Two Measures of a Man

Analogical Proportionality and Mere Metrics

I consider myself very lucky to have never cared for math or number games in general. It’s been a disadvantage for most of my life. And yet, for all dangers of going through the mental ringer to which I was vulnurable, there was very little chance of me cementing into the sort of person who pre-consciously unscrambles license plates or birthdays for numerological symbolism.

Some of my best friends have this knack for numbers and, as I listen to them, I enjoy the vicarious weirdness of synchronicities: of coincidental dates and one or two-step arithmetical and geometric leaps to sublime meaning. But I’d not care to come up with sort of meaning on my own—I find it interesting mainly for the sake of getting to know how other people think and see the world. I also suspect many powerful or influential people have this superstition, and for that reason alone it is worth understanding intimately.

Between the wordcel and the shape-rotator, I’m some weird other thing. I’ve always had a cautious aversion to rotating shapes which I couldn’t put into words. Speaking and writing and thinking in language is how I transformation shapes. I don’t have a symbolic short-hand for it, or visualize without words. Thinking unspeakable thoughts—not prohibited thoughts, but rather thoughts beyond the capacity for language—has always distressed me. The boundaries of my curiosity are demarcated by this tension of always pushing up to—but not spilling over—the line of becoming incommunicado.

I dread being robbed of speech. There was a phrase at MIT’s Media Lab, according to Stewart Brand’s book of that name, which was their adaptation of the academic mantra “Publish or Perish.” The phrase at the lab was “Demo or Die.”

Fuck that.

I mean, I know I’m not working for grant money to create new technology, and so I am taking the phrase out of its marketing context. But I do not want to communicate through any medium other than words. Making a thing to which I mutely gesture is a form of self-expression which I’ve an innate fear of. I do not want art to speak for me—I’ll speak for me, thank you very much.

There’s something in here very vulnerable I’m sharing, and I haven’t quite figured it out yet. It’s like I’d rather be a quibbling brain in a jar than be judged within games or rules beyond lexical simulations. What I’d like to think is that I’ve an abundance of caution of thinking-through the consequences of what I do. What I suspect is that this is often an excuse to never do anything, and thus never fail according to measures outside of myself. The closer one gets to doing, the more catastrophic one imagines failure to be.

Anyway, where were we again? Ah yes, Numbers.

Numbers…

When trying to make sense of the world, numbers are very seductive. You can quantify stuff, average stuff, make visualizations of many sorts. Statistical analysis is useful.

We have mathematically mapped the crap out of human beings in the past century. In The Interface, John Harwood tells us how the engineers who created our technical material world, like IBM industrial designers Eliot Noyes, drew on books like Henry Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man, originally published in 1959.

There is something very creepy to me about the application of math to human psychology. All the psychometrics and audience-testing and polling which the public relations and marketing world have foisted upon us aim to know us better than we know ourselves. That’s one legacy of Freud—revealing that the rational subject is always lying to him or herself. That our word games are just that. They’re rationalizations for what we’re really doing.

What we are really doing is beyond our own language to explain to ourselves.

What we are really doing is over the horizon of our self-awareness. It is the frontier of our potential psychological development.

Whatever we are really doing is predictable on average, and whatever we tell ourselves we’re doing is just an ephemeral excuse to do it, totally inconsistent with what we tell ourselves five minutes later.

“I’ve already had so much, one more can’t hurt.” “I’ve been really good, I can treat myself.”

“I’m having a great day, I’m not going to ruin it handling this.” “I’ve had a terrible day, I can’t handle this right now.”

…By Whose Accounting?

Before Freud, this inconsistency of thought as self-justifying bad rationalization was apparently not accepted and excused as a universal like it was today. It was getting there but, in the main, culture still believed in enlightened individuals who thought rationally and knew themselves. The problem, though, is that this rationality was basically mathematical in form.

As Marshall McLuhan writes in The Gutenberg Galaxy,

By the seventeenth century we find ourselves in a world that speaks of “political arithmetic,” which carries the separation of functions a step past Machiavelli… And the eighteenth century business man whose political arithmetic was based on visual quantity, or the eighteenth century business man whose speculations were built on the mechanism of “the hedonistic calculus,” alike relate to the uniform repeatability of print technology. Yet the calculating business man who used this principle at every turn, in production and distribution, fought its logic of centralism with anarchic bitterness…

If Lowenthal is right, we have spent much energy and fury in recent centuries in destroying oral culture by print technology so that the uniformly processed individuals of commercial society can return to oral marginal spots as tourists and consumers, whether geographical or artistic. The eighteenth century began to spend its time at the Metropolitan Opera as it were. Having refined and homogenized and visualised itself to the point of self-alienation, it hied off to the Hebrides, the Indies, the Americas, the transcendental imagination, and especially to childhood, in search of natural man. D. H. Lawrence and others repeated this Odyssey in our day with much acclaim. It is a performance of automatic kind. Art tends to become a mere compensation for a top-sided life…

What a fate, to be integral and whole in a fragmented and visual flat-land! But the homogenization of women was finally effected in the twentieth century after the perfection of photo-engraving permitted them to pursue the same courses of visual uniformity and repeatability that print had brought to men. I have devoted an entire volume, The Mechanical Bride, to this theme.—The Gutenberg Galaxy, pgs 208-212

Someone who keeps a budget and works within it, it must be readily accepted, is in some control of their life. It takes a great deal of self-discipline and resistance to social pressures, the seductions of advertising, FOMO and the like, to achieve and maintain.

Such people are, by the present economy’s standards, bad for the economy—after all, if the combined forces of influence which invest in shaping our culture wanted people who could control their spending than it would produce such people!

If all the algorithms which Shoshanna Zuboff enumerates in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism are doing what they are supposed to do, then most people have delegated control not only over their gambling budget to the house. They’ve also delegated their card-counting strategy.

Dealer, play my hand!

Film 101… Forever!

When I suffered my psychotic break, my fear of being rendered speechless was manifested in all its horror. I couldn’t explain what was going on or what I was seeing. My thoughts were too wildly-spinning unspeakable thoughts—unspeakable in both the vehemently prohibited sense and the inarticulable sense. I resorted to the dreaded strategy of art, as I had understood it from Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death and Otto Ranks Art and Artist.

I made Silicon & Charybdis, which became the thing thing I could gesture to mutely. I demo’d, rather than died.

I couldn’t explain to otherswhy I was making it; why I was spending hours from morning to night pouring over a timeline editing clips of film and VHS ripped from YouTube and Archive.org. But, within the confines of the art-project, I could write and re-write scripted lines for the voice-over narration. I could churn just enough of my own cement to sensibly mortar the bricks of found-footage together. And then, for two or three years after, I’d watch it again and again, overwhelmed by the sublimity of something in which only I could see. As I did, I slowly found more and more words to describe what I was looking at. What it is I was doing.

I’ve always enjoyed David Lynch movies. But the best way to explain my psychosis would be the forced condition of living in one. That is, when you’re watching a film like Mulholland Drive or Inland Empire, you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on. There is something beneath the surface for you to interpret.

Stanley Kubrick provides a similar cinematic experience, but with far more structure. The first time I saw Barry Lyndon, I could see how the silent, watching eyes were the star of the entire narrative. I’ve experienced the unshakable sensation of living in some of his films too.

👀

Both directors are widely recognized as demanding a great deal of interpretation on behalf of their audience. From first-hand experience, I’ll tell you that Kubrick’s universe of symbolism reflects a paranoia which Lynch’s is thankfully denuded of.

First I’ll explain it as a movie-goers. You can be terrified of something monstrous and atmospheric and inescapable in a Lynch film, but it’s not paranoia as in Kubrick film. In Lynch, the character can be paranoid, not you. In Kubrick, you are often paranoid with the character.

When you’re in a Lynch film, and you know you’re paranoid, it’s okay. You’re just a paranoid person in a strange and wild and beautiful universe. But when you’re in a Kubrick film, you’re not paranoid—they really are out to get you.

(Sometimes…. sometimes I was in a Philip K. Dick novel too. But my resolute adherence to Ockham’s razor quickly sliced me back into the small and mundane world of what science says is and is not possible. And the more it seemed that my writing became true, the less I journaled the scary stuff. Lament the sci-fi novels I never wrote if you want, but I’m way better off having not written them. I like what I’m writing now way better.)

I’m saying all of this because, after having spent two decades of life gradually learning to interpret stories in books and in movies, I suddenly found those skills being applied automatically at a lower metaphysical level. My broken sensory gate rendered my waking life a non-linear, symbolist narrative to be interpreted on-the-fly. I started to live my actual life as though I were writing an essay in film class; my inner monologue was one giant endless essay for the film class of life.

Silicon & Charybdis let me put all that back into the box. It was a movie—an edited duration of short clips and graphics and audio. But it was also reality… at least as best as I could put it together for myself. And I made it—I could trust it as much as I could trust the thoroughness of my own research.

Silicon & Charybdis was other people’s real lives, and it was an essential story preceding my own. My life took place in this world. I lived in this universe of this movie—I lived in a movie and this was part of it. I could interpret the world around me like it was a film, and I could interpret this film, and they were a coherent whole.

I studied it over and over. It became a nucleus of me recapturing my ability to speak. And, as a simple story of stuff that occurred decades ago—things which were totally uncontroversial, yet seemed to have great bearing on events today—it allowed me feel much less radioactive. It didn’t feel toxic to think and work within that retro-computing universe. I could just stick to this old history and feel authorized by… whatever it was I was feeling outside of me was authorizing stuff.

And most importantly, I was I working entirely within the language of interpretation. Of exegesis. Of literary or cinematic or artistic criticism. And these things are not mathematical, but rather poetical.

“Her lovely locomotion keeps my eyes open wide”

Yesterday I spent the morning writing up a primer for beginners on how Marshall McLuhan taught literary criticism. As he studied English at Cambridge, he was trained in a very rigorous form of close-reading. Each and every word of a poem was scrutinized in the New Criticism of the ‘30s and ‘40s. McLuhan had his own initiation into classical forms of interpretation as well, and developed a robust application of Aristotle’s definition of metaphor from Poetics into an entire interpretive and evaluative technique.

My primer is a simple introduction to the four part metaphor structure of Aristotle which McLuhan, to its fullest, exploited. Later, incorporating the language of Gestalt psychology, he would refer to a metaphor as the ratio or gap between two resonating figure/grounds. McLuhan integrated the four-part structure into most of his public speaking as a way of “showing his work,” in the same way one does in proofs or algebra assignments.

McLuhan’s distinctive style owes much to his preference for perceiving and discussing the world and things and people in it by metaphor and analogy. Against the norm, he generally eschewed perception by conceptual schematization and—heaven forbid!—statistical measurement.

Internally consistent models are naturally incomplete. That is the lesson of Kurt Gödel in the early 20^th century. If you create a mathematical structure to represent some swath of the dynamic substance of matter and life, you will either stifle it into conformity and death, or your containment will be broken and exceeded by it. Systems thinking, cognitive science, and every other realm of mathematics applied to dynamic and complex systems has had its reckoning with the infinitude of combinatorial explosion and fractals and recursions and other wacky structures which emerge from the attempt constrain and define reality’s underlying chaos. Math nerds go crazy trying to put reality in a box because reality is bigger than any math.

Comprehensive? Or consistent? Pick one.

Conventional, archetype-based interpretation of narrative, myth, and symbolism suffers the same problem. Cinema is capable of capturing much of human life but not all of it. Stories are like memories—they’re exciting and structured and missing all the details worth forgetting. Interpreting my life as a movie meant that I was reading into everything in a horribly lopsided and overloaded way. The slow and strange parts of Lynch’s work of supposed meaning that add to nothing are actually the most helpful, in this regard.

What McLuhan’s maxim “the medium is the message” taught me, however, is that my story didn’t take place in the modern world of the metricized man as conceptualized for computer processing in the 1950s. Nor did it take place in world of Lynch or Kubrick or Dick. The metaphysics of the universe described in those terms were delineated by the bounds of the enframing medium within which they were shaped. The modern consumer exists as something measurable by computers and statistical polling and surveys. The main character in a modern fiction is a hero fit for performance to an unseen audience, subject to close-ups and edits and suggestive soundtracks.

To live in the embodied world was to live in a the world where these art-forms existed and were practiced. To be behind-the-scenes of the world of art, not within their terms. Exceeding the frame of the modern consumer meant eschewing and fighting all the surveillance technology designed to study me and place me in a box. Exceeding the frame of cinematic terms meant a great amount of work in discovering embodiment and social graces and routine. Of falling back as a supporting or background character—and then eventually transcending the cinematic frame metaphor altogether and resigning myself to mere humanity.

McLuhan’s habitual establishment of four-part metaphoric structure is a hack which, when internalized, becomes a homing-signal for grounding. It helped me work forward and backward between computers as they are, and computers as everyone talks about them. I could stay conversant with people while also, layer by layer, follow the metaphors between the gaps of their perception and the gaps in my own.

“When you say app, you mean commoditized computer application, meaning a virtualized real-world process, meaning a perceptual identity between physical objects and on-screen objects, meaning post-human splice, meaning submersion in a cybernetic loop, …” etc. The change in ground from consumer to post-human subject is drawn methodically by going back in history along metaphoric resonances.

And I could “measure” ratios and proportions between totally unrelated things, all around the central figure of a roughly normative idea of the human. This sense of analogical proportion around norms was central to medieval ethics. Hope lays between the extremes of presumption and despair. Courage lays between cowardice and brashness. So many individual and unrelated situations call for courage or hope, but the virtues of courage and hope are universals, as are the vices of the extremes they temper.

When we measure the world mathematically, it’s too easy to lose touch with the humanity of people who experience different numbers. Computers were terrifyingly powerful to those scientists in the late ‘40s who saw calculations that formerly took months to solve being completed in a few hours. Computers today are just as terrifying to us as computers in the ‘40s were to them. They stood on a precipice of total reinvention of their entire world—and they were totally right. They were thrown into an entirely different universe full of drugs and hippies and DNA and black holes in space and domestic terrorism and fear of nuclear annihilation. Our situation today is metaphorically proportional. But our computers are a billion times faster—and so, too-easily, we chuckle and condescend. We think we can sum the numbers and be bigger than they are. The past shrinks into quaintness and much ado about mere kilobytes and megahertz. And we lose touch with history. With our own humanity.

In communication, it’s not the metrics—the raw numbers—which define the commonality of the social-space which we share. It’s the proportion of the metaphors we use to resonate across all the numerical inequalities which divide us. We all perceive common spaces in a different way—molehills are mountains when you determine the ground of each. And so the study of shared metaphors is what brings us togetheter. And that study is the critical appreciation and appraisal of poetry in motion.

As a guy who’s all talk, it was very empowering to slowly translate from living in film to living in poetry. Both require interpretation—but words express so much more than film ever can.

Practical Criticism

The social fabric of our tattered world of high-octane rhetoric, alarmingly out of control numbers, and motivated self-delusion will not be mended by more and more statistics which seek to establish the truth of any given situation. More data will not save us.

It will be mended by the discovery of analogical proportions across unconnected, dissimilar scenes which skew and transform, like a parallax motion, everyone’s preconceived and dehumanizing perceptions of their out-group. The more people we have studying words and metaphor, and seeking eloquence and poetry, and trying their voices out in private, the better our odds.

If, since the collapse of the belief in individuals capable of “political arithmatic” and “hedonistic calculus,” we’ve stopped believing our own words about each other, then it’s time to come up with new words to express and prove ourselves. We must stop projecting into the transcendental-world of the abstract or the ideal, and speak again of the concrete. These are jobs for poetical language and new resonances of metaphor—not another schematic logical system. It’s a good way out of algorithmic capture, to boot. As for the future, we’d better normalize the practice of whispering outside of the capture of A.I. while we can—hence my staunch support for end-user liberating Free Software over programmer-centered “open source.”

Please donate to the FSF today.

Language is a vast dynamical system which poetic traditions have been conquering as a generational project long before modern semiotics and structuralism came along—it’s a superset of math and always will be. Poetry, properly studied, will teach you more of the art of language than the mere science of linguistics ever could.

Let’s be more organized in stepping outside of the world computers built. The trick I’ve most-relied on involves plenty of time straddling across long gaps and interpolating what fills them. This straddling is called suspended judgement.

Art is made in the tension of dissolution—of being pulled apart. My idea has been to hitch the ego simultaneously to a) examining computers and the role numbers plays on our social world so as to climb outside of them, while b) studying and remembering the human proportions of the world before they existed, and c) remaining immersed and in intimate contact with all the regular normal folks who live in the world as it is culturally constituted and socially constructed.

I think we need more people doing this. And, because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll go first.