Author: Jonathan Taylor (Page 2 of 2)

Semiology: An academic discipline devoted almost entirely to the study of dichotomies. More specifically, the dichotomies between what you mean and what you say, what the significance of a signifier is and what its aesthetic is, what the form of a phrase is verses its function, et cetera, et cetera. In all honesty, I wrote one essay on this topic in my senior year of high school and expected to never again address the subject. At first glance, semiology (a more common term is semiotics, but I prefer the former because it sounds cooler, which is an interesting semiological implication in and of itself) embodies everything wrong with academia. It is a discipline for the Jean Baudrillards and Roland Barthes’ of the world: Stuffy, white sexagenarians sitting in ivory towers deciding–with an almost comical sense of self-importance–what the words of the plebeian class mean.

This cynical view of semiology is one towards which I am personally fairly partial. I believe that the things that we do and the things that we say almost always carry some implicit meaning into which further study is generally redundant, pointless, or a combination of the two. However, last Tuesday’s presentation did help shine some light on a couple of rather topical implications of semiotic analyses.

I distinctly remember the how Professor Colangelo talked about a man who went from country to country without the knowledge of even two words in the local languages. Though this isn’t even close to being a good idea, a desire to hear things without knowing what they mean–in essence, a desire to observe an aesthetic but not its significance–embodies the postmodern idea that meaning can actually be harmful to language. Baudrillard, a semiologist whom I mentioned earlier, wrote thousands upon thousands of pages across multiple books and articles (ironically, each page with explicitly signified arguments and conclusions) about how meaning–the abstract concept of being able to attach a signification to a signifier–is, in large quantities, harmful to society and to the individual.

It’s this postmodern idea to which Professor Colangelo alluded that is so interesting to me. Why bother to observe a signifier if you haven’t the slightest clue as to what it’s actually signifying? Not wanting the natural sounds of a language to be corrupted by knowing how they relate to other sounds is all fine and dandy, but why bother? Couldn’t you just stay home and take a walk down to the railyard and listen to trains all day? It’s essentially the same principle: Hear everything, but derive meaning from nothing.

As it pertains to this question, I think that the key thing to note ties right back into my earlier discussion of semiology. Train horns don’t have much signification on which to miss out (aside from maybe, “get out of the way!”), but Moroccan Arabic, for example, does. Therefore, making the conscious decision to not get any sort of meaning out of what can be heard is just that–a conscious decision. It’s a conscious decision to understand the aesthetics of your surroundings as opposed to merely listening for meaning. In a world with too much meaning already (That’s basically Baudrillard’s central argument, in case you were wondering), it’s not a puzzling choice to take extreme measures so as to try and focus solely on the form of language as opposed to function. 

Whenever someone uses the phrase “adjacent possibility” to refer to something that may not be possible now but will be given the realization of one intermediate possibility, I’m inclined to try and picture something like a big bike wheel with lots and lots of spokes continuing outward from the center for a long, long time. Where we are right now can be construed as an “origin” of sorts, so the metaphor makes some degree of sense in that particular manner. The infinite distinct things that could happen right now or that could happen because of what we do right now  are, logically, extensions of the present in the way that spokes are extensions of the center. So far so good with this metaphor. But let’s keep going. Each spoke would have to have another center attached to the end of it, right? For every action or inaction (meaning for every spoke) there is a result, meaning that this metaphor would have to include additional centers at the end of each and every one of the infinite spokes. And then each of those centers would need more spokes with more centers and so on and so on. My question is at this conundrum. At face value, it doesn’t seem difficult to arrive at the assumption that there are infinite possibilities. The notion of infinity spokes, each leading to infinity more spokes forever and forever until the end of time certainly doesn’t  lend itself to any sense of finiteness. But if there are infinite possibilities, shouldn’t that mean that everything is possible? And I do mean everything. Not just outlandish stuff like “ghouls and goblins rise from the graves and launch their own Super PAC,” but stuff that fundamentally challenges our most basic understandings. For example “the fabric of spacetime turns orange.” Maybe that’s a bad example because there isn’t actually any “fabric” (as far as we know), but couldn’t there be? It’s a possibility, meaning that it’s gotta be on one of the spokes I talked about.

I hope I’ve made my point clear so far. With my bike spoke model (which, by no coincidence, has a very close resemblance to the model that was used in the presentation), it seems that there’d be nothing that’s impossible. Even if we limit the number of spokes that a given center can have, then, eventually, you’d still arrive at any possibility you wanted. You’d just have to pass through more centers. So that’s the issue that I take. Everything is possible in this model. Paradoxes, mutual exclusivities, and even logic itself could be (respectively) resolved, coincident, and altered.

So that’s my problem with this whole “everything is possible” thing. Even if that’s not what he meant, it’s still the logical conclusion of the model that was used in the presentation. Everything.  This may be the proverbial hill on which I have to die, but I will not concede that this is true. Some things are just impossible. Some are impossible because of logistical concerns (flying to the sun in half a second? Can’t happen because it’s faster than the speed of light) while others are impossible by definition. And the model that seems to be used most commonly to describe the “adjacent possible” seems to imply otherwise.

That’s my two cents.

-Jon

If I remember correctly, it’s Lewis Gordon who writes a good number of articles about how we interact with knowledge as a society. He takes particular interest in the division of inevitably overlapping disciplines into separate categories. Gordon has also outlined some problems with this model: Some scholars tend to judge the work of others through the lens of their own disposition. For example, a physicist might be inclined to brush aside the work of an economist because the economist presents a model to which there are exceptions and deficiencies (these are generally called “market failures,” and they tend to be inevitable in even the most meticulously planned economies). Of course, there are no “market failures” in physics: Gravity doesn’t turn off given a certain set of conditions, thermodynamic laws always hold true in closed systems, et cetera, et cetera. So one could see why a physicist might not want to accept a seemingly inadequately designed econometric model as a bona fide academic accomplishment.

Gordon, in an article whose title I cannot for the life of me remember, explained why this is not a desirable model for academia, and why the division of research praxes into “disciplines” is to blame. But he never really, throughout his immense body of work, specifically outlines any form of feasible alternative. I know that, at one point, he called for the “teleological suspension of disciplinarity [sic]” (http://escholarship.org/uc/item/218618vj), but that is mostly meaningless in the context of a college whose campus has to be pragmatically designed.

And that brings me back to Professor Hanlon’s talk. More specifically, the beginning of it. He went to great lengths to describe how Colby, and universities in general, are divided into disciplines, and those disciplines are relegated to their own spaces. This spatialization of knowledge does have some benefits: I know that my econ class will be in Diamond, and that my Spanish class is probably in Lovejoy. That makes my life easier in terms of memorizing schedules and getting from class to class without having to devote a whole lot of thought to where I’m going. However, there are drawbacks, too: I’m not very likely to run into any biology majors in the hall, and I’m almost certain to never stumble across a bulletin board that advertises a bunch of exciting developments in the field of astrophysics. This is for the simple–almost arbitrary–reason that I just don’t have any classes in science buildings. The closest I get is the four hours a week I spend in Keyes for math.

So that’s my understanding of a practical application of what Professor Hanlon was talking about: the spatialization of knowledge. I’ll gladly concede that knowledge in the abstract does have a tendency to creep into places where it would seemingly be unwelcome (Case in point: The Royal Soceity, a body founded to maximize material research over oratory presentations, wound up being instrumental in hundreds of years’ worth of philosophy and novels). But still, isn’t it just a bit troubling that something as abstract and free as “knowledge” can be crammed into distinct spaces, as if one body of knowledge is never supposed to interact with other types of knowledge?