Carrie by DePalma, 1976

I Am, I Do

So anyhow, my explorations of the hot blog topic of trolls and grey vampires, of sneers and accusations, of projects and critiques, are motivated only in part by my desire to choose sides. We might wish we had tough skins, separating critiques of our work from critiques of our selves, but I’m not sure it’s either possible or optimal. Who I am consists in large part of what I do and of what’s done to me. Much of what I do is impersonal, in the sense that anyone could do it. When I drive my car or do the laundry or calculate the mean and standard deviation of a data set I’m performing a generic task, in a prescribed way, that’s intrinsic to the role I’m occupying. Still, my performance of these tasks can be distinguished from that of a machine. I take an alternate route to admire the scenery; I fail to notice the black sock mixed in with the whites; I detect a possible pattern among the outliers while eyeballing the raw data.

In academic work some projects seem inevitable. There’s an obvious next study to be conducted in a research trajectory, an obvious connection to be explored between two thinkers. And yet the precise contours of even a predictable project almost always carry some idiosyncracies in their design and execution, idiosyncracies that can be traced back to the person conducting the project. Do project idiosyncrasies make manifest certain stable characteristics of the individual or team undertaking the projects? Or is an individual or a team best regarded as a temporary nexus of historical and contemporary trajectories, such that even their idiosyncracies can be regarded as predictable for them? I’m tempted to say that it doesn’t matter, but I believe it does.

We can talk in inhuman terms: while an object and its environment occupy the same reality and interact bidirectionally with each other, there is a difference within that reality between object and environment. What constitutes the environment depends on what kind of an object we’re talking about: what a patch of tall grass means to a rabbit is different from what it means to the guy who mows the lawn. And whether grass patches and rabbits and lawnmowing guys are more or less interchangeable, this particular patch of grass is part of the environment only for this particular rabbit, this particular guy. (And vice versa, of course: this rabbit, this man, are part of this grass patch’s environment.)

But humans are different in the ways they interact with their environment. Individual rabbits surely differ in the way they go about eating a patch of grass, but those differences are minor random variations in the execution of a preprogrammed instinctive behavior pattern common to the species. The behavior of the guy with the lawnmower might be predictable too, but his behavior depends on whether he’s the owner of the patch of grass or the guy hired by the owner, whether the neighbors keep their lawns well-manicured or not, whether the guy prefers to mow on a weekly schedule or based on how much the lawn has grown since last time, and so on. These individual differences are surely affected by species-wide characteristics, but they’re not locked in as tightly by instinct. There are distinct characteristics about this particular guy — his sensitivity to social pressure, his economic motivation, his aesthetic sensibilities, his enjoyment or distaste for the task, his compulsiveness versus impulsiveness, other things he wants or has to do today — that affect what he does with his lawnmower to that patch of grass.

This particular guy’s characteristics: do they describe what he does, or who he is? It’s not a clear-cut distinction. Individual differences between people manifest themselves in the different ways they perform particular tasks — that is, in the ways they interact proactively with their generic and specific environments. I don’t believe that my selfhood is diminished because I have no personal lawnmowing responsibilities. Still, when I had a lawn and a mower, someone could infer a few things about  me by observing the way in which I typically performed the task. In all likelihood there are other tasks which I do perform these days that would offer similar glimpses into some of those same characteristics I manifested as a lawnmowing guy. The performance of a task exposes both the characteristics of the task as well as certain characteristics of the performer. This is true of lawnmowing, of doing crossword puzzles, of formulating theories, of writing blog posts.

So, returning to the topic of undertaking a project: one could argue that the project in effect executes itself. Maybe there is no meaningful difference between person and environment. Projects emerge through the social interactions among humans and the neural interactions in those humans’ brains. The boundary between the guy with a project and the guy with a critique of the project is an artificial one: the interactions internal to the social and intellectual environment are what make the project happen. That’s one way of looking at it, and it’s a legitimate way. Differences among individual projects would be less important than the projects regarded collectively as the cumulative expression of a larger human intellectual environment.

It’s also legitimate to regard individuals and their particular projects as separate entities, distinct from other people and their projects. As an individual I act and am acted upon by a local environment made up of natural things and forces, of artifacts and social forces, of other individuals and what they’re doing. I can regard the blog post that I’m writing as manifesting a particular pattern of generic characteristics present in all blog posts which, together with those posts’ readers and commenters, collectively comprise the blogging environment. Or I can regard the writing of this post as a distinct and focused expression of part of who I am as an individual. And I can regard the post itself, now that it’s just about finished, as a unique artifact that in all likelihood would never have come into existence if I hadn’t done it. Outside forces surely have shaped what I’ve done here regardless of my awareness or intentions. But to some degree I can intentionally filter those influences, absorbing or deflecting or adapting to them. They are part of my local environment. My idiosyncratic interactions with that environment reveal as much about who I am as about what I do and the environment in which I do it.

I venture to assert that this blog post is different from any of the other millions of blog posts floating around out there, and that this particular post would never have come into existence if I hadn’t written it.

Becoming Visionary, Chapter 1

Per Dejan’s suggestion I secured through inter-library loan a copy of Eyal Peretz’s 2008 book Becoming Visionary: Brian DePalma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses. Most of the book is devoted to extended treatments of three DePalma films: Carrie, The Fury, and Blow Out. The introductory chapter establishes the theoretical context for discussing the films. My interest in the book lies less in film theory than in a possible psychological and artistic praxis of “becoming visionary.” So we’ll see how that goes.

Peretz begins by describing Plato’s distinction between an object and its image. The image is accessible to the senses; behind the image are those properties of the object that are closed to the senses. These “real properties” can be reached only through the mediation of the realm of Ideas, where the meanings of things reside. The image is a kind of poor copy of the real thing, pointing beyond itself to an excess that’s inaccessible to sensation and perception. Another kind of non-sensible “eye” is required to see this excess, which is the intellect.

There’s a materialistic tendency to reverse Platonism by affirming the sensory order of reality while disavowing the separate realm of  “objective” or ideal meaning. What Peretz wants to do is to retain the Platonic distinction between image and meaning without assigning them to two separate realities.

Peretz contends that, in parallel to the philosophical tradition, there’s an alternative artistic construal of the split between sense and meaning. The artist, claims Peretz, reveals that the sensory opening onto the world has at its center a blindness to what’s already there, something that blocks clear vision. Art doesn’t try to eliminate this blindness or to bypass it through another channel like intellect or insight. Instead, the artist enters into the blindness itself, opening it up, activating the blindness itself.

“The artistic tradition tries to bring about a visionary eye that sees out of blindness, that senses its opening out of a closure beyond it, rather than conceptualizing a non-sensual eye that perceives objects of a superior kind.” (p. 12)

This isn’t just a blindness to what’s out there in the world; it’s also a blindness to one’s self. And the source of this blindness? Peretz says that it’s the inescapable human position as “a being inscribed in time.” By being embedded in the present we are blind to time itself, and especially to the future. According to this formulation, the future is what “makes sense” of the sensible world in which we’re immersed, but this future is unknown and unknowable to us.

In more traditional explorations of the artistic tradition the future already exists, such that each of us is embedded in an unfolding destiny to which we are blind. There may be visionaries who can see through the blindness into the future: seers, prophets, gods, visionary artists, omniscient narrators of stories.

In some contemporary variants of the artistic tradition future time can never be glimpsed through the blindness because the future does not yet exist. Instead of seeing destiny, the artist looks into an impenetrable and undifferentiated whiteness, a “haunting no-thingness traced in the field of vision and of the world… a blind spot with no content, with no object.” The excess beyond the sensory image resides beyond anyone’s understanding, outside of meaning. To gaze into the whiteness is to confront the incompleteness of the world, an incompleteness caused by the future’s absence from the present. The present isn’t informed by a meaningful future when all accounts are settled and all loose ends are tied up. Instead, the present is haunted by the multiple trajectories of the present that lead into a future that doesn’t yet exist.

The beyond of meaning, therefore, doesn’t transcend the sensory order of the present time. It’s immanent to sensory reality, continuous with the present in a way that fades to the nonexistence of an open future. Paradoxically, it is this impenetrable open future that gives the present world its meaning: the world, by its very nature, is open to transformation. What the contemporary artist sees in the blind spot is a blindness inherent in the world itself, which is the world’s futurity:

“not the fact of the future as something we can predict, but the fact that the world is transformable in essence and open to unpredictable change, an openness that is part of what the world is… [W]hat one is blind to is thus simply the future or futurity, its potential openness.” (p. 14)

It is this seeing into the blind spot, becoming aware of the world’s open futurity, that Peretz calls “becoming visionary.”

Chinatown by Polanski, 1974

This to me is as iconic — as portalic — an image sequence as the one in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart sees Kim Novak fully revealed as the dead version of herself. Jimmy realizes the uncanny haunting he’s entered; Jack doesn’t get it yet.

[Originally I posted only the second shot; I added the first one in light of discussion.]

The Portality Notebook Transcripts Conclude

[This should end the transcriptions of my old Portality Notebooks.]

(11 Nov 02) Praxes of the Portals

The Portal inverts, goes inward, through myself. I follow myself in. Is this the ultimate self-absorption, or its opposite? Especially if there’s nothing on the other side…

Alternative Portals:

• Church – prayer, meditation, etc. (The Mass turns to stone, part of the church itself, while the tourists come and go)
• The Tao
• Attachment (Once just a vector of genetic transmittal, now a self-oriented metaphor of love.)
• Psychoanalysis, quest, consume, True Self, art, sex, travel, home, drugs.

What I need to do is to transform these prototypes, each of which is a praxis, into an Alternate sensibility, driven by the Discontinuum and the Interval.

(12 Nov 02) Truth or Truths?

I cannot say that the Portals and Intervals are true or real, more so than Solipsism or the Continuum. But I can create them, and then they are true-as-created. There is the overdetermination of shared fantasies: an Alternate picture is a delirium until others regard it as real already.

It’s like the Glass Bead Game: inside, the Game is integral; outside, it’s doomed. Or, perhaps equally true: if it’s embraced by the culture then it’s coopted, transformed into the Continuum. It has to stay marginal to exist, which means it can’t exist. Paradox and tragedy.

Does that make it art, “only” art? Is it virtual? The opposite of virtual – nowhere but everywhere, fictionally pervasive. The thing is Real, the “world” in which it’s embedded is imaginary. All the more reason then to make it extreme. But it must be possible, like the Bead Game. There’s no real reason it couldn’t be, except that the world renders it impossible. Not like Borges or Dick, where fantasy supports an idea.

A society in which the Portal functions is not tenable, because the Portal is a way out of culture. It must exist only for a Remnant.

Do I describe the Portal itself, and not just the ideas? Can I avoid telling a story?

(18 Nov 02) Cosmopolitan Reality

It is an Interval in which individuals encounter one another and create conversation with emergence. Not based on apathy, where the other self-absorbs.

(20 Nov 02) Emergence

Emergence of Self from the World ↔ Emergence of World from the Self

These are the two complementary movements:
Self from World → difference, plenitude, individuation, subjectivation
World from Self → difference, creation, (dis)engagement

Engagement is possible only with separation of Self from World and World from Self. But emergence implies more than separation: to “come out of” is also to emanate from, to be born by, to irrupt, to transcend.

Does the world emerge from the self? Yes! Self absorbs and consumes world → world loses its autonomy; world is “for” self, instrumental. Emergence of world from self is more than only separating and naming.

(21 Nov 02) Interval as Emergence

Is a Portal a link between Self and World? Is an Interval an emergence of Self from World and/or of World from Self? Perhaps always an Interval is the mutual emergence of Self and World.

An Interval of Creation

Something of the World emerges from Self. It’s not pure creation out of nothing, nor is it a thing that could have come into being independently. And it does separate off from Self to exist on its own.

Does Self emerge from World in the creative Interval? Do you become different in the act of creation? By separating off a piece of the world, do you also separate off a piece of yourself? Surely so.

It’s the Strands linking Self to World that are sundered and re-engaged in the Interval. An engagement of World where Self is lost: what is this? Good or bad? E.g., lost in a novel or a piece of music.

This isn’t Showbiz. But it might be fun.

*   *   *

In my second novel the main character returns to his old Portality Notebooks in preparation for turning them into some sort of system for exploring alternate realities. He reads these old notes and finds that they’ve largely lost coherence and meaning for him, as if he’s excavated writings from some ancient civilization written in a dead language. He ends up slipping through a portal that he hadn’t anticipated. I think my motivation in returning to the Notebooks now is to figure out how the portals-and-alternate-realities schema can retain its centrality for a real-world praxis. This feels like system design work, trying to adapt the alt-reality framework to customer demands/expectations, which seem invariably to invoke more routine paradigms of therapy and coaching and career counseling. But when people hear the words “alternate realities” they tend to think of scifi/fantasy or new age spirituality, neither of which is what I have in mind.

Projectus Interruptus

How often is a movie or a novel set in motion when a project, well underway and approaching its objective, is, without warning or evident motivation, interrupted? The interruption intrudes from outside, breaking the frame of the project, throwing the operation into disarray. But the interruption also erupts from inside, undermining the action or motivation of one or more of the participants in the project, rendering them immobile or ineffectual. The interruption opens up a hole in the project, throwing a short-circuit into the smooth operation of the project’s circuitry, cutting off its energy flow, bringing the project to a halt. Soon it becomes evident that the energy hasn’t stop flowing; it has been rerouted. The energy has begun flowing into the hole. Or is some foreign energy, generated from outside the project, flowing out of the hole, overloading the project’s circuitry with its excess? The hole in the project turns out to be a portal into a different project, hidden from view. The original project doesn’t just dry up and die: it is sucked into and through the portal, projected from inside out into something else altogether. The project organizing itself inside the portal turns out to be the generator of some alternate reality…

A Hermeneutic of Sneerage

I don’t want to start no blog war or nothing, but the topic is psychologically interesting to me. Dr. Zamalek’s latest post on projects and energy suckage is entitled The Banality of the Troll. It seems that what I’ve been interpreting, per k-punk, as grey vampirism Dr. Z  has demoted all the way down to troll. (I wonder if we can infer that he’s been subjected to considerable negative criticism in his Belgrade presentations.) He says this:

“One thing to remember is that trolling is not just an unpleasant social phenomenon, but also an INTELLECTUAL ERROR. The sneer from nowhere is not just rude, it is also shallow and insufficiently aware of what it is doing. It lives in a world made solely of people, not of realities more generally. Sneering is not a project, it is an anti project. Projects are in touch with realities, not just with people…”

Dr. Z seems to contend here that the interpersonal sneer precedes and probably produces the intellectual critique. For many sneering critiquers this is no doubt the case: one hopes to gain relative status by publicly poking the needle at someone better known than oneself. But projects created by people are also often motivated at least in part by all-too-human egoistic considerations. Project producers tend to get pissed off when a “hermeneutic of suspicion” is applied to their work, suggesting that their project masks the creator’s “real” agenda of defending neoliberalism or paternalism or imperialism or whatever. I think the same goes for the recipient of intellectual critique: exposing unsavory psychological motivations for the sneer isn’t the same thing as dealing with the substance of the critique.

[A personal note: To find yourself subject to sneering critique is to have already achieved sufficient status that you’ve attracted the iconoclasts. Good on you. Most projects and their creators are ignored and would welcome the opportunity to discuss their work under practically any terms dictated by the discussant.]

Earlier in his post, though, Dr. Z depersonalizes trollish critique, embedding it in a broader intellectual culture:

“The troll, however, is extremely abundant, and is a direct byproduct of the model of critique that dominates most modern conceptions of what it means to be an intellectual. If we were to choose one global intellectual bias whose overturning would do the most good, it would be the primacy of critique”

This is worth considering. Empirical psychology is constructed piecemeal from studies that pit themselves against the “anti-project,” or “the null hypothesis” as it’s known in the biz. The goal of the research project is clear: starting with the assumption that randomness prevails, demonstrate that the pattern in your observable evidence is very unlikely to result from chance. The method doesn’t pit one theory against an alternative theory; it pits one theory against non-theory — a “critique from nowhere,” if you will. Still, I know what Dr. Z means: research driven by a pre-emptive attempt to poke holes in the Nowhere often results in a lot of trivial and mundane “normal science.” Still, in the aggregate the scientific enterprise is effective in building fairly intricate structures across the Void.

Like Dr. Z, I’m a big, naive fan of expanding these void-spanning structures rather than either siding with the Void or engaging in zero-sum debates about nailing down Plank A versus Plank Not-A. This critique style isn’t limited to intellectual circles. The corporate environment might look attractive to the outsider who believes that the entre-/intrapreneurial spirit actively cultivates creative risk-taking. Not so. Most new ideas don’t pan out; most risks fail, and workers have quite a bit to lose by actively promoting a risky new idea that will probably fail. But of course joining the chorus of nay-sayers makes failure all the more imminent. Conservatism is overdetermined. It’s amazing really that any new ventures succeed. Usually they’re championed not by the idea people but by the financiers and marketeers who’ve calculated the risks and conceived of the sales campaign. This is also why most new offerings in the marketplace aren’t all that new, and why the cineplex is filled with sequels and knockoffs.

Object-Oriented Psychology

[More transcripts from my old Portality Journal…]

(9 Nov 02) Psychological Objects

A Psychological Object can be a theoretical construct. It can be a statistical nexus. What is it when you want to put a Psychological Object forward as an Object for its own sake, or for the sake of the Alternate and the Remnant, rather than as a predictor or a revealed truth?

A Psychological Object can be an artistic creation. Is it a writing? A performance? An experience? I think it should be an “objective” thing, existing independently of the creator and the audience. Like a Portal or an Interval.

Interval as Object

The Intervals can be described abstractly, categorically, reductionistically – like a rationalist or a scientist. This is the description of Intervals.

An artist can portray Intervals, or give subjective experiences of Intervals. The attention begins to focus on the medium of expression rather than the Object itself.

An Interval is an obect that can be entered into. It is a kind of place and time. A description of an Interval isn’t an Interval per se. I want to create the per se.

To the extent that an Interval exists independently of the person experiencing it, to that extent it can be described, portrayed, represented. To the extent that an Interval is emergent from interactions with those who enter it, to that extent it can only be illustrated or exemplified, as in a story or a study. Or, it can be created in real time.

(10 Nov 02) Postmodern Realism?

There is no going back; the present is crumbling; the future is a trajectory – what else? Create the postmodern thing that is neither otherworldly nor subjectively imagined. Something that is, but fantastically out of alignment with the Continuum. Something that is because someone imagined it into existence, named it, brought it forth.

It is understood that Realities morph in unpredictable ways by virtue of our interactions with them. So the Interval is an arena of Dasein, of experience, not of abstract Being. It is a There, an arena that turns into something else by virtue of being played in.

*   *   *

It’s interesting that I had gravitated to the object-oriented constructions around which Graham Harman was building his particular form of Speculative Realism. Maybe it was an eddy in the Zeitgeist. My objective wasn’t to eliminate the distinctly human from these constructions, but I did want to decenter them away from the entirely intrasubjective. Individuals don’t just think things up in their heads; they occupy and immerse themselves in realities. Anyhow, his elaboration of an object-based theory is why I felt inspired by Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics when I read it earlier this year.

On Projects and Energy Suckage

I’ve been both intrigued and vaguely troubled by the warnings against “grey vampires” issued recently by popular bloggers, PhD-earners, and successful project-executors k-punk, Dr. Zamalek, and Dr. Sinthome. Generally I agree: if you’re pursuing a focused project you can lose energy to others who aren’t similarly engaged. I have no interest in defending energy suckage per se, nor in what k-punk calls criticizing from nowhere — from no positive ground of my own. So I’ll offer a few caveats and qualifications as a way of clarifying my own ambivalence about the grey vampire proposition.

The mere possibility of “having a project” is a kind of luxury. Most people’s work projects are pretty pedestrian: get through the day without exhausting yourself or compromising your integrity, make some money, find some small pleasures in the workplace to keep you going. Even among knowledge workers, concentrated pursuit of some specific project is typically governed by demands of bosses and customers. Academic projects aren’t immune from marketplace considerations: working on a hot topic is more likely to get you noticed than exploring some small deserted corner of your field; the academic aspirant who receives active support from a network of advisors and colleagues is more likely to get ahead than the lone wolf. Still, compared to practically any other work environment I’ve experienced first-hand, academe affords far more freedom to do one’s own thing in an atomosphere that actively encourages independent creative thinking. So it’s a shame to squander the opportunity while it’s available, even if your interests eventually lead you out of the academy.

Most of us who read and write theory-infused blogs are pursuing projects. Some projects are more focused, with specific means and ends clearly identified — conduct a study, write a book, do a detailed critique, create a theory, (re)design a course offering. Other projects are more nebulous and diffuse: learn to think like a scholar, understand so-and-so’s theoretical perspective, see different points of view on a particular topic of interest.

All focused projects emerge from unfocused exploration. The dangers at this exploratory stage are varied. Your attention wanders so that nothing ever comes into focus. You get too grandiose, trying to come up with a grand unifying theory or the great American novel rather than formulating this particular theory or writing that particular novel. You foreclose alternatives prematurely, locking into someone else’s ideas or techniques before giving yourself a chance to discover your own perspective and voice. In this exploratory phase your attention is appropriately drawn to the middle distance as you oscillate between microscopic inspection and the panoramic view.

Once you embark on a focused project, it’s important to concentrate your attention and energy on doing what you’ve set out to do. The danger is distraction: letting your attention get diffused into other topics and perspectives, second-guessing yourself too much, worrying about how your project will be received by the field, and so on.

After your project is completed, it gets launched into a world beyond your control. While you’d like it  to remain iconic and pristine, pretty soon it starts getting transformed into raw material for the development of others’ projects. Some may build on your work while others attempt to dismantle it in order to make room for their own work. Most will ignore it altogether. Any reaction to your  finished project is better than no reaction: at least it’s having an impact. And any feedback on your completed projects is better than none as you plan your next project. Immunizing yourself from criticism, even of the “critique from nowhere” pot-shot variety, is like running your own Nixon-Bush Administration.

Who are the grey vampires, sucking your energy away from your project? They differ depending on what phase your project is in. If you’re in the formative, nebulous, middle-distance phase, then anyone who keeps your focus either too broad or too narrow can be an energy-sucker. For example, the grad student with a domineering advisor is too easily sucked into becoming a disciple or acolyte rather than channeling his/her energy into exploring something distinct. Conversely, the domineering advisor can be sucked into complacency through the flattery of fawning admirers. Academe is good at promoting these sorts of codependency relationships. The underling grad student, in order to establish a distinct identity, may have to pursue a course of active resistance to established ideas and respected figures in order to break free, even if that means being perceived by these respected figures as a grey vampire. And the established advisor may have to resist his/her students’ admiration and support, even if in so doing the students feel rejected and consequently drained of energy.

Dr. Zamalek says that you cannot change the grey vampire so you should just avoid him/her. I’m not so sure. Being-vampire may be an inescapable phase of becoming-individuated and becoming-productive. The trick is not to get stuck for too long in any of those vampiric phases of action and reaction. Remain in the nebulous phase too long and you get spacy or nitpicky. Keep working on a focused project too loing and you get obsessively perfectionistic and never get done. Spend too long contemplating the (non-)reactions to your last project and you never move on to the next one. Concentrate too long on kissing or kicking someone else’s ass and you never disover your own passions.

Finally, with respect to blogs… For even the most popular of blogs, there are far more people who don’t read it than who do. Among blog readers there are far more lurkers than commenters. Among commenters, far more comments are written on new posts than on older ones, even when the subject of the post is not time-limited. Blogs are a medium best suited for pursuing exploratory projects, where people sharing similar interests but different perspectives and different levels of commitment can converge for a day or two, then move on the next blog and the next topic. Complaints about trolls and grey vampires are the complaints of successful bloggers who are good or lucky or popular enough to draw an audience. Most people’s blog posts generate no discussion at all.

Where Sacred Interpenetrates Secular

Here’s most of an email I sent to a guy last Friday: he’s an academic postmodern theologian who teaches at a nearby university. This is one of the directions I’m trying to take my practice.

I “work on work,” helping people reconnect the circuitry between passion and calling, between subjective agency and objective/intersubjective standards, between who they are and what they do. The ego is decentered in my praxis. Work isn’t all about what makes you happy or where you score on aptitude tests and interest inventories. Work contributes to culture, and hopefully work motivated by something like Truth, Beauty, and Justice can contribute to the construction of a better culture.

As you know, many evangelicals interpret the idea of “in the world but not of the world” in a way that dichotomizes church and human culture. Evangelicals can go into “the ministry” or conduct prayer breakfasts before work and so on, but the secular job itself? It’s a place to work out their individual salvation maybe, but not an arena where God is actively engaged. Emerging types can lament the worldliness of consumerism and pollution and neoliberal globalization, but they’re often more intent on building the church as a countercultural alternative to secular culture than on taking individual and collective stands for “good works” at the secular workplace.

As I’m sure you know, the TV show The Wire has prompted a lot of discussion in theory circles. Some dismiss it as just another racist indictment of inner-city drug-and-violence culture or a crypto-fascist valorization of vigilante justice. I’m more in the camp that regard the show as inspirational. Is it possible for some subset of people to be moved, as individuals and collectively, to Fight the Powers and take an active stand for justice? Are there rhizomatic movements of Spirit that, irrupting in particular places and times and situations, set the preconditions for a just event to break through? Can individual and collective agency amplify and concentrate this movement of Spirit in an intentional act of de/reterritorialization? Even if the world eventually absorbs the event and carries on as usual, such events embody and prefigure an alternate reality in which highers standards prevail.

This is already a long email, so I’ll get to the specific agenda. I’d like to make a push into the church world, looking for people who might see the Spirit at work in the workplace but whose subjective agency is hampered both by the marketplace ethos and by the Christian ethos of ecclesial hermeticism. Can individuals hear and heed the rhizomatic movement of Spirit? Can collective Wire-like initiatives in the workplace be assembled through some kind of Spirit-led biopower? I’m not talking about self-consciously church-branded programs, but emergent efforts where the sacred interpenetrates the secular.

I sent a somewhat shorter and less abstract version of this email to a local pastor. No response from either so far.

Non-Humanistic Research Psychology

I’m going to try writing posts while I’m thinking about them, rather than doling them out in regular intervals or choreographing a particular sequence of posts. When I save up ideas for later I either forget about them or lose interest myself.

So, the thought on my walk this morning was that academic psycyhology, ironically enough, is non-humanistic. A human participant in a research project is called a “subject,” but the real subjects of psychological research are the variables and forces that converge on and animate humans. Researchers are interested in aggregate statistics: means, standard deviations, correlation coefficients, structural modeling equations, and so on. Individual difference is of little interest, being dismissed as noise or random variation in the aggregate models.

While I was working on my doctorate in psychology I split my time between research and practice. My sense was that, in the person-to-person encounter of psychotherapy, research was pretty much irrelevant. I practiced a distinctly humanistic version of therapy, emphasizing personal connection as a means of strengthening the client’s self-efficacy. At the same time, clinical research was increasingly focusing on identifying “evidence-based” interventions: treatment strategies and tactics that, on average, generated significant positive outcomes. The problem in practice is that, even for statistically significant findings, the noise was always much stronger than the signal. In other words, individual variation far outweighed the strength of the averages. Building a humanistic praxis on the basis of weak non-humanistic research findings just didn’t seem very useful to me.

Tarnation by Caouette, 2003

Games, Interstices, Religion, Practice

[More from my old Portality Notebook, wherein I started sketching out the basics for a psychological practice.]

(5 Nov 02) The Glass Bead Game and Perky Patty

For Hesse, the game is alternate, monastic, high-status, institutional, real. For Dick, the game is alternate, common, alienating, paranoiac, fantasy, part of the systematic repression of a bad reality, something to be overcome. Dick is closer to the portals than is Hesse.

The Salon is Interstitial

The Salon occupies the place and time between the Self and the World. Self is of the Remnant; World is of the emergent and discontinuous Alternate. The Salon is a place where Self engages World in order to generate Realities. The mechanisms of the Salon for this purpose include: strands, intervals, create/destroy, emergence, fate. The Salon is not a place to be healed, empowered, enhanced, coached, modified, or treated. It is a place for Self to engage, to create or destroy, to be subjected to emergence and fate and chance. It is a place to be in = Dasein.

(6 Nov 02) Portality is Religious

The intent is to create a new heavens and a new earth. Portality has all the components of a religion:

• The Chosen, the Remnant, who are callled.
• The Quest, which is to get outside of Self by getting out of the World, and vice versa.
• The Code – something that functions like a morality, getting you beyond self-absorption, committing you to the World yet isolating you from it at the same time.
• The Fellowship.
• Transcendence.
• Plenitude – something like salvation and transformation and ascencion.
• A Meaning.
• A Genesis myth that is also eschatology.

It’s not really the creation of a new heavens and a new earth. Perhaps it’s intensification and diversification: follow the strands, obsess on them, weave them together until emergence happens. No goal: it’s an engagement that’s called for. But it’s a detached sort of engagement, detached form self-absorption and from culture. It’s the creation of a world that’s more intense, less expected, yet less coercive. That’s why there is no end to the creation: once it starts attracting the masses, it’s doomed to fail. We require continual renewal. Not new: different. An earth that doesn’t fill up, but that grows from the surface, adding complexity.

Diabetes

What strands link self to world? Disease as the vector: blood sugar and symptoms are subpersonal. Health status is personal, self-oriented. Where’s the link between the subpersonal and the world? It’s probably cultural. What drives up blood sugar in the culture? Blood sugar as it flows between people, as if it were a communicable disease. Blood sugar as a behavioral trajectory across people, not just within people. A shared obsession with the blood – what it turns into cannot be known in advance. Latch onto the strand, pull it, weave it together with others, create something, put it in front of people who might care to see if they belong to the Remnant. Whether all who pick up the woven strand are Remnant is irrelevant, since it has a life of its own.

(7 Nov 02) Salon, Studio, Portal

A writing is an Object; so is a concept I choose to write about. There are perhaps three venues for creating psychological Objects:

• Salon. Self-other, subject-object, plenitude-zero.
• Studio. Create-destroy, strand, aesthetics, ethics, market.
• Portal. Place and time, beginning and end, discontinuum, intervals, Quests and Pilgrimages, explorations and escapes, the permanent traveler. The Portal is a weird tourist bureau, or a surreal tour prospectus.

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Post hoc observations on these Notebook entries… I see that I envisioned a threefold practice: the Salon, to assist clients in discovering, creating, and occupying alternate versions of themselves; the Studio, for doing the same with alternate realities; the Portal, for different ways of exploring the physcial world. The first two praxes would later merge, and this is the merged praxis I’m currently trying to rehabilitate. The merged Salon and Portal became the basis for my first novel, The Stations, which I wrote as a thought experiment about how such a practice might play out with certain kinds of clients. The central character in the novel embodied the idea of blood as a strand or trajectory linking people together pre- and intersubjectively, an idea toward which I gesture tentatively in this cahier entry.

I see that I called here for “a Genesis myth that is also eschatology.” I wound up elaborating just such a myth in my Genesis book, in which my (literal but deconstructive) reading of the archetypal story serves as the basis for a praxis leading toward new creations. This idea is of establishing new founding myths is perhaps related to Kvond and AnodyneLight’s recent proposal to sketch out an Antigone Complex.

Black Orpheus by Camus, 1959

Not having read the story, I can’t offer much help to Kvond in assembling an Antigone Complex, but watching Black Orpheus last night gave me a chance to think about retrofitting mythic stories to contemporary lives. Throughout the film the characters pulsate with music and movement, animated by the inchoate and protean spirit of life. Though seemingly chaotic, the Greco-Deleuzian lines of flight seem predetermined to assemble themselves into the same configurations again and again. Many recurrent patterns are trivial, mundane, insignificant, ignored except by those who experience them directly. Assemblies that carry particularly intense and universal meanings become commemorated in myth.

Are these mythologized events purely empirical, purely materialistic, the meaning conveyed on them retrospectively from a vantage point outside the event by creative storytellers? Or is the commemorated event already imbued with meaning that the observer can apprehend directly? In terms of the film, is spirit bestowed on passive flesh, or is spirit inseparably embodied in a particular material life?