squareONE explorations
resources, discoveries, insights, perplexities

A sign-system such as a natural language is not an input-output system of encodings and decodings for the transmission of contents from one mind to another. Instead, it is a normative and conventional resource consisting of semiotically salient differentiation-types for producing, acting on and transforming situation conventions and the cognitive representations that people have of the situations in which these conventions operate. Paul J. Thibault

Hat tip to eldon, my Netdynam colleague, for hipping me to the book Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body, by the semiotician Paul J. Thibault. It fits into a funny reflexive picture, because I’m reading my friend Heward Wilkinson’s The Muse As Therapist, and, trying to pare away time to keep two different music-making projects percolating. Then Thibault pops into the frame. Really, Heward and Paul should get to know each other someway other than in my tiny mind!

Which is to say, it’s probably been years since I set up two wondrously knotty books by my night stand. (I don’t recommend trading off between Heidegger and Husserl as I once tried to do.) Oh, and to make this picture complete, Bra Ken, generously sent me the back issues of his literary chap House Organ. This does make dr.p’s head spin when I can’t decide what looking glass I’m going to pick up.

Musings About the ND2.0 Project

Free time is tending towards its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself. Thus unfreedom is gradually annexing ‘free time,’ and the majority of unfree people are as unaware of this as they are of the unfreedom itself. –Theodore Adorno

Locus of Control Matrix (Original discussion on this blog: Slowing Down to Better Problem Solve.)

Group Entry Norming Matrix (Posted to the Netdynamics 2.0 group blog, Group Entry Schema.

My colleague, Eldon, and me enter into a dialog in the comments. This dialog points toward this:

Cognitive Construal Vectors

Anybody conversant with social psychology will note the conventions captured in this schema. The schema does not represent formalized theory-making. It simply depicts a way of looking at the conjunction of the egocentric/stereotypic conventions. (Hmmm, I shall coin a term, egotypic, less confusing to me than egocentric given the latter’s numerous meanings.)

I’ll be referring to and saying more about Netdynam 2.0. It is an offshoot of the Netdynamics email discussion list, of which I have been a spiky participant for 13+ years. If you’re interested in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or, oh yeah, post-disciplinary, wandering through the mashed fields of depth/social/group/personality psychology, and linguistics, and applied semiotics, and ecosemiosis, and, disruptive poetics, and the internet and Web 2.0, you can peruse the offerings, and, maybe give our tiny crew a pinch or two.

New Dub Collision, (my music-compiling pseudonym,) mix over at nogutsnoglory studios blog. It’s titled Lookout Cleveland Part 1 – Back On the Porch.

West coast drum master George Marsh. More over at my nogutsnoglory blog.

Gordon Knox, director of the global initiatives project at Stanford University’s Humanities Lab could be considered an instigator of the “post-professional” meme as it applies to the commons and articulations of knowledge and experience on the internet.

article: If Corporations Could Paint (Forbes)

Over on our, (being the Netdynam email discussion group,) new group project blog, Netdynam 2.0, I’ve posted Knox’s video, Darwin, web 2.0 and the Role of the Amateur.

Hard-headed realists take pride in asserting that organizations are concerned with real things like profit and loss. To label profit a thing is to miss much of what is interesting about it. Profit is one way of labeling and making sense of the world; it is variable in a cause map, it can be an enacted environment, and it can be a symbol. It is one form of sensibleness that can be imposed on an organization¹s stream of experience but it is only one form of sensibleness, and it is an arbitrary one at that.

Karl Weick
The Social Psychology of Organizing,
McGraw-Hill, 1979

Love and power are not opponents; it is our ideas that have constructed them so. — The resolution of this tiresome conflict between power and love requires but one simple test, a move from the singular to the plural. Just add an s. The world is not one world, power is not a single idea, and love, which comes in thousands of varieties and even more disguises, is a generic commodity, unable to be owned by any single definition. So, too, business; just add an “s” to profit; profit not only for partners and shareholders. The monotheism of the profit motive can be loosened so that it makes places for other kinds of profitability; profitable for the long-term continuity of life and future generations, profitable to the pleasure and beauty of the common good, profitable to the spirit. The double bottom line of social and ecological responsibility extends profitability only part way. The idea of profitability itself needs pluralizing.

James Hillman
Kinds of Power,
Doubleday, 1995

True story: I was standing in line behind an attractive woman many years ago, and she ordered some vanilla ice cream, “I’d love some vanilla, a scoop!”

Tapping her on the shoulder, she half turned, and leaning over, I suggested, “Love is strong word for what you feel about ice cream, no?”

She gave me a weird look. But, it was enough of a line to entice her to sit down and spend a moment conversing and, well, checking each other out. And, I meant what I asked her earlier.

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NATURAL BENCH – DETAIL