Some people see meaning when it just isn’t there.
But maybe it is – just not in the way you think.
And who am I to presume what you’re (not) thinking?
Start again.
There is meaning.
Perhaps more meaning.
Than.
I.
Realised.
But the pre-meditated, agenda-pushing, social engineering nature of this message may not be as clear as a Chanel or a Tory Saatchi ad.
What would Barthes say?
And what of Jung?
Is my shadow bursting out of the shadows?
Are my deepest most repressed desires all simply masquerading themselves via randomness?
Or has an experiment in image generation let me colonise semiotic space by repurposing otherwise dormant media so as to to operationalise my own bit of harm reduction?
maybe
such undertakings leave little to the imagination.
Di(c)e-Sect a.k.a. Random De’ath Cult
Speaking of Rednecks / Bannonites:
Kulchur
Ezra Pound starts his defence of totalitarianism known as the Guide to Kulchur with a reference to a conversation involving a Chinese Philosopher on the topic of government, law & language.
The first thing is to agree the terms. He prints Chinese ideograms. Some repeat.
So Pound is against the Clouding, the Vagueness, the Shadow.
The double standards.
The lack of a go to point where meaning is meaning and not Machiavellian semantic gymnastics.
We have this today with Shadow Banking which is an activity in which all major banks are players — and with the use of this word Regulation.
Once we go into the regulatory space then it becomes a civil matter.
No such thing as a Corporate Criminal!
And the Police will tell you to call your lawyer.
Brexit means Brexit.
Q: What do you like about Pepsi?
A: It is the Taste of a New Generation.
When marketing bleeds into news you have a world full of shadows.
From the flickering light of the Sun as viewed indirectly from inside the Cave to the Electric Flicker of the Mobile Smart Phone competing for your attention with actual traffic and real world goings on.
Have we become fully Cyborg? Part Man Part Machine.
Of course there would be no advertising per se in a truly totalitarian society. Advertising is driven by tapping into people’s free desires. So what is the difference between today’s China and ‘the West’? Or Russia for that matter?
We are amusing ourselves to death.
Shirley Robin Letwin in her On the Idea of Law references Plato’s idea that if a law is wrong, it must stay wrong until it is updated. In some systems this would have been every five years.
Better there be injustice for all till the bad law is updated – or instead everyone will turn a blind eye to the bad law – and the good law as well!
They say the best way to get rid of a stupid law is to apply it fully — to the letter.
As Mencken said :
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Does this make Shirley Letwin, Ezra Pound and Ayn Rand Crypto-Fascist Proto-Platonists?
Who wants the Law updated every five minutes?
Now that we have access to real-time updates and big data, continuous consultation could be an imminent reality.
Nothing describes the pitfalls of modern British politics better than the closing scene of The Rise of Michael Rimmer.
Discrete vs Continuous
A bit of continuity might help. Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion, refers to those people who lived in peace after war had been declared simply because they hadn’t yet heard the war had started.
In the same way there are those for whom there will never be peace.
Permanently living in the subjunctive.
The role of fiction & theatre for the anti-truthers.
The rapidity with which truth subverts itself to reveal yet more truth at a scale so granular as to elude reasonable immediate inspection yet somehow capable of permeating through to all.
One has to either be very clever or try very hard not to feel it. Our society excels at both. From the outstanding declarative to the merely procedural.
From neoteny to phylogeny. The Master and his Emissary. Left Brain / Right Brain. Iain McGilchrist.
The recreation of the journey of human consciousness from zygote to foetus to birth – thousands of generations of evolution in just nine months.
Laputa
Jonathan Swift’s mysterious flying island of Laputa features in two places of significance for me.
At the beginning of Nicholas Dunbar’s Inventing Money – on the downfall of the Long Term Capital Management Hedge Fund staffed by Economics Nobel Prizewinners who perhaps should have known better. LTCM’s collapse was a notable pre-cursor to our post 2008 too big to fail bailout culture.
And in Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity as recommended by the wonderful Robert Anton Wilson.
Science and Sanity was published in 1933 and opens with a quote about the mysterious flying island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels.
The Laputans’ collective consciousness enabled the island to fly.
Was Swift satirising scientists? Full of knowledge but lacking basic wisdom?
The island was a place where they were very good at music and mathematics and interested in little else.
not unlike our current love of sharing songs on social media to help marketing firms target us with the data we generate:
If you look at the bottom of the image above, I like how the guy who came up with the term self fulfilling prophesy also wrote a book called Mass Persuasion.
And spawned a mathematician, Robert C Merton, who, with Fisher Black and Myron Scholes, created a derivative pricing mathematical model which in non financial engineering terms could legitimately be described as a money machine.
But as Donald Mackenzie of the University of Edinburgh points out in – It’s an Engine Not a Camera – the point of these mathematical models which are based on imperfect economic and psychological assumptions is not to be correct.
They are simply designed to make money!
And if they go wrong – we shouldn’t be surprised because truth was never their purpose.
A source of confusion when marketing rubs shoulders with fact.
When the Calculus was invented many scientists went around saying that what they had discovered was wonderful but they didn’t know why it worked.
In the case of financial engineering, the bottom line is the bottom line.
Korzybski said:
The Map is not the Territory – The Menu is not the Meal.
Bit like Magritte:
And his pipe:
Took me forever to realise that it’s not a pipe – but an image of a pipe.
Korzybski speaks of abstraction:
There are no illusions. Only what we abstract.
Neil Postman, follower of Marshall McLuhan fused his Medium is the Message argument with George Lakoff’s Metaphors we Live By to produce: The Medium is the Metaphor in the first chapter of his 1985 work: Amusing Ourselves to Death.
McCluhan was a Catholic and heavily influenced by GK Chesterton who also influenced Jorge Luis Borges.
Borges is himself referenced in Dunbar’s Inventing Money.
The Garden of Forking Paths is quoted in reference to option pricing. So many possible futures. We happen to be friends in this world – doesn’t mean we would in any other.
Borges himself was interested in Infinity.
One of the best books I ever read was Jorge Luis Borges and the Eternal Orang-Utans
whose title is inspired by the idea that if you give a chimpanzee a typewriter and infinite time it will eventually write the works of shakespeare.
imagine my joy when I saw the Thomas Mullaney book on the Chinese Typewriter – in front of which I would be no different to an Orang-Utan!
Tamil is the oldest spoken language. I no longer speak it but here is a recent talk in Tamil on Borges. I only found it because I couldn’t find my favourite sound recording of Garden of Forking Paths.
How Borgesian! All things for a reason. Or Not.
Discriminate.
I am that.
Things. Consciousness. Bliss.
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