It's now cliche to assert that mass media business models are dead. It's no longer hard to either make or distribute media products. Markets are awash with digital product, which people expect for free. Artists today have to apply their creativity to other ways of producing unique value that people will buy.
At Sceneverse, where I work, we are becoming huge fans of the band One-Eyed Doll (Wikipedia), not just for their music, but for the whole way they create a scene around themselves that keeps them in touch with their fans and economically viable.
They sell what's rare.
For digital music files which have become hard to price, they sell album downloads on a pay-what-you-want basis. But if you buy an "appreciation package" involving a physical CD from them, you do so secure in the knowledge that each one is individually signed and bitten by the band's lead singer and guitarist, Kimberly Freeman. We bought some, and you can see the bite marks. They also sell buttons and baubles and stuff that fall off her costumes during their performances, (she is insanely energetic). They sell paintings of band members, thank-you notes handwritten by the duo, personalized thank-you videos, and other artisan products (understanding that these are FUN pomo-goth-slasher-freak-tregan-playing-hard-touring artisans). Items are priced by the degree of personalized attention the duo pour into them for the specific fan.
The bitten CDs and costume detritus put me in mind of Derrida (that's how much of a nerd I am). These are traces - marks of clawbacks - taking the product out of abstraction and connecting it to the material, physical person of the artist again. You could say it reminds us that artists are real people who need to survive, but it is too easy to be blithe about this market shift when you frame it that way. It's also a good example of Mike Masnick CwF + RtB = $$$ formula, but I want to resist formulation for a moment, to appreciate the deeper dynamics that make the formula work here.
In the value universe hypothesis proposed (and further developed) by economist and fellow Sceneversian Greg Rader, the bite marks on the CD "rehabilitate" it, in the following sense. A CD hovers perilously between economic quadrants in Rader's model.
- Is the CD a political-economy good? (A bearer of legally-enforceable intellectual property?)
- Is it a transactional/commodity good? (A "thing" you might find in a bin or rack for $10?)
- Is it an attention-economy good? (A heavily managed "star" product from a "fame" industry?)
- Is it a relational-economy good? (A way of personally thanking Kimberly and Junior for their art, and their dedication to making kick-buns experiences for us?)
The bite marks add flesh to how you consider this item. It's a trace of the non-metaphysical, which claws the product over much more in the direction of the relational economy than most CDs are - even autographed ones. (Music. Reloaded. This time, it's personal.) One-Eyed Doll are masterful relational marketers. Their offering actually covers all four Raderian value quadrants, but they strongly downplay their legal right to extract a price (obscure its legibility), and pump up the personal touch. They walk the incredibly delicate tightrope between offering relational, attentional and transactional goods with Venti integrity and a big invigorating shot of sheer camp.
Kimberly is certainly a persona. The real person that she is exceeds what we as remote fans can know about her, but she makes her presence known with a very physical trace of a moment - a moment when she considered us in particular, even if abstractly. The broken bits of her costumes are traces of the ferocity of her performances, of the activity pattern in life that she is. These traces themselves are not metaphysical. They are not pure hype or simply symbolic. Each one costs her some of her own life's focus.
One cannot escape metaphysics - these artists are replacing commodity fetishism (mass-producible, like the Coca-Cola brand marks) with relational fetishism. In (what might seem to be) less metaphysical terms, a materials engineer looking at the bite marks using an electron tunnelling microscope might just give a molecular description of the indentations in the material lattice of the substrate, and not care what made the marks. We imbue them with presence, with the subjectivity, agency, intention and affect of an author. We make them hosts in a communion with their source as we imagine her.
But that willingness to read presence into a trace (that if anything should alert us to absence and presence simultaneously) - that craving for presence that Derrida messes with and frustrates in his writings... that is a great marketing driver! If that hunger for presence drives all of Western civilization, and has since antiquity, that's a damn strong market trend to ride! It's a very smart way to start thinking about a business model.
One-Eyed Doll have their way of doing it, but other independent musicians are also - of sheer necessity - feeling their way around the new economics of culture, and doing more and more things to build up high-relational-value offerings that they can authentically and with integrity exchange in ways their fans are willing to pay for. This new music industry may not enjoy the same economies of scale that the old attentional economy of mass-market pop stars did, but it will be delightfully weird.
Integrity is key to this. This return of artisanal economics in the music industry is an example of the "new spirit of capitalism", where capitalism goes to the edge of the market, to things that exceed the rationalized production of industrialism, to mine authenticity and to return with products that bear its stamp. Not every indie rock group could offer the kind of value One-Eyed Doll does, and if they did, One-Eyed Doll would have to think of new stuff, to stand out from the crowd. One-Eyed Doll both is goth-y and makes fun of it, and they make fun of the vampire craze in pop culture. Bitten CDs take their meaning in the context of the whole conversational culture they create with their fans around that experiential stance.
Marketing in the way One-Eyed Doll does means cultivating weirdness, and being very clear about the weirdness you offer. That is the business you are in.
There is something you offer that your fans connect with. There is a distinctive communion, outside the easily-explained, outside the generic comparisons people may make between you and every other musical act out there. That is your product. It's probably something you can't quite put into words - something that may be the mojo in your music, or maybe the way you address the mix of dedicated fans and first-time listeners who turn up at your shows, the way you make great evening for them, or the comic perspective on the world you embody... maybe it is in the imaginary world or alternate reality your music creates for listeners who "get" your music... the kind of pain you give expression to for people, the masterful way you faithfully deliver on the awesomeness of a genre, the surprises and new sounds your technical skills let you produce... something that can't be churned out in a factory is the real thing you have to offer people.
If you connect your weird relational goods to that unique and authentic source of weird value, it is starting to look like you can build a business as a musician again. Communications technologies give you the relational reach to connect with your fans in these ways. In this new post-megastar economy, you may not be able to buy a castle in Scotland (at least not a big one in good repair). But you may actually be able to make your living managing your band, your brand, and your time, centered around the activity you most want to do.
There are definitely worse ways to spend your mortal moments.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Essentially Contested Concepts
This is another cool idea, similar to the "invincible rhetoric" concept I discussed in my previous posting. The idea was initially expressed by W. B. Gallie in 1955, and then revisited by John Kekes in 1970.
Essentially Contested Concepts (ECCs) are "Big Concepts" like the following: art, love, morality, reason, nature, democracy, culture, knowledge, science, truth etc. The concepts are vague, ambiguous, highly general, and also highly valued. There is constant debate over the proper use of these terms, such as whether or not a particular installation of objects is "really art" or not. Very often, people will disagree over how these ECCs should be used. Each side in such a dispute feels that they are making the proper use of the term, but they are also aware that the other side does not agree with them on that very point. Nonetheless, neither side is prepared to concede the term to the other side, and pick a different term that better captures their side of the distinction. Instead, they go to war over who gets custodianship of the ECC.
Gallie described 7 conditions which together define an ECC. I review them here:
1) It defines some kind of valued achievement.
2) That achievement must be internally complex, with many parts adding up to make the whole achievement.
3) HOWEVER, there are several possible ways to interpret HOW the sub-components contribute to the end value, and these interpretations need not be consistent with each other.
4) The achievement itself must be adaptive or modifiable, capable of being expressed differently in different circumstances.
5) The ECC must be simultaneously used both defensively and aggressively - when you take a stand and say "art is x", you are consciously aware that some people say "art is y", and your articulation of your position includes an opposition to theirs.
These first five points describe what an ECC is, but they fail to distinguish ECCs from other concepts around which communication is merely radically confused. Gallie's solution to this problem was to appeal to history - to an ideal exemplar that everyone can agree to as an example of the concept (point 6); and this exemplar must also be internally complex, so that the final performance of the concept depends on the performance of composite activities in ways that are not clearly straightforward (point 7). The exemplar provides the indisputable shared point of reference that distinguishes an ECC from an idea that is merely confused, but yet that example too is complex enough to be essentially contested.
Kekes offers 6 conditions for something to be considered an ECC:
1) ECCs signify some kind of voluntary activity - they involve conscious human conduct and choices. Thus their essential defining characteristic can be thought of as either the activity itself or its goal - the means or the ends, or both.
2) ECCs are evaluative, and the conflict over them is value-charged, with participants putting great weight into which side will prevail because of the evaluations that will be implied.
3) The contest over an ECC will be in the interests of the participants, because the single concept being disputed concerns their best way of satisfying their needs and achieving their goals.
4) Like Gallie, Kekes states that the goal-directed activities that can be classified as instances of an ECC must be internally complex, with many elements each of which plays a role in the performance of that activity. These elements have certain qualities - one element must be something the agent does or has, and could stop doing or having without ceasing to be an agent, and the elements do not each have value of their own (they do not achieve a piece of the goal in isolation). Only the goal state is evaluated, and the constituent activities gain their value from that fact.
5) The component activities must be variously accessible - people will disagree about how significant each element's contribution is to the overall performance.
6) Despite all of this dispute at component levels, participants in the debate have to agree about the general description of the domain they are contesting, and they must share the core problem that prompts the debate in the first place. (This general agreement takes the place of Gallie's appeal to history.)
It seems to me that ECCs and invincible rhetoric are related - both are produced in part by human source-monitoring limitations. These source-monitoring limitations may be caused by general working-memory limitations, or as a side effect/pathology of our capacity to generalize across exemplars. At any rate, if we cannot all agree on how to weigh all the source components of the final goal-achievement, then we are likely to choose explanations that we like based on some extrinsic preferences or some general bias.
This has my Spidey-sense humming... there is some kind of shared pattern here...
W. B. Gallie's paper was in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-56] pp. 167-198, and in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. John Kekes' paper was in Philosophy and Rhetoric 10(2) [Spring 1977].
Essentially Contested Concepts (ECCs) are "Big Concepts" like the following: art, love, morality, reason, nature, democracy, culture, knowledge, science, truth etc. The concepts are vague, ambiguous, highly general, and also highly valued. There is constant debate over the proper use of these terms, such as whether or not a particular installation of objects is "really art" or not. Very often, people will disagree over how these ECCs should be used. Each side in such a dispute feels that they are making the proper use of the term, but they are also aware that the other side does not agree with them on that very point. Nonetheless, neither side is prepared to concede the term to the other side, and pick a different term that better captures their side of the distinction. Instead, they go to war over who gets custodianship of the ECC.
Gallie described 7 conditions which together define an ECC. I review them here:
1) It defines some kind of valued achievement.
2) That achievement must be internally complex, with many parts adding up to make the whole achievement.
3) HOWEVER, there are several possible ways to interpret HOW the sub-components contribute to the end value, and these interpretations need not be consistent with each other.
4) The achievement itself must be adaptive or modifiable, capable of being expressed differently in different circumstances.
5) The ECC must be simultaneously used both defensively and aggressively - when you take a stand and say "art is x", you are consciously aware that some people say "art is y", and your articulation of your position includes an opposition to theirs.
These first five points describe what an ECC is, but they fail to distinguish ECCs from other concepts around which communication is merely radically confused. Gallie's solution to this problem was to appeal to history - to an ideal exemplar that everyone can agree to as an example of the concept (point 6); and this exemplar must also be internally complex, so that the final performance of the concept depends on the performance of composite activities in ways that are not clearly straightforward (point 7). The exemplar provides the indisputable shared point of reference that distinguishes an ECC from an idea that is merely confused, but yet that example too is complex enough to be essentially contested.
Kekes offers 6 conditions for something to be considered an ECC:
1) ECCs signify some kind of voluntary activity - they involve conscious human conduct and choices. Thus their essential defining characteristic can be thought of as either the activity itself or its goal - the means or the ends, or both.
2) ECCs are evaluative, and the conflict over them is value-charged, with participants putting great weight into which side will prevail because of the evaluations that will be implied.
3) The contest over an ECC will be in the interests of the participants, because the single concept being disputed concerns their best way of satisfying their needs and achieving their goals.
4) Like Gallie, Kekes states that the goal-directed activities that can be classified as instances of an ECC must be internally complex, with many elements each of which plays a role in the performance of that activity. These elements have certain qualities - one element must be something the agent does or has, and could stop doing or having without ceasing to be an agent, and the elements do not each have value of their own (they do not achieve a piece of the goal in isolation). Only the goal state is evaluated, and the constituent activities gain their value from that fact.
5) The component activities must be variously accessible - people will disagree about how significant each element's contribution is to the overall performance.
6) Despite all of this dispute at component levels, participants in the debate have to agree about the general description of the domain they are contesting, and they must share the core problem that prompts the debate in the first place. (This general agreement takes the place of Gallie's appeal to history.)
It seems to me that ECCs and invincible rhetoric are related - both are produced in part by human source-monitoring limitations. These source-monitoring limitations may be caused by general working-memory limitations, or as a side effect/pathology of our capacity to generalize across exemplars. At any rate, if we cannot all agree on how to weigh all the source components of the final goal-achievement, then we are likely to choose explanations that we like based on some extrinsic preferences or some general bias.
This has my Spidey-sense humming... there is some kind of shared pattern here...
W. B. Gallie's paper was in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 [1955-56] pp. 167-198, and in Chapter 8 of Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto and Windus, 1964. John Kekes' paper was in Philosophy and Rhetoric 10(2) [Spring 1977].
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Invincible Rhetoric
Okay, so this is a seriously cool idea about a seriously annoying phenomenon - the phenomenon of invincible rhetoric. People who use invincible rhetoric are always right. They will stress a point one way to be right in another situation, but then when you bring up an objection they have another stock answer for that one too. A quick example of the difference would be the two sayings "haste makes waste" and "the early bird gets the worm".
A person who enjoys dispensing post-hoc advice will always be infallibly wise, if their knowledge base supports both of these claims. These two invincibly paired proverbs are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. In some contexts one proverb applies, and in other contexts the other does. However, sometimes when you want to challenge the advice someone gives you, you want to hold them to one claim-context pairing or another. This can be difficult. Since their assumption base contains both beliefs, they can stipulate either of the opposing points as what they "really" meant, and in so doing, they can re-contextualize or re-frame the debate. If they keep shifting within their assumption base just so as not to be wrong, this should be criticized as a type of invalid argumentation. This is a subtle and infuriating case of the if-by-whisky fallacy of infallibility.
Any kind of unassailable belief system enables invincible rhetoric. Religious people - truly religious people - don't make a fetish about being "right" all of the time, instead they use their faith to commit to meaningful lived actions amidst the uncertainties of life. However, religious literalists and armchair apologists often do crow with pride about how their belief system can answer every question and withstand every argumentative challenge. They can mount this kind of invincible facade because they have an assumptions base that generates invincible rhetoric. For example:
- SUPREMACY CLAIM: Their religion is the one true religion (of many thousands throughout human history), and their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god wants everyone to know this and to follow this one religion (sect).
- AGENCY COUNTER: If that is what this omnipotent being wants, why doesn't it just make it so, or make it obvious to each one of us.
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: This one god wants people to believe in it for the 'right' reasons, so it sent a message through a very narrow channel (one person/tradition) instead of a broad one, and deliberately made it difficult to believe in it, so that people can 'prove' their belief and loyalty in the face of opposition, disbelief and persecution.
- BURDEN OF PROOF COUNTER: Why would an omnipotent, omnipresent being need or value oaths of recognition and fealty from much more limited beings, such that it would set up these kinds of ordeals and tests?
- SHIFT TO 'GIFT OF LOVE' FRAMEWORK: It loved us so much it gave us free will, which we abused to turn away from it. But it loves us so much it sent us messages and signs to lead us back.
- INCONSISTENCY COUNTER: So it gave us the means to do what it did not want us to do, in order that we would do what it does want us to do?
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: For the right reasons - that we may prove ourselves worthy.
- RATIONALITY COUNTER: Based on what we know about agency, intentions, and the scope and scale of subjective goals and concerns, it does not make much sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being to develop these kinds of intricate tests of loyalty. However, it makes perfect sense that human groupings develop these kinds of in-group tests of belonging and commitment.
- SHIFT TO THE 'MYSTERY' FRAMEWORK: How can you claim to understand the reasons or motives of such a supreme being? All of our concepts are so limited in trying to understand god. He has revealed himself to us in the only way we can understand, but he is far greater than our understanding. All we can do is accept what he has shown us in his benevolence.
This kind of thing has a great sense of felt-closure to it. There is an answer to every objection, and it seems irrefutable, despite the fact that the different frameworks or assumption bases in the rhetoric are not all perfectly consistent with each other. It is odd that supreme beings demand all kinds of commitment signals from humans. It is also odd that supreme beings with no limitations would leak their message out through narrow and protected channels. Why not just tell everybody? But there is a framework in apologetics - call it the SHIFT TO THE HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK - that this being *has* told everybody, but people are just too busy, confused, misled, numb or fallen to notice the message that is everywhere. But this is inconsistent with the need to be loyal to one specific channel for this message.
These objection-countering themes can wax and wane throughout a discussion with a religious literalist, creating a position that they feel is unassailable because it has an answer for every challenge. However, the coherence between the answers is loose, and reliant on dubious premises which would support conclusions the religious person might not endorse. The only thing notable about their invincible rhetoric is that it is invincible, with no necessary indication that it is also correct. This makes it incredibly annoying to argue with them.
In a research paper called "The Invincible Character of Management Consultants' Rhetoric: How one blends incommensurates while keeping them apart" (Organization, Vol 7(4), 2000, p. 633-655), Johan Berglund and Andreas Werr describe how rhetoric of this sort draws its objection-countering power from the fact that we embrace a wide variety of master-narratives or root-metaphors as valuable for different explanatory contexts. By freely mixing arguments from more than one mythical system within the same discourse, we can construct a sequence of arguments that has an answer for any objection. The argumentation may also be easy to endorse, because we recognize the value of each argument within it. Receptive audiences for this kind of message react positively to the prima facie validity of each of the commonplaces of wisdom as they are trotted out, without reflecting on the fact that each commonplace is drawn from a very different discursive context, and as such they cannot really be jointly applied against the same objection.
In the religious example I used above, there is the "Omnipotent Creator" mythic system, which emphasizes an unbroken narrative of cause and effect (except for the cause of God itself, which is never given, and so the creator myth still fails to explain how it all started. It just shifts the creation-from-nothing from an object-protagonist - the universe - to an equally inexplicably pre-existing subject-protagonist; the creator. This probably seems plausible to each individual human who believes it because they were once tiny kids with huge parents who *were* their world, so it makes sense that subjects precede the world). Then there is the "Ordeals of Faith" myth, whereby God tests the loyalty of those who believe in it, and the way to be down with God is to prove your unshakable faith no matter how sparse the evidence, or how hard the test. This sits uneasily with the "Omniscient judge" myth, according to which God would already know how loyal you were anyway, thereby requiring no test to find out...
If you freely counter objections raised relative to one mythic system by drawing on another mythic system without noticing that the story lines are kind of distinct, then you can always have an answer for every objection without noticing their incompatibility, because each answer draws on mythic systems which are fuzzily-distinct enough to prevent the conflicts from being noticed. This is unbelievably infuriating for us rationalist types, to the seeming great delight (at times) of those who manage to silence our objections without having to submit any of their incommesurable beliefs to Occam's razor.
This phenomenon is similar to one of the cognitive defects that Pascal Boyer identifies as one cause of religious belief in "Religion Explained"; specifically "Source Monitoring Defects". We do not recall or activate our awareness of the distinct sources of distinct knowledge types. Other defects Boyer analyzes include the well-known "Confirmation Bias", "Cognitive Dissonance Reduction", "Consensus Effects" and "Memory Illusions", all of which can conspire to efface the disparate sources of wisdom to create invincible rhetoric, where incommensurable ideas cohabit in powerful ways.
However, this same infuriating aspect of religious literalist apologetics tells us something important about religion as a human cultural activity that should lead us to receive religious wisdom in a respectful manner (even if we don't believe that God exists in any kind of way besides in human culture). Religious wisdom has enormous power as a repository of important generalizations drawn from many domains of human life, compressed into non-argumentative mythic structures.
So religious belief will be full of inconsistency, and unacceptable as a rational description of how the universe works, but at the same time it will be a powerful mashup of observations and generalizations about all features of human life. This storied richness is a resource that people can draw on to act meaningfully in positive ways, and some religious people who are committed to this kind of lived religion are empowered to do more good than they would otherwise have attempted. Thus people who take the love of wisdom seriously will attend to the wisdom of the irrational, even while rejecting it as a description of the world, and remaining vigilent against its capacity to empower people to do more evil than they might otherwise do, as well. What goes for religion can also go for all kinds of human discourses that are non-scientific, such as the pop psychology and pop business writing were a great many important observations may come together in ways similar to how root metaphors come together in religious traditions.
There are thus thoughtful ways for rationalists to engage religious ideas, pop-psychological ideas, folk wisdom, managerial/self-help guru-dom, and other such cultural repositories of meaning. Nevertheless, invincible rhetoric remains totally infuriating, and when it is being used as a dodge, people should really be called on it.
A person who enjoys dispensing post-hoc advice will always be infallibly wise, if their knowledge base supports both of these claims. These two invincibly paired proverbs are not necessarily mutually exclusive or contradictory. In some contexts one proverb applies, and in other contexts the other does. However, sometimes when you want to challenge the advice someone gives you, you want to hold them to one claim-context pairing or another. This can be difficult. Since their assumption base contains both beliefs, they can stipulate either of the opposing points as what they "really" meant, and in so doing, they can re-contextualize or re-frame the debate. If they keep shifting within their assumption base just so as not to be wrong, this should be criticized as a type of invalid argumentation. This is a subtle and infuriating case of the if-by-whisky fallacy of infallibility.
Any kind of unassailable belief system enables invincible rhetoric. Religious people - truly religious people - don't make a fetish about being "right" all of the time, instead they use their faith to commit to meaningful lived actions amidst the uncertainties of life. However, religious literalists and armchair apologists often do crow with pride about how their belief system can answer every question and withstand every argumentative challenge. They can mount this kind of invincible facade because they have an assumptions base that generates invincible rhetoric. For example:
- SUPREMACY CLAIM: Their religion is the one true religion (of many thousands throughout human history), and their omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god wants everyone to know this and to follow this one religion (sect).
- AGENCY COUNTER: If that is what this omnipotent being wants, why doesn't it just make it so, or make it obvious to each one of us.
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: This one god wants people to believe in it for the 'right' reasons, so it sent a message through a very narrow channel (one person/tradition) instead of a broad one, and deliberately made it difficult to believe in it, so that people can 'prove' their belief and loyalty in the face of opposition, disbelief and persecution.
- BURDEN OF PROOF COUNTER: Why would an omnipotent, omnipresent being need or value oaths of recognition and fealty from much more limited beings, such that it would set up these kinds of ordeals and tests?
- SHIFT TO 'GIFT OF LOVE' FRAMEWORK: It loved us so much it gave us free will, which we abused to turn away from it. But it loves us so much it sent us messages and signs to lead us back.
- INCONSISTENCY COUNTER: So it gave us the means to do what it did not want us to do, in order that we would do what it does want us to do?
- SHIFT TO 'ORDEAL' FRAMEWORK: For the right reasons - that we may prove ourselves worthy.
- RATIONALITY COUNTER: Based on what we know about agency, intentions, and the scope and scale of subjective goals and concerns, it does not make much sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent being to develop these kinds of intricate tests of loyalty. However, it makes perfect sense that human groupings develop these kinds of in-group tests of belonging and commitment.
- SHIFT TO THE 'MYSTERY' FRAMEWORK: How can you claim to understand the reasons or motives of such a supreme being? All of our concepts are so limited in trying to understand god. He has revealed himself to us in the only way we can understand, but he is far greater than our understanding. All we can do is accept what he has shown us in his benevolence.
This kind of thing has a great sense of felt-closure to it. There is an answer to every objection, and it seems irrefutable, despite the fact that the different frameworks or assumption bases in the rhetoric are not all perfectly consistent with each other. It is odd that supreme beings demand all kinds of commitment signals from humans. It is also odd that supreme beings with no limitations would leak their message out through narrow and protected channels. Why not just tell everybody? But there is a framework in apologetics - call it the SHIFT TO THE HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK - that this being *has* told everybody, but people are just too busy, confused, misled, numb or fallen to notice the message that is everywhere. But this is inconsistent with the need to be loyal to one specific channel for this message.
These objection-countering themes can wax and wane throughout a discussion with a religious literalist, creating a position that they feel is unassailable because it has an answer for every challenge. However, the coherence between the answers is loose, and reliant on dubious premises which would support conclusions the religious person might not endorse. The only thing notable about their invincible rhetoric is that it is invincible, with no necessary indication that it is also correct. This makes it incredibly annoying to argue with them.
In a research paper called "The Invincible Character of Management Consultants' Rhetoric: How one blends incommensurates while keeping them apart" (Organization, Vol 7(4), 2000, p. 633-655), Johan Berglund and Andreas Werr describe how rhetoric of this sort draws its objection-countering power from the fact that we embrace a wide variety of master-narratives or root-metaphors as valuable for different explanatory contexts. By freely mixing arguments from more than one mythical system within the same discourse, we can construct a sequence of arguments that has an answer for any objection. The argumentation may also be easy to endorse, because we recognize the value of each argument within it. Receptive audiences for this kind of message react positively to the prima facie validity of each of the commonplaces of wisdom as they are trotted out, without reflecting on the fact that each commonplace is drawn from a very different discursive context, and as such they cannot really be jointly applied against the same objection.
In the religious example I used above, there is the "Omnipotent Creator" mythic system, which emphasizes an unbroken narrative of cause and effect (except for the cause of God itself, which is never given, and so the creator myth still fails to explain how it all started. It just shifts the creation-from-nothing from an object-protagonist - the universe - to an equally inexplicably pre-existing subject-protagonist; the creator. This probably seems plausible to each individual human who believes it because they were once tiny kids with huge parents who *were* their world, so it makes sense that subjects precede the world). Then there is the "Ordeals of Faith" myth, whereby God tests the loyalty of those who believe in it, and the way to be down with God is to prove your unshakable faith no matter how sparse the evidence, or how hard the test. This sits uneasily with the "Omniscient judge" myth, according to which God would already know how loyal you were anyway, thereby requiring no test to find out...
If you freely counter objections raised relative to one mythic system by drawing on another mythic system without noticing that the story lines are kind of distinct, then you can always have an answer for every objection without noticing their incompatibility, because each answer draws on mythic systems which are fuzzily-distinct enough to prevent the conflicts from being noticed. This is unbelievably infuriating for us rationalist types, to the seeming great delight (at times) of those who manage to silence our objections without having to submit any of their incommesurable beliefs to Occam's razor.
This phenomenon is similar to one of the cognitive defects that Pascal Boyer identifies as one cause of religious belief in "Religion Explained"; specifically "Source Monitoring Defects". We do not recall or activate our awareness of the distinct sources of distinct knowledge types. Other defects Boyer analyzes include the well-known "Confirmation Bias", "Cognitive Dissonance Reduction", "Consensus Effects" and "Memory Illusions", all of which can conspire to efface the disparate sources of wisdom to create invincible rhetoric, where incommensurable ideas cohabit in powerful ways.
However, this same infuriating aspect of religious literalist apologetics tells us something important about religion as a human cultural activity that should lead us to receive religious wisdom in a respectful manner (even if we don't believe that God exists in any kind of way besides in human culture). Religious wisdom has enormous power as a repository of important generalizations drawn from many domains of human life, compressed into non-argumentative mythic structures.
So religious belief will be full of inconsistency, and unacceptable as a rational description of how the universe works, but at the same time it will be a powerful mashup of observations and generalizations about all features of human life. This storied richness is a resource that people can draw on to act meaningfully in positive ways, and some religious people who are committed to this kind of lived religion are empowered to do more good than they would otherwise have attempted. Thus people who take the love of wisdom seriously will attend to the wisdom of the irrational, even while rejecting it as a description of the world, and remaining vigilent against its capacity to empower people to do more evil than they might otherwise do, as well. What goes for religion can also go for all kinds of human discourses that are non-scientific, such as the pop psychology and pop business writing were a great many important observations may come together in ways similar to how root metaphors come together in religious traditions.
There are thus thoughtful ways for rationalists to engage religious ideas, pop-psychological ideas, folk wisdom, managerial/self-help guru-dom, and other such cultural repositories of meaning. Nevertheless, invincible rhetoric remains totally infuriating, and when it is being used as a dodge, people should really be called on it.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Hegel goes to Hollywood
I've been reading Derrida's Glas (don't ask me why), and it gave me a striking idea about Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit. (Now there's a topic with universal appeal... the comments section is going to explode with people chiming in on this one. The horror! The madness! The Hegelians!!!)
ahem.
[Making another parenthetical remark, Hegel actually went through three different titles for the book we call Phenomenology of the Spirit/Phenomenology of the Mind. The original title of his book was Science of the Experience of Consciousness.
This is by far and away the best title for this book, I think. However, he changed the name to Science of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Tom Rockmore, whose book Cognition:An introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is my source for all this, points out that he probably made the switch in names when he was writing the preface.
This is extraordinarily interesting, I think. The initial title is more of a first-person-experiential title, since the experience of consciousness is something We each experience as individuals. The final title is more of a third-person-observer title, reporting on the things that Spirit/Mind experiences. There is a shift from interiority to exteriority that may coincide with Hegel shift from writing the "actual" work to writing the preface "outside" the work.
Rockmore's book is way cool and is on my Amazon Wish List (all rich patrons please search for Neil LaChapelle to find my list!).]
AAANNNYhow...
I got to thinking that one could read the Phenomenology of the Spirit as a theory of story. It would describe a story arc that would begin in a self-unaware state, a patientive state rather than an agentive one, but one where some catalyst (e.g. the obligation imposed by a gift) forces the protagonist to evolve towards greater and greater self-awareness through a series of conflicts. The resolution of each conflict sets the new limits which will have to be overcome in turn. It would be a Teutonic alternative to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey", one skewed more towards interior struggles of recognition.
As long as one was not too heavy-handed with this, using the Phenomenology as a guideline rather than a crutch, it might help one create character-driven dramas of self-actualization or self-mastery. Those are the pictures that earn prestige, although they don't always earn a ton of money. Still, you never know...
I'm just waiting for a book to come out called The Phenomenology of Spirit for Screenwriters. It'll go on my Amazon Wish List too. My Amazon Wish List. Did I mention that I have an Amazon Wish List? (The online store... not a list of robust females...) Search the lists for Neil LaChapelle to find it. (Rich patrons need a lot of encouragement!!)
ahem.
[Making another parenthetical remark, Hegel actually went through three different titles for the book we call Phenomenology of the Spirit/Phenomenology of the Mind. The original title of his book was Science of the Experience of Consciousness.
This is by far and away the best title for this book, I think. However, he changed the name to Science of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Tom Rockmore, whose book Cognition:An introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit is my source for all this, points out that he probably made the switch in names when he was writing the preface.
This is extraordinarily interesting, I think. The initial title is more of a first-person-experiential title, since the experience of consciousness is something We each experience as individuals. The final title is more of a third-person-observer title, reporting on the things that Spirit/Mind experiences. There is a shift from interiority to exteriority that may coincide with Hegel shift from writing the "actual" work to writing the preface "outside" the work.
Rockmore's book is way cool and is on my Amazon Wish List (all rich patrons please search for Neil LaChapelle to find my list!).]
AAANNNYhow...
I got to thinking that one could read the Phenomenology of the Spirit as a theory of story. It would describe a story arc that would begin in a self-unaware state, a patientive state rather than an agentive one, but one where some catalyst (e.g. the obligation imposed by a gift) forces the protagonist to evolve towards greater and greater self-awareness through a series of conflicts. The resolution of each conflict sets the new limits which will have to be overcome in turn. It would be a Teutonic alternative to Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey", one skewed more towards interior struggles of recognition.
As long as one was not too heavy-handed with this, using the Phenomenology as a guideline rather than a crutch, it might help one create character-driven dramas of self-actualization or self-mastery. Those are the pictures that earn prestige, although they don't always earn a ton of money. Still, you never know...
I'm just waiting for a book to come out called The Phenomenology of Spirit for Screenwriters. It'll go on my Amazon Wish List too. My Amazon Wish List. Did I mention that I have an Amazon Wish List? (The online store... not a list of robust females...) Search the lists for Neil LaChapelle to find it. (Rich patrons need a lot of encouragement!!)
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