As a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator, I know firsthand the opportunities they have to help their clients develop invisible capital as well as the challenges that incubators face. When I was the vice president of entrepreneurial programs at a nonprofit-based business assistance organization born out of an independent study conceived by Wharton MBA students, I was asked on occasion to be a judge for a business plan competition, a feature of the program mandated by its well-intentioned philanthropic funder.

The participants were all under twenty-five years old. Some were high school dropouts, while others had earned their GEDs. Some were attending or had received an associate's degree fro the Community College of Philadelphia, and a few were students at the University of Pennsylvania or Drexel University.

Invariable, the winners of these business plan competitions were students from the more selective schools. Were they more entrepreneurially oriented than their counterparts? No. Were they harder working? No. Were they more business savvy? No. Were their ideas or business models more compelling than those of their less educated peers? Rarely. So why did students from elite schools always win these competitions? Two words: invisible capital.

The Penn and Drexel students were more adept at using technology. They could write better. They were better trained in conducting research. They were more confident speaking in front of audiences. Their projects were often connected to experiences they had working in other professional or educational environments, and their plans incorporated how they would secure funding, talent, or customers based on their various social networks. They had more human, cultural, and social capital, not to mention economic capital. It wasn't even close.

The problem with these competitions, I soon realized, was they did not rate the viability of the business model but the ability of the contestant to advocate for her venture in clear, substantive, and compelling ways. While this is important, it was not supposed to be the purpose of the competition, which was to reward the person with the best business plan, one that (at least in theory) would be related to the most viable business model. However, the contests always turned into a virtual beauty contest, where beauty was defined by eloquence, clarity of thought, poise, presentation, and the use of language often associated with conventional intelligence (aka cultural capital). Eliza Doolittle [of "Pygmalion", which Rabb references throughout this chapter] mimicked the patrician ladies, and in so doing, she was accepted as their peer regardless of her intellect, values, or skills. To them, Eliza's most important tacit skill was her ability to assimilate.

The winners of these business competitions walked away with a nominal prize, big smiles, and their egos stroked. The losers left with serious mixed lessons. First, many undoubtedly thought that their business concepts and models were inferior to those of the winners, without any indication why that was the case (when in fact it rarely was). Second, they did not know how influential their lack of invisible capital was in diminishing their chances of excelling, largely because they didn't even know that the were being judged (albeit unconsciously) on the amount of invisible capital they brought to the competition.

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The concept of development helps rationalize the position of autocrats by postulating an unstoppable transition toward a bright future. This is why donors call all poor countries “developing.” Once the donors started paying lip service to democracy, they could label undemocratic aid recipients as “democratizing.” Let’s call this the Gerund Defense for supporting dictators. Thomas Carothers, an expert on the connections between aid and democracy, described the Gerund Defense in a classic article [Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, 2004), p. 169]. He quoted a USAID description of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2001 as a country in “transition to a democratic, free market society.” (Such “democratizing” is still notably weak in 2010.)

The World Bank’s response to Helen Epstein’s article in these pages accusing the bank of supporting Ethiopian tyranny is a classic Gerund Defense. The World Bank’s country director for Ethiopia and Sudan, Ken Ohashi, replied:

We start…with a belief that in every country people want…to develop a transparent, accountable…governance system. Ethiopia is no exception. Our task…is to support that innate tendency.

However, building institutions… takes a long time…. Changes are incremental, and at times they may suffer serious setbacks….

The Gerund Defense has the attraction of being irrefutable. We don’t know the future, so we don’t know whether a particular event is a “setback” to “building institutions,” or whether the “building” is a myth. We could of course observe the actual trend in “democratizing”—but this has been discouraging in Ethiopia, where parties and politicians that seriously challenge the government risk prison. Donors could conceivably overlook anything, even the 1994 Rwanda genocide, as a temporary “setback” to an “innate tendency.” Such a view is not as easily dismissed as you might think.

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I would say just start with Bloom's Taxonomy:

1. Blog quotes from other articles, blogs, reports, etc. Shit, quote your own emails if necessary. No commentary, just a one sentence citation/context. If you can't do this, don't move on to the next steps (heck, if you can't do this, you clearly are not engaged at all with your work). Duration: 15 min (assuming light editing/anxiety over appropriateness)

2. Same quotes as #1, but this time lightly criticize, compare or contrast between them or somehow contemporize. If you've built up a collection of quotes, it's fairly easy to pull 2 contrasting ones and write a light paragraph to fit between them with your analysis. Length: 30 min.(assuming you already have the quotes and can bang out a quick explanatory connection).

3. Write down a conversation that has already taken place. This requires a higher level of literacy, but you're basically rehashing the arguments you've already made---with maybe a brief conclusion where you say "I should have explained x better" (but don't actually explain it, just acknowledge you recognize the holes and let them sit). Duration: ~1 hour (depending on complexity and your level of honesty in narrative)

4. Original analysis: avoid at all costs. People who can bang out 500-1000 words of original, longform analysis are in full-time academic, strategy, creative or executive roles where they can probably carve out 4 hours for writing (writing may be their only job) and be none the worse. Or else they are top 1% writers. Or are sociopaths. Duration: longer than most of our jobs allow.

I originally wrote Maslow's Hierarchy instead of Bloom's Taxonomy... but whatever, a pyramid is a pyramid.

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If I were to take the best amalgamation of words, I would go with "Social Media Community Architect and Manager"---which is somewhat awkward. I think you want the words:

1. social (which is the buzzword of online social networking);
2. community (which is both online and offline and has a certain fuzziness to it); and
3. something that describes the process of creation... and management.

I would shy clear of the word technology... "media" definitely has more hotness right now. Maybe "Social Media and Community Architect".

What about "Social Media and Community Entrepreneur" (everyone loves an Entrepreneur and I would say you qualify more than anyone I know... though it is somewhat heartless)

I went through my contacts on LinkedIn and picked out some words/phrases they use to describe themselves:

• Community Technologist
• Online Community Manager
• strategic planning for your online social network initiatives
• Building and Executing Social Media Business Strategy
• Rich Media Developer
• Interactive Marketing Executive
• Technology Coordinator
• Community Architect
• community & communications coordinator
• New Media
• hybrid social media
• collaboration technology
• listening technology
• Emerging
• Link Development
• Interactive

I think he went with something sensible like "Community Alchemist".

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Interactions between people with diverse backgrounds leads to richer and more effective experiences.

About two months ago I attended the 140 Character Conference in Boston. Mostly it was a bunch of white guys using phrases like “filter disintermediation”. Fortunately there was a woman who described the need to “midwife” a process, and a crazy old guy (that is what I wrote in my notebook—though he probably made the most sense) who described the educational system as “constipated”. They were the highlights—and pretty much all I remember too.

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My account of meaning is grounded in what real people do when they speak and write. When people speak or write successfully with each other it looks as though there is a transfer of meaning: the speaker puts the meaning into the words and the listener takes it out at the other end. If you look at it from the larger perspective this account is fair: the listener ends up knowing what the speaker wanted him to know and ends up knowing something he never knew before, and so it must be that the words put this knowledge into his head. But it is important also to take a closer perspective and realize that, strictly speaking, words cannot contain meaning. Only people have meaning. Words can only have meaning attributed to them by people. The listener can never get any meaning out of a word that he didn't put in. Language can only consist of a set of directions for building meanings out of one's own head. Though the listener's knowledge seems new, it is also not new: the meaning may be thought of as structures he never had in his head before, but he had to build these new structures out of ingredients he already had. The speaker's words were aset of directions for assembling this already-present material.

To change the metaphor. Meaning is like movies inside the head. I've got movies in my head. I want to put them inside yours. Only I can't do that because our heads are opaque. All I can do is try to be clever about sending you a sound track and hope I've done it in such a way as to make you construct the right movies in your head. What's worse, of course, is that since neither of us can see the movies in each other's head, we are apt to be mistaken about how well we are doing in trying to make the other person show himself the movie we have in mind.

We can let ourselves talk about words "having meaning" and even "carrying meaning from one head to another" as long as we now realize these phrases denote something complex: the words don't transport the contents of my head into yours, they give you a set of directions for building your own meaning. If we are both good at writing directions and following directions for building meaning, we end up with similar things in our heads---that is, we communicate. Otherwise, we experience each other's words as "not having any meaning in them," or "having the wrong meaning in them."

The question is then how these meaning-building rules operate in ordinary language. Meaning in ordinary language---English, for example---is midway on a continuum between meaning in dreams and meaning in mathematics. Dreams may be hard to interpret, but the nature of the meaning situation is very simple because there is no audience. Dreams are all "speaking" and no "listening": dreams are for the sake of dreaming, not for the sake of interpreting. Therefore, though dreams or dream-images have particular, definite meanings, they can mean anything. They have whatever meaning the dreamer of that particular dream built into them. The rules for dreaming are as follows: let anything mean anything. (We could be fancy and say that the meaning-building rules for dreams are the rules of "resemblance" and "association." But everything resembles everything else to some extent, and anything is liable to be associated somehow with anything else. Thus anything can mean anything.) If we dream of a gun or a steeple, we may be talking about a penis, but then again we may not. And we may dream about a penis with any image at all. In dreaming you can never make a mistake.

At the other extreme is a language like mathematics. Here people have gone to the trouble to nail down the rules for building meaning into symbols. Something may mean only what these publicly acknowledged rules allow it to mean. In mathematics there are mistakes, and any argument about what something means or whether there is a mistake can be settled without doubt or ambiguity. (Perhaps there are exceptions in some advanced mathematical research.)

Meaning in ordinary language is in the middle. It is pushed and pulled simultaneously by forces that try to make it fluid and dreamlike but also fixed like mathematics.

The individual user of ordinary language is like the dreamer. He is apt to build in any old meaning to any old word. Everybody has just as many connotations and associations to a word as he does to an image. Thus, as far as the individual is concerned, a word is liable---and often tends---to mean absolutely anything.

To illustrate this dream-like fluidity of ordinary language, notice that words do in fact end up meaning anything as they move through time and across mountain ranges. "Down" used to mean "hill" ("dune"), but because people said "down hill" a lot ("off- dune"), and because they were lazy ("adown"), finally hill means down. Philology, it has been said, is a study in which consonants count for very little and vowels for nothing at all. A word may change its meaning to absolutely anything.

But the mathematics-like force for order is just as strong. That is, though words in ordinary language can mean anything, they only do mean what the speech community lets them mean at that moment. But unlike the case of mathematics, these agreements are not explicitly set down and agreed to. That is, our rules for building meaning into words are unspoken and are learned by doing, by listening to others, and even by listening to ourselves. It's like one of those party games where people get you to start playing before you know the rules of the game and indeed part of the fun is learning gradually to understand the rules after you find yourself following them. When you pick up the rules you can play---you can send and receive messages with others who know the rules. These rules for building meaning may be thought to be written down in dictionaries. But dictionaries are only records of yesterday's rules, and today's may be somewhat different. And dictionaries don't tell all the meanings that speakers send to each other in words.

The dynamism between the dream characteristics and the math characteristics in ordinary language is important: there is a constant tug of war. The individual is tending to allow words to mean anything---just as he allows dream images to mean whatever he builds in. Not because he is naughty but simply because he is a meaning-building creature and cannot refrain from constantly building new meanings into everything he encounters.

But the speech community is constantly curbing this looseness. When an individual speaker means things by a set of words which the community of listeners does not "hear," he tends to give in to the community and stop meaning those things by those words: that is, when they don't build in at their end what he builds in at his, he either stops building it in or else remains unconscious of meanings of the words. Similarly, when an individual listener hears things in a set of words which the community of speakers do not mean, he also tends to give in to the community and stop hearing those meanings or stop being aware of having those meanings for those words. (The exceptions to this process illustrate it well. When there are listeners who are especially eager to know what is on someone's mind---someone like a specially loved child or a poet such as Blake---they will learn to interpret his words even if he talks like a dreamer. If there's enough utterance and enough care, the code can always be cracked.)

The history of meaning in a language is the history of this power struggle between dream characteristics and math characteristics. Rules for meaning-building change when some speaker is somehow powerful and makes people "hear" in an utterance what they never used to hear in it. And even a listener can be powerful in this subtle way (be an unmoved mover) and make people "mean" in an utterance what they had not meant before. When, on the other hand, the community holds its own, meanings don't change. Humpty Dumpty put his finger on it:

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knockdown argument,' "Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean---neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "who is to be master---that's all."

Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The picture is oversimplified, however, if we talk of only one speech community. For actually there are many overlapping speech communities for each individual---building up to the largest one: all speakers of, say, English. Smaller subcommunities are in the middle in this power struggle. On the one hand, they exert stabilizing force upon the individual's dreamlike fluid tendency of meaning. But on the other hand, they are not as strongly stabilizing as the larger speech community is---that is, I can change the meaning-building rules of my friends sooner than I can do it to a larger community. And so, in fact, the smaller communities turn out to act as forces for fluidity upon larger communities.

This model implies that meaning in ordinary language consists of delicate, flexible transactions among people in overlapping speech communities---peculiar transactions governed by unspoken agreements to abide by unspecified, constantly changing rules as to what meanings to build into what words and phrases. All the parties merely keep on making these transactions and assuming that all the other parties abide by the same rules and agreements. Thus, though words are capable of extreme precision among good players, they nevertheless float and drift all the time.

Elbow does a better job than anyone in characterizing non-converging processes: change just is. And this is just about the meaning of words; add on to that form, structure, medium, authority and all the other trappings of rhetoric that are themselves constantly reconstructed.

But that is why I'm a language nerd: it's enjoyable to float on your back in the warm ocean with the sun on your face and feel the lapping of a million tiny waves pushing you about (and imagining the millions of tiny waves pushing them about and so forth). As long as you can balance those thoughts with the vigilance necessary to keep from drifting into the surf zone or floating out to sea, searching for a stationary spot on the beach can't compare.

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A Dutch economist, Jan Pen, famously imagined a procession of the worlds population where people were as tall as they were rich, everyone's height proportional to their wealth (note wealth, not income). A person of average wealth would be of average height. The procession starts with the poorest (and shortest) person first and ends, one hour later, with the richest (and tallest). Not until twenty minutes into the procession do we see anyone at all. So far, they've had either negative net worth (owing more than they own) or no wealth at all, and so have no height. It's a full thirty minutes before we begin to see dwarfs about six inches tall. And the dwarfs keep coming. It is not until forty-eight minutes have passed that we see the first person of average height and average wealth, when more than three quarters of the world's population has already gone by.

What delays the average so long after the majority have passed? The answer lies in the effect of those who come next. "In the last few minutes," wrote Pen, "giants loom up... a lawyer, not exceptionally succesful, eighteen feet tall." As the hour approaches, the very last people in the procession are so tall we can't see their heads. Last of all, sid Pen (at a time before the fully formed fortunes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett), we se John Paul Getty. His height is breathtaking, perhaps ten miles, perhaps twice as much.

One millionaire can shift the average more than many hundreds of poor people, one billionaire a thousand times more. They have not this effect to the extent that 80 percent of the world's population has less than average.

In everyday speech, "average" is a word meaning low or disdained. With incomes, the average is high. The colloquial use, being blunt, thoughtless, and bordering on a term of abuse, distorts the statistical one, which might, according to the distribution, be high, or low, or in the middle, or altogether irrelevant. It is worth knowing which. If only one thought survives about averages, let it be that they are not necessarily anywhere near the middle, nor representative of what's typical, and that places often called "the middle" by politicians or the media may be far removed. These ideas have been lazily hitched together for too long. It is time for a divorce.

A more narrative explanation is available from The Atlantic.

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There are two basic approaches to classification. The first is typology, which conceptually separates a given set of items multidimensionally... The key characteristic of a typology is that its dimensions represent concepts rather than empirical cases. The dimensions are based on the notion of an ideal type, a mental construct that deliberately accentuates certain characteristics and not necessarily something that is found in empirical reality (Weber, 1949). As such, typologies create useful heuristics and provide a systematic basis for comparison. Their central drawbacks are categories that are neither exhaustive nor mutually exclusive, are often based on arbitrary or ad hoc criteria, are descriptive rather than explanatory or predictive, and are frequently subject to the problem of reification (Bailey, 1994).

A second approach to classification is taxonomy. Taxonomies differ from typologies in that they classify items on the basis of empirically observable and measurable characteristics (Bailey, 1994, p. 6). Although associated more with the biological than the social sciences (Sokal & Sneath, 1964), taxonomic methods--essentially a family of methods generically referred to as cluster analysis--are usefully employed in numerous disciplines that face the need for classification schemes (Lorr, 1983; Mezzich & Solomon, 1980).

The article then goes on to explain the difficulty of applying the more strict taxonomic classifications to, in this case, policy:

...the empirical qualities of many policies are not immediately apparent. Scholars such as Steinberger (1980), T. A. Smith (1982), and, especially, Schneider and Ingram (1997) make a persuasive case that the very concept of a policy category is a social construction, something rooted in individual perceptions. What distinguishes a redistributive from a regulatory policy is an individual judgment, not an observable, policy-specific equivalent to height or length. This argument is at the heart of critiques of Lowi's work, and it creates obvious difficulties in making the shift from a typology to a taxonomy.

I also like this lecture outline from a University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign entitled "What Isn’t in a Name?: Terminological Misapprehensions Between 20th-Century Linguistics" that explains why the terms "taxonomy" and "typology" are not unbiasedly embraced:

II. CASE-STUDY 1: TYPOLOGY vs. TAXONOMY — positively- vs. negatively- valued by linguists; negatively- vs. positively-valued by biologists

1. Typology as a laudable goal in linguistics:

a. From the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT, La Trobe University) mission statement: “putting forward inductive generalisations about human language”.

b. From Association for Linguistic Typology mission statement: “the scientific study of … cross-linguistic diversity and the patterns underlying it”.

c. Existence of societies like the Association for Linguistic Typology, journals like Linguistic Typology or Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, and research centers devoted to typology (RCLT, some of the Max Planck institutes (e.g., at Nijmegen and at Leipzig), etc.)

2. Typology as a tainted term (and concept) in modern biology.

a. In most 20th- (and 21st-) century biology, typology invokes the typological species-concept, an essentialist notion that, along with many other scholars, Mayr (1982) holds responsible for delaying the proposal, defence, and acceptance of legitimate evolutionary ideas prior to Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species.

b. Mayr 1982:256: In "the essentialist species-concept, ... each species is characterized by its unchanging essense (eidos) and separated from all other species by a sharp discontinuity. Essentialism assumes that the diversity of inaminate as well as of organic nature is the reflection of a limited number of unchanging universals (...[cf.] Hull 1975). This concept ultimately goes back to Plato's concept of the eidos, and this is what later authors had in mind when they spoke of the essence, or 'nature', of some object or organism. All those objects [that] belong to the same species ... share the same essence".

c. The link from essence to type is made as follows; cf. Mayr 1982: 256: "The presence of the same essence is inferred on the basis of similarity. Species, thus, were [once] simply defined as groups of similar individuals that are different from individals belonging to other species. Species, thus conceived, represent different 'types' of organisms. Individuals... do not stand in any special relation to each other; they are merely expressions of the same eidos. Variation is the result of imperfect manifestations of the eidos".

3. Taxonomy/taxonomic as a frequent term of reprobation in linguistics.

a. Recall Chomsky's 1962, 1964 attacks on Post-Bloomfieldian American structuralist phonemics as involving, not (usually) the classical or autonomous phonemic level, but the taxonomic phonemic level. Here, the intended criticism is rather explicit.

b. Only implicit, though, are criticisms like those that we both heard from our own (ca. 1975) linguistics-professors, exhorting us not to act like Post-Bloomfieldian American structuralists; e.g.: "Make generalizations going beyond the original set of facts that you were given; don't just rearrange the data!" — recall that Greek taxo-nom-ía originally involved, literally speaking, the 'arrangement-law…', or 'law of arrangement...'....

4. Yet taxonomy has long been an extremely positive term in modern biology (and the one positively evaluated use of type in biology involves type specimens, which are employed taxonomically!).

a. Taxonomy is often employed synonymously (e.g., by Mayr) with systematics (and/or classification): "The terms systematics and taxonomy are considered by me as approximately synonymous...[; i]n America...[,] the term taxonomy seems to be preferred...[; i]n the rest of the world...[,] the term systematics seems to be more
widely used" (Mayr 1942/1982: 6n.1).

b. And, as for the importance of systematics: "It is the basic task of the systematist to break up the almost unlimited and confusing diversity of individuals in nature into easily recognizable groups, to work out the significant characters of these units, and to find constant differences between similar ones. Furthermore, [(s)]he must provide these units with 'scientific' names which will facilitate their subsequent recognition by workers throughout the world.... Even this 'lowest' task of the systematist is of tremendous scientific importance. The entire geological chronology hinges on the correct identification of the fossil key species. No scientific ecological survey should be carried out without the most painstaking identification of all the species of ecological significance. Even the experimental biologist has learned to appreciate the necessity for sound, solid identification work" (Mayr 1942/1982: 9).

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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.

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