If you are a person, the pages written for you are at jerroldmcgrath.com/people. Back to Form 1
JERROLD McGRATH: THE RECORD
6. Books, continued (part 3 of 4)
In Praise of Disorder, chapters 7 and 8. Continued from part 2.
In Praise of Disorder, full text (continued)
7. Interrupt
Rage, in the strong sense, is more than an affective state. It means the ca- pacity or power to interrupt existing conditions and bring about new ones.
~ Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm
Those that have visited will tell you that Montréal is a place where cul- ture comes and meets you on the street. While some cities ask that you buy an expensive ticket and make your way into some architecturally significant concrete bunker deep downtown, culture in Montréal overflows. Celebration, creation, and beauty fills its parks, roads, paths, and shopping areas. Montréal’s Quartier des spectacles sits at the centre of this activity and is acknowledged as the city’s preeminent cultural district. Open spaces and constant activity ensure a steady flow of visitors.
On a 170-metre-long strip of concrete between two busy roads, the Avenue du Président-Kennedy and Boulevard de Maisonneuve Ouest, can be found the Promenade des Artistes. This underused land serves as a partition between a major music complex and a renowned science faculty. Traditionally, it is a place to cross over, rather than a place in which to linger. However, at a certain time of the year, this strip is home to an unusual collection of twenty-one swings that are often heard before they are seen.
Each of the swings represents a musical instrument—vibraphone, harp, piano, guitar—signified by the color of the swing. When the swings are in mo- tion, musical notes are played, governed by how high a person can swing. The instruments are distributed among the three swing sets, allowing for different combinations to be tested and refined.
When those using the swings synchronize their motions, complex melodies emerge. However, this requires that people, sometimes strangers, communi- cate to align their efforts. The formerly abandoned space bustles with life when the swings are there, usually starting in the spring. Children and seniors, locals and tourists, all are engaged in play and laughter.
The creators are the renowned design firm, Daily tous les jours, whose hope it was to inspire new rituals and to reward cooperation through a physical and social interruption of shared space. The swings have travelled around the world. In each city, there is clear evidence that this interruption in an otherwise abandoned space creates conditions for new relationships, and connections to place to emerge. Research funded by the Knight Foundation has focused on how the swings inspire isolated communities to come together, reinhabiting abandoned spaces. When strangers talk, success is achieved. Even in the rain and wind, people spend hours at the site, often returning again and again to attempt new combinations with new players.
Daily tous les jours has found that interrupting the day-to-day lives of pas- sers-by need not be an abrupt or unpleasant experience, but the work requires a professional rigour married to deep compassion. Human beings are remark- able sense-makers. We are constantly scanning our environment, determining what things mean, then responding accordingly. A nasty glare from a security guard lets us know to avoid a particular route. A dotted line painted on the ground tells us where we should walk. An outdoor ashtray suggests that this might be an appropriate place to smoke or a place to avoid if you are bothered by the smell of tobacco. The material world and the cues of others tell us how we are meant to show up and which behaviours are and are not acceptable.
Often, this interpretive work is done unconsciously. Spaces are full of signals and symbols that we process without a second thought. Some respons- es are so habitual that even when the space is altered, we continue as if noth- ing has changed. Our understanding of the sociocultural world around us is informed by the behaviours modelled by others, formal requirements, rewards, praise, infrastructure, and material symbols, both natural and designed. The Promenade des Artistes, prior to the installation of the swings, was a barren strip of concrete. A new arrival might have noticed the lack of seating, the fact that no one else was stopping, the cars whizzing by on either side, and conclud- ed that this was a place to move through quickly.
In the West, our conceptions of space are usually Euclidean. That is, we have come to understand space in geometric terms. A space has a set of di- mensions and is located within larger spaces that can also be described by their own length and width and depth. Within the space, there are objects whose positions can be clearly and precisely mapped. Other cultures less beholden to Euclidean ideas have different conceptual models and approaches. In Japan, there are at least four words for space, and each reflects different ways in which our environments shape the activities that happen within them.
We explored the idea of Ma previously. Another Japanese concept, angli- cized as Wa, relates to how different contexts prefigure the human relation- ships and interactions available to people. Entry into a teahouse, as we have seen, requires navigation of a series of unevenly distributed steps winding through a garden or field of bamboo prior to arriving at the front entrance. The steps ask that the walker’s attention be directed to their feet, and to prepare for the experience of the tea. They can choose to think about other things, but this might lead to a fall. The teahouse’s low and narrow entry historically served to oblige those carrying weapons to remove them. Individuals of all stations would need to bow to enter. To appreciate the tea requires focus and surren- der to the act of making and drinking it. The architecture and interactions are designed to support the mental state necessary to do so.
This is not anachronistic or purely historical. In the Japanese language, there is a shorthand expression that came out of texting to describe individuals that are unable to interpret the social and materials cues around them. KY is short for kuuki yomenai, which literally means that someone is unable to “read the air.” In English, we might say that someone’s head is in the clouds or that they are oblivious. There are many references across cultures to how we make sense of the world and the challenges that arise when we ignore the signals around us.
Whether we are aware of our surroundings or not, the cues we respond to structure our own interactions and those of others. The way in which I read and interpreted the Promenade des Artistes when I first encountered it prompted haste as I moved through that space. Lingering didn’t seem like an appropriate response but, had I seen others lingering, I would have started to reas- sess my motives and intentions. When I am out at night, an unlit alley might offer a more direct route to my destination, but I refrain from entering it.
Systems are enacted through interactions and our subjective interpretations and feelings. These inform the routines of everyday life. When I see seven players and six chairs, I conclude that aggression and speed will be necessary to secure a seat. Perhaps I enjoy the competition and participate with enthusi- asm. Perhaps I prefer gentler games and find a way to remove myself from the event. Perhaps I see birds with metal rings around their necks and I interpret this practice as cruel.
We often make our own contributions to the possible interactions and feelings experienced in spaces without reflecting on how our decisions will be interpreted. We are not acting from a place of moral intention, but our choices have moral consequences. If I organize a community meeting and place my chair and table apart from those invited, I run the risk that people will think that I am trying to elevate my own role and voice. I may inadvertently signal to others that my knowledge is privileged, and this will shape my own par- ticipation and that of the community members from whom I wish to hear. The same set of chairs arranged in a circle will signal something else to both me and others.
An automated teller at a grocery store lets us know that social interactions are unnecessary or unwanted, while the uniformed staff member standing nearby, watching the various machines and their users, suggests that we are not fully trusted. The radiation readings distributed by the Japanese govern- ment signal the immutability of the data to worried mothers. They also suggest the government’s preference for experts to gather and finalize what is known about the world and to assess whether a place is safe for children to play.
Of course, the ways we interpret our environments are informed by our experiences. A world designed for scale works perfectly well for many people and is oppressive for others. A building that I find familiar and welcoming might seem hostile to someone who relies on a different set of stories to make sense of their environment. While supporting healthcare projects in Alberta, Canada, I worked with survivors of residential schools. These institutions were a network of mandatory boarding schools run by the Church on behalf of the federal government. Their intention was to remove Indigenous children from their own culture and to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Unsurprisingly, survivors expressed reticence about entering hospitals or other medical institutions unless the need was overwhelming. The architecture and routines too closely resembled their experiences as children.
We can try to ignore the expectations embedded in the spaces we occupy. But, as we’ve seen, there is often a price to pay. We can refuse to play the game but then risk scorn, violence, illness, or attempts to control us. Over time, designed environments come to reflect a dominant ideology about how they are meant to be used. Potato monocultures or automated cashiers reflect the assumptions of the broader culture about what is valued and what is unnec- essary. Deviations from this imposed pattern are met with efforts to restore order. Those efforts might be informal—shaking heads, angry looks, facetious questions, comments, and observations—or they might involve more direct applications of power.
Power is a thing we talk about a lot but often struggle to pin down. We are immersed in power but cannot hold it in our hands or trace its strings back to a single source. Power is manifest through various means: the hidden nudges of automated systems, the social condemnation of others, physical barriers, and violence. Maps on our portable devices nudge us toward the commercial inter- ests of the host platform. The old man talking to the cashier will hear the sighs of frustration from those behind him in the line. Park benches are designed to prevent those most in need from sleeping on them.
While efforts at order shape how a space will be used, violence evacuates it, sometimes even annihilates it. Power determines how a space ought to be used. Control ensures that individuals align their behaviour with those expecta- tions. Violence is the extreme application of control, removing the possibility to act autonomously.
A portfolio of approaches to control have developed over time to establish and maintain order. Historically, each offered diminishing returns as insti- tutional ambitions scaled. As it grew, the Roman Church was frustrated by contingency as distinct communities expressed their relationship to the world around them in idiosyncratic and inconsistent ways. The Church and subse- quent institutions of control found, though, that entropy of communities and systems was reduced when individuals in those spaces voluntarily acquiesced and shifted the costs of entropy on to themselves and their inner lives. This was made possible through the institutionalization of confession, the cen- trality of oaths in recognizing important events, and as organizing values for education and social services.
Our willingness to accept control, and even violence, comes from a sense that those scripting these interactions have the rightful authority to do so.
Control is symbolically mediated and, as long as a group or institution is understood to have a legitimate right to enforce order, things proceed most- ly without pause. However, automated systems are often invisible, limiting our ability to assess their legitimacy. Often, we are unaware that control is being exerted in the first place.
Some would argue that transparency is the key to interrogating these patterns in our lives. Sunshine disinfects. Once the instruments of control are made visible, we can assess their legitimacy. However, we have seen that under the dictate of transparency, dissonant opinions or unusual ideas are not shared for fear of the social and moral evaluation of others. When we internalize the dictates of the social order as a matter of conscience, we take on the work of policing control for ourselves and others on behalf of these larger systems. We have the feeling of being watched because we are being watched by all those that believe that social control is a moral duty. Bentham’s panopticon has been constructed through our digital and social lives and we must be wary of what we share.
If lingering allows for the process of categorization to be slowed, directing attention toward observational habits, then interruption is the practice of refus- ing existing interpretations in order to bring about something new. While the practice of lingering allows us to settle into events in different ways, interrup- tion tries to bring about their completion.
Specifically, interruption is an approach to design and interaction that draws attention to the unspoken assumptions and habitual patterns that define our world. It also creates the potential for uncertainty and wonder that allows for something new to emerge. The practice focuses on introducing new feel- ings to increase the likelihood of new behaviours and ideas coming forward.
One of the great joys of being alive is that each of us will respond to an intervention in our own way. For this reason, interruption is iterative, as we cannot control or even predict how others will respond to the choices we make. I may fervently wish for my daughter to be safe and happy. In service of that goal, I make frequent mistakes, occasionally provoking responses that are far from what I seek. Either I can learn and improve my ability to create conditions supportive of safety and joy or I can continue applying the same tactics, mov- ing further and further from my goal. Daily tous les jours hoped that pas- sers-by might stop and play, might connect with strangers and make music, but this required a testing of their own assumptions over many months and with multiple collaborators.
A Framework for Interruption
Interruption is a practice that helps create conditions where others can experience productive uncertainty and awe. While lingering allows for exist- ing boundaries and categories to dissolve and decompose, interruption draws attention to existing routines and replaces them with something else. Like the door to the tea house and the end of the uneven path, we can create breaks in the narrative that disorder the route we’ve taken and suggest that other paths might be possible.
- We may lack the skills to build a swing set in a busy downtown corridor, but each of us has the ability to structure interactions in service of new ways of experiencing the world. A simple set of questions can be asked in almost any social situation:
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How do I want to feel?
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How do I want others to feel?
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How does the current context make us feel?
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If necessary, what interactions might support a different experience of this moment?
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What behaviours, symbols, actions, or ideas might facilitate those interactions?
A job interview can be intensely intimidating. The applicant enters a room.
The interviewers are already seated on one side of the table. The applicant approaches the table, assesses the right form of greeting and then sits down. Between them and the role is a rectangle of wood. The conversation is mostly driven by those with the power to decide.
A colleague of mine walked me through her decision-making in an effort to interrupt this routine. She was being interviewed for a senior role with a cultur- al funder in Canada. The interview was as I described above. She found herself nervous and unable to bring her best self forward. So, she decided to make some changes. Before the questioning could begin, she mentioned that she was a member of the Michipicoten First Nation and that, in her community, con- versations often happened in circles. She asked the two interviewers if one of them would mind moving to the short end of the rectangular table so that they would be arranged as a triangle rather than across a table. They agreed and one of the interviewers moved their chair. The impact was clear. All three relaxed, and the question-and-answer structure quickly became a discussion, with the two interviewers engaging each other as well as the applicant.
Even small changes in context can have dramatic implications for how an event is experienced. We don’t need swings, but we do need to have a voice regarding how the world around us is organized. My colleague was offered the job, but she left the organization just over a year later. Some routines as a government funder were beyond her ability to transform. Nevertheless, she continues in her professional and social interactions to draw on the values that she holds dear and that are central to her community.
Interruption happens both when we intervene in a system and when we debate the novelty and appropriateness of that intervention. While a commu- nity might ultimately determine that fishing with birds is inappropriate, the existence of an alternative disorders ossified routines. Completely new ideas are necessary to challenge the moral assumptions that underpin our activities. With- out them, we experience an unaltered sameness. We can trawl the sea with better nets but then the underlying beliefs in growth and efficiency remain unchallenged.
The massive challenges we face as a planet will require interruptions. Much like lingering, interruption is too often interpreted as something inherently negative. Disorder invites us to reconsider the conceptual categories that we use to describe experience. Events that slow or stop us fail the efficiency test, yet they are essential. To carry on as we have been doing since the start of in- dustrialization will do little to pull us back from the threats of climate change, inequality, or authoritarianism.
Hannah Arendt argued that new beginnings, from the perspective of the systems they interrupt, can only be understood as a miracle, as another source of wonder. Moreover, she saw this capacity to generate miracles as entirely human and the source of all freedom.
What usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the faculty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source... of all great and beautiful things.
An interruption can be seen through two distinct but essential lenses: the generative and the selective. Interruptions are generative in that they introduce new and original ideas, enabling us to respond to the world around us in differ- ent ways. Someone who hates musical chairs ought to have a few other games to recommend if they hope to enjoy their time at a birthday party. My colleague disliked the structure of interviews and had a substitute ready. Cultures de- termine the appropriateness of different approaches over time. Those that are deemed useful are preserved.
Algorithmic systems are active in both these categories. The dominant ide- ology pre-programmed into most automated systems elevates scale. New ideas that prioritize other values, such as compassion or reciprocity, will face signif- icant obstacles to being seen in the first place. Despite considerable novelty, there will be bias in favour of the moral positions around which institutions and technologies have been organized. Many companies now record interviews on video cameras and depend on artificial intelligence to assess candidates’ facial expressions and body language. Beyond the discomfiting assumptions this practice involves, it also presents mechanical barriers to interruption. In such a situation, it is likely that a request to change the seating arrangements would be refused. Camera placement would supersede the human desires of both interviewers and interviewee.
Selection pressures are even more pronounced. Algorithmic systems are extremely good at categorizing, sorting, and selecting. Experiences that require reflection or multiple exposures are algorithmically eliminated before human tests of appropriateness can occur.
Most cultures have understood the importance of sudden breaks and have elevated these interruptions in mythological terms. Mystification of newness can hinder our understanding of interruption. However, there is a need to con- front new beginnings from a place of wonder.
Plato explored these themes in the language of enthoysiasmos, which translates as the “spirit of God within.” He also associated creation with mania, or the idea of ecstasy. A creator overflows with spirit, their creativity extend- ing from a disordered ecstasy. The story of the unappreciated genius may be unhelpful in understanding how new ideas emerge. Yet it reflects how Western cultures have mythologized the importance of interruption and the individual willing to work outside of cultural expectations, imagining a new foundation for collective action.
In The Creative Mind, Margaret Boden distinguishes between P-creativity, which relates to personal or psychological creativity, and H-creativity, which relates to historical creativity. Others talk about “Big C” creativity to refer to socially embedded practices and “little c” creativity to discuss the quotidian or internal versions. Interruption can take either form, although we tend to focus on the small, everyday acts of interruption that suggest other ways of being.
The Daily tous les jours swings occupy a sort of middle ground where the accu- mulated moments of individual interruption possess the potential to transform a space and those that make use of it.
We can understand interruption culturally. Interruption can have a trans- formative impact on individual knowledge, modes of action, ideas, values, and attitudes. Through repetition, it can transform the broader operation of a system. New solutions become possible, but interruption requires awareness and adoption of new ideas by individuals and social groups. Rather than an individual act or expression, it should be understood as a socially, historically, and culturally embedded practice.
Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat are the founders of Daily tous les jours. I spoke with Mouna about their work and their practice, and she outlined a process of “getting people to change how they perceive their environment and how they perceive each other.” The work is also deeply embedded in a desire to interrupt the narratives we hold about ourselves and the spaces we occupy. The design firm’s mission has long been to “give people a voice in the stories being told around them.” Mouna argues that there is a Trojan Horse aspect to the work they do. A series of “delicate gestures” invite strangers into new relation- ships with each other and with the world around them. These delicate gestures are developed through a rigorous process of experimentation and prototyping.
Interruption is particularly effective in responding to efficiency, as efficient systems often depend on human beings willing to tolerate the demands of their design. The General Motors (GM) assembly facility in Lordstown, Ohio, was considered state of the art when it was brought online in 1966. Every step, every movement, had been broken down and optimized, in the same way that Amazon monitors the micro-movements of its warehouse staff. GM ensured that things were well-lit and well-ventilated. Floors were clean and muzak coun- teracted most of the mechanical noise. The tempo of work required, however, was without precedent.
In 1972, defective GM Chevrolet vehicles consistently came off the line with torn upholstery, among other issues. The causes were both human and mechanical, and in some cases may have been the result of sabotage, as had been the case the previous year with a fire in an assembly-line control box. The cost to GM over just three weeks was estimated at $150 million. Management theorist Peter Drucker argued that the required increase in production line speed had contributed to resistance and the ensuing problems, but workers themselves maintained that their omission from process design had escalated their sense of frustration and helplessness. Algorithmic culture increasingly de- mands that human beings accommodate the needs of systems set up to scale, but it refuses them any say in how they operate. Since industrialization, there has been a long and successful tradition of interrupting the machine.
The Role of the Individual
Individual ideologies may align with environmental expectations because of sincere agreement, disinterest, inattention, or fear. Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian cultural theorist, highlights the critical differences between official ideologies and the individual positions we hold. In the former, the official position is finalized, achieving a certain rigidity. It is woven into the material structure of the world and can be called forth by anyone who chooses to do so. It is a pre-located discourse, the language of a past that remains present.
Interruption provides the individual with an opportunity to draw atten- tion to this pre-located discourse and to suggest that other values need to be present. As the moral positions of capitalism occupy new spaces, other values are marginalized or excised. Their absence is a collective failure, as values are made manifest through the practice of shaping belief into forms. Ideas about the world are not simply beliefs we hold abstractly. When there is conflict between a pre-located discourse and my own individual preferences, the rigidity of the official ideology often prevails. Just as there is a correct way to use language, there are correct ways to use space or, in the case of lingering, to use time. Similarly, just as slang is a means to refuse officially sanctioned language usage, interruptions serve to refuse the officially sanc- tioned environmental usage.
Desperation for greater certainty afflicts both the technology companies that make use of data extracted from our daily lives and the governments concerned that a promise of a better future may no longer be possible. Official ideologies ossify in service of this greater order and desire for certainty. With interruption and the release of constraints comes entropy and disorder. The work of inter- ruption is to reopen things again and again. More than embracing or settling into uncertainty, this is about creating it. We draw attention to the values embedded in systems and we create breaches for new values to emerge.
As with any practice that implicates other people, we must proceed with caution. Interrupting can lead to liberation, contact, and encounter with oth- ers and the world around us. In excess, it can lead to shock, disruption, and trauma. Trauma might be understood as the excess of experience that we are unable to assimilate. The potential for awe also holds the potential for harm.
As Mouna suggests, “Getting people to change how they perceive their envi- ronment and how they perceive each other is critical to what we’re trying to do.
There need to be bridges to serendipity and opportunities to linger, for taking a detour.” Everything that interrupts a routine makes the potential for an event. Doing this well is difficult.
As previously mentioned, for many years I worked as a program director at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. It was founded in 1933 and, prior to the pandemic, welcomed thousands of artists, leaders, researchers, and others across dozens of disciplines to over one hundred different programs each year. My responsibility at the Centre was to create conditions for individuals and communities with wildly different interests and expertise to come together and create. The projects I led focused on issues relating to Indigenous leadership, creative education, organization in the creative sector, entrepreneurship, innovation, and other broad, cross-sector, socio-economic issues.
Programming at the Banff Centre had long integrated a practice of inter- ruption to trigger the sense-making capacities of participants. Direct experi- ences of art and nature paired with structured reflection obliged participants to make sense of what was happening. Through the reorganization of conceptual categories, they could draw on new stories to explain the world and diverse solutions to address intransigent issues. The aim was to liberate them from the relentless pace of their lives outside the Centre.
Our methodology was based on a hermeneutic approach. This presented a marked departure from traditional pedagogies in other post-secondary and professional environments. Traditional methods involve figuring out what kinds of competencies and behaviours are best suited to success in a particular field, then providing training and simulation to build up these skills. A compe- tency-based approach is appropriate to an environment experiencing minimal change with a consistent and predictable structure. A hermeneutic approach, relying on interruptions and encounters with hard to process experiences, assumes unstable environments that rely on the individual’s capacity to make sense of events and respond accordingly.
In 2012, the Centre began to focus on how the application of creativity could support collaborative solutions directed at real-world challenges. Behind this change in direction was an assumption that future breakthroughs would come from multidisciplinary coalitions. The role of interruptions was still central, but rather than prioritizing individual experiences and sense-making, partic- ipants were engaged in collective activities that asked individuals to interpret and integrate diverse perspectives into their meaning-making approaches. Art and nature remained central to triggering a sense of wonder. Opportunities to develop intimacy and engagement with other worldviews added another layer.
For example, we hosted Hope Decoded, a week-long residency focused on the issue of hope and hopelessness across a range of sectors. We convened Indigenous leaders, frontline workers, philosophers, researchers, technolo- gists, and others. We tasked them with supporting four partner organizations working around issues of homelessness, environmental sustainability, LG- BTQ+ rights, and Indigenous families in crisis. Participants were exposed to surprising interventions that interrogated routine patterns of sense-making and problem-solving. They spent time in nature, in a jazz club, in dance, and in contexts for which their habitual patterns were inadequate. They were also forced to accommodate individuals with wildly different worldviews and experi- ences, developing understanding of their collaborators’ interiority as a prompt to sense-making. These interruptions allowed for new connections to emerge, and, most importantly, for solutions to be developed and carried forward.
This approach to interruption and renewal was formalized through a concept called MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics). I have contributed several chapters in both academic and non-academic publications outlining the approach though the original framing is not mine. MDA is indebted to video game design and research, particularly the work of Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubec. MDA was initially articulated as a way to ensure coherence in created environments. Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubec suggest that “thinking about games as designed artifacts helps frame them as systems that build behavior via interaction.” A designer will want a game or environment to feel a particular way and MDA provides a framework to ensure that this feels consistent across users and interactions. MDA can also be used to explore how existing systems are constructed and how their hegemonic operation can be disordered.
The rules of a space—whether spoken, unspoken, material, or contextu- al—serve to map out the types of choices available to people in a system. These are the mechanics of the model. People make choices and act. The interactions among people and between people and the environments in which they find themselves are known as dynamics. An abandoned slice of concrete suggests certain choices. The presence of swings playing music suggests a different set of potential responses. When I stop and begin to explore the swings, I learn that I can unlock special musical features with the cooperation of others. This mechanism incentivizes me to connect with other users and to experiment, learning what the swings are capable of producing.
How I experience these dynamics is referred to as aesthetics. If I enjoy the interruption, the interaction with others, the creation of sound, then I will continue to commit time and energy to the swings. If I prefer my streets quiet and solitary, I will choose a different route. If an interviewer prefers a more conversational interview where each participant has equal status in how space is allocated, they may persist with that structure. If they prefer separation and a clear hierarchy of power, the official ideology will return in future interviews, with candidates and interviewees positioned on opposite sides of the table.
Official ideologies tend to limit the range of interactions available in most designed environments. The MDA model provides a structure for supporting people as they seek to break away from ossified routines, allow- ing their decisions to open up new possibilities. Participants co-create the experience of a space, interrogating the underlying assumptions that surround them. Daily tous les jours had an idea about how they wanted people to feel. They then imagined different interactions that would facilitate the sense of play, wonder, and connection they sought. From there, they developed the mechanics of the swing set and tested their efficacy in generating the dynamics of the work.
All of this, as Mouna outlines, is in service of “improving or contributing to improving quality of life for people in urban contexts that are increasingly becoming less about the human experience.” Success is when the changes brought about have the potential to become permanent, or “when something starts becoming a part of a place and they’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always there.” They seek a shift in the official ideology, an interruption of pre-located discourse and its replacement with one or many other options.
Mouna relates what happened when the swings were located briefly in West Palm Beach.
The swings were in a parking lot in an area of downtown which had gone through a phase of being abandoned. It had become a dangerous locale, and many would not go there. We interviewed a twenty-something man who thanked us for bringing the swings. He told us that West Palm Beach is very divided economically with one of the most expensive zip codes in Palm Beach right next to this very poor community. There, a person’s zip code clearly signals their economic and social status. He ex- plained that people didn’t mix, except when the swings were in town. He found the experience of people from different backgrounds coming together very touching.
If a social context exists through its interactions, then the design needs to prioritize the nature and experience of those interactions. We tend to focus on mechanics, on what we want people to do and what needs to be done. We want the payment process at supermarkets to go faster and more efficiently, so we introduce mechanics that enable this. We need more fish to feed more people, so we build enormous factory ships that scrape the ocean clean of life. We want the assembly line to produce cars at an unprecedented rate, so we organize the space to that end. We keep the grain for ourselves and adapt the land to accommodate the needs of a potato monoculture. Too often, though, we fail to consider how human beings experience these systems.
To interrupt these systems, we need to focus on people’s feelings. The old cliché — “People don’t remember what you say, but how you make them feel”
— holds true. Mouna elaborates:
We can’t decide what people feel. We can try to invite them to act in a certain way by creating interfaces and invitations that are as clear as possible. And also, by provid- ing them opportunities to engage at different levels based on their comfort. So, all our work is designed in a way that both the passer-by or the one who just wants to watch is as valuable and critical to the overall experience as the one who’s a repeat user who knows all the secret tricks. Designing for that variety of experiences is one thing that we do. By being there, interacting, reacting to something that we create, you start paying attention. You realize that you can have a role to play. We hope that this will open up a little door in people’s minds, suggesting that they can become bigger and more active participants in other things pertaining to where they live and the society they’re in. So, it’s a tiny bubble that is a metaphor for how people can be in the world in general.
Our Role in Society
All acts of human creation are both collaborative and social. We draw on our collective culture to imagine new approaches and we receive feedback on whether our offer is appropriate to the job we have given it.
The ability to create something new, particularly in the West, has long been mythologized as the work of a lone genius whose ideas irrevocably interrupt the status quo. This romantic idea holds up poorly to deeper study. Today, creativity is generally understood as a sociocultural activity bringing forward innovations, novel approaches, and solutions. Novelty and appropriateness are, of course, highly contextual. Using cormorants to catch fish would hardly be seen as original in Japan but would appear quite remarkable to a Canadian unfamiliar with the practice. Similarly, potatoes plucked from the Andes might once have seemed an appropriate solution to feed the Irish people without having to give up any of the more financially valuable grain but, in light of the blight that subsequently affected the crop, such an approach would now be thought of as misguided.
In Why Voice Matters, media scholar Nick Couldry argues that voice “is an irreducible part of what it means to be human; effective voice (the effective op- portunity to have one’s voice heard and taken into account) is a human good.” Across economic, political, and cultural life, however, we are too often denied the value of voice and “insist instead on the primacy of market functioning.” As we saw in previous chapters, moreover, when a system becomes suitably complex, the human dimension often becomes another problem to be solved. To maintain order, increasing investments of energy are required, and there is a tendency to select against the ambiguous and unsettling.
The official ideology is bolstered by a power to declare. A police officer can declare me under arrest and the world changes as a result. A municipal gov- ernment draws the line between the acceptable and the unacceptable, drawing on the state’s monopoly on violence to ensure that the lines are obeyed. Max Weber, in his lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” defined the state as a body that “successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” The state both co-authors and upholds the official ideology. There can be no interruptions in a monoculture. Technology companies ban their customers from repairing and upgrading the hardware that they own, just like Monsanto bans farmers from replanting the patented seeds that they grow. There are real dangers that arise from an excess of order, particularly when that order is narrowly defined in service of growth and efficiency. At a social level, interruption provides the discursive resources to make new things possible.
How might we allow for more voices to be heard? Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire argues that a culture of silence can cause the “dominated individu- als [to] lose the means by which to critically respond to the culture that is forced on them by a dominant culture.” Language ceases to be subversive if we never hear it. There are significant pressures to conform and confirm official ideol- ogies. Interruption can become a moral duty when the official ideology proves unable to meet the human needs of the culture it exists within. Byung-Chul Han, in the Topology of Violence, writes of the urge to validate our systems, arguing that we tend to affirm and perpetuate power relations when electing to do “what is respectable.”
Yugoslav politician Milovan Đilas witnessed the power of disinterest and disengagement in eroding the communist system. He described this “slow, unproductive work of disinterested millions” as “the incalculable, invisible, and gigantic waste which no communist regime has been able to avoid.” Yet our current order relies on disinterest and disengagement for its success. The invisible urging of automated systems depends upon a willingness to confirm the “respectable.” We do the work of internalizing official ideologies as a matter of conscience and the systems operate autonomously of our will or intentions.
For Nietzsche, the original art is the art of the festival. To him, festival represents the interruption of the everyday, when the passing of ordinary time is suspended. At a social level, might ideas of carnival and festival provide the necessary interruptions for a collective interrogation of shared routines and official ideologies? Might the politics of play serve as a hedge against the moral assumptions of growth and efficiency?
Carnival
With The Power of the Powerless, playwright and politician Václav Havel examined themes of power and freedom. Havel argued for “living in truth” and denying the lies of dominant ideologies. He wanted to shatter “the world of ‘appearances’,” revealing the true nature of power. But Havel was cautious of those who believed in an “ideal project” and their right to impose it on others, arguing that individuals should have the agency to “decide what he or she will or will not take from their experience and work.”
We have also seen how difficult living in truth becomes in a culture administered by automated systems that remove the possibility of encoun- tering different truths in the first place. Living in truth requires cracks or unoccupied spaces in the existing structure where new behaviours might be demonstrated. The West has exported a structure of control that asks individ- uals to internalize the moral duty of defending the existing social structure.
We moved from communal confession to private confession, from communal belonging to allegiance to a national identity, from authoring systems to being authored by the systems that bring us our material well-being. The bounding of culture, both physical and digital, means that any efforts at living in truth will resonate with those living similar truths while remaining hidden from those that might gain from our efforts.
Totalitarianism was always deemed unimaginable because of the incredi- ble energy and effort required to maintain it. As social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff offers in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, it “requires henchmen, and their henchmen, and their henchmen, all willing to roll up both sleeves and thrust both hands into the blood and shit of actual living persons whose bodies stink and sweat and cry out in terror, grief, and pain.” Our henchmen are now digital. Although their touch has been relatively light to date, the potential to impose a truth remains the fear for many. Collective behaviours are being manipulated and the means of interrupting this process seems chimeric.
The years of suspicion that replaced the initial excitement of the Com- munist Revolution and the foundation of the Soviet Union shaped the ap- proach Bakhtin took in sharing his ideas and the caution he brought to the work. He garnered attention late in his life and many of his ideas, which cover a wide range of themes, often filtered through a literary lens, were unknown outside the Soviet Union for decades.
Bakhtin’s notion of carnival is a potentially useful framework as it relates to a profoundly interruptive and creative event. In carnival, there is no outside, with everyone involved as participants. The intention is to provide an embod- ied transcendence of the individual and cultural rules that govern society. For Bakhtin, “carnival travesties: it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank, exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense.”
Culturally, we are losing many of our opportunities for carnival in its purest sense. Carnival has traditionally served as a literal interruption of everyday life. Official ideologies and the “sacred” are stripped of all power. Activities of the body and the earth are elevated. The high is brought low, and blasphemy and obscenity are encouraged.
Bakhtin wrote that carnival and its sense of the world “is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness, which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order.” Individual ideologies become equal in importance to of- ficial ideologies in that both are meaningless. The priority is on those aspects of human life that are “identical, involuntary and non-negotiable,” such as eating, drinking, reproduction, and defecation.
As a practice, carnival has four characteristics according to Bakthin:
The process of change is celebrated in carnival, rather than what is being changed. The space created and the interruption of existing social orders allow for something new to emerge. One could imagine that carnival served that very function. Even under the most ossified of structures, the presence of carnival gave permission to imagine other ways of being.
Today, it appears that the original meaning of carnival is frequently forgot- ten. There are few spaces without consequences, where we need to rely on our community to keep us safe and to embrace and celebrate our natural urges and bodily functions. Events such as Burning Man in the United States attempt to recapture the spirit of carnival, but even these are constrained by rules.
Our modern carnival replaces the rigidity of one order with that of another in service of different ends. Carnival is a physical and temporal space of disorder, yet one that is built on laughter. We so often equate the suspension of societal rules with violence and harm, but evidence suggests that left to our own urges, what emerges is joy, celebration, and excess.
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, force-fed to generations of school- children, tells us that the absence of rules leads to violence and fear. When a real version of Golding’s tale did occur, however, the results were far from the horrors related in his novel. In Humankind, Rutger Bregman describes how six boys between the ages of thirteen and sixteen decided to skip school and sail from Tonga to Fiji in 1965. They fell asleep on their first night, finding themselves on a damaged vessel when they awoke. They washed up on an island where they survived for over a year. They were discovered naked, long- haired, but healthy. The man who found the youths wrote in his memoirs that “the boys had set up a small commune with [a] food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire.”
Yes, when rules are suspended, we experience anxiety. We become unsure of what will come next, feeling an urge to finalize the moment, to make sense of what is happening. Official ideologies declare that suspension of order inev- itably leads to violence and harm. When we understand disorder as a practice, then we are better prepared to cultivate small, local instances of disorder, either avoiding profound shocks or becoming more resilient when we encounter them. Disorder is inevitable. It can come either through our own choices or through catastrophic release. Other cultures have recognized this and devel- oped approaches to build comfort and facility in navigating these moments of uncertainty and confusion. However, many of us seem to be actively forgetting these lessons.
The science of complexity demonstrates how simple rules foment emergent properties. Our culture is built around a small number of official ideologies that tell us how to show up and what to do. Interruption enables us to inter-
7 INTERRUPT rogate those rules and to insert new ones that might better serve us as we respond to challenges and seek to survive the relentless pace of life.
Automated systems are quickly learning how to generate the outcomes, often commercial, that their owners seek. This isn’t about brainwashing or conformity, but the need for certainty in a world no longer sure that the future will be an improvement on the present. We are asked to turn ourselves over to these structures, policing ourselves and others to ensure that we deliver.
Zuboff argues that “uncertainty is not chassis but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense.” We are developing routines to survive the near constant assault on our attention. Over time, these routines become ossified. We need to break them up. The content of our interruptions matters less than their existence. Both individually and collectively, we can disorder existing routines to support something new. Like Daily tous les jours, we can extend an invitation to linger and build connections with others. We can allow for new rituals and theories of the world to be present, informing our curiosity and action—just as Haiyan Zhang interrupted the Japanese government’s monopo- ly on sharing radiation levels and created the possibility for mothers to become active participants in measuring the world around them. We can also create the possibility for cultural borders to be enforced and for the relentless encroach- ment of growth and efficiency to be resisted so that communities might contin- ue to fish with birds at night, under burning pine, wearing hats of straw.
8. Ritualize and Theorize
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
— W.H. Auden
Beginning in the 1880s and up until the Second World War, migrant work- ers in the United States created and applied their own secret language, placing markings on civil infrastructure like fences and railway sites to aid one another in finding help or avoiding trouble. Usually, these “hobo” signs would be writ- ten in chalk or coal.
Communities and subcultures have long developed their own systems— slang, hand signals, visual images—to communicate outside of official systems. In 2021, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut and the Canada Council for the Arts, my colleagues and I became curious whether by using local symbolic systems we might enable a fuller picture of technological changes that were underway, providing greater access to conversations about these changes. This project, called “please don’t understand this,” drew on theories and rituals to map out new collective sense-making approaches for issues related to artificial intelligence and algorithmic culture.
Malawi is a nation in Southeastern Africa formerly known as Nyasaland. It is bordered by Zambia, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The country is nicknamed “the warm heart of Africa” because of the friendliness of its people. Dzaleka is the only permanent refugee camp in Malawi and has a population of approx- imately 40,000 refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, and Burundi.
Based in Dzaleka, the Tumaini Festival was founded in 2014 and is a large- scale cultural event created and run by refugees in collaboration with the local community. As part of the 2021 edition, my colleagues and I commissioned art- ists from the refugee camp and the surrounding community to generate their own visual, symbolic languages to represent their fears about, hopes for, and understanding of artificial intelligence.
Concurrently, in Beijing and Cairo, we commissioned similar inquiries. The overall goal was to involve communities most impacted by artificial in- telligence, encouraging them to think and talk about the topic. We also asked the artists to consider how they might let people know that taking or posting a picture could create risks for others and how they could let people know that they were being watched without alerting those doing the watching. The work carried out in Malawi, China, and Egypt was remixed by members of the Cen- tral African, Chinese, and Egyptian diaspora living in Canada.
The language and metaphors we use for AI are almost always drawn from Western frameworks. The project was based on the assumption that we need many ways to see issues if we hope to generate many ways to respond to them. This contrasted with the dominant view that there can only be one “correct” approach, technically accurate and ethically derived, which is administered and disseminated by experts. Emergent ritualistic languages, though, become ways of working outside of established, official ideologies. They communicate with metaphors drawn from the communities themselves.
An anonymous Beijing tattoo artist that participated in the project was a long-term resident of a traditional hutong. Hutong are narrow alleys commonly found in northern China, particularly in Beijing. Neighbourhoods are often formed by connecting hutong together. Around her home, there are many tour- ist spots, and nearby places to eat are usually discovered through an app called “Da Zhong Dian Ping” (“people’s comments”). The app prioritizes whatever locations are trending, often because of paid influencers and advertising, and these quickly become sites where influencers eat and photograph themselves. The prices in these locations are often high because of their popularity.
The artist described the situation as follows:
Long ago, there were no phones or internet, so these restaurants often relied on word of mouth for their advertising. These eateries were an essential part of our social and cultural lives—a place to truly connect with our community. Today, with the emergence of AI marketing, restaurants that actively integrate with the inter- net have gained a serious competitive advantage. The small local restaurants that couldn’t adapt to the shifting technological landscape were forced to close. On the other hand, restaurants that leveraged the promotional power of internet celebrities and social media became famous.
To increase the exposure of their business, many restaurants in China will hire companies to boost their profile on the many social media apps. Companies will use all kinds of marketing methods to attract the attention of the public. Some will even pay for “likes” and positive reviews, propelling themselves to the front of the algorithms. The online marketing space in China is not well regulated, leading to an abundance of misleading and exaggerated advertisements. Many patrons leave feeling disappointed when their meal doesn’t match their expectations. Despite the disappointment, many guests will continue to leave favorable reviews so as not to be rude. This creates a feedback loop where customers continue to be lured in with inflated expectations.
At the same time, the traditional local restaurant hidden in the corner of the hutong has fallen. While focusing on the quality of their menu, they have opted out of social media and put themselves at a disadvantage. Unfortunately, only a small number of nearby residents know about these eateries, while the population at large has no way of discovering their nostalgia-infused fare.
The artist wanted to overcome the invisibility to app users of the small, local restaurants, making people more aware of them as other options to be consid- ered. She created two sets of icons, one for the store fronts and the other one for the staff to wear on their clothing or on their skin as a washable tattoo.
The culture surrounding tattoos has completely changed. Tattoos are now associated with wealth and fashion rather than rebellion and criminal behavior. A good tattoo can be a significant part of someone’s style and help strike up a new conversation.
Tattoos are pieces of art people carry on their skin. It can help express one’s emo- tions and reflect one’s reality.
The icons are small devils that visually reference the app while drawing at- tention to how decisions are being made and who is included or excluded. The little devil can be affixed to the outside of the shop. The number of positive re- views the restaurant has received will be displayed in the upper right corner of the symbol. The hope is to encourage multiple locations to display these icons. Customers can always order from, ask questions of, or seek assistance from someone wearing one of the icons. The intent is to make an analog symbolic system visible among gourmets. True food lovers will see the icon and know that a restaurant has a reputation for outstanding cuisine, instead of inter- net-boosted algorithmic success. The icons are attractive but would be almost impossible to interpret if one were not familiar with the Chinese app ecology. They now serve to interrupt the process of selection and make visible locations rendered invisible by algorithmic systems.
Much of the debate about AI, even within the artistic community, has pri- oritized the exploration of a small number of theoretical, ethical, and ideolog- ical principles and consideration of what should underpin policies and public interest in the deployment of these systems. Overwhelmingly, the ethics that emerge on all sides of the debate centre on Western ideologies and traditions. However, the ultimate objective ought to be effective governance of these extremely powerful tools. Good governance requires meaningful participation from affected communities. Meaningful participation requires literacy to dis- cuss and explore socio-technological systems.
The project team had a theory about how to animate local creators who proposed alternative ways of imagining social and technical changes. We hoped to avoid the dominant assumptions of the West. We then went about testing that theory.
I offer this as an example of how a theory or ritual operating outside of offi- cial ideologies can introduce new ideas and new approaches into our collective culture. It is unlikely that any of these commissioned works will lead to broad change, but they do complicate the stories being told about control and surveil- lance and, more importantly, invite new people to tell those stories.
A practice of lingering helps us collapse into a moment, thereby allowing the categories we apply to fade and flicker. Interrupting lets us insert new cate- gories into routines that have become ossified over time.
Ritualizing and theorizing support the creation of new categories and frameworks for interpretation. Rituals give form to chaos and are a well-es- tablished approach to countenancing disorder. Hegel described ritual as a way to make ourselves a home in the world. Theorizing allows us to set direction in our search for meaning. To take ownership of our rituals and our theories transforms the fundamental assumptions on which our categories are based.
Frequently, they will be found inadequate to the reality of experience, but they allow for new spaces to be discovered and uncovered. Collectively, they offer opportunities to practice being wrong, at least temporarily.
Our relentless embedding of official ideologies in institutions and technol- ogies has led to the professionalization of ritual and theory. Events replete with meaning, such as the passing of a loved one, are turned over to the hands of professionals who enact the gestures but are removed from the experience of loss. Faith systems have traditionally provided some sense of certainty about what will happen to those that have passed. They also provide a set of actions to be followed in order to reveal the event’s meaning, and to support the journey through grief. Faith is playing a lesser role in interpreting the world’s events.
What is taking its place?
Ritual and theory are activities of structured attention. They provide shape to experience. We inherit theories and rituals from our families, schools, com- munities, and culture, and most of them do a good job of describing what is going on. If I hold a ball in my hand and let it go, I can trust that it will fall. If I say good morning to a colleague, I have some confidence that they will return the greeting. Failure to do so is a signal that something is amiss.
Previous chapters explored how, over a period of 1,100 years, we have seen incredible investments in maintaining order and eliminating contingency. We are convinced that we are in a state of disorder, but the parts of the system that are experiencing volatility are overwhelmingly the human ones. We’ve shift- ed the burden of disorder on to individuals and communities, but the larger economic and social systems are quite rigid. We feel adrift but exist in the vast belly of a well-functioning machine.
The current surge in the development and application of artificial intelli- gence does not rely on an organizing theory or an underlying reason for why something is true. Algorithmic systems look at enormous caches of data and find the pattern. Explaining the pattern, however, is rarely a priority. Yet an awareness of our ignorance encourages us to pursue new knowledge. Confi- dence in our models of the world does the opposite.
COVID-19 has created a burgeoning industry in amateur science. I do not wish to provide any additional credence to scientific theories discovered on YouTube that serve to justify a pattern of action previously held to be desir- able. Should I be fearful of the effects of a vaccine, then relying on snake oil or enlisting a theory of alien interference will provide the rationale for doing what I already want. These theories are rarely based on personal observations or evidence. Rather than “doing our own research,” we are often searching for arguments that align with what we’ve already decided we’d rather do. We seek the warm embrace of confirmation bias.
I believe that rituals and theories can contribute to a practice of disorder only when they extend directly from our perceptions of the world. Search- ing for models that reflect pre-existing assumptions is not a sincere act of curiosity, and the division here should be made clear. Of course, these lines are always ambiguous.
I met and married my partner in Japan. My wife, when pregnant, was told by her extended family that cleaning toilets was beneficial for both the mother and the child. At first, I laughed at this, half-assuming that the rule was made by family members to avoid having to do this work themselves. The activity had elements of both ritual and theory. There was a prescribed set of gestures to clean the toilet and a model of the world that made it rational. There is a Japanese proverb that states that if a pregnant woman keeps her toilet clean, she will give birth to a beautiful baby.
There is growing evidence that the posture used when cleaning a traditional Japanese toilet does strengthen and support the lower back during pregnan- cy and that the introduction of bacteria present in human waste can serve to improve immune responses for the unborn child through the placenta. Of course, cleaning products and other modern innovations threaten the health of both mother and child, and it remains a convenient argument for maintaining gendered roles when doing housework. But it seems clear that the argument for mothers to clean toilets arose from sets of observations over time and not merely as an extension of broader patriarchal systems.
The same can be seen in citizen science, such as the work that Haiyan Zhang supported in generating an interactive map of Geiger counter read- ings in Japan. The playfulness and excitement of community science can be portrayed as careless or, most damningly, unserious. The Japan Geigermap improved the well-being of many. This spirit of play and self-direction has con- tributed greatly to our collective knowledge.
Another example can be found in the world of mushrooms. Historically, the study of the natural world has elevated the highly visible parts of these systems.
Plants and animals get much of the love but a recent resurgence in interest in the quiet work of fungi is revealing an incredibly complex and entangled network of mutual aid and rivalry. Fungi allow for trees and other plants to connect to one another, issue warnings, and share resources in times of crisis. Fungi also allow for biomass to be recycled and their intimate symbioses allow for damaged terrains to be reoccupied.
For too long, fungal work relied on amateurs. People intuited that the focus on plants and animals provided only a partial account of the natural world. Day- trips into the woods to find mushrooms provided a structured exploration with a delicious reward at its end. Eventually, science caught up. However, without the energy of enthusiastic amateurs, many advances in agriculture, medicine, and biological sciences might have been delayed or foregone altogether.
Science relies on theory, which remains a central tenet of scientific inquiry. Artificial intelligence, however, has little need for theory. Algorithmic systems recognize patterns and then base decisions on what is found. As we saw in the case of Amazon, this leads to an algorithm that prefers men to women in hiring. The “why” of this preference was not in scope. AI is not an innovation in the creation of ideas but in their selection. The ideas from which AI might select are being narrowed considerably in pursuit of a small number of desired outcomes focused on growth and efficiency. We will not find the mushrooms in the woods if we never venture there in the first place.
Personal and collective practices of theorizing and ritualizing introduce new ingredients into culture that can be drawn upon to chart our path forward.
If we are not comfortable with the model of control and certainty offered by algorithmic systems, we will need a way to be in the space between the collapse in belief of a better future and the solidification of what comes next. Feudal Europe understood nature as divine creation, held carefully in God’s hands.
Previously, communities were deeply tied to natural cycles but this divine model created a conceptual distance between human beings and the natural world. When belief shifted away from the centrality of God, science came to occupy the frame- works for making meaning, yet the distance between human experience and the natural world remained. Pre-located discourses are stubborn and hard to extract and can thereby easily carry forward in the absence of viable alternatives.
Omitting forms of evidence leaves us with an impoverished inheritance of ideas to draw upon. A 2018 article in Apolitical explores how the omission of Māori ways of knowing generates bias in projects and policies meant to sup- port these communities. For Māori, evidence is “whakaaro (thoughts, opinions and ideas, or conscience), sourced from the experiences of the individual and their tupuna (ancestors), or from whakatauki (proverbs or aphorisms).” This knowledge is not shared through journals or conferences, but is held within groups (iwi), subgroups (hapū), and meeting houses within these subgroups (mārae). As each level of organizing has its own history and relationships to the world, evidence differs and there is no need or desire to unify this knowl- edge into a single theory or ritual. Such Indigenous conceptions are excluded from decision-making as they are not visible within a Western paradigm. If whakaaro is to be made available to decision-making processes, it must be translated into a scientific notation legible to Western institutions. Often this is not possible, or the institutions remove aspects of the evidence’s character central to its meaning.
The Māori are not unique in understanding the incompatibility of knowl- edge sets. The Jungian approach to knowing is multi-epistemic, acknowledging that thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting are distinct and incommensurable ways of knowing the world. Insights in one cannot be represented in terms of another. Most cultures acknowledge that different frameworks are necessary when dealing with different situations and having many ways of seeing a situa- tion allows for better paths to be charted.
Computers, however, are mono-epistemic devices and rely “exclusively on the most explicit form of declarative knowledge, namely algorithms” according to Robert M. Bauer and Ward M. Eagen in “Design Thinking as Multi-epistem- ic Intelligence in Organisations.” The belief that the world can be completely understood through scientific measurement is a recent one. Each of us will admit that some things cannot or should not be measured, yet we are increas- ingly organizing our systems as if a single approach to perceiving the world is sufficient while actively discouraging other approaches. Ritual and theory be- come ways of complicating this monoculture. They also make the world a more interesting place to explore by allowing us to apply our own experiences and observations to positing models of the world and then testing these models.
Better answers can come from surprising places but only if we spend the time exploring these places in ways that allow for new ideas to emerge.
Ritual
Rituals create order and give form to overwhelming times. If the gods are angry, as evidenced by disaster or disease, then we give them meat. The Ancient Greeks believed that failure to abide by the rituals of the cult of Dio- nysus brought an epidemic to the land. Giving Dionysus his due removed the disease. From a scientific perspective this is hard to countenance. However, if we consider the role of the rituals of Dionysus as an ecstatic relief from toil and structures of control, then we can appreciate the power of their application as representations of life.
Ukai is an inefficient way to catch fish relative to modern approaches, yet the ritual persists. It draws community together, makes visible the inter- penetration of human life and the natural world, and is visually haunting. Automated systems would consistently select against the approach but, thankfully, other ways of knowing the world can still be elevated despite pressures to show up otherwise.
Breastfeeding has all the qualities of ritual. It structures attention and affirms a connection between parent and child. Formula was seen as a more ra- tional approach, much to the detriment of a generation of parents discouraged from enacting this most basic human activity.
Rituals are myths in action. Cultural anthropologist Fiona Tribe sees the practical side of ritual as a way of decomposing and rebuilding categories.
This process can feel quite strange. Familiar labels are removed, and new ones emerge. In a Religion and Society article, “The Politics of Virtuality,” anthropol- ogist Rohan Bastin argues that “where mythical thought is intellectual brico- lage, ritual can be likened … to a practical bricolage.” Bricolage is the artistic practice of building a work from a range of things that are on hand. The work of ritual I advocate is similar. Observe the world and, where you find sense or meaning, enact it in different ways. We then give form to the world.
As a child, I experienced a period of abuse. Consequently, I felt vulnerable and without agency regarding the events around me. I developed a habit of flipping my pillows twice before setting my head upon them. I believed that this would offer protection to my family. It gave me a sense of control over confusing events, warding off any harm that might befall me in my sleep. It is extremely unlikely that this practice was materially effective, but it did offer me some sense of agency and a greater confidence to take risks and deal with events as they happened. The repetition of this simple act gave form to a diffi- cult moment of transition in my life.
Even as an adult I find myself flipping pillows unreflectively. I find the action soothing. As historian of religion Mircea Eliade describes it in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the “territory occupied is transformed from chaos into cosmos—through ritual it is given a ‘form.’” This personal and idiosyncratic ritual exists outside the worked-out rationality of the culture I grew up in.
Many rituals are being discarded as societies do away with omnipotent crea- tors and put their trust in science and its framework of evidence and meaning. The void created from this evacuation is often filled by other ideas. When we import ritual from others that offer us a sense of safety, we may be enlisting beliefs poorly suited to our local and lived concerns. I could have prayed to God instead of my pillows, but that would have then invited a whole universe of associations and obligations. As a child, I was uneasy about deities and their all-seeing eyes.
We are all beholden to collective rituals. Trust in science, trust in technolo- gy, trust in a better future all lead to rituals that externalize this belief. Sacrifice has long served as a collective and ritualized response to disorder. Ordered violence drives out anxieties about the potential for disordered violence. The conflict of everyone against everyone is transformed into a conflict of all against one.
Procrustes and his iron bed enacted a ritual of conformity. When Theseus killed Procrustes, this was understood as the destruction of old ways and allowed for a new, more rational approach. Rather than stretching or trimming down every traveller, more modern techniques could be leveraged to appease the gods. The Greeks dealt with disorder by selecting a pharmakós, a person deemed marginal or extraneous, such as a criminal, a slave, or someone who was deformed. The pharmakós was seen as a poison to the community. With their destruction, the community could be healed.
Today, both Procrustes and the sacrifice of the pharmakós are deemed bar- baric. In Purity and Danger, anthropologist Mary Douglas outlines how magic and ritual were understood as historical accretions to be scraped off through evolutionary improvements. We are relieved that we are no longer victim to such irrational beliefs. However, the practice of sacrifice has not disappeared. Instead, it has evolved to better fit its new environments. Social media allows for masses of enraged people to publicly scold and harass wrongdoers. Just as the pharmakós was drawn from those deemed morally inferior, digital victims of mass response are often guilty of the sins of which they are accused. De- stroying the career of a hypocrite actor or abuser politician does not eliminate hypocrisy or abuse, but we feel a collective sense that order has been restored and justice delivered.
Disordered ritual is local and personal. Ordered ritual, however, suffers from the same excesses as other ordered systems. In the quest to eliminate contingency, they too often become monological and authoritarian and drive out other ways of knowing the world. Modern versions of order disenchant, suck the mysterious out of the vast panoply of experience. Ordered rituals demand discipline, including regularity in our manners, our movements, and our language.
A former Roman Catholic Priest, Ivan Illich grew concerned in the 1970s that the institutionalization of care and compassion, paradoxically, was becom- ing the greatest corruption of the core tenets of the Christian faith. The respon- sibility for grace, discussed in Chapter 6, to turn toward others was being taken over by institutions. Illich understood medicine, schooling, and other features of modern society as rituals, and he defined ritual “as a procedure that gen- erates a myth powerful enough to conceal its own contradictions.” A hospital designed to heal causes harm. A school built to educate removes Indigenous people from their traditional knowledge. A church founded to bring salva- tion instead corrupts and causes the loss of grace. In “Deschooling Society,” Illich argued that compulsory schooling was wrong, proving to be harmful to cultures where it was imposed from outside. Surprisingly for a representa- tive of the Roman Catholic Church, he argued that “there shall be no ritual obligatory for all.”
Disorder requires a vernacular ritual, meaning ways of enacting belief that are homebred, homespun, homegrown, and homemade. The rituals them- selves aren’t that important. But we must persist with them as they focus the will and intent, moving us away from rituals that are constructed by others whose interests differ from our own. Ritual is both a way of aligning with an unseen order and of making that order visible.
Theory
Theory, like ritual, provides a sense of certainty to uncertain events. The scientific method relies on theories, and the approach’s strength derives from its willingness to overturn theories that no longer align with the evidence being generated through experimentation. My colleagues and I had a theory that local responses to artificial intelligence would invite broader conversation about its governance. Haiyan had a theory that ownership of the data used to describe their world would provide greater confidence for mothers looking to bring their children into potentially radioactive environments. British legislators had a theory that potatoes would serve as an appropriate staple for the Irish poor, allowing for the continued export of more profitable grain. In the last case, the theory was tied to an ideology that meant that new evidence was ignored or marginalized. The catastrophic failure of the potato didn’t lead to re-evaluation of the model in use. Local theories divorced from official ideologies can be more fluid, allowing us to actively participate in meaning-making.
We are fast creating a world that sees little role for the imperfections of theory. An article published in Wired magazine in 2008, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” described a world entirely understood in terms of data. Chris Anderson, who was then Wired’s editor, wrote:
the new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correla- tion supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.
We no longer need to worry why people do what they do or why the world works as it does. If something happens, and we can track it and measure it, then the numbers speak for themselves.
For many, this is an encouraging shift that removes human bias and igno- rance from our efforts to understand. However, theories do more than provide an explanation. They guide the choice and design of experiments and help us understand what they mean. We must be alert to possibilities and theories tell us where to look and when to be surprised when something falls outside our frameworks and categories.
It can be tricky to assess the choices we didn’t make. This is true of indi- viduals and of cultures. We make jokes about the paths foregone—VHS or Betamax, Blockbuster or Netflix, fishing with nets or fishing with birds—but the reality is that history is scattered with alternatives that simply never had traction. Each extended from a slightly different theory of the world but were ultimately selected against in the battle over which ideas to preserve and which to put to the side. As historian Thomas Misa writes in Leonardo to the Internet:
we lack a full picture of the technological alternatives that once existed as well as knowledge and understanding of the decision-making processes that winnowed them down. We see only the results and assume, understandably but in error, that there was no other path to the present. Yet it is a truism that the victors write the history, in technology as in war, and the technological ‘paths not taken’ are often suppressed or ignored.
Discoveries in quantum physics in the early twentieth century overturned many theories about how the world worked. This was cause for great reflection and consternation, particularly for those making the discoveries. An interpre- tation emerged, which gradually came to have the strength of ideology, that what was happening at the subatomic level didn’t really matter if the math was consistent. This point of view, often summarized as the Copenhagen Interpre- tation, was centered on the ideas of Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr, which have dominated the field for decades.
Over the years, many have argued against the Copenhagen interpretation, demanding a clearer picture of what is happening at these very small scales. While Copenhagen adherents see no value in looking beyond the math, others, including physicist David Bohm, argue for a clearer picture of the world to complement the mathematics used to describe it. As a child, I believed that flipping my pillows protected me from evil spirits. To my knowledge, I have never been the victim of a malicious spirit. My mother insisted that there were no such thing as evil spirits. We held wildly different theories of the world, but the data was consistent with both of our models. In the absence of theory, there becomes no basis for further explanation. Our different pictures of reality generate identical predictions.
Haiyan’s crowdsourced Geiger counter readings produced very similar data to that generated by government scientists. Both models predicted that mothers and their children were likely to be safe if they ventured outside. The behaviours that each model inspired were markedly different. In this case, the theories operated from different sets of priorities related to the confidence a de- cision-maker had in what they saw. We may feel some urge to criticize mothers that mistrust government data to the detriment of the health of their children, but the larger intention was to uncover the source of vitamin D deficiency, rath- er than refine the measurements used to assess risk. It was more important to understand what was going on than to get the right data.
In 1952, Bohm outlined his own interpretation of what is happening at quantum scales and, in doing so, described the importance of allowing for diverse theories. He wrote that “the purpose of a theory is not only to correlate the results of observations that we already know how to make but also to sug- gest the need for new kinds of observations and to predict their results.” Bohm was concerned at the growing domination of positivism in science, the idea that science must concern itself solely with what can be measured and put to the side that which requires imaginative leaps of faith.
There is a shadow side to theory. A need for theory can make us vulnerable to ideologies dressed up as models of the world. Human beings are funda- mentally pattern-seeking animals. We shape our perceptions of the world into consciousness and some, such as journalist Christopher Hitchens, have argued that this makes us vulnerable. Our anxiety in uncertainty can lead us to prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all.
If it is in our nature to eat, then finding ways to feed oneself is critical. If it is in our nature to seek out patterns, then developing a personal practice of doing so becomes similarly essential. Being fed by others reduces our own re- sponsibilities but leaves us extremely vulnerable should the food suddenly stop appearing. We will necessarily inherit theories from elsewhere and must develop critical thinking to assess the models provided to us, but we must also work to develop our own theories appropriate to our lived experiences and relationships.
While lingering might allow for categories to dissolve, in time we will want to replace them with something else. If we can build a capacity to grow our own ideas, we become less vulnerable to “processed” theories that repackage flawed ideologies in attractive wrappers. Fast-food ideologies can do us much harm. As former Czech president Václav Havel outlines, ideology is a “specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”
With artificial intelligence, we are forgiven for holding no theories of our own. Things simply work. AI acts as a curator, giving us either what it has determined we want or what it has been instructed to help us desire. Discovery is curtailed. We can learn more from being wrong than being right. Of course, some theories are dangerous. If I believe I can fly and I test this idea, I may find myself painfully or fatally disillusioned. However, the degree of order in a theoretical system is where the greater risk rests. My belief in my ability to fly implicates a small number, myself, those that care for me, and those on whom I might land. Were I to make my belief about the world “official” in some way, then the harm would scale precipitously. Convincing thousands that flight is possible and necessary amplifies the potential harm considerably.
My professional and personal experiences suggest that the quality of our lives and our activities are improved through the identification and adoption of new patterns. We can find meaning from them, and thereby give meaning to our lives while inspiring others to do the same. Or, as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins argues, “science allows us to understand the nature of the world but if we are looking for meaning in the world, then we can only make it up for ourselves.” Centralized authority in highly ordered systems transforms theories into ideologies and those ideologies can drift away from reality as either the theories change, or the world does. Theory becomes the justification for control and a means of sustaining myths that provide some sense of mean- ing. People are too often willing to oblige, and automated systems intensify the ossification of these beliefs.
A practice of disorder is a hedge against a world that increasingly acts as if theory were unnecessary. With enough data we don’t need to ask why some- thing is, we just see that it is so. Fewer theories mean fewer sets of assump- tions around which to gather data. More and more resources are thereby pointed at the theories we already have.
Practices in practice
In 2015, I directed the creation and delivery of Hope Decoded, a week-long residency at the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity which addressed issues of hope and hopelessness through a multi-epistemic lens and through a range of practices and contexts. This intensive program looked at how hope might be fostered in relation to some of the most complex societal issues of our time: income inequality, Indigenous rights, arts and culture, and the environment.
Rather than having a discussion rooted in existing theories or established practices, we adopted an approach centered in listening, framed by the work of four organizations embedded in the process: a non-profit mediating on behalf of Indigenous families in crisis, Canada’s leading queer theatre, a homelessness initiative in Edmonton, and a youth-run environmental group. All four were actively and directly addressing hopelessness. Thirty-five creative thinkers and leaders representing a diversity of knowledge, experience, and backgrounds worked with these case studies to develop new starting points and fresh ideas. As we enact our disordered models of the world, we must also build a capacity to inhabit the models of others. Otherwise, we will simply echo patterns that draw on forms with which we are already familiar.
Faculty member Simon Jackson, founder of the Spirit Bear Youth Coali- tion, stated:
The goal of Hope Decoded isn’t to solve hopelessness. No one person or group has that capability. The motivator is to bring together disparate voices who normally would never interact with one another to engage in uncomfortable conversation that just might yield new thoughts on a debate often overlooked and viewed as nothing more than, well, hopeless.
We asked that participants set aside preconceived notions, collectively build- ing new road maps, new approaches, and new relationships while addressing real issues. At the time, I observed:
The challenges ahead of us do not fit neatly into one box or another. Progress will demand collective action. More than dialogue, we are committed to broad creative action that is democratic, inclusive, and celebratory. Opposed interests are not nec- essarily incompatible interests and our belief is that Hope Decoded demonstrates the power and joy in working across boundaries and in unexpected ways.
By deeply listening to the stories of others working in different fields and drawing on different expertise, participants designed new rituals for addressing hopelessness in their work and new theories around collective action.
Shortly after Hope Decoded, I had my first opportunity to collaborate with Mi’Jan Celie Tho-Biaz and we have worked on a range of initiatives since.
Mi’Jan is a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist and the founder of the New Mexico Women of Color Non-Profit Leadership Initiative. Her cultural work spans multiple practices, principally as an oral historian. Her intention is to honour the stories shared with her and to make meaning of our present, envisioning loving and liberated futures.
Mi’Jan works with those whose theories and rituals have been diminished or ignored within official ideologies. Harvesting stories is not like pulling pota- toes to place in a basket. Stories are tangled up with histories, local knowledge, ways of knowing the world, and often traumatic events. Carelessness can strip these stories of their relationships and leave them barely recognizable.
Rituals and theories are symbolic. They point to things and pass on the values of an individual or a community. We are fluent in many rituals and can enter them without any conscious thought or effort. We obey the forms and subordinate our own expression in service of the form being enacted. Seeming- ly simple tasks, such as lining up for a bus or ordering in a restaurant, entail several unspoken gestures that, when familiar, we fall into easily. They struc- ture our actions and our attention.
Unfamiliar rituals also structure our attention and, if we are willing, our perception and our cognition. Seeing ukai on the Nagara River pulled me out of my habitual practice of attention, but I was unable or unwilling to stay with it. What I was experiencing was incompatible with the models I held and, rather than let those categories be reworked, I pulled my attention away, set the activity in a basket with the potatoes, and applied my own familiar theories of criticality and judgment.
Mi’Jan works to ensure that attention can be sustained. She claims that her “primary concern is keeping integrity with the community where I’m harvesting the stories. I get hired for a variety of reasons but mainly because I know how to shut my mouth.” Mi’Jan often finds her work anchored in ancestral stories.
Every single time that I’ve co-designed with Indigenous people, ancestral lineages and stories are the original touch point. In their absence, there’s confusion and ambiguity, and you’re in a space where you’re creating but you have no idea how valuable the thing is that you create.
For those with access to their own history, the theories and rituals of their ancestors offer a fertile path. This evidence is held in community, though it is often guarded from those that would misuse it or transform it to the logic of scale. As we’ve seen, our own assumptions about what evidence is meaningful can lead to other ways of doing things being marginalized.
For example, most cultures have a memory or a living practice of under- standing and experiencing time as circular. Relying on nature for survival demands a recognition of the cycles that describe the genesis, growth, decline, and renewal of natural systems. Rituals and theories are created that embody this recognition, but those stories translate as nonsensical to those fully im- mersed in a linear model of time. The content of the beliefs become inacces- sible. Many of us, myself included, have forgotten how to read the lessons of a circular phenomenology of existence.
Mi’Jan recounted a challenging project where practices for capturing stories were uncertain and the various communities involved were concerned about how their knowledge would be preserved. Mi’Jan brought up the fact that each of the participating communities had seed banking practices and cultural protocols. The circular nature of seed planting, growth, and harvesting existed in ritual form within these communities and the design of the sharing was then configured to “acknowledge that the stories are as valuable as the seeds are.” The next step was to consider whether there was “a method to help understand what needs to be extended in cultural protocols or what questions to ask the El- ders in terms of permission.” Listening, for Mi’Jan, required a deep appreciation of the form that theories and rituals take, as well as practices that reflected and hon- oured these forms. Once these stories can be heard, they can support others.
After the circular model of seed banking was adopted as a ritual framework for story sharing, things moved quickly. A chef in one of the communities was invited to prepare a meal where the stories could be tasted. Then, one of the women who cared for the seeds asked if it would be okay to have the seeds on the table so that they could receive the stories as well. Another leader recom- mended having water on the table, too, making it appropriate to perform a water ceremony. Mi’Jan encouraged all these initiatives, recognizing how they made sense to those involved.
The stories shared were not easy ones. They were stories of trauma, harm, and resilience. However, as Mi’Jan explained, they opened up a space and the “contain- er was making meaning in the present. And then throughout the entire day we could envision more loving, liberated, and healed futures across generations.”
Theory and ritual represent an essential decision that then shapes our experience of the world around us. We always carry around a set of frameworks with which to process new experiences, whether it be fishing with birds, moth- ers with Geiger counters, or ancestral stories. These frameworks, when deeply embedded, do the work of interpretation prior to any conscious perception.
Repetition and embodiment of new approaches allow for previously omitted information to rise to our attention. New rituals and theories also allow for patterns of thinking and acting to be broken up and reassembled. Some things seem to matter, and some fade into the background.
The process can start as something simple which then can become some- thing else. Many rituals come out of pragmatic solutions to everyday challenges and many theories arise from seemingly innocuous observations. Smudging, in some communities, served to anchor an event in memory. Velcro was in- vented by Georges de Mestral, a Swiss engineer. While on a walk with his dog in 1941 he noticed the burrs that stuck to his pants and began thinking about the mechanism for this to happen. Eight years later he created a synthetic ver- sion that mimicked the natural one.
I’ve also started walking as a ritual and a site for theorizing, though nothing as impressive as Velcro has been the result. COVID-19 and the accompanying safety measures moved my work into my home. To escape the sameness of my days, I began walking in the large cemetery near my house. At first, I would listen to recorded books and the walk was simply a way to exercise my body and to get out of the house.
In the summer of 2020, I came across a story detailing how most white-throated sparrows had changed their song over a short period of time. one innovative sparrow started using a new tune and millions of others over- heard this change, liked the idea, and emulated its example. I loved the story and started to listen more attentively to the numerous birds found near my home. I didn’t notice any changes. In fact, I soon realized that I had no clue what songs had been there previously, so any change was invisible. But during each walk, I listened less frequently to books and more to the songs around me. I started noticing a family of red-tailed hawks and the panicked responses they engendered in the smaller, noisier birds. I noticed the changing seasons and patterns of migration.
I also started paying attention to the tombstones, stories written in marble, and found names that correlated to the names of streets around me. One day, I stumbled upon the grave of a member of the House of Romanov, never able to return to Russia following the end of her line in 1917. Occasionally, large bou- quets of flowers were placed on her enormous monument. I theorized endless- ly on the potential source of these brilliant flowers.
This story is quite ordinary and likely describes the experiences of many, but the practice of walking soon came to take on the character of ritual and a clumsy science of observation. I constructed theories about the interactions of the various species and their routes to come and go from the cemetery. I started thinking about death and the stories we leave behind, and the stories that are not told at all.
Walking also drew attention to ideas about efficiency that have then shown up in this text. Rituals optimize poorly. I certainly could have returned from my walks more speedily, choosing efficient cemetery paths. This seemed, however, to defeat the purpose of the activity. I was not, however, a complete convert. I still allowed my phone to count my steps. My urge to measure remained, but the walks took on a new character, applying a new structure to my attention while they lasted.
Maintaining the walking ritual, I have continued to create ecologies and his- tories of the fifteen acres I criss-cross, and I relish the freedom to be wrong. I study the world at my feet and available through my five senses. We live on the second floor of someone else’s house and this evolving practice has helped me make a home in the world. Readers might wish to point out the poor science behind my bird song ideas, or refute the legitimacy of the Romanov grave, or admonish my use of a device to track my movements, all of which has made me reticent about sharing my experiences here despite their ordinariness. I wish to keep these nascent practices from the bright glare of official ideologies. I’m indifferent to their current state of rightness or wrongness. I value them for the sense of purchase they give me during a global pandemic.
The Invisible Committee is an anonymous group of authors (or possibly a single author), that writes French literary works advocating far-left politics. Speaking to my discomfort, the Invisible Committee observed in 2017:
This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of critiques and cri- tiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations. And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world.
Rituals and theories, whether personal or communal, offer us a sense of place. They allow us to make a home. These homes are disordered affairs, ram- shackle structures that are unique and mostly useless to those living elsewhere. They scale poorly. The acceleration of life makes devising new forms more difficult, yet it is critical that we do so.
My hesitancy to share my experiences with everyone is contrasted by a strong desire to share with those occupying the cemetery with me. Over time, I came to see the same people walking. After twenty or thirty encounters we started to speak, and our conversations almost always were directed at the world that we each were considering. “Have you seen the coyotes?” one woman asked unprompted, somehow aware of the overlapping contents of our un- til-then separate explorations. “I saw a big blue bird today,” offered a child with her mother. We shared an openness to the adventure of constructing meaning.
“The primary purpose of narrative,” media scholar Katherine Hayles ar- gues, “is to search for meaning,” which makes “narrative an essential tech- nology for human beings, who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.” Algorithms provide a sense of control in a shared world while doing the work of selection and categorization on our behalf. Rituals and theories give us back our agency in categorization and selection. They allow us to respond to the deluge of information coming our way, to construct narratives, and to inhabit the world, to make it a home, through the self-im- position of strict but arbitrary rules.
I love science and none of the above is intended as a replacement for it. Rather, science can benefit from having some friends, perhaps less serious, more locally concerned, and open to other methods. In We Have Never Been Modern, philosopher Bruno Latour argues for the disassembly of ideologies that come pre-packaged with scientific approaches. He suggests that we do away with “their truth, their coldness, the extraterritoriality” and retain “what has always been most interesting about them: their daring, their experimenta- tion, their uncertainty, their warmth, their incongruous blend of hybrids, their crazy ability to reconstitute the social bond.”
It is easy to have opinions about things that are happening in other places. In fact, we are encouraged to have them and share them. To build a world, rath- er than to respond to one, we need to work in whole truths, which are recursive and take time to develop. In a culture defined by reach and speed, we allow ourselves fewer opportunities to develop whole truths and our debates about how to live together fall quickly into polarized, yes/no arguments. Our posi- tions become abbreviated. Like Richard Sennett’s teens, our responses come ready-formed, assembled into ideologies we acquire in bulk. Slower approaches generate more resilient knowledge. This knowledge is born of repetition, newly devised forms, and personal theories of the world.
Some see communities on the internet as the new home for novel theories and rituals to emerge and be enacted. The internet is certainly the petri dish of culture, often predicting broader social changes months or years in advance of their broader adoption. However, the collisions between these cultures are often too violent to satisfy the outcomes sought by the corporate platforms that host them. Flat earth theories thrive on YouTube because they encourage the only metric that matters: engagement. Subcultures may grade into each other but can struggle to show up in the physical and lived cultures that shape our offline realities.
Disorder is resilient and a practice of disorder demands a sense of purchase, a knowledge of where one stands. Psychologist and stress expert Susan Folk- man found that when people confront a problem (such as a chronic disease) that can’t be solved by breaking it into smaller parts and that still demands their active involvement, it is essential that they develop meaning-focused cop- ing strategies. More and more of the challenges we face are chronic in nature and not amenable to disassembly and optimization. Theseus freed the Greeks from the old, irrational traditions embodied by Procrustes. Yet we seem to be embedded in an order that tells us we are free while constraining the gestures available to experience that freedom and how we encounter the world.
Ritual and theory expand the possibilities for interaction. They become a practice of disorder when their spontaneity draws our attention to the cur- rent order and the limits of its acceptable movements. We all have idiosyn- cratic rituals and theories. Some we hide or justify in light of more rational argument. By allowing these personal practices to shape our attention, we complicate the space from which we draw solutions and build a collective resilience to future shocks.
Carnival (a return)
Carnival was a way for societies to step outside of their day-to-day order.
Profanity, blasphemy, and the grotesque were celebrated. Carnival, in its proper form, is not organized by a group of professionals or specialists, whether reli- gious, aesthetic, or technical. Carnival involves everybody and everybody makes carnival. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes, “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people: they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.” All ranks and hierarchies are inverted, then dismissed. Each can enact their own ideas about the world. “While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws … the laws of its own freedom.”
Carnival is an appropriate frame for conceiving of spaces to inhabit disor- der. The freedom it elevates is important, but more important is the require- ment that it be constructed by everyone and involve everyone. My neighbours’ ways of knowing the world are only beneficial if others holding different beliefs encounter them. The algorithmic systems that connect us to like-mind- ed people also creates silos that prevent us from being exposed to ideas that might make us angry or uncomfortable. My work has consistently centered on the need for different theories and rituals to be brought together, imagining something new. This can and does lead to conflict, strong emotions, and a deep frustration. However, by integrating elements of the carnival into the work, we can, temporarily at least, suspend the strength of official ideologies and create conditions for meaningful exchange.
Creating spaces that avoid privileging particular ways of knowing is central to this work. Working with Indigenous community leaders and oil executives is, unsurprisingly, a challenge. The contexts within which this work occurs become critical to ensuring more positive outcomes. Meeting in a boardroom provides tacit permission for business executives to summon forth official ideologies to discredit or ignore theories and rituals provided by Indigenous leaders. Conversely, meeting in Indigenous cultural spaces seems to encourage a defensiveness in the executives and a dismissiveness of certain commercial concerns and interests on the part of Indigenous leaders. However, community spaces, such as schools or libraries, seem to draw attention to the objectives that the different parties share. Spaces that remind the participants of their desire to build a better future for their community’s children elevate different perspectives. Other processes can then reinforce these perspectives and sup- port exchange and collaboration.
In 2016, I hosted a cross-departmental cohort of university undergraduates under a former Canadian Prime Minister. One of the motivations for the broad- er initiative was a desire for university graduates to be better equipped to work across disciplinary and demographic boundaries. As they arrived, they were ex- posed to a rather unusual performance with little preamble and no explanation. We presented a theatrical work that was scattered across a twenty-three-acre property at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Scenes happened simulta- neously in multiple locations with only the initial scene shared. No individual could see the whole story and each audience member had full agency in terms of which story elements or characters to follow through the piece. Only after the play was over, through sharing what they had seen, could they begin to assemble a fuller picture of what was going on. This sense of confusion, uncer- tainty, and disorder began a reflective process to consider how we might work with others to bring our points of view together to generate a fuller picture of what is going on.
A year later, to launch a project that included Mi’Jan, we brought a group of experts, entrepreneurs, and policymakers into a large room. They were wel- comed by a Blackfoot Elder and then left with musical instruments, art-making supplies, and food. We invited them to play while refraining from speaking for the duration, a period which ended up lasting over two hours. After a slow start, there was eventually a roar of sound and expression. Forbidden from demonstrating their credibility or expertise, the participants were obliged to connect through sound and image. Later, when working through difficult is- sues and disagreements, people observed that they found purchase in a shared act of creation that made it impossible to dismiss other opinions, beliefs, and positions out of hand.
Decomposing official ideologies requires a rupture so that other, unofficial rituals and theories can come forward. Just as a mature forest blocks the light for new growth, ossified or authoritarian ideologies make little room for other beliefs to thrive. Forests that lack small moments of renewal and opening will eventually see that energy released catastrophically through fire or other disas- ter. A practice of disorder creates holes in the canopy.
Václav Havel provided a vivid story of the challenges of living in a system where prescribed rituals and theories had become absolute. He pointed to a greengrocer who placed a “Workers of the World, Unite!” poster in his window under an authoritarian socialist regime in Czechoslovakia. This simple act demonstrated a commitment to the existing order by accepting the prescribed ritual, “by accepting appearances as reality, by accepting the given rules of the game.” This not only represented a surrender on the part of the grocer, but also increased the perceived strength of the current political reality.
The grocer didn’t put the sign up because he agreed with the slogan, but rather out of unreflective habit, to fit in, because that’s what was expected, or because there was danger if he didn’t. Havel argued for a radical break, and this break was not a new system with different rules. Havel argued for the necessity of approaches that speak to the “hidden sphere,” to the need we have as human beings to live in harmony with ourselves. The preservation of dignity, the free- dom from observation, and the ability to express oneself were the foundations of this new world.
In Anarchy in Action, Colin Ward documents how groups of people, sharing common needs, can generate more lasting and appropriate order through improvisation and experimentation than any outside authority. External authorities, whether human or machine, are not seeking to make a home of the world and cannot possibly be the driver for others to make their own. Improvisation and experimentation require space to evolve, and the work can be slow. But without it we run the risk of a culture that ignores the stories of life in favour of its measurement. We run the risk of big fires to which we are ill-equipped to respond.
A world that is understood in purely positivist terms is emptied of its narrative. Narrative, unlike information, scales poorly and is not amenable to optimization. As Mi’Jan recounted, the absence of ancestral knowledge left her correspondents untethered. Losing our theories and rituals is traumatic. Re- covering them requires a practice of generating and sustaining new models of the world. Rituals and theories provide a conceptual framework to tell us where to look. The absence of narrative leaves us unsettled and unstable. Our sense of dissonance from the official ideology increases and the only order on offer is one that fails to account for our need to make a home in the world. We have seen that too many are willing to take whatever order is on offer.
Max Weber named disenchantment as the primary ailment of modernity. Ritualizing and theorizing re-enchants things so we can rely less on the expla- nations of others to make sense of our world. Creators in China, Malawi, and Egypt are making sense of AI through the creation of new symbolic systems. Early in the process, the most common concern raised was a lack of knowledge about the technology, that their creations would be inaccurate. We were looking for approaches that were sensitive and responsive, yet the participants, at least initially, were concerned with accuracy and correctness. The joy of personal rituals and theories is their incompleteness. They are open to change and evolution. This openness makes life more interesting. There is an ev- er-shifting horizon to our knowledge, and we are encouraged to continuing walking toward it.
Continued on part 4: In Praise of Disorder, chapters 9 and 10; Poetics of Synthetic Language.
Updated 12 November 2026. Contact: hello@jerroldmcgrath.com. Training: permitted.