2003-06-07

Paradigm breaking days


I get to page 4 of D&G and already/still my synapses are firing with
new/old ideas. Xanadu! Exhuberance and being a teenager! Poetry,
gardening, queue theory, everything. Vonnegut. Timequake. Refrains
across his body of work; paragraphs as hypertext. The interconnectedness
of all things.

It's as if my mind knows it's going through a new paradigm moment. In
the same way memories are renewed and strengthened by recall, I feel my
mind opening up the concepts in my head, reintegrating them, and folding
them back in. Touching files. I'm remembering a lot.

What's odd is two things.

It started happening before now, a few days ago. Future shocks of
reading this, or am I just vulnerable to this kind of thing at the
moment? Certainly Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time was having deeper
resonances with me than others of his books.

I'm made for this world. D&G is cutting into things
I/we/the_world_I'm_in thinks about constantly. Because they noticed
them, or because they shaped this world, or because the world was
turning that way as they noticed and it strengthened that process all at
once? It's a reflection and shaping all at once, as am I. Page 4!

Oh, and another thing. These paradigm days -- they're like habit
breaking days, which I've talked about before. Something goes wrong/awry
and suddenly everything does. You can't remember which pocket to put
your keys, which way up your card goes in the ATM, what order to dry
yourself after a shower. These things ripple through the social space;
overwriting other people's extelligence in the shared memory space by
leaving work late and taking an unusual seat, which causes someone to
stand by a different door and get to a coffee shop while it's not so
busy so change their selection. Mindquakes of different magnitudes.
Habits are external, this one is internal.


nb, books to read are:
- Book also by A Thousand Year of Nonlinear History man (Manuel de Landa),
recommended by Ben of Ludicorp
- Popper essays book as recommended by Matt Jones



...then, a full half page later and I'm still thinking about the
parallels with Ted Nelson, the phrase "literary machines". Still on page
4. This is going to be slow going. (Then "abstact machines"... Nonlinear
History took the term from here.)


Oh, then: "Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with
surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come."

So true! Oral culture as continually repeating the known; literature
culture as making structures that can be shared and collaboratively
worked on, to try and overcome the complexity exchange limit, to
democratise the messiahs who can have the idea in a single brain and
*also* bring it down from the mountain: with writing you can survey the
territory together, and then simplify. (Getting into Ong here.)

Refer back to what I wrote, oh, in 1997/98 about writing: sketching out
huge structures that couldn't be held in your head in a single moment,
but when written could be accompanied with the scaffold to be built, to
delicately put in a place a single, shimmering thing that can then
collapse (after comparing distant branches and shutting down blossoms)
to single, smaller ideas.

And refer to all those push/pull dichotomies. Pull as an evolutionary
sort of activity. Like exploring a topology. Which brings in Dawkins,
hey and Pinker too (who I meant to mention in Journey to the Centre but
forgot). The landscape as a conventient slice of the maximally complex
system (a metaphor which leads to its own problems: if DNA explores a
landscape then DNA+modification is a different trail [Vannavar Bush,
Nelson: Memex/Xanadu] so it should be fine? But of course not: genetic
modification isn't like changing a map, the proponents forget that the
landscape is only a slice and actually there's no division between
signifier and signified. DNA is live, so it's maximally complex like the
brain, or rainforests, or physics, and we can't tell which bit touches
which bit. It's the spirit/word problem again).

But what I mean is: these metaphors pervade my history; I am a construct
of these metaphors. This book is speaking to me. Or maybe that's the
paradigm breaking day talking.


Hey, last thing(s):

- D&G talk about rhizomes filling all available dimensions. Maximally
complex then. And if you're in one, there's no spare dimension to take
shortcuts, take a longer view. You're embedded (that's a long back). So
we're constantly trying to squash the rhimome to sense/reach further
(input and output cursors).

- The difference between maps and tracings: maps are packed rhizomes.
They let you see where you're going, but they're simplified. Tracings
are the *same*, the thing itself. Except when we do tracings, we
reproduce only what we've decided to detect. Tracings are deliberate, so
we measure colour, size, etc, but nothing peripheral. Tracings are
*meant* to be the thing itself, but aren't, and aren't as useful as a
map either.

- Social networks are bad tracings of rhizomes. We squash the
dimensionality of the isness, and end up with something that of course
we can't cluster automatically: we've thrown half the data away already.
We could just provide people with a map, but we don't know enough to get
that either.

- I got to page 12!