the
strangest token
It’s hard to decide
what the real anatomy of our tokens is, and a specific exploration
could require the synergy of many academic disciplines to accomplish.
At the same time with careful examination (we must remember we are
using what we are exploring to explore what we are using) we can
identify some of the common and general principles of animalian
relation with symbolic representation. This will reveal to us of
the power of the inference-capacity of the metaphors and stories
we select to define things and relations. I hope that it will also
grant us a position from which to create a generalized anatomy that
will be experientially as well as theoretically useful.
Our tokens display the
troubling characteristic of changing with each reference — and
this is something we do not normally notice about them and the methods
we employ with them. Both are, like us, alive. Their features are
not flat, or linear in their connectivities and expressions. Additionally,
our creations with these tokens change their container during their
organization and activation — thus they indirectly or directly
change themselves — as a product of the organismal gesture
which results in their activation.
Few of us will personally
discover the depth of deception we are subject to as hosts to stories
and metaphors that — overtly or through implication —
preside over our common relations with definition, relation and
value. The nature of the tokens we use to simulate and express relation
is extractive, producing integrations which are always less than
what is being rePresented. While this feature is part of what what
renders our languaging tools incredibly useful, it is also part
of why they are also incredibly dangerous. They shave off something
in order to exist, and are thus in a sense the arbiters of what
is discarded — in subject, and context.
The terms and models of assembly and usage we adopt will largely
determine the character of our persons, societies, and nearly every
other domain of the experience of our lives. If their shape encourages
the exploration and embodiment of our potentials, our experience
and fulfillment as an organism and person will be generally and
commonly supported. If, on the other hand, our models are tyrannous
or binding — we will suffer accordingly — and not merely
as individuals, as we have clearly seen in our history — but
as the entirety of a living world. If we continue as a species to
elaborate and enthrone biophagic ways of knowing, our world will
at first suffer, and then proceed to phases of catastrophic destabilization.
In the modern moment we are in the late phases of a progression
of geometric steps. The one we were on ten years ago was catastrophic.
The one we are on at the moment is beyond description — but
we cannot attend it, because the shape of our tokens and the power
of emotions won’t allow us to.
We are not the labels or metaphors we describe ourselves with, yet
their shape and character influence what we may become. In a sense,
we are map-users. The maps do not define our travel — but
they will radically influence it, and merely by existing, they will
cause their users, the terrain and its participants to change. In
this way a map modifies both its user, and the terrain it refers
to. Since a map is commonly a frozen token, use of the map can cause
it to become immediately inaccurate, for its use changes the terrain
it rePresents. A map of any kind, especially a general map, is a
much more unusual creature than we are commonly led to believe,
or experience.
To be a human being
in the modern moment is to be a thing of many potentials —
there are no laws which will typify the outcome of such an embodiment
because the potentials are difficult if not impossible to exhaust.
Yet they depend in their particulars upon connectivity, and the
domains and contacts of its tunnels and arms. If we merely remove
language, or common access to modern society — what we are
appears to mind as primarily animalian. This picture will differ
only slightly from examples of ‘wild animals’ which
our metaphors suppose us vastly separate from. Our species is fundamentally
communal — and if access to this is changed or removed —
what it means to be human is again radically redefined in all of
its terrains.
So we can observe that the essentially intrusive or penetrative
encounters with language or culture change us entirely — into
an animal with the power to transform an idea into a local or biospheric
fact. This skill is in no way modest in its areas of effect, and
the story of its lineage holds the answers to the most essential
of our questions and perhaps even our dreams. That we’ve evolved
as a species to a place where we represent and can generally conserve
the biological and cognitive stability and complexity necessary
to begin a relationship with such a skill probably means
one of two things:
Either...
Living worlds struggle as organisms to ascend a ladder of catastrophe-crossings
with the goal of producing such a skill in one or more or their
children (probably for an emotionally and organismally observable
reason).
Or...
Our species’
narratives that relate gods, monsters, angels &c with our
origins and our relations with language are true in some significant
way (which might be something far more significant than primitive
misunderstanding).
Both of these positions
have striking implications, which we will explore in a general way
as we proceed. It is not my desire to envision them as laws, but
instead treat them as toys of exploration. In such a game, we might,
for example, decide both are overtly false (negation), and then
proceed to pretend that something about each of them is true enough
to merit playful exploration (advocacy). From another perspective,
we could decide both are true, and yet they are not quite true enough
to exist as facts — thus we could playfully set about opposing
or negating them until we achieved what we felt was a rational size-meaning
outcome for each of them. I believe there is truth in both of them,
and something larger than their integration comes from their mixing.
There is a hidden variable we are unlikely to account for in our
games, and accounting for it changes ourselves, our games, and their
outcomes entirely. When we touch each of these ideas, or even activate
the organismal structures that allow us to relate linguistically
and semantically with metaphors and their connectivities —
we are changing the being asking the question, the language, and
the referents. All of this is taking place in a virtual animal,
which exists at one scale as the involutive expression of a real
biocognitive animal. At another scale, it is changing the biocognitive
moment of the animal as it arises. In reality, these two things
are co-arising, they are emerging together in scalar waves of connective
and constant relation. How does one metaphy this?
There are, it turns out, many species of metaphoric tokens.
Metaphors that tend toward specificity can trap us in a place where
we lose contact with their holophores — the general parents
from which the metaphors arose. When we are returned to adept relation
with holophores, many of the deadly problems inherent in our ways
of knowing will dissolve, and with them many of the plagues of knowing
which have harrowed our world and species more than they have nurtured
it, thus far.
We use ideas is to modify their container, which in turn modifies
the ideas and their origins and sources. Our languages and definitions
of ourselves have forgotten this, or placed it in an obscure corner
where we may view it somehow as third-parties. Spectators to the
opportunistic deconstruction of our human persons, languages, and
planet by what in effect is an alien invader — housed in the
vehicle of a particular form of relation with language.
For the past 1000 years
at least, human ideas have been modifying not only humans, but also
the container they emerge in — our biosphere — and all
of its participants. In the last 150 years, this modification has
reached beyond the auguries of science-fiction, into a strangely
invisible mechanical and cognitive holocaust. Yet certain species
of ideas continue to appear and be enthroned in the regalia of heroes,
while, in the large, they mutilate their nurseries, and their hosts.
We can see openly in this model the dangerous potential for scalar
feedback. Let me draft a simple analogy:
Some metaphors act
as terrain-predators. Since all metaphors define extractively —
some or much of what they highlight is established by negating,
and when translated into the physical realm, serious consequences
will always ensue.
Once generally established, some conceptual organisms damage the
connectivity in their community, by co-opting aspects of the semantic
and psychoemotional transports that might otherwise thrive. By establishing
itself in the transports, the organism of the metaphor can mediate
whatever is transmitted, person-to-person, and even by groups of
any size. It can, in effect, copy itself into other humans via means
which are, while more general, vastly more productive and effective.
This activity, in modern
moments, causes significant damage to the biosphere. Though we often
excuse this in various ways — we should see that if one only
had a single cell, it would be absurd and suicidal to immediately
start compromising all of its member-organs in an attempt to change
them into machines, food for machines, or servants of machines.
We should bear in mind that our metaphors only empowered us to realize
that we might be able to permanently damage the entire planet in
a very recent moment of our history, perhaps less than 300 years
ago. Our modern phase of this understanding is brand-new, having
arisen in perhaps the last 40 years.
An example of an actively biophagic metaphor would be the rapid
and unparalleled rise of the automobile as a planetary participant.
As the idea gains popularity, and is then materialized, it begins
converting real terrain as well as the activity of life forms to
its own elaboratory endeavor, and support. It becomes first a metaphor
for connectivity, then a transport of it, and then a symbol of it.
This activity proceeds in a somewhat auto-mechanical way to gain
both terrain and velocity in scalar leaps, rather than a linear
curve. There is essentially nothing available to oppose it. Human
arguments are not powerful enough to change or eliminate an automatically
omnicidal paradigm which has entrenched itself as firmly in our
cognitive persons as it has our biological world.
The concurrent compromises
in the container (the biosphere) are immediately represented in
all of its constituents. The order of this systemic distribution
is obvious: those most complexly intimate with their environment
will experience this faster, and more dramatically than those of
less complex connectivity. So the metaphor begins to have a physical
and psybiocognitive effect on its originators, which in turn modifies
the idea, which modifies the environment, etc. This is how a dangerous
feedback loop is created.
In noticing this, the potentials and powers of its inversions are
immediately clear. We can use this feedback to rescue each other,
and our world. It doesn’t require technologies, or machines
— but instead, understanding, and connectivity. Real human
unity.
We represent the first
complex interpenetration of metaphor and animal. Once enlanguaged,
it is this that sets us one step above animals on a specific ladder
of ascension. The ladder of simulative ability. We are symbiotic
with strange tokens — and these virtual organismal symmetries
modify our persons, our cultures and our world.
It is a chameleon-like
gift at best. In one costume it appears as a hero, but is an assassin
of children. In another, it appears as a beggar, but is a messiah.
It allows us to be like the gods — in a very dangerous way.
The domain and features of our relations with mind and semantic
consciousness — with definitions and quality and class —
this place where we judge ourselves, narratize our experience, and
simulate universes of personal and arbitrarily linked relation —
this is the result of Earth’s first metacreature. Whether
we were touched by gods or aliens — or we arose as a consequence
of the terrestrial organism’s inward gestures of elaborative
complexification — our origins, potentials, persons and destinies
are far vaster than our limited ideas and new relations with language
have allowed us to glimpse.
None of us is merely individual. For the other power we embody is
communal. We need intimate community in order to survive. We are
perhaps the most connective of all the children of Earth —
certainly we are the most cognitively connective. Perhaps we have
lost contact with what connectivity once meant, in way which we
would consider nearly biological — or at least neurological.
The symmetry our species represents has changed, dramatically, and
it is still changing. Our models will never keep up with what we
are becoming. How then will we reasonably explore ourselves while
ensuring that, in the process, we don’t erase the context
we arise from in our enthusiasm for elaboration?
Behind all our words — the truth is that there is a radio
in your body that is connected to your sources. Stories and definitions
serve primarily to block its reception. Touch and activate the radio.
Then return to the domain of definitions empowered to stand in sovereignty
amongst them.
