The emotional meaning of ritual and icon
Use is meaning.
The flag means the country; the strip means the team; the wine means the blood of Christ.
When I burn your flag, it means something, and when you object, and I start talking about political correctness gone mad and how you are destroying my freedom, I am winding you up for the second time.
When the Brexiteers turned their backs at the playing of the EU anthem (Who knew there even was one?), it means something just as it meant something when the Nazis turned their backs at the Reichstag in 1926. It shows, in both instances, a contempt for the political institution, and a challenge to its existence and legitimacy.
Britain lays claim to the lion as symbol (why?). This does not exhaust the meaning of a lion symbol, but don't imagine some esoteric argument will cut any ice with England football fans on match day.
Taking a name in vain is a serious business, a life and death affair. Blasphemy is betrayal.
Identity is invariably ritualised and symbolic, and I hope no-one is going to attempt to claim a position of externality - as if they had a certificate of rationality or something. Much of life is conducted through the forms of ritual and icon - hands up if you wear a badge.
(Note: if you didn't put your mental hand up because you do not wear a badge, you are joining in the hand-raising ritual.) {Other hand raising rituals are available.}
So I hypothesise that language - the spoken and written human peculiarity - is a particular form of something more visceral, more important in the sense of having more import or meaning because more directly connected with emotion and embodiment, that is the ritual and symbolic interaction that constitutes still, the large weight of human interaction. Discussions of grammar and syntax delve into the froth of the reality of existence.
The flag means the country; the strip means the team; the wine means the blood of Christ.
When I burn your flag, it means something, and when you object, and I start talking about political correctness gone mad and how you are destroying my freedom, I am winding you up for the second time.
When the Brexiteers turned their backs at the playing of the EU anthem (Who knew there even was one?), it means something just as it meant something when the Nazis turned their backs at the Reichstag in 1926. It shows, in both instances, a contempt for the political institution, and a challenge to its existence and legitimacy.
Britain lays claim to the lion as symbol (why?). This does not exhaust the meaning of a lion symbol, but don't imagine some esoteric argument will cut any ice with England football fans on match day.
Taking a name in vain is a serious business, a life and death affair. Blasphemy is betrayal.
Identity is invariably ritualised and symbolic, and I hope no-one is going to attempt to claim a position of externality - as if they had a certificate of rationality or something. Much of life is conducted through the forms of ritual and icon - hands up if you wear a badge.
(Note: if you didn't put your mental hand up because you do not wear a badge, you are joining in the hand-raising ritual.) {Other hand raising rituals are available.}
So I hypothesise that language - the spoken and written human peculiarity - is a particular form of something more visceral, more important in the sense of having more import or meaning because more directly connected with emotion and embodiment, that is the ritual and symbolic interaction that constitutes still, the large weight of human interaction. Discussions of grammar and syntax delve into the froth of the reality of existence.
Comments (90)
Hence, pragmatics?
Money lent, when there was no money anywhere. And the money isn't physical to begin with.
This fascination with the abstract isn't a philosophical wrong trail. It's an indirect approach to who we are; who we've become.
So, yes, I'd say we are driven by some rather complex 'visceral' ideas. I think of culture as the gateway to collective conciousness.
but straightway commanded the clear-voiced heralds to summon
by proclamation to battle the flowing-haired Achaians;
and the heralds made their cry and the men were assembled swiftly.
And they, the god-supported kings, about Agamemnon
ran marshalling the men, and among them grey-eyed Athene
holding the dear treasured aegis, ageless, immortal,
from whose edges float a hundred golden tassels,
each one carefully woven, and each worth a hundred oxen.
With this fluttering she swept through the host of the Achaians
urging them to go forward. She kindled the strength in each man's
heart to take the battle without respite and keep on fighting.
And now battle became sweeter to them than to go back
in their hollow ships to the beloved land of their fathers.
Iliad, book 2, line 440
translated by Richmond Lattimore
I don't read the story as saying Athene is the source of the lust. Earlier in the tale, she gets Achilles to chill out. She is a manipulator who uses different ways to attain different ends and they change as the situation unfolds. Her favorite mortal is Odysseus.
In regards to the OP, I was thinking of the effect of the aegis in the midst of the Achaians being persuaded through words to stay and fight. The flutter of the tassels directly influencing each person.
That is not to throw cold water on your question. I think it needs to be framed differently.
One way to interpret that passage is that the Achaians understood the rise of emotion as an external force. Moses Finley says that we don't know for sure, but that there's reason to doubt the conventional wisdom that the mention of a goddess was just poetic.
But going with Finley's view, divinities were what we would think of as physical beings. Intangible spirit stuff wasn't on the scene yet. So that would mean they experienced collective emotion as an aspect of the world's body, so to speak.
It would be as if we went to an action movie and reported that some divinity associated with the movie swept through the crowd and filled us with fear or whatever.
Maybe one cannot truly mark where the "external" begins.
So, in the matter of action films, the appearance of a potential we dismiss in other places as possible is a feature, not a bug. But I don't think that analogy is a good fit for the Homer narrative. The analogy projects a way to perceive phenomena instead of looking around nervously at our surroundings.
But it wasn't an analogy. Imagine people sitting in a theater and sensing the rise of emotion in the crowd. Imagine that they all think of that rise of emotion as a conscious force in the environment. Words, traditions, and potent symbols are carried by conscious forces that influence us as Athena carried the aegis.
There's no clear separation between humans and the environment in this outlook. The very idea of individuality is missing. Or not missing; Finley says individuality was a fearful concept in that world. Apparently to be a loner in that world was to have a short life.
What do you mean "looking around nervously at our surrounding"?
I am not sure how to respond to the absence of individuality idea. It doesn't square with the depiction of all these different agendas of both mortals and immortals to advance their fortunes.
The not being able to separate between the human and the environment idea is put to rest by the brutal way terrible acts of violence are constantly being compared to events in the natural world. From that point of view, the Iliad is an anti-war message.
What I mean by looking around nervously is wondering how much energy is expended to create a safe zone for the individual. Nothing would make someone feel safer than the depiction of other times where people did not have our advantages.
The things mortals do, think, and feel, are often indistinguishable from divine forces. Absence of individuality isn't right. It's that individuality wasn't lauded as it is in our world.
Quoting Valentinus
Natural world? The perspective I've been talking about is that supposed to have existed at the end of the Bronze Age, which is the setting for the Iliad. They didn't think in terms of a natural world (as opposed to the world of conscious agents). When you get a chance, read Moses Finley's book. I think you'd like it.
Quoting Valentinus
Still not sure what you're talking about. Anyway, I really didn't think a conflict would arise here. It just interested me to think about how Homer relates to the OP.
Indeed. Just where we tend to think we are most certain, most pragmatic, most rational. there is not even an abstraction, but a complete fiction by which we rule our lives and deaths. One tends to think of the hedge-fund manager as somehow different from the shaman, but they are functionally identical, and just as in 'primitive society' if the money man curses you, you will die.
Is there any other way?
Other fictions are available.
But I'm pointing towards a loss of meaning that results from the philosophical project of rationality. The objectivity addict produces a world of meaningless facts - because facts are only meaningful if someone gives a damn; that's what it means to be meaningful.
Whereas meaningful fictions operate 'through the agency of mind' as social constructs. 'Faith' is called in economics 'confidence' and in other social settings 'social cohesion' or 'solidarity' or 'love'.
These are givings of damns that populate and imbue material with meaning. So to say that meaning is essentially emotional has implications for language, as per ...
Quoting Banno
One can dance or fight or inform or explore or confuse - with words. But always it is interpersonal, relational. But more broadly, the ever-failing attempt to derive ethics from the material fails because it works the other way about: definition - materiality is what one cannot escape caring about. And what one gives not a fig for is immaterial.
Something I've been entertaining recently is the integration of reason with passions. Hume was right that reason serves the passions, but to believe it wholly distinct might be an error. I believe it's possible to superimpose reason with other states, so that the two blend into a unified product. Something like what Phil Ochs portrays in "I Ain't Marching Any More":
or Brecht portrays in "The Critical Attitude":
It is tempting to portray reason as an inertia of the subject that calls or returns us to our essence, as in Spinoza or Epictetus, or as the central mediator of virtue as in Aristotle. What I wonder is if reason already does supply the form of expression the passions provide the content for, neither isolable from the other, and whether one can develop skill in this regard. Like relearning how to see.
Inference, or patterned structural linkage of interpretation and sensation seems rooted in our perception/sensation as much as in our deliberation; when one reasons about what play to make, they find they already understand how the pieces may move. Such heuristics are inescapable, but perhaps they can be trained to become better at exercising the passions; perhaps giving them a robust or more relatable structure. In that way, perhaps developing this integration is a key source of expanding one's autonomy, through reciprocity, in the fleeting moments of our life; in further cultivating ourselves.
Also, lexis
This all sounds like applied linguistics.
I am not trying to pick a fight.
The Finley view is interesting and I will try to check it out. My comments were not an argument against them but trying to look at the challenge of the OP as something that put explanations of all kinds in a dim light.
This is so, because that's all words can do. The depths are at best, show, and more often, beyond expression.
Probably so. Your comment about Homer just put me in mind of trying to use other cultures as a vantage point on our own. At least seeing how we're different from our ancestors.
Hume is the man. But left and right are distinct enough, but not independent. Does one say that the architect is the slave of the builder? It is the other way round according to our social conventions - the builder does what the architect says - yet the architect without builders is a mere fantasist the master is dependent on his slaves for everything, but especially for his mastery.
I was expecting Nietzsche to turn up about now. His view on the master/slave relationship seems relevant, and he is the official philosopher of passion. And he takes us again to the Greek gods - this time Apollo and Dionysus. And perhaps the previous paragraph will indicate where I think he went wrong in his diagnosis of Christianity.
Quoting Banno
Well indeed. But although pencils can only make marks on paper, they are not confined to depicting pencils. Words can inform deeds, and deeds are motivated by passions. I think we could talk less about words and more about deeds. And perhaps, with great caution, we might sometimes enact our words. It does seem to me that such notions are not even mentioned very much in philosophy of late.
Completely new motion, eh, that, ah-- that there be, ah, immediate action--
In the-- in the light of fresh information from, ahh, sibling Un--
Cue Marx; "the point is..."
:up:
The hierarchical asymmetry of power there only makes sense upon a reciprocal inter-dependence; you can't need to give an order without needing their actions. System internal feed forwards between two components always require (or really just are) their supporting feed backs . Even though the presence of both is an exploitable resource for another causal pattern, like a hierarchy, to emerge or be imposed.
I think Master-Slave in Hegel follows that reflex logic I quoted above, but my Hegel foo is not particularly good. One becomes definable only in opposition to another, like left and right.
But we have more freedom to intervene here, one can choose to cultivate integration or to cultivate detachment from oneself. One can cultivate a reciprocal interdependence between the two, perhaps so one can feel their thoughts and think their feelings (but this is an exaggeration).
Just like an asymmetry may emerge from a reciprocal interdependence; parts and wholes dynamically reciprocate rather than passively abide. So the form content schema I used was clumsy, but I think it suggested the right thing.
Maybe like left and right if we could choose the orientation of the cardinal directions.
Edit: I don't really know what this does to ritual and icon. I suppose my perspective on it is similar, you can't really 'reason' your way from the wine to the blood of Christ without partaking in the tradition of interpretation that provides the links, or the road to follow. I would however defend that noble ritual of ritual choice, reason, and the feelings which inspire the choice.
The same flag means a million different things.
I like the metaphor, but the flag isn't a given either. The flux has a habit of making islands to flow around - which push back upon it and give it shape.
Flags are made of flux?
Well yes, in one respect they are. They're a stable object of an alliance of atoms that blows in the wind from atop buildings as a signal. Then they're a stable coagulation of cultural norms and social history with expressive power. A flag is a drawing with the right history.
Gilgamesh sought immortality and finally found it on a lapis lazuli stele bearing his story carved in cuneiform.
He's still alive 5000 years later because he's taken shape in your imagination. He lives in you, and he will likely outlive you by 10,000 more years.
None of us mortals are in a position to piss on grand immortal symbols. We're dust to them.
Which is a shame, as they're all made of piss.
and poptarts
So my best understanding is that to the extent that information is ordered, it is compressible, and to the extent that it is un-compressible it is maximally disordered. The difference between one string of random information and another is random, and thus 'meaningless' - it is a difference that makes no difference.
Which means that the difference between maximally compressed meaningful information and meaningless 'noise' is discerned through some form of 'interpretation'. Call this interpretation 'ritual'.
Ritual is what one has to do to find out if there is even something there to be understood. It is the medium of fuck-giving.
Don't expect proof or evidence. The demand for such is simply the denial of this particular ritual in favour of some ritual of scepticism which is of course an unjustifiable nativity itself. Play or don't play therefore, bring forth, not the weirdness of the Greeks or the lunacy of the religious, but the mundanity of everyday life - the buttering of always and only one side of the toast.
No. Rationality produces a list of facts, like an encyclopdia, that can be accessed when someone gets to the point of giving a damn (has a goal) in which those facts would be relevant. The meaning is already there. Relevancy, not meaning, is the more accurate term to use there.
Marmite.
We obviously have different goals in mind.
Yes, I'd put it that identities are products of the prevailing mythos, or ideology. And facts are wrapped around ideologies, presenting as clear and unassailable to the extent those ideologies are rendered invisible. The fact-ideology-interpretation-production complex then is us. And this does pose the appropriately linguistic functional question: who or what is doing what to whom or what, where, when, and how? Which is a perennial.
There are some points of contrast though. It seems in "traditional" societies, your place in the symbolic order was more clearly defined and was what gave sure weight to you as an individual. That is, your individuality was more firmly rooted and clearly framed. What's new is the widespread idea of the individual constituted in opposition to the existing symbolic order, the ideological rebel, as anything other than tragic or destructive. And even if the current romanticism of rebellion is in some sense just another cloak of ideology, it's an odd self-refuting one. We can't all be rebels, or to the extent we are, we're not.
Quoting fdrake
:up:
Quoting unenlightened
I would have tended to think of language and ritual as being co-evolutionary. Maybe just because ritual is usually so soaked in language. But then there is this:
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep22219.
What I should better have said is that they are the same thing - as in there is a ritual of desensitising and disembodiment prevalent and resisted that is academic rigour (mortis). Recognisably Nietzsche's void looking back.
Whenever you have a goal, you can consult Harry's encyclopaedia, and the goal is nothing less than to replace the world with the encyclopaedia, and live entirely in rational thought. This 'fact' explains why the world itself is going to hell in a handcart.
Poetry re-embodies language, and puts us back into the world. Plato hated it and his footnotes still do. But the good is without form and rather constitutes the substance of being; physicality as in accumulations of stones or whatever, is the mere abstraction of the encyclopaedia.
Quoting Banno
This not radical enough. Meaning is the world one is embedded in; everything is marmite.
I don't understand what you are talking about - but I wish I did. It sounds interesting
Ditto.
I'm not sure I agree with this. There are 'extra-meaningful' things operative all the time, the things we settle on as 'having meaning' in a conversation like this ultimately come from some meaning-individuating exercise of reflection, which has its own biases; it seeks and represents meanings, it generalises and stereotypes, it substitutes easy solutions for hard problems. We are bodies that build up heuristics, we swim through a sea of norms in our expectations (futurity/anticipatory response), reflection used well marks out parts of the map that emerges from the practices reflected upon. But it cannot record every detail.
Perhaps that little cough that won't go away will suddenly kill you. Maybe you discover one morning that you don't feel love for your partner. Life has a way of interrupting meaning and changing it in its wake.
We typically make little islands of marmite in the sea of marmite that we can go to for reference, sufficiently stable transmissible habits, like our uses of words, or the characters in our myths. They are still malleable, but try to shrink back to the shape tradition affords them.
Sure, many people need an escape from the cold hard truths of reality. Art, sports, religion and leisure allow us to go on living despite the awareness of death and no objective purpose or objective morality. But that is all okay. It is a rational fact that I am a intelligent, social organism that finds these escapes useful in achieving my goals as such. It makes me happy to participate in these activities. These are all rational facts as well, so I dont see how theres a conflict.
I think you are exhibiting some misdirected outrage. The world itself isn't going to hell in a handcart because of rationality. The world is going to hell in a handcart because this growing notion of self-entitlement, as if we should accept feelings as proof.
You have it exactly! Wishes and interest have priority over understanding. How hurt I would be if you were to say, "I understand what you are talking about, but I don't wish to. It is uninteresting."
So I want to start with what is interesting and what hurts and make that the object of enquiry, not knowledge, information, understanding...
Quoting fdrake
"Reflection used well"? Is this not the sea of norms swimming through itself?
Quoting fdrake
I think it is we who shrink back; we are the islands - or think we are, and the ritual confers stabliity of identity 'I love marmite', or 'I hate marmite'. I am married, or I am single. A convict is created by the rituals of a justice system, but if I become convicted or if I become married, it is as though a marmite lover became a marmite hater.
I am flailing incoherently in an attempt to switch views from one that has dominated the civilised world, and there is a chaos of old meaning clashing with new meaning, of ritual being undone or repurposed.
_______________________________________________-
Try and bite this bullet; folks: suppose we need new rituals; it is surely conceivable at least? How, for fucks sake, can a ritual be new?
Thus spake the hard-man of philosophy, prepared to face any truth except his own inadequacy. No, exactly not so. Many people need to escape to the cold hard fabrications of their rigid, ritualised identity. "And we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing."
Maybe the Lacanian real is a useful concept here. The ultimate "reality" is a monstrous, suffocating, inhuman, and even forcefully antihuman... well, let's call it a black hole that we build ourselves out of with ideology. Or to put it in Rilkean terms "The heaviness of life is heavier than the heaviness of all things". So the real is the invisible gel in which the symbolic order lies suspended and which nourishes it so making it possible yet at the same time threatening through its potential crushing pressure its utter destruction. And rituals are those exercises of the symbolic order on whose patterns identity can manifest and reinforce said order. Thus we escape the black hole by cleaving to social cuts in the fabric of an ultimate trauma we're not even aware we spend our lives trying to avoid. This world of escape is the world of Marmite, which distasteful as it can be offers the basic sustenance of meaning on which we base our existence. But then Marmite isn't everything, only everything we can handle.
Of course I could be mangling Lacan but who cares.
It seems to me that a ritual, while often reliant upon tradition, need not be motivated by tradition -- how else did our rituals come about in the first place, after all?
But rituals are re-occurring. So when Christmas comes about perhaps we do not give gifts this time around. Instead we get together and sing songs -- because the whole gift-giving thing become a monster on its own, and took away from the meaning of Christmas, where being merry together seemed to bring is back to what we were after in celebrating in the first place.
Obviously there's nothing new in that, but it gets at how rituals are re-occuring -- Holiday on such and such a day has such and such a meaning, we get together and do something every year to enact, remember, or get closer to that meaning; to feel the meaning.
Holidays in general are sort of like this, I think. There is some significant thing in our life that we are easily drawn away from in the day-to-day, and so we commemorate it with a holiday where we go out of our way to remember or enact that important thing, and we make a ritual of it.
So perhaps a ritual can be new insofar that it has some established re-occurring activity we do together -- and it's just a matter of starting it and making it a re-occurring thing rather than going back to a tradition. Maybe it doesn't need to be a holiday, or a day on the calendar set aside for the year. Perhaps it could just be a morning ritual. And I don't think that pouring a bowl of raisin bran every morning would quite count all by itself -- it would have to have some kind of meaning attached to it as well. Like a morning cup of coffee to take in the simple pleasures of life, or a prayer at night to feel grateful.
Why do we need new rituals?
This is some form of overgeneralizing in my mind. I've long been trying to elucidate the notion of rationality in the form of emotional reasoning. We aren't fatalistically driven by passions, hurrah-boo responses according to Hume. Higher order volitions do exist, and are formed through reasoned deliberation.
So, one might want to bullshit here and there about the meanings of rituals or traditions; but, from an evolutionary standpoint, or at least even under a Marxist understanding, we are driven not by instinct, emotions, passions, and desire if they do not coincide with the common denominator that is 'reality'.
The role of the organism is to maintain a state of homeostasis (not homeostasis driven by imposing my/your/her will over reality), even in a possessed state that passions and emotions can drive a person.
I think not.
There must be ways of thinking and acting which attend to the nature of what they are concerned with.
We have sensorimotor constraints that embed us in the world in ways we cannot change with ritual or custom, only mitigate their effects through it. You cannot always restore someone who cannot walk to walking, but you can make disabled access ramps. Perhaps in the same way, you cannot contradict the reality of things, you can only place contradictions in the map; perhaps those contradictions can attend to tensions in the territory, however, like between the needs of the wheelchair user and the accessibility of shops.
Quoting unenlightened
A change of subjectivity like that is something like a choice of clothing, but one cannot choose one's size in all respects. One cannot always choose what does not fit, there are limitations which act to constrain what identities or subjectivities a person can come to adopt, and these limitations express the irremovable reality of the person.
Habituation requires a substrate. Our bodies are built for habituation.
Edit: @Baden perhaps such a real need not just be a trauma, maybe it can also be a source of joy, empowerment and discovery.
Because that is a ritualised obstructive response. Suppose you came back with something more interesting than 'why'. Suppose you cooperated with the project of supposing instead? Why? because it is more interesting than the triumph of rationality fully realised in the extinction of the species.
Yes, the question makes one look at what a ritual is. Consider OCD, not stepping on the cracks... One view, commonplace, is that it is a failed manipulation of reality. Doing things with words of which the marriage ceremony is the exemplar, is taken, on this view, to work by a sort of collective irrationality. The classic social construct.
This is a view that 'accounts for' subjectivity by objectifying it as 'social fact'. This is a ritual of self immolation. " I am rational." Idiocy!
New rituals come from child's play and dreaming.
P K Dick, Castenada and Leary would disagree, but I won't for the moment, beyond noting that for them, it is ritual that breaks those constraints and ritual that maintains them.
Quoting fdrake
Doesn't ritual do that? Red wine for the blood of Christ, obviously.
Quoting fdrake
That seems like an unnecessary controversy at this point. If I asked who chooses their subjectivity, a rabbit hole of infinite depth seems to open up, as if the clothing might equally be choosing a body, within the same constraints of 'fitting', of course.
So there is a division, or we imagine for the purposes of discussion a division, between the weirdness of this thread and the normality of other threads, or between the subject and their clothes, or whatever and out of that or into that we find we have to pour a limit and a relatedness such that I am embedded in the world and the world is embedded in me and this is the necessary condition of the separation.
At which point I could in all truth recite "All is one... ommmm." but choose not to. So instead I choose one side or the other and talk about the world in me OR me in the world, and keep the two separate for the sake of argument.
So this is me in the world talking and noticing:
And noticing too, that there is an idea in some circles that we are making progress towards something that is called 'understanding reality' which is taken by me to equate to something like rationality and sanity. But I notice that this is not in fact happening. Rationality and sanity are in retreat. The enlightenment project has so far failed that the scientific endeavours have reached the point of foreseeing the collapse of the species and the end of civilisation.
So the whole enlightenment project, the whole rational scientific endeavour is demonstrably, by its own criteria, in just that position of over-reaching the constraints that you point out as embedding us in the world. It cannot be made to work any more. All that has become dogma and ritual of the most pernicious sort that imprisons us in helplessness.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/jul/06/are-you-really-the-real-you-and-how-can-we-best-become-our-true-selves?fbclid=IwAR12geasNm_oFujgducni3Y95hwZ1GwWgNZMW020RgllpYNlDo9-ZxMSyHw
Note how 'true' and 'false' become as unreliable as 'narrator' and 'narrative' ... If I were you, I wouldn't start from here.
Given that ritual is something that is done, it kind of follows that a new ritual arises by just doing something. Have you really said anything? Look at that last link. I'm trying to get folks to notice that reasons and causes are inadequate to our lives; that the impossible and unreasonable are commonplace. In this sense 'just doing' for no reason is perhaps as good as it gets ...
I believe I agree with you in saying that reasons and causes are inadequate to our lives -- and I'd at least agree that the unreasonable is commonplace.
I read the article. It's a cool story -- I sort of wonder about that moment things clicked for him. Everything had a reason at one point, before, and then as he tried to "Fake it" he became it. Or, at least, he let go of his reasons and waited to see what would happen after he passed the test.
Isn't it a bit like acting in a play? We are given a script in a play that's different from our lives, and so an opportunity to try a different role on. In that transition we might come to recognize that what we were living was more of a script than we had realized.
https://neurosciencenews.com/meaningless-psychiatric-diagnosis-14434/?fbclid=IwAR2rie8n4NjQxVZax21o6XMQ_e2pKGPK6mq8zuB-_Nlp7OUOrzI0vm7wrmY
I had to laugh. This is neuro-babble declaring psycho-medico-babble to be - to use my words and relate it to the topic - prejudicial ritual.
Yeah, that's probably where you went wrong. :wink: One says things like 'I am a graduate', 'I am a philosopher', 'I am married', as if one is the ritual.
Identity 'undergraduate' undergoes ritual 'graduation' and becomes identity 'graduate'.
Identity 'misfit' undergoes ritual 'diagnosis' and becomes identity 'schizophrenic'.
Identity 'learner' undergoes ritual 'driving test' and becomes identity 'driver' (or not if 'fails')
Identity 'sinner' undergoes ritual 'communion' and becomes identity 'saved'.
Not every ritual changes identity some are voluntary, some are imposed - some are transforming, some merely confirming... but I think the general shape is this. The same thing happens to objects too: a church is consecrated, a contract signed, an old master authenticated, and so on.
So the question is exposed - people and things are transformed by ritual - how is ritual transformed? But we cannot even account for how ritual transforms...
That is, we cannot give a rational, scientific account of our non-rational unscientific nature.
I don't know what else to do, but to try and conduct folks to this same spot, this dead end of thought. One arrives, but somehow one does not stop, but diverts or jumps away to an unscientific narrative of our scientific nature, an irrational claim of rationality. Perhaps one time one person might just see that this contradiction cannot be maintained as one's identity - the contradiction kills it.
Heidegger rolling in the flowers type thing? Speculative again, but depends how condensed the joy of transgression is into the fear of punishment. I'd tend to say the prohibitive is constitutive. Primally and developmentally, fear is dominant re the macrosocial (society) level with (ideally) a balancing love at the microsocial (family) level. So, applying socio-linguistic (ritual) origami to nascent awareness gives you a recognizably human consciousness, the price of which is psychological boundaries that may be practically impenetrable. Transgression can be joyful but as pleasures are behaviourally conditioning, the telos of that path veers towards ostracization / incarceration / self-destruction, and that presents a huge mental barrier for Joe Average. But, sure, the potential is likely there.
More from the article:
"...my question about whether we can be persuaded into the “right” belief about our “true selves” rests on the false idea that there is some truth waiting to be discovered. And that we can get at it with enough evidence, as though the Alex of today was waiting, dormant, inside the Alex of 2000, and that the right sort of evidence could have revealed him. Of course it wasn’t."
Great story. Bouncer Alex was no more "true" Alex than toffee-nosed Alex because there was no correct "identity of Alex" waiting to be found. There were and are circumstances and reactions and redistributions of potentials, and out of it comes someone who is more or less comfortable in their own skin. So, identity cleaves to ritual and rituals form of identities in more or less stable configurations. The substance is nowhere to be found and can't be reined in—as in defined and controlled by—rationality. Which leaves a hole in what rationality should be. History never ends and Nobody is at the wheel.
But maybe, pace Bataille, having sex near your mother's corpse while wearing a mitre isn't a necessary prerequisite for rolling in the flowers.
Even if the real is that in which the social and symbolic is suspended, it doesn't follow that the only access to it is trangressive violence to the social and symbolic. If you're playing chess and also want to sip lemonade, you don't have to knock the board over first.
Well that is not at all the implication I want you to draw. The social and symbolic is already real and cannot be suspended. There is no person absent the social and symbolic to transgress or not transgress and whether or not you can sip lemonade during chess is entirely a matter of the conduct of the chess ritual itself - which may be more or less formal.
There is a lack of respect for emotion, that culminates precisely in the denial of its reality, that has devastating consequences both for the individual and for society. Matter and energy are fine notions and very useful at times, but reality is made of giving a fuck.
Quoting Baden
Nobody? Who is Nobody? You might as well use the old fashioned term "God" -- The Abyss that Looks Back - old Gives a Fuck Himself. There are traditions that Nobody can be realised as Jesus or Buddha, but otherwise, it is Little-old Ritual Me running the show and making history.
Ritual is the science, and icon the technology, of emotion. It's called an iPhone for a reason.
I agree with that, but I think you're being a hypocrite a bit in the thread. I suppose a more polite way to put it is that you're suffering from a methodological oversight. You're trying to frame reason as a ritual among others, which it is, but it's also a ritual of domain non-specific criticism. This holds even when reason is treated as part of an embedded continuum with the our emotive and sensory (and linguistic) faculties; however they behave, it's the social mediation of it all that matters. Moreover, then, this capability to transform our rituals is already built into our rituals, when viewing custom from such a zoomed out perspective that it also contains practices of reason.
In essence, what allows you to revolt against reason is criticism, reason in a different form. To be sure, I agree with the targets of your suspicion; our current instrumental reason is too heavily tied to unsustainable yield maximisation and not enough tied to longterm welfare. We definitely have sacrificed humanity on an altar of our own construction, but to tear it down we'll need to think critically! To build something new we'll need to think critically.
Quoting Baden
Behavioural limitations associated with norms or personal habits or personalities don't necessarily make us avoid trauma, the limitations can keep the trauma bottled in, giving it structure. Someone who has gone from narcissist to narcissist in their relationship history and has that as their norm need not be so afraid of symbolic transgression perturbing their behaviour. The personality that forms in wake of an encounter with the real is not necessarily diminished one, it could bloom.
Guilty as charged, your honour.
[quote=His Bobness]In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand at the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats, mutinied from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.[/quote]
Where do I stand to deny myself a place to stand?
Quoting fdrake
But this I dispute. This is the path we have been pursuing, and it can only lead to more of the same. Thought cannot produce the new, because it is reflective. I'll try a personal anecdote.
I have been a smoker since I was 11. That's about 55 years of daily, hourly almost, ritual, just like a Muslim call to prayer. It's one of the most consistent things in my life. I've tried to give up a couple of times and gone back like an alcoholic falling off the wagon.
If you think about the idea of 'giving up' it is a sacrifice. And that's how it always was - denying myself with gritted teeth, the thing that made me comfortably myself. And this was the course dictated by thought, with homilies 'it's bad for you to smoke', 'you ought to stop', etc. So when I stopped like that, I suffered from symptoms, nervous agitation, irritability. I was the same person, a smoker, not smoking and having symptoms, and wanting to smoke.
But then something happened, such that something new was built. The might or must have been some provocation, but to me it is a mystery, that I will call a realisation of ... Well it occurred to me that I did not need to smoke or want to smoke; that I never had, but had been imagining I wanted to all this time.
So I stopped. And I was anxious and agitated and irritable, not because I was not smoking, but because I had always been anxious and agitated and irritable. And there was no sacrifice, and nothing to give up, it was as straightforward as turning left at the crossroads. I don't smoke any more.
But to be clear, I am describing in words something not thought but felt.
Many people claim the lion as their symbol because they have this personal and tribal connection with. Its a conscious link between our true selves and the outside world. Because the brain processes information in this dream way, its possible that this tribal dress of a culture (uniforms, flags, anthems, insignias etc) is purely natural.
We are a family orientated species, our instinct is to stick together because we can survive better in large families (im calling society a family here because your surviving together). And a way to create and strengthen a bond with strangers to create families is to share symbols, a language and culture to link our unconscious self's together.
Thought alone can't, but it was never thought alone to begin with! Reflection isn't some isolated medium, as it can appear from the image of the armchair in our minds, it's part of every effective psychological/psychoanalytic/cultural intervention. I wonder how we would integrate our feelings with this new society, or void of one, if not relying upon our reasoning to do justice to the new concern for humanity (or for humanity + its environmental context) you wish to cultivate.
Thought was never alone, but tends to think it is. I want to dethrone thought, not annihilate it. Rather as technique in art is the servant of a creativity that is beyond thought. Mindfulness is not mindlessness.
Quoting fdrake
I'm conceptualising the real (or the Real) here as that place utterly beyond identity and the social, but in which the potential for identity via the social is fostered.
Per Lacan:
"The real is that which resists symbolization absolutely."
The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: Freud's Papers on Technique
So, sure, the swapping of social norms at a micro-level can be freeing, particularly when, as in your example, fdrake, what's being swapped is the smaller exception for the larger rule. But what do you swap the highest level of the social for? What's left is the obverse of identity. It's by definition traumatic.
See also: The Real
"The primordial Real in which a (pre-Oedipal) human subject is born is differentiated from the real which a subject integrated into the symbolic order experiences. In the former, the real is the continuous, "whole" reality without categories and the differential function of language. Following the mirror stage, however, and the eventual entrance of the imaginary and the symbolic (the split of the subject between the conscious imaginary and the unconscious symbolic), the real may only be experienced as traumatic gaps in the symbolic order. An example of this are traumatic events such as natural disasters, which effectively break down the signification of everyday life and cause a rupture of something alien and unrecognizable, without the usual grammar of the symbolic that conditions how to make meaning of something and how to proceed."
Of course, there's no obligation for you to accept that analysis either in whole or in part. But that was (more or less) where I was coming from.
Quoting unenlightened
The idea there was exactly to avoid the society/individual-ritual-which-comes-first-chicken-and-egg-vs-controlling-deity fork while maintaining the idea of something beyond absolute arbitrariness re cultural development. So, not "God" nor "nobody" but "Nobody".
Quoting unenlightened
Aren't we all at some level unless we're merely parroting memes? The emotional response gets its validity from being a condensed form of reason as per your analysis. And generally, reconfiguring emotional content using reason may open up novel emotional perspectives and the novel reasons accompanying them. Doesn't sound very sexy, but...
Quoting unenlightened
Agree, in a poetic/melodramatic moment I once wrote:
"The automation of instrumental ends, the ultimate efficiency and triumph of enlightenment reason, has, as its dark after-image, the annihilation of thought itself and so the absolute superfluity of the form of reasoning it champions and that underlies the logic of its existence. The triumph of subjective reason then can only be fully glimpsed in its demise. Enlightenment devours itself before our eyes and demands we applaud its victory. And the God we killed in its name revenges himself on us by showing that what is most sacred in us must evaporate just as he did in the brilliant light of progress."
Which was motivated by some of the same concerns, I think.
I'm a bit familiar with Lacan's real through Zizek's appropriation of it, and Badiou's obvious inspiration from it in his term "evental subjects". I agree with you that it is characterised as an 'absolute negation of identity', but all that ensures is an unpredictable formation of a new pattern in response to the event. No one imagines this as leaving zombies behind, devoid of consciousness and identity, it gets imagined as a process of identity transformation as the real can never be 'internalised' in the symbolic order. It isn't so surprising that the easiest examples of this are traumas that force someone to learn to deal with profound loss; it remakes their personality through the torsion around what was annihilated. But what if you annihilate destructive tendencies? On a more meta level; how can we attribute emotional valence to a tear in the symbolic order which produces the attribution of novel emotional valences?
Per Badiou, what if the event is an event of love? And you're called to the truth of your inter-relation with another rather than the destruction of your hometown or death of everyone you know. This rings just as true and just as loudly as profound loss; and it is still a profound loss, a change which was never articulable pre-event, and post-event the intimate connection with the pre-evental subject is severed, as if one's personality undertakes a paradigm shift or iterates from one conceptual scheme to another incommensurable one; as if one beetle in the box is substituted with another, it is felt but makes its presence known only through shadows in language.
To quote a song "I can't say that knowing you changed me for the better, but I can say that it changed me for good."
I've had a very similar experience, recently, in my case involving drinking after work to 'wind down.' Just as you say - I had a shift from commuting home thinking to myself 'I shouldn't drink, I shouldn't drink, I shouldn't drink' to realizing that I actually didn't want to drink, that I didn't enjoy it and hadn't for a while. Again, as you say : I had been imagining I wanted to. And that was the real addiction, the addiction to the imagining because:
Quoting unenlightened
Once you can't blame this on (the lack of) something else, but rather as how you are (or at least how you've been for a while) you have to confront something else, tip of my tongue. Imagining you want something very much - and are either pursuing or refusing it - keeps everything in motion in just the right way, so things never settle.
It's a weird thing because it's not a particularly liberating realization (you're left with yourself), but it's not something you can undo.
But Lacan, the head priest, would like to emphasize failure and castration over everything else. Once you identify a rite of passage (an encounterwith the real) not with joyful success, but with the necessity of diminishing failure, you can draw in a lot of people (like me) eager to transform ressentiment into resigned wisdom. Powerlesness becomes a deeper power, just like that.
Maybe there's an art of encountering the real, which is risking trauma for something else, using various techniques and social and emotional stores of self-belief to guide you through.
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires
Leads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.
Also could be titled : the world as seen by a sad librarian.
Positing the negation of identity accompanying incursions of the real as necessarily traumatic doesn't imply (in my book) nothing good can come from the trauma or that the trauma need be of some very dramatic nature. It would depend on the specifics of the incursion. You could maintain a conception of the Real as threatening and potentially destructive and so a source primarily of a socially-moulding fear along with ultimately positively transformative effects of specific encounters. I may have hammed up the description in my initial post, but I'm fairly sanguine about the whole thing. As I am about alternatives. Just don't pin the zombie librarian thing on me, please.
Quoting csalisbury
Sounds too uplifting. And your book was due for return yesterday. :razz:
Quoting unenlightened
The identity 'misfit' is just as much a result of the ritual 'diagnosis' as the identity 'schizophrenic'. Both are results of diagnosis. You've not stated otherwise. This I know.
All referents of the identities mentioned in the above quote require a creature capable of language use - aside that is - from learner. Only a language user can be an undergraduate, a misfit, or a sinner. Only language users can go through graduation, offer diagnosis, take a driving test, and/or take part in a communion ceremony in order to be saved by virtue of doing so.
But...
Being a learner is being a creature that newly acquires and/or further develops practical survival skills. I know the thread points towards more... deeper... possibly still unknown influential things in all of our lives. Indeed though, the rational, reasonable approach seems to have gotten stuck in it's tracks along the way. Imposing the rules of logic onto things that do not care about obeying them.
Things like learning.
There are new reflections. Things like learning.
One problem is that he's taking account of that which existed in it's entirety prior to his account. Another problem is that careful contemplation of different viewpoints can influence and change one's passions by changing what one cares most about, what one is emotionally invested in, and the way one comes to acceptable terms with oneself and the world around them. So... Reason is not always slave to the passions. To quite the contrary, sometimes the passions change as an unavoidable consequence of having looked at the world through another's eyes.
Unlearning...
get out of here zombie librarian number one trauma guy
Nice to have you aboard!
I'm going to play hardball about this; it's a question of time. Something is new at time t, and thereafter it is not strictly new, though we may go on referring to it as new for convenience for any length of time eg. any number of towns called Newtown, Newquay, Newcastle.
It follows that new something n, at time t, is unknown. Not that one doesn't plan Newtown before building it, but the plans are imaginary, and however detailed and closely followed they are, the built town will be capable of surprising the builders because the real is more than the imagined. (It might fall down in the first storm)
Likewise, something m, new to me at time t, I can only reflect upon later when i have already learned from the new experience.
This is the distinction I want to make, the temporal one, between the present, experiential, learning process, and the accumulating, learned, reflective thought process, Not that they do not influence each other of course, not that both are not happening all the time.
This feeds into Hume's distinction, and the whole thing becomes an important tool for understanding trauma.
At which point I must turn to my other friends, @Baden, @csalisbury, @fdrake to ask if they can offer a handy crib sheet for Lacan novices, because ahem, he is new to me, so I cannot reflect on anything other than an imagined freudian philosophy, or my own understandings of trauma from elsewhere.
I've only sparred with Lacan and found some of his concepts intuitively attractive. Maybe csal who sounds like he's done the full 12 rounds.
To what extent do you group rationality, scientific activity, and reason? Is the venn diagram of these three akin to an "O"?
I ask because I'd like to posit that reason -- our ability to think -- differs from rationality -- social norms for collective thinking -- differs from science -- the present way we do things in universities, labs, and industry.
In which case we should be able to provide a reasonable account -- at least in principle -- of rationality or science, though it would by these definitions count as unscientific.
Of course I would agree with you that there is more to the story than reason when it comes to how we do things. But I guess I'm asking is the more even state-able, on your view?
https://k-punk.org/democracy-is-joy/
"For human beings who want to move in the direction of love and freedom, the only option consists in the apparent paradox of theoretico-practically inserting themselves into the naturalistic matrix of cause and effect. The effect is to break down the cordon sanitaire that Hume placed around emotions, preserving bourgeois thought’s “commonsense” division between feelings and thought. In refusing this opposition, Radical Enlightenment democratises the possibility of what Lynne Segal calls Radical Happiness (with the proviso that Spinoza preferred to think of joy rather than happiness – because of the association of happiness with happenstance)
Emotions don’t just happen, they emerge out of fields of cause and effect which can be analysed. This means that feelings can be engineered, in a hyperstitional spiral, which has more to do with what Justin Barton calls “lucidity” than with what academic philosophers call Reason. I’m using the term “emotion” rather than “affect” here, very deliberately. Affect as it is now routinely used by academics is pretty much completely opposed to what Spinoza meant by it. "
Thank you kind sir. Nice to be welcomed.
Quoting unenlightened
Reflective thought - strictly speaking - could be characterized as any and all thought/belief about what's happened. However, I think we want it to be a bit more significant than that though. Right? Otherwise all thought/belief aside from prediction and/or expectation would count as being reflective. Thinking about the sound one just heard would be reflecting upon past sounds. Reflective thought/belief has to have some more significance that just being thought/belief that is not expectation and/or prediction.
Reflective thought/belief is thinking about one's own worldview, one's own previous statements, behaviours, thoughts, and/or experiences. It is remembering how terrible one felt on one's own wedding day. It is regretting one's prior decision.
Reflective thought not only can - but it also does - produce the new.
Novel correlations drawn between things can be both. Being new thought and being reflective thought are not mutually exclusive and/or incompatible That's the general outline. Specific examples are innumerable. Here are a few examples thereof...
One can dig with a familiar item that one has never previously imagined to be and/or witnessed being used for that purpose. That is reflective thought that produced new use of a previously existing tool.
There comes a time in everyone's lives that we have our first clear memory of that which has already happened. When one first remembers one is remembering that which has previously become significant, symbolic, and/or otherwise meaningful. That memory consists of thought/belief that are both new and reflective.
The original experience(now being remembered) included an array of directly perceptible things. The memory of that experience does not include that same array of things. Rarely does. We could even say that memory never includes all the same directly perceptible things. While being strict enough about what counts as being the same thing without drowning in Heraclitus' untenable river, we can talk sensibly about an attainable criterion for being called "the same". Strictly speaking, the memory of the original experience is never exactly the same as the original experience. However, the memory can and often does include the same sorts of things.
A familiar(same sort of) sound in a new environment connects past and present. A familiar smell in a new environment does the same. New thoughts will always include some of the same content. That's how thought/belief works.
The sound of bells heard by one who is in another country can trigger memories also involving the sound of a bell. Wedding bells can trigger new thought and reflective thought. One can be certain that one is amidst a wedding ceremony in Vienna without knowing anyone involved, because one can still know who the bride and groom are, the flower girl, the ring bearer, etc. if certain circumstances arise.
These are new events with new things. There are new correlations drawn between old ideas, thoughts, and memories and currently directly perceptible things. Being reflective and being new are not mutually incompatible and/or exclusive.
Imagine walking in a familiar town. Imagine further, being particularly deep in evocative contemplative thought. There is an important upcoming foreseeable choice to be made. An inevitable future decision between two mutually exclusive options. A foregone conclusion as it were.
The sounds of wedding bells, laugher, and excitement suddenly capture a sizable chunk of your attention. You immediately realize where you are. You're in front of the church. Hmph. It's funny how sometimes we go on autopilot only to have something or other redirect our awareness to our immediate surroundings and away from the imagined impending situation.
The wedding is in the background. Literally, it's going on behind you. You are immediately reminded of a past distaster of a wedding, but immediately note that this one is different. There are happy go lucky friendly voices and the offerings of congratulations everywhere. Your attention is now more trained, and the decision dominating your thought now fades off in the background as you listen to what's going on behind you while still picturing your own wedding day.
Suddenly the cheering crowd increases their volume, and before you know it a plethora of voices begin begging for the bouquet to be thrown their way. You're now deliberately attempting to picture what's going on behind you. A content smile begins to form. Weddings have always carried feelings of happiness. Just because some are bad ideas, does not mean that they all are. You're curious now what the wedding gown looks like. Sometimes they are the most beautiful things. Oh! The lucky person caught the bouquet! The crowd raises the roof.
You turn to see the entire entourage. You cannot find the ring-bearer or the flower girl. At least, you cannot be too certain which child acted as either. The bride though... her identity is clear and obvious. And the recipient of the bouquet is waving it around cheerfully as though she'd found a life changing item or perhaps won the lottery.
These are reflective and new thought, as they must be. There is no way to acquire a wealth of knowledge about anything in particular without reflecting upon that thing. Each thing learned is new. The composite of all the new thought has reflective thought as a basis.
Quoting creativesoul
This use of "imaginary" and "real" seems a bit arbitrary and unhelpful. Hardball is good.
At the time when the plans are complete but ground has yet to have been broken...
The plans are new. The plans are real. The town is imaginary. The plans are not the town. The plans are known. The town is not.
There seems to be some disconnect here. The something new to you at time t is part of a larger new experience. Red dresses can be the new focal point of a language-less child who does not know that what she is witnessing is a wedding ceremony.
The red dress is part of the child's new experience. The child will remember that experience every time something else later reminds her of it. Could be that she's learned nothing from the experience. She was in a mental state of being completely captivated by that red dress, at that time, and partly as a result of the lady's face. It and the dress had arrested all of the child's attention. This child later remembers the woman wearing the red dress on the day of captivation, as the result of seeing another lady, who like the lady wearing the red dress, had hairy dark growth patches above their eyes.
Remembering the wedding, the lady in the red dress's face, and the red dress is reflective thought. It is to recall some prior thought/belief about something that happened. Recollection is reflecting on past.
I think that one can reflect upon one's own worldview as well. A new viewpoint can be later reflected upon without learning much at all from the viewpoint aside from what it consists of. One can also experience what happens when s/he/they consider and agree with a new viewpoint. One can later recollect this learning experience. In this latter set of circumstances, the argument given fits.
However, there are other situations when it doesn't. Not all new experience involves learning another way to talk about the same things.
One sees a wedding for the first time. That experience may not include being able to name the event. One can witness a wedding without knowing how to articulate language. There are new things within the experience.
The recognition of new things is an experience. A new experience is full of new things. A new experience is full of old things. The recognition of a new experience contains both, new and old things. Having a new experience does not require recognizing that one is having it.
One that is worthy of consideration. That distinction is spatiotemporal only. Some content can transcend both time and space.
But I am going to stick to this; newness entails unknownness. And it seems to me that there is no easier way to predict a complex world than to run it - or live it, because those damn butterflies keep making tornados...
So the unknown is always with us alongside the aspects of predictability. With and within. So if I can get my butterflies to flap their wings just so, and give you the insight you need, then the world will be transformed.
But I am not talking about hallucination especially as cultural sanction is already an hallucination, by hypothesis. I think it has already been pointed out that the distinction real/unreal does not function here. @Evil's revolutionary meme must inevitably eat itself.
But what interests me is that what is implied is a radical freedom. Addiction can be, not overcome, but in some judo move, dissolved. And that includes the addiction to fossil fuel, to weapons and power, and so on. One does not have to go on being depressed, and suffering. Any time you want, you can walk out of your front door, and never come back.
Think even this is too instrumental, there's two ideas in the butterfly effect as usually presented that just aren't there in chaotic complex systems:
(1) Outlandish perturbation sensitivity.
(2) Ability to attribute the cause of a cascade to any given perturbation.
(1) Complex system dynamics are typically overdamped, which means that small perturbations (like the butterfly flapping its wings) are way more likely to fizzle out into their immediate environment (system A) before passing on any of their effects to some other system in the complex system (system B); this is like a generalised 'friction' tending to render events' effects minor.
Moreover, perturbation sensitivity can't really be thought of as finding 'god's levers' into the system, it's still complex and hard to reduce to levers. Sensitivity reveals itself on the aggregate level, and is very difficult to link to any specific perturbation, which introduces (2)...
(2) Given that we're in a cascade, we (or another system) only observe the effects of the cascade after it's built up a bit. A great example here is orgasm:
So generally people are gonna know what feels good for them in sex, but they're not going to know the biomechanics of everyone involved's flesh and friction and tactile feedback, despite these lower system components feed forward-ing to the state of pleasure.
The take home here is that interventions in complex systems have to be done with respect to their organising principles (how they feedback loop, "do they enjoy this position and style of touch?" in sex) rather than their feedback loop inputs (the butterfly flapping its wings, the precise pressure and skin deformations and other tactile variables in touch). So we can think in terms of "what are the worst/best effects of this system and how can we act to stabilise our community/agriculture/relationship from it or grow from it?" rather than "i need to find a butterfly lever to pull to make everything right again".
That'll do for me. The aim is to get away from the mechanical model, so the harder it is to find the levers the better. Or perhaps I could say, following Isherwood, 'I am a lever' not a puller of levers.