Interdemocracy’s architecture
Interdemocracy has not emerged from a single idea. Its architecture has gradually become visible through a succession of concepts that were developed according to the method portrayed in blog post 146. Authenticity, for instance, describes why participants need to formulate their perspectives independently before encountering those of others. Personal ontology describes why participants within the Interdemocracy format do not merely express opinions but reveal the relational organization through which they constitute reality. Ma describes why a preserved interval is necessary for alternative relations to emerge. And autopoiesis describes why external conditions matter for autonomous entities. Each concept resolves a particular challenge. Together they constitute an increasingly coherent architecture. Yet the architecture itself remains strangely difficult to characterize.
Individual concepts
This difficulty is not unique to Interdemocracy. Clive Bell (see: blog post 147) argued that most people approach a painting by asking what it depicts. Their perception is directed towards individual recognizable objects. Bell describes a second mode of perception, in which perception shifts towards the relations through which the work is constituted. In this perception objects do not disappear; only the way in which the objects are perceived changes. He called this arrangement of forms “significant form”.
Perhaps Interdemocracy’s architecture can also be characterized by a term like significant form. This term may not diminish the worth of the individual concepts but would find what unites them. Currently, the concepts could be understood as separate procedural or philosophical ideas. Authenticity belongs to expression, ma to Japanese aesthetics, personal ontology to philosophy, and autopoiesis to systems theory. Viewed individually, each concept appears to describe one aspect of the format. That seems to be why the architecture is so difficult to characterize.
Architectural principle
The potentially architectural principle that is to characterize Interdemocracy’s architecture needs to describe why all the individual concepts are essential to the architecture, notwithstanding their origins in different disciplines and represent seemingly unrelated processes. The architectural principle should not change the interpretation or essence of the individual concepts but should make clear what they have in common as part of the same architecture.
A similar process
What do the individual concepts have in common? Authenticity protects the independent emergence of a participant’s perspective before it becomes influenced by others. Ma preserves an interval before relational possibilities collapse into established epistemic stabilizations. Personal ontology describes the relational organization through which a participant structures a shared conceptual field. Autopoiesis explains why that organization cannot be imposed externally but must emerge through the participant’s own activity.
At first sight these concepts describe different phenomena. Taken together, however, they all seem to regulate a similar process. They describe how participants successively orient themselves towards themselves, towards others, and towards the relations through which social reality is constituted. Although each concept addresses a different phenomenon, they all regulate where participants direct their attention and how that direction changes throughout the participatory process. The underlying process can thus be described as attentional architecture.
Attentional architecture
Attentional architecture as a architectural principle would not replace the existing conceptual architecture of Interdemocracy. Nor would it introduce a new foundation. Rather, it identifies the underlying process through which the existing concepts operate as a coherent whole.
Attentional architecture management would not replace authenticity, personal ontology, ma, or autopoiesis. Rather, it would describe how these concepts jointly organise the progression of attention throughout the process. Just as Bell’s concept of significant form enabled viewers to perceive a painting as an organised whole rather than a collection of depicted objects, attentional architecture may enable Interdemocracy to be understood as a coherent architecture rather than as a diverse collection of procedural and philosophical concepts.