The contributions to this blog will remain here but new work will appear THERE.

The shift has to do with spelling. I'm giving culturopoiesis a shot.

The Birth of a Nation

If culture is made - an artifact at some level - what parts does cinema play? "Classic silent film, directed by D. W. Griffith in 1915. This is probably the first film constructed with the classic hollywood narrative style, that is attributed to Griffith. "Two brothers, Phil and Ted Stoneman, visit their friends in Piedmont, South Carolina: the family Cameron. This friendship is affected by the Civil War, as the Stonemans and the Camerons must join up opposite armies. The consequences of the War in their lives are shown in connection to major historical events, like the development of the Civil War itself, Lincoln's assassination, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan."

"Kramer's" Racist Tirade - Caught on Tape

Richards, who played the wacky Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV show "Seinfeld," appeared onstage at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. It appears two guys, both African-American, were in the cheap seats playfully heckling Richards when suddenly, the comedian lost it. http://www.tmz.com/2006/11/20/kramers-racist-tirade-caught-on-tape/ He later apologized on Letterman and was obviously struck. What is happening here? Is he really shpowing the audience their own underbelly or just freaking out on his own anger, or both, or ...?

Feeling particularly grateful for my soon to be official Dissertation Advisor/Reader,

Debra Knowles, Ph.D.

I finally shifted from emails to a simple phone call and now feel we are much more on the same team. A quote from her: "Everybody is living out their thoughts"
and from her work on Hannah Arendt: "All I ever tried to do with my writing is to explain it to myself."

further excellent advice...

Be clear about stating my unique hypothesis as though beginning (but not being obsessive about ) a scientific experiment. State the Process Arts shift as a given but be clear I don't intend to prove it unequivocally. It will substantiate itself as we go.
Don't stop mid sentence to comfort the reader re the vagaries of expression itself being indefinite. Just be clear what is meant.

On a different tangent, the dictionary definition of Empirical = 1. Relying on or derived from observation or experiment: empirical results that supported the hypothesis. 2. Verifiable or provable by means of observation or experiment: empirical laws. 3. Guided by practical experience and not theory, especially in medicine. James Hillman works Jung's "empirical event" such that he "refreshes a term that has shrunk into an encrusted cliche of scientism" (Healing Fiction p32). Does anybody know of any other specific places Hillman or Jung directly expand on the idea of non-scientistic empiricism?

Also in the news, I am grateful to Huston Smith for nominating me for membership in the Pacific Coast Theological Society. He called to inform me today that I am definitely accepted and expected at their Spring Meeting. They send out three papers from members and gather on a Friday from 2pm (2 papers) through dinner, and Saturday from 10-noon (1 paper). I'm looking forward to joining in and chewing on some lovely intellectual roughage.

Reminder to self: send dues to Secretary/Treasurer Sharon Burch

Genworth - Agassi and Graf

David Miller example - compare to opening sequence of "Matchpoint" by Woody Allen

Dissertation working outline 20061023


Re-visioning Conflict

Overview

Introduction

Ch 1 The Emergence of the Process Arts, a review of literature

Hillman and...

gods

Art

Community

Conflict

Peace

Thomas Moore

David Miller

Wolfgang Giegerich

Greg Mogenson

Arnold Mindell

George Lakoff

David Kidner

William Doty

David Mamet

Sam Keen

Paul Kugler

Joseph Campbell

Dan Noel - From the Liberal to the Process Arts

Additional Authors to be considered together:
S Freud, CG Jung, ML von Franz, Dennis Slattery, Ed Casey, P Roszak, T Driver, D&L Cowan, R Bly, M Eliade, W Doniger, G

Bachelard, T Zeldin, H Corbin, P Berry, R Romanyshyn, W Berry, M Prechtel, Huston Smith,

Authors who will supply supporting references througout:
J. Hillis Miller, A Dundes, Rumi (Barkes), Rilke, T Merton, T Nh’ăt Hanh, M Ueshiba, J Miles, F Turner, S Schama, G Paris


Organizing what’s ahead



CH 2 Process Arts: beneficent open source developmentalism

Introducing dreams, themes, and micromyths/memes

Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Nuclear Imagination

Industry, Progress, and Information

Nationalism, War, and Terror

Psychology, Mythology, and Associative Inquiry

Available wisdom and other dreams

Running At Depth – the brilliance of wormwood and gall, an example

Theoretically Ecologizing the Fictional Process, or a place for thinking of home



CH 3 Culturopoesis: manifesting the context and movements of ideas

Introduction

the Idea of Epochal Narrative

From prehistory into the images of Hunters, Gatherers, and Farmers

Imagining Hunting and Gathering

Farming & Husbandry: Cultivating Civilization

Empire

Enlightenment

Consciousness, Sight, and the interpretative mirroring of history

Example fugue

modernity, individualism, and psychoanalysis

From Enlightenment to Consumptive Rationalism

Scientistic Psychology

Post-Jungian Psychology

Dream, Mirror, and Representation

Bureaucracy, Absurdity and Bootless Foolery

Mythicity, or, ongoing postally modern



CH 4 Healing Friction: the Drama of Business as Unusual

Introduction

Government, Politics, and the Healing Friction Initiative

Association Cultural Movement and Education – a high point in depth

Virtual and Actual Organization

Associative Inquiry: mapping and returning to Imagined Terrain – more to come



CH 5 Bluevolution: Neo-shamanism, New Monasticism, and the new god image

Following submerged images into their own twilight



CH 6 Guardianship of Peace: ambivalent heroism on purpose

Guidance and Education

Children: Montessori & Steiner vs. the Prussian Military

Action and Performance

Mediation

Martial Artistry



Appendixes, and Hidden Bonus Tracks

Word Complexes

Healing Friction Initiative as Cultural Activism

Abbreviations

Works Cited

Notes

Dissertation overview and working title 20061025

Re-visioning Conflict

Process Arts,

Culturopoesis,

Healing Friction, and

Guardianship of Peace

“In his book Inter Views, James Hillman remarks that instead of being the founder of a school of thought, he sees himself as the member of a community of people who are at work re-visioning things.”

from the acknowledgment with which

Thomas Moore's begins Blue Fire

Overview

As densely stated as possible for refinement and substantiation as we go along, the 20^th Century brought with it the awareness of several deep shifts. One result of industrial urbanization is the accelerating, global extinction of relatively self-sufficient, village-size communities containing inescapable, long-term relationships[i]. Like no other structure communities, as defined here, can provide a container for both the desired and dreaded changes that accompany human life. This fading connective potential has been shown to deepen and reinforce the individual and group experiences that lend meaning to being human. The need for the kind of meaning associated with place and community persists and becomes progressively acute as the Industrial Mind[ii] promulgates and dwells in literalized abstractions, as though humanity were reducible to refined components or producible as an efficient mechanism. Human beings seem to be moved by this process to identify less with being rooted in familiar ground (literal and metaphorical place, work, family, body, etc.) and more in abstract idea spaces like The Market, Family Values, Globalization, The Environment, War on Terror, and many more. This creates greater exposure and vulnerability to a kind of self-perpetuating mythic structure at works in individuals and groups at the level of epistemology, ontology, and volition. Words often used to describe this mythic complex of influences include: “memes”(Richard Dawkins), “metaphors we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson), and “mythicity”(Gould).

A recent shift of awareness happened in contact with the way industrial memes become a matter of social doctrine and underlie a previously unimaginable facility in fabricating and distributing not only concept based products but also product serving ideas. Vast ability now exists to convert life energy into the development, manufacture, and circulation of almost any thing and idea, from conception and comodification, to advertising campaigns and distribution networks, to the collection and retention (holding the attention and volition) of populations who learn to depend and insist upon on the idea or thing, as well as incipient ideas and things which will of necessity resemble it.

I will refer to this production cycle using its own metaphors, when possible, and will often borrow the mitts, flame, and caliper from this “idea foundry”[iii] in order to re-grind a well used lens, a way of seeing through, by reshaping familiar words. For example, I will use affixes and plays-on-words to refer to the shift from industry, in the sense of any purposeful activity, to industrialism, an abstraction into doctrine, “–ism” coming from the Greek suggesting the act, state, or theory of anything. Following the abstracting movements of industrialism, for instance, might lead to consideration of “industriality” – the quality or state of being within the culture shaped by the doctrine, and then to “industreality” - the submersion of the doctrinalizing process by ubiquitous theoretical usage until the “real” is defined industrially. I create or use others’ neologisms not simply to catch the mind’s eye but as a way of opening and working an idea-complex which reflects not only a shift in observable behavior but also the accompanying inescapable change in word-ideas.

A wave of change followed the industrial revolution as an entire spectrum of vocations, “Process Arts,” were born which draw attention to and educate about how we do what we do, including and informing what we produce. Following the rise of governmental bureaucracy and urban population growth since civilization began; the place of the Manager became prominent, whose entire responsibility is related to other people’s production. The modern workplace now knows the ubiquitous presence of another subset of managers who function at large, temporarily rooted like so much of post-industrial society, given titles like “consultant,” “facilitator,” and “coach.” As the place of work and place of home become in many ways conflated, counselors, mentors, advisors, and therapists all begin to have overlapping areas of interest and expertise for better and for worse. Any of these professionals may move into process artistry, from simply influencing life and work management, when their practice develops a self perpetuating autocritical discipline, “challenged all along the way to rethink, to re-vision, and to reimagine…nothing short of a new way of thinking,”(1) which returns again and again to the way all relationships are built in depth -- tending the quality of interaction. In this realm the experience of creative production undergirds human understanding and the capacity for both suffering and joy in the living of life, independent from and related to what is produced between birth and death. Lay and professional practitioners of these arts tend the influential interdependence of form (existing empirical structure), frame (theoretical environment – or idea space), and function (tangible applications and intangible consequences). The Process Arts are at very least fundamentally implicated in the practice of depth psychotherapy, the modern visual, liberal, and performing arts, organizational management consulting and development, social, civic, and spiritual activism, coaching, mediation, facilitation, and cultural study and criticism. Even die-hard traditional approaches are now fundamentally changed in that they employ additional levels of process awareness and conscious practice. More and more people are making an art form of crafting the layered choices and shared assumptions underlying the understanding of co-creativity itself. This shift in culture is so wide that the world as a whole is changing to mirror its shape. Culture is thereby being made more consciously. Borrowing a neologism from my field (mythopoesis – see below), I call this Culturopoesis. In his work on the culture of psychoanalysis, James Hillman frames this process as “a work of imaginative tellings in the realm of poesis, which means simply ‘making,’ and which [he] take[s] to mean making by imagination into words.” His work, and this work “more particularly belongs to the rhetoric of poesis, by which [he] means the persuasive power of imagining in words an artfulness in speaking and hearing, writing and reading”(H.F. 3-4). Drawing on the approaches of David Miller, Wolfgang Giegerich, Greg Mogenson, and other “post-jungian” thinkers, I will add to that word work its natural extension into action, literal bodies and choices, and the co-creation of the concrete world.

The culturo-poetic shift makes it clear that (post)modern persons are co-creating overlapping, interrelative micro- and macro-cultures by consciously and unconsciously constructing the narrative environments within which reality generating choices become concrete. On one hand, deeply connective stories and images are literalized and functionalized to market, sell, and distribute ideological products. Cases in point include Hitler’s “Final Solution” mirrored in recent “ethnic cleansing.” On the other hand, psychological and mythological studies are being interrelated to make space consciously for personal and corporate biography, group process which includes all possible participants in a given sphere of influence, the cultivation of understanding beyond the collection of information, and calling for global needs to be fully expressed and received in a welcoming of deeper, more “soulful” individuality and interdependence. A result is the building of Community on purpose.

Intentional community is no longer unique to literally cohabiting activists. Beyond and including initiatives like co-housing and kibbutzim, this powerful idea is bringing soul and spirit together in workplaces, militaries, religious groups, families, warring factions, and schools. Process-level methodologies and practice groups are arising around the world with Community-on-purpose in mind. They are finding that the core focus for creating this kind of culture has to do with the deep hearing of participants’ stories and the processing of conflict earlier and with growing capacity and facility in order to hope for Peace, referred to here using the term neo-shamanism in the way outlined for the western “seeker” by Daniel C. Noel, and developing the idea of a new monasticism, as imagined in the work of Thomas Moore.

This redefinition of Community, as being made on purpose, is supported by the redefinition of peace itself. Rather than framing peace as the absence of conflict, here I speak of Healing Friction—doing conflict well rather than avoiding/eradicating it, and changing and being thus changed by this fiction of friction. I propose that professionals who identify this practice of peace as their deep desire and vocation might benefit both from identifying themselves publicly as Guardians of Peace and from working together in ways suggested herein to forward the practice of this kind of community, such that it can and will be adapted and lived wherever it is learned and the Process Arts are practiced.

---

[i] According to University of Veracruz researcher Mario Pérez Monterosas, Veracruz and Chiapas (Mexico's largest coffee-growing state) form part of the latest migratory region. Between 1995 and 2000, some 800,000 people left Veracruz. Pérez Monterosas reports that Veracruz has been steadily climbing the ladder in the list of the states that contribute to the migrant population in the United States. In 1992 Veracruz was in 30th place, by 1997 it had risen to 27th, in 2000 it held 14th, and by 2002 it had become the fourth-largest sending state in the nation.(a) Before this wave started, emigration from Veracruz's coffee zones to the United States was so scarce that a 1994 survey registered only one township--Misantla--with cases of migration to the north, and there were only twelve.(b) http://www.counterpunch.org/navarro12152004.html a) Mario Pérez Monterosas, "Las redes sociales de la migración emergente de Veracruz a los Estados Unidos," Migraciones internacionales, Vol.2, Núm 1, Enero-Junio 2003. b) Odile Hoffman, "El andar investigando historial de un proyecto de investigación sobre cambio sociocultural y crisis cafetalera," Ciesas-Orstom, 1994 .

[ii] Wendell Berry, The Agrarian Standard, Orion Online (Great Barrington, MA: The Orion Society, 2002).

[iii] http://www.ideafoundry.org/ http://www.techcollaborative.org/members.aspx?member_id=IdeaFoundry http://www.bufflink.org/NewsText/383596236805556.html

The term up has no meaning apart from the word down. The term fast has no meaning apart from the term slow. In addition such terms have no meaning even when used together, except when confined to a very particular situation... most of our language about the organization and objective's of government is made up of such polar terms. Justice and injustice are typical. A reformer who wants to abolish injustice and create a world in which nothing but justice prevails is like a man who wants to make everything up. Such a man might feel that if he took the lowest in the world and carried it up to the highest point and kept on doing this, everything would eventually become up. This would certainly move a great many objects and create an enormous amount of activity. It might or might not be useful, according to the standards which we apply. However it would never result in the abolishment of down. - Thurman W. Arnold

My thopoetic Hero

HOW THE SOUL IS SOLD

May 28, 1995 New York Times

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1D81E3BF93BA15756C0A963958260

During my recent two years as an executive story editor and then co-producer of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," nearly every episode I wrote was inspired, directly or indirectly, by the books of James Hillman ("How the Soul Is Sold," by Emily Yoffe, April 23). When Hillman reworks the world, it's by way of ideas so startling they can induce vertigo, by way of paragraphs so rich they border on poetry. JOE MENOSKY Florence, Italy

"How the Soul Is Sold," by Emily Yoffe, April 23 reference located at
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5D91238F930A15757C0A963958260&sec=health&pagewanted=all

Joe Menosky

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/TNG/creative/69099.html

Joe Menosky was Executive Story Editor during the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Co-Producer the fifth season. He then moved to Europe for three years, where he wrote and developed television pilots for the French studio Gaumont, and continued to write stories and scripts on a freelance basis for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and then Star Trek: Voyager. After returning from Europe, Menosky joined Star Trek: Voyager as a writer-producer. His story or teleplay writing credit appears on over two dozen episodes, including "The Nth Degree," "Darmok," "Hero Worship," "The Chase," "Future's End," "Distant Origin," and "Scorpion."

In addition to Star Trek, Menosky recently sold a feature screenplay, "Real Time," co-authored with Brannon Braga, to director James Cameron ("Terminator," "Terminator II," and "Aliens").

Before working in film and television, Menosky was a journalist. He was science editor and reporter for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition" and his articles and essays on the social and political ramifications of science and technology have been printed or re-printed in "The Economist," "The Washington Post," and M.I.T.'s "Technology Review" among others.

Spotlight: Farewell to Joe Menosky reproduced below

Spotlight: Farewell to Joe Menosky

http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/111610.html
Special to STAR TREK.COM by Deborah Fisher
04.26.2000

As Star Trek: Voyager makes a run to the end of its sixth season, the episode "Muse" also marks the end of Joe Menosky's stint as a Star Trek staff writer that began back in Star Trek: The Next Generation's fourth season. A former colleague at Simon & Simon had recommended Menosky to then ST: TNG Executive Producer Michael Piller. He gave Menosky a trial run, asking him to rewrite the fourth season episode "Clues." Piller hired Menosky on the strength of his first assignment.

Menosky entered the Star Trek fold at a critical and colorful time. Gene Roddenberry's launch of ST: TNG had relied heavily on the talents of well-known original series writers including Roddenberry himself, Dorothy (D.C.) Fontana, David Gerrold, and heavyweights Maurice Hurley and Herbert Wright. Years two and three had given way to newer and younger names and faces including Richard Manning and Hans Beimler, Melinda Snodgrass, Scott Rubenstein and Ira Steven Behr. Fresh-faced Ron Moore captured every fan's dream of a brass ring, a Star Trek job, with his spec script, "The Bonding."

After a hectic, unsettled first couple of years, the third season of ST: TNG was like beginning anew. Into this third-year team came Michael Piller, a Hollywood veteran, a former CBS censor, an experienced television staff writer with the chops to manage a writing team. He loved Star Trek and brought a stability and vision to the show and the writing staff that began to pay off almost immediately. He set up an open submission process and the staff took hundreds of pitches from experienced writers as well as fans. At its height, ST: TNG received 3,000 spec scripts a year. Besides keeping Moore on staff, Piller also acquired Jeri Taylor who became, with Piller, like mom and dad to a whole new generation of fresh, young writers. New voices were added to the stable of free-lancers like Hilary J. Bader ("Dark Page") and David Carren and Larry Carroll ("Future Imperfect").

Piller also found ways to work within the bounds of Roddenberry's rules of the Star Trek universe that so many writers had chafed against, especially the one that dictated no open conflict between regular characters. By the time Menosky arrived in the fourth season, the formula was highly recognizable -- a five-act structure with A and B plots that culminated just before the show's ending coda.

While "Legacy," a story about Tasha Yar's sister, was Menosky's debut script in October 1990, it was his scripting of "The Nth Degree," aired in April 1991, that made clear to viewers just what Menosky was capable of. "The Nth Degree" was about the character Barclay (first seen in the third season's "Hollow Pursuits") who is made super intelligent by contact with aliens. It was just the kind of intellectual game that Menosky was fond of playing and what made it so memorable was that it completely played with Star Trek's established structure. What might have once been a fifth act climax was instead plopped down into the middle of the third act and the story went someplace else entirely after that. Compared to where Star Trek scripts are now, it may seem tame by comparison, but at the time it signaled a significant change in direction for the show.

Piller, Executive Producer Rick Berman and Taylor couldn't have been more pleased. Later in the fourth season, Menosky's rewrite of "Clues" aired and he worked on "First Contact" and "In Theory." At the same time, another new kid on the block, Brannon Braga came to Star Trek as an intern. Braga's application had caught Piller's eye for two reasons -- he wrote a pretty good Star Trek script and he had flunked Human Sexuality at UC Santa Cruz. The fledging writer quickly got up to speed on "Reunion" and Braga and Menosky began a friendship that lasts to this day.

"They bonded in the early, early days," recalls former ST: TNG and Voyager Executive Producer Jeri Taylor. "When Brannon's tenure as an intern ended, I remember Joe saying he missed him. That actually got me thinking of the plan to hire Brannon. He and Joe were nothing alike whatsoever, but they seemed to fill each other out in some ways. They developed a very strange and symbiotic relationship."

Piller and Berman led the fifth season writing staff of Taylor, Menosky, Braga, Moore and Peter Allan Fields into exciting and uncharted Star Trek territory, introducing Ensign Ro, bringing Leonard Nimoy's Spock (and Denise Crosby's Sela) back for "Unification," and letting Braga loose on such stories as "Cause and Effect."

Menosky seemed to make it a personal mission to take Star Trek writing conventions and turn them on their heads, especially with stories like "Darmok" in which the writer didn't just write a script but created an entire language. "Joe is a brilliant, brilliant person," says Taylor. "I mean that both in the sense of education and native intelligence as well as creativity. His mind worked in ways that none of ours did."

Menosky marched through scripts like "Hero Worship" and "Conundrum" as he and Piller began to make their way toward the season finale, "Time's Arrow, Part I." When ST: TNG launched into season six with "Time's Arrow, Part II," former New York waiter Rene Echevarria and Science Advisor Naren Shankar had joined the staff. The stride the staff had started to hit back in season four really clicked in through season six.

But the years on staff had taken Menosky away from his first love, which was scholarly research. He slipped away to go live near family in Italy and devote himself to long hours studying, eventually penning a mini-series about the Italian Renaissance. Back home Jeri Taylor took ST: TNG through its seventh and final season using Menosky as a free-lancer on "Interface" and then "Masks."

"Masks" was a typical Menosky script much like "Muse," a story full of the writer's love of mythology, archetypes and intellectual puzzles. An examination of Data's possession and the ship's transformation by the mythic gods of another race, "Masks" gave Menosky room to march to that individual drummer that the staff had grown to know and love.

When Berman, Taylor and Piller launched Star Trek: Voyager, they had Braga and other talent to draw on but Taylor always missed Joe Menosky. He returned in the new show's second season because, as Taylor said, "we all implored him to." The timing was perfect as Taylor herself finally contemplated retirement from the Hollywood scene and the Star Trek pressure cooker. Incoming Executive Producer Braga needed a lieutenant and Menosky was it. "He became my right hand man," says Braga of Menosky's eventual ascension to Co-Executive Producer, "especially helping with the immense amount of rewriting Voyager takes. He has a kind of crazy, genius mind that brought a unique perspective to the show."

Braga cites as the high points of his work with Menosky on ST: VOY the big two-part "mini-movies" they started churning out -- "Future's End," "Year of Hell," and "The Killing Game." "Joe is very literate," says Braga, "worldly, knows a great deal about history and art and philosophy. We were very much on the same wavelength in many ways. It was fun working on those two-parters, like writing a movie but we had to do them in two weeks. We were a good team."

While Menosky would go on to write or co-write "Latent Image," "Dark Frontier," "11:59," "Equinox, "Blink of an Eye," and others, it was his work on Voyager's 100th episode, "Timeless," that Braga called "perfect." Starting with Braga's vision of the ship trapped in ice, Menosky felt that "Timeless" had all the great elements of Voyager's new style -- minimal dialogue, startling imagery, and Menosky's personal favorite, a great crash sequence.

Having already slipped back to Italy to return to his much beloved research, Joe Menosky himself was not available to comment on his long Star Trek career. Of his going, however, Jeri Taylor had this to say: "I can't speak highly enough about him. His unique sensibility was particularly suited to Star Trek and some of its loveliest, most lyric episodes have emanated from him. He is steeped in mythology, and found the most elegant ways to use that knowledge to formulate fascinating, intriguing stories. He will be sorely missed."

Ciao, Mr. Menosky.

IMDB page here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0579775/

Wikipedia page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Menosky

Memory Alpha page: http://www.memory-alpha.org/en/index.php/Joe_Menosky
includes a photo