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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.
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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
