[Reader-list] The noisy nativist crowd

[Prem Chandavarkar]

On 14/02/2008, Vivek Narayanan <vivek at sarai.net> wrote:
>
> I bring this thesis up not as some kind of advice from the gods, but
> because I am not certain if it is true. Tsvetkov himself presents it
> only as a possible theory, and of course I'm still puzzling around that
> example (metaphor?) of the opera singer. I'd be curious to know what
> readers on this list think about-- am eager to hear both philosophical
> and pragmatic responses-- how to bring the muses back to this list. In a
> way this is to explore the inverse, positive side of the anti-censorship
> debate: what are the conditions for speech, what makes speech possible,
> how does one revive rich conversation?
>

Dear Vivek,
I do not have a specific answer to your most interesting and very relevant
question (and I find the metaphor of the opera singer very powerful).  But
let me share current thoughts on possible direction.

First of all, we tend to believe that the best way to combat irrational
noise is clear and rational argument.  And this is an approach that is
doomed to failure.  Let me enumerate a few reasons why I believe it to be so
(my list is somewhat artificial as the points made are highly intertwined,
and are stated here rather simplistically):


   1. As Foucault argued, power is not achieved purely by force, but
   largely by constructing a system of knowledge that is widely believed to be
   proper.  Very often, the noise emerges from this dominant knowledge base.
   An attempt to resist it through argument, will result in your argument being
   treated as inadmissible purely because it rubs against the grain of this
   knowledge base.  As a result, the argument is not evaluated on its own
   terms, and tends to be dismissed outright, before consideration, as
   treasonous, destructive or ignorant.
   2. We currently live in a world where the relationship with one's
   sense of history is difficult to logically comprehend.  This is for a
   variety of reasons too complex to go into here.  The response to this
   problem has been to treat history itself as a transcendent rather than a
   logical issue, and people seek to believe in a history that is  considered
   inevitable, transcendent and immanent.  A critique of such a history is
   treated as being outside it - as Michael Polyani observed,the Nazi would not
   react to an argument on public morality, not because he was an untaught
   savage but because he disbelieved in it in the way that we may disbelieve in
   witchcraft - he saw it as something antiquated and out of tune with history.
   3. Rational arguments about social and cultural issues have to face
   the fact that such issues are extremely complex.  The rational argument
   therefore has to accommodate depth and complexity.  In a world where a thing
   is not felt to be real unless it also appears in some form of mass media,
   such argument fails to survive when it has to oppose simplistic and
   aphoristic slogans.
   4. As Michael Goldhaber (and others after him) pointed out, we now
   live in an attention economy.  An economy is conditioned by its scarcest
   resource.  We are in an information age, and information consumes attention,
   so attention is now our scarcest resource.  Most organisational forms in our
   era are preoccupied with techniques of capturing attention.  The primary
   means of capturing attention are novelty and scale (noise would be one of
   the dimensions of scale).  Rational argument, because of its inherent
   nature, is a poor means of connecting with either novelty or scale.

The only conditions under which rational argument serves a purpose is when
relationships have an a priori orientation towards deep engagement, where
all sides make the commitment to pause their thinking and seriously and
intensely listen to the other.  I am posting this message in the expectation
that my interaction with you (and some others) will be in this spirit of
deep engagement.  But given the amount of noise generated on the reader-list
in the recent past, I am sceptical of generating wider debate.

So if reason tends to run up against a brick wall, then what are the
options?  The first, of course, is to seek to devote more focused attention
to the construction of spaces for deep engagement.  Clearly the reader-list
started out with such an intention.  But the problem with the reader-list is
that it also seeks to be a scale neutral network - that is it is totally
neutral to the scaling up of the number of members.  This has been a matter
of design rather than accident: the ethical desire for inclusivity has led
to its design as a scale free network.  This means that noise generators are
also free to join the network.  Since deep engagement is predicated on
listening, it cannot flourish in the presence of noise.  And the need to
filter noise becomes a contradiction with the ethical principle of free
speech.

The easy resolution is to introduce the filter - do not put impediments on
network membership, but moderate posts so that noise is filtered out.  But
this is not without its problems.  I remember hearing a remark once that the
most efficient system of governance is a benevolent dictatorship, but the
only problem is dictatorships rarely remain benevolent, even in cases when
they have started out that way.  A moderated list is dependent on the
moderators being benevolent dictators.  The question of long term
sustainability arises, as the network becomes personality-centric rather
than system-centric.

If one has to seek a system-centric specification for networks of deep
engagement, then one may have to move to networks that are composed of scale
hierarchies rather than being scale neutral.  This is to say that the basic
building blocks are scale sensitive  - for examples groups of like-minded
friends.  Such a group may choose to link with a few other groups over
shared interests.  And this smaller network may choose to subsequently link
with other such networks, to form a network at a larger scale.  Perhaps the
basic building blocks could be also linked to physical geographies so that
they supplement digital connections with face-to-face contact.  The
characteristic of a scale hierarchical network is that it has the capacity
to be self healing when subject to noise.  Since the basic building blocks
are scale sensitive, they are less subject to noise, and the prevalence of
noise will tend to be at larger levels of scale.  When the level of noise
becomes too much at a particular scale, one only has to make the relatively
small scale adjustment of moving down to the next level of the hierarchy.
In comparison, in a scale free network one's only choice is to make the
large scale jump between remaining in the total network or retreating to
isolated individualism by leaving the network.  The scale of this jump makes
the choice difficult and problematic.  In the initial period, the
reader-list possessed an overall level of like-mindedness so that noise was
negligible, but it has now scaled up to a level where it cannot sustain its
earlier (relatively) unitary mode of appproach and intent.  While the
situation is still not too bad, if current trends continue, a point may be
eventually reached where one will have to face the choices of moderation,
dissolution or redesign.

The central question that arises here is what kind of connections does the
network facilitate that entices a group at one level to connect with another
level.  Clearly they have to be the kind of connections that strengthen the
richness of the network as well as the autonomy and depth of the group.  The
jump in scale also has to result in a jump in the level of thinking, so that
the group benefits from the complexity that can be handled by wider
connections.  So for example, the group dialogue could be oriented toward
practices, tools and prototypes, the next level above that toward critique
of practice, and the next level above that toward philosophical critique.
The jumps in scale can then be beneficial in both directions: the movement
upwards achieves a critique of practice, whereas the movement downard
achieves a rooting and contextualisaion of philosophy.  I do not have any
clear ideas to propose here, but it would be good to see more thinking and
research in this direction.

But the other direction worth exploring is to respond to the limitations of
rational argument not by bypassing reason (and resorting to noise oneself),
but by seeking to transcend reason.  Italo Calvino in his book "Six Memos
for the Next Millenium" has an essay on "Lightness" where he talks about his
early attempts to write, where he found an increasing gulf developing
between the natural lightness and fluency of literature and the world he
wanted to write about.  Since the complexity of the world was unlimited, he
felt driven to add more and more to his description until his writing was
weighed down by an excess of information. It is as though ligthness was
impossible to achieve, there was an unavoidable heaviness, and inescapable
process of petrification.  And once he thought of petrification, he
naturally thought of the myth of Medusa where it seemed to impossible to
avoid her gaze and subsequent petrifcation.  But the conquest of Medusa is
eventually achieved by Perseus, who has wings on his sandals and is able to
step on the lightest of things, and he achieves his task by refusing to look
at Medusa directly but at her reflection in his shield.  To Calvino this
myth is an allegory of the poet's relationship with the world, refusing the
direct look (of rational analysis) and looking only indirectly through
metaphor.  And that is how the poet achieves lightness while still being
able to tackle complexity.

This seems fine for poetry, but what about the everyday world of politics.
We have not tended to look at politics that way, but there are examples in
history - a primary one being Mahatma Gandhi's role in the Indian freedom
movement.  Analysis has tended to be in terms of Gandhi's ethics and
politics, and while these are worthwhile handles for analysis, we have not
tended to devote sufficient attention to his poetics.  One of his major
contributions was his ability to transform the spirit of swaraj into
metaphors such as spinning wheel, khadi and salt.  The construction of these
metaphors offered two major
impacts: firstly they made the whole idea of freedom more accessible to a
wider population, and secondly the fact that these metaphors could be
appropriated by a wide range of people allowed a sense of cohesion to what
was actually a fairly diverse sets of struggles.

This also has its set of issues that have to be tackled.  Firstly, the
metaphor has to be friendly to its subsequent appropriation by others (and
all metaphors are not necessarily friendly to appropriation).  Secondly the
metaphor has to be capable of making the connection between the routines of
life and higher level aspirations such as freedom, justice and creativity.
What are the characteristics of such metaphors?  It would be good to see
further thinking and research on this too - analysis that does not confine
itself to an examination of the politics of resistance, but also seeks to
include the poetics of resistance.

Regards,
Prem