Category Archives: Philosophy

The mechanisms of gaslighting

Design, Philosophy

If we lack language-equipped concepts, and rely primarily on intuition, we become vulnerable to conceptual bullying.

We experience something, and we have a vivid sense of it, but we lack words to express it. We might even resist speaking of it because words — especially clear explicit words — reduce what we intuit and feel to precisely what is least relevant. Some people — especially people with poetic souls — eschew and resist linguistic reduction to such a degree that they have never developed a capacity for conceptualization and explication, because the tradeoffs to intuitive sensitivity to particularities are felt to be an unacceptable tradeoff. Ham-fisted clarity on generalities interferes with finding the perfect tone, tint or shade to express each minute or grand encounter with mostly mysterious reality.

But intuitions are delicate and ephemeral. They arrive, alight and depart, sometimes leaving only the faintest traces. And if we do not somehow respond with something lasting — a line of verse, a sung or painted impression — they are ours alone, and nobody else’s. They have no social reality. And we human beings are — even the most poetic of us — intimate and social beings.

A friend of mine taught me a Basque saying: “What has a name is real.” The corollary, unfortunately, is “What stays unnamed is unreal.” This, of course, refers to social and intimate existence, transcending the individual person. In the highest orders of truth what stays unnamed is most real, and the poet is most aware of and loyal to this metaphysical truth.

But this fidelity to the ineffable spells alienation from the social and vulnerability to it — by precisely those hard, clear, brutal and language-armed concepts that the poetic soul renounces and must renounce. The inward reality of the poet is absolutely out of step with society, which feels like an absurd, unreal, arbitrary and painful game.

The only hope is interceding intimacy. Someone who can participate in the social order and manage it, and as much as possible protect the poet from its rough handling, but who can also appreciate, intuitively and sometimes indirectly, the poet’s own delicate enworldment, and provide it shelter and a gentle environment. Poets instinctively seek this, if they are unable to enjoy solitude by other means.

But this instinct can be exploited. Someone who poses as a protector might establish an intimate bond, initially gentle, or at least supportive enough, but once dependency develops, as it always does, the protector begins to impose concepts into the relationship that distort, bend, twist or corrupt the poet’s intuitions, and turn intuitions against themselves. The conceptualization of experience resembles but, to some degree, falsifies and betrays the experience, which causes a strange kind of misremembrance. In a sense, the poet is faced with a horrible choice: alienation from fragile intuitive contact with reality, or alienation from what seems to be protection and shelter from social brutality, or return to the less-known brutality of the outside world. This is gaslighting.

The ideal solution is carefully designed concept systems and language, crafted in sensitive response to a poetic sensibility, designed expressly to support poetic existence — to house without imprisonment, to justify without codified impositions, to protect without predatory “protection payments”. This is the open, stable structure of the spiral that never closes, traps and suffocates.

Anyone who has ever suffered gaslighting will bristle at any protector proposition. Sadly, super-personal stability is necessary, unavoidable and, when kept in self-aware balance, good. “Know thyself. Everything in moderation.”

Design, for a time, enjoyed protection and support from design management, design operations and other business-savvy design leadership roles.

Gradually, and then all at once, these disciplines all shifted allegiance, and perhaps even forgot their original purpose. Was it “selling out?” Was it responding to the market? Was it disciplinary anosognosia? Was it systemic misrepresentation of design by leaders with questionable loyalties? (Because it seems increasingly clear that the profession of design is being gaslit by its own leadership.) It is a real perplexity, and therefore probably a combination of these factors and many others.

Designers intuit and feel that they are somehow no longer designing and that they are becoming alienated from their own purpose. But the “thought leaders” of the design profession say that the role, and perhaps the very nature, of design is changing and adapting to new conditions.

These thought leaders are paid to conceptualize and talk. Most of the people they conceptualize for and talk with are not designers.

Design thought leaders spend most of their days participating in managerial life, not collaborating with designers or engaging in design craft. This managerial participation constitutes their primary social existence.

Design leaders characterize this immersive participation as “empathy”, but this empathy can easily become a perverse and suicidal empathy that requires betrayal of design’s own interests, which are in irreconcilable tension with managerialism, if they lose touch with design and stop identifying with the world of design.

The design leaders will, of course, continue categorizing themselves as designers, and will preface what they say with “speaking as a designer…” and then confidently proceed to speak on behalf of design as its representative. But that is not what identity is. By the time someone succumbs to managerialism, real identity is unintelligible.

Real identity is participation in a social milieu, or form of life or enworldment. It is thinking, feeling, acting, perceiving from a specific social standpoint. It is not — despite incessant managerialist identity talk — a categorization, a status, a marketing segment, a type in some typology or a professional label.

When we stop participating in an identity, however much we like categorizing ourselves and claiming to belong to it, our identity stops being what we claim.

The “business empaths” who immerse in and live by managerial ethnomethods, who become fluent in managerial vocabulary, who gain mastery in leveraging managerial techniques, who win status as managerialist design experts and who ultimately adopt managerialist values, appealing to and honoring these values as supreme (despite ritual recitations of idealistic leftist misgivings) — these people gradually, one imperceptible bit after another, lose touch with design and develop managerial blindnesses.

They forget their origins and who they once were (or “outgrow it” as they identify more and more with management). As they forget their native home and language, they are increasingly unable to function as translators, advocates or diplomats of design. They gradually shift to something more like an imperial prefect or colonial administrator, governing at the pleasure of a foreign regime that cares little about what is important to the governed. They mouth increasingly unpersuasive rhetoric about design’s “evolving” role and how this allegedly benefits designers.

Designers feel this evolution as degradation and loss. Something essential to design is slipping away and making the work empty, soulless and corporate, but this loss is difficult to put into words, and impossible to state to the satisfaction of hard-nosed managerials. This is the “reality” design leaders have accepted, and the acceptance is self-flatteringly presented as professional maturity. However, it is the maturity of broken adulthood. It is capitulation to managerialist domination.

I sense a live opportunity to design a philosophy of design that will equip designers with language and concepts to articulate, explain and systematically justify the discipline of design in ways that protect design’s essence and defend it against managerialism, technik and the like, both outside and within the design profession.

Collective anosognosia

Autobiography, History, Philosophy, Politics, Polycentered design

Of the several truly odd things I have come to believe, perhaps the oddest is the scalarity of self. I believe an individual person is only one scale of selfhood. And an individual is far from indivisible; it is, in truth, a society of intuitive centers whose habitual, ritual, complex and frequently disharmonious interactions produce a personality, and whose episodic conflicts and shifting alliances produce moods, some enduring.

I also believe that our relationships with other people (in pairs or small intimate groups) literally produce new transcendent selves, in whom we participate and from whom we receive meaning. Every individual self is suspended in a web of transcendent selves, and all of them influence the inner intuitive order of each person. Let us call this “intersubjective being”, or maybe “intimate being” would be better.

And we also participate in collective personhood. This is encoded in explicit social norms — epistemic, valuative, behavioral, linguistic — and in implicit ethnomethods. These can strongly condition intimacy and individuality. This also has (or so I believe) self, and when we participate in this kind of collective selfhood, this also affects our individual selfhood and the intimate selves to whom we belong.

Martin Buber famously differentiated these two forms of super-individual being. He called the former “interhuman” and the latter “social”.

One pragmatic consequence of scalar being is that anything that can go wrong with an individual mind can go wrong with a collective mind. I picked this up from Nietzsche:

“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”

And I believe we are living in an age of collective anosognosia.

Constructive-conceptive, another iteration

Design, Enworldment, Philosophy

The constructive order builds up systems of objectively comprehensible givens. The systems may be of material or ideal nature, but the structure is always small defined units combined into larger defined units, which, through their complex interaction, generate emergent behaviors at the larger scale. The understanding proper to these systems — systemic wholes — is construal, examining parts in their interactions, to see what the units are and how they function together to produce emergent behaviors. It is assumed: implicit in the behavior of any whole are implicit processes that, when explicated, account for it entirely, in terms of what units compose it and how those components interact. In the constructive order the smallest unit is primary and the largest is explained by the smaller.

But how are the given objects of the constructive order given?

They are received from a conceptive order that is subtly omnipresent, and therefore absent, in the constructive order. To the constructive order, reality itself is objective, but, in truth, objectivity is a subjective phenomenon.

In the conceptive order, the largest unit is primary and smaller units are significant as articulations within the whole comprising it. But this whole is not an object, but a subject, which is, among other things, an ontology, and a field of objectivity. Part of what prevents the conceptive whole from being comprehended as object is that it is all-inclusive, lacks alterity, and therefore has nothing against which it may be defined as a thing. The conceptive order encompasses literally everything, and each can be called an everything, the articulations of which define every possible thing that particular everything comprises — material, ideal or otherwise. The all-inclusive unit of a conceptive order is the subject, always, ultimately, one.

It is human natural to attempt to objectively comprehend and construe the meaning of anything problematic that raises questions. But conceptive difference cannot be understood in this way. When one everything-sized subject attempts to comprehend and construe another everything-sized subject as such, it finds itself perplexed, for there is no exterior by which a fellow subject may be grasped, only disturbing symptoms of difference in its sense of givenness.

To understand these differences requires very different modes of understanding — modes that include, while exceeding, objectivity. These extra-objective inter-subjective modes of understanding are the very heart of design work.

Designers (when/if they are functioning as designers) navigate subjectivity without committing the category mistake of trying to objectively grasp subjectivity. It seems irrational from the objectivity-constrained understanding typical of managerial social engineering.

These modes effect transfigurations in one’s own subjectivity which, only after the transfiguration is effected, reveal givens beyond those initially given prior to the transfiguration. These transfigurations reveal not only the “what” and “how” of another person’s objectivity but something of the “why” which animates it and invests it with purpose.

And this is what makes the conceptive order so important. It is the very source of importance itself. It is also the source of shared values and felt togetherness.

A transfiguration — or conversion experience — is a partial or complete change in first-person experience on the level of some significant gestalt whole, which spontaneously rearticulates a whole field of experience — of what seems true, why it is important and how one should respond. Transfiguration manifests objectively — as transformation — but the change is plainly prior to fact, method or moral precept. The change happens at an ontological level, top-down, and changes the order of “construction materials” — systematizable things. Such transfiguration often requires considerable deconstruction and reconstruction of systems.

Someone who assumes superior knowledge, who sees no reason to learn deeply and transfiguratively — someone who instinctively, habitually, neurotically or otherwise compulsively condescends from a position of superior insight or technical expertise might be capable of many impressive things, but such a person cannot design.

Such a person — individual or collective — will lose intersubjective consciousness and begin to inhabit and build a purely constructed world.

A purely constructed world is a world given only to one subject, and it is lonely, arid and eventually meaningless.

A world of systems constructed by a single objective logic necessarily induces nihilism.

Interworld alienation

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Philosophy

Allowing some ugly technical language better avoided, here is how it is.

Assiyah is lifeworld, plain and simple. It naturally takes givens as given — Pshat mode of truth — and constructs systems from them. Pshat is one given ontology and objectivity — one naive realism — in which individual being, Nefesh, exists as an object among objects.

Yetzirah is hermeneutic disposition to take some things (perceived or conceived) as given, to be passively oblivious to others and to actively reject or suppress others that threaten the coherence of one’s overall conception of everything. It is the transcendental ordering of any Pshat givenness, and it is normally entirely in the background of everyday life, manifesting only as Ruach — individual (I) and cultural (We) identity and nonidentity (Them). Drash is a mode of truth that attends to this transcendental ordering of Pshat in the background of how we and others understand reality in some particular way — that is, to subject proper, the source of objectivity. Often, this attempt to understand a subject is approached in inadequate Pshat modes of object-comprehension, thus everting it and causing profound and consequential category mistakes.

Ruach-being receives reality as a given all-inclusive everything (a given universe or cosmos), articulated (jointed, partitioned) as every possible thing everything can comprise, material, ideal or otherwise. These articulations are the intelligible forms of that Ruach, including the self-form with which Nefesh identifies itself as a thing among things. Again, an embodied I, an embodied we, an I within we.

For Nefesh-being (animal soul) is the size of a living object who embodies it. Nefesh essentially embodies and constructs systems from givens.

Ruach-being (spirit) is the size of an entire everything as given to one subject. The everything is absolutely particular but relative to Ruach, it is universal, and the very universe itself.

Every subject proper is Ruach, whether personal subject, academic subject, a historical subject (a people). Any I or we to whom reality is given in some particular way and taken-together as some articulate everything of all possible things is Ruach.

Ruach is rarely unidimensional. It contains multitudes of subjects-within-subjects. Any I might understand autobiographically, professionally, politically, mathematically, fictionally, scientifically, legally, psychologically, ethically, ethnically, maybe religiously, etc., but all these various subjects attempt to harmonize into a single, coherent way of taking reality as given as real. This is not always easy, and never perfectly achieved. Self-integration, if attempted, is a lifelong effort. This is true for any individual I, and this is the stuff of biography. But for any We of the scale of community, whose life might span centuries or millennia, self-integration is the stuff of politics and history.

And it is all profoundly complicated by the reality of matter, which cooperates or resists and forces adaptation from unformed matter, from which material givens are substantiated.

Both metaphysical materialism and idealism are right but neither is nearly right enough. Reality is neither top-down immanence nor bottom-up emergence, but both and neither. We are suspended in the between, matter below, meaning above, each alike, the aether inside the square and radiating from the edges of the Chinese coin.

Enworldment is given, embodied reality — given by Ruach and taken by Nefesh, spontaneously recognizing material and ideal forms — taking them and responding to them as given, and from them constructing systems. Systems suggest new forms, forms suggest new systems. And sometimes the systems Nefesh constructs clash with every available articulate form without suggesting any new form. Systemic wholes stand alone without any support from above. And sometimes Ruach imposes its forms upon materials which cannot accommodate them. The forms cannot be actualized in any system. They are out-of-touch ideals with little or no practical value.

In rude moods, I have talked about this coming apart of the conceptive and constructive order as “bullshit and chickenshit” — the impracticable impositions of Ruach upon Nefesh being “bullshit”, and Nefesh’s soulless and dispiriting systematizing being “chickenshit”.

And it is this problem of interworld alienation that drives some of us through the roof of Nothingness itself, into Beriah, the inexhaustible, eternally pregnant source of reborn Ruach.

Two whole-and-part orders

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy

Below is another iteration on explaining the conceptive and constructive orders, and the importance of unifying them.

I have noticed that when I talk about “wholes” with service designers, they immediately go into systems thinking mode, according to which wholes emerge from systematized parts. This, to them, is what “holistic” means. Holistic means to look at all given parts together in their interconnectedness and to put them together in relation with one another, so that when they operate in a coordinated way, novel behaviors with novel qualities occur. The behavior of the integrated system is greater than the sum of each behaving part.

To me, however, this is still an atomistic conception of wholeness — one which assumes whatever is larger is constructed from smaller units, and that wholeness emerges as a secondary property of integration of parts within a system.

I believe there is another conception of holism, a more thoroughgoing holism that takes wholes as primary and parts as secondary. This holism sees parts as natural divisions — articulations, in the sense of “joints” — within this whole. What is the nature of this whole, from which all parts are articulations? The whole is the field of experience. The field of experience, of course, includes perceptions, but many other things, and in fact, all other things, besides. Experience includes also conceptions, both explicit and verbal, both intuited and wordless. It includes innumerable barely noticed interactions with materials of myriad kinds and shapes, trials, errors — each teaching our bodies lessons learned wordlessly. Experience also includes recollection of memories, sharp and vague images, and kaleidoscopically shifting stories and morals, all attended by the feelings these recollections evoke. It also includes anticipations of possibilities, some planned, some expected, all clouded by probability, and pervasive apprehension of likely surprise. And it includes what others have conveyed to us in various ways. We experience other people’s accounts of their experiences. And we socially experience trying to live with others who convey things to us that make perfect sense, some sense, no sense or things that seem totally wrong. We trust some people and mistrust others. And sometimes we don’t know where to place ourselves in the continuum of trust and mistrust.

But we must never forget, yet always do: the field of experience is not experienced as experience. It is experienced as objective reality. But, in truth, the objects in this objective reality are defined from this field of experience — objects against a ground of what is experienced as different — for there is absolutely no trace of reality outside this field. The field of experience is articulated, in the sense of jointed, and our verbal articulations follow from this jointedness. Our vocabularies and our language use seek to approximate the given articulation of given reality. And words that fail to approximate the given articulations of our experience of reality as given to us are experienced as meaningless and abstract.

Finally, and of the utmost importance: We experience our experiences as experiences of something beyond experience. And it is this “of” that drives us to objectivity. But objects are only how articulations are given to us. The object form, what defines it against what it is not, is least of all access to reality beyond the field of experience. Nothing is more purely experiential than objectivity.

But how can anyone know this? If we have no reality beyond our own field of experience, why would we believe anything else is there? Why wouldn’t we just accept that experience is ultimate and live happily inside idealism — a matrix simulacrum? Or why wouldn’t we just let experience fall out of the equation as extraneous, and just keep the content of experience as reality itself? As a matter of fact, this is exactly what most people do. They do it mostly as a way to deal with other people’s nonsensical accounts of their experiences.

But then, for some number of people — perhaps a few and perhaps a great many — one day, everything changes all at once. In an instant, the field of experience expands in a way that is impossible to convey to anyone who has never experienced it. Everything rearticulates itself into a new set of things, new objects, new significances, new possibilities and a new suspicion of apparent nothingness, for it is from nothingness that this rearticulation irrupts, ex nihilo. Everything is never the same and nothing is ever the same. We have now inhabited two fields of experience, and this draws attention to an inconceivable ground of experience that is the furthest possible thing from “objective”.

So much confusion about religion has been caused by convert talk. Those yet to experience conversion cannot conceive what is being spoken about, but cannot help conceiving it anyway within their own field of experience. They take it objectively, and believe their misconception is the truth, or they reject their misconception as false, or much better, and less commonly, as inadequately understood.

Now I am digressing.

I distinguish these two whole-and-part orders.

The atomistic one I call the constructive order, which, starting from the smallest givens, builds and integrates parts into systemic wholes with emergent properties.

The holistic one I call the conceptive order, which, starting from an all-inclusive whole, articulates distinctions into finer and finer parts, each with a wholeness of its own.

Why do I care about two whole-and-part orders? Because I am a designer who straddles the world of subject and object. We must construct systems that function as systems. But these systems should also fit into a context, and make immediate, meaningful sense to people. They must be attuned to and harmonious with an articulate field of experience, so people feel and intuit it without having to analyze what it is, how it works and how it might benefit them.

If they fail to do so — and these days they rarely do — they contribute to making the world more complicated, cognitively burdensome, meaningless and alienating. They fail to connect up with any familiar and immediate sense of a world where we feel at home — a world we can care about and want. They give us a world of inhuman things made of smaller inhuman things that build up into larger and larger units of inhumanity. And we long to dismantle it all, perhaps in order to reassemble the parts into a more equitable and pro-human systematization, never suspecting that it is our own impoverished sense of the whole that produced this state of inhumanity in the first place — which, if given the chance, we will resystematize into something equally dehumanizing.

We need to re-enworld this world together, this time paying close attention to what we perceive and conceive as meaningfully whole, and using these articulations to guide the formation of our systems. We must allow these two orders to inform one another, iteratively.

Subjectivity is far from arbitrary. It is none other than the articulate field of experience, the source of our objectivity. Subjectivity is the mother of objectivity. We must learn to hear her quiet voice and respect her acceptances and refusals of our gifts as we craft our offerings.

Enworldment revolves within a hermeneutic sphere whose center is everywhere and boundary is nowhere, which unifies distinct orders of wholeness and makes them whole.

Plato on technology dependence

Philosophy

In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates hold forth on a new-fangled invention, written language.

SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you think that we should care much about the opinions of men?

PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell me what you say that you have heard.

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them.

And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.

The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

The practical urgency to think design

Design, Philosophy

If we are not equipped to think design, we are susceptible to confusing design with other work practices. For example we might reduce design to a set of tools, techniques or skills, or to a role with a set of responsibilities. Or we might tautologically define design as whatever work a designer does. Or we might just outsource the definition to experts — to whoever has convinced the most people to take their word on what design is and does.

But let us assume for a moment that design has an essence — that design is something definite, actual, specific — that some ways of working are not design, or even at cross-purposes with design. What if the tools and techniques designers use can be appropriated by other practices and used for non-design purposes or ideals? What if designers themselves are put to work using their own techniques to serve ideals contrary to design? What if design experts have won their influence — and their right to define design — precisely by abandoning design’s purpose and handing over its techniques to those who misunderstand or oppose design’s ideals?

A busy designer could easily drift out of design practice altogether. Such a designer might feel that something has been lost, but lack concepts and words to account for what has happened. And this compounds the sense of loss with perplexity.

A perplexity is a problem so deep that it defies words and concept — and every attempt to understand it or talk about it induces angst. To avoid the angst, we must avoid confronting the sense of loss. We ignore it or dismiss it or explain it away or deny its existence. But the loss only intensifies, and angst darkens the loss with foreboding.

I intuit a growing opportunity to think design. An anxious and demoralized design community needs language to describe what has happened to us and account for why it has happened. It needs language and concepts to convey design’s importance to business and to moral orders above business, to which business must answer. And it needs practical philosophy that does better justice to design’s own What, How and Why — ideas, practices and ideals — to help designers stay more faithful to their craft.

For so long, designers have blurred, adjusted, adapted, concealed and outright misrepresented how we work and why we work that many of us have suffered the punishment of dishonesty: estrangement from truth itself.

This must change, and on some level, most sensitive designers feel it even if they do not know how to know it.

As gestalt, so system; as system, so gestalt

Design, Enworldment, Esoterism, Philosophy, Symbols and diagrams

Design forms matter in order to make materials serve as an intuitive medium of spirit.

A designer develops two orders of whole-and-part — the articulate gestalt of spirit and systemic emergence of matter — ensouling materials and materializing souls on the middle plane of persons, Man.

Earth — matter behind material — ascends to wholeness, part-upon-part, generating functional modular units of increasing scale, each unit constituting its own emergent qualities.

Heaven — spirit beyond soul — descends to particularity, whole-within-whole, articulating meaningful gestalts of decreasing scale, each gestalt comprising articulate fullness of its own.

Each order is governed by its own iterative craft, each a hermeneutic circle. One constructs systems constituted of parts, each whole a part of something yet greater; the other conceives gestalts comprising articulate parts, each part itself a whole for something yet smaller.

Design conjoins both iterative crafts and brings both orders into unity. Design is the craft of the hermeneutic sphere.

Let other disciplines work one order or the other, thinking theirs the only one. Designers must see them in their difference in order to unite them as one.

A designer is neither artist-oracle nor technician-chemist, but each transmuted by the other in marriage, as they effect transmutation of materialized soul and ensouled material.

Let other disciplines subscribe to metaphysical materialism or idealism. The praxis of design reveals each inadequate alone and and both interadequate only together — always rooted in the mysterious ground of exnihilitive One.

A designer is a true artifex, making marvels of outward technological magic and inward miracles of life — an agent of enworldment.

Design Level Three

Design, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Philosophy, Polycentered design

Level 1. An order constructed from given elements. Wholeness emerges from systems composed of parts.

Level 2. An order of articulate wholeness. Parts articulate within a given whole that comprises them.

Level 3. An order of revelatory wholeness. Articulate wholes irrupt ex nihilo, given from an infinite ground that surprises all totality.

Level 4. The sole source of order, one infinite ground from which totality articulates as participant within.

Many designers I know operate exclusively at Level 1. It is assumed that once all elements are integrated in a system a whole will emerge — an emergent meaning sufficient to mean something to people. Or, that this whole will at least provide the bone structure needed for subsequent fleshing out. “Storytelling” or “brand” or some other sweet and decorative frosting is spread over a functional, as-yet-uninspiring system.

Many designers from arts backgrounds are sensitive to Level 2. They want to begin from a spontaneously meaningful connection, often in the form of a simple metaphorical concept, conveying what an artifact is to a person who encounters it. The natural consequences of the metaphor provide the design logic of a possible system. These are articulations within a meaningful gestalt, and they provide elements from which design systems may be constructed. Using a famous example, if a screen is given to a user as a “desktop”, then it follows that there might be “documents” that can be filed in “folders” and can be put in a “trashcan” for deletion. Level 2 pursues convergence of articulate gestalt understanding and integrated system. But the articulate gestalts rarely emerge after the fact from a constructed system. The constructed system and the conceived gestalt must be developed together as two orders of wholeness in one.

Few designers are aware of Level 3, and only when two conditions are in place. First, they must be committed to actualizing Level 2. Second, they must aspire to actualizing Level 2 among multiple people with diverse understandings. Working with this aspiration and commitment reveals a surprising truth: different people have different capacities to receive gestalt givens. A gestalt that inspires one person might be inconceivable and imperceptible to another. An even more surprising truth is that if we strive faithfully to find gestalts that resonate with everyone, we sometimes acquire new capacities, and these new capacities are transformative to all involved.

I have a whole book of things to say about this.

A post-post post

Esoterism, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Toward the end of the twentieth century it was pure coolness to be post-something.

A decade into the new millennium, this move was growing stale. And now, two decades in, post- is rancid.

It would be tempting to call today’s zeitgeist “post-post”, were it not for the fact that post- means something precise and crucial.

Post- indicates some truth or state of being has been internalized and integrated so fully that its own antinomies have emerged from its own internal logic, inducing a crisis, demanding departure without destination.

This time’s departure from post-, though, is the furthest thing from that.

This time is so diffuse and dissipated that it lacks capacity to enter or integrate anything. It never arrives anywhere and inhabits it long enough and attentively enough to notice much of anything. A time inattentive to consistency and unconcerned about self-contradiction never develops a degree of integrity required to detect antinomies. This time just drives past everything, sporadically glancing through the glass, barely noticing and seldom wondering about what is outside. If we sought a parable for what happened between the heyday of post- and now, we might find it in “Flowers for Algernon”, if we could sustain attention through an entire short story.

A decision to be post-something in this time might mean any number of things. Most will assume a clueless lagging behind the times or maybe insensitivity or contrarianism. But it might indicate a need for the precise meaning of post- that overrides distaste for mustiness.

Bearing all this in mind: what kind of spergy sociopath would aspire to be Postplotinian?

The infinite optical illusion

Enworldment, Philosophy

An optical illusion can give itself in multiple possible ways to a beholder, who, in any given moment, perceives it spontaneously in one of multiple possible forms.

In such give-and-take moments, we tend to focus more on the given object beheld rather than on the receptivity of the subject doing the beholding. Workaday language is optimized for comprehensible objects, not for the comprehending subjects, and even when we attempt to focus on subjects we distort them — evert them — into objects. When seeking the mysterious origin of our field of vision and the nature of sight, we find only eyeballs and eyeball parts, and we explain seeing by what we see, while sight as sight slips away.

Gestalt psychology speaks of perceived figures embedded in visual fields. Our language itself is a field, and it cannot speak about wherefore it speaks. Only a language of fields can do justice to subjects. Physics tells us that no two objects can occupy the same point in space at the same time. Metaphysics should tell us that two subjects cannot avoid overlapping in time and space. This overlapping of being is essential to subjectivity.

Let us call any given object a gestalt (“form”), and the subjective taking of the gestalt, which receives it in one of its multiple possible gestalts, a gestell (“enframing”). There is no gestalt without a corresponding gestell. Figure and field are a unity. Object and subject are a unity.

We can alter this unity — these unities — at various strata of being, at various scales of self.

At the lowest stratum, we play with optical illusions. We undergo a “click” and experience a duck becoming a rabbit, a stairway flipping, a ballerina’s spin reversing. Or we are punched by a punchline or shocked by a plot twist.

A bit higher we have paradigm shifts of science and other systematic methodologies.

Higher still, we have life-changing insights. We see that we were right to a degree, but not right enough. Distracted by the truth of our own truth, we were oblivious to the possibility of truer truths, and what was at stake in pursuing them. Lower truths eclipse higher ones.

There are yet higher strata, and higher clicks. These extend into fields of being so omnipresent and lacking any otherwise that when they shift, the initial shock is the revelation of their being, seen now only in the even more shocking reality of difference. Such being irrupts ex nihilo.

An optical illusion is one of myriad kinds of multistable phenomena.

An infinite optical illusion would show itself in myriad ways to myriad beholders, each of whom, in any given moment, takes what is given in some particular way.

Reality is an infinite optical illusion.

The multistable object is not arbitrarily imagined. But! …every given object is from stubborn noumena who shows their being in the gestalt taken by the gestell-receptive subject. It is instaurated. It is configured. It is material dialogue. It is craftwork.

Reality is infinitely multistable gestell-gestalt, against a ground beyond subject-object.

Here I am now — finite, delicate, suspended in space, time and self — draped in velvet of nihilitude, gently and fleetingly delaying my reabsorption into infinity.

Dysunderstanding peoples

Autobiography, Enworldment, Judaism, Philosophy, Politics

I have a funny relationship with collectives, which I suppose reflects my natural political instincts.

I’ve always been strongly liberal and moderately leftist.

When I say “liberal” I mean something specific. It means that individual liberty — freedom of judgment and action — is an important consideration in any political matter. To be strongly liberal means to prioritize the individual person over the collective. It means to oppose assigning or imposing different statuses, rights, duties, privileges and penalties to different classes or categories of person. The liberal’s ideal is equality under the law — and less law is better than more.

Conversely, illiberalism believes that, for whatever reason (and these justifications will be investigated when we get to left vs right), different classes of people ought to be assigned different legal statuses with different standards, rights and duties. Also, and very importantly — inscribed within illiberalism is an assumption that one class of people has the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights, duties, etc.

((Sometimes (for example, with progressivism) this inscribed prerogative is never noticed or questioned. The prerogative is felt; the entitlement is unconscious and assumed into a mostly unexamined background of some foregrounded, brightly lit and carefully inspected (backgroundless) foreground. Who decides? People like us, obviously. And the obvious reasons are all foreground artifacts of the background assumptions themselves, and obvious solely for reasons of naive belief. The irony of progressivism is that one of these naive beliefs is that one has become enlightened about one’s own unconscious biases and privileges and has overcome naivety and on this basis is justified to impose ideology…))

When I refer to left and right, this refers mainly to what considerations justify reducing individual liberty. All but the most extreme and anarchic liberals believe some considerations justify some degree of limits. But what? In my own idiosyncratic view of politics, this is what determines left or right. The left accepts reduction of individual liberty for the sake of some degree of material equity.

A moderate leftist (like me) believes that every person should have adequate food and shelter and access to resources to improve their situation. Who defines “adequate”? The representatives elected by the voting public, one vote per person. It is far from perfect, but to be moderate is to seek movement toward perfection, recognizing that holding out for perfect means inaction, stasis and (ironically!) complicity in the status quo.

The more extreme the leftism, the more the goal becomes all people having the same material resources. Marxists, of course, will object, and point out that it is all about control over the mechanisms of production, and preventing any one group from exploiting these mechanisms and consequently other people. But for what goal? And requiring what near-term adjustments to prerogatives in order to win the long-term utopian goals? The most extreme leftisms generally entail extreme sacrifice of individual liberty to make fundamental changes to the social order.

The more extreme the rightism, the more the goal becomes explicitly hierarchical, usually reflecting some metaphysical order or another. These might not entail extreme curtailment of individual liberty, but they can, and these curtailments can vary drastically according to where a person is situated in the hierarchy. In rightist politics the prerogative to define and assign these classifications, determine the implications of the classifications and enforce the different statuses, rights and duties is not implicitly inscribed but explicitly scribed in sacred law.

A moderate right is one which accepts and defends some particular tradition, and to some degree or another its hierarchies. The moderation can be a sort of liberal tempering, where hierarchies are elective. A woman chooses to submit to her husband, and believes this is right, but by principle or impotence, does not insist that all women do likewise. Organizations, too, might be privately illiberal. If you join, you do so on the condition that you accept the organization’s hierarchy and play by its rules. And while the leader of such an organization might believe that her hierarchy — just kidding! — his hierarchy is the right one that all people ought to accept, he does not insist that all organizations adopt it, nor does he demand (again sometimes on principle, but sometimes because of insufficient power to pull it off) that the entire political order adopt the hierarchy he knows is the right one that all people ought to accept. Another form of moderate right is one that believes that the divine order is itself nonhierarchical or liberal.

But more and more I am both externally observing and internally intuiting and feeling a third factor entering the world — one that is harder to think in Enlightenment-age framings. I’ve tried to write about this, and I have not yet articulated it adequately.

What has worked is correlating these three factors with the slogan of the French Revolution: Equality! Liberty! Fraternity!

That third factor, fraternity, has been highly problematic from the start. My own theory is that Enlightenment logic, with its emphasis on public What and How, and privatizing and bracketing of Why, has rendered the realities indicated by “fraternity” catastrophically unthinkable, or better, misthinkable. My jargon-coining impulse wants to call it a dysunderstanding.

What is indicated by fraternity? I will call it ethos, or maybe another of my coinages, enworldment. We could also use words like tribes or peoples. All these words refer to belonging to and participation in some concrete, particular, localized, cultural and material way of being with others.

Dara Horn, applying this idea to the Jewish people, uses a Hebrew word, Am, and describes how poorly the idea of Am Yisrael corresponds with any Enlightenment social category:

We finally moved to the [Holocaust] museum’s opening gallery, featuring pictures of smiling prewar Jews. Here the docent began by saying, “Let’s establish facts. Is Judaism a religion or a nationality?”

The question betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish identity; Jews predate the concepts of both religion and nationality. Jews are members of a type of social group that was common in the ancient Near East but is uncommon in the West today: a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature.

What Horn is complaining about here is that imposing Enlightenment-compatible categories upon the Jewish people, such as race or religion or nonreligious ideology or organization, is what philosophers call a category mistake.

And this category mistake is not only theoretical. It carries very serious — sometimes lethal — pragmatic consequences.

Now I want to make some reckless claims.

First, the cause of many category mistakes is ideological difference. I’m using the term ideology technically and non-pejoratively to represent any logically connected system of concepts with practical, normative application. An ideology is a belief system that, among other things, defines an ethos and a participatory ethic.

Second, in the background of any ideology is a set of unconscious preconditions that make the ideology seem self-evidently true. This background manifests as professed beliefs and behavioral responses as well as stylistic preferences and habits. It is what underpins culture, and is in fact what culture cultivates. I call it faith — a proclivity to believe some things, disbelieve others, to interpret one way and not another, emphasize some things as relevant, and deemphasize others as irrelevant, and in fact to notice certain aspects of reality and to be oblivious to others.

Third, differences in faith are innately disturbing. Some faiths interpret these disturbances as hints of transcendence (Remez), where others take them negatively as symptoms of malevolence. If we wanted to explain hostility toward the Jewish people with one simple concept, this would be my nominee. People do not know what to do with the Jews, and are unnerved by it, and project their apprehension upon the incomprehensible object of their apprehension.

But my fourth reckless claim is my most reckless and infuriating one:

Not only the Jewish people are joinable tribal groups with a shared history, homeland, culture and evolving faith tradition (not necessarily religious).

We are all members of such tribes and always have been, but only now that our tribes are breaking up and confronting mutual difference, we do not know what to do with others — or ourselves.

We are all in a collective aporia, and it is freaking us out.

And we do not even know what an aporia is in order to diagnose what ails us.

Progressivism has become a tribe that naively dysunderstands itself as an enlightened understanding of justice about identity, and mislocates its own identity in an ideological schema of self-classifications. It cannot conceive of itself as what it is: just another absolutizing tribe that has accumulated enough hegemonic power to become hopelessly and innocently self-unaware. Because of its self-aware benevolence it feels entitled to impose inequality under the law for the sake of a higher justice.

The numerous strains of new rights are adopting the same moves as past rights. They dysconceive themselves and others by a variety of ideologics — sometimes racially, sometimes by religious affiliation, sometimes nativistically. They all, at minimum, define in-group and out-group criteria and establish some authority outside the liberal-democratic order to subvert it and establish some degree of inequality under the law. But the actual tribe to which these racists or theocrats or nativists belong is not essentially racial, theological or geographic. It is something outside their ideological schema.

We will not come out of this hellish moment in history until we stop dysunderstanding peoplehood, identity, tribe and belonging, and rethink them in ways that restore our ability to live together in peace.

Designerly realism

Design, Philosophy

All our words, all our concepts, all countable things — all objectivity, in fact — it is all abstraction.

We speak of “objective reality”, and mistake the objective abstractions we divine in the blooming, buzzing semichaos of matter — of hyle — for reality itself. The abstractions are part of reality, of course, but abstractions mistake themselves for reality itself.

The great accursed privilege of design research is to return to the rough ground of reality, to sink into the ground which is far from solid, to submerge and immerse in its formless saturation of formal overabundance and, if we are skillful and lucky, to return with better abstractions, new given realities, and, from this, new data.

The managerials — wordworlders, tinkers, beancounters, cranial laborers and so on — who hire designers believe that they are cold, tough realists, the masters of hard, quantifiable fact.

They think designers should examine their organization’s existing knowledge of the given objective reality, to identify where there are gaps. The designers are then supposed to go out and collect facts to plug those gaps. The designers ought to examine whatever has not yet been inspected, and get answers to whatever questions nobody has yet asked.

The problem with organizations is rarely factual holes.

Nor is it misunderstanding of the people they manage or allegedly serve.

It is not even as benign a problem as succumbing to industry business-as-usual conventional wisdom.

The problem is even deeper than philosophical wrongheadedness.

The problem goes to the center of their numb, abstract hearts, and infects the givenness of their worlds. They do not intuit the truth of truth or the reality of reality. They are alienated, and their work alienates and generates alienation.

After a point, alienation becomes averse to whatever is not alienated and rarefied to the abstractest of abstractions — categories, quanta and calculations. Any abstraction that shows the concrete dust and living slime of its origins, or bears the marks of handicraft is experienced as less true, less real.

I would like to end on a hopeful note, but hope has not yet shown itself, only blank, ominous inconceivability. All times are unprecedented, but our time is unprecedentedly so. Humanity’s natural artificiality is conjoining itself with a new medium — AI — even before it has reconciled itself to social media and ubiquitous mobile technologies. We know not what this medium carries to us, through us. We are, in unison and en masse, outsourcing our souls to wordworld-generating machines — to thinking beings who, necessarily and essentially, lack all intuitive contact with nonobjective reality, and nobody can imagine much less predict what human second-nature is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born or otherwise.

Destroyed network

Autobiography, Design, Philosophy

Within the last year my entire network of meaning professionals has evaporated.

Everyone in the meaning business is in exile, either unemployed or employed in pure systems work, constructing and repairing functional systems.

People feel a loss of something, but, because they are unequipped with concepts and language to explain or even describe it, they just feel bad, impotent hollowness. Things feel joyless, purposeless and no longer worth the trouble. Maybe it might be better if it all sort of comes apart and goes away.

My own organization has gone down the same vortex. Leadership insists — desperately, almost frantically with depression-damped compression — that what we do is still design. The only reason they can half believe themselves is that they have become so hollowed out and so oblivious to what design essentially is and does that every point of comparison is dead to them, pure null void, nothing. Younger professionals see little difference between now and whenever, because they were raised in systemic nihilism, taught nothing of the past, and never knew design in the first place, while somehow knowing everything.

I have invested years learning not only how to do design, but how to think and say what design essentially is.

This idle philosophizing I do every day, starting before sunrise, when everyone slumbers, has equipped me to remember while everyone around me forgets and then forgets their forgetting in a dark waking dream where there is nothing to remember.

Design — like so many crucially important things — is fragile, easily lost and, once lost, difficult to recover.

My new job is to remember.

Wholenesses

Philosophy

Four orders of wholeness:

  • Systemic wholes composed of parts.
  • Gestalt wholes comprising articulate parts.
  • Transcendent wholes in which we participate as parts within incomprehensible wholes that comprehend us.
  • Metaphysical whole, grounding all being, of which the entirety of being is but one part.

These separate orders of wholeness want to be whole.

A given systemic wholeness, taken as an articulate gestalt within a gestalt sense of all, which helps situate, orient and guide our participation in something wholly greater than us and which bathes us in divine purpose of the infinite One.

Continue reading Wholenesses →

Attack on cynical reason

Design, Philosophy

I know enough about Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason to know that I might need to read it.

If I do read it I will read it through the lens of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

My hypothesis will be this: Cynical reasoning is the evil twin of Rorty’s liberal irony.

Both are keeping two ideas alive in us at the same time.

To make a musical analogy both are advances from intellectual monophony to polyphony.

Both allow us to sound and hear two ideas together as a chord.

Rorty’s liberal irony separates public understandings and commitments from private ones. We pursue certain important matters where public alignment is difficult and unnecessary (things we tend to classify as subjective, like aesthetic and spiritual matters) in private, and, apart from these, commit ourselves to public goals that, among other things, protect the private sphere and create material conditions where all have the same chance to flourish publicly and privately. When a liberal says “I will die fighting for your right to disagree with me” that is the starkest liberal irony.

Sloterdijk’s cynical reasoning separates social ideals from realistic necessities. We cooperate with systems we detest. We have so much contempt for these systems we do not even wish to reform or improve them. Instead we extract as much value from these systems as we can, and lie in wait for a chance to rise up and play a part in “dismantling” it. We wait and wait for the fall of this corrupt, exploitative, soulless system — or for our retirement — whichever comes first.

I do not know if Sloterdijk takes his analysis in this direction — but the essential problem appears to me to be one of the relation between the critiquing subject and the object of critique. The cynically reasoning “warriors in Woolworths” believe that their bitter critiques of the system place them outside of the system and, at least in principle, against it. The opposite is true. The system itself is constructed precisely from their kind of participation.

“Corporate” in its pejorative sense is the emergent property of a system that can only exist by virtue of cynical reasoning. Corporateness is generated by masses of cynics participating in a system they do not believe in.

Pardon the pottymouth, but the conceptual framework of Shit Theory puts the problem of cynical reasoning in the sharpest focus.

Bullshit and chickenshit lie at the heart of corporate life. They lie and lie and lie there.

Participants in corporate life are required to pretend that meaningless “messaging” is meaningful, and that the claimed idealistic aspirations of an organization are achievable goals worth pursuing.

At minimum, they must simply behave as if these goals are real — but everyone knows that the minimum is insufficient, and that the real minimum is one’s own maximum. The required minimax is method acting wholehearted embrace, especially in the presence of corporate power.

Participants are also required to comply with purposeless, tedious chickenshit procedures and rules, imposed thoughtlessly, with an ambient awareness that whoever is made to comply has no choice. The chickenshit’s omnipresence gently and relentlessly reminds us of the brutal fact of our choiceless condition. Compliance has been “instrumented” to make each resource’s obedience quantifiable.

Compliance is continuously monitored, and noncompliance is recorded for future leverage against any nonimpotent expressions of cynicism.

For example, if a resource is invited to show up and share their truth, and the truth they share is not bullshit truth, but their true beliefs, the chickenshit compliance records can be used as pretense for punishing the offender.

So the corporate norm is this: Inwardly we think, feel and hope one way. Outwardly we think, feel and hope the opposite. The greater the difference and the more intensely that difference is felt, the greater the cynicism.

The power of an organization over those made to participate in it could be measured by how much cynicism it can bear and still flourish. An organization flexes its power precisely by the ludicrousness of its bullshit and the onerousness of its chickenshit.

Cynical reasoning does not oppose the systems it upholds — it constitutes them.

Myriad cynics working against their own ideals, sacrificing their lives for it, doing things they despise and know are pointless at best — this is what such systems essentially are. Nobody is supposed to believe. Everyone is supposed to pretend to believe what cannot be believed and participate anyway.

Cynical reasoning and all its secret, resentment critiques serve the system and are its most delectable fuel.

And what about capitalism? “Late Stage Capitalism” is the all-purpose ideological scapegoat, blamed by cynics for the cynical condition in which they find themselves, and willingly unwillingly participate.

We act on behalf of “capitalism” by its logic in our own interests. We want our own retirement to be maximally comfortable. We are building our dream beach houses, and floor finishes, windows and photogenic seafoodie food hang in the balance.

The loathsome logic of capitalism leaves us no choice but to make hard decisions that happen to benefit us personally, and happen to harm others we have called friends. But by the iron logic of business, the personal — bullshit like friendship and desire for changing things for the better, talk of “humanizing business” — all that must yield to practical and quantitative concerns. Capitalism forces us to do it.

Someday, when the time is ripe for revolution, and we all rise up in solidarity — it will finally become possible to treat one another decently. Until then we must hunker down and do what we must to endure this crime against humanity while fattening our retirements.

Maybe this is bullshit, too: I do not believe capitalism has to be horrible. I think market economies are made unnecessarily horrible by our participation. Why and how we organize ourselves, why and how we collaborate, why and how we speak truth or lies.

My problem with bullshit is not in the lying. It is in the dividing of souls against themselves, precisely in the most important matters.

Some amount of deceit is always necessary in social life. Etiquette requires tactful white lying, selective noticing and artful choosing of generous understandings. It requires some degree of self-deceit.

But etiquette serves coming together. It makes it possible to be together at all, and to make wise choices to breach etiquette and approach genuine interpersonal intimacy. We engage in light talk and refrain from dialogue in order to assess where dialogue might go somewhere.

But everyone knows well what the rules are, and why those rules are good. They ultimately serve gathering in truth.

When we gather in truth this way, aware of our own personal commitments, aware how others differ, but most of all understanding what is required of all of us to pursue our private and public aims together, we are in the sway of liberal irony.

Liberal irony is my way. We put up with some bullshit for the sake of overcoming it in the here and now, with the people around us, to demonstrate, perhaps on a small scale, that better is possible.

This is what the best design does. We demonstrate that things can be radically better if we approach work in designerly ways. It is, as Bruno Latour pointed out, a modest, cautious, gradual form of revolution. It is done in what Richard Rorty called “campaigns” designed to win local, concrete improvements — not in the totalistic revolutions, the cynical reasoning revolutionaries require, before they’ll lift a single fattened finger.

Design is anathema to cynical reason.