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fluid situations
Aug. 13th, 2011 09:59 amThis post follows on a loosely related autobiographical note that I deem too self-indulgent to post, though I may eventually hide it on another blog, or forward it on request. More likely, I shall instead transcribe a perfectly good 2009 introduction to an essay on design and time that I never finished. Rest assured that everything about about the design work and design theories of Karim Rashid, Hussein Chalayan and Deyan Sudjic that followed after the introduction would have been brilliant.
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Simply because I’m such a total romantic myself, I have in later years reacted more and more against the romanticization of any imagined entity: “the people,” “the community,” “free trade,” “atheism,” “small business,” “folk music,” “religion,” “social activism,” “the unconscious,” and what have you. Everything human is a mixture of what we would consider transcendent, ignoble, intuitive, analytical, short-sighted, self-sacrificing, albeit mingled in wildly different proportions.
Our evolutionary tendency towards binary thinking leads us off in all sorts of silly directions: nourishment or poison? friend or foe? danger or opportunity? and all those other mostly true or mostly false oppositions that shade off all too quickly towards ones that make no sense whatsoever. For good or ill.
The happy fact of recent years is that increasing numbers of people seem to be accepting fluidity and hybridity in ways that don’t collapse everything into just another dualism—which latter habit of mind I saw exemplified very recently in a panel discussion that was seemingly meant to contrast an analytical mode of interpretation with non-dualistic “mindfulness”—whereas in fact there is a great deal of unverbalized attentiveness underpinning interpretation, just as there is a great deal of analytical reflection that accompanies and/or precedes the attainment of the ability to perceive, and perceive immediately rather than reflectively, the obvious truth of the Buddhist question, “Where is there any duality?”
There are distinctions within the continuum, and not paying attention to those distinctions will get you killed. So there is a definite evolutionary advantage to worrying about whether something is A or Not-A, within a system in which both are simply nodes of an indivisible process without which neither A nor Not-A would exist in the first place.
We aren’t very good at noticing the environing background, because it involves plucking it out of the great mass of taken-for-grantedness without which we wouldn’t have time to perceive the things that are about to kill us or offer us a chance to make money, or whatever.
In fact, we seldom notice the environing background until the background itself turns into a threat and whops us one upside the head.
I was going to explain how all of the above reflection stems from a quotation in Electric Eden and how it relates to the larger issue of cultural fluidity, but the observations above have already overflowed into environmental issues and mystical religion and all sorts of other stuff in addition to global economics, so it seems sort of silly to end with a passage about folk tradition that Rob Young quoted from a book by Bob Pegg.
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Simply because I’m such a total romantic myself, I have in later years reacted more and more against the romanticization of any imagined entity: “the people,” “the community,” “free trade,” “atheism,” “small business,” “folk music,” “religion,” “social activism,” “the unconscious,” and what have you. Everything human is a mixture of what we would consider transcendent, ignoble, intuitive, analytical, short-sighted, self-sacrificing, albeit mingled in wildly different proportions.
Our evolutionary tendency towards binary thinking leads us off in all sorts of silly directions: nourishment or poison? friend or foe? danger or opportunity? and all those other mostly true or mostly false oppositions that shade off all too quickly towards ones that make no sense whatsoever. For good or ill.
The happy fact of recent years is that increasing numbers of people seem to be accepting fluidity and hybridity in ways that don’t collapse everything into just another dualism—which latter habit of mind I saw exemplified very recently in a panel discussion that was seemingly meant to contrast an analytical mode of interpretation with non-dualistic “mindfulness”—whereas in fact there is a great deal of unverbalized attentiveness underpinning interpretation, just as there is a great deal of analytical reflection that accompanies and/or precedes the attainment of the ability to perceive, and perceive immediately rather than reflectively, the obvious truth of the Buddhist question, “Where is there any duality?”
There are distinctions within the continuum, and not paying attention to those distinctions will get you killed. So there is a definite evolutionary advantage to worrying about whether something is A or Not-A, within a system in which both are simply nodes of an indivisible process without which neither A nor Not-A would exist in the first place.
We aren’t very good at noticing the environing background, because it involves plucking it out of the great mass of taken-for-grantedness without which we wouldn’t have time to perceive the things that are about to kill us or offer us a chance to make money, or whatever.
In fact, we seldom notice the environing background until the background itself turns into a threat and whops us one upside the head.
I was going to explain how all of the above reflection stems from a quotation in Electric Eden and how it relates to the larger issue of cultural fluidity, but the observations above have already overflowed into environmental issues and mystical religion and all sorts of other stuff in addition to global economics, so it seems sort of silly to end with a passage about folk tradition that Rob Young quoted from a book by Bob Pegg.
