More strange doubling…

What is X?

THIS IS HIP-HOP! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

What is X?

Finishing up where I left off (literature-as-fractal, literature-as-rainbow), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

Combining the ideas in the last two posts in this series—with attention to literature (artful verse; the continuum of texts figuratively documenting the human experience) and to the play of signs, myths, archetypes, and words—I end up with a theme for my class and a larger thesis to mull over and refine:

Literature is a fractal in form, in shape. It is made of feedback based on recursion. It evolves as it recurs, as it is iterated, as more of it is made. Literature evolves over time.

Literature has a fine structure, scaled arbitrarily. It can be analyzed at all levels: macro (genre or movement), meso (text), micro (sentence), and nano (sign). Each level is revealing. It is not enough to look only at the macro (as in a Wikipedia entry). It is not enough to look only at a text, to skim it.

It is not enough to dwell upon a few choice sentences. It is not enough to obsess over an image, a word choice, a myth recalled by an off-hand adjective. It is our job as critical readers to read at all levels—not all the time (that would be impossible), but as much as possible. This may require rereading, and it certainly helps conversation: You and I may have read the same text, but we may have understood it differently. We help each other as we combine levels.

Literature is too irregular to be easily described in traditional semiotic language. An epic such as Moby-Dick or Beloved is not just an advertisement, or a stop sign on the road. To talk about a literary text at all requires some level of appreciation of its otherness from other texts. If every text was literature, we wouldn’t still be reading Homer. We’d only read the Post. It is its irregularity—in literature’s case, its artfulness, its ability to affect human consciousness—that makes it both awesome (literally, fear-/religious love-inspiring) and difficult to pin down, at times.

This is not meant to diss the Post or comix or stop signs, BUT: Literature is the artful craft of verse, the manipulation of signs in a certain realm in which many big ideas—the whole of history and mythology and individual human consciousness and the stream of life that surrounds us and the abstract melting down of all of this, its reduction and manipulation and re-manipulation—construct a single text (and, because literature is a rainbow, that text is only one cell within the titanic body of literature).

Literature is self-similar, stochastically. A) What is similarity? Texts are not all the same. Duh. But they share similarities: They are non-arbitrary groups of signs. This sentence, for instance, did not come out of a monkey’s typewriter. Literature is also self-similar. We know it when we see it. We know why Moby-Dick is not the Post. It’s similar. But… not every literary text is the same. Moby-Dick is not the same as The Crying of Lot 49. Similar, generically, categorically. But different, specifically… (Literature is like the sign in this way.)

B) What is self-similarity? A literary text shows itself at each level of investigation to be itself. Moby-Dick is about whales, in summary; it’s also about whales, in every sentence. Self-similar. Many levels to view. Each level similar. Power through this self-similarity. Similar across the form: We recognize it as literature. Similar across itself: We recognize it as itself. But each level is distinct, each chapter is distinct. The literary text is a fractal. To the degree it is a fractal, it is literary.

To the degree it feels truly random (monkey typewriter nonsense), it is “bad” writing. To the degree its supra-claims (A NEWSPAPER OF IMPORT!) do not match its sentences, it is hypocrisy, popular or “genre” work, mere journalism. (It is, in any case, not literature, in the highest meaning of the word. Literature doesn’t have to be hoity-toity or exclusive. But it must have a definition we can at least kinda-sorta agree upon, as scholars, as writers, as critical readers.) The literary text must resemble itself, artfully, as a whole (an idea) and in each sentence.

C) “Stochastic” means “random,” but “stochastic” is a more musical term; it means “not-metered,” “non-metric;” it is therefore a less random way of saying “random.” Literature, verse, is a kind of music, after all; it is the metering of signs, trapped in language sounds, themselves trapped in squiggles on screen or on paper; literature, whether prose or verse poetry or unmetered poetry can be said to have a meter; that meter may of course be non-meter, but non-meter is still a kind of meter. (Prose has a relationship to meter.) All literature has meter. Very little literature, these days, outside rap lyrics, has “metrical” meter. Prose mostly has a stochastic meter.

D) So what is stochastic self-similarity? Literature does not consist, with a few exceptions, of the same exact words or sentences or even ideas repeated over and over again. Therefore, while it is self-similar at each level, it is self-similar in some other way than simple stamping, or copying and pasting. It is stochastically self-similar. Moby-Dick is not the same sentence about whales; it is delightfully new sentence after delightfully new sentence about whales set out in a non-arbitrary pattern.

Literature has a simple and/but recursive definition. We know it when we see it. But we sometimes have a hard time defining it or putting a name to it. We rely on jargon (”sign”); jargon is not universally intelligible. Yet literature is literature (a recursive definition): The problem is not in calling literature a spectrum of texts crafted artfully, but in doing so without resorting to language.

Literature has been with us since we first wrote down language; before that, proto-literature was with us in a different, oral form. We cannot imagine literature “from the outside;” our every phrase draws upon or alludes to or is shaped unconsciously by texts, and—especially in a world of text messaging, email, and the infinite superfast free flatness of the internet—we think textually. We are part of literature, living, and it is a part of us.

What the hell is this? It’s some literature, fools—deal with it. (Actually, I think this image relates to sign language, but I like it in general. Signs raining down, from the concavity of the umbrella. And those weird-ass smiley faces with double eyes… Already, a story is implied.)

This spring, I was asked to teach a survey of literature from 1800 to today at Brooklyn College, but I didn’t want to teach a survey class with a boring title (nothing with the words “vista,” “perspective,” “lens,” “examining,” “investigating,” “tradition,” &c.). I also wanted an arbitrary organizing mechanism, something simple and flexible.

So I settled on a title, the Fractal Rainbow—literature as fractal, recursive; literature as a continuous spectrum of voices, blending into new voices, organized by period and style but each individual, a thousand strokes of light on the back of an eyeball—and on color-in-the-text’s-title as guiding sine qua non.

I would teach, I thought, “The Black Cat” and White Jacket and Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and The Bluest Eye and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Maybe The Green Child (but it proved too dang difficult to procure copies of this under-loved Surreal novel).

All this grand literary painting left me with a problem, however. At some point I would have to define in more detail what I meant by “the fractal rainbow.” Sure, it sounds like a Dream Theater concert DVD, or an anime I wouldn’t want to watch. But I like it, in part for its flatly fantastic(al) sonic quality (”frac” and the long vowels of rain, dream vowels), in part because it presents a puzzle.

Each person encountering the phrase has to test it against what they think it may mean, arriving somewhere unexpected. The phrase itself has a fractal quality of depth-plumbing leading not to an answer, but to more depths to be plumbed.

In a few posts, I’ll outline some of my ideas about the intersections of fractals, rainbows, and fiction.

To start off, what is a fractal?

These videos tell the story sans words.

For words, I paraphrase Wikipedia:

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. Roots of mathematical interest in fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century; however, the term “fractal” was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

A fractal often has the following features:

• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales: It can be analyzed at the macro, meso, and micro levels.
• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
• It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
• It has a simple and recursive definition.

>> More fractal video, the “Classic Newton.”

>> Fractal math.

Deleuze-heads out there can already guess at what I mean when I say that literature is fractal. Elements at the lowest levels reverberate or straightforwardly recur at the levels of consciousness and even at whole-text levels—via paratext, the marketing of the fiction, the criticism and controversies and biographies and hagiographies surrounding it.

Look at the whiteness of the whale: It’s discussed openly, consciously; it recurs in imagery again and again; it pallors everything over, at the word-level, with the paleness of death, so all blanks and snowblind positivisms in Moby-Dick and even retroactively in White Jacket become the wall, the wall Ahab or any gnostic must somehow strike through… the whoosh of waves, white birds’ wails, winging harpoons whanging into whaleflesh, song of wind, wide openness, the hypnotizing whiteness of the sun, which is blindness. The term and chromatic qualia and death-signifier recur differently at each level, as whole chapters, as running motifs, and then as sentences, thoughts, and then as unconscious bits.

It’s not enough to teach the meso-level story; the text should be shown to be truly fractal.

Read the review on The Outlet (Electric Literature’s blog).

Bad Nature, a novella about translating for Elvis in a Mexico City dive bars, is mesmerizing. Javier Marías is a force of compact, darkly humor. I wish I’d known about him earlier, and I wish I could read his work in Spanish.

Self-grievance aside, I’m happy Electric has both introduced me to Marías and offered to publish my thoughts on novellas, novella-writing, and novella-tasting on their blog. Channeling the spirits of Deleuze and Guattari, I approach a novella as a meditation on an incident (”What happened?”), a freeing-out-of short story which strays into philosophy while reining itself in enough to prevent a freezing-into novel.

My list of novellas and quasi-novellas is already too long to tear through before the summer’s out. My mood is, in a word, psychednessitude.

Potentially up next for the Outlet series: No Tomorrow (Point de lendemain; a long short story about sex, lies, innuendo, and levels of counter-innuendo), The Murderess (a brutal meditation on women, money, aging, and—naturally—murderizing), The Chrysalids (a post-apocalyptic American tale—perhaps too long to qualify, but too tempting to put down, now that I’ve started it—or really now that I’ve seen its future-primitive rainbow cover), and a “classic” classic by James.

In the mean time, pick up Marías (who is the king of Redonda) on the King (of whatever he was “the King” of). If so inspired, do a dance:

In the last week, I’ve been directed to enjoy not only Six Versions Of Blood Meridian by Zak Smith, Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle, but also One Drawing For Every Page Of Moby-Dick by Matt Kish. (Zak Smith also created Illustrations For Each Page Of Gravity’s Rainbow.)

Why these massifications of mass? Cormac McCarthy’s epic and Melville’s—upon which McCarthy’s is founded—are both highly visual, detailed, colorful, painterly works. Their stories (the authorized versions) are clear, even if their meanings will be debated for as long as humans are around to debate.

Ah, but here’s the genius of translation. Translation is not repetition for another audience, not performance, but re-creation, re-playing God.

Look at A Humument by Tom Phillips. Phillips admits the book out of whose guts his own visual-poetic masterpiece is painstakingly stitched is trash. He does not translate Mallock’s A Human Document, because that translation would be worse than unmoving; it would be offensive to a modern audience. Instead, he uses the field of signs of A Human Document to create an ongoing series of paintings, to tell new stories, to comment on the original, the author thereof, and the era that produced them both.

Or… he translates the book out of the book: Translates it into the painting; then out of the painting and into the multimedia product-event. A Humument has been published four times; you can buy prints of it from Phillips’s website; the book continues to grow, existing outside of time.

(Which iteration is definitive? This is the happy problem of Leaves of Grass, the bible, and all those classic unfinished texts, from The Castle to those last revisions of À la recherche du temps perdu, from Nabokov’s final emission to the unfinishable, shifting rhizomes of the internet—Wikipedia and its shadows [Uncyclopedia], any forum, the Atlas Obscura, this site…)

Two works I’ve written about here before also merge the media of “book” (word, story, argument, linearity, sound, consciousness-as-lighting-upon, abstraction and forms and modules of thoughts) and “art” (color, moment, muteness, instant all-comprehensibility, the unconscious-as-perceiving-everything, figuration and line and negative space).

What is Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini? Is it a book of “art” (a joke on us), or a “real” fictional encyclopedia (self-coherent, non-rules-breaking, so “realistic” as far as alien encyclopediae go)? Has the content of the Codex been translated from the alien, or into it? Can you articulate the distinction?

Book From The Sky by Xu Bing provides a final and I think highly molecular example. Xu made, over four years, a mesmerizing set of fake Chinese pictograms. They are technically ”devoid of semantic content” but so suggestive of content that these “pictures” of words serve as pseudo-words a la Serafini’s squiggles in the Codex, but moreso. (The Sky-words are made from elements which are real; Serafini’s squiggles can be examined at a microscopic level, but they yield if anything less meaning.)

Again, has Xu translated a book out of the infinite/infinitely strange heavens? Or has he translated human words into a higher form? Is the book so mesmerizing, for Chinese readers and non-Chinese readers alike, because it suggests we humans can never mean anything (the original title was An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century), or because we make meaning from everything, because we translate and transmediate everything?

I think books inspire pictures and music automatically, and vice versa. As I write, Deltron fades into Devendra Banhart, and I am surrounded by the postcards whose meanings (semantic, semiotic) I have forgotten but whose figures and negative spaces and limits and patterns call out to me to write a story about a pair of leopards who trade their spots with the clouds and so doom great blotches of sahel-grass to deadly shade…

My homies over at Electric Literature have done it again. In less than a year, they’ve become one of those sacred few “real” literary journals, pioneering how to make e-reading more friendly to literature pur sang: Their journal (5 great stories per quarter, $10 an issue) appears in print as well as on Amazon and Lulu, and via the Kindle and iPhone.

And now they’ve become the first literary publication on the iPad.

Granted, I don’t have an iPad and don’t intend to buy one. Between a Macbook and an iPhone*, I have all the computing power and mobility I want. (Probably too much: Multitasking is dangerous.) Mostly, all I want is to write about the Crusades and make inspirational hip hop graphics that are really just silly.

But the iPad app works on the iPhone and is free, so check it out.

Sayeth Scott and Andy:

Whether or not you go in for all the iPad hype, we found it’s a great way for us to feature everything Electric Literature does in one place. Our videos, audio, and imagery work together to enhance the reader’s experience without overpowering the literary content.

We designed the application from scratch, with the help of a young programmer who quit his job at Motorola and left Silicon Valley to study writing in New York.

(Read the press release for more.)

*Confession: I find reading books on the iPhone irritating. Weeks ago I started Wodehouse’s Little Nugget, purely based on its hilarious name, and have only made it a few pages in. The charm of paper is still obvious. Then again, the iPad is commandingly bigger than its telephonic cuz. More tests to be conducted, perhaps sans Wodehouse…

Regardless, props to EL for being available. However it is that we read, we should keep doing so. That Kool-Aid I drank long ago. Reading expands the world infinitely in all directions. It’s cheap. And it’s even maybe a little hip. At least, the possibility is there, humming with charge.

The folks at the Hand Drawn Map Association have been kind enough to publish my map of Our Hollow Planet Earth, which we live upon (potentially, unconfirmed).

I suppose now I have to write a story that relates back to the items on the map, none of which directly relate to the places mentioned in my one-sixth finished novel of similar name (The Hollow Earth). A sampling of the places mentioned in the novel thus far:

• New Orleans* (*actual place)
• Bechuanaland* (*actual place)
• Z’quoz
• Barrels Bridge* (*actual place? I don’t remember)
• The civilized Central Philosopher-Kingdom, or Hollow Kingdom, as it is commonly known
• The duplexiverse
• The Garden of Sulayman
• The Academy Of The Humay
• Mictlan^† (^†the Mayan underworld, may be cut)

For more pseudo-maps, monsters, inspirational hip hop posters, and geometric designs by the untrained by constantly doodling Author, visit the Author’s humble doodle-blog, Ill-Luminations—now with commentary by professional illustrator and collaborator Ethan Gould.

I will now be publishing quotations to a tumblr blog (they didn’t have the venture capital for an E?), florillegium. The metaplasmus (intentional misspellingg) of the title = ill + florilegium. (So it matches ill-luminations.) [Plus the one-L domain was taken. Dang.] A florilegium is a book of ill shit you found out there, such as quotations, flower petals, doodles, whathaveyou: a Renaissance blog…

Time passes even in the past—things seem to become more obvious and understandable than they were in the present…

—Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House.

A friend at work sent me the Sam Harris talk, and I sent it to a friend I used to live with by the name of Luke Rodgers. Luke is a philosopher, and if you enjoy his thoughts on Harris, I encourage you to explore his blog, everything flows.

I sent Harris’s talk to Luke in part because I wanted to confirm my own biases: I agree with some of Harris’s thoughts, yet others annoy me. Luke’s reply is as thought-provoking as Harris’s lecture. Check out this off-the-cuff philosophizing:

First, the fact/value distinction is old, but also has been under attack at least since 1805 (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). There are many good reasons for believing that this distinction is not rigid, but there are also good reasons for, in some cases, not abolishing it altogether, I think.

Harris claimed that the moral core of every religion is ultimately about conscious experience. I think this may be deeply wrong, and that the opposite is probably true. Certainly Kant’s philosophy specifically eschews this approach, and it seems to me that Judeo-Christian morality, conceived of as a law issuing from without, is also exactly contrary to Harris’ conception.

The question of suffering may be a good one, and some philosophers in the 20th century sought to locate this question at or near the centre of ethics (Derrida does something like this in some places). There does seem to be a “fact of the matter” here, so I think Harris is at least partially right that science can contribute to this debate.

Even though he went out of his way to try to avoid coming across as racist/imperialist, the contention that “conferences like this” are only conceivable in certain parts of the world, as though that is evidence of some moral or developmental superiority, is utterly hypocritical and arrogant, insofar as conferences like TED are, at least within the parameters of the current global economic system, only conceivable on the basis of incredible inequality and suffering in other worlds. That is to say, it can only exist in the USA because it cannot exist in so many other countries.

The overall reductionism, this century to the brain, last century to psychology/genetics, the previous century to phrenology, is a stupidity that many Western philosophers and scientists have been trading in since the early modern period. I doubt we will stop making it any time soon, though anyone who is acquainted with the history of modern philosophy (as Harris obviously is not) would be less likely to make this blunder. Harris reveals the ultimate contradiction himself when, in the Q&A period he admits that brain states cannot be reliably interpreted without reference to the larger context. That is to say, things are not reducible to the brain, that is to say his basic thesis is inherently misguided.

The question of “how humans flourish” is totally abstract, and cannot be determined outside of particular contexts. It is incapable of a universal answer. Harris’ talk about “valleys and peaks” on the moral landscape, while not absurd, here functions merely as a screen for his actual thesis of convergence which, along with the utopian idea that borders between nation-states are already disappearing (plausible) and will eventually vanish (incredible), is an old liberal myth.

The notion that “certain opinions [on morality] must be excluded” and that an objective domain of expertise on how to achieve human flourishing will emerge strikes me not only as vastly improbable, but also extremely dystopian and proto-totalitarian.

So, in sum, “yes” to weakening the fact/value dichotomy and being open the possibility that science will *inform* moral debates, but a resounding “no” to the notion that moral debates will constitute a domain of experimental science, and also “no” to the naive brain reductionism.

§

With regard to the veiling and honour-killing &c., yes, I agree. In that sense, I am ethnocentric in the sense argued by Richard Rorty (one of my favourite pragmatist philosophers), which I see as the least contradictory and most sophisticated way of avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and absolutism. I believe (though perhaps in a less jingoistic way than Rorty did) in the superiority of democracy and (certain aspects of) the individualist/liberal and secular traditions, though I also believe that I have no ultimately foundational, or non-question-begging ways of supporting those beliefs (i.e. I don’t think it’s grounded in objective reason, or anything like that).

As to brain science, yes it is indeed gaining serious weight, and it’s hard to see what will replace it and supersede it, though something probably will in the next 100 years, at least in terms of what we consider to be the science best suited for understanding human nature. On the other hand, it is still seriously deficient in many ways (deficiencies which, I think, scientists are sometimes better able to recognize than the breathless philosopher sycophants), e.g., it’s explanatory language is still at a very early stage and relatively crude, it has basically no idea how many anti-depressants work, etc.

If you can find the essay by Alisdair MacIntyre called “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” it’s a good read on this topic

Also, with regard to genetics, I expect there are still some huge surprises in store for us which are potentially game-changing. For example, until recently we thought that a large amount of DNA was “junk,” i.e., didn’t code for any proteins, and I think we’re just now beginning to figure out what that junk DNA is for.

There is some research going on right now that shows how Lamarck was right in certain ways, that is to say that sometimes a genotype can actually be modified on the fly in response to certain environmental conditions in a way that makes the change heritable.

But yes, genetics may be approaching a level of maturity comparable to physics; i.e., we may find that in 100, 200 years, certain beliefs we have now about genetics are still held true—a situation I would say is fairly plausible, barring societal collapse.

An interesting book on this topic is The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, in which he develops a sophisticated way of looking at the extent to which different things may be considered “socially constructed.”

My man Verlyn Klinkenborg is all, “books will endure not (just) because they look and feel beautiful, but because they don’t offer distractions—no pop-ups, games, Flash modules, interactive doohickeys and gewgaws. ‘They do nothing.’” And, as usual, I’m all, “Dog, Verlyn is my dog. He’s right.”

People tend to a) think in dichotomies and b) set up the wrong dichotomies. I’ve often overheard subway readers muttering to one another about Kindles and Nooks, books and newspapers. They see a war between tactile and visual, old and new, elegant and multitaskable. What they should see is a play of information-filtration. Who’s filtering your media, and how? Nowadays, we mostly filter our own experience with books and news. We look up what we want on Google or Amazon and read it, buy it, or rent it. TV is on demand. NetFlix has brought the movies to our computers, to our whims.

But Google sorts what we filter. (We don’t flip through hundreds of screens to find what we want, most of the time.) There are two layers here. There’s a layer of basic, molecular, robotically sorted metachoice, then a conscious level of filtration. Given options [A-Z], we pick… whatever. (*I pick Z.)

That said, yes, the (immediate) future of the book is secure for a number of reasons. At the same time, not opposed in a dichotomy, but progressing plurally alongside book-ness, we have the Library of Congress saving our tweets for posterity. So books remain, and now so do our tweets. The once-solid becomes ephemeral, but does not disappear. The ephemeral becomes, not solid, but permanent…

As an addendum, I suggest all future-readers who dig poetry sign up for Knopf’s free Poem-a-Day emails. Check out “Mirror” by Mark Strand for a taste.

I wrote this jam for my current literature class and offer it up in the spirit of sharing*. (*The spirit animal of sharing, FYI, is the eastern screech owl.) I’ll follow up with a few thoughts on Postmodernism. But for now—let’s munch on some Mod:

For most historians, modernity begins in the mid-seventeenth century, with the Enlightenment. Modernism (notice the “-ism”) comes at the end of the nineteenth century, with Pound in poetry, Joyce and Woolf (and the earlier Kleist) in prose, and Manet, Matisse, and Picasso in painting.

But Modernism is not some hi-falutin “school of art.”  It’s a shift in thought.  The “crisis of the Modern” hits home after transdiscursive (discourse-inventing, meaning way-of-making-knowledge-inventing) thinkers such as Freud, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Eliot, and Bergson, collectively question our basis for making knowledge (from the past) and of representing Being (which cannot be represented). They are skeptics. They cause a collective shift in thought—a shift from which we have never recovered.

By the outbreak of the Great War, Modernist thought suddenly finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities” (Plato, the bible, science as understood by Bacon and Newton, biology a la Curvier), but in human experience—the succession of moments—the imprint of moments lived, sensations felt, memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

But this focus on the individual and her thoughts shares little in common with the willful Romanticism of the nineteenth century: In just decades, the idea of the unconscious comes to play a huge role in art, as does the Marxist idea that the course of your life is largely determined by class. Darwin’s observations concerning biology’s fatalism (natural selection) completes the trifecta. The Romantic notion of the totally free human is gone, replaced by a mixture of the individual (which is fragmentary, reaching to define self, to ground self in knowledge that she must construct) and the massively social (because the Utopias conceived in the nineteenth century are finally being acted out).

Siggy Vicious

Further, lived moments do not exist purely as affects in the heroic human brain (as per the intense emotions of the Romantics), but as medialized, technologically-distributed information. Signs. With Modernism and a shift away from the Enlightenment’s insistence on a rational, discoverable world (with Bohrs and Einstein, and with Joyce, and with Picasso and the Dadaists), we see the prefiguration of the current age, Postmodernism, and the current condition of thought: a vast chain of signs—shared, created, effaced, mutated, and judged via media (social networking, calls on phones, TV, emails, texts, books, ads)—stored and changed via the still-mysterious alchemy of the (biologic) brain.

The center of knowledge is no longer (only) the past, no longer authority, but the immediate, centerless, distributed, individually-experienced present. We agree upon certain canons because they are expedient (allow for the manufacture of iPods and cars…), but we constantly threaten them in order that they should not lead us into the pre-Modern error of supposing there is a Truth or Perfection to be empirically “detected” by humans somehow, even, especially in art. It simply isn’t possible. Michelangelo isn’t perfect. Science is incomplete and will continue to be. Science, with the uncertainty principle and the discovery that the best contemporary models for the universe (string theories, leading to brane theories) can’t be tested empirically, ever. (To see the universe at its absolute level, we require a particle collider the size of the universe…)

Knowledge is part of the experience of being human, and humans are not computers. We are highly sensitive animals who write poetry and scamper and go crazy. Knowledge is not separate from poetry and scampering. Though we know quite a lot within a certain framework (science—the Enlightenment), there is much, mainly our own consciousnesses, that we cannot “know” or that we have yet, at least as a global culture, to find a framework for.

Knowledge itself, with the smashing of the atom (going back to relativity’s rise in the late 1800s) and the smashing of the rational mind (Freud and Mach, in the late 1800s), is merely a convention. (I know I’m biting Foucault here; knowledge is what is made by power. Psychoanalysis opens a knowledge to control sexuality; post-seventeenth-century prison systems open a new knowledge of “reform” and “discipline” to control the population.)

And there’s more. The fact that I can formulate the above sentence means we are living in postmodernity. “Post-” here implies less “after” than “aware of.” I could say we live in paramodernity (”beside modernity”), since we can examine it at our leisure, using its tools (technology, psychology, modern biology, economics and history after Marx).

But that’s another essay. The point of this one izzz: Modernist thought finds knowledge not in tradition and the traditional “authorities,” but in human experience—the succession of moments lived—sensations felt, of memories created and buried deep and suddenly remembered.

And I’m out!

Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite things, period, and I’m proud to edit it, when I can. Congratulations to everyone who’s written, edited, viewed, or even heard of AO. You’ve all earned the award (a “Southie,” perhaps?).

FYI, apparently, South By Southwest is the new Burning Man. (Both have godawful oogly websites.)

[Of course, both of these media circuses pale in comparison to a good ole fashioned Wicker Man.]