attending.

You need not do anything.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
You need not even listen, just wait.
You need not even wait,
just learn to be quiet, still and solitary.
And the world will freely offer itself to you unmasked.
It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

~Franz Kafka  “Learn to Be Quiet.”

weaving rainbows?

just finished reading richard dawkins’s ‘unweaving the rainbow’ (1998) and have had very strong reactions to it of which i am still trying to make sense. All that follows is not meant as a discouragement from reading the book.

the first feeling that comes from it is that it can tell me things about biological processes (co-evolution, the idea that organisms are made up of other organisms, and feedback mechanisms in human consciousness and perception to mention but a few) that are quite fascinating and rich material of how animals live in their environments. I have to say that I was more impressed the more I read of it, and the last chapter truly resonated with resonate with some of the ideas that i’ve encountered in anthropology interested in biological processes and how the metaphors used to describe them might go some way towards describing social phenomena. he is also somewhat keen on reacting to what i suppose then was a long string of reactions and polarisations of ‘the selfish gene’, his earlier book that he kind of revisits in a chapter called the ’selfish cooperator’. the last chapter in particular goes some way towards dealing with the idea of subjective consciousness and mind-brain patterning understanding.

while the whole book goes some way towards dissolving strict oppositions of science versus poetry, it does not stand away from its pedestal of authority and trashes anything that is remotely ‘religious’ (my use of this term being closer to an anthro use of it, as describing phenomena of social efficacy and meaning? — his examples often deriding the patterning processes that people resort to in explanatory frameworks such as astrology or other ‘nonsense’ acc to him).

i am guessing from the tack of this book that he is taking issue with ‘creationists’ (also much more dogmatically in ‘god delusion’ – a more recent work which has not been received well by reviewers). he also takes issue with ‘relativist’ frameworks, and quotes some, to be honest, quite unfortunate instances of anthropology-in-destructive-mode, aka po-mo utterances that, taken out of context, are pretty easy to be misread and twisted. these type of attacks happen mostly at the beginning of the book, as a ‘positioning’ device of sorts. they are like this one, that quotes an anthropologist matt cartmill who writes in Discover magazine in 1998 in an article that whistleblows a book by gross and levitt on ‘higher superstition: the academic left and its quarrel with science’ (1994) to illustrate the general jist of those Dawkins attacks here:

‘anybody who claims to have objective knowledge about anything is trying to control and dominate the rest of us… There are no objective facts. all supposed ‘facts’ are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines… Therefore, when some guy in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact… he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.’

cartmill is a respectable biological anthropologist in ‘evolutionary anthropology’ at duke. he then goes and follows the quote by

There are even a few vocal fifth columnists within science itself who hold exactly these views, and use them to waste the time of the rest of us. Carmill’s thesis is that there is an unexpected an pernicious alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalist religious right and the sophisticated academic left. A bizarre manifestation of the alliance is their joint opposition to the theory of evolution. The opposition of the fundamentalists is obvious. That of the left is a compound of hostility to science in general, of ‘respect’ (weasel word of our time) for tribal creation myths, and of various political agendas. Both these strange bedfellows share a concern for ‘human dignity’ and take offence at treating humans as ‘animals’. … Purveyors of cultural relativism and the ‘higher superstition’ are apt to pour scorn on the search for truth. This partly stems from the conviction that truths are different in different cultures… and partly from the inability of philosophers of science to agree about truth anyway. There are, of course, genuine philosophical difficulties. Is a truth just a so-far-unfalsified hypothesis? What status does truth have in the strange, uncertain world of quantum theory? Is anything ultimately true? On the other hand, no philosopher has any trouble when suspecting his wife of adultery. ‘Is it true?’ feels like a fair question, and few who ask it in their private lives would be satisfied with logic-chopping sophistry in response.

I am not too sure how to respond to this bunch of statements, which, to me muddle certain (interweaving) things:

1. relativism does not equal relativity, relativity does not mean anything goes, it means awareness of positioning
2. epistemological truth-claims are themselves embedded in systems of validation and power, i.e. asking ‘what is truth’ is not the right question in this context

However, the bunching of left-wing academics (including social anthros) with fundamentalist right-wing religious arguments is a cause for alarm. I believe that a lot of anthro that attempts to be radical in its treatment of subjects gets misunderstood, and labelled ‘po-mo’ in the process.

Anthros are really bad at PR, and sometimes we get caught up in so much complicated social life that we cannot think about them properly and our accounts are incredibly rich, but incredibly un-appealing to larger audiences. We tend to excuse this as ‘complexity’.

photo: slain’s castle

threshing-floor.

if someone mentions character building, i might uncharacteristically turn violent, and get one of my mafia connections to deal with them. that is called sarcasm in the dead of the night (this is written between the hours of 3 and 4am).

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

in silence, i long for company.

in company, i get restless and leave.

in love, i trust very much i will get it right one day.

clarity of feelings is probably not prioritary at the moment.

thanks to you who comfort and soothe and care.

comic rippled from here.

areyouspeakingmy?

in a discussion (it felt more like i was refusing to have the discussion, actually) with greeeni i found myself saying something like ‘there is no language’ and had to laugh at my own utterance. geez, nutshell! what are you on about?

‘t was not actually what i meant.

what i wondered about is the following idea:

familiarity with various clusters of language that different groups of people use every day, i.e. the ’speech communities’ however temporary or contestable they may be of civil servants, anthropologists, dock workers, mothers, Fort McPherson Gwichin, Russian Israeli, people from one village…

+

the way in which the evocation of specific words trail a whole lot of others with them, both denoting and connotating. so the image this conjured up in my head was the following: word rings your door bell. as you answer you find not just that word has arrived, but with him/her/it an entire clan tucked in a caravan, with various objects dangling from either side, and drawn by a supersized penguin. this has all kinds of effects on different people.

+

i wonder then how it is possible bar in philosophy or linguistic seminars [which are highly specialised speech communities] to speak about something called ’semantics’ – and i still don’t buy the idea that context is considered here – that purports to be universal knowledge. and the thing is that it is circular: to understand it you have to submit to it, which makes you understand it, which in turn makes you part of the speech community, up to some degree. notwithstanding whether saussure and structural linguistics are pretty exceptional cases.

or am i just brainwashed by anthropology? which defeats the point in arguing with me anyways.

i think i need some sun to get these thoughts in boots to lighten up and dance naked.

i also need some convincing that it is entirely unnecessary for me to read up on the entire history of western philosophy since parmenides in order to be able to finish this chapter. no violence please.

longing.

consequences.

“When one puts objectivity in parenthesis, all views, all verses in the multiverse are equally valid. Understanding this, you lose the passion for changing the other. One of the results is that you look apathetic to people. Now, those who do not live with objectivity in parentheses have a passion for changing the other. So they have this passion and you do not. For example, at the university where I work, people may say, ‘Humberto is not really interested in anything,’ because I don’t have the passion in the same sense that the person that has objectivity without parentheses. And I think that this is the main difficulty. To other people you may seem too tolerant. However, if the others also put objectivity in parentheses , you discover that disagreements can only be solved by entering a domain of co-inspiration, in which things are done together because the participants want to do them. With objectivity in parentheses, it is easy to do things together because one is not denying the other in the process of doing them.”

Humberto Maturana – Interview 1985.

dawn is just around the corner.

it seems that i cannot sleep tonight. full moon. moonstruck. it is after 5am. only a few birds are out to sing in the starry icy night. dawn must be just around the corner even in this northern place. i remembered this at around 3am:

Encounter by Czeslaw Milosz

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

cat’s cradle.

also learnt the meaning of ‘cat’s cradle’ today in the context of bateson’s metaphors.

i think it’s a lovely word.

along the lines of ‘cradle’ this is its origin: ORIGIN Old English cradol, of uncertain origin; perhaps related to German Kratte ‘basket.’

1 an infant’s bed or crib, typically one mounted on rockers.
• figurative a place, process, or event in which something originates or flourishes : he saw Greek art as the cradle of European civilization.
• figurative infancy; childhood : a society that would secure the welfare of its citizens from cradle to grave.
2 a framework resembling a cradle, in particular
• a framework on which a ship or boat rests during construction or repairs.
• the part of a telephone on which the receiver rests when not in use.
• a frame put over a hospital bed to prevent the bedclothes from touching a patient’s injury.
• Mining a trough on rockers in which auriferous earth or sand is shaken in water to separate the gold.
verb [ trans. ]
1 hold gently and protectively : she cradled his head in her arms.
• figurative be the place of origin of : the northeastern states cradled an American industrial revolution.
2 place (a telephone receiver) in its cradle.

i don’t think anyone would now use the last meaning ‘to cradle’ the phone receiver. technology making words redundant, inventing others, displacing other.

painting from here by baila goldenthal

fieldtrip.

did a fieldtrip to the math department. these guys have a huge whiteboard in their kitchen.

they also have a wicked sense of humour as the coffee scheme from winter term ‘71 proves.

1 weekly coffee unit = 5p.

autonomy.

Such oscillating systems [as ecological systems] are operated by thresholds – not by states, but by differences and changes and even differences between changes. There is information not only in our words but also in the processes we describe. It’s nice to have the explanation in step with the system of ideas within the process you are trying to explain… Now if you are going to face oscillating systems, you meet a very curious circumstance – that a certain degree of reality is imported to the ‘system’, the chunk of living matter. There is a justification of some sort in drawing a line around it, perhaps in giving it a name. That justification is based on the fact of autonomy, of literal ‘autonomy’ in that the [topology of the] system names itself. The injunctions which govern the [topology of the] system necessarily are message which stand for the name of the system. The system is auto-self-nomic, self-naming, or self-ruling. And that is the only autonomy there is, as far as I know. It’s recursivenss, and recursiveness is crucial to any system containing if-then links, where the ‘then’ is not logical but temporal ‘then’ (Bateson, A Sacred Unity, 1991: 181-2)

he’s the (dead) man of the week, definitely.