Transformative Behaviors

"Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project." - Joseph Beuys

One might also say, looking back over the past decade, that the Harvard and Warton MBA cliques are bad art movements.

What's that about the "best and brightest?" What would Nietzsche say?

VaR

I recently got asked by a headhunter to consider a job as a project/implementation manager for a company that specializes in VaR, or "Value at Risk." That's high finance talk for software that risk departments in investment banks and other financial institutions use to evaluate the extent of the damage they could bring upon themselves, considering their current strategies. You load up all of your positions and it tells you how risky your portfolio is, and perhaps suggests ways of hedging your bets with others so that your investments might be safe and sound.

During the interview I asked a bit about what went into it. At first I was thinking, wow, this might be my opportunity to find out first hand about strange attractors and self-organizing systems, but the interviewer, an MBA and PhD in mathematics (because you have to be in order to understand this stuff) assured me that VaR uses normalized calculations, just very complex ones. I lost about 95% of my interest at that moment, but I was still curious, so we went on.

He was most confident that in all but very rare cases the calcs could pinpoint and closely predict riskiness, and even alleviate most of the risk due to chaos (the unexpected), by helping to stabilize everything that was easily assimilated into knowable and predictable patterns. This was a few weeks before the financial markets imploded.

I'm sure that Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia, Fanny and Freddy, for instance, were all using some sort of VaR system to help stave off their own tribulations.

But when I think again about Laura Ward's "Whistle Me Higher" (see previous post) and all of the figures that may have been taken as indicators that may have suggested financial peril (i.e. gambling casinos, radioactivity, pandemonium, superstition, the sweeping up of toxic money by people in breakout suits), I am left wondering: who's got a better system? True enough, like all art, Laura's work is a bit of a Rorschach, something like the Delphic Oracle pouring out of the mouth of a Python Priestess high on geologic gasses, later interpreted by a throng of specialized priests.

There are many oracular parallels throughout the history of the world, everything from the reading of tea leaves to the bumps on one's head. The Tao De Ching, for instance, grew out of a practice people in ancient China had of turning over tortoise shells in order to seek a correspondence between static visual patterns and those being lived. Nowadays we have complex visualizations of numerical data, (i.e. graphical display) which attempt to convey information in a way a body can understand, alongside explanations that, after all, mathematics is built upon embodied metaphors, bringing us oddly back to where we had begun, with a little added perspiration (and perhaps precision).

Add to that the concept of expertise that Malcolm Gladwell puts across in Blink, or the theory that our neurologies enable us to make complex statistical-based decisions on an unconscious level, and you begin to gain a kind of insight into the possibility that the somewhat mystified and mistrusted operations of art-making may not be, in many ways, too different from those more reliable domains, such as the sciences.

This does not say that one should listen only to Laura, and ignore the complex, though normalized, mathematical formulas. But we might attempt to think, and experience, for ourselves and learn to weigh both into our judgements, in whatever proportion seems fit for the context. In other words, use the statistics the machine can give you, but also those that we give and receive as a system of biological machines. True, there is much that is quite primitive in there, but tempered by our other facilities (i.e. those that have built the complex mathematical models to begin with), we might find we have a much bigger net to catch things in.

It comes down to being able to pay attention to, and integrate, more varied data. And also to develop a kind of optimized paranoia for detecting patterns in emergence.

Welcome Back

It's been nearly a year since the last time I posted here. I have no excuses, not really, but I have been hard at work learning Tai Chi Chuan, with my sifu Tom Chan, who says he will make me a sifu by the end of the year. Oddly enough I have learned quite a bit that would be relevant here, and as soon as I figure out how to describe that I'll let you know.

Another thing. A few months ago my wife Kathleen and I went to see an old friend's dance company do a show at The Theater for the New City. We were pleasantly, enormously, surprised at how far Laura Ward's work had come. While I always admired her quirky inventiveness, disturbing playfulness, her sense of surprise, as well as a number of other qualities, her most recent piece, called "Whistle Me Higher" was not only on par with the best dance performances I've ever witnessed, it was an amazingly ambitious collision of mythos centered around the experience of Las Vegas. Not only is the city the great cliche gambling and entertainment capital, but it is not far from sacred native American and nulcear weapons testing sites. All of this comes out in the show, with sparks flying where they strike each other like flint on steel. Petite dancers in glittering patriotic garb grin manically to throbbing electronica, winding at times with lounge and parade tune overtones. There are occasionally theatrical breaks where a woman and man in breakout suits sweep away piles of fallen dollar bills amid fallen dancers, who get carted away in wheelbarrows. The two exchange poetic and philosophic dialog, sometimes strewn with scraps of clinical hypnotic scripts, suggesting, of course, a culture of the entranced, in which any verbal exchange wavers between directive and guesswork.

I had lunch with Laura not long afterward, and asked her how she managed the whole thing, from conceptualization, to composition, choreography, music selection, costumes, set design, you name it. What I found out was that Laura has developed an incredible prediliction for a kind of project management that you just don't see in people trained by professional organizations. It sounded similar to the way Charles Mingus described leading his band, where the core themes and spirit of the work was embodied by the participants (an amazing collection of performers, I need to mention), who worked out the details through their own impetus.

It's hard to imagine how something like this could be translated to the ordinary job world (even Laura works a day job, or rather day jobs), but it's a much different process than the task list and Gantt chart way of doing things, and it's got me thinking that there has to be a compromise, at least, or so many ways to organize and lead from inception to completion, if only we studied the way we actually did things, tracked the intinsic path of our minds and bodies, and designed a methodology around that. I would want to learn project management from Laura, rather than the PMI, even if they do get Colin Powell as a keynote speaker.

Re: The Uses of the Humanities, Part Two -- Stanley Fish

My response to Dr. Fish's blog post:

When I was pursuing my MFA in creative writing (poetry), which involved creative and critical writing, I inadvertantly became much better at unrelated work, i.e. business analysis and financial software QA. In fact I’m much better at what I do than most of the MBA’s I know. Go figure.

I don’t think I was the odd man out, either. I think you can easily see this as a pattern, if you look closely enough.

The problem is that it’s impossible to draw a direct equation, as one might more easily pretend to with business education, for instance.

But maybe even Alby Einstein wouldn’t have had some of the dreams he had without a background of the things that were happening in painting, for instance, and without those dreams, where would relativity come from? After all, these dreams were visual, and where did he learn to see things like that, all the atomization of objects of the impressionists and cubists, the motion of futurism, etc.? Just a thought. Just a perhaps. We don’t know where ideas come from… And you can’t survive unless you have them every day.

At least most people can’t.

Intelligence was never a straight-forward process. And anyone who is looking to justify a particular activity by the most simple equations available to one (i.e. science yields tech breakthroughs, while business ed. yields better business), isn’t very good at intelligence to begin with.

In the end, there shouldn’t be a need to justify funding for the humanities. It’s very short-sided to think along those terms. It’s like saying, “let them eat cakes…”

Announcement / Request

Somewhere along the line I decided that in order for this venture of mine to have real heart and soul, it needs to stick one leg into something more experiential.

I am looking for volunteers. I would like to interview people who think they manage their work / creative (and family, if possible) life balance exceptionally well, and those of you who don't think you do a very good job at all. Actually, I'd love to talk to anybody within the full spectrum in between, but I'm focusing on the extremes, for obvious reasons.

If you are willing, or at least curious, please email me at cae_fu@pipeline.com (my email address began as a typo, and I ran with it).

Also, if anyone is interested in attending workshops in downtown Brooklyn dealing with these issues, by exploring one's own experience and the experience of others, and who is unafraid of experimenting with simple hypnotherapeutic techniques, please contact me as well.

This would be absolutely free, at least to start out, except for the possible expenses needed for a space to hold these sessions.

Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

Besides the usual suspects, those social effects associated with the 1960s counterculture, i.e. lots of questionable metaphysical speculation and sex, one of the things I've read that was supposedly a direct result of the psychedelic era is the huge explosion in information processing that's taken place, especially since the advent of the personal computer. Things like object oriented programming and the Internet as we know it today were, according to some, not possible until a bunch of the right sort of folks (those with a peculiar com sci predisposition) had shifted their neural processing, ever so slightly, in a way that allowed for a particular brand of visual logic that could be shared by a community of researchers and dabblers, and who would carve out the world we are living in today. Hence, the primary skillset driving this change was a highly attuned visual imagination, something traditionally associated with artistic ability.

Along my own travels, I've also noticed that musicians (people obviously tending more toward auditory than visual inclination) often have a tremendous intuition for data processing as well. I worked with a couple of concert level pianists, who were about the best programmers I've known. One was so close to being among the very best performers in the world that he gave up playing altogether, for a number of years, out of grief. The other was even odder, he could read in about nine different languages (most of which he taught himself) and was rumored to belong to some cultish spiritualist organization. I had a tape he had given me of one of his compositions, that he had played himself, with a few string players, something that reminded me of Debussey or Ravel, not anything overtly challenging (afterall, he was a COBOL programmer) but rich enough to inspire strong admiration on my part.

During this same period, the models of cog sci have filled out as well, going from Miller's, Gallanter's and Pribram's sequential TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) model, to complexities like Conceptual Blends, Emergence, Self-organizing Systems, etc., and even a term like "cognitive" has mutated from something akin to explicit rational thinking to a hydra-headed and self-reflexive analog system functioning mainly on the unconscious level.

But none of this should be taken too seriously. What we have here is no more than the current mythology. In fact, it might turn out that our current notions of complexity in the sciences are nothing but our recent scientific worldview trying to take into account those phenomena that only superstition could talk to previously.

Where once we had day and night, light and dark, Apollo and Dionysus, we now have conscious and unconcscious processes (not 'minds', anymore, btw).

I'd like to point out, however, that just because the sun shines on things, and makes them more available to the eye, doesn't necessarily make the world more sensible. Rather, the enormous amount of information that becomes available can in itself become a source of delirium. The god of poetry and medicine was (is?) just as much a drunkard as his wino brother, therefore. And the proof is that his spokeswoman, the Python Priestess of Delphi, often communicated in word salads which took a team of specialists (priests) to unscramble.

Once a poet, always a poet, but people usually don't think of Apollo as a Surrealist (or schizoanalyst).

What this comes down to is that there may be no such thing as gods and goddesses, darkness and lightness (other than relative perceptions), order and chaos, or even a conscious and unconscious mind. There are certain types of thoughts, perhaps, that are possible to be processed consciously, but they tend to be the simplistic kinds. The purpose of the conscious mind may not be thinking at all, but only awareness, and using the thoughts derived at from other functions to guide us.

The only way something becomes conscious is through distortion, overgeneralization, and filtering most of the information out. This is how we begin to distinguish polarities, such as black and white, Israel and Palestine, work and the rest of life.

One should remember, as well, that the Sun is only a star that's close enough to seem to take the night away.

That Gray Place

Truth is I don't know if it will ever be possible for you to feel great about your job. It's reallly kind of a sticky situation. I, myself, would much rather be spending my time reading and writing poetry, perhaps even pushing large boulders uphill, than doing what I do at work. The whole idea of it gives me a terrific sense of horror at times.

Other times I get caught up in some of the things I do when I'm there, helping people, solving problems, getting an idea across successfully. Granted, I'm not generally helping people in ways that are life-altering, nor are the ideas and solutions I'm offering earth-shattering. But the fact that those things can happen, somehow helps me get through the day. And besides that, it puts a roof over my family's heads and food in our bellies. Leave it at that.

But I can't leave it at that. Beneath this drab exterior is a person who is obsessed with changing the world (though rarely does he do anything to express this obsession, not outwardly, I realize). Maybe it's only really about being desperate enough. I'm not asking much, but I do at least want to ask, how might one change one's day job, so that a chain reaction goes off in one's life. And how might one set a chain reaction in other people around us so that little by little the virus is spread, and somehow we are living in another world?

It happens. We're obviously not living in the same world we were living in say 50 or 100 years ago. Everything's changed, the music, the technology, the way we transport ourselves about, even the way we treat other people, at least as far as our institutions go, or at least as far as they're supposed to work.

What I asked you to imagine last time I posted was perhaps quite a difficult task, I realize. Perhaps not even difficult, maybe absurd is a better word. Yes, quite loony and off the wall, I'd say. Mad as f@#k. I know because I've been trying it too. I'm along for the same ride your on, if, in fact, there is anyone out there at all, anyone listening in to the maniac behind the blog curtain.

On the surface it sounds like kind of an odd, but not too abnormal request, to consider what it might be like at one's day job, if you could transform it into a world that you would really want to live in. But how could such a thing be? Not for most of us. For most of us, it is the biggest compromise of our lives, possibly what makes it a lot less meaningful and pleasurable.

But from another point of view, this is what it takes. It takes a terrible leap over the chasm of unreason and into the land of the absurd. It takes something akin to dementia, schizophrenia, but not dementia or schizophrenia, but something opposite of that. This is what I believe Deleuze and Guattari are pointing at, to some extent, when they talk about deterritorialization, becoming a body without organs.

What I'm offering is not self help, not something that will especially improve one's performance, but just as easily self hurt. More likely neither, but a form of experimentation that is hopefully outside the categories of either side of the dilemna, something to do instead of.

This doesn't mean that there is no chance of a kind of satisfaction to be derived from such efforts. But these satisfactions will be different from those one ordinarily plans for and achieves by rote, or not.

These are not the satisfactions one already knows and can plan for, nor can expect in any way, shape or form. This is what you do not yet know how to experience.