Education as Over-Reach, the Fallacy of Accuracy

ow does this affect education? It ripples throughout the entire project. The bottom-line is that we run away from analysis based on sound judgement and prudent wariness and towards amassing ever more elaborate constructs – not so as to be able to make a better decision, but in the wish that doing so will find us a way to game reality and “Get What We Want.”

Mastery, Not Control

I put this presentation together last April. I’ve been “sitting” on it, waiting to see how it held up before releasing it. Now seems to be the right time. This was originally written out as an essay, but after experimenting with different formats, I think it is best suited to the slide show. I use

Not Individuals, Not Groups

One open question around the brain/mind formulation is what it does to our conception of individuals and groups. It seems easy to criticize a practice of attention that opens us to mind and sees the conditioning of the brain – thought in Bohm‘s characterization – as an impediment; either as swallowing up the individual into

It’s not a process…

It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have

Algorithms and Intention

Algorithms. While teaching a week-long course in half-model making and marine drafting I came across a tangible definition of an algorithm. In drafting we use splines, long, thin wooden battens that we bend around control points held by lead weights called ducks or whales. The shape, density and grain of the wood influences how it

It’s All Holographic, Stupid!

This phrase just popped into my head after reading Alex Fradera’s post on an event he led at Atlantic College recently. To be clear, and fair to Alex, it’s not directed at him! I’m not even quite sure what it means, that’s what sitting down to write this is for. It just seemed a nice

Further Notes on the Meaning of Wealth

We all act as though what we mean by wealth is obvious and lacking in ambiguity. Wealth is enough money to wield power so as to conserve one’s ability to keep a lot of money. Hmmm… That’s probably not what you had in mind. Has wealth always been the same thing? Is it going through

Shaping Awareness

I began this piece sitting in an automotive dealership’s waiting area, a U of chairs arrayed around a television playing daytime tv at full volume. I shared this space with a handful of other inmates, all eying the screen in between looking at a magazine, or a best-seller, or texting on a mobile phone. The

Do We Need Leaders?

Do we need leaders when our most pressing task is to collapse with as much, or as little, grace as we can muster? Do we need to maintain the fiction that leaders are necessary? Movements require leaders to galvanize the masses and run herd on them. Movements are mechanisms to chain us to ideologies, not

Double Binds

In a life of double-binds there are no useful “answers,” because every way “out” leads to another barrier. We are shocked by this. We spend all of our energies trying to avoid this truth. We will do anything to get out. At some point, if we’re lucky, we come to realize there is no way out, but death or insanity. The choice then narrows to a decision to succumb or accept what is.

Tall Towers

I continue to be mesmerized by the opening credits to Mad Men. Don Draper’s dapper silhouette falling endlessly past a grid of windows on a Haute-Modernist Skyscraper. I’ve written before on how this vertiginous fantasy stands-in for our rootlessness. What’s struck me today is that it might also tell us something interesting about why skyscrapers

War of the Worlds

In the past we had place. Now we don’t. In the future place may re-assert itself – at least I hope so…. Any search for a carving out of our own agency soon comes to the absolute necessity for a place on which to stand. Most fundamentally that distills down to a physical place upon