Turtle music
In some ways it seems, for many people, the world is still flat. There is just a raft of stuff out there and it is all just stuff. There are billions of people and they are all just neoliberal individuals even though some are louder than others. In the end it all the same, no reason to pay attention to this place rather than that place.
It the last blog, Of This and That, the issue was to get beyond trees to rhizomes. A rhizome is a structure that joins disparate things to allow messy communication patterns, unlike trees with their organising central trunk and branching structure which can always be traced back so you know where you are. In Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus we are faced with true multiplicity, a raft of complexes that precisely cannot be traced back to make sense of it. But rhizomes are not flat, they are still a structure, and they are structures that make a difference.
It seems there is plenty of mythology and anecdote behind the phrase “turtles all the way down”: even a recent novel, well reviewed. If the world rests on the back of a giant turtle, then what does the turtle rest on? Well an even bigger turtle of course. When we come to know something, our way of knowing it rests on some other things that we already know. These epistemological turtles have their own way of being, their own ordering, and in these respects the world cannot be flat. There are some things that we know that ain’t so, and when we find out that a cornerstone of what we know is plain wrong (and we are prepared to admit it) then much of what we know may need revisiting and reordering.
Epistemologically speaking, some things are more important than others. Not because we say they are or think they are but because more of our structure of things we think we know rests on them, whether we like it or not. Time and time again structures of scientific knowledge are built on our prejudices and insecurities. What came out as Darwin’s survival of the fittest was a piece of economic prejudice that was then used to provide a scientific basis for economics. But there are more examples of this than counter-examples. I respect Donna Haraway when she says that the two biggest barriers to thinking are human exceptionalism and boundaried individualism. These are good examples of very bad cornerstones for knowledge. We build on these “universal truths” and then they collapse taking loads of conscientious work with them.
Where is the semiosphere?
In our world of rhizomes, everything is signalling away madly. The types of signalling system, the differentiation of messages, the sources and receivers for those messages are amazingly various and complex. Every time we look we find another one, unsuspected until now. (As a side issue here, this is why conscious purposes don’t work out because we can never know what creatures, organs, cells, symbionts, etc. are saying what to whom.) The shorthand for all this activity is to call it the semiosphere, where semiotics is the discipline. Just like we have cyberspace, so there has always been a vast integrated sphere of messaging.
When we try to communicate our understanding of a particular situation, and in particular how it is not flat, we get into deep water very quickly. An example I wrote about elsewhere is end of life care. Doctors are there to make you better, aren’t they? And everyone dies in the end, don’t they? So where is the space for our elders to choose the time and place and manner of their dying? What we need here is a way of signalling that we are having a meta-conversation about when the skills and tricks of the medical professions are appropriate and welcome and when it is not the right time for them. You can probably feel how difficult it can be to have a simple conversation about a universal situation.
This is analogous to epistemological cornerstones: now we have semiotic cornerstones. We need to be able to say in effect, right we share an understanding of this stuff and how it works, but now we need to have a conversation about this “higher level” issue that rests on what we believe to be true. In a flat world everything is just another conversation. Whether my mother is ready to go is at the same level as a conversation about what is being prescribed for her. Or whether we think the super-rich deserve their “earnings” is at the same level as ethnography about what they use their financial power to do.
Rhizomes are structures where this all gets connected in a messy way. What I eat, when I eat it and how much of it I eat has a particular and immediate effect on my blood pressure pattern. Perhaps I have a blood pressure test, affected by what I just ate, on the basis of which I am prescribed something that a big pharma company is pushing hard. Perhaps those pharmaceuticals affect the way the mechanism works that senses my eating to control my blood pressure. Perhaps that affects my mental state when considering some important issue. It is much more interconnected than my sketch here and there is zero chance of separating the issues to consider them one by one. Randomised Control Trials my eye.
Music and turtles
Is music flat? Arguably elevator music is devoid of any musical input or effect. We can indeed string one damn note after another ad infinitum. Which reminds me of the fleas:
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em
And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum
And the great fleas in turn have greater fleas to go on
And greater fleas have greater fleas and greater fleas and so on.
Turtles all the way down and all the way up. Magic.
Rather with music there is an interlocking set of structures: chord sequences, melodies, phrasing, architecture, dynamics etc. What is notionally the same piece of music can sound very different and have a very different impact performed differently. The turtles are definitely there, all the way down. And perhaps this is an easier metaphorical place to unpack what happens when something changes. Do we consider that the note sequence is fundamental and that we need everything else to change when we change the tune, or do we consider the overall shape of the music to be key(!) and that the melody must tune in to that?
Now we are in a position to address an issue raised in the last blog. What does it mean to contribute to the music? What sort of a turtle are we talking about and how will the other musicians respond? How I wish educators and pedagogues would address themselves to this question. It literally brings tears to my eyes to have it so vehemently and categorically excluded. Bastards.
There are a range of jazz styles in terms of the mode of delivery, all the way from fully written out music to anything goes. When my son first played with a commercial band with a live audience the style was “right, we are in E flat and here are two bars of theme, go”. The metaphor seems to be one of tossing ideas from one player to another: someone takes off in a “creative” direction and on a good day someone else can catch that and turn it into something else for someone else. And when a band in on fire that can totally new and unique. We all know of particular musical events where something special happened.
At what level of turtle does “creative” “contribution” happen? At what level can it happen? That depends principally on what someone else can catch, that is, on meta-level communication. We are talking about ripples in the semiosphere. We are talking about taking something that normally has this set of connections and meanings and turning it into something else with different connections, different meaning but still the echo of the old. Reinterpretation, repurposing, reimagining, indeed renaissance. On the fly.
When corporate types ask for innovation they don’t expect that their world will be turned upside down and inside out. They wouldn’t ask. The soullessness of that world is precisely the absence of the one skill in the world. But we are talking about contributions that do just that at their best. A piece of music that was good and reliable becomes dangerous or ecstatic. A chord sequence that was comfortable becomes unstable and unsettling. And as Brian Eno says the importance of playing this out in the arts in that it is a safe space compared with the rhizome of life. Who knows the ways in which medical tricks can be repurposed into different contexts? Who dares to know?
In the last blog I claimed this is the one skill in the world. We can now see it in more detail. The skill is to see what is, not in terms of something fixed but in terms of what it can morph into. And to see it in such a way that other people are enlivened into doing their own creative reinterpretation. And building on that and building on that and so on. Andreas Weber would say this is what life is, no more or less. And it is why we have rhizomes in the first place. So claiming it is the one skill in the world may not be hyperbole, but more a recognition that we fall away too readily from life is and what it can be.
The real story of evolution is that cells, organs, organisms, social organisms, whatever are ceaselessly repurposed to do creative things. I read that our eyes are developed as a repurposing of a patch of skin (for the lens) and a repurposing of part of the brain (for the retina) in a messaging process where both stimulate the development of the other. That is how things happen in developmental biology, that is what we want as something more than a metaphor here. Totally amazing new developments from a twist in existing reality.
There IS an issue. It is an issue about how to stabilise things that work really well so we don’t lose them again. That is for the next blog.
Skills in meta-communication
Once more round this loop. The one skill in the world is finding how to contribute to the evolving music of life. And, in the nature of things, that means taking what is and giving it a new twist. Since we have said the trick is to produce a twist that enlivens others, that involves meta-communication: talking about what is in a new way. That is close to a definition of art too. We have already commented on how hard meta-communication can be, especially about anything that matters. When I am suggesting a repurposing of your work, that can easily be taken as criticism. Jazz musicians are people who thrive on the new.
I suspect this reveals a clash in world view. There are some people who want to work with what is, to make it better. There are some people who want to reimagine their involvement with the world every day. There are people who have climbed the greasy pole, got their corporate promotion and need the world to stay the way it is currently ordered. And there are people who think that the world as currently ordered is going to hell in a handbasket and that it can’t be reinvented too soon. The boss of Coca-Cola serenely says there has never been any convincing evidence that the sugar in Coke makes people obese, and under the water he is paddling like fury to make sure that no such evidence ever emerges. A deathly culture dealing death: how can it be otherwise?
Life then is committed to the new. Even when some life forms are stable over hundreds of millions of years, there is always a flux in ecosystems. Stale jazz? We need to notice, in a way that we usually fail to, that this life context is different to that, that people in their prime are not people at the end of their time. We need to be speaking about what things are for in different contexts. We need to get a thousand times more skillful at playing with the themes in our world: making new music with them. In doing so we are integrating, we are joining different conversations, we are welcoming difference and we come to know that life itself is unstoppable, while our individual existence is dispensable.
