Forever Becoming

Assuming a Position

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"The kind of blogging I do has to be based in personal obsession, in spats and rivalry, in a kind of light, oblique but perpetual autobiography. There has to be a subject for all this data to make any sort of situated sense, and that subject has to be seen to have a body, clothes, a way to wear those clothes, and so on. As soon as I get tugged out of that embodied, situated world I get bored and anxious and mistrustful. I want to know always who's speaking, how old they are, what culture they were raised in, what their vested interests are, and so on.

For me, the Anon is suspicious because I can't see what s/he looks like or what life his/her comment is rooted in. For the Anons (or some of them), I'm the suspicious one, because my comments are far too obviously rooted in an ego, a persona. The Anon's habitual mode of attack is therefore ad hominem, but since it comes from -- apparently -- no-one it could also be described as ab nemo."

[Momus]

"To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity"

[Oscar Wilde]

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What is a "position"?

Psychologist Eric Berne described a position as a "simple predictive statement which influences all of the individual's transactions [...] Unless something or somebody intervenes, [a person] spends the rest of his life stabilizing his position and dealing with situations that threaten it: by avoiding them, warding off certain elements or manipulating them provocatively so that they are transformed from threats into justifications."1

We could see a position as a castle. We may live within it, and we may, when we need to, man the barracks and defend it against attack.

When we look for someone's position we are looking for their epistemology; the ideas and beliefs that lead them to think and act the way that they do. To see their castle is to see the individual bricks that it is composed of, and, if we look hard enough, it is to see the foundations upon which it rests.

In understanding a person's position we bring perspective to our image of them, framing their behaviour within a larger picture. When their thoughts and actions no longer clutter the foreground, we are able to relativise their claims to truth; instead of being the whole truth - transcendent, impersonal - they become someone's truth. A person's position is the centre of their individual mythology, and both influences, and is influenced by, the stories that they tell themselves about the world. To see a position is to see a person's fictions, the meanings and values that are guiding them.

When we can see a story, and when we can frame this story within a network of alternative fictions, we may feel less threatened by its otherness. For example, when Oscar Wilde tells us that "The first duty in life is to assume a pose", we may find his words incommensurable with our own experience, and may reject his statement as false. If we understand Wilde's background - his fiction - and can see his position, then we may be less tempted to reject his statement on the grounds of its truth. For Wilde, the idea of the pose may have been an important one in giving meaning to life, and it may be that it could also mean something to us. Be if we take his truth as literal - as objective, as transcending the realms of subjective fiction - then we are forced into a corner, into either accepting his truth and modifying our own position accordingly, or rejecting it outright. If, on the other hand, we are able to relativise his truth, and to frame it within his position - and this position within a system of multiple positions - then our tight corner disappears. His truth can exist without threatening to annihilate ours.

Because it is no longer in the foreground, making claims to universality and thus threatening our own truth, we may feel more able to approach, and entertain, Wilde's idea; to visit his castle, look around, note the structure, the decor. To see his position, and to frame it within a landscape of alternative positions, is to allow it room to exist.

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Monotheism & Polytheism

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We may often fool ourselves into thinking that there is such a thing as a definitive position, a castle of castles, and that we may inhabit it, or that someone else may. This belief springs from what we could call a monotheistic view: it has in mind a "perfect castle" and measures all others against this standard. When we're in a monotheistic mode (thinking with the mono-view) then we may come to think that we'd prefer it if there was only one castle. The fact that there appear to be many becomes something of an inconvenience - how, after all, do we know which one is the "right" one? Perhaps we can see from a distance whether a castle fits the bill or not, but appearances may be deceptive. We may have to visit each one and check. This is, of course, to assume that we've managed to make it out of our front door in the first place. It may, after all, be easier to decide that ours is the "right" one and leave it at that. That way we won't have to get tired wandering around, and we won't risk getting lost on the journey.

The monotheistic view has its roots in the Christian tradition, and the idea that there is one God, and one way (thus, one castle - "God's castle"). This one way - the "true path" - is exemplified through the figure of Christ, and to deviate from it is to live erroneously.

We find an alternative view in the form of polytheism, which has its roots in the Greek tradition, and the idea that there are many gods, each representing different facets of the human psyche. The polytheistic view invites us to think in terms of modes.

If we consider our castles with the polytheistic view, then we see that there is no such thing as a definitive castle. Instead of being inconveniences, the differences between castles can become points of interest. We may marvel at how much other castles seem to differ from our own, and from each other. We may find that when we are in a certain mood we prefer one castle and not another, that our different moods (or modes) seem to draw us towards different castles. Above all, we are able to appreciate this difference between castles, and our journeys and visits give us occasion to celebrate it.

In the monotheistic mode multiplicity may have a tendency to become a nuisance. If our way is the right way, then theirs musn't be. Likewise, if theirs is the right way, then we must be in the wrong. By defining a "right" path, monotheism also creates a "wrong" path, and when we see the world through its lense we may be tempted to categorise what we see in terms of this opposition, amongst others. But slip into the polytheistic mode of thought and we suddenly become open to the multiplicity of possible positions, realising that one may be no more "true" than another.

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Remembering the Balance

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Society is, at best, a system that manages to combine many disparate elements whilst maintaining some sort of balance between them. If this balance was not maintained then the system would degenerate in one way or another, before either finding a new balance, or collapsing. In this sense, we can see society as an eco-system, much like the kind that we would find in a forest. Balance between its various elements is key, not only to the survival of the system, but to the survival of the individuals within the system.

Now, let's imagine that within our forest there is a badger that has somehow managed to get it into its head that to be a badger is the "right" way to be, and that all other forms of existence are inferior and irrelevant compared to his. Not only does our badger have a monotheistic view, but he also has a rather militant spirit and has somehow acquired destructive technology and the know-how to use it. Suffice it to say, the fragile balance of his forest will not last long. Perhaps what our badger doesn't realise is that without his environment to sustain him, he will soon be a goner too (or perhaps he is a nihilist to boot).

Of course, destruction may not be the only way our badger may go about his path of domination. If he can't abide the thought of killing, he may instead choose to convert all those around him to his position. Suddenly the palette of the forest become dominated by two non-colours, as everything is painted in black and white. Hole digging and meat-eating likewise become the norm. In no time our badger has managed to implement a forest-wide monoculture, saving himself the bother of investing in all that expensive weaponry.

Our badger has made the mistake of taking his "badgerness" literally. His belief in the correctness of his own position has blinded him to the fact that he lives within a balanced system, one that requires its multiplicity - the difference between its elements - for its survival. He is short-sighted, unable to understand things beyond the four walls of his castle, the confines of his position. When he looks out of his windows he sees only confusion, and deviation.

His confusion is, perhaps, understandable. He has become so accustomed to the look and feel of his castle that all others naturally appear foreign and deviant. He has forgotten the truth of his castle: that it hasn't always been around, that it was built brick by brick. Perhaps he built it, or perhaps someone else did, but it was built.

To avoid confusion, let's leave our badger in his castle and return to the human world. Within a forest we are talking about the differences between species, whereas within a human society we are talking about the differences between people. The badger is confined to his castle, his position as "badger" - he has no choice but to take his position literally. He would probably find it very difficult to start flying if commanded to do so by a domineering bird. As humans we have freedoms that the badger does not; we can imagine other ways of being, and we can, within limits, move between them. So whilst the badger may be confined to his four walls, the same is not, strictly speaking, true of us.

Much of the time we may forget that we also live within a balanced eco-system. To truly believe in the sovereignty of one position over another is to overlook this balance. It is a belief founded on a confused epistemology. For example, in the popular Western consciousness, certain values often appear to be held in higher esteem than others. Our consciousness is entrenched in a rationalist perspective; we see the value in things like science and commerce because their projects appear to make sense: in other words, the logic that underpins them is easy to identify. Science cures diseases, and gives us new technology - it answers questions, and solves problems. Commerce makes the world go round. Things like art and religion seem to make less sense; they often raise more questions than answers, and any answers they do provide are generally not certifiable by "scientific" standards. Their logic is, from the rationalist perspective, obscure and confusing.

If we are too entrenched in our position, and if that position has at its roots these rationalist ideas and values, then we are bound to overlook the necessity of things like art and religion to the balance of the system. We may not believe that we need these things at all, that they are an aberrance, and we may wish that they did not exist. If we were able to act on this belief, and if we had the means to eradicate these ideas, then we would be making the same mistake as our badger; from a simple lack of insight into the wider balance of the system, we would be tipping it into a potentially disastrous imbalance.

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Battles and Challenges

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It is our contention that within a monotheistic framework we are more tempted to preserve the sanctity of our position - to arm the battlements - when faced with the position of the Other. Another castle represents a threat to our own, and more often than not a battle ensues. Battles are a form of game-playing: if our interest lies solely in preserving our position, then we will play to win and nothing more. A battle is a very specific and narrowed form of communication; its main messages are, "I am right and you are wrong" and "I will show you that you are wrong". It is not a place for indecision, vulnerability or doubt - and if we decide that these things are requisites for a constructive dialogue then we cannot see a battle as "constructive."

Yet, a battle, like a game, can also be enjoyable. It structures time, gives us something to do, and can be exciting. It allows us to exercise certain aspects of our being, to flex and thrust. But we would be mistaken in thinking that we are engaging in anything other than the reification of our own position. Once arms are laid down - the pose seen through - a more nuanced form of communication can begin.

A polytheistic outlook allows us the room to be more amenable to foreign words and deeds. Of the two, the polytheistic view appears the wiser, but, because it can lead to relativism, it must also go hand in hand with a willingness to have our own position challenged. It can become all too easy to use a position to dismiss the thoughts and actions of others - "Of course he would say that, because of who he is (but I needn't take heed, because my position is different.)" - and so we become immune to the challenge that is posed by 'otherness'. In avoiding conflict like this, we would again be making a mistake similar to that of our badger earlier on, an error based upon a limited view of the ecosystem. We would be overlooking the possibility that contact (in its varying forms; conflict, negotiation, exploration) is a necessary and healthy occurrence. In avoiding conflict entirely we have essentially tipped the balance in the opposite direction; where formerly our badger sought to assert the sovereignty of his position through the annihilation of all other positions - through sameness - he would here be asserting his sovereignty through relativism, through difference. Both paths have in common the refusal to have his own position challenged.

The battle, then, becomes the refusal to be challenged, and the challenge can only take place when the battle ends.

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Common Ground

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A wise man once said, "those who are awake have one world in common, those who are asleep live each in a private world."2 Perhaps this one world, this common ground, is that area outside of our castles; and when we are able to step out of our front door - to leave our position behind - we become truly "awake." Awake in this sense would mean untangled from self-interest, from the concerns that go along with living in a castle. After all, a castle can often be self-perpetuating; it provides comfort, a place to live - but if we are to continue living within it then we must maintain it, and, when necessary, we must defend it. To step outside of the castle is to put its demands in perspective, to see that looking after our castle may not be the be-all and end-all. Thus, in many ways, to enter the common ground is to become liberated.

With this in mind, when we are faced with the behaviour of others we can ask; does this behaviour come from within a position, or does it come from without - are they still standing in their castle, or are they in common ground? In short, is their behaviour entrenched or transcendent? Because to understand where behaviour comes from, is to be able to form a more nuanced approach towards it.

We've seen that we all have our positions, our castles within which we exist. We've examined the ideas of monotheism and polytheism and how these outlooks can affect the way we see others' positions as well as our own. We've seen that understanding a person's position can make us more amenable to their 'otherness', but we've also seen the importance of having our own position challenged. Having seen these castles, our own and those of others - and having seen the distance between them - we must be willing to leave our structures for a while, and to take a trip. We must be willing to knock on some doors, and to ask to come in.

In the last, it may be that no-one has a sovereign position, that no-one is so enlightened so as to see the full workings of our ecosystem. The monotheistic view may make us believe that this view does exist, but it leaves us in no doubt that there is only one who is able to see this way: God. With its pantheon of gods, polytheism blows this model apart, allowing us to structure our thought in a different way; one that may be more in line with a world that has at its heart no certainties, and no definitive positions.

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1 Games People Play, p.42
2 Heraclitus, as paraphrased by John Fowles in The Aristos, p.216

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In fact, how can we let ourselves be moved to pity unless by transporting ourselves outside ourselves and identifying ourselves with the suffering animal, by quitting, so to speak, our own being in order to assume his?

The commiseration will be the more energetic, the more intimately the spectator identifies himself with the sufferer [...] It is therefore quite certain that compassion is a natural feeling which moderates in every individual his self-esteem, and contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire race.

[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]
Émile, p.115-20
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 92, 94

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My announcement at the end of September that Click Opera would end in February elicited some interesting reactions. The bit that seemed to spark the most empathy with Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher was my anti-dialectical, anti-democratic point (if by dialectics and democracy we mean OMG WTF Web 2.0 ghost-sparring) that "Click Opera has been a sort of karate course, and its comment facility has taught me to be more dialectical and -- above all -- the skill set of prolepsis, of anticipating reader objections.

But is a more moderate, accessible and dialectical me really what the world needs? Doesn't the world need an immoderate, outrageous and concentrated me, just laying out things that only I could think, no matter how wrong they may be?"

Simon Reynolds on his Blissblog responded: "Yeah I agree prolepsis sucks, it seems to have taken a lot of the categorical oomph and thrust out of writing, unless you're just utterly bullheaded you will inevitably find yourself riddling what you do with qualification and nuancing... Strangely, prolepsis rarely seems to afflict comments boxers... but i guess they can shelter under aliases or "anonymous," they don't have to own their utterances in the same way."

Mark Fisher makes a similar point on his K-Punk blog: "For me, the answer is clear - I certainly don't want writers who "respond to criticisms", who patiently deal with "feedback", no matter how hostile and uncomprehending. I want writers who have the courage to pursue their own lines. What's interesting, I suppose, is the libidinal impulses at work in those who don't want that - who would rather have a writer spending their time on discussion boards and in comments boxes defending themselves, nuancing their position into innocuous irrelevance, or effectively abandoning it altogether in the name of some vacuous commitment to "debate".

[Momus]
'Tactics, not skirmishes'

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Related posts:-
Escaping Uncertainty
Do Not Disturb
Rules of Engagement
Being open to the new
This, Not That
[Anonymous]
The Eternal Ideas
You ought to be more like me
Walk a Straight Line
Left Out

What's Your Position?

The Nymph and the Oak

Once upon a time there was a forest that was inhabited by nymphs. The nymphs took pleasure in hopping from tree to brook, from plant to fungus, from animal to insect, bringing inspiration and vitality to each and every thing. We could say that these nymphs were the soul of the forest, and their shape-swapping dance somehow seemed to play a part in its fragile balance.

Now, whilst most nymphs found joy in their hopping about, it would sometimes happen that a nymph would tire of his dance, preferring instead to to choose a suitable form in which to come to rest. It is with one such wearisome traveller that our story will concern itself ...

Our hero had for a long time played his part, hopping from one thing to another. He had come to notice, however, that he was never more comfortable then when within the sturdy frame of an old oak tree. And so it was that one day he decided to quit his jumping about, choosing the oak as his resting place, his "form of forms." He grew close to the tree, and began to understand its rustling and creaking, its slow and steady breath, its silence. As time passed the two grew ever closer, and our hero began to forget where the tree started and he ended. "I am a proud oak," he thought, "these branches are my branches, these roots my roots." He forgot what it was like to have been a nymph, to have hopped from one form to another. His tree seemed to him his natural form, and any thought of dancing and hopping had long since vanished from his mind.

There were many things that our hero liked about being a tree. His sturdy trunk was immune to the strongest of winds, and provided a stable resting place for the weary back of many a traveller. His thick canopy provided shelter from storms, and his strong branches a home to birds and insects. His bark was rough and durable, and his roots reached deep into the earth. Yes, it was a fine thing to be a tree, especially one as proud and powerful as he!

As the seasons went by his leaves turned a lovely shade of orange, and eventually found their way down to the forest floor below.

Many seasons went by, and as they passed the inhabitants of the forest began to notice a change in the old oak tree. Where once its branches had reached far into the sky, rustling and chattering along with the other trees, they were now cast downwards, and had become gnarled and rigid, indifferent to the breeze that flowed through them. Any birds that had once made their home here had long since disappeared. Not only that, the bark of the tree seemed rougher, full of jagged edges, and no travellers dared risk their backs against its trunk. Where once the oak had seemed at the centre of things, it now stood alone, the life and energy of the forest passing it by.

It so happened that one day a pre-occupied young nymph, reveling in the newly discovered joys of bird-form, alighted upon the twisted branches of our oak. No sooner had he landed than his thoughts were back with flying, and he readied himself to take off. As he spread his wings, a strange noise caught his attention and stopped him in his tracks. He cocked his head and listened intently. Sure enough he heard the sound again - it seemed to be coming from the tree that he was perched on. Bringing his head even closer to the tree he began to make out the very faint sound of weeping. How strange! A crying tree! He'd heard of Weeping Willows, but never Weeping Oaks.

He hurried off and quickly convened a group of his young nymph friends. "I think someone is trapped in that old oak tree! Its branches are so twisted and rigid that it cannot talk when there is a breeze, like the other trees! Its bark is too thick for hopping through, and its trunk is so sturdy and its roots so deep that we can't possibly move it! What is there to do?!"

Another of the group spoke up. "I've heard tales that there is a nymph within that tree, and he's been there for many a season."

"Perhaps he has been there so long that he has grown tired of being a tree," spoke another.

"Perhaps he is lonely," spoke a fourth, "And that is why he is weeping."

"We must do something," said the bird-nymph. "We can't leave him in there, sad and alone".

And so it was that our young nymphs formed a plan.

The bird-nymph flew off, collecting the seeds from as many trees as he could find. Upon finding one he would fly back and drop it near the lonely old oak. Another of the nymphs would hop into the seed, and within no time a shoot would break through the soil. After a while a fine collection of young trees had began to appear around the oak, their energetic rustling and chattering filling the air. Whenever a breeze came by, they would bend their flexible trunks, reaching their branches toward the oak and caressing its rough surface.

Other nymphs hopped into the brook, and when the sun shone down upon them they travelled up within the water droplets toward the clouds. In no time they were raining down upon the oak, drop after drop, soaking its leaves and branches, tracing the furrows of its trunk, and tickling its roots.

It was in this way that life was brought back to the oak.

Having made his nest within its branches - not the most comfy of spots, but nest-worthy none-the-less - our bird-nymph listened carefully day after day. To his relief he could no longer hear any weeping. Only the soft music of the wind, as it made its way through the forest.

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Related posts:-
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Monotheism & Polytheism

Mono / Poly

Mono - Poly
One - Many

Masculine - Feminine
Efficiency - Redundancy
Narrow - Wide
Specialist - Generalist

Vertical - Horizontal

Inner - Outer
Objects - Relations

Communal - Individual

Self-identity - Self-division

Universal - Particular

Spirit - Soul

Transcendent - Immanent

Rationalism - Empiricism

Mono - one way for everyone - promotes the collective by making all conform to a single norm. Differences are discouraged.

Poly, on the other hand, allows divergence, and thus promotes the freedom of the individual; to roam and become distinct.

We like it when a thing is only one thing. But society is always two things: it’s the thing that alienates you, and it's the benevolent father; always.

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'Joe Rogan Experience #958 - Jordan Peterson'

It's not Christian love that's conquered the world; it's not its sophisticated interpretations, sophisticated theology.

It's successful because it mobilizes the will, and the will needs fundamentalism or it doesn't know what to do.

Fundamentalism serves the hero myth. It gives you fundamental principles - words, truths, directions. It builds a strong ego. It is American psychology. No Hermes, no Dionysus, no Aphrodite in it at all.

Utterly monotheistic because there is only one meaning, one reading of the text - like, for instance, the one meaning of Christ's suffering.

[...] anything that doesn't fit within that unity is split, or schizoid, a hysterical complex or autonomous or whatever else, and you have lost the fact that you are a bundle of many levels, people, noises, impulses, trends, personalities, possibilities and no two days are the same and no two voices are the same and one is a loose structure of many beings - Jung called them complexes.

But as long as one lives in the myth of unity one is forced into commanding the psyche to obey the principle of unity and the unifier, the ego, creating this monstrous Western ego, which then has to be subdued by all kinds of Christian virtues: tolerance, self-control, patience, humility, charity, obedience, poverty ... all this huge ascetic structure to deal with the Monster which is created by its own dogma!

So that the repression which Freud placed at the basis of our relation with the unconscious is nothing more than the Christian myth at work in us each, cutting us off from our innate polytheistic imagination and renaming it, the unconscious.

[James Hillman]
Inter Views, p.81-2

It is conventionally held that ancient polytheistic humanism collapsed because it was unrealistic, a highly artificial system.

But there is a sense in which it was realistic, as we should expect in any religion springing from Greek origins.

The gods on Olympus at least represented actual human attributes, or varying and often conflicting archetypal human tendencies; while the Hebraic system - the uniting of desirable (moralistic) human attributes into one god - was a highly artificial procedure.

In many ways the Greek system is the more rational and intelligent; which perhaps explains why it has been the less appealing.

The Hebrew god is a creation of man; and the Greek gods are a reflection of him.

Nonetheless, periods of history come when it seems clear which serves the general need best. Monotheism saw man through the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman empire; but today the benevolent scepticism of humanism seems better suited to our situation.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.114-15

Whether something is monolithic, binary, dialectical, or meaninglessly plural is a function of your distance from it.

When you're very close to something, all you can see is oneness, pure dominance by the thing of all others. For a baby, Mother's breast is the entire universe. For a fundamentalist, it's God.

When you're a bit further away, a tidy binary replaces oneness. There are men and there are women. There's East and there's West. This is the distance journalists live at. The world of journalism is always seeing small fluctuations in the relative positions of big, established binaries like these.

[Momus]
'Binary hopping'

In psychological inflation, as Jung developed the idea, the personality is ‘taken over’ by a single archetypal pattern.

A person’s perceptions, values, and behaviour are driven by an image which has its source outside the individual, in the collective or objective psyche. Personal identity is engulfed by the archetype. One’s perceptions of the world, one’s thoughts about it, one’s values, are shaped by a single image.

Ancient cultures explained it as coming under the power of a god. Where we see someone as having a “power complex” or a “mother complex” or just as “falling in love”, the classical Greeks would have seen an individual driven by Zeus, Demeter or Eros.

Analogously we can talk about cultural inflation, in which a nation or society, or at least a substantial part of the population, is taken over by an archetype, so that the group’s perceptions, self-image and behaviour are formed by a single archetypal pattern and driven by a single archetypal energy.

Domination by a single pattern to the detail of everything else can be considered a form of pathology (personal or societal), though some pathologies (e.g. falling in love) are obviously more benign than others.

[Bernie Neville]
‘The Charm of Hermes: Hillman, Lyotard, and the Postmodern Condition’, Journal of Analytical Psychology (1992), p. 347

According to the research, three key bodily systems - the neurological system, the endocrine system, and the immune system - function independently yet work harmoniously together.

There is no central system which integrates these three systems. Each of these functions within its own integration, and, in addition, they function well as a whole though not integrated by a central control.

Taking a hint from the above, I think that the human psyche also should be seen as a "supersystem."

I have repeatedly discussed different levels of consciousness while also indicating that even logically conflicting things will coexist in the mind of a human being. Indeed, that coexistence has value.

I am inclined to think that our human mind maintains integration in each of the different levels of consciousness. In addition, as a whole it functions as a supersystem without a center. In short, I think that the psyche as a whole, when it is healthy and functioning well, does not need to have an integrative center.

Some might say that, if a system as a whole is functioning well, you call it "integration." For integration, we tend to think that a principle or rule exists which should be central and controlling. I think that things - including human beings - work well beyond the center or principle which man creates.

I described my great trouble being caught between Eastern and Western cultures. While in such suffering, I believed in the integration of the two and talked about it easily. But, after trying hard many times, I gradually came to know that it is, in fact, impossible to "integrate" them.

It even seems dangerous to attempt quick integration, as I have realized that people who attempt it tend to ignore things which are "inconvenient."

So it seems likely that a new science would not try to develop a system of knowledge featuring simple, logical integration [...]

If we are to develop this new science of the whole, we must open ourselves to imaginative ways of thinking and perceiving and summon up our most determined efforts.

[Hayao Kawai]
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy, p.140-1

With all such control phenomena, a critical issue is robustness: how well can a system withstand small jolts. Equally critical in biological systems is flexibility: how well can a system function over a range of frequencies.

A locking-in to a single mode can be enslavement, preventing a system from adapting to change.

Organisms must respond to circumstances that vary rapidly and unpredictably; no heartbeat or respiratory rhythm can be locked into the strict periodicities of the simplest physical models, and the same is true of the subtler rhythms of the rest of the body.

Some researchers [...] proposed that healthy dynamics were marked by fractal physical structures, like the branching networks of bronchial tubes in the lung and conducting fibers in the heart, that allow a wide range of rhythms.

Fractal processes associated with scaled, broad-band spectra are 'information rich.' Periodic states, in contrast, reflect narrow-band spectra and are defined by monotonous, repetitive sequences, depleted of information content.

Treating such disorders [...] may depend on broadening a system's spectral reserve, its ability to range over many different frequencies without falling back into a locked periodic channel.

[James Gleick]
Chaos, p. 293

'Wittgenstein develops a style of writing which is radically errant, which unlids all the accidence concealed by "normal" uses of words in order to show how many different routes it would be possible to take from any given point in their discourse - routes which we had simply not thought of because we were bemused by normality.'

Once 'ordinary language' is shorn of its residual metaphysics - the idea that ultimate truths are somehow vested in our normal, everyday habits of usage - linguistic philosophy takes on a very different aspect.

Rather than reinforce existing conventions or naturalized 'forms of life', it works to reveal the unlooked-for possibilities latent in all communication.

Plato is the prototype of all those unfortunate philosophers who must resort to writing in order to communicate their thoughts, but who lay themselves open, in the process, to all manner of unauthorized reading and interpretation.

[...] language is subject to a generalized 'iterability' - or readiness to be grafted into new and unforeseeable contexts - such that no appeal to performative intent can serve to delimit the range of possible meaning.

[Christopher Norris]
Derrida, p. 178, 187, 191

Jim Rutt: Another theme that I […] took out of what I read of your work is that you certainly encourage dissent and diversity […] but at the same time, if one’s trying to make an organization work you have to manage the signal to the noise. Not all opinions are equal. How do you encourage dissent and diversity without being overwhelmed by crankery?

Dave Snowden: […] First of all, I say we need to shift from homogeneity […] I disbelieve everybody should have the same values, the same goals, and the same objectives, because that destroys. That makes systems non-resilient.

[We need to shift] into what I call coherent heterogeneity.

You have to have differences which can come together in different ways. For example, I’m Welsh. If you meet anybody from Wales, the first thing they’ll ask you is where’d you come from, because we have to establish some way in which we can have a fight with you […] but when the English come we’re Welsh.

That’s an example of coherent heterogeneity. Now what we can do with the attitude map that I mentioned earlier is we can measure the level of cognitive and behavioral diversity in your organization, and we can identify outlier groups that you should pay attention to, rather than them getting drowned out by middle management.

That’s the key thing that comes out of the attitudinal mapping. You have to maintain diversity in the system, but you have to maintain diversity which isn’t freakish […] You actually need to get around those sort of problems by providing interactions between dissonant groups.

I present a situation, I’ll get everybody in the workforce to interpret it. I’ll then get dominant views, but I’ll get 15 or 16 clusters of outlier views. I let the clusters run a small safe-to-fail experiment and we see what works. That’s a key conflict resolution device. Effectively I do what’s called a shallow dive into chaos. I move into an unconstrained system to actually statistically map onto a landscape, and I know which ideas are coherent enough to explore even though they’re different, and which are actually nonsense.

A lot of our work has been to produce objective quantifiable measures of coherence within an organization, so you know which dissonants are worth talking to and which aren’t. That’s actually a relatively simple process.

[Jim Rutt & Dave Snowden]
'EP11 Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking'

Freedom of the will so construed is not the absence of causal determination but a harmony among all of a person’s preference schemes. It is a state in which desire follows thought, and action follows desire, without tension or struggle, and in which the distinction between choice and constraint may well be thought to disappear.

Nietzsche is very clear about the extraordinary difficulty with which this state of harmony of thought and action can be reached […] success consists in having the minimum level of discord among the maximum possible number of diverse tendencies.

“The highest human being would have the highest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant ‘human being’ shows itself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g. in Shakespeare) but are controlled.”

The creation of the self therefore appears to be the creation, or imposition, of a higher-order accord among our lower-level thoughts, desires, and actions.

It is the development of the ability, or the willingness, to accept responsibility for everything that we have done and to admit what is in any case true: that everything we have done actually constitutes which each one of us is.

[…] we are always finding ourselves in new and unforeseen situations; we constantly have new thoughts and desires, we continue to perform new actions. In their light we may at any point come to face the need to reinterpret, to reorganise, or even to abandon earlier ones.

To desire to remain who I am in this context is not so much to want any specific character traits to remain constant: the very same passage speaks of “multiplicity of character considered and exploited as an advantage.” Rather, it is to desire to appropriate and to organise as my own all that I have done, or at least that I know I have done, into a coherent whole.

It is simply to become able to accept all such things, good and evil, as things I have done. It is not to cultivate stable character traits that make my reactions predictable and unsurprising.

[…] it is to become flexible enough to use whatever I have done, do, or will do as elements within a constantly changing, never finally completed whole.

[Alexander Nehamas]
Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 187-190

For Aristotle, an object had a clear purpose set by its designer. An eye was there to see, a nose to smell. This is a rationalistic argument, another manifestation of what I call Platonicity.

Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive - and on occasion [...] the auxiliary function becomes the principal one.

[...] anything that has a secondary use, and one you did not pay for, will present an extra opportunity should a heretofore unknown application emerge or a new environment appear.

The organism with the largest number of secondary uses is the one that will gain the most from environmental randomness and epistemic opacity!

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
The Black Swan, p. 318-9

Brian Arthur in a brilliant book, shows the degree to which technology innovation depends on exaption rather than adaption.

Exaption is more important than adaption; traits that evolve for one context accidentally get used in a different one and we get true innovation. Most of human development including language is the result of exaptive processes. There are some related techniques here, the use of metaphor for example can allow association or linkage of ideas in new ways.

[...] we need to create the conditions for innovation. Now critically that means that we need to focus on a degree of inefficiency [...] Managing for exaption requires a degree of mess [...] You can’t determine in advance what innovation is needed, you have to create an ecology in which novel solutions can emerge.

Innovation never happens within a formal highly efficient system. Yes, when the informal system makes the bureaucracy work despite itself you get considerable innovation. However this is generally invisible to the formal system.

[Dave Snowden]
'A grain of sand: Innovation diffusion', '… forever blunt and merciless'

In an accurate language, meaning would be a one-one relation; no word would have two meanings, and no two words would have the same meaning.

In actual languages, as we have seen, meaning is one-many. (It happens often that two words have the same meaning, but this is easily avoided, and can be assumed not to happen without injuring the argument.) That is to say, there is not only one object that a word means, and not only one possible fact that will verify a proposition.

The fact that meaning is a one-many relation is the precise statement of the fact that all language is more or less vague.

[Bertrand Russell]
'Vagueness', The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 1:2, p. 90

We may be seeing the beginnings of the reintegration of our culture, a new possibility of the unity of consciousness. If so, it will not be on the basis of any new orthodoxy, either religious or scientific.

Such a new integration will be based on the rejection of all univocal understandings of reality, of all identifications of one conception of reality with reality itself.

It will recognize the multiplicity of the human spirit, and the necessity to translate constantly between different scientific and imaginative vocabularies. It will recognize the human proclivity to fall comfortably into some single literal interpretation of the world and therefore the necessity to be continuously open to rebirth in a new heaven and a new earth.

[Robert Bellah]

Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditionalist World, p. 246

A certain distance too from oneself is necessary. A “clinical” eye in regards to oneself, one’s faults, is required for this mindset.

In our time this can be achieved in part by embracing spirit of true science, whereas for man of Bronze Age it was easy to embrace because he saw things that happened to him, including the great motions of the spirit, the feelings that troubled him, as instantiations of various gods, for which he was not responsible, and which he could therefore judge and evaluate externally.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Bronze Age Mindset, p. 139

Those moralists who command man first of all and above all to gain control of himself thus afflict him with a peculiar disease; namely, a constant irritability in the face of all natural stirrings and inclinations—as it were, a kind of itching.

Whatever may henceforth push, pull, attract, or impel such an irritable person from inside or outside, it will always seem to him as if his self-control were endangered. No longer may he entrust himself to any instinct or free wingbeat; he stands in a fixed position with a gesture that wards off, armed against himself, with sharp and mistrustful eyes—the eternal guardian of his castle, since he has turned himself into a castle.

Of course, he can achieve greatness this way. But he has certainly become insufferable for others, difficult for himself, and impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful fortuities of his soul. Also from all further instruction. For one must be able to lose oneself occasionally if one wants to learn something from things different from oneself.

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

The Gay Science, 305

It is interesting that, being so radically different from Christian symbolism, modern symbolism obeys the same semiotic laws. In one case, one assumes that symbols do have a final meaning, but since it is the same everlasting message, there is an inexhaustible variety of signifiers for a unique signified.

In the other case, symbols have any possible meaning because of the inner contradictoriness of reality, but since every symbol speaks about this fundamental contradictoriness, an inexhaustible quantity of signifiers always stand for their unique signified, the inexhaustibility of the senses of any text.

One witnesses in both cases a form of “fundamentalism.” In the former case, every text speaks of the rational and univocal discourse of God; in the latter every text speaks of the irrational and ambiguous discourse of Hermes.

[Umberto Eco]

The Limits of Interpretation, p. 20

The Classical soul [...] with its parts and its properties, imagines itself as an Olympus of little gods, and to keep these at peace and in harmony with one another is the ideal of the Greek life-ethic of Temperance and Ataraxia.

[Oswald Spengler]
The Decline of the West, Vol. 1, p. 313

The ego, with its illusion of self-mastery and containment, is formed through misrecognition, an anticipatory identification with an idealized, stable, self-enclosed, citadel of self.

This identification with an image of oneself sets up the ego as rivalrous, narcissistic, and aggressive. While the act of misrecognition becomes the basis for a sense of self or for self-consciousness, it is also an act of alienation, exclusion, or self-division; by erecting an imaginary ideal, representing oneself in a perfected image, the self is also split and rendered unconscious to itself, cut off from the multiplicity of dispersed drives.

For Lacan, the ego is a “knot of imaginary servitude” and thus the site of the subject's stagnancy and inertia. The mirror stage also forms the basis of Lacan's critique of ego psychology; whereas the latter takes strengthening the ego to be the aim of analytic practice, Lacan takes the aspirations of the ego to be a “lure” of self-possession, an armor that rigidifies the subject and resists freedom and movement, a defensive structure that provides an alienating identity.

With this theory of the ego, Lacan presents a subject at odds with itself, non-self-identical, in “primordial Discord”, torn between unity and anarchy, organization and chaos, integration and fragmentation.

The writers affiliated with French Feminism […] are philosophically and temperamentally more sympathetic to the split of subjectivity detailed by psychoanalysis, the idea that I am not I, that self-division rather than self-identity is the fundamental feature of human existence, and therefore that the subject is not a unitary point of origin for choice.

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Irigaray's genealogical account of sexual difference resists both the idea of an invariant universal (and hence sexually neutral) human essence that subtends (and thereby expels) human multiplicity and the idea of sexual essences that consist in self-enclosed identities between which there is an uncrossable divide.

That is, she rejects the ontological assumptions of both universal equality and separatism, taking both to be implicitly masculine and patriarchal, bound to a metaphysical essentialism that aims to capture diversity in first or final principles, or to subsume particulars under general concepts.

Challenging the logic of the one and the many, Irigaray takes the self-division of nature, its being-two, as a model of autonomous self-development. When Irigaray says that human nature is two, she does not mean that there are two fixed sexual substances, but that to be natural is to be embodied, finite, divided, that the fundamental character of nature is growth through differentiation. Human nature, in her view, is not disembodied or neutral; it is always distinctively sexed or sexuate, a neologism for sexed, but not necessarily erotic, bodily difference.

Viewing the natural body as self-differentiating rather than self-identical, Irigaray also articulates distinctive capacities for generation corresponding to differing morphological possibilities (the possibilities of bodily form) that entail “different subjective configurations.”

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The vision of Western science rests on the notion of the uniformity of nature and its law.

The current perception of the universe occurs in terms of a hierarchy of laws built on the foundation at the most fundamental level. Mathematical elegance, simplicity, and beauty are considered to be a feature of the universe and its laws. Complexity is a secondary effect that emerged out of the primordial simplicity of the big bang through a series of chance processes called "symmetry breaking."

What is considered to be preeminent about the universe could perhaps be classified as the general, the abstract, the repeatable, the context-independent, and the all-embracing. By contrast the individual, the idiosyncratic, and the singular event are considered to be of less importance, or as being particular and superficial cases of something deeper and more embracing.

While native science also stresses harmony and balance, it nevertheless gives importance to diversity, as well as to the particular event - to the dream and vision, to a unique phenomenon, and to the experience of each individual.

Indigenous science accepts the rich complexity of life and the natural world as being the essence of the cosmos. Relationships and renewable alliances take the place of fixed laws, and Indigenous science accepts the possibility that chance and the unexpected can enter and disturb any scheme. Thus, the circle is left open and chance, as represented by the clown, the trickster, and gambling games, occupies an important role.

[F. David Peat]
Blackfoot Physics, p.255-6

If one accepts that information is proliferated throughout the system and that it is continually transformed - by other bits of information and by itself - then it becomes impossible to stipulate a 'true' interpretation for any piece of information.

Information can only be interpreted locally and then only through the dynamics of différance - as reflecting upon and transforming itself. These dynamics precludes the definition of truth or origin at a meta-level and is therefore referred to as the postmodern predicament - ‘a crisis of our truths, our values, our most cherished beliefs' (Lawson 1985:9).

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.121

Lyotard is quite clear on the point that the complexity of the social system does not automatically lead to randomness or noise.

From the passage above it is clear that the system 'combats entropy', that it generates meaning, not noise or chaos. To optimise this process, the system has to be as diverse as possible, not as structured as possible. This, for Lyotard, is the function of paralogy. Paralogy thus performs a similar function to that of self-organised criticality.

Self-organised criticality is the mechanism by which networks diversify their internal structure maximally. The more diverse the structure, the richer is the information that can be stored and manipulated. The network has to walk the tightrope between solid structure, on the one hand, and disorder, on the other.

In our network model, this process is the consequence of fierce competition among units or groups of units. For Lyotard, the driving force in a social system is that of paralogy and dissension […]

[Paul Cilliers]
Complexity and Postmodernism, p.117

Language and personae mirror each other in both Spenser and Shakespeare.

The archaizing language of The Faerie Queene is analogous to the Apollonian unity of its armoured personalities. Belphoebe and Britomart have one line of thought, as they have one line of action. They are not besieged by fantasy or mood, by the rising torrent of imagination surging through Shakespeare’s major characters.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.196

Cleopatra has a Dionysian all-inclusiveness. She breaks through social restraints to plunge into the sensual, orgiastic pleasure of pure feeling [...] For Cleopatra, life is theater. She is a master propagandist. Truth is inconsequential; dramatic values are supreme.

Metamorphoses are horrific for both Spenser and Dante, who consigns impersonation to one of the lowest circles of the Inferno: incestuous Myrrha, “falsifying herself in another’s form,” is classed with liars and counterfeiters (XXX.41). Puritan hostility to theater was justified.

Like Auntie Mame, Cleopatra, a creature of theater, sees persona as a mirror of soul. The pagan folk sciences, astrology, palmistry, and phrenology, have never forgotten that externals are truth. Beauty is only skin-deep; you can’t tell a book by its cover: these pious axioms come from a contrary moral tradition.

The aesthete, who lives in a world of surfaces, and the male homosexual, who lives in a world of masks, believe in the absoluteness of externals. That is why Auntie Mame was a diva of homosexuals. Cleopatra’s multiple personae are far from feminine fickleness. She represents a radical theatricality in which the inner world is completely transformed into the outer.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.219, 221

I have already emphasized that medieval societies are in general societies of conflict, lawlessness and multiplicity.

John Gardner has written of the fifteenth-century circle around John of Gaunt, Edward III of England's fourth son, 'What they desired of their world was law and order, firm and unchallenged monarchy, or, in Dante's phrase, "The one will that resolves the many"; what they saw all around them, and ardently hated, was instability, debased values, endless struggle, a mad commingling of high and low, not Oneness but Manyness - what Chaucer would describe, in his magnificent elaboration of a poem by Boethius, as a cosmic fornication' [...] This passage suggests a common ambiguity in the medieval vision of the moral life.

On the one hand that life is informed by an idealized view of the world as an integrated order, in which the temporal mirrors the eternal. Every particular item has its due place in the order of things. This is that intellectual vision of total system which finds its supreme expression in Dante and in Aquinas, but to which a great deal of ordinary medieval thought continuously aspires.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.206

Dionysus affirms all that appears, "even the most bitter suffering", and appears in all that is affirmed. Multiple and pluralist affirmation - this is the essence of the tragic.

We must find, for each thing in turn, the special means by which it is affirmed, by which it ceases to be negative. The tragic is not to be found in this anguish or disgust, nor in a nostalgia for lost unity. The tragic is only to be found in multiplicity, in the diversity of affirmation as such. What defines the tragic is the joy of multiplicity, plural joy. This joy is not the result of a sublimation, a purging, a compensation, a resignation or a reconciliation.

The anti-dialectical and anti-religious dream which runs through the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy is a logic of multiple affirmation and therefore a logic of pure affirmation and a corresponding ethic of joy.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.17

[...] pluralism (otherwise known as empiricism) is almost indistinguishable from philosophy itself.

Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy; the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violent atheism.

The Gods are dead but they have died from laughing, on hearing one God claim to be the only one, "Is not precisely this godliness, that there are gods but no God?"

There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense. A thing is sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes something more complicated - depending on the forces (the gods) which take possession of it.

Hegel wanted to ridicule pluralism, identifying it with a naive consciousness which would be happy to say "this, that, here, now" - like a child stuttering out its most humble needs. The pluralist idea that a thing has many senses, the idea that there are many things and one thing can be seen as "this and then that" is philosophy's greatest achievement, the conquest of the true concept, its maturity and not its renunciation or infancy.

For the evaluation of this and that, the delicate weighing of each thing and its sense, the estimation of the forces which define the aspects of a thing and its relations with others at every instant - all this (or all that) depends on philosophy's highest art - that of interpretation.

To interpret and even to evaluate is always to weigh. The notion of essence does not disappear here but takes on a new significance, for not every sense has the same value. A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it. But the thing itself is not neutral and will have more or less affinity with the force in current possession.

There are forces which can only get a grip on something by giving it a restrictive sense and a negative value. Essence, on the other hand, will be defined as that one, among all the senses of a thing, which gives it the force with which it has the most affinity.

[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.4

Only Playing

Distanced - Close
Detached - Attached
Unlimited - Limited
Playful - Serious
Ironic - Earnest
Safe - Dangerous
Empty - Full
Light - Heavy
Conscious - Unconscious

To be able to play the games of culture with the playful seriousness which Plato demanded, a seriousness without the 'spirit of seriousness', one has to belong to the ranks of those who have been able, not necessarily to make their whole existence a sort of children's game, as artists do, but at least to maintain for a long time, sometimes a whole lifetime, a child's relation to the world.

(All children start life as baby bourgeois, in a relation of magical power over others and, through them, over the world, but they grow out of it sooner or later.)

This is clearly seen when, by an accident of social genetics, into the well-policed world of intellectual games there comes one of those people (one thinks of Rousseau or Chernyshevsky) who bring inappropriate stakes and interests into the games of culture;

who get so involved in the game that they abandon the margin of neutralizing distance that the illusio (belief in the game) demands; who treat intellectual struggles, the object of so many pathetic manifestos, as a simple question of right and wrong, life and death.

This is why the logic of the game has already assigned them rôles - eccentric or boor - which they will play despite themselves in the eyes of those who know how to stay within the bounds of the intellectual illusion and who cannot see them any other way.

[Pierre Bourdieu]
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.54

[...] one may question the bourgeois paradigm, only not in any way that is effective or has results;

one may play with the symbols of radical politics, but one must not act on them; anyone can say the emperor has no clothes or even scream it within the closed walls of a gallery, but no one may cut off his head.”

[Gene Ray]
Art Schools Burning and Other Songs of Love and War, chap. 2, para. 8

Daughter: Daddy, are these conversations serious?

Father: Certainly they are.

D: They're not a sort of game that you play with me?

F: God forbid ... but they are a sort of game that we play together.

D: Then they're not serious!

--

F: Suppose you tell me what you would understand by the words "serious" and a "game."

D: Well ... if you're ... I don't know.

F: If I am what?

D: I mean ... the conversations are serious for me, but if you are only playing a game ...

F: Steady now. Let's look at what is good and what is bad about "playing" and "games." First of all, I don't mind - not much - about winning or losing. When your questions put me in a tight spot, sure, I try a little harder to think straight and to say clearly what I mean. But I don't bluff and I don't set traps. There is no temptation to cheat.

D: That's just it. It's not serious to you. It's a game. People who cheat just don't know how to play. They treat a game as though it were serious.

F: But it is serious.

D: No, it isn't - not for you it isn't.

F: Because I don't even want to cheat?

D: Yes - partly that.

F: But do you want to cheat and bluff all the time?

D: No - of course not.

F: Well then?

D: Oh - Daddy - you'll never understand.

F: I guess I never will.

F: Look, I scored a sort of debating point just now by forcing you to admit that you don't want to cheat - and then I tied onto that admission the conclusion that therefore the conversations are not "serious" for you either. Was that a sort of cheating?

D: Yes - sort of.

F: I agree - I think it was. I'm sorry.

D: You see, Daddy - if I cheated or wanted to cheat, that would mean that I was only playing a game with you.

F: Yes, that makes sense.

[Gregory Bateson]
Steps to an Ecology of Mind ('Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious'), p.14-15

'[...] But there's no reason to be surprised if we can't convince the majority of people. They have never seen our words come true. They are used to carefully matched phrases, not the kind of spontaneous argument we are having now; and as to a man who will live up to our ideal of excellence and do his best to match it both in word and deed, and who rules a state as good as himself - that, surely, is a thing of which they've never seen a single instance.

[...] Nor have they heard enough free and fair discussion, which strains every nerve to discover the truth out of sheer desire for knowledge, and gives a wide berth to subtle tricks of argument whose only object is to make an effect or contest a point, whether in law-court or lecture-room.

[...] I think a lot of people fall under it quite unconsciously, and fail to see the difference between scoring points in a debate and arguing seriously. They are unable to draw the distinctions in kind needed for the discussion of a subject, and so get sidetracked into purely verbal contradiction; they aren't really arguing, but only scoring points.

[Plato]
The Republic (Penguin Classics Edition), p.163, 221-2

Among the Qabbalists of the Middle Ages were a great number of black magicians who strayed from the noble concepts of the Sepher Yetzirah and became enmeshed in demonism and witchcraft.

They sought to substitute magic mirrors, consecrated daggers, and circles spread around posts of coffin nails, for the living of that virtuous life which, without the assistance of complicated rituals or submundane creatures, unfailingly brings man to the state of true individual completion.

[Manly P. Hall]
'Ceremonial Magic and Sorcery', The Secret Teachings of All Ages, p.293

‘Man plays only when he is on the full sense of the word a human being, and he is a perfect human being only when he plays.’

It is through the experience of beauty, Schiller argues, that one reaches the experience of freedom. The reason is that in every other activity one is under some degree of constraint.

[…] play is one’s own pluralism, a release from the orthodoxy of discourse.

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile.

The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who […] throughout his entire history has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”

Derrida’s main authority for play is, of course, Nietzsche, ‘the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.’ This affirmation ‘then determines the noncentre otherwise than as loss of the centre’; and plays without security.

What does Derrida’s distinction between interpretation and play amount to? It accords with Nietzsche’s distinction between responsive, receptive woman and productive man; between consumer and producer.

Derrida wants to retain of words nothing but their primordial gesture: he regards as so much dross the discursive commitment of words. He is a Manichee, not merely a Nietzschean; for him, the bourgeois domain of good and evil is enforced by language in its logical, discursive, semantic character. Play is what is left; it corresponds to the primordial cry, the speech before the fall into words and the sin of grammar.

[Denis Donoghue]
The Arts Without Mystery, p. 64-7

What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.

While most modern sports enthusiasts are aware of wrestling's status as a pseudo sport, what few alive today remember is that it evolved out of a failed real sport (known as "catch" wrestling) which held its last honest title match early in the 20th century. Typical matches could last hours with no satisfying action, or end suddenly with crippling injuries to a promising athlete in whom much had been invested.

This highlighted the close relationship between two paradoxical risks which define the category of activity which wrestling shares with other human spheres:

• A) Occasional but Extreme Peril for the participants.

• B) General: Monotony for both audience and participants.

Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants. As such Kayfabrication is a dependable feature of many of our most important systems which share the above two characteristics such as war, finance, love, politics and science.

Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience.

[Eric Weinstein]
'Kayfabe'

The Aesthetic Life

Artist / Citizen

Commitment

Assuming a Position

The Nymph and the Oak

Mono / Poly

Only Playing

Search Forever Becoming

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