so2 – rhizomatic architecture

What I did

Graduate students in the United States who major in Rhetoric and Composition are expected to become college teachers or at least teachers of some sort.  I had entered grad school because I felt uncertain of my abilities to carry on outside of school.  I was also intensely interested in critical theory and wanted more.  Undergraduate studies were too introductory for me.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to teach but I took the path seriously.  I began to read as many ‘interesting’ books as I could get my hands on.

Eventually, I had the opportunity to enter the world of Real Estate and business.  This was an expected but great benefit; to be introduced to a world I did not know existed, one that operating on a logic completely foreign to me.  With that introduction I began to realize that while many of my professors in Grad school often talked about big topics — basically the aesthetics surrounding life — around ideas like fairness, justice, and resource distribution — many of these professors did not have the same kind of experience I was having.  At this time I was reading close to 8 – 12 books a week outside of grad school (and finishing a second BA as well in religious studies).  So I took this opportunity seriously and decided that

1. If I wanted to better myself I needed to explore something different (in comparison to business, reading and being mired in the academy didn’t offer me a complete understanding).

2 I didn’t really want to teach anyway.  I wasn’t enamored with the teacher’s lifestyle.

So I changed the focus of my life.  I had intended at some point to pass the Series 7 test to become a stock broker, to work in the exciting world of finance.  But this didn’t happen.  I won’t bore you all to death with my work history but I will say that I currently am partners running a corporation called YTA.

What I Do

Yours Truly Accessibility helps businesses achieve compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act while navigating the relevant parts of the California Building Code.  You can check the website out if you like (or email me for more information) as I won’t go into detail here about this venture.  I still maintain a Real Estate Broker’s license as well.  I live in North Hollywood, CA.

David Markson wrote in one of his aphoric books that the first greek philosopher (I forget which one was his name, maybe Anaximander) created philosophy as an abstract language-based system to navigate the various principles common between the different cultures of the many greek-speaking nation-states of long ago.  Speaking a common language while experiencing different life-practices better lent itself to abstracting culture into Philosophy. There had to be ONE Philosophy as a valid field of study was challenged by many people — Anaximander’s response was to go into business, become rich (claim that was his proof) and then go back to teaching.  While I like that story and took it as inspiration I am not certain I would like to teach in a formal institution.  I do want to return what I do to the world at some point, and hopefully that benefits others.

Too often do I feel that our current culture forces specialization on us in order to have ‘experts’ who can help us in limited ways.  This modularity may work for capitalism — and it certainly works for life forms in a biome, to have a niche — but it doesn’t help us as individuals who live in a multi-faceted way.  A creature may be able to live its entire life in a niche.  A company or an employee may be able to do a specific job indefinitely.  But as people, we cross many different areas and need many different ‘experts’.  We can’t know everything, but we don’t get a road map anymore.

If we take postmodernism seriously then the end of the grand narrative is the end of the ‘one size fits all road map’.  That ain’t a bad thing, but it certainly isn’t useful for those of us who want to live meaningful lives or be able to navigate the many grey areas of life in an ethical.  Meanwhile, as there are more and more people, we each have to become more specialized to survive and to draw work to us.  Like diversity in nature, being more efficient with the resources we get means becoming more and more embroiled in a niche.  The more definite the niche, the more our world becomes complex.  An increasingly complex world means that each of us more easily loses sight of the big picture. After all, the world of a fly is quite different from the world of a spider (even if each of them directly interact). This kind of fragmentation, this kind of disintegration of defines both postmodernism and post-structuralism. This fragmentation incidentally, also forces each of us to become little politicians, little philosophers to make sense of what we are doing on our own (we may not be able to go to a priest or a pastor anymore). As we are flies or spiders, we aren’t trained or maybe even interested in doing that kind of thinking. Bad reasoning or bad philosophy means bad living — contradictory or with false foundations, what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’.  This might be okay if we just want to sit in front of the tv, but our inner life as human beings isn’t really suited to sitting in front of the tv.

I network a great deal in the Los Angeles business community (which is huge). Among those I network and speak with, we all struggle to achieve our hopes and ambitions. We all want to go out in the world and lead full and meaningful lives. I don’t mean to sound like another call to ‘Fight Club’ but among those in my generation we feel the squeeze deeply; our inability to see the larger picture or access the root of meaningfulness.  Living well is impossible if we live lives according to faulty principles or contradictory reasoning. Living well is impossible if we behave in self destructive ways.  Often our hopes and dreams are thwarted because we aren’t clearly pursuing them, or we think we want one thing but actually live in a completely different way.  This is a pathetic waste. It doesn’t matter how smart we are, or how charismatic or good looking we are. What matters most is clarity.

A large part of the problem comes about when we get teachers who understand abstract general thinking but don’t understand economics.  We are taught about what fairness and justice is — often by people who have mostly lived in a classroom.  Or we may study science and math — seeking to do great things in the world — but have very little training or resources when it comes to things like how to better yourself as a person. And who would teach you how to be disciplined? What about being focused? What about being focused but also living a balanced life? Those of us who become successful can also become arrogant. Plenty of accomplished people become assholes in their own right because they forget how to connect with others. How do you deal with failure? How do you deal with success? How do you deal with loss and life?  9/11 was a huge wake-up call for the United States, for the world — about what we need to do and how we need to treat and live among one another.  But in the end, our response was to blame, blame blame and duck our heads in the sand and consume more resources… distract us from the challenge of being a stronger people, of a better people.

I don’t think that I will become famous or find any “THE ANSWERS” to these issues.  The void that exists today, exists because we have a fragmented, market driven society that is unable to transcendentally bridge meaning between its isolated sectors.  Neurologists can’t talk with psychologists.  Religious figures and politicians speak nearly different languages.  Rather than suggest an academic transformation, it becomes increasingly imperative that we need a cultural transformation to fill our ethical void.  Rather than let movies that address our problems distract us more from our problems, let’s tackle them directly.  Ben Franklin was on the right track.  How do we become a better person?  How do we put aside our crippling cynicism and really critically interact with events and people?  Instead of shrugging our shoulders and giving up, going out to dinner how can we begin to understand what to make of promises and situations? How should we feel? How do we want to feel? Should happiness be the means or an end? (I think not!) Too often do we sit at a table, talk about issues that we really care about but reach a conclusion that verifies a pre-determined link without really leading to any solution. It’s like we talk amongst ourselves just to feel better (like we solved the problem) so that we can forget the problem completely exists when all we did was talk.

President Obama was elected when he hit a nerve — giving a jaded people Hope. He did hit on a great need that we have today but Obama is a politician who tries to work within a system with an incredible amount of institutional imperative. He is probably too remote a source to reach the lives of everyday people today.  It seems as though the days of FDR’s fireside chat is gone. We can’t expect our leaders to lead us — this is very modernist and we live in a time when we are supposed to lead our selves, each and every one of us.  But now a days, in the 21st century, we have something different and new.  Something common people can do to share and learn and grow as individuals.

Blogging.