On a Few of the Many Varieties of Codes and Deceptive Behaviors in History

Buckminster Fuller writes about the earliest Polynesian navigators, who were wizards who learned to sail East to West against the winds, with secret knowledge that was only shared orally with their sons, or coded in their chants: 

"Knowing all about boats/These navigator priests were the only people/Who knew that the Earth was spherical,/That the Earth is a closed system/With its myriad resources chartable./But being water people,/They kept their charts in their heads/And relayed the information/To their navigator progeny/Exclusively in esoterical,/Legendary, symbolical codings/Embroidered into their chants."- Synergetics, pp.749-751

I see this as an example of a small group who protect their knowledge because it was powerful and probably because it was thrilling for small-group cohesion.

-----------------------------------

How do we decode writing such as what you're looking at right now? In 11th century Fatimid Egypt, under science-loving Al-Hakim (who had become ruler at age 11, but then disappeared mysteriously during a solitary walk 25 years later), Cairo was the apex of learning in the world: lots of trade with Mediterranean neighbors, a fearsome army recruited from Sudanese, Turks and Berbers, the Polynesian's sailing code long since cracked. Among the brains that drained toward Cairo at this historical moment was al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Western scholars called him "Alhazen"), from Basra. One project was to explain perception. Al-Haytham had read the recent translations of Aristotle and agreed that things we see enter the eye via the air, but al-Haytham elaborated with more physiological and mathematical suppositions about how perception happens. Furthermore, he said we perceive via a faculty of judgement, after inference. Pure sensation was different from perception, the latter requiring a conscious, voluntary act on our part. Here was a theory of gradations of consciousness, 900 years before Korzybski: there was first pure sensation (whatever we experience before words, analogous to Korzybski's "event level"); then we voluntarily attend to some phenomena (say, paying attention to letters and words and sentences on a page: perception); then we "decipher" the words, and finally: we are reading. Al-Haytham died in 1038. (I mention the 20th century polymath Korzybski; in the first half of the 18th century the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Vico wrote, "People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner stress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind."- The New Science, #53

                                 al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, b.965

                                 wrote possibly the first great work in 

                                 optics, influenced Roger Bacon and 

                                 Leonardo da Vinci

Roughly 200 years later, under Europe's Catholic mullahs (led by Pope Clement IV), Roger Bacon - one of those guys interested in everything - was interested in optics. He'd read Al-Haytham, but was keeping it on the QT and yet still got persecuted for "unorthodox teaching." There were a lot of Churchmen who insisted rather violently that scientific research was dangerous to Church dogma (They have made some progress since then...). Bacon explained to the Pope how optics/perception/reading probably worked. Bacon and al-Haytham had both realized it's got to be far more complex than they'd suspected. In 11th century Islam, al-Haytham was not persecuted. Roger Bacon, soon after trying to explain to the Pope roughly the same theory, found himself in a cell. 

250 or so years later, Leonardo da Vinci was interested in this same problem of decoding perception and reading. But he was smart enough to know he could get in trouble: he wrote about it in his notebooks in a secret code that could only be read when held up to a mirror. 

It's only in the last 80 years that we've gotten a thick neurobiological account of how reading occurs and there's still interesting problems being worked out at this minute.

------------------------------

When looking into codes and ciphers, codes are one thing, ciphers another; all translation from one language to another is codework; any language you can't read can function as a code to crack; at one time only priests, kings, and scribes/accountants knew how to write and read: for everyone else in the culture "writing" was a code. 

O! So many codes! And right out in the open. If only we could crack/hack/decipher/decode...

-----------------------------------

Not long ago I yet again re-watched one of those films from the Great Age of Hollywood Paranoia (c.1971-1976): Three Days of the Condor, in which Robert Redford plays a CIA agent whose specialty is reading novels, looking for codes embedded in them. These codes would apparently qualify as steganography. Messages hidden within other messages...and how do you know I'm not doing that right now? (If I'm doing it, please take my word for it: it's all in good, clean fun.)

I remember when I first saw Condor: I thought Redford's job was a fiction-writer's fancy. But apparently it's a real thing, and being taken more and more seriously by...yes, CIA, but all sorts of others working in the (not so) Great Game.

What if some of our best conspiracy writers and novelists of exquisite paranoia were leaving code in their books that hadn't yet been cracked? I mean...it could happen, right? Maybe not, but we never know. Let's not rule it out completely. Which reminds me of a passage in Don DeLillo's haunting, hilarious, deeply paranoid and postmodern White Noise. The main character - who is a professor specializing in "Hitler Studies"? - his ex-wife works for the CIA:

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail. 

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice. (p.213)

Maybe it's just me, but "high-level jungle operative" makes me laff. 

White Noise is one of DeLillo's short novels, but there are some really "long serious novels with coded structures." Hmmmm...

---------------------------------

Speaking of postmodernists, Douglas Rushkoff, in his wonderful book Program or Be Programmed, writes that the postmodernists were right to be suspicious of language and "reality," but they didn't go far enough: they hadn't accounted for the hidden biases of code writers whose codes were embedded deep within our digital gadgets. (see pp.83-84, ibid)

-------------------------------

Well, the pre-postmodernists, often called simply Modernists? A few of them left works so cryptic (and therefore threatening to dull minds, like J. Edgar Hoover's), that they became suspect. 

Even though James Joyce never set foot on Unistat soil, Hoover saw him as a threat. Joyce had an FBI file. Because someone in Joyce's extended circle was a known communist, Joyce was suspected as one, too. (He was more of an individualist-anarchist of some sort.) From Claire Culleton's Joyce and the G-Men:

Even as early as 1920, Joyce had been plagued by rumors about him and his work, and he was (laughably) reputed to be a spy for the Austrians, the British, and the Italians. He even complained to his brother Stanislaus that Ulysses was believed to be a prearranged German code; Ezra Pound had heard that "British censorship suspected Ulysses of being a code." (p.45, Culleton)

Anyone who's looked at Finnegans Wake for 5 minutes might wonder what the eternally paranoid agents of Control thought Joyce must have been up to. If we go back to the early distinction between codes and ciphers, and al-Haytham's and Roger Bacon's and Leonardo's forays into human perception and reading, well, then surely Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are written in code, only in a different semantic sense than what an asshole like J. Edgar Hoover would sense as "code."

Similarly, Ezra Pound, after being captured by the Allies in Italy, had to answer to the charge that his Cantos were some sort of code. (see one of my earlier posts on codes, HERE, skip down to "Modernist Investigative Poets Are Suspects (By Definition?)"

-----------------------------------------

The great cryptologist David Kahn writes about the enigma of the "emotional bases of cryptology," reminding us that "Freud stated that the motivation for learning, for the acquisition of knowledge, derives ultimately from the child's impulse to see the hidden sexual organs of adults and other children. If curiosity is a sublimation of this, then cryptanalysis may be even more positively a manifestation of voyeurism." (p.755, The Code Breakers) Kahn follows with a long line of later psychoanalysts who basically agreed with Freud, and many who challenged his idea. Nevertheless, I find the idea cosmically funny. I mean: if Freud's right - and I don't think he is, but anyway - then if you've read this far and feel like you acquired some knowledge from the OG, 'tis only 'cuz you're some sort of very well-practiced voyeur! Which reminds me of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Fairly early in the book, you'll recall, Allied spies have noticed that US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop has sexual conquests all around London, and they're followed by V-2 rocket hit - in the same place he had sex - a couple/few days later. They don't know why, but there are theories. Rockets and hard-ons...Slothrop's penis must have a "code" to crack...it - his dick - was possibly encoded by...who? Does he know? Slothrop seems to not know. How are they going to crack this code? Talk about an Enigma!

                                       psychedelický grafický umělecké dílo Bob Campbell

On "Maps" as Maybe the Best Metaphor For Our Knowledge?

I was talking with a friend of a friend about GPS devices and I said I didn't have one. He didn't either. I said I like the challenge of getting lost (my sense of direction in non-familiar environments seems sub-optimal) and trying to "figure it out." We both still carry road-maps in our cars. About GPS systems: Apparently they're getting smaller, cheaper, more portable, and are causing trouble with not only the cops "illegally" tracking someone, but citizens are using them to spy on each other. (But of course...)

(I've already digressed?)

I still use road maps in my car. I love maps of all kinds. They fire my imagination.

"The map is not the territory." - Korzybski, who apparently annoyed certain segments of the cognoscenti by repeating something so obvious. (But is the phrase so obvious when looked at from from the angle of personal knowledge? Human behavior? Our own neuroses?)

Robert Anton Wilson, elaborating on Korzybski's famous riff, reminded us that for a map to actually "be" the territory it would:

• Have to be as big as the territory
• Have to show every inhabitant, including animals, plants, and microbes
• Give an account of every change, which it cannot do: maps are inherently frozen in time

In a fragment by Borges, "On Exactitude In Science," the cartographers of the Empire zealously mapped the entire Empire, point-by-point. The map of the Empire was as big as the Empire: what a pain in the ass. Eventually, they realized the uselessness and "pitilessness" of such a venture.

In reading a collection of articles on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (AKA: the DSM-V), I became ever more aware that Big Pharma had succeeded in making more behaviors "diseases" that could be treated by drugs, while things like "homosexuality" had been taken out of earlier versions of the book. Psychiatrists apparently listen to their patients, and if they don't "know" enough about what drug to prescribe - what they decode as a specific set of mental symptoms - they consult the DSM-V. But it's only a "map" of human complaints and hypotheses and theories and ideologies about what might help "remedy" the patient's unhappiness.

Here's where I think Korzybski's "map" metaphor is still underrated. Practically all of our knowledge "is" "maps". Certainly all of our books are maps. Even "fiction" books. (I welcome a spirited disagreement in the comments!)

                                                                               metaphor

Veteran Korzybski scholar Robert Pula:

By "maps" [in the korzybskian sense] we should understand everything and anything that humans formulate...including (to take a few in alphabetical order), biology, Buddhism, Catholicism, chemistry, Evangelism, Freudianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Lutheranism, physics, Taoism, etc, etc,...!"
-Preface to the 5th ed. of Science and Sanity, 1994, p. xvii

This entire blog - any blog you read - mostly consists of maps, or maps of maps, or maps of maps of maps, etc. And what of it? Are we still sub- and/or un-consciously looking for Someone with The Truth? (What we want is "more of the truth," no?)

What truths do we want most for ourselves? How to go about it? When do we know we're on the "best" or one of the better trails?

Computer scientist Alan Kay, on "science":

Science is a relationship between what we can represent and think about and what's actually "out there"; it's an extension of good map making..."
-p.118 What We Believe But Can't Prove (ed. John Brockman)

Kay appreciates Korzybski. Here's Blake Victor Seidenshaw on Alan Kay on Alfred Korzybski (or a map of a map of a map?):

I enjoyed Alan Kay's perceptive comments about the irony of the Korzybskian "null-A," since the "null" is itself an Aristotelian operator! Alan mentioned that he thought Korzybski himself probably would have found this hilarious, since he had obviously never intended to do away with Aristotelian logic entirely. This is an important, if obvious point: if you think about it, as Korzybski certainly did, we cannot logically - intellectually - do away with classical logic; the very attempt to do so would precisely reproduce it. This amounts to an excellent paradox; it is literally unthinkable.
-ETC: A Review of General Semantics; vol.67; no.1, January 2010, p.3

With Robert Anton Wilson, "The word is not the thing" being called Korzybksi's First Law, the 2nd Law is "The map is not the territory." Aside from the philosophical zombies and the possibility I'm a brain in a vat imagining/hallucinating my "reality" (or the recent lysergic philosophical idea that we're probably Sims created by more advanced beings from Elsewhere, although, with this last, on some level, so effing what?), there seems to be a booming, buzzing confusion of a pre-verbal world "out there." Once we note it and begin to make sense of it we're abstracting/making a "map" of "reality" in our nervous system. (I think that guy is going to make a left-hand turn...why can't he use his turn indicator?: This forms part of your own mental map of "driving" or "other drivers", etc)

It seems there might exist some exceptions to this? Maybe. How about when maps are part of the territory? When I'm teaching a class and I talk about how "maps" work, am I not using maps as part of the territory about representation from within a teaching framework?

[...Or does this constitute a Strange Loop? Can I JOOTS (jump outside of the system- Douglas Hofstadter) and aver the teacher is using his knowledge (map) to talk about how maps work, putting teacher in a larger set/system of "reality" of map-users and map-makers? Just asking for a friend...]

Well, as we saw in my prior OG-spew, many Serious Thinkers thought Korzybski "nutty" and gave plenty of snarl words and "reasons" why. I'm not buying. Korzybski was weird, but also: pretty damned genius, in my opinion. Here's a passage from deep in modern cognitive neurolinguistics:

(The author has spent 190+ pages addressing neurons, how they fire, how the nervous system of humans make neural circuits based on embodied being-in-the-world, and how conceptual schemes arise, allowing us to categorize our experiences and understand the world. - OG):

How do people learn the concepts and language covering rich array of cultural frames such as baseball, marriage, and politics? In particular, what does the embodied NTL [Neural Theory of Language - OG] have to say about learning and using the language of cultural discourse? 

The answer is metaphor. Metaphor in general refers to understanding one domain in terms of another...The NTL approach suggests that all of our cultural frames derive their meanings from metaphorical mappings to the embodied experience represented in primary conceptual schemas. 
-p.194, From Molecule To Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language, Jerome A. Feldman (2006)

Now: you're an embodied human reading and abstracting from what I've written here. You're making sense of it in the best way you can for right now. (I am trying to do this, as you read and breathe.) Feldman is reporting on not only his own work, but the work of hundreds of other cognitive scientists and others. He's trying his best - presumably - to get us to understand this exciting set of ideas. And, as I abstract from this, it's all about "metaphorical mappings."

We are attracted to people who make really interesting maps. A lot of the time we call these people "artists" or "inventors." We love them because they help us make our own maps richer in detail.

If you accept the idea in the title for this blog-spew, what other sorts of metaphors exist but maps? Metaphors here "are" maps. Maps are metaphors, by a process of algebraic thinking.

Where might I have gone wrong here?

                                            artaĵo por Bobby Campbell

Why Korzybski Waned: Some Educated Guesses

As I meditate - even ruminate, at times - on the quandary of climate change, income inequality, the Supreme Court's tragically stupid ruling that money "is" speech, that Trump or Hillary will probably be the next POTUS, etc, lately I've been thinking that, were Korzybski's "General Semantics" (from now on: "GS") taught in schools, or talked about on teevee or lauded in pop kulch, we couldn't possibly "be" in the mess we seem to be in now. I recently re-read Ezra Pound's 1937 essay "On the Immediate Need of Confucius" and thought, "We need Korzybski immediately."

And GS had its moment in Unistat education (c.1938-55 or so); now it's apparently thought of as something from the "fringe." While I constantly re-read the Ur-Text of GS, Korzybski's Science and Sanity, and can always "see" something sort of "wild" in the text, I think it's one of the great underrated books of all time.

I will try to provide a brief, necessarily idiosyncratic and truncated sketch of GS's marginalization. The following ideas, while numbered, represent no particular hierarchy:

1. The late media theorist Neil Postman (d:2003), who was a great student of Korzybski's writings, gave two reasons why Korzybski had fallen out of favor:

"Many academicians do not care for Korzybski - in part because he was not careful, and in part, because they have no patience for genius." - originally in Postman's "autobibliography" in his own book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk, but my immediate source is "Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk - Redux," by Martin Levinson, PhD, in Etc: A Review of General Semantics, vol.63, number1, January 2006, pp.67-76

Brief comment by OG: Yes, Korzybski seems at times not-careful (ask me about the jazz irony sometime, for example); also: he clearly seems like an overpowering generalist-genius to me. If academicians have no patience for such a cat, my current main interpretation is that specialization has so manically taken over academe, and someone who writes about - on many pages all-at-once - neurobiology/philosophy/mathematics/biology/anthropology/physics/psychology and chemistry: can't possibly be taken seriously. I see AK's synthesis of what was known by 1933 as astounding.

2. Korzybski was a Polish count, polyglot, and not a bona fide academic, under Western standards. Hence, he was often seen as a cranky weirdo by academics. Not one of "us." Tries to cover too much. Too esoteric and generalistic. Now: many writers in different fields loved Korzybski and wrote interpretations (abstractions?) of his work. One of the earliest popularizers of AK's work was by Stuart Chase, whose Tyranny of Words (1938) was a best-seller. Chase was an MIT social theorist and advisor to FDR.

Brief comment: While Woody Allen's joke about the intellectual class being like the Mafia - "they only kill their own" - is one of my favorites, this seems like an exception.

3. By the late 1950s/early 1960s, AK and his GS was seen by the "responsible" intellectuals as allied with the outre and growing culture later known as "the counterculture." William S. Burroughs studied under AK briefly, and used ideas about GS in a science fiction-y way. (By extension, Allen Ginsberg was influenced by WSB's interest in Korzybski, and so Ginsberg was obviously influenced by GS too. When mentioning Ginsberg in this context, it seems Alan Watts's AK influence need be added.) Indeed, for a while, GS was seen as synonymous with science fiction-thought, with Heinlein being an exponent of AK. A.E. Van Vogt wrote SF novels trying to popularize his interpretations of GS. (Sorry about the initial-stew here!)

4. AK and his GS have gradually become "infected" (my word) by its association with Scientology. Perhaps the richest irony here: an adequate understanding of GS would reveal that a mere association of one group with another does not mean that one groups's idea "infected" the following group. The notion that previously-created knowledge is utilized by many subsequent groups, for their own ends, still seems a pillar of sophisticated thought.

In Lawrence Wright's riveting book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (2013), while science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard was formulating his new religion, Jack Parsons's ex-mistress, Sara Elizabeth "Betty" Northrup, read to Hubbard from Korzybski; and Hubbard, "immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion." (p.60) A further taste:

"Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory is represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses - including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities - could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. 'Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,' he later related. 'I know quite a bit about Korzybski's works.'" (p.60)

Comment: There's no doubt Science and Sanity influenced Dianetics. I feel quite confident that Korzybski (who died in 1950) would disavow such a thing. Is it the fault of a writer if a later writer takes their work and uses it toward entirely different ends? Nietzsche's sister played her brother's work into the proto-Nazi's thought. I also have no doubt Nietzsche would have been appalled by Alfred Rosenberg's use of his thought, not to mention Hitler's bad reading in Mein Kampf. I will not comment on the parade of Christian fascists we've seen in the grand historical sweep.

5. As Unistat gradually took on the character of the National Security State after 1947, there slowly grew an apparatus of apologists for the State (of which I prefer Chomsky's term "commissar class"), and some of these intellectuals appointed themselves as "debunkers" of challenges to scientific orthodoxy. Darkly ironic, and seemingly at odds with the spirit of scientific investigation itself, probably the most famous and enduring Official Debunker was Martin Gardner, a brilliant writer who seemed polymathic in a way that mirrored Korzybski. However, in his enormously influential book Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science (1952), Gardner lumped Korzybski in with flying saucer fanatics, psionics, the Bates theory of eyesight, Atlantis, Bridey Murphy...and L. Ron Hubbard. The zeitgeist and Gardner's formidable writing chops cannot be overestimated here. The chapter, "General Semantics, Etc," gives (to my eyes) a bad-faith ad hominem reading of Science and Sanity. While prefacing that he thinks Korzybski's bad book is not as bad as previously-discussed pillories of Wilhelm Reich and Hubbard (separate chapters are devoted to taking down those guys too), Gardner writes of Korzybski's magnum opus:

"It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive, repetitious mish-mash of sound ideas borrowed from abler scientists and philosophers, mixed with neologisms, confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations about neurology and psychiatric therapy." (p.281)

At the same time, Gardner - who for some reason links Korzybski with Jacob L. Moreno, the Rumanian who invented psychodrama - says Korzybski "may or may not have considerable scientific merit." Then he gets down to debunking. If Korzybski ever had a good idea, it was not a new idea. usw.

Comment: At the risk of taking 10,000 words to debunk this debunker, I would merely aver that Korzybski's psychology of perception and individual/societal "making sense" of phenomena is still on very strong ground, and that Gardner should have at least acknowledged this and written, "It seems to me that..." (It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive...etc). I charge Gardner with ad hominem, but he's canny about it. It seems mean-spirited and underhanded to me, with lots of appeals to authority and almost zero charity. See for yourself: Chapter 23, pp.281-291.

6. Many years ago I was sitting in a very large room on the 5th floor of the hall of justice in Long Beach, California, waiting to see if I would be impanelled on an actual jury. I was reading Korzybski or another book on GS. An older lady stopped and took note: "You're reading General Semantics! I used to teach that." I asked what ever happened to it? How come I wasn't taught it? She said "The business community hated it." She also said she thought the local churches and politicians didn't like it, either. I remember saying this reminded me of Socrates getting busted for "corrupting the youth" of Athens. I recall the older lady saying it was sort of like that, yea.

Comment: I mean this as an endorsement of Korzybski.

                                   A Chomsky diagram: how will this tell you how
                                   "the death tax" really works?

7. In 1957, Noam Chomsky broke radically with a long historic tradition in linguistics, publishing a thin book titled Syntactic Structures. It was so obscure at the time the only place he could publish it was at The Hague. In what myself and many others take to be a prime example of "physics envy" in areas of the academy that were not physics, this book gradually achieved academic cult-status, filled with abstruse diagrams of transformations of sentence structures, as an attempt to get to the "deep structure" (still a potent metaphor, with legs!) of English. The goal was audacious: scrap the entire history of empirical linguistics and, using the latest mathematics and following a Cartesian philosophical rationalism, to eventually show that human language contains Universal Grammar that only humans are endowed with, by...well, not the Creator-creator. Not evolution, either. Oh, he'd deal with that some other day.

Comment: This may be the most underrated reason why Korzybski is now seen as a fringe figure: Chomsky's linguistic work, which now looked as important and impressive as physics diagrams on a blackboard as scribbled by Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, or Feynman, was too seductive to not jump on board if you were an academic who wanted in on the Newest Abstruse Theory. Or: a new, possibly more-encompassing language paradigm, which, if legit, was a real winner. Couple this with Chomsky's tireless humanistic ethics against the State, war, inequality, official lies, Behaviorism, and most of his fellow intellectuals' overweening ambition to serve the State: you have the conscience of the entire Intellectual Class residing in one man's thought. I think Chomsky's odd non-charismatic charisma helped his linguistic program, which was doomed, probably from its inception, to never be able to account for the most important aspect of language: semantics. Intellectual attention space is limited. Chomsky's language ideas and his background as a properly trained academic seemed more impressive. Hence, GS waned. Unistat culture suffered. I now see Chomsky's linguistic gains, over 60 years, to be quite modest considering the declared ambitious grasp in scope. It was a bifuration point, culturally, and to our detriment and for complex reasons, it went the other way...

8. "Popularizations" are not serious reading. This, in the age of Specialization, seems gospel in Academe. Now not only AK but his popularizers are seen as not only "wrong" because non-Chomskyan, but debased, because for the masses. I have on my shelves GS-popularizations such as People In Quandaries by Wendell Johnson; Levels of Knowing and Existence by Harry L. Weinberg; The Language of Wisdom and Folly, by Irving J. Lee; Mathsemantics: Making Numbers Talk Sense, by Edward MacNeal. Oh, and Samuel Hayakawa's Language In Thought and Action, which has proven to be the most famous of GS popularizers. (More about this last book and author below.)

Comment: All of these books consist for me as guides to what might have been. Korzybski's work was so fecund that none of these books are alike. Just one irony among many I could point out here: In Chomsky's Understanding Power, he extolls 1930s leftist intellectuals for popularizing difficult subjects! (see pp.331-333) For more irony, see pp.37-44, where Noam - not doing linguistics but championing human freedom against the State and its violence, gives one example after another of how the State uses Orwellian language against the masses, who are defenseless unless they somehow learn one or another form of "intellectual self-defense," none of which could possibly include GS because that approach is "all wrong."(<----I read an email from Noam forwarded to me by a friend who asked what Chomsky thought of GS)

Popularizations are not to be taken seriously, but we want the public to understand the increasingly opaque world. So: popularizations are no good unless they're good. Since 1930: it looks to me like the Commissar Class doesn't really care if a small minority of the population reads something very truthful about power. As long as more than a "few" don't catch on?

9. In what functions as an update on Gardner, Steven Pinker's popular book The Language Instinct (1994) has an entire chapter showing why Korzybski/GS/Sapir-Whorf "are" all wrong. Pinker has picked up the Chomsky linguistic model and assumed the role of Public Intellectual. When I read his chapter, "Mentalese" from TLI, I get the feeling Pinker has never actually read Korzybski. I emailed him; Pinker never wrote back. In my opinion Pinker contributes to the enormous disservice to the public by making fun of the previous model of how language works. (See The Language Instinct, pp. 55-82 and see what you think?)

10. Regarding S. I. Hayakawa, the most popular popularizer of Korzybski: it's pretty complicated. Because Hayakawa was teaching mostly writers and humanities types, his biographer, Gerald Haslam, has called Hayakawa's GS "General Semantics Lite." Language In Thought and Action is a delightful read, and will make you "smarter" right away. However, if you decide then to look at his source - Science and Sanity - you will probably be STUNNED by all the math and science.

In Robert Anton Wilson's book The Illuminati Papers, there's a page of Erisiana that may seen obscure now. On p.92 (I have the olde And/Or Press issue), there's a jokey-ornate form letter from, among other "groups," the American Anarchist Association. The letter is addressed to someone named S.I. Hayakawa, and cautions the recipient to read another person with the same name, because the other Hayakawa was evidently a sane reader of GS who knew and wrote about  Korzybski well. The recipient of the letter would benefit, because "He might also teach you something about neurosemantic relaxation. In the last photograph We saw of you confronting the dissidents, your entire face, shoulders, and body showed rigidity, neurosemantic 'closedness,' and the general nonverbal message, 'Don't talk to me; my mind is made up.' General Semantics might teach you how to grow out of this infantile and primitive attitudinal set and function as a time-binding and open personality. Please get in touch with the other Dr. Hayakawa an give this a try." - signed by "Theophobia the Elder," a Robert Anton Wilson pseudonym within the Discordian religion.

Some background HERE.

Here's his biographer, Haslam, giving a talk to General Semantics Symposium.

A defense of Hayakawa by his son: Let's remember that S.I. Hayakawa1 is not the same as S.I. Hayakawa2, who isn't the same as S.I. Hayakawa3, etc.

Comment: Hayakawa famously slept in the California Senate. As Haslam notes, it's ironic that this is all people remember about Hayakawa (who was Marshall McLuhan's paperboy in Canada when he was very young!); it seems very unfortunate that his semantic reactions at SF State during the anarchic late 1960s has been used to denigrate GS.

11. Robert Anton Wilson - who turned me on to Korzybski - told interviewer Charles Platt in the early 1980s that there were "defects" in his [Korzybski's- OG] system, but his body of work is something "everybody should grapple with." RAW told me he thought Korzybski could be personally abrasive, and that may be why he fell out of favor. (I forget where I read that some of Korzybski's students said he could be "blasphemously cheerful.") There's an idea that runs through a lot of RAW's heavily-influenced-by-Korzybski oeuvre: that there is a semantic unconscious - which Pound called  paideuma - in which it is taboo to know how power, sex and knowledge "really work." In my opinion, this may be the deepest "reason" why Korzybski waned.

                                           बॉबी कैम्पबेल द्वारा कलाकृति

Metaphors in Literature, Philosophy and Science: Divagations

"It's an instrument," Machine Gun Kelly said. "Play it." [1]

--------------------------------------------------

Lately I've been studying ideas about influence, coercion, advertising, hypnosis, and ideas about "mind control," particularly what is usually called "conspiracy theory" ideation. I'll just leave it at that.

Well...no. Let me add one thing: I have come to a tentative conclusion about that last item: Yes, some conspiracy theories about "mind control" seem to have varying degrees of validity, if not soundness. Others seem batshit crazy to me. But for those C-theorists with more scholarly minds - or even those who have attained reading levels of a bright 15 year old - I think the richest depths to plumb are in the study of 1.) Rhetoric, and 2.) Metaphor. You wanna learn how to control minds? Find out everything you can about both of those areas. You won't be drilling in a dry hole.

                                Can Chinatown be a metaphor? Who for? Why?

-----------------------------------------------------


In a prescient essay from 1996, "Farewell To The Information Age," UC Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg quotes John Perry Barlow, Ted Nelson and Michael Benedikt about how digitization wipes everything clean and is totally revolutionary. Barlow said something to the effect, "We thought we were in the wine business but it turns out we're in the bottling business." Nunberg riffs off this - in 1996! - by writing, "We are breaking the banks and hoping still to have the river." (If I recall correctly Nunberg is quoting Paul Duguid.)

No divagation here. Make up your own!

------------------------------------------------------

"You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back on the freeway again." [2]

------------------------------------------------------

"I am completely convinced that there is a wealth of information built into us, with miles of intuitive knowledge tucked away in the genetic material of every one of our cells. Something akin to a library containing uncountable reference volumes, but without any obvious route of entry. And, without some means of access, there is no way to even begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature."
-Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL p.xvi

Do you like to find out new things every day? The pleasure of learning a new thing gives you a bit of a dopamine buzz. Because you're learning. And possibly from books. Now: what if you already have the most marvelous stash of novelty-in-form-ation ensconced in your genes? Too bad you don't have a key to that library. Well, who is this Shulgin guy? Does he know of which he speaks? If he's right, what are some of the barriers to keep you/me from accessing the stupendously wondrous texts held within?

A friend of Ted Nelson - Jaron Lanier - thinks the idea that all it will take is another thirty or fifty years of Moore's Law and our computers/AI will outrun Nature? Probably wrong, even though widely accepted among his fellow Internet-inventors. And, because I love metaphors around books, Jaron says this:

"Wire and protocol-limited mid-twentieth-century computer science has dominated the cultural metaphors of both computation and living systems. For instance, Jorge Luis Borges described an imaginary library that would include all the books that ever were or might possibly be written. If you were lucky enough to live in a universe big enough to contain it (and we aren't), you'd need to invest the lives of endless generations of people, who would always wither away on starships trying to get to the right shelf. It would be far less work learning to write good books in the traditional way. Similarly, Richard Dawkins has proposed an infinite library of possible animals. He imagines the invisible and blind hand of evolution gradually browsing through this library, finding the optimal creature for each ecological niche. In both cases, the authors have been infected by the inadequate computer science metaphors of the twentieth century. While an alternative computer science is not yet formulated, it is at least possible to speculate about its likely qualities." - The Next Fifty Years (2002)

First off: are there any Borges experts out there? I wonder how much Borges was influenced by computer science in his marvelous "Library of Babel" versus notions of infinity he'd read about in kabbalah, Renaissance magicians, and sufism. Still, I guess Jaron's point holds regardless. And he's been trying to re-imagine a computer science for quite awhile now, given the quick advent and obvious problems of inequality and surveillance.

The codex-book as metaphor seems so potent to literate minds. When I read Borges's famous short story, then read Lanier's literal interpretation, I realize I visualize the Library of Babel as something along Chomsky's "discrete infinity." I mean, I don't want to board a starship, but I do hazily recall many days of spending timeless hours in the stacks of very large libraries or used book stores, finding endlessly marvelous things, actually looking at books written in Chinese - completely mysterious and yet wondrous - and the Babel branch is like that, only it goes on forever. The place closes at 10 PM, and I realize I never ate dinner. And now that you mention it, I don't see any EXIT signs anywhere. How long have I been in here? How do I get back to the register?

However, psychedelic drugs as accessing experiential book-like knowledge? I don't know. One often reads in visionary works the problem of our "clouded lenses" - flawed vision as metaphor. In Erik Davis's Nomad Codes there's a metaphor around psychedelic drugs as keys that can open doors previously kept locked. Earlier (c.1976), Dr. Leary gave us the metaphor of DNA as text: "The DNA code contains the entire life blueprint - the history of the past and the forecast of the future. The intelligent use of the brain is to imprint the DNA code." - Info-Psychology, p.59 As an exercize, unpack all the metaphors there!

-----------------------------------------------------

Speaking of kabbalah: Joseph Dan discusses the structural argument of the Zohar: "Historical events, the phases of human life, the rituals of the Jewish sabbath, and the festivals are all integrated into this vast picture. Everything is a metaphor for everything else." - Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, p.33

-----------------------------------------------------

"The history of consciousness is the history of words, " Joyce said immediately. "Shelley was justified in his bloody unbearable arrogance, when he wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Those whose words make new metaphors that sink into the public consciousness, create new ways of knowing ourselves and others." [3]

-----------------------------------------------------

Along the above lines, one of my favorite passages in Lit about the poet's magickal imaginative powers to alter reality comes from a passage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Theseus says the "poet's eye" works on "the forms unknown" and:

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.

You've probably seen this quote used to bolster all sorts of arguments in contemporary thought. There seem to "be" things "out there" as yet undiscovered OR: people experience something but have no words to label these "things" in experience. The neologist, the meme-propagator, the master rhetorician, the re-framing metaphor user who alters minds: these all seem to fit Theseus's poet's magickal workings.

In a delightful book on the neuroscience of music, Daniel J. Levitin discusses our need to categorize from an evolutionary standpoint. "Categorization entails treating objects that are different as of the same kind. A red apple may look different from a green apple, but they are both still apples. My mother and father may look very different, but they are both caregivers, to be trusted in an emergency [...] Leonard Meyer notes that classification is essential to enable composers, performers, and listeners to internalize the norms governing musical relationships, and consequently, to comprehend the implications of patterns, and experience deviations from stylistic norms." Then Levitin quotes The Bard's lines from above. - This Is Your Brain On Music, p.147

------------------------------------------------------

There may be one reader (I'm looking at YOU!) who has wondered, "Is this dude gonna address all the 'the brain is a computer' metaphors?" No. Because there's too much written about it. I swim in those waters. (Are you, by chance feeling hyper-aware of metaphors right now? Hyperaware of the so-called "tacit dimension"?) One of my favorite lines about "the brain is a computer" comes from some book I don't even remember reading, but it's in my notes. The brain is NOT a computer, but it is a Chinese restaurant: crowded, chaotic, lots of people running around, and yet stuff gets done. I apparently got this metaphor from Welcome To Your Brain, by Aamodt and Wang.

------------------------------------------------------

George Lakoff admits his empirical research on metaphor (of which I am a major amateur reader) had been preceded by Ernst Cassirer, I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Benjamin Lee Whorf and a few others. The oldest thinker he names is Vico, who died in 1744. Lakoff argues strongly and convincingly that metaphor is not some fancy part of speech, as most of us were taught. It's deeply embedded in everything we say and do. I once wrote him that he never mentions Norman O. Brown, who said, "All that is, is metaphor." Lakoff wrote back and said NOB wasn't "empirical." Anyway, check out these lines from a guy who died in 1592 (if Vico was allowed, why not this guy?):

"To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think that they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that are no better than the chatter of my chambermaid." - Montaigne "On the Vanity of Words"

Okay, maybe it's a stretch. Montaigne seems to not be arguing that metaphor is basic to our speech - as Vico did - but he seems to be rather unimpressed by the talk of metaphors. And yet, he's using metaphors in every sentence. If Montaigne were here to find this out, I suspect he'd find it all quite marvelous.

------------------------------------------------

A.) I recall Joseph Campbell talk about a lecture he gave on gods, goddesses, heroes, etc. And a young man rose up and said these things didn't exist; they're lies. Campbell replied they were metaphors. After a slightly rancorous exchange, Campbell suddenly realized the young man didn't know what a metaphor was. Campbell told him it's when you say something IS something else. 

B.) Alfred Korzybski argued that humans suffer for taking literally what he called "The Is of Identity" and "The Is of Predication." If I say, "Cate Blanchet is the greatest actress alive now," (And I might if you were here, just for fun, but for now that would be missing the point entirely) I'm predicating/identifying/making the same "Best Actress In The World" and "Cate Blanchet." But who knows how to logically prove my assessment? And even if I could prove - an impossibility, in my metaphysics - that Cate "really is" equal to the term "best actress in the world," Cate's so much more than that. I'm hypnotizing myself or you or both of us by leaving out Cate as a mother, Aussie, masturbator, gardner, philanthropist, a person with a rich private memory, as prankster, etc, etc, etc, etc. 

How do we square A with B? And what about font size?

1. From the Hemingway-inspired short story by William S. Burroughs, "Where He Was Going," from Tornado Alley

2. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

3. Masks of the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson

                                          OG logo by Bobby Campbell

"Moist Panties": The Oddity of Word Aversion

Whilst reading a collection of articles on slang, trying to get a line on how it's created by in-groups in order to define themselves and give members a sense of belonging, and how created slang words make their way into mainstream culture, I happened upon the apparently mysterious linguistic topic of word aversion.

I'll get to moist panties in a sec, but I wonder what y'all make of sentences such as, "After a nourishing hot meal it was Tad's brainchild to make fudge, but feeling suddenly like he needed to vomit, he dropped the spoon, wiped his slacks, felt like puke, and threw his sweaty shirt into the crevice of his couch." Or: "The hardscrabble pugilist towed his luggage into his man-cave, his brow felt viscous and the scab began to ooze. He wondered if he'd ever win a bout again, and if this was the new normal."

Okay, I admit these sentences seem ripped from a Bulwer-Lytton Bad Writing contest, but I crammed in as many words as I could that people reported having a visceral reaction to...for seemingly no good reason at all. There are no "swear" words here. The words seem pedestrian, inoffensive.

U. of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman gives this definition for word aversion:

"A feeling of intense, irrational distaste for the sound or sight of a particular word or phrase, not because its use is regarded as etymologically or logically or grammatically wrong, nor because it's felt to be overused or trendy or non-standard, but simply because the word itself somehow feels unpleasant or even disgusting." 

I read this and, similar to the association Proust had with madeleines, I remembered a conversation with a friend in which he brought up how much he couldn't stand the word "ointment." Just the sound of it bothered him. He was otherwise of very sound mind.

So, I swerved and started reading on word aversion. It seems a lot of us have these words that really bug us, but scholars don't know why, or what percentage of the population has these aversions, or how old the phenomenon is, whether it's similar to disgust over sounds, smells or tastes, or if bilingual people - who have more of a sense of how arbitrary words and meanings are - are less prone to word aversion.

                                          Sorry! 

Sarah Fentem of The Atlantic really hates the word "panties." She goes on about why, and while I get where she's coming from, I happen to love the word "panties." Fentem seems to think it connotes patriarchy and making women's undergarments (the lower one) into a little girl thing. It's undignified, I guess. For me, it makes me slightly randy, and I don't think of women as anything less than men; au contraire: women might be better than us men. Or I find myself often thinking so...What's interesting is that Fentem seems to have a lot of company.

But the all-time gross-out word, or at least recently, in English, seems to be "moist." Which...I don't understand. Here's another word I think perfectly lovely. In reading on the aversion for "moist," I learn it migrated to us from the French in the 14th century, and meant "damp." The French got it from a Latin word that denoted that which is slimy, moldy, mushy, and possibly associated with disease.

I use "amazing" too much, and I'm not happy about it, but many others abuse it to the point where it almost disgusts me. "Your hair...is amazing!" No, it's not. Very few hairdos are truly "amazing," but let's not go down that road. I dislike the word "amazing" because of its overuse, so that doesn't qualify under Prof. Liberman's definition.

Others declare they detest the word "like" as a placeholder in everyday conversation, and I agree, but that doesn't qualify under the Liberman definition either. When college students are asked what words they dislike they often trot out pus, mucous, phlegm, vomit, puke, crud, scab and ooze, but the disgust issue seems to be baked on there. And besides, I really like all those words. They don't disgust me; I'm not aversive to them.

But why did other people cite brainchild, slacks, navel, squab, cornucopia, pugilist and goose pimple? This is where it gets interesting. Interesting-weird. To me, anyway...

I tried to compile a list, over the past two days, of words that seem to bug me, for no good reason. I came up with:

dust bunnies: I think I don't like this because I remember my mom picking up the term from TV she'd recently watched, and I guess maybe this lowbrow acquisition bothered my affected and wanna-be highbrow pretenses at the time. The aversion to the term has stuck for 30-odd years.

yummy: I almost feel apologetic for admitting this one. After all, it's an extremely common expression of joy over food, and lately: the good looks of someone else, and it seems that women will say it about hunky men far more than men about alluring women. I think maybe it seems too childish for me? As I said: I apologize to all of you, but Liberman does say it's an "irrational distaste."

FWB/friends with benefits: Gawd, I hated this from the get-go, as soon as I understood the acronym. Have your flings! Be far more..."French" folks! Enjoy your dalliances. But to couch your carnal sex-partner in terms from the workplace? "Benefits"? Now that I'm forced to write about it, I'd prefer "fuck pal" as it's so up-front and unapologetic, brazen even. The "benefits" connotes the Human Resources person down the hall, sick days, the rec room at work. Come to think of it, FWB doesn't disgust me. It pisses me off. I think of John Dewey's term for people who are so caught up in their work it's their whole goddamned life; they can't talk about anything else, even when off work. And it's BORING to listen to: who in the office said what when so-and-so showed up dressed like blah blah and then the thing that another person at work knows that the other person doesn't know they know and that some other co-worker might be gay, etc: Dewey's term: "occupational psychosis." Fuck FWB! And maybe FWB wouldn't count with Liberman, I'm not sure: my distaste seems rational to me, not "irrational."

foodie: I loathe this term, but I think I've unpacked it and it's about class and pretentiousness. I use it, but only within the context of jokes. I saw a sketch comedy bit where a guy with AIDS walks out on his date because she says in passing she's gluten-free and he says he's a foodie and that disgusts him. "Gluten-free is bullshit! I'm outta here!" I can imagine a few friends reading this and later bringing it up, because they use "foodie" all the time, and I try to hide my wincing. Hoo-boy...

upscale: I think I hate this word for roughly the same reason I hate foodie. It doesn't seem like panties or moist or crevice to me. I maybe think far too much about words...I will use "upscale" in an ironic or comic sense, too.

The American people...: A lifetime of having my Crap Detector on while politicians and other demagogues speak has me recoiling in a visceral rictus of hate for this term. It's a term that's supposed to instantly hypnotize its audience, and it only adds to my hatred of it because it seems like it works well enough for the assholes who use it.

convo: I see this in writing. People want to get together for drinks and some conversation. Only they write "convo," which strongly suggests to me they have nothing to say that could even possibly be of remote interest to me. I think this one fits Liberman's definition. I feel an irrationality in my distaste for this term.

And finally: I would like to murder and get away unpunished anytime a person says:

The F-bomb: The layers of ignorance and sheer idiocy this term connotes, for me? I can't even go into it here, now. Suffice: if you say that someone "dropped an F-bomb" I will want to drop you, hopefully with blood oozing out of your ears. FUCK seems like a perfectly lovely word to me. Jesus H. Muthafucking Christ on a pogo stick: GROW THE FUCK UP, AMERICA!

Another scholar, Jason Riggle of U. of Chicago, says word aversion seems highly specific in evoking a visceral reaction, but about feelings of disgust, not moral outrage or annoyance. The words that disgust people seem to conjur up an association of imagery or some scenario. I'm not sure any of my words work here from his perspective. And if so, it has been suggested that the people who aren't bothered by moist panties covered in crud in a crevice, who might need to put some ointment on that scab that's oozing pus? They're people who work with words and writing every day. I have since I was five years old.

Robert Anton Wilson was not word-aversive, and his first published book was a dictionary of slang and "forbidden words." He'd wanted to discuss how irrational semantic reactions to some words which acted like spells on listeners and readers, but the publishers cut out those parts. In the last decade or so of his life he wrote an essay about "fuck" and other words that we're supposed to be scandalized by...even "liberals" will seek to harm your career if you use these black magick words. RAW begins his essay, "Copulating Currency," with these lines:

James Joyce defined an artistic epiphany as any "vulgarity of language" which reveals the "whatness" or "radiance" of an event or of those structural systems which remain "grave and constant in human affairs." As biographer Richard Ellmann noted, the effect of these fragments on conversation, preserved in Joyce's novels, often appears "uncanny." I myself tend to find them a combination of the tragic and the hilarious. - see p.171, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution

The linguistic scholars who have yet to formally delve into word aversion have already banished Alfred Korzybski to the Region of Thud; he is declasse in the groves of academe. But he'd already come up with a robust theory that covers much of this ground: we have "semantic reactions" to words and they work throughout the nervous system (NB: the current linguistic professors' use of "visceral"), and, well, let's let Korzybski speak from 1933 to us, the time being bound:

Since "knowledge", then, is not the first order un-speakable objective level, whether an object, a feeling; structure and so relations, becomes the only possible content of "knowledge" and of meanings. On the lowest level of our analysis, when we explore the objective level (the unspeakable feelings in this case), we must try to define every "meaning" as a conscious feeling of actual, or assumed, or wished...relations which pertain to first-order objective entities [...] The meanings of meanings, in a given case, represent composite, affective, psycho-logical configurations of all relations pertaining to the case, coloured by past experiences, state of health, mood of the moment, and other contingencies.
-pp.22-23, Science and Sanity

Korzybski was the one who cautioned us: the word is not the thing; the word "water" will not make you wet. A later student of Korzybski paraphrased him: the menu is not the meal. We should try to constantly remind ourselves, via a "consciousness of abstracting" that we are throwing around abstract words and maybe we don't even know what we're talking about. Does the "National Debt" have a certain odor? What color is it? How much does it weigh? If we can't give good answers to these types of questions, we may be tossing around a high-order abstraction as if it were on the same level as the hammer on the table in front of you.

Natasha Fedotova of the U. of Pennsylvania found that the word "rat" can "contaminate" words next to it. I hope you have a good rat time tonight at the cafe with all your friends! (Wha?) Fedotova served perfectly delicious food on plates that said RAT on them; people tended to not want to eat.

Here's my kinda guy: blogger Ted McCagg. He got the idea to determine the best word ever. Not the most erudite or funniest or most whimsical: "the best." And all sorts of people got involved and he laid out a massive competition, like the college basketball "March Madness" style of brackets. He loves words like Wilson and Joyce did...and George Carlin, indeed. I too like kerfuffle, hornswoggle, gherkin and diphthong. I even like viscous and maggots.

And, of course, moist panties.

[Apologies to all who have been harmed by certain words in this blog!]

I Didn't Build This Blog

In the Blizzard of Memes, you can't see what hit you. Metaphors land softly in the snow of your neural fluids only dimly noted, at best. Other cleaning systems, born by fluids electrically discharging, move the thought-stuff out of your system, and what remains...remains. Other memes are noted...as "memes" because, well, here you are: noting them. But what's inside?

And what's forgotten?

When Obama made a now-famous speech in his campaign against Romney (who ironically invented Obamacare), he riffed on "You didn't build that." I immediately recognized this riff as being probably stolen (watch my loaded words here!), or borrowed from Elizabeth Warren. I'd read or heard or saw Warren give a variation, well-fleshed-out, years earlier. But she didn't build that.

I just finished reading the Wikipedia article on "You Didn't Build That." I thought it was a decent Wiki, although as I read it I found - as I usually do - that I'd wanted it to link to...something older. Because Elizabeth Warren didn't build "You didn't build that." (But I've always believed she had long internalized the conceptual framework of the idea; and I think it gets near to the heart of our central tragedy in Unistat that hardly anyone understands that conceptual framework. When Obama used the idea, I had the strong feeling he had not fully internalized that conceptual framework; he was merely riffing and playing his role.) Let me explain. Try to...

The Wikipedia link above? If you clicked on it and only skimmed it for two seconds? All the iterations that article has gone through? The contributors? They didn't build that. Jimmy Wales didn't build it. The infrastructure of the Internet? The infrastructure that supports that infrastructure? The history of architecture, design, craftsmanship, planning, industrial works, mathematical, chemical, and physical ideas? As the Jewish comedian said, "Don't get me started!"

I assume you're reading this in some sort of environment. My guess is, you're "indoors." (I find it taxes my imagination to visualize anyone reading OG outside, walking down a street, on a mobile device, but  who knows?) Anyway, indoors or out: look away from the screen for 30 seconds or three breaths and note your surroundings. Did you build that? As I look around this cramped, book-packed room, I find I assembled most of it. The bones - walls, ceiling, the wiring inside the walls, the paint, those little screws that hold the plate on around the light switch on the wall...I most definitely did not build that.

(I was thinking just now of tough guy and revolutionary Modernist Ezra Pound, who, barely scraping by but going out of his way and tirelessly taking pains and efforts toward making sure that rich lady patrons of the arts knew about Pound's friends, the relatively unknown Joyce, cummings, Hemingway, Frost, Eliot, on and on...and that those soon-to-be "important" artists were going to be supported, subsidized, receive notice. Meanwhile, Pound the poet-revolutionary made his own furniture and got by on a bowl of soup. He could look on the serviceable chair with pride. Did he build that?)

In 1919, a writer writing about a very, very old idea:

The now dead inventor of the steam engine could not have produced his ingenious invention except by using the living powers of other dead men - except by using the material and spiritual or mental wealth created by those who had gone before. In the inventor's intellectual equipment there was actively present the kinetic use-value of 'bound-up-time,' enabling him to discover the laws of heat, water, and steam; and he employed both the potential and kinetic use-values of mechanical instruments, methods of work, and scientific knowledge of his time and generation - use-values of wealth created by the genius and toil of by-gone generations.
-pp.121-122, Manhood of Humanity, Alfred Korzybski

Who knows to what degree this idea has sunk in. I know that when I first encountered it it felt totally revolutionary. And yet, I found I kept forgetting it. Growing up in Unistat you very easily become brainwashed to believe without reservation, that everything someone has, they..."made that." For what it's worth, I now find the idea completely preposterous and feel embarrassment when I remember how naive I'd been to believe it. (And I'm embarrassed that so many of Us still believe it.)

I'd encounter the idea articulated by Korzybksi (NB: he didn't build that) again and again and it was wondrous and seemed "truer" than what my conditioning led me to work with. It seemed very much like when I learned as a young boy that the sun didn't "set" but instead we were on a much smaller body, revolving away from the sun. I knew intellectually this was true, but my natural, naive experience of the sun moving and not us...held. It took practice to get over this. Now when the sun "sets" I can feel us moving on Earth, from my relatively inertial standpoint.

"We" can be utterly profoundly liberating as a concept internalized. Or so I assert.

You can take in history in an embodied way that seems to me qualitatively richer than what was dished to you by cultural conditioning. And, to take a Poet out of context, this "makes all the difference."

"We" goes back a long time, to the most inchoate use of tools by our deepest ancestors.

The words on the screen you're looking at right now are made of letters, and people helped you learn to read them; they had a breakfast those mornings that they merely assembled...: the phonemes, the sounds, the poetry of language and its resonances. They helped you learn to decode these, as others had done for them.

Countless tinkerers throughout human time added incrementally to the sum totals of technics. The ones who tried a new approach that didn't work, but others took note? This too created value: we now know what doesn't seem to work. Let's go more in this direction. And hey: why not keep notes?

Assembling, let me be clear, is nothing to be sneezed at. It is a creative act. But it seems thoroughly encompassed within building.

You have built much. Probably far more than you realize. You don't realize the many things you have built because of categorical accounting schemes you assumed were true. You have built neural circuitry in other mammals, for one thing...You have played a part in building me. (How? Just think about it. Hint: maybe it has something to do with one of Korzybski's triumvirate "material and spiritual or mental wealth"?)

This laptop I'm using? I built none of it. (But "We" built it all.) The silicon, the plastic, the glass, the mathematics "inside" it? I didn't build that. The router, the insulation on the thingumbob that plugs into the whatsit that gives me the juice? Me no build-a dat ting, no. Let's not even get into the Server, or satellites, or the stuff that goes into the foundation of the building that houses the thing that supports the dealio that runs on the doohickey, artifact, and article that goes into that gadget over there, that thing made of metal but's really some alloy of some sort? Who the hell mined that? But I digress...

My ideas at Overweening Generalist? An absurdly complex agglomeration and concatenation of metaphors and names that I didn't build, but I may have used a form, a syntax, a display, an array of combined ideas that may have spurred something within you. I got that from those who went before me. It's my understanding that almost all knowledge percolates constantly in these fashions. But I didn't build it all ex nihilo, of course. The details seem fabulous but true...

No: It's more like We the culture threw out an ungawdly amount of mindstuff, and some of it stuck inside my head! (I didn't build any of those metaphors, I merely borrowed them, so if you have any complaints, please see The Mgt.) The quasi-hidden form of the desktop? The icons? The people at Blogger? The coders that made Blogger so easy for a dunderhead like myself to use, so I can write this crap so you can read it? Me no build zees zing, neethuh! (The farmers that grew the food that allowed most thinkers and tinkerers and laborers to get off the farm and do weirder things with knowledge, like build engines, roads, algorithms, surgical steel, Etsy?)

WE built it, like Korzybski says. Take what he's saying about the steam engine and just extrapolate, and give yourself credit for doing so, for it's a creative act to do so, and who knows what brilliant and novel ways you're envisioning this idea, but if you make something of this idea (did I do that, just now, today?), give yourself some credit. Just not all the credit.

Because giving yourself all the credit just seems to me...childish. Or, I'll be charitable: child-like. Naive, and, as the Philosopher said, "Human, all-too human." Other times I say: greedy and pretentious and stupid.

There seems very much I have not said here.

Here's Prairie Populist Elizabeth ("Betty") Warren, with a variation on a very very olde idea: Is she right? If not, how is she wrong?

William S. Burroughs at 99: Viruses, Memes, Cats, Art, ETC

On Feb 5, WSB would've been 99. What follows is a hodgepodge of Burroughsianiac musings.

For virtually all of his life, WSB was at odds with the trans-societal forces he eventually labeled Control. (On the Wiki page for WSB it says he was turned down by the OSS, and IIRC that was in Morgan's bio, but I digress already.) I've always found it interesting that Edward Bernays, the nephew of Freud who used Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses in the new "science" of Public Relations, had as an early competitor Ivy Lee, who was WSB's uncle via marriage. Lee was the epitome of Control, and just before he died of a brain tumor at age 57 in 1934, Congress had begun investigating Lee's ties to the Nazis and IG Farben.

In Ezra Pound's Canto 74, he mentions the stark fact that the Allies bombed the hell out of Germany, but somehow they missed the Farben plant.

WSB, the grandson of the founder of the Burroughs adding machine corporation, was sent to the Los Alamos Ranch School, a boarding school and college prep for rich kids that was influenced by the Boy Scout code, around 1930. He hated it. Later the US government bought the school and all the surrounding land, for the secretive Manhattan Project. Gore Vidal had also gone to Los Alamos Ranch, and in his autobiography Palimpsest he compared WSB to Pound (p.228) WSB was influenced by Pound (and Joyce). The NY artist/critic Richard Kostelanetz asserted that Pound's The Cantos was the last great poetry collage, while WSB's Naked Lunch was the last great prose collage. (Kostelanetz: ABC of Contemporary Reading, p.53)

Pound and WSB were very much in love with cats. See these photos of writers and their cats. If you know much about these writers - they were all (perhaps?) "weirder" than the average weird great writer. I wonder if it had anything to do with toxoplasmosis, or tiny organisms that get into the brain, which originate in cats?  (They are actually protozoa, these cat-carrying microbes...)

Pound was found "insane" by the US for his very poor use of First Amendment ideas on behalf of Mussolini and "the US Constitution" and other things.

If this had anything to do with explaining the avant aspects of WSB and his art, it seems almost too ironic, as he, under the influence of a course of study with Korzybski, developed the idea that language was a virus that had commandeered humanity's minds; we are language's "host."

[The great Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky on toxoplasmosis. Some of you hardcore Pound and Burroughs exegetes might want to invest 25 minutes of your time to listen to this guy, keeping in mind those writers' love for cats. Has anyone else pointed this out? I wonder if toxo can make someone sort of "half-schizo," where they are really weird, but creative, and not bothered by auditory hallucinations and the complete consort of the full-blown paranoid schizophrenic? Pound went around Rapallo feeding the feral cats despite not having any money; WSB was horrified at the prospect of nuclear annihilation because it would mean his cats would die. If there's something to it, then maybe we can venture that a protozoa has had a huge influence on Literary Modernism. OR: the OG is a cat lover: maybe I'm toxo-infected and what it does is give you grandiose ideas about unforeseen connections?]

This reminds me of an essay called "The Aliens Are Among Us," by Nathan Wolfe, who founded the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative. He's talking about viruses: "Viruses operate along a continuum with their hosts and other organisms they interact with: some harm their hosts, some benefit their hosts, and some - perhaps most - live in relative neutrality with them, neither substantively harming nor benefiting the organisms they must at least temporarily inhabit for their own survival." (p.191 of What's Next: Dispatches From the Future of Science)

The Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris said that Burroughs himself was like a cultural virus: "Burroughs dedicated himself to immortality by becoming what Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene (1976), called a 'meme.' : 'a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation which propagates analogously to the genetic code and the parasitism of viruses, and is more than metaphorically 'alive.' If memes survive by parasitizing human minds, so, reciprocally, can the mind survive parasitic self-replication. The viral programme 'simply says' "Copy me and spread me around." This is Burroughs: 'all poets worthy of the name are mind parasites, and their words ought to get into your head and live there, repeating and repeating and repeating.'" (from Harris's essay, "Can You See A Virus?: The Queer Cold War of William Burroughs")

Speaking of viruses from space, language as virus, cats infecting human brains, and memes: Scientology has been in the news a lot lately. And Burroughs had his fling with it. See here. This is another aspect of WSB that fascinates me.

Still one of the best biographies of WSB is, in my opinion, Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw. Last year Morgan wrote an article about why WSB hated Morgan's book. In Morgan's book he pointed out that, in Naked Lunch WSB seemed to foresee AIDS, liposuction, autoerotic asphyxiation becoming common, the crack epidemic. I'd add that WSB seemed, very early on, around 1961,  to suspect the CIA would be behind LSD flooding the streets of Unistat, and they would be doing it in an effort to staunch a youth rebellion.

I think WSB also foretold Kenneth Starr sexual fascism, but maybe that's for another day.

Oh yea: there's a wild little book called The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, by Tom Clark. In it he asserts that the antics of Chogyam Trungpa are like WSB's character "Dr. Benway."

Not long ago I went looking for the origin of a line WSB repeated: "And beside, the wench is dead." It looks like he got it from Christopher Marlowe via TS Eliot. (See Lives of the Poets, Schmidt, p.606)

Robert Anton Wilson: two passages around WSB:

"My friend, novelist William S. Burroughs, liked to say that 'anything which can be accomplished by chemical means can also be accomplished by non-chemical means.' I have personally found this to be true. There is no area of new perception and expanded awareness discoverable by peyote (or LSD or similar drugs) that cannot also be reached by techniques well-known to Oriental yogis and Western occultists. The sensory withdrawal techniques pioneered by Dr. Lilly and the new biofeedback machines also duplicate most of this expanded awareness." -pp.32-33, Sex, Drugs and Magick

From a 1992 interview:
Q: And what are some of your memories of that whole scene at Millbrook at that time?

RAW: Well, I'm sorry to sound like an advocate, but my impression was that Leary was one of the most brilliant people that I've ever met. Very much like my impression when I first met Buckminster Fuller and William Burroughs. The three people who gave me the sensation that I am in the presence of higher intelligence.

Q: And would you elaborate a little bit on why you put William Burroughs in that company? What do you see in Burroughs's writing, or his particular brand of intelligence that put him in that company?

RAW: Well, it's the choice of words. I first read Seventeen Episodes From Naked Lunch in a magazine called Big Table, and I felt no writer since James Joyce was able to put words together so efficiently and effectively to create the exact images and emotional overtones that he wanted. And I began to notice that not only was he a great prose poet, but he had a lot of interesting ideas, too.

Q: Had you also had the familiarity with Alfred Korzybski at that point?

RAW: Yes. That's one thing that Burroughs, Leary, Bucky Fuller and I all have in common - we all have familiarity with Alfred Korzybski and General Semantics.
(-from transcript of radio interview for Off The Beaten Path, see near the end. The person that transcribed the interview was quite unfamiliar with names mentioned, so I corrected the gross misspelling of Korzybski's name in the original.)

- In an effort to induce altered states without using drugs, Burroughs, in collaboration with Brion Gysin (the main brain behind the Thing) and Ian Sommerville, they came up with The Dream Machine, which uses flickering light patterns to interact with the eye/brain rhythms. You sit in front of it with your eyes closed and it does things to your brain. See the 2008 documentary by Nik Sheehan. Anyway, here's a brief:

WSB on art and making people aware of what they didn't know that they knew: