A BIRTHDAY DECLARATION

One thing folds out of another, thus all the “post” philosophers: post-structuralism, post-colonial, post-what-have-you-got? that have dominated a lot of thought. Here’s what the wikipedia volunteer authority (unnamed) has to say: “a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the problem of objective truth and inherent suspicion towards global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. It involves the belief that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs, as they are subject to change inherent to time and place. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial. Rather, it holds realities to be plural and relative, and dependent on who the interested parties are and what their interests consist of. It upholds the belief that there is no absolute truth and the way in which different people perceive the world is subjective.”

These guys wear those sweatshirts that say on the front, “Question authority!” Some looked at the back (“Listen carefully to the answers.” Note plural.) Some authorities (!) said that it wasn’t a rebellion against what came before so much as it was an extension of the thinking of some people who came before, and about all you can do is name the people mostly in France (Derrida, Foucault, et al) but also in Italy and even a few elsewhere. In 1982 when I left seminary, they were just beginning to hit their peak.

I wasn’t ready for the shift, unless you count Thomas Kuhn, who defined paradigm shift (the point when the evidence against the standing order has accumulated so convincingly that everyone goes to a new understanding -- like the shift from theism to science, which is not quite finished). I was forty, my reality was challenged, but I loved both structuralism and narrativity. Now, thirty years later, I’ve found Deleuze and Guattari who turn out to be an excellent entry point for me.

For instance, Nick Lane’s understanding of what he calls “Ascending Life.” I’ll go finish the book as soon as I finish this post. I have two chapters left. Notice that he converts the noun in the “Ascent of Man” to “Ascending” and is not anthropocentric. In fact, his account of evolution is largely about the invention of life itself and most of the evolving is done at the single cell level, where things reverse, hop sideways, fuse, gobble each other in an orgy of change that continues on without much attention from us until now. He describes an entity that has 28,000 “sexes” -- meaning they can copulate in various combinations to create entirely new creatures with unique genetic scripts -- at which point he suggests maybe we need a new word for the category. Humans are limited to maybe a double-dozen variations, including people with XY chromosomes, XX chromosomes, YY chromosomes (they die), XXY, YYX, upside-down versions, partial versions, etc. Post-binary but not unlimited because if the plan gets too far away from the norm, it’s erased. That erasure is as important to evolution as is war or competition for resources, but only with instruments can we see it. It’s all based on electrons and we still aren’t sure exactly how to describe them except by their behavior.

Because so many people in my family have had head injuries (you can include Bob Scriver) and because I’m old enough to see the consequences play out, I’m aware that the identity of people is dependent on their frontal lobes. Disease or stroke can do the same kind of damage as a blow or a fall. Yet sometimes only the people closest to the damaged person can really “see” the change unless it’s major. Now I’m reading Michael Gazzaniga and

thinking about Leda Cosmides’s work, trying to understand exactly how it is that identity arises from not just the brain but the whole body. Long ago I converted to the idea that identity is not from a “soul” residing in the brain, which is mostly what we can get to through introspection, and that identity changes all the time, which leads to problems with relationships -- or does it solve them?

My trusty guides are largely at edge.com, the same folks I loved in young adulthood. I still protect my worn “Whole Earth Catalogue.” It’s remarkable that people my age and much younger still continue the back-to-the-land communal practices of those times, except that now many of them are on-line. They have gone from being "social fossils" (which they never were anyway) to self-confident networks, rhizomatous, as DeleuzeGuattarian thought would have it. They preserve the boundary between the hunter/gatherers and the ten-thousand-year-old experiment with agriculture and cities that sometimes burdens us. In the beginning much of civilization depended upon the expanding and protecting of population because of granaries and walls: a lot of people with time and safe space for thinking. Now the biggest "cities" are “virtual.” The online “cities” are bigger than any resource-bound city can ever be and more assorted as well, which means richer, deeper, more complex thought explorations. I have better access to more brilliant people now than I had on the campus of the University of Chicago.

So now I can return to the task I set myself there, which is something like “the re-enchantment of the world.” That is, the most basic level of reconciliation and rejoicing between the planet and the human body/brain. I’ll close with this quote from Art Durkee, which he posted as a comment to yesterday’s blog.

“Shamanism is the single most rhizomatic spiritual technology, or set of practices for dealing with the spirit world. It's an utterly pragmatic, local system. Yet it turns up in literally every culture, in every era, in some form or another. Often it takes on the local language and cosmology without really changing its essence.

“That's partly because it's rooted in earth, in sky, in the land, in the people. The organized religions are smart when they adopt the local practice and try to subsume it into their own systems. That works better in some places than others. In native North America, the Jesuit presence among the early explorers was a political policy, part of the policy of conquering a new land for Europe. It's interesting to note how some native groups, who nominally converted to Catholicism, still practice their old ways anyway. Rhizomes, growing up and spreading invisibly below-ground.”

I do not want to be a shaman. I do not want to join any organization. I do not want to convert people. I want to read books and write about them. On to Michael Winklelman. But first I’ve got to get tarps on the roofs of the bunkhouse and garage. After I finish reading Lane’s book and copying his bibliography. Busy day. Every day is a birth-day.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED !

By now it’s firmly established in the minds of most of those paying attention that we are going through a paradigm shift, one that was predicted twenty years ago. But we never really thought about the specifics, which are now coming down on our heads daily. So much has changed without our even realizing it.

The one that slaps me upside the head all the time is the change in publishing. It’s FAR beyond the idea of print being presented electronically instead of ink on paper. It’s FAR beyond print of any kind. Now we are out of the books-as-objects biz, a paradigm that treated books like gizmos, making as many as anyone could accurately estimate would sell (after some market research), tarting them up as nicely as possible (design, cover, blurbs), advertising far and wide, then -- in time -- discounting and finally destroying the leftovers to free up warehouse space. With a little luck, reviewers in newspapers, mags and on the air would say nice things. There was a thing called “hand selling,” when clerks in bookstores recommended their favs to customers. Accounting was just a matter of figuring out what was spent for all this and deducting that from the amount made from sales. You prevented the books from shipping across national boundaries and had to pay someone to create a foreign language version. This is still the model in most minds.

But now a book is NOT an object. It might not even be a “book” in the sense we are used to. It might be videos (with music, print text and voice-over). It might be only spoken, with the speaker as much a selling point as the actual prose. (What would “Outlander” be without the elegant Scots accent of Davina Porter?) And then there are the graphic versions, which are drawn in frames: “comic books.” And eventually the movie or even a series on television. How strong must a narrative be to withstand so many morphs? Or will a narrative line even work now?

Many people have finally realized that all these incarnations of "literature" exist, but may have nothing at all to do with fleshly bodies. Not many people have thought about what sort of “literacy” is required to make sense of them, how to create them, or how to read/watch/hear/interpret them. With mags, newspapers, TV reviewers popping like soap bubbles, how do we even know what is out there?

The REAL action is in the chaos of marketing. The internet has no national boundaries, which means that copyright must be totally rethought. No one knows how to do world-wide market research. We have to make up words like “vook” for a video book or “vlog” for a video blog, and what is a series-written tale in blog form anyway? A “blovel”? Anyone could download it and forward it anywhere in any order. What about mash-ups now that everything is code and can throw images, sounds, scenes from movies into one big suggestive stew. What about parody? The kids who act out Jane Austen or Diana Gabaldon, half-mockery and half-fandom? What sort of genre is it when video clips from old movies and BBC series can be cut together to create a rather convincing facsimile of Outlander -- all in the name of encouraging favorite actors to take favorite parts. Most of this is way beneath the radar of formal publishers, who don’t even have the time and resources to look for examples of illegal variants -- much less do anything about them through the cumbersome means of lawsuits.

I watch all this. It's remarkable that I can, sitting here on the prairie. Yesterday I watched “The Edge,” two interviews of Daniel Hillis who is an engineer working in oncology research. (Cross-disciplinary is where it’s at.) He explained that cancer is not a “thing” but a process that ought to be called “cancering.” (That Hopi idea is now mainstream, whether or not it’s accurate in Hopi terms.) Cells with corrupt genetic code are cancer and the body normally pops them. Though this is the same process in every case, we persist in thinking there are as many kinds of cancer as there are different cells in the body. Lung cancer, skin cancer, toe cancer. But the digitalization of the genome has been a revelation, and one of the first things it has revealed is the proteome. (Well, it has revealed the EXISTENCE of the proteome -- there are millions of proteins.) The genome is the template and the parts list: the proteome is the actual molecules made in the body, molecules that “talk” to each other by constantly changed in amount and kind.

Hillis is not even a doctor. He is an engineer. His work is learning to sort and recognize the conversation among the proteomic molecules by designing the “machinery” that will read what’s in the blood at any given time. He displayed a tablet (maybe an iPad) with the “read-outs” of two sets of blood samples on top of each other but color coded so there were three colors: the molecules present in only one sample, the molecules present only in the other, and the molecules present in both samples. This “reading” is so specific that one isotope of carbon can be distinguished from another, along with the changes they cause in the molecule, assuming they do. He says that the most recent research is able to “hear” the conversation inside a single cell, what each molecule is saying to the others. All this is at the outer limits of human perception and conception, made possible only because of computers. Eventually, we will be able to “see” not just cancer cells, but "who" is “saying” the dysfunctional molecules that create them.

Once that paradigm shift is in place and we see all these old familiar things in a new way, it can profoundly change the way we do things. For instance, Danny Hillis repeats again and again that the only way we know to treat cancer now is to administer poison to the patient and try to calibrate it so it kills the aberrant cells but not the healthy ones -- at least not enough of them to kill the patient. Or we can cut or burn the bad cells. But this is wasteful, clumsy, has terrible side-effects and benefits only the pharma people who want to sell a lot of pills, hopefully in a constant regime rather than as a one-time event.

More futuristic is the practice of killing all the cells in bone marrow that are manufacturing rogue cells, and then infusing new bone marrow cells from someone else. Even MORE futuristic is infecting someone with a harmless virus that carries along healthy code and “infects” the molecular assembly line. A proteomic “patch,” to use computer jargon. This will totally upend the pharma industry assembly lines who are dependent on mass-producing pills in a Third-World low-pay environment. They are Exxon in a world going to wind power. The new way is one-on-one-once.

The difficulty is not just in terms of profits and marketing strategy. In my age group, which is seventy and over, I find many many people who simply cannot start DIS-believing what they have learned about the world in the past decades, what their teachers told them long ago. The ones who can accept a new paradigm are the ones who were anthropologists anyway, or who got bumped out of one context into another -- maybe more than once. It’s hard to STOP believing that writing a famous book will make your life worth living. Or even stop believing that there is any such thing as a famous book worthy of being famous, since the marketing is what controls fame -- not the quality. The same problem as political leaders.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html
There are two hour-long talks, but Hillis is very clear and easy to listen to.