Holographic Thinking
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In 1969-70 Chip Delany won the Hugo & Nebula awards with a little number called “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones“. Like a lot of Delany’s work it was more about art than science, but that made sense because we were on the cusp of post-modernity, and he was the great white hope of science fiction. Despite the indicators most of didn’t realize that he was both black and gay. Time was pretty good, the plot didn’t get in the way of the story and as usual it had characters that we wanted to identify with and a narrator that we liked, one Harold Clancy Everett or HCE an acronym which seems a bit pretentious until you stop and think that the whole thing is, on a certain level, about language and reference as markers of membership. All of which was brought to mind by a post by Scott McLemee on Criminal Incompetence:
There is a valuable lesson here. If you are planning on a life of crime, it is probably best not to get tattoos on your forehead. There are bound to be times when you will need to remain inconspicuous, and having a tattoo over each eye really won’t help with that.” Then again, career guidance for criminals is probably not what it could be.
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On the other hand, it certainly shows a certain commitment to one’s chosen career. It’s also a way around the inconvenient fact that nowadays movie stars and accountants and writing-program administrators are sporting bitchin’ ‘tats. A generalized social destigmatization of body art ups the ante for people whose livelihood comes from projecting an aura of menace. In some lines of work, the forehead is a perfectly good place for one’s CV. It may even qualify as proof of ambition.
In Delany’s metaphorical (?) narrative, this translates to the underworld Word, which serves as a kind of global passkey. Used properly, two criminals who may never have met can communicate many shades of meaning, from a greeting to a warning. The Word changes every thirty days, and is always the name of a semi-precious stone. The Word is distributed/created by the Singers, who are public poet/performers with the ability to improvise a song to celebrate or memorialize a major event. Such Singers are highly prized in society, and are much sought after as guests at fashionable parties. All of this predates the World Wide Web, but there are certain parallels with today’s Internet memes. We establish communities of interest and perhaps communities trust by means of commonly mediated experience, and by our familiarity with the tools used to create and exchange these experiences. The LOLcat that begins this post really makes sense only if you’re familiar with the LOLcat Bible, and makes a different sort of sense if you’re one of the contributors to that translation. There are more parties and more ways to participate than there used to be.
Community in this context is probably a bad signifier. As Ze Frank points out, the shifting nodes of awareness and interest look something like community but are actually a different Heideggerian ”thing” entirely. What I find interesting, is that the meme markers now function as works of art; they define a kind of common and agreed upon humanness. To share the awareness and appreciation of a meme is to enter into an assumed agreement of likeness. By which measure, you may be experiencing this writing has wandering about, drifting as though searching for some point or conclusion, which would put you in good company with its author. Memes multiply, and when they function as the work of art, this abundance redefines the work. Meaning and understanding is what we crave, but what we are given is mere experience; what we need to share is enough: Calcite…
