my personal judgment, and anyone who asks for suspension of personal judgment is not to be trusted. Anyone who demands it should be fought.

Shittheory.com

Autobiography, Philosophy, Shit theory

There was absolutely no chance that shittheory.com could be available, but I decided to check, anyway.

I am now the owner of shittheory.com.

Clearly, this is a sign from heaven.

Update: shitstudies.com is also available.

Destiny speaks.

Another update: blowjobstobedone.com is available, too?

My cup runneth over.

Precisely what it runneth over with is questionable, but it is certainly overflowing with something.

Polycentered declarations

Autobiography, Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Hermeneutics, Judaism, Philosophy, Polycentered design, Polycentrism, Star

The main difficulty I have with esoteric thought is this: I know from direct experience how effective esoteric thought structures are in the dissolution, coagulation, crystallization and stabilization our own souls (psyches) and, consequently, the givenness of the world. Comprehensive conversion — transformation of soul — is a perpetual possibility. This is not even open to doubt, because I’ve experienced conversion phenomena for decades. And people who dismiss this only demonstrate spiritual naivety paired with hubris.

I also know firsthand the role that symbols play in these soul transformations. Radically new truths following from such transformations often emerge first in visual images and diagrams that precede the ability to verbalize the new truth. And when words come, they first come as poetry. Only much later can explicit language be found, but this language still collects around the original structural, visual and poetic core. This genre of revelatory drawing, poetry and writing is hermetic. Again, people who dismiss these things as nonsense only reveal their own limitations.

And I believe that esoteric and normal religious practices can do the same things that thought can. Periodic services and ceremonies, rituals, prayers, forms of mediation as well as religious observances (mitzvot) integrated into everyday life can change or stabilize the givens of reality. And as Susanne Langer taught, our best art is continuous with these religious productions.

To be fully transparent, for me these are less core to my own religious life than thought and symbol work. But they are profoundly important to people in my life that I love most, and by participating in them and bringing my own symbology to my participation, I contribute denser, richer meaning to these practices and receive spiritual communion with others.

Prior to participation in a religious tradition, my spiritual isolation bordered on intolerable. This could be called religious alienation. (Despite what the spiritual-but-not-religious folks believe, serious spirituality craves community of faith. My strong hypothesis is that if this seems otherwise, a person’s spirituality already subsists in an unacknowledged community of faith, perhaps a political one.)

The challenge for me was finding a religious community whose general faith, symbology, practices and metaphysics could accommodate my own faith and its peculiar ways. I absolutely could not belong to any community with anti-intellectual tendencies. I could not belong where devotion or punctiliousness or inchoate mystical feelings of knowingness prevail, and condescendingly assume all religious thinking must be mere theology — a handmaiden of “real” religiosity, or an idle distraction from it.

I found my home in Judaism, where deep study is not thinking about religion, but is itself a core religious praxis on par with prayer. Since the destruction of the Temple and the loss of its material sacrifices, Judaism has sublimated sacrifice and become a radically hermeneutic religion, where lesser understandings are ritually sacrificed and burned on the altar of Machloket l’Shem Shamayim and freed to climb like smoke into the aether, so that insights can descend through the dissipated vapor, back into our souls for recirculation.

This is the religious life as I know it firsthand and very close secondhand.

If you want to know why in Heaven’s name I live a Jewish life, this is my best answer. I am grateful for the miraculous Jewish tradition, and what it has given me (and to all of us, if we are willing to feel the depth and magnitude of gratitude we owe it, instead of stealing these gifts like today’s fashionable anti-Jew “antizionist” prophets of horseshit). And having been adopted into this dysfunctional holy family, I love it in that same stormy, spastic way tight, loving, fucked-up families love — with warmth, fury, irritation, dismay, toughness and hope. And now whatever happens to Am Yisrael — pride, shame, pain, glory, awe, and everything between — directly in my own heart, soul and body, like it happened to me directly, like it happened to my child.

This is identity. It is being a living organ of a living supra-personal body. Anyone who thinks it is a social category imposed on us from without only knows half of the truth, and most very obviously know far less than half of this half.

This section is about what identity is — belonging as an organ of supra-personal being — and what identity is not, a social category that is assigned by oneself or another. It can be skipped, if it bores or offends.

Progressivism is an identity. What progressivists “identify as” is not. This identifying-as is only an expression of one’s Progressivist identity.

The same is true on the right. A great number of Tradcaths and Orthobros express their political identity through some requisite traditional religious devotion.

Progressivists who “identify as a Jew” mainly experience Jewish “identity” as a category assignment within their political identity. Like all members of their faith they are jealous of their category. But they feel directly and spontaneously only the triumphs and humiliations of Progressivism. The daily vicissitudes of the Democratic Party are more viscerally real to them than the existential struggles of Israel. To put it in the starkest terms, November 2024 was personally devastating, where October 2023 was a news story about something that happened far away to someone else.

With respect to the Jewish people — Am Yisrael — Progressivist “as a Jews” are like an estranged spouse with a new lover. Technically they remain married, but their heart belongs to someone new. They are, in fact, Jewish, and nobody can take that away, but they are faithlessly and soullessly Jewish.

They might have a lingering fondness for ethnic Jewishness, and they may feel occasional spasms of ownership, especially if they spot their spouse out in public with someone new (like me, for instance!). “That’s mine, not yours, you lame imposter!” But they have no commitment or loyalty. All that goes to Progressivism. And deep down they know their “as a Jew” identity, is conditional. They must regularly, vocally and explicitly betray their people. Their function is to be human proof-points that Jews, too, can be indifferent or hostile to Israel, and therefore that Anti-Zionism is not anti-Jewish. As long as they keep serving that function, they can be Progressivists in good standing. For now. If the need to renounce antisemitism disappears — and that seems likely — the “as a Jew” Jewish Progressivists will find themselves in the same boat as their disloyal ancestors — abruptly expelled and attacked as outsiders. This pattern has recurred in every European and Arab nation, which of fucking course was precisely why Zionism became necessary. That and two thousand plus years of oppression, persecution and deadly pogroms. To be clear, in this age of exaggeratedly reified metaphor, by “deadly” I mean intentional, non-figurative, non-rhetorical, literal, physical, biological life-ending deaths in large numbers. Folks like Scott Weiner who accuse Israel of genocide, but not enough to satisfy the insatiable hatred of Israel-haters should remember that kapos — even the most willing ones — only delayed their gassing and incineration.

This is how I understand and experience Jewish identity, and how I see it in relation to technically Jewish “as a Jew” Progressivists of Jewish ancestry.

Now I want to speak frankly about important doubts about esoterism, hermeticism and the like. These center on magical claims beyond effects on souls.

Here I have only secondhand knowledge.

To make matters worse, these claims conflict with my metaphysics. These ideas remain outside my faith, perhaps beyond my faith, cloaked in oblivion, as these things are before they reveal themselves ex nihilo.

All this might very well be beyond my reach in the same way my firsthand knowledge of spiritual transformation is beyond the experiential range of the as-yet unconverted or authentic Jewish identity is outside the experience of ethnically Jewish Progressivists.

And I do not mind showing my limits. I am who I am, and I have only come as far as I am today.

I will try to stay faithful to what I know while maintaining as much exnihilist humility as I can toward what may someday come to light. And I will try and re-try never to alienate anyone whose spiritual center is remote from mine.

I will, in other words, respectfully polycenter myself where I am: I, here, now.

And I, here, now believe — humbly and tentatively — that design does, in actuality, and even more in potentia, what magic (also) claims to do.

That is, design forms, reforms, maintains and repairs materials and souls together to instaurate enworldments capable of mediating infinite, finite and definite being. Design circulates the divine light through exchange of gifts.

I have written about design this way before, in a variety of ways, so I will leave things here, compact and opaque and pregnant with hope.

Design deterioration path

Autobiography, Design

For almost twenty years my friend Vanessa and I have laugh-cried together at how projects all go to hell in roughly the same way. We are Gen-X. Bitter truths are hilarious to us.

Design projects deteriorate in four stages:

  1. Make it awesome
  2. Make it better
  3. Make it suck less
  4. Make it stop

Ha, ha, ha and ha.

Today I realized something important and serious about this design deterioration path.

Each of these stages is a revelation of the kind of project the design team has been hired to do. Each step is a disappointing discovery of the true constraints and feasible goals of a project, initially overoptimistically presented as a design project, with the usual goals designers pursue, namely producing something useful, usable and desirable. To recap:

  • Useful: The design satisfies functional needs.
  • Usable: The design minimizes functional obstacles.
  • Desirable: The design is valuable beyond its function.

“Make it awesome” is the goal of a project where a team has been challenged with transcending mere function and is aspiring to design something special and differentiated. The goals is not only usable usefulness, but also desirability — felt meaning.

“Make it better” is the goal of a project where a team has been charged with producing good functionality. Desirability is a nice-to-have, but the main goal is usable usefulness.

“Make it suck less” is the goal of a project where a team has been tasked with fixing broken functionality. Desirability is out of the question. Usable-enough usefulness is the goal. This is no longer really a design project. It is mostly design-informed repair work.

“Make it stop” is the team’s realization that the damage is beyond what a design team, and probably any team, can address. The organization is incapable of allowing anyone to repair what they themselves make irreparable.