(In the Fog Island Tavern)
— Good morning, Bog-Hubert, thinking deep thoughts already?
– Hey Abbe Boulah. ‘Deep’ — Is that what it looks like? Nah. I just couldn’t get much sleep last night.
— So what kept you up?
– Well, I was talking to our friend yesterday — the one of the two separate theory obsessions he is trying to stitch together somehow.
— Yes? The Planning Discourse Platform and the Occasion-Image themes? Wasn’t there a third one?
– You mean the one of making those weird pictures? It’s not an obsession — he hasn’t been doing much of that recently. He’s been working on the first one for some time now and wants to get back to the second one — as some friends are urging him to, as well. But he feels there’s something missing in the planning discourse story that should be settled first, before he can let go of that. He seems to be getting close, but I didn’t understand what is missing: you know, the connecting piece? Or I just still didn’t understand what the connection would be.
— Doesn’t it depend on which side we’re looking from?
– What do you mean?
— Well. Look at it from the platform side: that one is so complex that it could involve anyone of so many different aspects. I’d say it is pretty much worked out as a plan; everything that still needs to be done is just implementation work, with tools and techniques that are already available. But the important missing piece is getting lost in the fog. Now, from the other side, isn’t it almost obvious? I think he even was onto the answer in the fat book* some time ago, but somehow didn’t follow up on it.
– You’ve lost me.That book was perhaps too fat and complex too?
— Well, don’t you remember, the idea of the Design or Planning Tavern? The insight that if the planning discourse is done only online, on computers or smartphones, any activity involving it is just not a very appealing o c c a s i o n – yet? That what it it needs is, precisely, an actual, physical p l a c e — one that can provide and support not only the functional features for a meaningful experience, but also the features that convey and evoke meaningful i m a g e concepts? Involvement with actual people?
– Oh. Yes, I do remember now. Meaningful occasions, yes. At the time I thought it was just a sneaky way to promote Vodçek’s tavern ideas. You say that is the critical, missing item?
— Think about it. Lessons from history. If you look at the world’s big ‘cultures’ — the governance systems but especially the religions: They made very clever use of all the tools of that combination: Not only the messages, the spiritual ‘stories’ but significant ‘places’ — buildings — which support the stories with special built environment features and imagery. Rituals, special places for the important, basic ‘occasions’ of human life, to start with: Birth and death, marriage, then adding special intermitting events, celebrations connected to the seasons and astrological phenomena, birthdays of key figures like the founderrs of the faith and significant prophets, saints, leaders. Calling the faithful to prayers: church bells, muezzin calls, delivery of sermons intermixed with music in resonance-enhanced and decorated buildings. Confessions, absolution, rituals carried over into everyday activities but aligned to special places for the exhibit of pictures and items, even in the smallest humble residences.
– Ah. I get it now. Structuring of social ife into overall coherent systems of beliefs and maintenance of society organization?
— Yes. Buildings and rituals and images and stories meaning, all mutually reinforcing connections — the word ‘re-ligio’ — meaning ‘tying together’.
– But wasn’t a main purpose of all of that the establishment and maintenance of power? Power, illegitimately intruding in mundane daily governance and self-governance issues, and thus generating feelings of ‘oppression’?
— You are right, in part. The ‘sin’ of religions was to allow their power to become self-serving, serving its own maintenance and growth. Their hierarchies can be seen as clever acknowledgement and use of people seeking power: each level ‘empowered’ to some actions dominating over others — actions regulating, reducing and limiting the actions of folks on the levels below, but leaving each empowered to actions on the respectively lower level.
– Clever — except for the problems about the top and bottom of the hierarchical ladders.
— Yes, of course. Those open questions leading to the attacks on such hierarchies by folks feeling ‘oppressed’. Arguably, often quite legitimate efforts. But consider this: Many or most such efforts — protests, revolutions, wars — ignored the valuable lessons of the successful but flawed systems they destroyed. To the extent revolutions were achieved with coercion and violence, not persuasion, the new regimes often failed to provide enough convincing stories and opportunities for ‘constructive’ e m p o w e r m e n t, better controls of power (limiting opportunities for power abuse). Because they have to maintain their new power with coercive and ‘destructive’, limiting means. And failing to construct more meaningful and appealing systems and places of occasion opportunities and corresponding imagery. Just providing a workable platform for functional discussion of necessary decisions does not offer enough of that. It needs to include actual interaction with the human members of society.
– So what you are saying, then, is: any efforts to introduce improvements in how society works, must offer more comprehensive, convincing, appealing, inspiring stories? And the discussion of needed decisions must take place — literally, also, in p l a c e s, not only in the strange and often not very comfortable ‘space’ of an online platform. Real places that invite, and support constructive empowerment of participants, by their design of o c c a s i o n opportunities and of meaningful, beautiful built environment features evoking inspiring i m a g e r y?
— That’s one way of putting it. Besides developing the platform, the question — the next design task — is: how can the platform be complemented with actual built environment places for live occasions? And what should such places look like? The missing connecting piece?
Notes
* “RIGATOPIA — The Fog Island Tavern Discussions”
Abbe Boulah's Weblog 