Things change, but sometimes they don’t: On the difference between learning about and living through [revising your priors and the way of the world]

This is a year old (first published in July 26 of last year). I'm bumping it to the top of the queue because I'm thinking about these things once again.

It has long been obvious to me that there is an epistemic difference between knowing history and living through history. I now have half a notion of how to think about this. That’s what this post is about.

I begin by talking about the effect the fall of the Soviet Union had on me. That’s my paradigm example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. Call it a RUPTURE in my sense of the world. Then I consider my intellectual career as a series of ruptures where I had to reconsider my priors, if you will, and so rethink my intellectual foundations. Finally I move to a graphics revolution that could have happened, SHOULD have happened, as a result to digital technology. I saw it coming, but it never really got started. What was I missing? I conclude with some reflections on the current situation.

 

I list five such ruptures in all. Three INSIDE my primary intellectual trajectory, my intellectual career, while two are OUTSIDE that trajectory, but nonetheless affected me.

World history and the fall of the Soviet Union

It’s about having to revise your priors – I’m talking Bayes, as least informally, your prior commitments. Living through events forces that on you, or at any rate, gives you the opportunity to revise those priors. Merely learning about the past doesn’t do that. Changing how you think is deeper than learning about change.

My paradigmatic example is the fall of the Soviet Union. I grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Cold War was going strong. I remember reading about how to construct bomb shelters, and thinking about where the family shelter should be. I remember talk of the missile gap; I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I fully expected to be living the Cold War when I died.

And then the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Cold War was all but over. Though some had anticipated this – I’m thinking particularly of U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan – I certainly did not. It took me by surprise.

What did I learn from that? Simple, that The World can change. Sure, I knew world history, I knew that things changed deeply and fundamentally, time and time again. But I hadn’t seen it for myself. I suppose I might have taken that simple lesson from the Civil Rights movement, but perhaps the persistence of racism blunted that achievement. The end of the Vietnam War? No, and I’d marched against that one and been a conscientious objector.

It was the fall of the Soviet Union that reached me, that forced me to abandon a set of simple, but fundamental – I was about to type “epistemic”, “epistemic commitments”, but no, it’s deeper – ontological commitments. For me the Cold War had ontological force. It was simply the way of the world. I learned about it in childhood and lived it through a quarter century of adulthood.

And then the world changed.

Let’s call that an OUTSIDE RUPTURE in my sense of the world, outside because it was outside my primary sphere of action and commitment.

My intellectual life

My intellectual life has had a number of “ruptures”, if you will. In the late 1960s I learned to interpret literary texts as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. I was trained in so-called “close reading”, but was interested in structuralist analysis as well. In the spring of my senior year I became interested in “Kubla Khan.” I decided to undertake a structuralist analysis of the poem for a master’s thesis.

Worksheet, first 36 lines of "Kubla Khan"

As things worked out that project fell apart in 1970 or ‘71. “Kubla Khan” refused to submit to the methods I applied to it. My commitment to the poem won out and I was forced to abandon those methods. I tell the story in considerable autobiographical detail in “Touchstones” [1] and supply the intellectual detail in a working paper on Lévi-Strauss [2].

FIRST INSIDE RUPTURE, inside because it is dead center in my primary sphere of action and commitment. I could no longer believe that existing methods of literary criticism were adequate to the task of understanding how literary texts work. New methods, incidentally, that required visual thinking. Standard literary criticism has been and remains committed to expository prose as its fundamental intellectual medium.

In 1973 I went off to get a Ph. D. in the English Department at SUNY at Buffalo and ended up spending considerable time studying computational semantics with David Hays in the Linguistics Department. My dissertation ended up as a quasi-technical exercise in cognitive semantics as applied to literature, one where, for large sections, I drew the diagrams first and then wrote prose to explain them. In 1976 Hays and I published a humanities-oriented review of computational linguistics in which we proposed the development of symbolic systems capable of “reading” a Shakespeare play in an intellectually interesting way [3]. I fully expected to be working with such a system later in my career. That hasn’t happened, nor do I expect it to.

Part of a semantic network for Shakespeare's Sonnet 129

SECOND INSIDE RUPTURE. Symbolic computational systems are not adequate for understanding the mind.

But this was not so drastic as that first inside rupture. For one thing, Hays and I didn’t really believe that symbolic systems were adequate to the task. We’d been exploring how to ground them in analog systems and in distributed neural computation [4]. The failure, rather, was one of degree rather than kind. I had overestimated the power of symbolic systems. I would later pick up my interest in neural systems in conversations I had with the late Walter Freeman and I incorporated into the early chapters of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001) [5].

I suppose there was a THIRD INSIDE RUPTURE, or quasi-rupture, as well. In 1995 I discovered that a bunch of literary scholars was interested in “the cognitive revolution” – you know, the ideas I’d begun investigating in graduate school. That was in the Stanford Humanities Review. My work was forgotten but, and more importantly, computation was nowhere to be seen in this newer. Their version of cognitive science was thus very different from mine. It was in working through that difference that I figured out that I had been chasing form all along.

It was the elaborate formal structure of “Kubla Khan” that forced me to abandon standard forms of “close reading” in the study of literature. I had been looking for the poem’s meaning, but found myself confronted with its form, form revealed in diagrams. I still read closely, as it were, but that’s not fundamental. It’s a useful skill.

And so the analysis and description of literary form emerged as my fundamental methodological commitment [6]. After Beethoven’s Anvil had been published, I entered into correspondence with the late Mary Douglas, the British anthropologist, who got me interested in ring composition. Ring composition has become my testing ground for the analysis and description of form [7].

Sigma 128.67, by Bill Benzon with the help of DHP, 1984

Another rupture – Visual culture

Come to think of it, now, there’s ANOTHER RUPTURE, this one more or less OUTSIDE, one off the main intellectual trajectory. My friend Rich sent me a page he’d printed on someone’s original 1984 Macintosh PC. Graphics and text in one file on the same page! I had to have one. And so I bought one. I went nuts playing with MacPaint and wrote about it for Byte: “The Visual Mind and the Macintosh” [8].

A year later I saw this amazing book, Zen and the Art of Macintosh [9]. I know, the title’s dated, and so’s the art inside. But what art! Word and text intertwined seamlessly on a single page, for every page of the book.

I expected a revolution in print publication, new modes of layout and design, of conception. It never happened. Oh, sure, there was some change around the margins. But for the most part the wonderful new technology was being used to produce the graphic designs of old. The potential for visual/verbal interaction lay fallow.

Was the whole society asleep at the wheel? Or does it simply suffer from a lack of people with 1) high levels of both verbal and graphic skill, 2) that are well integrated with one another?

Come to think of it, there is a deep connection between this failure of visual culture and the failure of academic literary criticism to move through structuralism to cognitive science. The computational models of cognitive science find their natural expression in diagrams (or mathematical formulas). Could it be that our whole civilization rests on a compartmentalization of visual and verbal modes of thinking, a compartmentalization that is threatened by a technology that is both deeply verbal and deeply visual?

I refer, of course, to computing. One programs computers using language, highly formalized language to be sure, but language nonetheless. From the very beginning, however, some kind of diagramming has been important in the process of analyzing and designing systems and in writing those programs [10]. Remember flowcharts? And that’s just the beginning. The world of practical computing is build on language and diagrams. Both are necessary.

Roles in an insurance claim

 

These are two very different things, the design of documents and the programming of computers. Both, however, require the integration of visual and verbal modes of thinking. Is that what’s going on at the roots of our culture, a massive re-working of the relationship between visual and verbal modes of thought.

If so, shouldn’t we discuss graffiti as well? From almost nowhere at the end of the 1960s it had gone around the world by the 1990s. What is graffiti? It’s practitioners call themselves writers. Why? Because that’s what they do, they write names. But the writing has become elaborated into visual art – which is hardly new, mind you, as the arts of East Asian and Arabic calligraphy demonstrate.

by Zimmer, 2016, Jersey City (the name is in the dress)

That’s how she rolls

Five ruptures listed in the order in which they occurred:

1. Standard methods of literary criticism, based solely in expository prose, are inadequate for understanding how literature works. (INSIDE) – Early 1970s
   
2. Symbolic computational systems are not adequate for understanding the mind. (INSIDE) – Call it the early to mid 1980s
   
3. The emergence of digital technology that supports the integration of verbal and visual material on a single page fails to ignite a graphic design revolution. (OUTSIDE) – Late 80s to early 90s
   
4. The world can change: fall of the Soviet Union. (OUTSIDE) – Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989, Malta Summit December 2-3, 1989, 26 December 1991 USSR dissolved
   
5. Literary criticism needs to focus on the description and analysis of literary form. Perhaps this is, in effect, the other face of the first rupture. (INSIDE) – Early to mid 2000s
   

Are there any more, at least that I’ll have to cope with, for I’m sure there are more to come? Perhaps I’ve got another change in me, perhaps I don’t. Who can tell?

But others will surely face changes, many of them. For example, doesn’t migrating from one country to another force, or at least invite, fundamental changes in how you think and live? There is a lot of migration in the world today, and much of it is forced, at one remove or another, by economic and political globalization. And that is, in turn, made possible by information technology. Computing. A study and a craft demanding new modes of visual and verbal integration. Changing modes of thought, when propagated through a population, lead to world-scale change.

That brings us to our larger question. I began with the fall of the Soviet Union, which was a world historical event. And then I moved to my own intellectual history. The only thing connecting the two is the fact that, in each case, I had to rethink fundamental assumptions. In the first case I had to abandon the idea that the Cold War was the fundamental geo-political framework of world affairs. In the second case I had to reset fundamental intellectual commitments. And then we have the relationship between verbal and visual modes of thought culture.

We’re moving in circles. From the individual, to the world. That’s how she rolls.

References

[1] William Benzon, “Touchstones”, Paunch 42 - 43: 4 - 16, December 1975. Revised and updated as “Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life”, https://www.academia.edu/9814276/Touchstones_Strange_Encounters_Strange_Poems_the_beginning_of_an_intellectual_life.

[2] William Benzon, Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, Working Paper, February 2015, 30 pp., https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_Lévi-Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition.

[3] William Benzon and David Hays, “Computational Linguistics and the Humanist”, Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 10. 1976, pp. 265-274, https://www.academia.edu/1334653/Computational_Linguistics_and_the_Humanist.

[4] On the analog foundation of cognition, see David G. Hays, Cognitive Structures, HRAF Press, 1981. On the incorporation of distributed neural computation, see William Benzon and David Hays, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence, Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Vol. 11, No. 8, July 1988, 293-322, https://www.academia.edu/235116/Principles_and_Development_of_Natural_Intelligence. See also William Benzon and David Hays, Metaphor, Recognition, and Neural Process, The American Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1987), 59-80, https://www.academia.edu/238608/Metaphor_Recognition_and_Neural_Process.

[5] Final drafts of two of those chapters are available online: Brains, Music, and Coupling, chapters two and three, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, https://www.academia.edu/232642/Beethovens_Anvil_Music_in_Mind_and_Culture.

[6] William Benzon, Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form.

[7] On ring composition, see William Benzon, Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary Morphology, Working Paper, September 11, 2017, 71 pp., https://www.academia.edu/8529105/Ring_Composition_Some_Notes_on_a_Particular_Literary_Morphology. On description, see William Benzon, Description 3: The Primacy of Visualization, Working Paper, October 2015, 48 pp., https://www.academia.edu/16835585/Description_3_The_Primacy_of_Visualization.

[8] William Benzon, “The Visual Mind and the Macintosh.” Byte: The Small Systems Journal. January 1985: 113 – 130, https://www.academia.edu/35123614/The_Visual_Mind_and_the_Macintosh.

[9] Michael Green. Zen and the Art of Macintosh: Discoveries on the Path to Computer Enlightenment. Running Press: 1986.

[10] William Benzon, Visual Thinking. Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Volume 23, Supplement 8. Marcel Dekker, 1991, 411 – 427, https://www.academia.edu/13450375/Visual_Thinking.