Interstice
McMindfulness
Profit involves the deferral of the true cost of a product to the “Other”, an exercise of power that privileges the consumer, and of course the profiteer whose manipulates this act. The cost of oil is deferred to vulnerable ecosystems, the cost of high fructose corn syrup is deferred to vulnerable bodies, the cost of fast fashion is deferred to vulnerable populations. The continual creation of commodities to displace in this way is achieved by systematically stripping a product of its context – mutually interdependent social, ecological, emotional, relational, and temporal continuities. Consumer goods serve as vectors that perpetuate established power relations and institutions. Yet the complexities that are denied in this exercise still remain.
Commodification achieved by stripping something of its context applies to immaterial goods as well as physical ones. Consider the rising popularity of “mindfulness” in popular culture, as Ron Purser and David Loy question in a recent article. Citing the increasing adoption of mindfulness concepts and techniques into American institutions – schools, corporations, prisons and government agencies – the authors question the distortion that occurs when mindfulness becomes a legitimized consumer product.
“While a stripped-down, secularized technique — what some critics are now calling “McMindfulness” — may make it more palatable to the corporate world, decontextualizing mindfulness from its original liberative and transformative purpose, as well as its foundation in social ethics, amounts to a Faustian bargain. Rather than applying mindfulness as a means to awaken individuals and organizations from the unwholesome roots of greed, ill will and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.”
Mindfulness’s popularity is based in its tangibly powerful technology for addressing and transforming suffering. Everyone wants to be happy. However, stripping the techniques of mindfulness from their context defers the root causes and conditions involved, in the service of the status quo. Commodifying mindfulness into relaxation and focusing techniques ultimately protects institutions. On one level, it protects the institution of the personal ego and its quest for control of experience. On another level, it protects oppressive and alienating social structures – in the face of which we experience natural feelings of protest – the disquiet, frustration, anxiety, and depression we are often trying to eliminate with meditation.
“Mindfulness training has wide appeal because it has become a trendy method for subduing employee unrest, promoting a tacit acceptance of the status quo, and as an instrumental tool for keeping attention focused on institutional goals.”
Early in my psychotherapy training I saw video of a woman in therapy recorded in 1964, who was struggling with the same wrenching internalized double-standards of femininity that my contemporaries are still suffering from 50 years later. A cynicism awoke in me, a dark fear that the role of the therapist would be like a janitor patching up the casualties of our power structures, helping clients to internally cope with harmful social forces. As such I would be performing in service of established institutional injustices, doing nothing to address the systemic causes of suffering but in fact perpetuating them by pacifying their victims.
A therapy that does otherwise must continually resist becoming a consumer product, merely selling reassurance and quiescence – and at what price? As a counsellor specializing in mindfulness-based psychotherapy, I am doubly poised for profit. To be honest about the practice I must be in constant dialogue with the practice itself – which is one of recontextualizing, coming into interconnectedness and complexity, and as such, is inherently radical.
The McMindfulness authors note that there is cachet to linking these practices to the Buddhist tradition, while assuring consumers that its practical essence has been salvaged from religious superstition. I can confirm that it is uncomfortable to be transparent with others that the fullness of the practice is deeply connected to the set of ethical, social, psychological, analytical and metaphysical teachings we call Buddhism – lumped as it is into unfashionable categories of religion, dogma and faith. But meditation itself is not a Buddhist innovation. Mind-training techniques were the normative cultural milieu in which the historical Buddha lived and practiced. A form of yoga, these practices function to build skill in calming and directing the faculties of mind, such as towards a trance state. What Buddhism does differently is to recognize these states as nothing special in and of themselves. The Buddhist suggestion is to direct the mind to investigate itself – the object no longer peace and tranquility, but the generation of penetrating critical insight. School education cultivates students’ cultural literacy.
The practice of meditation, or “calm abiding” is not particularly one of becoming more in control, more passive, or more comfortable. The thing about insight, is that it is fundamentally destabilizing. It cuts through. It will always take you outside of your comfort zone.
Another way to put this is, is that you are always meditating on something. Usually, it is on all the hope and fear accumulated for the narrative of your own life. Alternatively, you can focus on all the cheerful things going on in your life, cultivating calm reassurance. You can meditate on the breath until you learn to get less carried away by hope and fear. All this could allow you to be a more ruthless trader, a more cunning lawyer, less upset about your future cut short by economic disparity, less upset by racism, sexism, ecological disaster and exploitation suffered by yourself or by others. But you will be living in a bubble, a cocoon. It will feel small, and fragile, and always in need of maintenance/defense.
In short, you can profit, and displace the cost of your privileged position. In cultivating calm reassured control, we displace interdependence, our human need for interconnection – awakened and felt in suffering and compassion with others. We displace our natural protest at having this interdependence denied us. We displace the pangs of loss and fragility, indulging in the illusion of permanence of our status and independence. But this cocoon is false. You are part of a much larger world, and it will call for you.
McMindfulness is stripped of the rich practice of turning the mind to question these realities – the nature of interconnection, the precious impermanence of life, the causes and conditions that give rise to current appearances. The practice is not to know these things intellectually, but to cultivate a lived experience. Rather than displacing the unwanted costs of existence to the Other, mindfulness is properly the voice of the Other, welcomed back into awareness. It is opening to pain, discomfort, uncertainty, the illegitimate and transgressive elements of being. Something we might call peace may emerge out of this practice, on a much different order than the comfort of that cocoon; peace that blasts things apart and peace that binds things together, peace that probably still hurts and lusts and questions, peace that cannot be marketed, owned or achieved.
image credit Shepard Fairey
The Flower Lineage and Performativity
“Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets.”
-Jacques Derrida
The Flower Lineage
Zen Buddhism traces its origins to the so-called Flower Sermon, when the Buddha Shakyamuni silently held up a single flower among a gathering of his students. Most of the students were confused, but one named Mahakasyapa smiled, which was acknowledged as the moment of his enlightenment. This is thought of as a direct transmission of enlightened mind – a performative act, not a description or instruction.
From Mahakasyapa a lineage is traced via the influential philosopher Nagarjuna, 3rd century founder of the Mahayana (“Middle Way”) school of Buddhism, and later carried by the 5th century monk Bodhidharma into China and Japan. This legend illustrates the focus of Zen Buddhism on a wordless direct experience over verbal doctrine, analysis or philosophies. A Zen proverb professes: one showing is worth a hundred sayings.
The tradition of “show don’t tell” is also strong in the Tibetan Mahamudra (Great Sign) tradition, where the essential teaching is the “pointing out” instruction, which occurs in direct transmission from teacher to student. This tradition – that core teachings should not be written down but can only occur experientially between teacher to student – seems esoteric and secretive, concentrating power in the hands of spiritual leaders. But perhaps on another level, this tradition serves to protect the essential quality of insight, which is that it is dynamic and emergent – and therefore necessarily temporal and relational. It is not static information one can fix or possess.
In the Zen tradition, this “direct pointing” is perhaps most immediately conveyed in the arts. Every Zen art is a do, a “way.” Chado (Tea Ceremony) – the way of tea; Shodo (Calligraphy) – the way of writing, etc. The Zen arts are not the creation of representational objects, but they are the trace of a sudden act of awareness, both through the artist’s immediate process of creation and the transmission of that act available through its record. Yet these moments are not rarified or secret, but are expressed in the interaction with everyday objects and activities: household ceramics, a vase of flowers, a shared cup of tea.
Direct insight is also ordinary experience.
There is deep inspiration here for what I am exploring in this blog
When it comes to the exploration of experience, I am interested in the idea that the generation and communication of meaning is done peformatively, in temporary, propositional, relational tensions and figures. I want to look at the modes and practices for bringing awareness to this, building a process intelligence, doing it more constructively, creatively and daringly. I think this involves inhabiting a position that is shifted from an objective descriptive posture to a stance that is thoroughly and vulnerably implicated, that focuses on performance and effect rather than stability and product.
Bakemono-do: the art of creating monsters.
The Performative Turn
Attention to the performative appears in contemporary thought as well. Most associated with Judith Butler’s examination of identities – particularly categories of self, or subjectivity – as something that one “does” rather than something that one “is.” In this way, performance creates identities, rather than identities creating performance. E.g. my identity as a “woman” is not a site that I speak from, but a lived reality emerging in my constant relational performance of it within my social context. This can apply to any identity – be it “leftist” or “chair”. The performative is experience at its most ordinary.
An impact of this perspective is that forces we might take as natural, permanent or continuous elements of the human environment (from gender to race to language to architecture) are seen as interactive agents rather than passive objects. This awareness empowers one’s performative agency in constructing reality.
This is a strong thread in contemporary culture, an aspect of postmodernism sometimes called “the performative turn,” a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences that stresses the active, relational, social construction of realities. In the spirit of the flower lineage, performative contemporary thinkers/practitioners shift from a discourse based in the language and assumptions of fixity, to the plastic, relational and propositional play of figures, tensions, and effects. Along the way, building a process intelligence, daring to inhabit the uncertainty of emergent, dynamic meaning.
Vulnerability and Hyperreality
Yet the appearance of this performative turn in culture is limited. The suspicion of meta-narratives has sunk deep into the cultural consciousness, but manifests mostly in the deconstruction of outward identities (institutions, nationalism, cultural norms and practices) and is less directed inward towards a de-essentialization of the self. This pop-deconstruction mistakes the de-stabilization of truth as a rejection of truth, and so avoids the demands of active engagement with a shimmering, moving target.
Here is the critical, ironic stance, an armouring and defense mode that demolishes culture and protect the self from implication. What remains is the spectacle, the simulacrum, where we all know it is a performance without substance, and yet it appears with high significance, hyperreal. I broadcast a ballooning performance of self hour by hour on social media, reality TV, this blog…
So we know how to be critical of socially constructed meaning, and we know how to edify a socially constructed Self, but what about the deep and radical spirit of performativity based in the relational implication of oneself? Performance has the power to engage directly, with dynamic, emergent, process truth. At best, it can engage and enrich understanding, without taming reality, allowing the monsters to be wild. Can the performance be vulnerable, and creative? Can it liberate the ordinary from the hyperreal? The cultural resonance of Marina Abramovic’s performance art would suggest the hunger and power for such practice. For me, such a performance is what I do, or strive to do as a counsellor.
The question of performance is important insofar as mental health is synonymous with the agency to engage with narrative, to be flexible with categories, to act despite uncertainty, willing to be vulnerable and connected as the source of life’s immanence. These are forms of process intelligence which are not possessed but continually performed in a temporary, propositional, relational space.
There is so much attention to the performance of self in contemporary culture, so much acknowledgement of the emptiness/social construction of phenomena, unlike any other time in Western history. There is tremendous intelligence in this, a vast play space. Resistance to this destabilization appears as detached skepticism, disconnection, unwillingness to be vulnerable, bored or ordinary.
We are so close. Let’s be ordinary in the face of it, perform a flower sermon, play with the monsters.
flower image by Nick Veasey
street art photo by Daquella Manera on Flickr
In Praise of Obfuscation
On the importance of irritation in the creation of meaning
“Only Barthes, among the men, was at ease with incarnating a site that cannot be designated, a matte faubourg, without qualities.”
It started with this strange opaque phrase capturing my attention in “In Defense of Nuance,” Wayne Koestenbaum’s foreword to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (1978). It’s a phrase that only a fraction of readers could be expected to grasp. The words “a matte faubourg” were meaningless to me; a semantic collapse, a gap. However I did not drift over them but instead I stumbled, felt irritated, paused, mused, googled, mused some more…
Most people loathe what is often seen as the overly complex language of academic and critical texts, and roll their eyes at what is seen as the intention of contemporary art to irritate through cleverness or shock. At its worst, the fruits of modern discourse are alienation, ironic detachment, and a stratified system of insiders and outsiders.
But is this the only function of such disruptions, or can their impact contribute something deeper to human life? Can the art of skilled and meaningful disruptions be developed? And where does responsibility for this occur? Is it the job of the consumer of culture to pause and educate themselves in order to engage more meaningfully with disruptive language or imagery? Or is it the role of the author of the work to produce skillful, creative disruptions?
…A matte faubourg.
It is in fact a symbol that represents itself, a gap, detour, an empty site, an unrendered image, titleless and isolated.
In that moment, the text became a poem, linguistic friction that invited me into the play of nuance, beyond the symbols of meaning (the content) and into an effect of meaning (the play).
“A matte faubourg” frustrates a reader bent on overt meaning, but overt meaning may not be the ultimate function of a text. When I unwittingly read “a matte faubourg” I did not experience a metaphor, I experienced a matte faubourg directly, I danced with it, I experienced being pulled into that non-space.
Apophatic Acts of Unsaying
This “meaning event” – the momentary union of predicated meaning and direct experiential meaning – is at the heart of an apophatic discourse. Normally, language betrays direct experience, for words create distance, slippage. Language delimits objects and entities, but if the true subject of discourse is not static, non-object and non-thing, how can language be accurate? Author Michael Sells proposes that rather than foreclose on this problem with either non-saying (e.g. Zen Buddhism), or an analysis of the borders of the sayable and the unsayable (e.g. scientific method), one can actively engage the irresolvability of the problem by harnessing its infinite regress.
Unlike a discourse constructed out of finite assertions, apophasis (Greek: “un-saying”) is a propositionally unstable and dynamic discourse in which no single statement rests its own as true or false or even as meaningful. It is not the content of the sayings that is significant. The essence of the practice is that any propositional statement requires an undoing, a destabilizing revision, and it is the tension between proposed meaning and collapsed meaning that becomes important. Meaning events emerge from this tension, but each event is momentary, and must be “continually re-earned by ever new linguistic acts of unsaying.” Therefore apophasis is not asserted but performed.
Engaging with apophatic dialogue involves paying less heed to the content of the discourse than to the effect of the discourse. Apophatic discourse is not metaphor, it is tension – which in most discourse is usually experienced as irritation, confusion, disruption. But at its best, this tension is an invitation into a dynamic realm where meaning collapses in the moment of formation – and therefore approaches the more complex, emergent, systemic qualities of experience. Engagement requires not seeing disruption as an obstacle to meaning, but as a springboard into a different meaning mode.
Artistic Anti-Environments
Similarly, Marshall McLuhan described the task of art in contemporary culture as not about communicating or apprehending concepts, but about invoking direct participation in an experience. He saw such direct experiences as disruptions calling attention to the total ground rules of culture, which otherwise operate invisibly, conforming and restricting perceptual life. He therefore sees an organic need for artistic “anti-environments” in order to make new perception possible. Contemporary art involves an invitation into play and participation in a perceptual experience of un-doing. Its frictions reveal the emperor as having no clothes, but the emperor in this case is in one’s own mind – assumed meanings, roles and identities are shaken and reveal a deep and awe-full underlying unknowing.
Anti-environments are not about self-expression, but are a kind of research. Artistic practice probes into the presence of the unknown within the known, and therefore allows an unfinished process of knowing to emerge. McLuhan sees culture proceeding in this a dialectic of environment and anti-environment. Like the apophatic dialogue, every rule (“environment”) initially emerged as a disruptive innovation (“anti-environment”), and ultimately requires its own destabiliztion.
By One’s Own Petard
In my first post I proposed that there is an art to creating monsters, which can and should be developed. Obfuscation with the goal of inflating one’s professional status and appearance of knowledge is rarely a productive act. But the monsters created through disruption, irritation and concealment can serve a purpose in discourse. The purpose is the production of emergent meanings in the tension created between what is being said and what is being un-said. This kind of tertiary meaning is not apprehended in the content, but temporarily experienced in the performance of this movement. The destabilization created by skillful obfuscations create hybrid forms of meaning that extend outside of the structures of ordinary discourse, but meaningfully nestle within them as well, unsettling both, revealing the thinker as neither poet nor scholar. But there is investigation, and a new understanding produced, though it likely resides outside of the text itself.
This is a different kind of research than is usually recognized in our culture. Usually we are trying to figure things out: to clearly name our experience and arrive at our identities. However, experientially, this task is forever incomplete, and will endlessly be undone. Perhaps if equally interested in our own undoing, we can engage more fully with the life that is experienced in the tension between understanding and confusion. This openness may be easier to practice with a film or poem, than with our own lives. Yet many central human experiences may be better represented as an apophatic discourse at the cusp of both arrival and dissolution: love, identity, faith, desire, justice. They are worth our irritation.
photo credit: Neon Zoom Blur by Fields of View on Flickr
Dialectical Thinking – part 2
Both analytic and dialectic knowledge practices are necessary to make insightful decisions and take committed action. With an overemphasis on the practice of analysis comes the stress and brittle violence of continuous attempts to wrestle reality into static boxes for prediction and control. In addition, there is the harm caused by using lazy dialectics to dismiss, ignore, or assign inaccurate overarching schemas that promote ecological, economic and social systems of oppression. The key to genuine dialectic is found in one’s own vulnerability, which is often embarrassing and messy.
The analytic approach
Under the influence of western thought traditions, a contemporary person largely relies on using differentiation and formal logic to understand themselves and their world. This understanding relies on discrete stable identities and linear causal relationships; there cannot be contradictions, and there is no middle state between this and that, good and bad, true and false. Like mathematics, this is a very coherent way of representing and manipulating a symbolic reality to achieve prediction and control. But it is an abstraction. If some part of the flesh and stone of experience is not fitting into this logical understanding, then this is generally assumed to be a problem of incomplete knowledge or reasoning, and as such, must be resolved, usually by a process of isolating and de-contextualizing information, forming polarizing contradictory perspectives in an effort to determine which identity, fact or explanation is correct. Unfortunately, isolating, polarizing and differentiating have a variety of pitfalls from the political to the personal. There is violence to the project of prediction and control, often directed inwards. The internal human landscape is replete with contradiction, paradox, and nuance.
The dialectic approach
As I described in a recent post, a variety of cultural, philosophical and wisdom traditions propose a different model of knowledge which sees transient, contradictory and emergent qualities of existence as valid and important. Examples may be found in Buddhist thought, in most non-industrialized cultures, in queer theory, trends in continental philosophy and the science of complex systems. These perspectives acknowledge knowledge as:
- Transient, dynamic, changing, nuanced, continuously escaping definition
- Complex, contradictory, in tension, paradoxical
- Emergent, associative, networked, relational, contextual
This all sounds all well and good, but in experience, these aspects of life are usually deeply embarrassing and painful. It may be easy to think, “I’m a creative innovator / active in social justice / freethinking intellectual – I’m at home with all of this.” But engaging with dialectic cuts deeper than diplomacy and social critique, brainstorming and thought mapping.
When we find paradoxical desires unresolved in us; when we confront our own grief and loss; when one’s own experience doesn’t fit into stable identities, expected consequences or explanation, it provokes strong emotions of anger, shame, embarrassment, hopelessness, fear. Which in turn provoke strong defensive responses: numbness, denial, aggression, rumination. So strong is the social and internalized pressure to resolve contradiction and ambiguity that most of us are waging continual war against our own experience.
The Liberal Arts and the Guild
Liber, latin for freedom, is the root of liberal arts – originally, the studies in classical antiquity that were deemed essential for a free person to master in order to distinguish themselves from slaves.
A Roman free person is one who participates in a democracy, and is therefore expected to be well-informed about the world in which they share control and responsibility. Notably, the classical liberal arts – grammer, logic and rhetoric – were not studies aimed at accumulating content, but aimed at how to engage with knowledge itself. A free person is one who knows how to read the world intelligently, critically reflect and communicate skillfully.
A liberal arts education – once the backbone of public education and now an endangered species – is about learning for the sake of learning, imparting knowledge and developing intellectual capacities without aim of financial reward or vocational purpose.
Yet the liberal arts are intimately entwined with class and privilege, and share this with another approach to education – education as a credentialing system.
N+1’s Death by Degrees recounts the history of organized education beginning in 605 CE China. Instead of relying on imperial connections to gain a position among the political elite, the Chinese emperor set aside a number of political appointments for applicants who performed well on a series of examinations. For the first time, any peasant (who could somehow accumulate the equivalent knowledge) could join the privileged class. Over the years as these scholar-bureaucrats became more plentiful and test-prep academies boomed, there grew to be more degree holders than there were positions, which threatened to create a politically dangerous class of educated and ambitious citizens without the ability to change their socioeconomic status. In response, to regulate the ambitions of the public, the tests were made more difficult so that just over 1% passed the first exam. These institutions effectively channeled and distracted the efforts of the peasants to change their situation into systems that supported the establishment.
Similarly, the original universities in the Western world organized themselves as guilds. A guild’s mission was not to produce learning but to regulate the production of graduates through long periods of apprenticeship, which served to keep the services of the guild in high demand, with their workers in short supply and their services expensive.
This is the history of learning as a commodity.
As social and education critic Ivan Illich points out, like any commodity that is marketed, it becomes scarce in order to regulate its value (Illich, 1975, p 73). The situation is the same for a B.A., M.A., or Ph.D. The N+1 editors summarize,
Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor’s degree becomes democratized, the master’s degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification, and only secondarily and very dimly a system for imparting knowledge.
The contemporary dialogue around education – be it about tuition hikes, student loan forgiveness, fast-tracked degrees or more specialized degree programs – are focused on education-as-guild. On one hand, activists who want to democratize education are advocating for the guild to open up and make it easier to get credentialed. But credentialing still relies on rules as created by the established systems of power, and the entry fee to the privileged class will rise accordingly: a master’s degree or doctorate is no longer sufficient, unpaid internships are now de rigeur in many fields.
A fight for the right to education that continues to buy into this narrative is false.
Education defined as expedient practical training to gain credentials in an area of expertise is a lie that perpetuates institutions and systems of power, ransoms our own power as a collective creators in an information economy.
- It artificially limits access to the means of production at a time when technology permits unprecedented ability to localize production – protecting a model designed to maximize profit for corporate colonizers (while displacing environmental and social cost).
- It grants the false privilege of access to consumption (e.g. a consumer of credentials) as a stand-in for real power.
- It poses as a meritocracy, thus dismissing the realities of privilege and oppression and disguising poverty as a moral rather than social failing.
- It perpetuates the lie that work is that special and scarce.
- It perpetuates the lie that wealth is scarce and hard-earned.
There is a broad cost to our culture when we confuse institutional affiliations with learning / understanding / knowledge.
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1973, p. 9)
We confuse allegiance to powerful institutions with real democratic power, which lies in the ability to have a collective discourse, to negotiate different perspectives, interrelate creatively and collectively join power. A functioning democracy depends on forming networks through discussion, dialectical thinking, etc. These are the aims at the heart of a liberal arts education – the art of learning is the art of having a meaningful and productive dialogue.
I think on a more fundamental level, the fight for universal access to education is a fight to focus education on people, not institutions (eg. curiosity, interest, experimentation), and on dialogue, not competition (critical thinking, confrontation with difference, translation). I think this is something that it actually possible. In a stable well-funded educational system these practices can be the focus, as opposed to a false state of economic emergency, imposing a sense of competition among students and administrators that limits risk-taking and challenge, and therefore encourages the most conservative path towards any economic foothold.
As someone who had the fortune of a liberal arts education, I recognize the privilege of choice that I have had. The threat and consequences of poverty and other forms of oppression are real, and for many, access to education under the guild model makes a real and hard-won difference. I don’t want to minimize that. Let’s also not minimize the liberal ideal as “elitist,” nor set these experiences up as an either/or opposition. We can think bigger.
Wildness and Wilderness
What is it in one’s life that allows a love of the natural world to develop? I was discussing this question over coffee with a friend: as people who put in the effort as often as possible to maintain a relationship with natural space, how did we develop this love, compared to our friends and peers who did not? Was it childhood opportunities to camp or go to the cottage, walk in the woods or see animals at the zoo?
I found it surprising that when I reflected on my own experience, it was not these kinds of experiences that inspired an early passionate sense of place and love of nature. The feelings and state of mind I associate with this passionate love of nature – open, alert, curious, calm, belonging, exploratory – I link primarily to early experiences in distinctly urban spaces, to the presence of wildness in these spaces.
In my early childhood, wildness was the network of gates, fencerows, driveways and alleys between properties on my block, liminal spaces at the back of apartment parking lots, beneath the spruces in the strip of untended greenery between two driveways, a muddy spot behind a neighbour’s fence and compost pile where many snails could be found, treasures in the alleyway’s sewers and puddles and trash bins, a narrow sliver between two garages where leaves would pile up over the seasons into a rich and slippery humus with its own memorable smells and shadows.
Later it was the vacant lots, factory grounds, railroad tracks, helicopter landing pads, golf courses, boulevards, parking lots, cemeteries, churchyards, bridges, building rooftops, abandoned factories and warehouses, skyscraper stairwells, tunnels for watercourses under highways, greenbelts around expressways, edges of schoolyards, building sites, alleys and courtyards.
These undeveloped public spaces, forgotten post-use industrial sites and neglected underpinnings of urban life were rich with mystery and solitude, sensory information, engaging, and yet spacious, free of expectations.
I first realized that the moon could cast shadows in an empty factory parking lot.
I learned the names of birds and plants walking along the railway tracks.
I learned how to be alone, peaceful and at home with myself, under the branches of a tree in a waste behind an apartment block.
I learned the names of the constellations from a rooftop.
I began to talk to trees in the graveyard.
In these places I developed a love and care for unstructured wild space, a relaxation with gaps of decay and change, sensitivity to the ecosystem in a sense that transcends rural, urban and wild spaces. And it is this that draws me out to the mountain and lake and forest, and this that allows me to see the world beyond questions of use and profit. To see the world as animated and intelligent, not as a series of inanimate objects for use and quantification, as tools to an end, nor merely as an indifferent Other. When nature is animated, so am I.
Love of wildness creates love of wilderness.
What is wildness? According to the dictionary, a natural state, not domesticated, cultivated, tamed, nor inhabited; lacking order, arrangement, supervision, restraint; risky, fantastic, uncontrolled.
I see wildness as the breaking down of identities. To be tamed is to be named, ordered and defined. Wildness confounds definitions of ownership, use, function, and access. Age and decay are permitted to feather the edges of identities. There is space for creative re-use, undefined use, and the tension of uncertainty. Things are left to be discovered, imagined and created. The interaction between human and natural worlds is fundamentally unstructured and animated from within, which idealized urban settings are not structured to permit – although in actuality, opportunities are everywhere.
My ability to discover wildness/wilderness is, I think, entwined with the freedom I had to roam and explore on my own as a young child, as part of what is likely the last generation of children in my culture given this liberty.
I was allowed unstructured alone time to wander my neighbourhood on my own terms, from the range of a city block up an increasing scale as I grew older. Out of this I developed a sense of place, and an understanding of growth, decay, and the interconnection of the human and natural worlds. I didn’t need a designated wilderness site, because nature was not “out there” necessitating a car trip, maps and gear to access, rarefied and separate from the city. Nature was the teeming life force animating and interconnecting everything. I learned that it was inviting and awesome and vast, also messy and dirty and kind of dangerous at the same time. And so I learned how to navigate these realities.
There is an important conversation being had about what can support and integrate environmental concern and sense of place in contemporary culture. I think my environmentalism was most nurtured by the opportunity for unstructured solitary exploration at a young age, within an urban setting. So giving kids free range is one important part of the conversation. It is also worth discussing our ability to let our cities and public spaces nurture a sense of organic wildness. Fear unchecked can drive the impulse to tame all disorder, which results in a terrible loss of the interconnectedness and vitality of people, groups, urban and natural spaces.
Dialectical Thinking (Part 1)
Our own modification recognizes dialectic conflicts and contradictions as a fundamental property of thought. In contrast to Piaget, we maintain that at the level of dialectic operations at maturity, the individual does not necessarily equilibrate these conflicts, but is ready to live with these contradictions; stronger yet, the individual accepts these contradictions as a basic property of thought and creativity.
(Riegel, 1973, p.366)
Challenging Piaget’s established model of cognitive development, in which the highest form of development was the use of deductive reasoning to systematically and logically solve a problem, Reigel proposed a further sophistication of cognitive development in dialectical operations, cognition that has dexterity with inherent contradictions, movement, change, process; “able to transform contradictory experience into momentarily stable structures.”
The focus is a flexible, relational process of thought – dialogue – rather than creating firm identities.
The dialectical method has roots that extend back in western history as form of reasoning that resolves difference through dialogue. In contrast to rhetoric, where parties committed to their points of view aim to resolve the difference through persuading others to accept their perspective, dialectics aim at resolving differences through recognizing the interdependence of the differences from the perspective of a higher order.
Hegelian dialectics extend this discipline to an overall practice of engaging with knowledge itself, based on the emerging recognition that all meanings a) inherently contain their own contradictions, and b) exist in time and therefore temporary and transient. Thus dialectic does not aim at logically uncovering existing truths or final answers, but aims to engage with truth that is inherently dynamic, changing, emergent. And so any synthesis is not a stable resolution, but a new order with its own poles and tensions, open for ongoing dialogue. Artist Alyce Santoro writes,
1) participants in a dialectic dialog understand that reality and our perception of it is in a constant state of flux, therefore definitive conclusions may not be necessary 2) apparent paradoxes and contradictions are identified and embraced as inherently interdependent conditions whenever possible.
The goal of the dialectic process is therefore to deepen overall understanding.
Inter-personally, it is collaboration and power-sharing. Intra-personally, it is a flexible and dynamic process of cognition. There is therefore both a public and a personal need for the cultivation of dialectical skill. I will address interpersonal dialectic first.
In the public realm, rhetoric (the skill of persuasion), not dialectic, is the dominant form of communication. Since Plato, dialectic has been contrasted with rhetoric, which is not interested with advancing the creation of meaning but in winning conclusive power through persuasion. Like any polarity, there is a unity underlying these methods of seeking solutions to difference, and our culture likely benefits from the tension created between contest and compromise. However, in the hyper-rhetorical spectacle of contemporary culture, from reality TV, ubiquitous advertising and corporate branding, political pandering and partisanship, evangelism and fundamentalism of all kinds, there is an absence of role models for dialectical process.
In an increasingly interconnected world, and with growing diversity within nation states, there is the risk of an escalating isolation of viewpoints as our models for engaging with difference involve differentiation and competition rather than interdependence and understanding. I believe the widening ideological gap between progressives and conservatives is evidence of this trend, which accomplishes the near irrelevance of political process and the understandable disengagement of the public. Democracy is intertwined with the ability to bridge difference and collaborate.
Alyce Santoro makes an interesting proposal for establishing dialectic more prominently in contemporary culture:
A dialectic method would be applied like a scientific method especially for communication and distillation of understanding. Like the scientific method, it would be taken for granted that any practitioner who wished to be recognized by his or her peers as a clear, principled communicator would be obliged to employ it.
A preliminary outline of steps in a new DIALECTIC METHOD:
1. Establish the matter to be considered.
2. Identify and define abstract or ambiguous terminology and concepts.
3. Acknowledge the existence of apparent contradiction, paradox, and nuance.
4. Determine commonalities and points of connection.
5. Reevaluate the matter in light of information gleaned through elucidation of both paradox and connection.
6. Develop and implement solutions based on a refined understanding of the matter at hand. If further clarification is desired, begin again at step 1.
This kind of model can provide a structure for bringing difference – with its nuances and paradoxes – into the public dialogue where it is needed. There can be multiple truths in civic and social planning, scientific discovery and conflicts of all kinds.
Extending the practice into the internal, personal realm, dialectic is necessary to resolve otherwise paralyzing or self-destructive internal conflicts. As a counsellor, cultivating dialectical thinking forms the backbone of my interventions. I will write more about this in an upcoming post.
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Riegel, K. (1973). Dialectic operations: the final period of cognitive development. Human Development 16, 346-370.
In Praise of Monsters
“We are going to have to slow down, reorient and regulate the proliferation of monsters by representing their existence officially.”ii
In the above quote, Bruno Latour muses on the tension between two ways of relating to information, which he calls “purification” and “translation.” Purification is the separation and specialization of knowledge. It distills, reduces and creates partitions, separating knowledge into distinct and exclusive realms.
Translation is hybrid and continuous knowledge, stitching together disparate fields and perspectives into networks.
Purification is the acknowledged project of modernity, and it is what generally passes for knowledge in the contemporary world. We go to scientists and mathematicians for facts, priests and philosophers for morality, artists and sociologists for a critical examination of the discourse itself. Generally, the more purified information is, the more “true” it feels to the modern person.
Hybrid knowledge on the other hand feels “uncanny, unthinkable, unseemly”: think creationist museums, a doctor doing energy healing, a politician admitting uncertainty. It is taboo to cross the lines, we are uneasy with these monsters.
I’ve always been a fan of monsters.
That which is taboo is also very powerful. Hybrids are generative and transformative, they produce mutations – new forms of knowledge. This is vital.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the tension between specialized and hybrid knowledge, especially with the impact of information technology on our evolving relationship to knowledge. As information becomes more intimately and exponentially available, how are our knowledge practices changing? And what is possible?
The internet is a monster-generating hybrid network if ever there was one.
Any given search term will return a dazzling compound-eye’s view, a pixilated holograph gradually emerging in a grotesque and unsettled whole. There is obviously tremendous power here, a potentially iconoclastic democratization of power/knowledge. iii
Yet what I observe and what I practice in navigating information is an ever-increasing practice of purification. My google results target my geographic location, web browsing history and the content of the emails I write. In parallel, I rarely look beyond the first page of results. I get my news filtered through a silo of like-minded facebook friends or twitter users. Increasingly, what passes for news is anonymously data-mined clusters of information presented without context or analysis.iv I can in most cases avoid any interaction with information that is uncanny, uncomfortable, or annoying. As a result I exist more and more in a self-confirming knowledge-universe, like piled upon like, a cinching tautological noose of specialized information.
Of course in all this neatly curated purification, monsters proliferate. I mix my own lazy cocktail of nature and culture that confirms my beliefs about where the two lie.
What is not happening is the skillful practice of translation.
I believe that more than ever, there is a need for the art of creating monsters to be acknowledged and nurtured as a discipline – doing the important work of shuttling between perspectives and sources. Transdisciplinary understanding, critical dexterity and dialectical reasoning are vital skills to develop. If we let corporate entities do this work for us, defining which boundaries are enforced (trade ≠ ethics) and which monsters are okay (Islam = danger), then the monsters are being created by economic forces that will do to knowledge what Monsanto has done to our food supply.
I propose that this is what Latour means by officially representing the existence of monsters. It is not a shift or “return” to hybrid network thinking, but the recognition that both translation and purification are happening, and the more skilled and intelligent we are with the simultaneous practice of both, the better. But to be skillful with hybrid knowledge involves operating in the shifting realm between cause and effect, nature and nurture, us and them, immanence and transcendence – and not to hang there suspended in the “unfinished skepticism” of postmodernity. It is to commit fully as actors in the unfinished project.
Imagine a conversation, say, about the Alberta oil sands, or the Montreal student protests, that simultaneously and lucidly weaves technological facts, ecological and sociological data, history, questions of morality, national myths, an examination of race, class and power politics, personal exhortations, and a deconstruction of the language and media used to represent the issue.
This hybrid discourse is willing to explore the tensions of coexisting yet contradictory truths. It is a conversation without conclusions. I believe it is a conversation that is needed. And even more needed are citizens who can/will have it.
This is what this blog is about.
i. Goya. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
ii. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993.
iii. “There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. London: Penguin, 1991.
iv. “Barely rewritten press releases and daily stories under the news section about top DVD rentals in town, or where to find the cheapest gas according to GasBuddy dot com. No context, no analysis.” Sarah Kanig, in “Forgive us our Press Passes.” This American Life episode #468