2003-06-07
D&G- journey to the centre
I'm on a journey to the centre of my world [1]. I start reading Deleuze
and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (at last), and from the translator's
introduction: "Each 'plateau' is an orchestration of crashing bricks
extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifaces. They carry traces of
their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of
their vector. The vecotrs are meant to converge at a volatile juncture,
but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each
with its own trajectory. They word 'plateau' comes from an essay by
Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in which he found a libidinal
economy quite different from the West's orgasmic orientations. In
Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to
bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically
dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long
enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be
reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of
intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could
exist. Each section of A Thousand Plateaus tries to combine conceptual
bricks in such a way as to construct this kind of intensive state in
thought."
So not only do we get memebullets [3], we get Bateson (who I rate
enormously; whose essays unpacked for me an enormous amount; all about
cybernetics, and the rest) -- and Bateson alone is like a signpost I'm
on the right road. The ideas the same across disiplines: abstract
machines (A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History [6]), or coherent
Lakoff metaphors? All these things are my favourite models.
The centre of the world? The centre of my world, at least. The world
I've been shaped in, grown up in. It's almost as if there's someone I
naturally am, the self I always listen to and trust (I'm quite at one
with my instincts), and by reading and understanding I'm beginning to
understand the truth of the world as it is for that me. And naturally,
that world is echoed, reflected in the real world (or is it the other
way round?). In the Elegant Universe, dimensions are mentioned, and
there are equivalences in the maths: below a certain scale, below a
certain tiny tiny length, it's the same as being enormous. Is something
the smallest thing possible, or the width of the universe? It's the
same! My internal world; the world around me.
So I read and learn to articulate (I hope, or at least have a better
unarticulable understanding) of reality. That's fun.
Footnotes:
[1] is this what people mean by 'finding their centre'? [2]
[2] on the philosophy of Everything's Been Thought Of Before, then yes.
[3] An engram that is packed into symbols (words) to unfold in another
brain. Maybe there's a complexity exchange limit which means certain
ideas can't be made into memebullets, and the art is getting an
approximation that can be unpacked beautifully. [4]
[4] Imagine a pond [5]. A stone thrown into the pond will result in a
ripple pattern: the ripples interact with themselves, bounce off the
edge of the pond, interact with other ripples; bounce down to the bottom
and reflect from that. You are the pond, the pebbles are what happen to
you. But stones then sink; they're encoded into the shape of the very
thing that gives rise to that ripple pattern. It occurs to me now that
memebullets are a complex slice across this idea; each is a pebble
deliberately shaped to affect the ripple pattern in a certain way for
every person.
[5] I used to live on metaphors like this. Another was loops. Your life
follows a thread through time and space; or, better, through activity.
You go to work, you come home -- that little loop closes. Go to
university: years later, you say goodbye to friends, have a last
lecture, give your keys back, packs your stuff, take your exams, shorter
and longer loops closing all at once and a knot is tied. Loops never
close properly though, there's always a gap: hysterisis. And here's
another metaphor. We have different behaviours for different situations.
In a situation you're held in place by expectation, what your friends
expect of you, how your behaviour has been encoded into the environment
(idle extelligence) by the coffee cup near your elbow or whatever.
Sometimes you make big changes and that's a huge new bloom, you're a new
person. It's like broccoli. Then, over time, the two large branches make
cross-connections. Friends meet each other, you take expectations across
the gap accidentally, by travel maybe. And you merge the person you were
into the person you are. Branch, meet trunk. A less polite way of saying
it would be revert to type.
[6] I'll not even mention the parallels with the meshwork in the same
book, because that's clearly a D&G thing [7]. But the meshwork is
opposed to the hierarchy as D&G are opposed to state philosophy (from
the same introduction), and the philosophy being followed here is
clearly a pull, rather than push, activity/ model of arcs and vectors,
spiralling outwards, just like: hypertext, being embedded [8], this
essay.
[7] Clearer still is the parallel between the history of semiotics and
my low-resolution view of the field, and how it throws away structure,
retrieves it again, complexifies to approach the real world -- the
parallel between that, and the computer culture which has also grown
(the virtual world), which is now infecting the real world with the
semiotcracy [9], and being infected - we call it Learning From - it [8].
[8] Embeddedness. An acknowledgement of distance, the half-life of the
decay of the cause (the further you go, the more effects are diluted. I
won't say disappear, because I'm still unsure about the conservation of
transformation. That is, I think it exists). Embeddedness is a property
of machines that create themselves, that fill the system, of nature, of
no environment in which to lose side-effects. And it gives problems to
solve, the solutions to which we call things like: eyes, supersenses;
and the space in which we are embedded: the world, proto-oceans. Certain
science fiction is about being embedded in the grand sweep of history:
Kim Stanley Robinson (Vinland The Dream/ Remaking History. [10]
[9] Being able to tag, being able to pull apart layer of abstraction
(which are themselves distances, in that they serve to dilute effects of
accidental causes) -- and what's more, the impetitive to do so. [10]
[10] Let's close this down: the semiotcracy and constructed senses are
two great tides defining our (non-Popper [11]) worlds, but they're too
big to talk about here. I have notes elsewhere. These ideas do depend on
a justification of being able to talk about the real and virtual worlds,
however, which I have talked about a little [17].
[11] Dammit, and there's another one. Popper pops up all over the place.
When I was looking at E-Prime (English without the verb "to be"), whole
Earth theories, General Semantics, Borges, time binding, linguistics,
the non-allness of words [12] [13], the three worlds and so on, Popper
was all over the place. And D&G? It says on the back of the book "a
vital reference text for the study of relations between the 'first' and
'third' worlds". Well well. [14]
[12] Of course the meaning of words isn't the word itself! There's a
class of people who continually confuse this: saying the word 'book' or
'war' or whatever doesn't imply 'book' or 'war' in every context it's
been used (how literal!), it's the spirit of the thing. The
constituation is there to represent the spirit of the
constitution rather than the words, surely. I'd forgotten I'd found
'non-allness' before. I'll have to pick it up again.
[13] This week in the archives
is full of my
last push to the centre. I imagine the weeks before and after are too.
[14] Which leads to Kuhn and his structure of scientific revolutions: a
new paradigm must internalise everything which has gone before, which is
why (for me) everything here is tying in: everything must be re-stated
in terms of everything else. I'll have to dig out the exact quote, it
said exactly what's happening here. Which means, of course, that my
sense of getting closer to the centre is nonsense. It's just a dynamic.
At each step I feel like I'm going forward, but that's what each step is
meant to feel like. It's like two things. Firstly like the rotation of
language: words attract the culture in which they're embedded; if that
culture is rotten we change the word and it feels like a step forward
but it just happens again [15]. Secondly it means, does progress even
exist? [17]
[15] In a non time-bound sense [16], sort of, the same happens with
vowel sounds (the Northern Cities Shift) and which names for
bread-family products across the Atlantic: biscuit means cracker, and so
all the words get shifted along by one notch. It's all dynamics. [17]
[16] I mean, in the same way we can see the arc of history frozen across
the turning of a shell (in the A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
sense).
[17] And for a discussion of these things, see the document: Real,
virtual and making divisions.