I have become used to thinking of what RC has been calling “datamancy” as something that one does only with abstract information networks. I remember that a network of interconnected information is something I used to find in words in the world, and still do now. I recall one summer when i read three books in a row, of different provenance, each of which talked about an Armenian restaurant. I’ve still never been to eat an Armenian. When i read my notes from that time, half a year later, they formed messages to the future me, with an unnerving accuracy. So datamancy has come to work alongside psychogeomancy for me, because it always did; they are/become the same thing, become complementary.
A couple of months back, on a random walk, I found two volumes of science fiction classics in a soggy box in the street, outside a bookshop that often draws me in to find something that i discover i need. I dried the books out on the radiator and ate them up.
One of the volumes contained …And Then There Were None, which i was happy to find out was already a reference text for the classic community currency movement. It also contained A Rose For Ecclesiastes; i can’t say that i really enjoy this, the indulgent poesy of it grates at me, as does the ambient misogyny of so much of the otherwise wonderful writing of that group of people at that time. The story did, however, send me off to look at the text of Ecclesiastes, to figure out what all the fuss was about.
A little while before that, i’d found for the first time a truth that made sense to me while reading the Tao Te Ching, after about three nonchalant passes over it in the past when it had made no sense for me. I had what i felt was a structural realisation about Ecclesiastes then: that the Tao Te Ching is an ur-text for it; they join in enough places to convey the same sense; the second must have directly informed the first. They contain least one common message that helped inspire me to try to put some essays together touching on balance in technology, on why we build the things that we build, in a light of postgenderism, and postdualism. I wrote in email at the time:
The things that we build, they have what we perceive
to be divisive, destructive uses, and they have apparently creative,
constructive uses, and they can look and behave like just the same uses. And i don’t think it is possible to not-build, only to not-apply. But i have yet to find a “religious” message which is in favour of building, but plenty in favour of not-building.
I formed a realisation that messages in fear of tools that help build tools, and messages in fear of women, are aspects of the same complex, the same kind of pathology of fear. Be careful what you build, in case you build something that bites you; safer to build nothing at all. Be careful what you think, in case you think something that breaks you; safer to think nothing at all.
Of all the essays i’m trying to express, this is the one that feels like the most struggle. It’s the ground on which i’m least sure-footed; the best place to demonstrate the power of ignorance, yet the place that wants to set me off on six months to six years of new research. Most of the other ideas have been with me for a long time, feel fairly simple, and i think i can enunciate them clearly. While writing towards the book, each time i want to use a word of three or more syllables, i check myself and try to re-explain; but the Eccleasiastes thread almost compels me to drop in phallologocentrism as a given.
While random walking, i feel a tug in a certain direction, into the reach of some aesthetic object that i can’t quite see. With ideas, this feels natural; linearity as a narrative form, is a path traversed through a complex of forms which is massively N-dimensional. In the world, objects that contain ideas produce the strongest tugs; i find myself unconsciously dowsing for books.
In the remainder pile in that same bookshop i picked up Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization Vol 1 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano at the same time. The latter is a parable of fear, that helped me explore an extreme difficulty i’d come to feel in building very descriptive local information systems, innately public, whose future uses are impossible to predict or control. The former helped me come to terms with my own tool-building, concept-organising compulsions. It explained to me that what i have always wanted to build is not something carrying an innately coercive, suppressive capacity that deserves to be resisted; but is a neutral good that works differently according to the cultural structures around it, and deserves to be constantly reinspected. A soft architecture, always being re-formed as our needs change.
The new machines followed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid out by previous economic and technical structures.
I’m digressing wildly, and did not mean to talk about the theory of the PaleoInformation Age right now. I meant to talk about yesterday’s tug into that same bookshop, down to the remainder basement, towards a pile of Stephen David Ross’ The Gift of Kinds, which i opened at random where my eyes lit on this:
The dangerous magic of technology. The exalting magic of language, Griffin’s pronouns linking nature and women in domination and celebration; linking as exposure, mimesis and proximity. All who live in the earth, where every creature and thing speaks, knows, touches other creatures and things in proximity, endlessly exposed to others.
A small part of me wanted to resist walking away with this book; while i am trying to write something clear to me, superconscious of my own ignorance, others’ readings can too easily distract me into a kind of psychic masturbation. But it sets up a lot of resonance in me, in my dippings into it. In just the first few pages the author touches on WePrime, the dissociative effect of pronouns, post-duality and goodwill economy. I feel glad to see a similar narrative so clearly nearby, and so threaded through with reference points to philosophical texts that people have told me i should reify my ideas against, that Ross’ work offers a shortcut to.
On the other side of town today, i found myself in another bookshop with one of its companion volumes, The Gift of Truth, in my hands. Ross’ writing style reminds me of nothing so much as James Kelman’s Translated Accounts, a book which fascinates me, which i find something new in each time i lose a copy and acquire a new one, as if the words shift subtly in each instance of it. A self-conscious tone of machine-mediated writing from the future, intentionally broken in flow and in syntax, leaving an impression of knowledge intuited, waiting to be found. It always made sense to me, made more sense for me to read books in parallel, think about them in parallel, just as binocular vision offers better depth perception. I wanted to drop two excerpts from the Ross books that here, that i will be able to return to and remember and find more, or less, sense in.
A philosophy, an ethics, without contested borders is no philosophy, no ethics, at all. Philosophy and ethics are geophilosophy and geoethics. Yet geography cannot contain its borders, takes the gift of the earth for granted and the endless responsibilities from it, to find oneself a place, in place, and to resist every domination of place.
The goods and truths we know, within the ordinance of time, respond to something beyond time, immeasurable. Desire is the name for this excess, giving itself excessively everywhere, instituting a circulation beyond any restricted economy. Whatever desire touches goes to excess. Desire is the memory of the good.
I don’t pretend in the writing or in the software that i make to create new ideas; if i arrive a point where this or that Greek had been at thousands of years before me, i shall feel vindicated, or at least terribly cheerful. But if i can see enough to be going on with, then i want, by placing one idea next to another, by drawing threads visibly through them, to help immanentise connections that have always been.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.
