Metaphors in Literature, Philosophy and Science: Divagations

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

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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?

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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!

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

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"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!

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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

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"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]

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

Stranger Than We Can Imagine, by John Higgs: A Review

A magisterial "alternative" Tale of the Tribe-like history of the 20th century, and something that was desperately needed. Higgs has produced a book that somehow manages to function as a page-turner and to speak to three different classes of readers:

1. Those quite well-read folks over 30 who perhaps need to view the century they were born in from such an "alternative" angle Higgs provides.

2. Those of us over 30 who have tended to assemble a narrative of the 20th century from the occasional history book, TV, radio, newspapers, and now Internet. Like water to fish, we all lived in a world where individualism was one of the primary values. Higgs shows us how vital the movement toward individualism was in that chaotic century, and how we must learn to see how the downside of individualism as a primary value has led us homo saps into the quandary we're in now. This is a real eye-opener for many of us.

3. Those born after 1990, who probably feel "how odd" that people lived in a world without massive digital connectivity. Higgs shows them how uncanny, how weird, how what we found out about ourselves in the 20th century was indeed "stranger than we can imagine," and Higgs reminds us where he got this phrase. After a brief discussion about HG Wells and how, around 1900, Wells was able to predict many seemingly amazing things that did indeed come true, proving Wells as one of the great forecasters of all time, "But there was a lot Wells wasn't able to predict: relativity, nuclear weapons, quantum mechanics, microchips, postmodernism and so forth. These were not so much unforeseen as unforeseeable. His predications had much in common with the expectations of the scientific world, in that he extrapolated from what was then known. In the words commonly assigned to the English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, the universe would prove to be not just stranger than we imagine, but, 'stranger than we can imagine.'" While I read this book, I thought of young, smart artistically-minded people I know, and how I wanted to press this book into their hands and say, "You will really love this one. Trust me on this."

Stranger Than We Can Imagine is written from the standpoint of the generalist intellectual who is not beholden to a larger institution, and I see Higgs as a good example of the type of intellectual Karl Mannheim wrote about in his Ideology and Utopia, still the ur-text in the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim wrote of a "relatively classless stratum" of "free-floating"thinkers who, because they were not beholden to institutions, probably had the most valid overview of social life and current ideas. Higgs's erudition is quite great and yet he wears it lightly, and I found the book difficult to put down once I started it. Whether he's discussing Einstein and how artists contemporary with him who couldn't understand Einstein's math yet were still projecting a worldview that demanded a relativistic /multi-perspectivalist view, or a stirring encapsulation of the horrible irony of the space race (Jack Parsons, Werner von Braun and Sergei Korolev were visionaries who ended up beholden to nations who demanded their research be used to develop killingry, or hi-tech nuclear missiles)...there are no dull moments in this book.

There are chapters on chaos mathematics (Higgs makes it understandable to the most math-phobic among us), the advent of "teenagers" (a word that wasn't coined until 1940!), feminism and the rise of "free sex" with its misunderstandings and missed opportunities, post-Hiroshima nihilism and existentialism, how quantum mechanics showed that uncertainty is baked into the human condition, and the function of Freud's metaphor of the "Id" as it relates to fascism, advertising, individualism and alienation. The author manages to thread together all of these disparate ideas, which I find marvelous.

Higgs's work is vital in a world filled with paramilitary death squads answering to corporations, nuclear weapons, and banks/corporations that behave like psychopathic individuals and are in many cases more powerful than many countries and not subject to criminal law to boot. In a world of ISIS and the prospect of someone like Donald Trump as leader of the free world, we citizens in 2016, bombarded by information about our comparatively "little worlds," need broad overviews of How We Got Here. In a very substantive sense, this book can function as a map that will help us avert catastrophe. Higgs cites climate change and that the 21st century appears to be the penultimate century "in terms of Western civilisation." Id est, it's curtains for humanity in the 22nd c. But: "That's certainly the position if we look at current trends and project forward. We can be sure, though, that there will be unpredictable events and discoveries ahead, and that may give us hope."

Most of the books I've read on 20th century history address relativity, cubism, Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, cultural anthropology, quantum mechanics, postmodernism (which Higgs compares to New Age thought in a provocative section), neuroscience and perception, and the "linguistic turn" in philosophy as a world that found itself foundation-less. Or, as Stephen Dedalus thinks in Joyce's 1922 Ulysses, we can never be certain about our big ideas, because they are "ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void." Higgs uses the metaphor of the omphalos. Is the ultimate Source for our normative claims the Church? Our "selves"? Our money? Our country and our ways? Logic? Rationality and science? All of these were severely undermined during the Roaring 20th century, some moreso than others.

The deepest structure of Higgs's argument about what just happened to all of us in the 20th century, and where we might be going seems of the utmost importance in our understanding of our prospects as a species. With the demise of at least 30 centuries of rigid hierarchical institutions that governed every aspect of our lives falling apart at the start of the 20th century, individualism reigned. But an overweening individualist ethos turned out to cause more problems than it was worth. What arose at the end of the century was something to combat it: massively networked sociality and constant feedback and accountability, and those who grew up in this digital world seem to intuitively understand game theory: the zero-sum games we're running (especially with banks/corporations and politics) are no longer sustainable: the generation born after 1990 implicitly understands that we must all come together, under no hierarchy, to solve problems, then disperse back to our own lives. The only semblance of omphalos we have is the articulation of our own values and the idea that all of us are in this together. This younger generation - certainly younger than me - may be the best card history has dealt us. Let's hope Higgs is right, 'cuz if he isn't, we probably are living in the penultimate century for human Being.

It has shimmering prose, luminous details, and a rhythm I can dance to. Oh yea: it could also help save our species, and I'm only about 1/3 joking. You can't afford NOT to read it. 23 stars out of a possible 20.

Evgeny Morozov, Thomas Pynchon, and the dot.com Bubble

I had been reading tons of stuff over the past few days on three fascinating cybermedia critics: Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, and Douglas Rushkoff. In, say, 1996, all three were fairly gung-ho about the vast liberating potentialities of the digital era; now all three have quite grave doubts about how things have turned, by 2013. All three are stellar thinkers (I think one of them is just a staggering genius who should be far better known). They all came at cyberculture from different directions. But I got sidetracked, so maybe next month.

The Internet as "we" know it is only about 22 years old. By 1995, only 15 million people were on the Net. I find it jaw-dropping how It has changed everything in such a short span of time. In studying Turkle, Rushkoff and Lanier and how their views have changed, I spun off serendipitously into all sorts of other areas. Among other things, I found I didn't understand the "dot-com" bubble bursting all that well, so I started poking around  for assumptions about commerce and the Net, 1995-99.

                                          Kevin Kelly, one of the uber-cyberutopians

Concomitantly, I've been reading Pynchon's new novel Bleeding Edge - 'cuz it's freakin' Pynchon! - and it turns out to have a lot to say about the bubble. I'm calling it a coincidance, Robert Anton Wilson's word for something between "coincidence" and "synchronicity," that was actuated by his reading of James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. One of RAW's books is titled Coincidance, and reading it will elucidate what he meant by "coincidance" far better than I did here...

Anyway, I found over the past six-seven years that I'd developed an immunity to the approximately 3700 books (and counting) that hype how great this new digital age will be. I've seen plenty of upside; most of us will by now acknowledge there's quite a downside to it, too. The stakes seem not inconsiderable, to put it mildly and doubly negative.

I think I saw downsides before most of my friends and colleagues, but that may be due to the sociology of knowledge: many of them had jobs that were "wired" to the gills; meanwhile, I've struggled. My position as a reader-writer-thinker type has been on the edge of poverty; you simply get different perspectives from that vantage point. And yet, in keeping with the sociology of knowledge as I understand it (largely through Berger, Luckmann, Mannheim, Vico, Werner Stark, early Marx and McLuhan), my perspective is but one, yet possibly incorporates a wider view of the scene: I have no ideological commitments in the sense that I have not had to answer to authorities or bosses or peers in business, academia, or a funded private sector. If I had had a job in any of those places I believe I'd be like anyone else: being in those situations necessarily influences (an unkind word would be "warps") one's perspective on things. A steady, livable income is obviously desirable, but I have not had that. Mutatis mutandis: those in steady, honorable positions know things that I don't. (Obviously!)

So I found myself gravitating toward critics of cyber-utopianism (I miscounted: there are 3956 books that do nothing but encourage us to think It's All Gonna Be Just Great), and found a hero in a young Belarus-born academic named Evgeny Morozov. Perhaps you've read him: he's published two books, and had articles in Foreign Policy, NYT, WSJ, TLS, Economist, Slate, New Scientist, New Prospect, Boston Review, SF Chronicle...and many more. If the info on his Wiki page is right he's not yet 30. He was educated in Bulgaria, moved to Berlin, been at Stanford and Georgetown, and now he's working on a PhD in the History of Science at Harvard.

                                                      Morozov

What an odd egg Morozov is. He already seems to have an encyclopedic grasp of technology and media and how they affect the social sphere. He's perhaps the foremost critic of cyberutopian rhetoric, and for an Eastern European not yet 30, his rapier wit in English at times shines with a Gore Vidal-like gleam. At other times he reveals his age, but I must caution those conditioned to the rosy future of all things digital: Morozov as prolific gadfly may ridicule once too much, albeit, but his voice seems a necessary corrective as we move further into the Snowden Era. Color Morozov non-sanguine. His position as a species of Nay-Sayer seems absolutely legitimate, and his knowledge and rhetoric strikes me as stellar.

Okay, I'm not the biggest fan of hatchet jobs in book-criticism, and have long thought the only people who deserve to be savaged are the powerful, the wealthy, the pompous. If you're paying I'd be happy to savagely review Dick Cheney's latest book about how right he's been his whole life, or anything Donald Trump writes. But Evgeny reminded me that some of the cyberutopians in the second decade of the 21st century are ripe for the hatchet, and just check out this job Evgeny pulled off in The New Republic. He's bilious, abrasive, sarcastic, very smart, and funny. An enfant terrible. 
(I've looked at Khanna's stuff and think he deserves everything that Evgeny dishes.)

His two books are The Net Delusion  and To Save Everything, Click Here. But the subtitles are the calling cards for Morozov, he who is fed up with the rhetoric of cyberutopianism: "The Dark Side of Internet Freedom," and "The Folly of Technological Solutionism."

Morozov's history of the Net is one of the better ones I've seen (see The Net Delusion), and he goes way back to Pentagon-funded engineers like Vint Cerf, Norbert Weiner, Vannevar Bush, and David D. Clark. Where he gets really interesting is when he begins to discuss Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold (and yes, Jaron Lanier) and their crowd. There are at least 93 books that go over their story and I'm betting you know these guys well. Morozov seems to admire them, and I definitely do, too.

The problem is: these guys were anarchist-libertarian former hippies with deep roots in the hedonistic 1960s, and they developed a revolutionary rhetoric about how the Internet could change the world and make it a far, far, far better place. With the Net, we could be rid of the Intermediary: free exchange of ideas, different ways of trading, and politics would all transform our social reality. They were preaching a "flat" world at least 10 years before that colossal fraud Thomas Friedman was. But these guys were the real deal, and they seemed to believe their own rhetoric. But all that's not the problem. The problem was: the believed they could deal with The Suits/Wall St/Control, and we now see how that turned out. (I'm consumed by the "Information wants to be free" ideology they came up with. I believed it 98% in 1999. Now? Uhhh...maybe a forthcoming blogspew?)

But back to 1995-99. Who was it that once said that history was the temporary resultant of rival gangs of programmers?

Morozov thinks the lasting achievement of the the early cyberutopians was that they wrested the Net from the Cold War-mentality short-haired engineers. The cyberutopians in turn believed they were smarter and could handle the Big Biz people who would want to use the Net to make money. At some point, the cyberutopians realized they'd need some cash to make their ideas go over big, so they found themselves having dinner with Suits, and seemed to genuinely believe they could do their thing by using private capital without getting, to borrow a term from the guy who invented html, Ted Nelson: "intertwingled."

Here's what I'm still trying to puzzle out: why did Venture Capitalists invest at all in these start-ups that seemed like really neat-o ideas but couldn't seem to deliver real services? This is fascinating to me. I can't help but think the cyberutopians' rhetoric hypnotized them into abandoning all traditional methods of assessing risk and likelihoods of true financial performance. It seems that Bill Gates (who was once "hippie" enough to have possibly joined Stewart Brand, but didn't) and other believers in NeoLiberal economics being done with the Net PLUS the cyberutopians' dazzling pitches clouded the Venture Capitalists' minds. And: at Pets dot.com, probably the most-cited example of the ensuing insanity: at one point - around late 1999 - they were spending $12million on advertising, with only $620,000 in revenue. The bubble exploded soon after. O! The humanity!

I thought of writing about Rushkoff/Turkle/Lanier but ended up typing far too much around Evgeny Morozov. I barely touched on the Bubble stuff, probably because I'm still trying to understand it, with 13 year's hindsight. But I'd like to end with Pynchon talking about this stuff in Bleeding Edge:

It's Spring of 2001 and the heroine of the book, Maxine Tarnow, fraud investigator in Manhattan, is doing some detective work:

Silicon Alley  in the nineties provided more than enough work for fraud investigators. The money in play, especially after about 1995, was staggering, and you couldn't expect elements of the fraudster community to not to go after some of it, especially  HR executives, for whom the invention of the computerized payroll was often confused with a license to steal. If this generation of con artists came up short now and then in IT skills, they made up for it in the area of engineering, and many entreprenerds, being trusting souls, got taken. But sometimes distinctions between hustling and being hustled broke down. It didn't escape Maxine's notice that, given stock valuations on some start-ups of interest chiefly to the insane, there might not much difference. How is a business plan that depends on faith in 'network effects' kicking in someday different from the celestial pastry exercise known as a Ponzi scheme? Venture capitalists feared industrywide for their rapacity were observed to surface from pitch sessions with open wallets and leaking eyeballs, having been subjected to nerd-produced videos with subliminal messages and sound tracks featuring oldie mixes that pushed more buttons than a speed freak with a Nintendo 64. Who was less innocent here?
-pp.71-72

If The Reader has a recommendation for a particularly great book on the Bubble, or books or articles of dissentual data around Morozov, feel free to drop the title or link in the comments. Aun aprendo. Danke!