theosophical investigations June 30, 2006

Where the remainder pile in that bookshop is concerned, i have no free will. Books often come in pairs, but today I couldn’t leave without a set of three; God’s Last Words, The Book of J, and The Devil in the Shape of a Woman.

Why am i reading about how the Bible has been read? In part this goes back to my fascination with the combination of Taoism with misogyny+anti-technology elisions in Ecclesiastes. I knew i was groundless in understanding, missing connection to a world of biblical hermeneutics, without which i’d be underequipped to think this through. I took a look at the tradition and shied right away; no ten years in a theological seminary for me, looking for questions that i’m half-sure I won’t find, finding too much that I cannot accept. S’s mother, perhaps keen to reclaim her seed’s seed for Judaism, offered God Is A Verb and a syncretic approach not unlike S’s own pick-and-mix mysticism. I enjoyed it, didn’t fire with it, and dropped the thread for some time.

Recently T drove a spike through my mind, pile-driven with puritan sermons supporting a Word-literalist worldview unlike anything i have known a peer to express; a complete and perfectly-circular honesty of intent; a meta-framework for understanding what has been meant.

The King James is a great program; it makes my thoughts ring in syncopated metre. It jars me all the time with statements like “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (I was told that i was a witch once, by a person who otherwise called me very accurately from almost no context. This was meant in the “we are all witches” / “we are all christ” sense, but i found some “truth” (or at least “truthiness”) in the statement. (Not in the wiccan sense; i still think that’s mostly disingenuous schlock and self-involved creative anachronism.) Thus the third book I picked up; while i’m in the geopsychic hotspot of puritanism and its discontents, i might as well learn in-place about what happened here hundreds of years ago.) I’m more or less scared to get to the post-gnostic bits near the end, Paul of Tarsus‘ flashes of casual violence and offhand misogyny; how can one read past this, if one cannot draw a line in the text?

Yet if all of us have been for some time cursed; to be subordinating and subordinated; to be conflicted with desire; in communication only to be displaced; then i always want to know why, with the insistence of a six-year-old child; to help figure out how the curse is lifted. I don’t expect to find out myself, but am glad to have an extra reason to try, wanting to understand my friend.

a kind of kindness in kinds February 28, 2006

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.

reflections on systems and subjects February 3, 2006

I was offered a couple of reflections on recent writing that i wanted to note here.

KS offered a viable redemption of the word system, which i was starting to think just couldn’t be re-used, carrying too many implications within itself of one part of a system being governed and subsumed by another. K said:

the “operating system” is a system for operating the computer so you don’t need a computer operator. in that sense, “system” doesn’t imply subordination-to-other, just complex aggregation, as in general systems theory. it denotes routinization, systematization; what deming called “a process”. which is something that a person can do with no interaction with anybody else.

My initial brief reaction was; even in a system which is wholly and only comprised of myself, there is still a kind of subordination of part to whole inside the relation. Then i realised that i was probably slipping into the category error that Ken Wilber talks about in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; given the thought tendencies towards postmodernism and feminism that i already have running, i’m overly inclined to view an aggregating hierarchy with structural suspicion.

But one can re-view this in terms of a holarchy of part-whole relations. When i first read SES i was thinking very intensely about software, so i read in it a story about the software i enjoyed making and enjoyed using. I definitely saw in Unix/Linux a holarchy; kernel space, user space, network space.

My own software design was was like an onion with another onion inside. First, the originally envisaged set of components, each built on top of the other, was completed. The the outer part of the onion ring emerged. The components in the outer layers of the ring co-operated with each other. Each would work in-and-of-itself and do one thing reasonably well. They shared a world model and knowledge base which formed by the inner-onion, so when one part-hole was used alongside the other, the outer layers became more powerful with almost no extra effort. My software design reach has always outpaced my software implementation grasp somewhat; i felt compelled to Stop Coding, waiting for the depth of data available in the world around me to catch up with what i was trying to achieve by aggregating, re-annotating and re-publishing that data.

The systems discussion also reminded me of Christopher Alexander’s early work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and being able to make systems work better by identifying subsystems into which the inputs and outputs could be identified, treated as black boxes. Alexander’s later collaborative work on A Pattern Language constitutes in part a transcendence of the appealing over-formalism in his individual Notes, yet his two works share a spirit, drive from the same place. A Pattern Language and its companion volumes were more or less rejected as trendy Californian holism by the architectural establishment. But in the 1980s they came to inspire a whole group of people who were trying to think about software architecture in a new way. The original wiki was created in order to discuss and work out the practise of Alexandrian theories of software creation in a collaborative way, in a spirit of every-document-writable-by-all which was very much the spirit of the World Wide Web when it started – the first client software to it was for writing first, not for reading first. So it goes…

FT offered a wiki link as a commentary on the terrible zen poetry i wrote about WePrime; a description of the Subject-object problem which included this:

The range of pronouns available in a language is a key influence on how the subjects and objects are perceived by any native speaker of that language as a mother tongue.

WePrime reflects that because We only have one kind of We available to us, We can hide one kind of We behind another; We can play enjoyable games with the semantics of We; We can also become caught up in codecisions about who We are. If We had the ability to semantically differentiate with different pronouns for up to six different kinds of We, perhaps We’d have better tools to help us have Governance Discussions while actually enjoying them, and actually getting somewhere.

I did once write a manifesto and get a goodish pile of people to sign it. It was something i had to be talked into doing quite resolutely. Once it was done, i felt good about having done it; it became a useful reference point in future discussions about the same subject. It was an indicator that a lot of different classes of people were affected by something that prevented them from pursuing personal and professional happiness through their own interests. I tried to keep the manifesto itself WePrime: the we was only instantiated by the list of signatories; the messages were just statements of common sense. As Douglas Adams wrote, perhaps not verbatim but in words very like these:
Common sense won’t help us; we have to help each other.

co-operating systems February 1, 2006

I wrote the following passage in a different document where, as it was kindly pointed out to me, it clearly didn’t belong. I liked it a lot when i wrote it, and wanted to figure out where it does belong in the complex of thoughts that surround it.

The words “operating system” are pretty ghastly when you think about it. You are operating a system, or it is operating you. Operation is an intrusion and a misdirection. If a system is operating you, how is it possible to bypass it, and create more time and space for you to participate in activities which you enjoy? A surprising amount of software hackers, artists and theorists have managed to get into a position like this, and so far it seems to be working out pretty well.

Our capacity to program each other with words is amazing to me.

The words that people have to use, are words created through power, for use by people with power to describe people without it: people who have not had the means to record their thoughts.

Yet some of the most powerful, vibrant languages that have existed, are patchworks created by the need of the subjugated to communicate together. English came about this way, a language fused together on a small island that was constantly overrun and re-ruled by different waves of other more powerful cultures. The language that emerged became the defacto language of power; it travelled with the Empire that had to build boats to find resources to build more boats because the island it originated in had run out of trees. Right now, English is de facto the world’s second language; the global lingua franca, a phrase which amuses S greatly, given what it reveals about the patterns of cultural/linguistic empires overwriting each other.

Some people think that one day, wol wan tok; the pattern of fusion languages created together by subjugated people under the expression of power, reforged and simplified from the vocabulary of powerful people, will fuse into one world language when it comes to be that no person is any longer subjugated, or subjugating.

I can become very carried away with my own sense of rhetorical facility. At the same time I somehow fear the expressive power of words to program and deprogram people, particularly myself. Writing here, I can indulge in flourishes; what i am trying to write in the book that is parallel to this blog, are words that are as simple and clear as i can make them be. Reading, i can often see three distinct messages in any given statement. The power we have to program the world through words is incredible.

The Collaborative International Dictionary of English is new to me. It gives a much broader and more interesting, more nuanced description of ways in which power can exist and can be used than the ontologically hierarchical, institutional WordNet, which is very much about formalising machine cognition.

To veer back to the point of this loose piece of writing: what about operating systems? What kind of a metaphor, a verbal construct and a conceptual construct is an operating system to have so very much power as it has? What we know as an operating system is a kind of framework that nothing else will work without. The free software movement may have been impelled by frustration with a printer driver, but it quickly moved towards the software core of an OS; a place to re-begin, that everything else could be rewritten upwards and downwards from.

I’d quite like to use the words co-operating system instead, because i enjoy bad pseudopuns. Perhaps i should avoid use of the word system at all. As a word it encapsulates subordination-to-other in its very being. It carries a lot of pro/anti resonance with it, accreted during its recent history of use and re-use. I want to dream up a better word to use, and somehow persuade other people to decide to share its use with me.

In English and a lot of European languages, the words that describe decision, interaction, and frameworks, are very military in origin, very oriented towards ownership of states and goals; when one breaks the words down into components, the parts often convey Man As Person in a way which jars with me.

To reprogram myself, and then to inspire or encourage others to do that to themselves, i need to find a new kind of language inside the language in which i always already interoperate, in which i think. If i want to make a language entirely new, from my own mind innately, I am concerned that I may be for a long time in the position of being unable to communicate at all, unless I find the focus and word time energy to teach another person my entire new language. To interact with a lot of people, this could be a lot of effort. Yet when I come to want to relate that word time energy to one other person, i think that person already understands.