Han Feizi vs. hostile / protective encoding
OPPONENT'S CASE
Public language that is subtle, mysterious, private or needlessly difficult can become a technology of hierarchy. If common users cannot act on it, opacity serves the speaker more than the public.
JQD CASE
Some realities require specialized, corrupted or protective language; hostile encoding can also expose predictable reading errors. The author nevertheless explicitly tries to avoid cruelty-through-incomprehensibility.
UNRESOLVED
At what point does protective density become private prestige?
Krishnamurti vs. Naming as Instantiation
OPPONENT'S CASE
Naming can substitute a learned category for direct perception; the word is not the thing.
JQD CASE
Agreed often enough — but a name can also instantiate: create a role, institution, product, city, game, practical route or social fact that was not previously available.
UNRESOLVED
The name is both blindfold and tool.
Gurdjieff and Advaita vs. unresolved plurality
OPPONENT'S CASE
Multiplicity may be a deficient condition to overcome: through a more stable I in Fourth Way work, or through realization of nondual ātman/brahman in Advaita.
JQD CASE
The author-confirmed self need not resolve into a unit. Plurality is not necessarily a wound awaiting metaphysical repair.
UNRESOLVED
Without a unit, what grounds responsibility, continuity and promise?
Situationist suspicion vs. commerce as usable material
OPPONENT'S CASE
Commodity spectacle colonizes lived relation; recuperation turns opposition into sellable style.
JQD CASE
Promotion, merchandise, prices, packaging, websites and even commercial apparatus can themselves be compositional material. Refusing them does not automatically return anybody to an unmediated life.
UNRESOLVED
When does using the apparatus become being used by it?
Sontag / anti-interpretive pressure vs. the wiki itself
OPPONENT'S CASE
An interpretive machine can replace sensuous encounter with a secondary vocabulary of what the work “means.”
JQD / WIKI CASE
The wiki can expose recurrences and lineages the author hopes to discover, while its evidence model admits that taxonomy is imposed and incomplete.
UNRESOLVED
At what point does the map become the obstacle it warns about?
Foucault / Illich vs. institution-building
OPPONENT'S CASE
Classification and institutions can normalize, surveil, professionalize and make people dependent on the system that claims to serve them.
JQD CASE
Some capacities require infrastructure. The response is not necessarily no institution, but smaller, forkable, beautiful, recipient-usable institutions whose apparatus remains visible.
UNRESOLVED
Can an alternate institution grow without reproducing the frame it opposed?
These fights connect directly to Critical Objections: the strongest criticism is often an intellectual opponent wearing contemporary clothes.
External orientation
Krishnamurti Foundation: “the word is not the thing” ↗ · SEP on Advaita / Śaṅkara ↗.