[Reader-list] The noisy nativist crowd

[Vivek Narayanan]

Dear Prem,

Thank you for your detailed and deeply informed riposte.  There are many 
things to chew in it that do in fact relate to our little crisis on the 
reader list-- the difficulty of comprehending one's relationship to 
history, Gandhi as poet, the questions of lightness and scale, the 
question of how to scale up as a network-- so on.  I'm not going to be 
able to run with all your interrelated points, so I'm curious to see if 
anyone else on this list might build on them or even, perhaps, link the 
other discussions going on with this one.  I am going to pick some bones 
with a few things you have mentioned here and there, but I want to do it 
so as to open out your discussion and your questions in some ways, and 
this is because we are pretty much in agreement.  I owe this to the 
conciliatory but engaged tone of your riposte.  What I want to try to do 
is make some minor contributions in places where I think I might have 
something to add.  And, as I hope to suggest, my larger interest is 
really in the idea of adding itself. 

I obviously have nothing against metaphors as a form of thought-- I use 
them myself all the time.  And yet, this is precisely why I want to note 
that they can be misleading as well as seductive.  As an aside, I think 
that the notion that metaphors (while being, admittedly, indirect) are 
the opposite of direct, rational thought is not quite true.  Moreover, 
the commonly held belief that poetry, or poetics (while being, 
admittedly, indirect) is purely a place for the "irrational" or the 
"emotional" is also not quite true-- a poem's real charge (and I think I 
could show this with examples) really comes from the interaction of the 
rational and irrational within its structure, its mingling of "emotion", 
"thought" and "logic", not to mention the words in which these things 
are inseparable.  

That said, I want to note that, after thinking about it some more, I 
find Tsvetkov's metaphor of the opera singer, while being powerful and 
seductive, as you say, is deeply misleading  for our purposes here on 
the list (and for understanding poetry's current crisis as well-- but 
I'll leave that discussion aside for now).  Is the idea of an "audience" 
really the most useful here?  Am I singing now to the rapt audience of 
the reader list, whose duty is only to either applaud or throw tomatoes? 
And is the idea of an audience of connoisseurs in the opera hall likely 
to scale up well?  Does the idea of "audience" help us to productively 
understand the idea of "noise"?

Keeping those questions on hold for a second, I want to turn briefly to 
your idea of the "poetics of resistance"-- it fascinates me and I want 
to hear more of course, but I'm a bit uncertain about that old bugbear-- 
resistance, aka negation.  Again, resistance is important, of course, 
and ever present; but the idea of resistance itself became its own 
romance in the twentieth century; eventually, we became unable to think 
beyond resistance.  Disagreement -- which is but a synonym of resistance 
for our purposes-- is fetishized purely for its own sake, and the idea 
of agreement is simplistically equated with the idea of power.  And 
disagreement, when it becomes a singular and primary objective, turns 
all discussion  towards the idea of winning, of replacing or 
obliterating one's opponent, and this is done either by means of gleeful 
point-scoring and one-upmanship, sometimes in the canon-thumping style 
of sophomoric sophomores or, much worse, by ritualistic repetition of 
one's basic position, louder and louder in the manner of a child seeking 
attention, until all thought-- and emotion-- flees from the minds of 
those assembled.  (Another metaphor, flawed.)

I have nothing against disagreement, obviously.  But I have a feeling 
that we have something against, and misunderestimate, agreement.  
Shouldn't agreement be the legitimate other side of disagreement's coin?

Can't quite unpack it fully yet,  but I have a hunch that the idea of 
"audience" and the idea of "disagreement / resistance" are somehow 
linked.  And a hunch that it is the conjoining of these two notions that 
sometimes gives our list the flavour of a debating society, moreover one 
with some bullies sitting in who might shout everyone else down or even 
call the police on us.  Is there a way to move beyond both of these 
terms in searching for an appropriate model for our list?

I would be the first to include myself among those who have been overly 
seduced by the idea of disagreement as a model for productive talk on 
this list.  And note that I am not saying we should "do away" with 
fighting or point scoring or bullies; wherever we go from here, it would 
have to be by consensus if it is to have any meaning.  I am only asking: 
is there anything we can all agree on?  What protocols might we 
establish and find consensus on?  And: what would be the best picture of 
our list to adopt?

Prem, although I am also disagreeing with some of your minor points, I 
am earnestly trying to add to what you are saying, and I hope that 
others might add to what I have to say.  I am asking (uncertain, still 
thinking) if it would be useful to start from the point where we all 
consciously think of the reader list as something to add to, as opposed 
to something to resolve.

This would mean that we think of the reader list not as a debating club, 
or as a continuation of war by other means, but rather as an experiment in

collective collaborative writing. 

Which is exactly what it is!

Vivek

Prem Chandavarkar wrote:
> On 14/02/2008, *Vivek Narayanan* <vivek at sarai.net 
> <mailto: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 
>