2003-06-07 Paradigm breaking days I get to page 4 of D&G and already/still my synapses are firing with new/old ideas. Xanadu! Exhuberance and being a teenager! Poetry, gardening, queue theory, everything. Vonnegut. Timequake. Refrains across his body of work; paragraphs as hypertext. The interconnectedness of all things. It's as if my mind knows it's going through a new paradigm moment. In the same way memories are renewed and strengthened by recall, I feel my mind opening up the concepts in my head, reintegrating them, and folding them back in. Touching files. I'm remembering a lot. What's odd is two things. It started happening before now, a few days ago. Future shocks of reading this, or am I just vulnerable to this kind of thing at the moment? Certainly Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time was having deeper resonances with me than others of his books. I'm made for this world. D&G is cutting into things I/we/the_world_I'm_in thinks about constantly. Because they noticed them, or because they shaped this world, or because the world was turning that way as they noticed and it strengthened that process all at once? It's a reflection and shaping all at once, as am I. Page 4! Oh, and another thing. These paradigm days -- they're like habit breaking days, which I've talked about before. Something goes wrong/awry and suddenly everything does. You can't remember which pocket to put your keys, which way up your card goes in the ATM, what order to dry yourself after a shower. These things ripple through the social space; overwriting other people's extelligence in the shared memory space by leaving work late and taking an unusual seat, which causes someone to stand by a different door and get to a coffee shop while it's not so busy so change their selection. Mindquakes of different magnitudes. Habits are external, this one is internal. nb, books to read are: - Book also by A Thousand Year of Nonlinear History man (Manuel de Landa), recommended by Ben of Ludicorp - Popper essays book as recommended by Matt Jones ...then, a full half page later and I'm still thinking about the parallels with Ted Nelson, the phrase "literary machines". Still on page 4. This is going to be slow going. (Then "abstact machines"... Nonlinear History took the term from here.) Oh, then: "Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come." So true! Oral culture as continually repeating the known; literature culture as making structures that can be shared and collaboratively worked on, to try and overcome the complexity exchange limit, to democratise the messiahs who can have the idea in a single brain and *also* bring it down from the mountain: with writing you can survey the territory together, and then simplify. (Getting into Ong here.) Refer back to what I wrote, oh, in 1997/98 about writing: sketching out huge structures that couldn't be held in your head in a single moment, but when written could be accompanied with the scaffold to be built, to delicately put in a place a single, shimmering thing that can then collapse (after comparing distant branches and shutting down blossoms) to single, smaller ideas. And refer to all those push/pull dichotomies. Pull as an evolutionary sort of activity. Like exploring a topology. Which brings in Dawkins, hey and Pinker too (who I meant to mention in Journey to the Centre but forgot). The landscape as a conventient slice of the maximally complex system (a metaphor which leads to its own problems: if DNA explores a landscape then DNA+modification is a different trail [Vannavar Bush, Nelson: Memex/Xanadu] so it should be fine? But of course not: genetic modification isn't like changing a map, the proponents forget that the landscape is only a slice and actually there's no division between signifier and signified. DNA is live, so it's maximally complex like the brain, or rainforests, or physics, and we can't tell which bit touches which bit. It's the spirit/word problem again). But what I mean is: these metaphors pervade my history; I am a construct of these metaphors. This book is speaking to me. Or maybe that's the paradigm breaking day talking. Hey, last thing(s): - D&G talk about rhizomes filling all available dimensions. Maximally complex then. And if you're in one, there's no spare dimension to take shortcuts, take a longer view. You're embedded (that's a long back). So we're constantly trying to squash the rhimome to sense/reach further (input and output cursors). - The difference between maps and tracings: maps are packed rhizomes. They let you see where you're going, but they're simplified. Tracings are the *same*, the thing itself. Except when we do tracings, we reproduce only what we've decided to detect. Tracings are deliberate, so we measure colour, size, etc, but nothing peripheral. Tracings are *meant* to be the thing itself, but aren't, and aren't as useful as a map either. - Social networks are bad tracings of rhizomes. We squash the dimensionality of the isness, and end up with something that of course we can't cluster automatically: we've thrown half the data away already. We could just provide people with a map, but we don't know enough to get that either. - I got to page 12!