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a life outlook?
i dont have one.
i have processes that are important to me, so i do them.
i try to protect them as well, but with variable success.
if there is a disposition or idea at the heart of these processes, i guess it'd look like this: discipline at the level of routine or structure; openness to emergent possibilities in the doing. attention to craft throughout--precision, detail. if you're going to try to do new things, precision is fundamental. it has to be clear on its own terms, whatever it is. clarity is linked to structure. structure is enabled by clarity.
learn your own system characteristics--which ones to fight, which ones to accept and accomodiate. i am not a terribly organized person, for example. i keep thinking that i should organize stuff around me more, but i dont do it.
life outlook...protect what you are doing. the cultural order within which we operate is not a rational place. protect what you do, then. protect it so that you can keep going. what matters is that you keep going.
i dont share the committments to "science" that alot of folk have expressed so far--not that i dont believe there is science, or that it cannot know about phenomena, but more because like any formal system, each scientific procedure is not closed (in the way mathematics systems are not closed---godel's theorem applies to most forms of knowledge. it is entirely possible to be interested in what is discovered or known and not take seriously all the claims about what is doscovered or known. galileo wrote in "the assayer" that he found an inverse ratio between what people actually know and the claims they make: they less the know, the more sure they are, the more sweeping the claims. the more they know, the more cautious the claims.
i think it's like that, these beliefs in "science", these assumptions about what it does, what its for. science is no more separate from other areas of social being than the economy is separate from other areas of social life. it is not a space that generates "objectivity" that enables anyone to hitch themselves to it at the level of claims as a device to get them off the hook: we are embedded phenomena, recursion does not get your outside of your own embeddeness necessarily--more often it simply repeats the parameters of one's embeddedness in the social-historical.
faced with stuff like that, you just move. you do what you do. you try to be clear. you try to keep going. it doesnt really matter what people think of it, or of what you produce through it. just make stuff and keep going.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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