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From Making Sense of Change Management by Esther Cameron and Mike Green.

From Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy by Carl Olsen (I added paragraph breaks):

Within the context of postmodern art, Mark C. Taylor identifies, for instance, two processes at work: disfiguring and cleaving. These two operations are identified by Taylor in his attempt to grasp the chora, a nonexistent that stands behind being and becoming, makes possible all existences, and forms the essential space where both form and copy are inscribed.

The operation of disfiguring is connected to activities like marring, destroying, deforming and defacing in a process of negation or deprivation that also includes the negation of the notions of calculating, considering, and comprehending. By enacting denegation in the realm of form, the process of disfiguring interweaves revelation and concealment and presences and absence which allows for “both a re-presentation and a de-presentation.” If the artist removes, deforms, or defaces a figure and destroys its beauty, he/she leaves a trace of something that is other, which is itself neither being nor nonbeing, present or absent, immanent nor transcendent.

Associated with the notion of disfiguring is that of cleaving, which suggests both dividing and joining as well as separating and uniting. Cleaving is an operation that allows opposites to emerge and remain suspended in a process that is unthinkable and beyond the distinction of identity and difference.

The dual processes of disfiguring and cleaving are indicative that there can be nothing original from the postmodern perspective because such operations render everything secondary due to the tendency of the postmodern artist to disjoin, fragment, distort, and partially destroy a work of art in order to figure what cannot be figured.

In comparison:

In contrast to a postmodern deconstruction of drawing or consideration of the nature of art in the postmodern era, Dōgen quotes a saying by the Ch’an Master Hsing-yen (Japanese: Kyōgen Shikan): “A painting of a rice cake cannot satisfy hunger.” Many different kinds of people have diligently studied this saying without arriving at an useful understanding of its meaning. Like a similar saying, it is a mere clever expression and possesses no viable relationship to our real experience. To this puzzling statement, Dōgen offers his own interpretation: “The painting of a rice cake can be said to be everything: [Buddhas, sentient beings, illusion, enlightenment]. A rice cake, made from glutinous rice, represents both transitory and unchanging life. The painting of a rice cake actually symbolizes detachment, and we should not think about coming or going, permanence or impermanence when we look at it.” Dōgen offers an nondual interpretation of the saying; he denies the common view that a painting is unreal while the rice cake is real. The painting of the rice cake is not different from the various forms of existence. In other words, an actual rice cake is not different from a painting of a rice cake. Dōgen warns: “Do not try to find a real rice cake outside of the painting, if you do not know what the painting signifies.” From Dogan’s perspective, the painting may or may not appear in its true form: “The true meaning of a painting of a rice cake transcends the distinction of past and present, or birth and destruction.”

Dōgen further develops his interpretation of the painting of the rice cake by discussing unsatisfied hunger, which symbolizes the illusion of sentient beings for Dōgen. Hunger is used as a metaphor and/or symbol by Dōgen to illustrate the condition of illusion. By becoming detached from the opposites of enlightenment and illusion, a person loses his/her hunger. Dōgen indicates the nondualism of his position in the following way: “In reality there is no hunger of rice cake conflicting with each other, but when you think you are hungry the entire world becomes hungry; conversely, if there is a real rice cake it exists everywhere!” Prom this viewpoint, since an eatable rice cake and a pictorial representation of a consumable rice cake are both empty, either one can satisfy a person’s hunger, and are examples of ultimate reality in diverse forms. Moreover, an insightful observer of a painting can see, for instance, both movement and inertia, the way of practice, truth of the Buddha’s teaching and of the painting itself, the entire universe is manifested in the painting, and one can find one’s true self in the painting. Therefore, viewing a painting possesses the potential to lead one to an awakening, which functions to actualize the painting.” Thus a painting, from Dōgen’s perspective, can satisfy one’s hunger.

In other words, by intuiting mediation one can transcend it. But in conclusion:

In comparison to Taylor’s notions of disfiguring and cleaving and his emphasis on the surface of a work of art, Dōgen grasps a depth and mysteriousness (yūgen) to a work of art, whereas Taylor seems content with initiating a nonstop dialectic that gives birth to a double negation, a negation of negation. Dōgen and Taylor agree that we exist in a world of flux, although Taylor disagrees with Dōgen that we can catch a glimpse of the eternal in the world of flux. Rather than disfiguring or cleaving a work of art, Dōgen lets it be itself and does not seek to mark or spoil it in any way.

From Jacques Racière’s The Future of the Image (translated by Gregory Elliot):

The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visible instead of the figures of discourse–this is what is demanded by the contemporary celebration of the image or its nostalgic evocation: an immanent transcendence, a glorious essence of the image guaranteed by the very mode of its material production. Doubtless no one has expressed this view better than the Barthes of Camera Lucida, a work that ironically has become the bible of those who wish to think about photographic art, whereas it aims to show that photography is not an art. Against the dispersive multiplicity of the operations of art and games of signification, Barthes wants to assert the immediate alterity of the image—that is, in the strictest sense, the alterity of the One. He wants to establish a direct relationship between the indexical nature of the photographic image and the material way it affects us: the punctum, the immediate pathetic effect that he contrasts with the studium, or the information transmitted by the photograph and the meanings it receives. The studium makes the photograph a material to be decoded and explained. The punctum immediately strikes us with the affective power of the that was: that —i.e. the entity which was unquestionably in front of the aperture of the camera obscura, whose body has emitted radiation, captured and registered by the black chamber, which affects us here and now through the ‘carnal medium’ of light ‘like the delayed rays of a star.

Fortunately, Racière repudiates a hierarchical distinction:

…the semiologist who read the encoded message of images and the theoretician of the punctum of the wordless image base themselves on the same principle: a principle of reversible equivalence between the silence of images and what they say. The former demonstrated that the image was in fact a vehicle for a silent discourse which endeavored to translate into sentences. The latter tells us that the image speaks to us precisely when it is silent, when it no longer transmits any message to us. Both conceive the image as speech which holds its tongue. The former mad its silence speak; the latter makes this silence the abolition of all chatter. But both play on the same inter-convertibility between two potentialities of the image: the image as raw, material presence and the image as discourse encoding a history.

Biblical news from Academia:

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew. …

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.

The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth” …

She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts.

According to them there used to be an enormous body of water in which monsters were living, covered in darkness, she said. …

She concluded that God did not create, he separated: the Earth from the Heaven, the land from the sea, the sea monsters from the birds and the swarming at the ground.

That doesn’t make for great dogma, but it fits in with my thoughts on consciousness: it’s the continual process of creating meaning by separating something from the nothing at the corners of our consciousness (not to mention beyond it) that is the world around us. The fun of consciousness is taking control of that process of separation—which is why I spent so much time rewriting that last sentence.

This year’s Symposium on Values, Spirit and Business has the theme “How to Grow Your Business by Integrating the Gandhian Philosophy of Satyagraha”.  The Wikipedia has this to say on Satyagraha—and that “passive resistance” is not descriptive of its tenets—:

Gandhi contrasted satyagraha (holding on to truth) with “duragraha” (holding on by force), as in protest meant more to harass than enlighten opponents. He wrote: “There must be no impatience, no barbarity, no insolence, no undue pressure. If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause.”

I was forwarded this from Angelina, who apparently read it on the side of her Starbucks cup (emphasis mine):

“There is a subtle difference between a mission and a promise. A mission is something you strive to accomplish — a promise is something you are compelled to keep. One is individual, the other is shared. When a mission and a promise are one and the same . . . that’s when mountains are moved and races are won.”

Hala Moddelmog,

Pres. and CEO,
Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

The last sentence is mostly pablum, but from yesterday’s post about dialogue and creating a shared community, I think it’s important to think about not only what your own committment is, but also the expectations you are committing to with others.  In other words, a mission is a statement, a promise is a contract.

For Christmas, my friend Danielle bought me the book, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.  It’s getting a little long in the tooth near page 150, but I really like how they go about building up their argument.  Specifically, how they define Destinctions.

I’ve been accused in the past (by my own mom, for one) of being semantic.  Well, this is all of semiotics (of which semantics is just one part, along with syntactics and pragmatics).  So too bad.

The book builds upon the idea of “knowing how we know” and argues from the basic standing that “all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing” or “everything said is said by someone”.  They begin with the point that in creating knowledge, we are performing an act of Distinction: separating something from its background based upon certain criterion.  This something (being, object, concept, etc), is called a Unity.  Conversely, each time we refer to something (a Unity) in conversation, we are performing an act of Distinction.  A unity can be anything from a person, to a species, to an object, to a color, to an emotion, to a concept, to 1 of 100 different names for snow (which is an urban legend, by the way.

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buy Disturbia I found that to be an incredibly interesting way of breaking down understanding.  Building upon the core idea of Unity, I wanted to propose some additional building blocks of meaning that are commonly used in conversation, rhetoric and didactics (and easily found elsewhere on this blog).

A Dichotomy is choosing between two unities that are mutually exclusive.  Dichotomies (and false dichotomies) are easily used and abused in arguments and rhetoric—some go so far as to say the West is an Argument Culture where middle alternatives are ignored.

A Continuum is a linear series capped by two Unities.  Sometimes there is meaning along the line, but the meaning primarily is a function of proximity to one unity or the other.  Probability is a simple continuum, capped at one end by absolute certainty, and absolute non-certainty at the other.

A Plane (or Field) is an flat-area bounded by multiple  unities.  Creating meaning from one’s position within the plane becomes more difficult to communicate unless in close proximity (or far distant) to a unity.

A Space

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is the most complex construction of meaning in which many unities are “mapped” out.  For such a construction, pointing out significant features (low-points, high-points, etc.) are the only way to communicate meaning about a space.

Ending with spaces, it’s interesting to note that the realm of human understanding (as bounded by our senses and cognition) is still a simplification of the complete space of possibility.  Even so, simpler and simpler constructions are made in order to successfully communicate.

Of course, definitions need not be static.  Because of that, I propose two ideas of movement or state change.  Flow is the change from one state of unity to another; a meta-dichotomy.  A frog may flow through the states of egg, tadpole, and adult.  A Cycle is a flow that iterates multiple times.

And for recursions sake, by defining these concepts, or applying these definitions to something, we are performing an act of distinction.

Via some fun copy on BoingBoing Gadgets (“These “Toastabags” (phonemologically Bostonian, apparently…”) and someone’s analytical comment

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, I came across a way to cleave English speakers: those that pronounce R’s (rhotic), and those that don’t(non-rhotic). From the wikipedia page on Rhotic and non-rhotic accents:

English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɪk/) and non-rhotic, depending on when the sound typically represented in spelling with the letter R is pronounced. Rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound (see “linking and intrusive R”), and not always even then.