Category Archives: Enworldment
Craft as conversation
To be alive to craft is to converse well with materials. Good conversation is reciprocal exchange — give and take, hearing and responding — within an event of emergent meaning.
Hans-Georg Gadamer said that in the best games, players are participants through whom the game plays itself, and, similarly, in the best conversations, the conversation has itself through its interlocutors.
In craft, artisan and artifact, speaking a common language of materials — physical or otherwise — participate in the emergence of form.
This is your civilization on drugs. Any questions?
Postmodernism is civilization on acid.
Those bale-wire concepts that held everything together are snipped, and the whole is flying apart into mad coils of notional chaos. This wild profusion can eventually be gathered back up, after the unbound ideas release their spring energy in expansion and diffusion.
Ontological veils
The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.
Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.
Darkness conceals visibly.
Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.
According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from
revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.
If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.
My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.
The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.
In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.
Designerly metaphysics
Before any beginning is infinitude.
Pure infinitude. Ein sof.
Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.
At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.
Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.
Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.
For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.
From within finitude, piercing of the cloak is ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.
Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.
Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.
Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.
Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.
In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.
The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.
The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.
The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.
And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.
Protected: Brief: Enworldment
Notes on design esoterism
Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.
Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.
Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.
Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.
And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.
And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.
To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.
(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)
Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.
Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.
Esoterism wants to materialize.
Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.
Exnihilism is at the heart of it.
New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.
Dreamt awakening
Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.
Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.
We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.
Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.
We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.
And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.
Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.
Crossing design with Kabbalah
I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.
- Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
- Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
- Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
- Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
- Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
- Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
- Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.
Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.
Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.
For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.
Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.
The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.
The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.
Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.
Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.
The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.
Haloed dread.
The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.
Olamot
I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.
What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.
What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.
What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.
What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.
Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.
Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.
Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.
Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.
Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.
Protected: Seed
Philosophical ethnomethods
I got annoyed by a friend who had an intuitive epiphany concerning ontology and announced the inadequacy of all prior conceptions of ontology.
The annoyance was not about the content of the epiphany, nor about the challenging of any sacred definitions. I am not all that invested in any particular definition of ontology, because ontologies are (according to my meta-ontology) manifestations of an enworldment. This makes me an ontological pluralist, at least with respect to the domain of philosophy.
What bothered me concerned the domain of philosophy — the ethos of philosophy and the ethics that govern and sustain it. Or we could say, the game of philosophy and its rules. Or we could say, the social being of philosophy and the ethnomethods by which participants in philosophy make sense to others, and by which others make sense to us. These are all flavors of what I mean when I say “enworldment”.
Philosophers absolutely can, and should, propose new conceptions of ontology. The most radical ontology will necessarily entail meta-disputing the being of ontology itself.
But these alternative conceptions are philosophical conceptions of philosophical concepts and, as such, are subject to philosophical scrutiny.
In mysticism, one can bluster about making exalted gnostic claims of ineffable knowingness.
In philosophy, we make proposals, demonstrations, arguments, analogies, and the like.
Philosophy is done with others, within the ethos of philosophy, according to the perpetually contested ethical norms of philosophy — and whoever scorns these things should not pretend to philosophy at all.
Whenever mysticism does that infuriating thing it always does — running around comparing itself to philosophy and finding philosophy’s attempts to articulate, convey, or share its intuitions inferior to its own inchoate, felt intuitions — not only is it not doing philosophy, it is not really doing mysticism anymore either.
Rather, it is doing what mature mystics warn neophytes about when they say that esoteric thinking is dangerous. The danger of unguided esoterism is hubristic spiritual inflation, and the aggressive double-ignorance that comes with it — the endemic curse of youth.
This general subject always brings to mind a cold line from Borges: “Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.”
Dreamers dream. Writers write. The difference between a dreamer and a writer is that the writer writes those dreams so others can read them and join them in the dream. Dreamers dream of writing and being read.
Gift thieves
I’ve talked about stealing gifts.
Every gift is an investment in shared being with another. One member of a friendship gives something to another, who is to receive it, on behalf of the friendship. But that gift belongs both to the receiver and to the friendship itself. That mark of the dual ownership of a gift is the bond of gratitude.
When a gift is received as if it is a mere ownership transfer from one person to another, with no sense of gratitude, that gift has been stolen.
Material gifts can be stolen.
Ideas can also be stolen.
But the easiest thefts are the worst thefts: the theft of supraformal gifts.
The hardest part of such a theft is perceiving the gift in the first place. But if someone gives you the gift of experiencing the gift as real and valuable, then there it is — there for the taking. Nothing but decency prevents you from grabbing it for yourself and cutting all the “strings attached” that bind both it and you to the giver of the givenness.
Ingratitude says “You gave me an idea.”
Gratitude says “Thank you for teaching me.”
Ingratitude says “This belongs to everyone.”
Gratitude says “Thank you for showing me what is ours.”
Ingratitude says “We are the supercessors. What was yours is now ours.”
Only ingrates who know nothing about relationships think gratitude is about a craving for credit.
It’s as dumb as the belief that jealousy is thwarted lust for owning another person.
Young people know all kinds of new things, or at least know how to query ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to generate some knowing — but I’ve met next to none who understand what a relationship is, or know how to move around in the world of relationship.
Mission mistatement
I am still coping in my usual way, by bludgeoning my angst with my philosopher’s stone.
If the below reads like diary logorrhea, that is because it is. I don’t know why I can’t just keep a private diary like a normal person. My diary is powered by confessional exhibitionism. Dignity is not my lot.
In design, we work in teams to make things for groups of people.
Each team member has significant differences in how they experience, understand and respond to the world.
Each person for whom the team designs also experiences, understands and responds to the world differently.
If we stay suspended in the wordworld, many of these differences slide by us without notice. Imprecision, inattention, synonyms, vapid jargon coat language with social grease, and keep things slippery and smooth.
Designers, however, live under the Iron Law of Pragmatism:
In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.
One of my dear designer friends summarizes this as “…and therefore?” We designers must body forth the myriad therefores blackboxed inside abstract words as concrete things: visualizations, approaches, plans of action, prototypes, artifacts, new social arrangements — things that will be put to the test.
As soon as abstract words are applied and translated into concrete things, things get abruptly solid, resistant, obtrusive, abrasive, disturbing, distressing.
The making and doing of concrete things is where differences manifest, and manifest hard.
These differences in experience, understanding and response and — even more dramatically, the (meta)differences in how we (meta)experience, (meta)understand and (meta)respond to the experiences, understandings and responses of other people — painfully and dramatically manifested in the practical — all this is the everyday hell of the life of a designer.
Designers live in a hell of subjective difference refracted through incompatible objectivities, conflicting values, spastically dis-concerted responses.
And this hell is made exponentially harder by non-designers who refuse to accept these differences as a point of departure for design work.
These non-designers refuse to do their work outside their own private workshop paradise of their own objective certainty, their own rigid conceptions of objectivity and judgments of proper conduct, methodological rigor and quality.
These non-designers are happy to work on design problems, as long as they have everything their own way, following the laws of their own private paradise — which is precisely the opposite of how design proceeds.
It has been fashionable for some time for self-proclaimed designers to self-efface and flatter others by claiming that “everyone designs” and therefore “everyone is a designer.” This is horseshit. Many professional designers aren’t even designers.
Few people can tolerate the hell designers must navigate to do their work.
And even designers have limits. Any Atlas will, at some point, buckle, when one too many uncooperative paradises has been piled on his shoulders.
When people naively speak of a given, self-evident, objective truth of a given, self-evident, objective reality, implying an absolute objective truth — whether metaphysical or “ontological” or spiritual or social or scientific or technical or psychological — any designer who aspires to etiquette must stifle sarcasm.
Absolute objective truth is an oxymoron.
And objectivity is neither given, nor universal.
Establishing shared objectivity is hard work.
What is the origin of these differences in experience and response?
Faith.
Faith is the purely subjective background of all objectivity.
Faith is the tacit metaphysical ground that generates our uncannily divergent ontologies
The subjective being of faith is known only by its objective fruit.
Faith bodies forth objective fruit that — for those with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, skin to feel it, tongues to taste it, noses to smell it, souls to intuit it — indicates a world of origin.
A faith enworlds a given portion of reality.
Design is a metafaith and metaenworldment that deals in faiths and enworldments and works to reshape them and make them sharable.
That is our mission.
Value exchanges, sahib
I have been thinking a lot lately about value exchanges, the heart of service design.
In service design we try to arrange things (in the broadest possible sense) so that each person involved in a service — whether receiving it, delivering it on the front lines or supporting it behind the scenes — feels at each moment of the experience that the service is “worth it”.
At every moment of a service each “service actor” — each participant in the perpetually emerging service — invests something valuable in order to receive something even more valuable. “Worth it” is not often a calculation. More often it is a felt intuitive verdict.
As long as every service actor involved feels what they are doing is worth it, the service itself flourishes.
To the degree all the value exchanges that make up a service feel worth it to all service actors, the service works.
To the degree the value exchanges that make up a service feel not worth it to any of the service actors, the service begins to break down. Service actors begin to withdraw, or cheat the system, or they drop out of the service altogether. And the service becomes less and less worth it to any of the actors, until it eventually fails and dies.
I am thinking about value exchanges because things no longer feel worth it to me.
I have no place where I am right now. I am galut.
I am trying to decide if providing service design services to clients can ever be worth it, anywhere.
When I bring it all back to value exchanges, I feel worth welling up in me.
“Value exchange” to most ears, my own included, sounds crassly transactional.
But I suspect that this might be the result of a prejudice against economics.
(Many of us carry vestiges of Christian values in our basic moral attitudes. We confuse the Christian faith with Christian doctrinal content. But that new wineskin Jesus made to hold that new wine of his, is exactly the same container that today holds our hypercharged weirdness toward sex and gender, our conviction that the last among us are first, and perhaps, most of all, our ambivalence toward money. The most secular idealists I know grasp their godless convictions in a christoidal death-grip.)
Look at the etymology of the word economy. It is all about the ordering of a home.
And value? Value is just some portion of love.
Exchange? We exchange money, yes, but we also exchange gifts and glances. All giving and receiving is exchange.
Even the word “transact” becomes lovelier under scrutiny. It is even prettier than “interact”. In transaction, we act across the boundaries of individuality.
We are accustomed to think of needs in terms of deficit. We need something we lack.
But it seems clear that the need to give is equally important.
If we are unable to give what we feel we exist to give we feel less than human.
Black Elk seems to have universalized this need even beyond the human species: “The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”
Mary Douglas’s introduction to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: also speaks to the need of value exchange for social solidarity:
Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources. Though we laud charity as a Christian virtue we know that it wounds. I worked for some years in a charitable foundation that annually was required to give away large sums as the condition of tax exemption. Newcomers to the office quickly learnt that the recipient does not like the giver, however cheerful he be. This book explains the lack of gratitude by saying that the foundations should not confuse their donations with gifts. It is not merely that there are no free gifts in a particular place, Melanesia or Chicago for instance; it is that the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouchers. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created. It might just as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction.
When I view service design in this expanded sense, it begins to feel not only important, but maybe the one thing most needful in this alienated, anomic time.
Unless someone will receive what we most need to give, we do not feel human.
Each of us in society needs to give some particular gift.
And if our gift is refused, we are no longer at home here.
It might be that our own souls are held together by value exchange. Imagine soul as society writ small. Imagine intuitive centers as citizens of our soul. Our souls are intuitive centers, full of potential for value exchange, awaiting opportunity to do its thing for the rest of ourselves. One intuitive center of our pluricentric selfhood serves another with what it perceives, or does, or knows, and another intuitive center responds in kind.
But our souls are sometimes of two minds. Sometimes we hate ourselves. One intuitive center denies the validity of another and refuses its gifts, perhaps because it misunderstands what is given.
Sometimes an organization has great use for one part of us, while scorning other parts, and in order to belong to the organization, we must alienate the best parts of ourselves. This can happen among friends, too.
Our self is permeable, nebulous, unstable, ephemeral.
Our self also extends itself into materials and environments.
This is only tangentially related to value exchanges, but I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to say it, and this seems like the time.
Saint-Exupéry (author of the Little Prince) said “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
I have formed some of the best relationships of my life looking outward in the same direction with my fellow designers. And not only looking, but acting together, collaborating on problems, even before they came into clarity as problems, when they were dreadful and perplexing aporias.
And when this has happened, all of myself, too, looked out in the same direction. All the citizen intuitions of my soul were united in solidarity and mutual respect, and I was whole.
We all need this so much more than we know.
Service design cannot accept a value exchange that rejects its best gift, the most needful gift: restoration of soul to the world.
Commonality
Back in 2016, stunned and demoralized by the election of Trump, I needed to get my bearings. We were in a new reality, and I felt unequipped to move around.
I read several books that helped. The most helpful was Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal. Tragically, it was even more harmful than it was helpful. What I learned from this old-school leftist made new sense of recent history, at the cost of alienating me from my own social tribe. I’ve been politically galut ever since.
Rereading Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country also helped, and has continued to help. Whenever conflict with well-graduated Professional-Managerial class supremacists (thanks, Thomas Frank!) makes me doubt my own lefty bona fides, I can reread this book to recover the truth of who is left of whom. This I believe.
Then came Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible. This book presented a series of vignettes meant to help the reader understand the surreal cynicism of Putin’s Russia. It was wild and disturbing to read about a world with no trace of shared truth, that could only be passively ridden like a carnival tilt-a-whirl, or bushwhacked with individual intuition and stubborn refusal to believe anything.
At the time, I felt I was getting a preview of Trump’s America. And in hindsight, I can see I was mostly right.
For about fifteen seconds this morning, I considered rereading it.
But I am terrified I would be unable to read that book now as I read it then. I fear I would recognize that Russia is just like America, but wonder “…but as opposed to what?”
Because that firm common ground that, despite our differences, could be assumed to provide support under our feet, is no longer there. The air of freedom, equality and universal human dignity that we once breathed from birth no longer circulates among us. The compasses that once reliably pointed North, now spins erratically and stops only to point insistently atthis, then that, arbitrary direction. All of this — however hokey and fake it was — is gone now, along with the memory of what life is like when all these commonalities can be taken for granted.
This is what makes history and reading works from other times so challenging.
Objective grasping of the material is trivial. What is difficult is recovering the particular faith that enworlds that material and makes it seem given by reality itself. )O+
Much easier is to grip everything with the fingers of now, and profoundly misunderstand it all.
L. P. Hartley, whoever the hell that is, is said to have said “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
One of the great challenges of youth is to finally, for once, internalize what this means, and to outgrow the callow, hubristic omniscience that practically defines youth. Presentist accounts of past events is the furthest thing from history. It is historical Dunning-Kruger. It is literally sophomoric.
Hannah Arendt was taught by her patch of history to quip “Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians – we call them ‘children’.”
Kids these days.
The old faith and its enworldment is gone forever. We couldn’t recover it now, even if we found the world-lever that could hoist our nation back into e pluribus unum orbit around some common sensical sun. It would have to be a new sun in a new orbit.
What concerns me most right now is establishing common faith and enworldment with a new community — the chimerical and kaleidoscopic society called myself. I need my own ground of given realities and given truths. I need my own spiritus atmosphere of virtues to follow, to honor and to aspire to embody. I need my own conception and orientation to truth, by which I can navigate work, chaos and confinement.
I have at least one viable option for the future.
Sadly, everyone still knows everything.
There is no room for what I know in anyone’s head but my own.
Language of reception
I’ve returned to an old line of thought this morning, thinking about synesis, “together-being”.
In particular I’m focusing on one line from a post from last year, “Threefold Synesis”, where I expanded the sense of being from the initial two, to three, the first being:
“…the together-being of the object of experience. This object may be a perceived thing or a conceived idea.”
I’ve awkwardly defined “enception” as a psychic capacity to take (-ceive) some particular type of ontological given — a sensorily given perception or intellectually given concept. Without an adequate enception, a person is oblivious to what would otherwise be received in perception or conception. Instead of a given something, there is imperceptible, inconceivable nothingness that precludes even absence. When nothing is present, nothing is missed.
I like reception language because it connects with Kabbalah.
From Etymonline:
Jewish mystic philosophy,” 1520s, also quabbalah, etc., from Medieval Latin cabbala, from Mishnaic Hebrew qabbalah “reception, received lore, tradition,” especially “tradition of mystical interpretation of the Old Testament,” from qibbel “to receive, admit, accept.” Compare Arabic qabala “he received, accepted.” Hence “any secret or esoteric science.
The world received by the language of Kabbalah is given as the enworldment of Malkhut.
As I said last week,
Kabbalah is not a set of canonical truths. It is a language by which truth that needs saying — which cannot otherwise be said — may be said. It is a container, not contents. It is a medium whose speech is the message.
Protected: Excruciation
Design and form
We can speak of objective truth, but if we speak of objective reality, we reveal a fundamental metaphysical misconception. Objectivity is “real” only as a subjective phenomenon.
If we say “objective truth” while meaning “absolute truth”, we reveal two fundamental misconceptions. The first, of course, is the erroneous belief just mentioned, that reality is itself objective. The second is that absolute truth is an objective truth.
If we deny the existence of absolute truth, what we probably mean is half true. The true half of the meaning is that there is no absolute objective truth. But the untrue implication lurking behind the truth is that truth is essentially and necessarily objective. This is a philosophical limitation that can be overcome.
To overcome objectivist confinement, we must learn to think supraformal and infraformal truth.
Designers, especially, already know how to engage supraformal and infraformal realities in purely intuitive practice. But when pressed to explain or justify our way of working, our concepts and language mystify rather than clarify.
When designers try to be faithful to what we do, we bungle it — confusing and alienating nondesigners. So often we “translate” what we do to objective business language, and call it “design thinking”. But the stubbornly non-objective truth of design is lost in translation. In trying to represent design objectively, we misrepresent, misdirect, and mislead — offering only an illusion of comprehension and mastery. These nondesigners then share their “expertise” with other nondesigners. (Lesson #1: Everyone is a designer!) They found programs, institutions, consultancies, and whatnot, until we have a whole industry of nondesigner design experts. None of them ever actually design, and if they did, they would quickly discover that their theories and wise words — so compelling to executives, academics and writers — are useless to designers designing real artifacts. But of course, this is no argument against their expertise.
Much harder is clarity faithful to the reality of designing. But this requires us to “open the hand of thought”. We must allow some fundamental and unexamined beliefs about reality and truth to drop from our grip, and invite new ones to alight in their place.