Evolving Thoughts

On Negation

Jim Harrison is a regular commenter who made an important comment on my piece on Creativity. I invited him to do a guest post, and this is it, below the fold:

Omnis affirmatio est negatio

The idea that creation is essentially negative or subtractive is an old one in philosophy. It certainly predates Spinoza’s “All affirmation is negation,” not to mention Hegel’s monumental representation of everything whatsoever as the work of the negative. For that matter, it would be easy to assemble a huge collection of myths that figure creation as some sort of violence, division, separation, or castration; and it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to turn modern cosmology into an analogous tale: “Nothing is unstable and spontaneously decays into something by a series of symmetry breaks.” I’m interested in a prosaic application of this pattern. Whether or not nature works by negation, it does seem to me that cultural change largely does and in a rather unmysterious fashion.

Since culture is on a relatively larger scale than its individual inhabitants, it’s easy to think of the warehouse of artifacts as enormous, an interminable Louvre. The number of duplicates we encounter in our quest for the new eventually raises some doubts on that score. Indeed, though it is a fact far too obvious to be easily noticed, it is suspicious that there are usually many more copies than kinds in our world, thousands (or millions) of copies of the same book or image. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in the woods where, as Alfred Kinsey established in his seminal work on gall wasps, variation is the universal rule. Where identical or even extremely similar individuals show up, an explanation is needed since there are always hugely more possibilities than there could ever be actualities. Repetition tells you something: the more Barry Bonds show up with your bubble gum, the likelier that the entire set of baseball cards isn’t very big.

It isn’t just that there is an inversion of the expected proportion between types and tokens. The types are remarkably similar. Consider an instance close to hand: arguments on the Internet. Whether the discussion is about abortion or the definition of atheism or the advisability of tax cuts, one might think that the longer the debate continues, the more ideas would emerge. In fact, the reverse is the case. A couple of scientists discussing the proper taxonomy of flesh flies will entertain many options, but thousands of people talking about God will endlessly repeat the same rhetorical moves. Now an optimist could suggest that the steps in these fox trots are repeated because they are the best available; but while I don’t doubt they represent some sort of maximum, I have my doubts that it is very often a maximum of validity. What is indisputable, however, is that the remarks one normally encounters on comment threads fall in a tiny subset, not only of grammatical or logical statements, but of relevant and defensible statements.

The pattern repeats at higher levels of abstraction. How you say things is largely stereotyped into the kinds that literary critics call genres. These genres can be thought of as somehow natural and unconstraining. For example, drama can be defined as the telling of a story by the imitation of actions. In fact, as students of genre from Aristotle to Moretti have demonstrated in exhaustive detail and anybody who has actually written a play understands, such general descriptions vastly underdetermine actual genres. Greek tragedies or Italian farces may be artistically richer than the monster flicks premiered on the Sci Fi channel on Saturday nights but they are structured by arbitrary conventions in a similar fashion. I don’t know how many sorts of movies would be worth watching, but I find myself watching the same six or seven.

The perception I’ve tried to stage here is what Foucault was talking about when he wrote about the principle of rarity. As I recall, he imagined the culture as analogous to a muddy field over which people managed to travel on a rickety network of duckboards while telling each other that they were roaming where they chose on a pleasant meadow. My personal image is different and owes something to the pictures in Mandelbrot’s book on fractals. I think of culture as the spidery veins in a chunk of blue cheese with us as the mites in the mold. Nothing prevents us from venturing into the white part of the cheese, but we can’t stay there unless we bring the fungus with us. Thus you can write something original in a blog discussion, and people sometimes do; but the cases where they are actually heard and the game changes are extremely rare. And when you do make a change, you simply alter the system of negations that always constitutes culture. The negation of a negation is a negation.

Although I’m mostly interested in human affairs, I note in passing that my way of thinking about culture fits in very well with the niche-construction view of biology that looks at the unit of evolution as the organism plus the environment it creates for itself. Just as uninhabited nature is an extremely hostile place to live, an island upon which Crusoe would simply perish, the unsimplified world would be inexplicable to an individual mind, however notionally rational or insightful. But we don’t encounter an unmediated world. It isn’t just that our parents create a space of safety for us full of educational toys. The adult world is also something of a toy world. People think of culture as something psychological or maybe neurological, but it is also a regularized subset of the physical world: a city, for example, being that part of the cosmos where a tremendous proportion of the angles on physical objects are conveniently 90°. Levi-Strauss remarked someplace that we’re like people who think we’re especially smart and well-coordinated because we can drive heavy vehicles at great speed and usually get where we want to go as if the lines and signs on the highway had nothing to do with it. In fact, people are only powerful and intelligent agents inside a system of things. Or you might just say, culture is nature dumbed down to protect human vanity.   

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Comments (15)

  1. like the proverbial elephant statue, eh? a new creation is what remains after what isn’t that creation has been carved away.

    (also, I affirm this post–but don’t take that negatively! 🙂

  2. “We should not be surprised that difference should appear accursed, that it should be error, sin or the figure if evil for which there must be expiation.
    There is no sin other than raising the ground and dissolving the form.”

    Deleuze on what makes difference so monstrous

  3. “creation is essentially negative or subtractive ”
    Totally wrong: Explain how the Mona Lisa is “subtractive”!

    1. Thanks for mentioning the Mona Lisa, which is a wonderful example of what I’m trying to point out. The interminable multiplication of this visual cliche is the other side of ignoring thousands or millions of other pictures, just as the endless evocation of Hitler in public political discourse is part of the radical impoverishment of our imagination of history. I don’t know if you want to file this phenomenon under the rubric of the ecology of images or something less grand—I’m mostly just impressed with the mere arithmetic of it—but it is a striking fact about our civilization that its originality is so tightly bound up with copying and therefore with selection.

    2. I would say that any work of visual art is a negation because the artist attempts to present the essence of that which he pictures through a small number of attributes and not the totality.

    3. You have to engage in negation to make the point that the Mona Lisa is diffrent djlactin. So it is at least a part of how we chose to negotiate and distingush things and ideas from each other.

      Ive never come across the idea of negation before. Thanks Jim its a facinating topic.

  4. It certainly works for drama. You have a range of options in how you choose to inflect a piece. But at the end of the day you find the correct tone from the reaction of the specific audience on the night and what they will accept on mass without parts of it rejecting and not buying into the illusion.

    Each performace is unique and a singular creation due to the constrants you work within.

  5. While I agree with you totaly when you write:
    “”culture is nature dumbed down to protect human vanity.””

    When you submit:

    “”Just as uninhabited nature is an extremely hostile place to live, an island upon which Crusoe would simply perish””

    As an empiricist i must protest. I suspect you speak of that which thow knowest not.

    I refer you to: http://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article2605-the-law-of-the-mother.html

    There is no hostility in “raw” nature, only rules to follow.

    respectfully douglas
    (___)
    {O,O}
    /)__)
    -“-“-

  6. Jim I linked to this post on piece Ive started on sex and prophecy. I really enjoyed this piece.

    I hope you return to the subject somewhere online or in-print in the future.
    Would be great to hear more.

    I find Foucault difficult to deal with and use.

    Partly down to his use of language but I think its also the result of the urge some academics have to rigidly label you as a post modernist if his name is even mentioned and make a range of imaginative assumptions and conclusions on such a basis.

    1. I’m really pushed right now with teaching, but let me say that the early Foucault is quite acceptable and not at all pomo. I think most academics are coming to accept that. The later F I can’t say.

    2. Like John, I find Foucault of continuing interest and note that people like Ian Hacking have fruitfully continued his line of research, albeit absent the glamor and notoriety. The principle of rarity notion, however, isn’t really original with Foucault; and, for that matter, I arrived at my own version of it before I read any Foucault. Back in grad school I used to wonder out loud why modern civilization was not afflicted with something that could be called information sickness aka epistemia gravis or Harrison’s Fatheadedness. I had stumbled over Shannon’s definition of information as a measure of the unlikeliness of a message and rashly concluded that we should expect to be overwhelmed by the overwhelming strangeness if not the sheer mass of the cultural detritus on hand on every side in AD 1967. The real discovery was that we aren’t threatened a bit. No need for a Mother’s March for Epistemia Gravis. It’s like the German poem:

      An ass in a depressive state
      Spoke thusly to his wedded mate.
      “Since I’m so dumb and you’re so dumb,
      Let’s kill each other, come.”
      But as happens almost daily,
      The two continued living gaily.

      Culture is not a realm of abundance but of scarcity and possesses a host of mechanisms that make the threat of too much information purely notional.

      1. I also found the aspects of Foucault I found interesting reflected what I had worked out for myself. But then was not particularly interested in what he was saying more what I made out of his words. I think he allows you that freedom.

        “Culture is not a realm of abundance but of scarcity”, as a non-philosopher a don’t feel comfortable making statements like that. It certainly reflects what I find, but then I went to a good deal of effort to find a subject that replicates and repeats itself over a vast length of time in a range of contexts and genres.

        What I expected to find i.e a literary tradition far less conservative than an oral one and prone to inovation, given its far greater memory capacity, seems not to be the case. At least not with my specific subject.

      2. Foucault also demonstrated an interest in inflection. The more Barry Bonds show up the more you suspect its been selected because he has a wide inflection range.

        Its unfortunate my teacher Rudi Shelly never wrote. Far more influential on me than Foucault. It may not be a realm of abundance but you are taught how to make the most out of its limitations. I find myself in agreement with what you say but I think I would want to inflect it very diffrently. But then this is what I was taught to do.

        Here is the actress Amanda Redman discussing playing in the ‘muddy field’ and Rudi’s method.

        “When he was teaching us we would think “Oh no, not another Rudi lesson” because, although we knew what he would teach us would stand us in good stead, it could be boring. His lessons were three hours long, and I remember one term we spent each lesson studying one word from a line in Webster’s The White Devil: “What have I gain’d by thee, but infamy.” So the first one was all the different ways of saying “what”. What it taught us was invaluable, but at the time, when you’re 19, you’re thinking “Oh, please… ”

        http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2042472

  7. I am basing it on my own experiance of p.g. studies five years ago. Glad to hear things have changed. His history takes a nose dive in what little of the later stuff Ive read, which i always take as a bad sign.

    But A.O.K is interesting, for me its unfortunate his lack of interest in individuals makes him a bit cryptic about Monboddo and naming names.

    In my case those objecting to me reading him had not read him and were presumable unaware that the philosopher who set up the department I was working in was a major fan and influenced by Antonio Gramsci.

  8. grrrr. that should read was a major fan of Antonio Gramsci who also seems to have some relationship with Faucault.

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