I’ve been having email conversations with David Tames, of the Art Film Talk Podcast and Kino-eye.com, that have involved a fair amount of philosophy, and lead me to take some of my thought more seriously.. and to think I should probably blog / podcast about them more.  Besides this blog and podcast I also do the Asymmetric Biz Cult podcast which is basically “A New Philosophy of Art Mind and Business.”  The Asymmetric Biz Cult does explores similar territory as this entry…  though it tends to be in the context of “business for artists.”  Here, the philosophy bit of it, seems to be about providing new conceptual frameworks for thinking about the business of culture creation, to put it a certain sort of way.

Thinking for me; ideas, philosophy, psychology: they’ve always figured deeply in my life… one way or another.  Today I realize that these ideas give me a conceptual framework for understanding and interacting with reality.  They also have a huge influence on my creative process.  I don’t know if this is 100% true or not, but I feel a little as if these ideas might be the biggest achievement I’ve made thus far in my life.  Whatever the story, to appreciate myself, my art, my music, my whatever..  I think these ideas are a key.  I also think that this key might open doors for you.  So lets get on with this adventure.

My ideas have a certain rich complexity to them, and one of the challenges one confronts when trying to understand them is the level of interdependency they have in my larger body of thought.  To understand one thing you often have to understand 5 other things.. At some points, I suppose one could argue, that these ideas come dangerously close to a circular argument, I don’t know that they really do, but this does mean that we have to travel through a lot of ideas before the big picture emerges.

I play with ideas as if they were 3 dimensional objects:  I think visually, the geometric form that make up of the object is in part how we understand it’s “truthieness.”  Another words we say geometry is true because of the math that makes it up, I mean you can test stuff via the math.  I’m not big on math, but from the geometry of the idea, from the ideas shape, you can sort of see the truth of the shape.  So the way I think is to manipulate these 3 dimensional ideas.

What this provides the task of trying to understand my philosophy is, at least as far as I know, a unique set of challenges.  It means you must understand the object, the idea..  but it is not merely a matter of understanding the object…  the object is like a basketball…  one can understand the ball, but one must understand how to use the ball in the game of basketball.  The object is perhaps like a move in martial arts, where many moves are tied together, practiced over and over again, until it is all like breathing, it is all muscle memory.  So its not just understanding the object onto its self, its about understanding how to play with the ideas.

At best I would say I’m a kind of improviser in the life of the mind:  I have this huge toy chest filled with all these toys, all these ideas.. that I can bring out and apply to anything…

A part of my process we could call “toy acquisition.”  This involves looking at art, listening to music, reading books, watching tv and movies.. It involves conversations, it involves thinking.  Some toys come from the outer world, and some come from the inner world of my own imagination.  Even when in possession of a toy, there is work involved in crafting that toy into a better toy: You walk around the world of ideas and you pick up the toys that other folks have been playing with.  First you have to interrogate the toy;  How does this toy work, how is it constructed?  You question the toy.  

Now you must understand that I’m a little crazy!  I have ways of thinking that are more about how I manipulate toys then it’s about the toys them selves.   My true genius, assuming I have one at all, is really a child like ability to play.  It is a kind of grand master ju-jitsu of a 2 year old gone too far.  They say guns don’t kill people, Chuck Norris Kills people, well what if Chuck was a 2 year old?  A 2 year old can make a grown adult, a parent for instance, go insane with a toy as simple as the question “why?”  Now imagine that 2 year old takes on the inherited value system of our society with that simple question?  I suppose the moral of the story is “don’t mess with my inner child.”

Most children grow out of this, but I was a strong willed child, to put it mildly.  I was eventually thrown out of high school for questioning authority a little more then that insecure high school authority could bare.  Dear lord, I am a monster!

To get back to a point I was trying to make earlier, my behavior of thought is a part of my toy analysis.  Nietzsche is famous for questioning things more deeply then anyone else, as a part of dethroning religion as the central value system of our society.  I dare say I question toys just as deeply.  What you find when you question a toy this far is the toy transmuting into something new.  The ideas we find lying around in our world have evolved out of a kind of use value, lets say, so that there construction has to do with the particulars of there use.  But lets say you wanted to use that toy in a different context?  Perhaps a good way of explaining this is the notion of “best practices” that we see in business, and just about everything else.  These best practices are guidelines for success that have the wonderful benefit of allowing you to succeed without too much thought, yet the true master does not use these best practices in a dogmatic way.  The best practices have evolved as a kind  of crystallization of issues surrounding whatever it is that you’re trying to do.  The trouble, of course, is that we are living in a world with an ever accelorating rate of change, so that the surrounding issues and factors are forever in flux.  The effect of this is that the utility of best practices is forever limited.  

If you think about this for a little while you can see in the history of human values a similar sort of problem.  Its as if morality where a best practice, and when change comes to upheave old moral orders it is to expose the limitations of the application of now outmoded “best practices.”  The trouble, it would seem, is in a failure to recognize the limitations of the best practices..  It is in a failure to recognize how they worked outside of there particular context.

So my toy building process is one of moving beyond contextually dependent best practices.  Its one of taking a deep look at the ecology inside which a best practice operates and understanding the shapes of the interdependent relationships that make it work.  The shapes, can then be transplanted to any place where those shapes might work.  The shape here, is the idea, the toy. 

So what I do, essentially, is to try to understand ecologies.  At a certain point “it pops,” which is to say it becomes clear that you have come to understand all the shapes of that ecology..  I can look at any sorta psychological phenomenon and deconstruct it into is component parts, and understand what’s going on there.  In art school, when I used to be given to a certain amount of partying..  we would be doing the standard art school philosophizing.. many of us stoned off our gourd of course, and whatever it was that was going on in our worlds, I would deconstruct in this way…  In such a way that we were all sort of wide eyed in awe of what we were seeing.

A few latter:  

There is a tyranny to our inherited values.  It is the problem of best practices being apply outside of there effective range.  This made all the more problematic by the change that’s happened since those old values came into being.  As modernity creeps on forward, the problem grows.  So I believe a powerful utility to what I have to offer comes in the form of change management.  In the world of social media, one assumes the value of this utility would be very great indeed.

All this talk about a philosophical process and no philosophy at all?  Or maybe a philosophy of philosophy but..   Well I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 7:28 am and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.