At work today, we had a meeting about meetings, or, more specifically, we had a meeting to talk about the 'norms' of our meetings, which means we meet to talk about how we are going to talk about what we talk about in our meetings. With all this talk of the normative and meta-reflection about reflection I felt for a minute like I was in some sort of Platonic dialogue like the Alcibiades I, talking to Socrates about talking to Socrates.
I find the idea of talking about 'norms' interesting, it evidences a strong disconnect with both the phenomena and the noumenona that surround us. It also gets at the one way I ever intend to make any money, using my limited but sufficient sensitivity to things to do what my mother tells me is called group-dynamic consultation, essentially figuring out how and why groups of people do not function as they should, and fixing them. Talking about 'norms' implies one either has none or one does not like the ones one has, but it begs the question of how talking about something that operates on the noumenonalogical can be fixed by talking about it, or, even worse, agreeing on a new set of norms. It would be akin to talking about standing distance (how far or close you stand to a person) and deciding as a hive of individuals to change the standing distance. Would, or better yet could, anyone actually follow it? There is something profoundly ephemeral and mercurially about group dynamics, working on all sorts of unconscious levels, and the solution to things that are beneith the phenomenaligical can't be to rationalize, systematize, and explain them. As the Tao says, or doesn't say, the act of naming strips a thing of its name. We do not live in a world of objects that can be named and have properties, at least I hope not.
The meeting about meets was bookended by an announcement that the staff had to take 'climate' survey to figure out the. . . climate of the school (I thought it seemed partly-sunny, but the supercomputer I use to calculate the probability of the weather was down, so I had no confidence in my answer). The idea of categorizing and systemizing one's feelings about the 'climate' of a place, the same background state that permeates all of our interactions, our 'norms' evidences the same technocratic desire to control being, that our sense of existence is to control existence. The survey's replace what was previously seen as intuition, or, mono no aware as the Heian Japanese put it, the sensitivity to things and ability to be moved. We do not live in an era of poets and intuitives, where a highly attuned individual could be sensitive to the ontological feelings of his culture, but a technocratic era where smashing and hollowing out idols is done not with a tuning fork, but a blunt hammer. Where impositions come from the top, or are trolled from the masses by people who could not understand the answers because they do not understand the questions. There is some idea, deeply ingrained in Western thought from Plato to Freud, that even if you asked a person a question and they answer honestly, they are not being honest because they do not know themself, do not have access to the real answer. Can we know what influence our parents have on us, or our friends, or our teachers? Or why certain groups work well together and others do not? Would we even want to? Will a quorum on any of these things get at the answers, or will the answers be somehow meaningless because it is treating things of the immaterial as if they are something to be picked up, moved, and altered. Tolstoy said the only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless, or as the Tao puts it, know not-knowing: supreme, or can you control our breathe, gently like a baby?
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