I have been having some difficulty blogging lately. The reasons are numerous, though the biggest reasons are perhaps no more than four or five in number–but they’re been unusually intense. I say this by way of apology to my readers, with the evident optimism that comes from the plural. (As the kids would say, or text, “haha.”)

I last blogged about Ted Nelson, who for reasons of my own scheduling came before Doug Engelbart in the NMFS seminar this time. I swapped them because I wanted to be present to lead the discussion of Doug’s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” The discussion went superbly well, in my view, largely because the common complaints about the difficult and at times even bizarre ways in which Doug constructs his argument were paired with unusually tolerant, playful, and even enthusiastic insights into the complexity, richness, and originality of his thought throughout the essay. Sometimes from the same reader!

For me, it was a chance to think my way through Doug’s seminal essay once again, and to invite our community of seminarians to be as open and candid as possible about what they enjoyed and what they found impenetrable or otherwise frustrating about the essay. I got lucky with the invitation, perhaps because I’ve many opportunities now to think about how to be an “invitationist” with regard to Doug’s work, and no doubt because of the good chemistry in the group this semester. I mean, folks from central IT, cultural anthropology, engineering, business, history, rhetoric, poetry, science/technology/society, and of course the library (Pan’s Labyrinth, and I mean that as a compliment). Talk about an integrated domain. This time around, I got a clearer sense than ever before of the dramatic presence, in all respects, of Doug’s writing in the minds and expression of those reading him for the first time. I think this happened in large part because I was ready to look for that presence in a subtle, attentive way.

My small reflection, now:

Among its many other enormous and admirable ambitions, Doug’s essay challenges us to think hard, harder than before, perhaps harder than ever before, about what we say we want, what we say we prize as human beings individually and in community, and to ask ourselves whether we have the courage to accept the risks implicit in that kind of thought and questioning. In words that continue to jolt my being, Doug writes:

We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain….

So much of the praxis I observe, and engage in, appears to be swinging from one isolated clever trick to another like monkeys swinging from vine to vine, always in pursuit of a banana or some other reward, never with the realization of what “forest” or “jungle” or “savannah” or “world” or “universe” might mean. No time for that. Only time to expand the repertoire of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations.

Yet the notion of an integrated domain still beckons–and in truth, it does bring me down from time to time to think about how readily I and those around me run to the clever tricks. These tricks not nearly so complex as a way of life, and require much less commitment of self and the ferocious energy it takes to try to hold a self together, and then to hold that self against another self in the strange, high ways of love.

Lately I’ve been consumed by reading Gregory Bateson. His notion of an “ecology of mind” seems to me eerily parallel to Doug’s “integrated domain.” In “Mind/Environment” (collected in A Sacred Unity), Bateson writes:

The Pavlovian dog believes that the universe is made of sequences, and that the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus are fixed by a time interval. The only way of testing that, you see, is to act as though he could influence the events. But this is precisely what he’s learned not to do. And if he doesn’t interfere, then he will in fact perceive a university in which these regularities are reasonably true, and the whole thing becomes a self-fulfilling proposition.

I have preserved my typo above because it’s a telling slip, right down to the fact that my habits make “univers” end more frequently in “university” than in “universe.” Yet this habit is exactly the point, yes? What makes us in academe regularly mistake the university for the universe? What self-fulfilling propositions inhibit us from finding, or building, or sharing, an integrated domain–especially with regard to the computer as a machine, and a conceptual framework, for augmenting human intellect? An instrument whose music is ideas (Alan Kay).

It’s in the nature of self-fulfilling propositions that the answers lie in the realm of the unknown unknown. I am grateful, though, to colleagues like Engelbart and Bateson, extending into colleagues of past, present, and future seminars, for the light they share.