I was told early in my career that everyone prefers to learn through stories. I own several books on this topic, including one titled Storynomics which should be whipped at my painted forehead during my funeral. Stories and narratives, I was told, should be employed whenever possible, and even a simile should be explained as a parable. Generations of beautiful insects such as myself heard this loud and clear, the result of which is that we gradually narrativized everything. In crafting narratives we tend to convolute the simple, but more urgently, we crumple the complex
Our civilization (if you are reading this, it’s yours) holds a crestfallen view of history, what with it written by the victors and the ease with which we find victors we dislike. Even the uninitiated intuit that there is no way to perfectly record history, yet we maintain there must be a way to decipher it, with a bias towards older works. Events have been dutifully recorded, diaries have been collected, and historical data has been visualized from antique spreadsheets. It is something we are always seeking out, digging deeper, and parsing reframes within reframes. History can be written, but even that which was recorded a decade ago must be vetted by the same credentialed consensus that assesses the psychosexual value of Genghis Kahn.
Let’s zoom in on this system of historical consensus and etch an outline around the shape that which deceives us.
Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard addressed the problems inherent in such a love for narratives driving our increasingly technical and scientific society to pursue even grander explanatory arcs. The purview of science is to sweep away the superfluous and extract the essential, and this has inspired our conjuring of narratives that cut across all human assemblages. We recite these stories with data, with impartial studies, and with the news media ecosystem. The result is Ben Affleck shouting that Arabs just want to eat sandwiches.
Modern science legitimates itself by appealing to one or another grand narrative, such as the emancipation of the rational subject, or the creation of wealth, the Enlightenment story of reasons’ victory through progress, and Marxism’s narrative of emancipation through revolution. Theoretical physicists are searching for the “Theory of Everything” while aligning with the political faith that whatever we are now is undeniably superior to whatever we were in the past. To the world of science, grand narratives are the tectonic plates that undergird our entire human existence, and it is their duty to discover them.
Furthermore, along with the hegemony of computers comes a particular technical logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements. Knowledge traditionally was largely imparted through training, apprenticeship, or some other direct transaction. It was rarely the product of prolonged study or consumed as a product. There was a utility to knowledge and it was acutely imparted. Knowledge is now a commodity; something that can be templated, hoarded, stolen, hacked, or counterfeited. It is mass produced and analyzed like a marketed product. Knowledge is in such abundance we measure our very sanity by how effectively we navigate the bombardment.
The central question is who will have access to the the right information from the right sources – increasingly the real information – to guarantee that the best decisions are made. Those who hold feudal titleships over information will naturally hold dominion over world events; a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and political agitation orgs. Lyotard could not predict the domination of the technocrat class centered in Silicon Valley, but it’s all part of the same nebulous network sketched out in “The Power is Power Theory of Power.”
We might intimidate that this weaponization of information separates us from how information used to be, but we struggle to give that relationship an arithmetic. It didn’t used to be this way, we murmur to ourselves, but what does that mean?
It is only after the maddening multiplicity of media do we see information become currency, even something that can be speculated upon. Knowledge can be a motivating lie or a synthetic cognitohazard, and we discerning piggies cannot trust even our trough of pulverized ass.
“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds; most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal.” – Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition
The intersection of information-as-product and mass-narrative-as-faith is where we reside. Lyotard identifies the “postmodern condition” as a reaction against the Structuralism of universal narratives, explaining that they lack both explanatory power and medicative assuaging of people’s fears. He prefers discrete narratives that compete with one another, replacing the totalitarianism of rationalism, with legitimacy grounded in paralogy rather than consensus bureaucratized through the government, media ecosystem, and academia.
The inevitable conclusion of this rejection, however, is the belief that there exists no fundamental truth to reality; truth is subjective, and everybody has their own truth. Ontology becomes provincial. Further, we have never abandoned the meta-tendency of our rationalist analysis, already surrendered to total disenchantment with narrative power itself. We are keenly aware that the media lies, we understand that history is written by the victors, and we assume that propaganda is everywhere and deployed from every dimension of this once great civilization. We presume narratives are cynical tools, but we frequently defend their utilization because we cannot imagine another way. We don’t believe things like we used to.
This was investigated in an article titled “Truth is Shameless Repetition,” a primer for the discerning maniac to reaffirm localized strongholds of truth to withstand entropy. It is about how to make truth for survival, but our aim here is to reckon with our obsession with locating it.
What is the Truth? It’s not a synonym for accuracy; it is something deeper. We feel compelled to reveal this Truth, which is the explanation of or the reason for something. It is in so many words: the story. With this in mind, the question is reintroduced as: does believing in such a thing as truth make universal narratives inevitable? A friend of mine named Samu H2 mounted a defense of this inclination we all apparently share while discussing a trend in our political milieu: Finding the Root Cause of Secular Humanist Modernity. I will summarize his position here in the most charitable way possible.
I steelman, contrary to the nasty rumor that I steal men.
You’ve probably seen that to which we are referring many times before online, where someone seeks to locate the inciting incident that lead us down the doomed path we are on, be it the dawn of Christianity, the Enlightenment, or the status quo established by World War 2. My friend Mike Maxwell directs the blame towards the transition to the axial age, and Jay Dyer blames nominalism. My contention was that the desire to create a linear causal chain was too reductive to have any utility; saying that the French Revolution was because of Christian Moralism radiates a defensible vibe, but is so streamlined it breaks from reality. Further, we can end up tracing the causes so far into ancient history it describes another world entirely.
Samu was defending this as a rhetorical strategy: all of our models form narratives whether we want them to or not, and that the goal is to have these models’ sedimentize, relying upon their elevator pitches to draw people in. They are not collapsing everything to one simplified explanation, rather they are mapping reality at a certain depth and within a context which people need to initially engage with a complex concept. If a reader misinterprets this strategy as monocausal, that is a problem with the reader and not the framework, which inevitably slithers into being anyway so we might as well hijack this tendency for our own ends. By hook or by crook a story will be told.
“I hate the arbitrary narrative slop that some relativists dig and think Truth is found by subjecting interpretation to highest standards of objective measurement. But sometimes that produces simple models at a high level of abstraction. They just have to be applied at that level and not exported to some other context, because that breaks the model.” – Samu H2
My response was that there is no other conceivable achievement with this sort of strategy than utter confusion. If someone claims – and I have seen some variation of this frequently – that “individuality” leads to the enlightenment which leads to the French revolution which leads to black drag queens raping your children, this can only obscure the facts so extensively as to completely misdirect the subject from solutions. One revolution is blamed on a previous revolution and so on until we conceivably work our way back to RNA World Theory and the contextually-sudden tilt towards genetic mass production. That’s where communism comes from, you see this don’t you? The transition from cyclical time towards linear time – itself a diminishment of a folkish way of life – could be argued to be a transition towards humanist universals. It could alternatively be viewed the shattering of materialist rituals designed to commoditize the paranormal. How much money are you trying to generate from your post?
As it turns out you can condemn any flashpoint in any epoch as the engine of our woes.
We derive narratives from clouds of data to identify triggers and cast agencies, but my assertion is that in doing so we typically distance ourselves from the truth, which must be shaved and crammed into a plot. We do this because we can hack together a pop mythology that implants easier as a virus of knowledge, whereas parsing through the raw information ourselves is much harder to aggregate into something people must know urgently. We are presently inundated with information and pummeled by hyperreal revisions of historical narratives. How do we separate this most desired resource from sensory inputs or digital slopfuscation?
This is where we must wade into hermeneutics, which is a very impressive way to say how we figure out if we are reading historical texts properly. You would be correct to assume the primary problem is one of purely linguistic translation but goes much deeper than that, interrogating whether or not we can even capture the nuanced meaning of whatever is being communicated, imprisoned as we are by our cultural and technological debt.
Translation, like all interpretation, is an act of highlighting. To provide a nerdsplanation, look to the debate over anime voiceover localization. If you would like to earn easy ire, expose yourself to the internet tribes warring over how much an English voice actor should alter the direct Japanese translation in the interest of reimagining whatever the character is saying. Sometimes the goal is to make the dialogue less horny or Mexican.
Another example would be Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which opted to rephrase much of the original language in the interest of marketing a version approachable to a mass audience. Casting our attention back even further, can we be certain that the Word of God has accurately carried over from Koine Greek to English? We don’t want simply to behold a text, we desire to immerse ourselves in it and integrate it into our worldview. These are desires not just of technical accuracy but of intent, spirit, and meaning beyond grammar.
Pulling at this thread unravels our understanding of what it means to understand.
The goal of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer was to expose the fundamental nature of human understanding – not merely to propose a new method for interpreting texts, but to describe what actually happens when we understand anything at all. We are no longer looking for what perfect information might look like; we are investigating what occurs when we not only intake information and subsequently alchemize it into a new element known as knowledge. We might expect our multitudinous prejudices to stand in opposition to this, however Gadamer’s key architecture rests on the rehabilitation of such prejudices, as well as the tradition and authority that are bundled in with it.
Our culture and traditions form the foundation of our prejudices; to believe prejudice arbitrary is a falsehood popularized by secular humanism. All previous contexts of human language and culture enter into the greater canon of blood memory which is transmitted to us through the generations as an inexhaustible stock of moral instruction. You do not need to harness tradition for you are a manifestation of tradition whether you believe it or not. We maintain tradition ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in its repetition, and hence further determine it ourselves. In many instances this may be tradition assessing itself, measured externally against the text but also within the subject as its inherited agent.
Prejudice is unavoidable when consuming culturally foreign content – exponentially so the older it is – but for the sake of this inquiry assume the subject matter is at least culturally adjacent.
Conversation is similarly a process of coming to an understanding; each person opens himself to the other, truly accepts his point of view as valid and transposes himself into the other to such an extent that he understands not the particular individual, but what he says. When we try to understand a text, we do not try to transpose ourselves into the author’s mind; we try to transpose ourselves into the perspective. Thus the task of hermeneutics is not a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common meaning. It’s Dasein shaking its own hand.
What we are all attempting when we dive into old texts is, contrary to the empathetic time travel one might presume, the fusion of horizons: the dialectical confrontation where interpreter’s horizon and the horizon of the text come to overlap and integrate, yielding a new understanding for the present. We can never escape our prejudices. We can never step outside of our context to glace upon the source code.
“Every single individual who raises himself out of his natural being to the spiritual finds in the language, customs, and institutions of his people a pre-given body of material which, as in learning to speak, he has to make his own. Thus every individual is always engaged in the process of Bildung and in getting beyond his naturalness, inasmuch as the world into which he is growing is one that is humanly constituted through language and custom. Hegel emphasizes that a people gives itself its existence in its world. It works out from itself and thus exteriorizes what it is in itself.” – Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
Prejudice, preconceptions, and cultural debt are unavoidable, and the process of intersecting purposefully with another horizon is an opportunity to investigate one’s own priors. Like a conversation, we are ascertaining whether or not we are hearing them properly, while judging the merit of what they have to say, while assessing whether or not we are more or less correct than before. When you are reading something new or foreign, you are engaged in what is known as the Hermeneutic Circle, predicting the shape of what you are uncovering while engaged in the process of uncovering it, updating your preconceptions as you comprehend more like a map you are guessing the edges of and revising as you explore the landscape.
The purpose of all interpretation is to conquer a desert of remoteness between the past cultural epoch to which the text belongs and the interpreter himself, but does it help us ascend to the mountaintop to claim what we seek; the Truth? It’s one thing to reject soothing universalisms and accept the synthesis of author and reader, but we still battle over the correct interpretation of messages.
Careers are made with heterodox interpretations. It is yet another arena understanding struggles to understand itself.
We turn to one more French philosopher by the name of Jean Paul Gustave Ricœur who provides an attack formation for this problem: treating hermeneutics as internally split between an approach which sought to recover meaning that was assumed to already be there, and what he now called a hermeneutics of suspicion, like that found in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These intellectuals held that nothing ultimately means what it first seems to say, which is a reasonable assertion of the hermeneutic circle but then applied to all forms of communication.
Our language possesses qualities that encourage multiple interpretations, specifically how words or even symbols carry multiple dimensions of meaning. Ricœur’s signature contribution is the idea of symbols’ double meaning and the surplus of meaning of language; overlapping interpretations that make meaning overdetermined and equivocal or polyvocal. The work of interpretation is to explicate the multiple determination of symbols at the molecular level.
The symbol is constituted from a semantic perspective such that it provides a meaning by means of a meaning. In it a primary, literal, worldly, often physical meaning refers back to a figurative, spiritual, often existential meaning. The symbol invites us to think, calls for an interpretation, precisely because it says more than it says and because it never ceases to speak to us. What we create instigates inquiry but so too does the language itself, unable to be isolated as a chilled technic.
In considering an example of this – of which there are many superior instances – I became locked on the word “Biblical.” Hypothetically, 1,000 years into the future, when our media is scanned by bewildering anthropologists, how would they unpack our colloquial usage of this word that doesn’t literally mean “something from the Bible?” You may leap to the conclusion that it refers to someone wielding God’s wrath, but it’s deeper than that. Think on how you have observed it used: it indicates epic scale, but also severity of implications, all while wafting in the smoke of ancient history as an aroma of legitimacy. Contained within “Biblical” is the hidden cultural relationship between something big and old, and importance. Further, how the schematics for future conflict/catastrophes can be found in ancient history. You will see this word deployed by people who have never read the Bible.
We get it, but scholars of the future will get lost in the weeds of how influential hyperreal cinema has hijacked our shared interpretation of this word, or how we imagine its relation to what we are saying. Now they need to watch 50 quirk chungus reviews of Ben-Hur, since those obviously survived. The definition has breached the containment of textual language, and future hermeneutics must embrace a multimedia analysis.
“It must then be said that the symbolic does not reside in this or that symbol and even less so in their abstract repertory. This repertory will always be too poor —for it is always the same Images which return； and it will always be too rich—for each symbol signifies potentially all the others. The symbolic is rather between the symbols, as relation and as the economy of their relating. This system of symbolics is nowhere more apparent than in Christianity, where the natural symbolism is at once freed and ordered entirely in the light of the Word, made explicit only in a Recitative. There is no natural symbolism, no abstract or moralizing allegorism without a historical typology. The symbolic resides, then, in this ordered play of natural symbolism, of abstract allegorism, and of historical typology […] Taken by themselves, symbols are threatened by their oscillation between sinking into the imaginary and evaporating in allegorism.” – Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations
Rather than dissolving disagreements between humans, Ricœur treats it like a parallax gap: interpretation itself is generated by the conflict, but given that language itself cannot be depleted by any particular interpretation, that each accord only suspends conflict without fully resolving it. True understanding, indeed true synthesis, is impossible across all forms of communication. If tradition is necessarily collective and we draw upon it to fuse with meaning individually, we must eventually return to that collectivism as tradition demands we argue with each other over years, decades, centuries in a desperate attempt for consensus.
While total consensus is never reached, molecules of consensus are birthed through the furious oppositional grinding of opinions. I am unfortunately reminded of Spinal Catastrophism which posits the human spine is a record of trauma sustained by the human animal, verticalized as a form of cosmic rebellion. Our language and canon would then be a devouring record of shimmering scars.
Gadamer trusts inherited tradition as truth-bearing, whereas Ricœur wants narrative meaning reconstructed dialectically through explanation and critical distance. Lyotard inverts both: rather than narrative synthesis, he insists all legitimating “big stories” have collapsed into local narratives competing for survival. We are invited to consider whether Lyotard’s assessment of postmodernism constitutes an is or an ought, whether the regionalization and therefore tribalization of truth is the state of play or what should be pursued. I suspect he would say it’s both, and I would agree it stands as an accurate assessment of what has happened. Is happening.
There is cultural tribalization without question, and there is ethnic tribalization that will forever impede sufficient integration. Presently we are discussing the tendency to create hyperlocal narratives driven by political motivations, even contrarian implantation through shock value.
We return to the earlier question of whether the current hyperlocalization of narratives can manhandle historical interpretation and symbols to such a degree as to uncover a deeper truth through the embrace of inaccuracy. The monetization of such attempts cannot be removed from the conversation; in the Economy of Takes, thousandaires have been made harnessing this strategy to propose incisive nonsense that tickles our deadened nerve endings promising the warmth of heterodoxy.
Overall, what is being described is the process by which the canon is formed. It survives through self-analysis, it reaffirms through overlapping horizons, it evolves through the conflict between adversarial cells of its own body. We must halt before we grant this process a life unto itself or a personality, as so many of us are wont to do. We don’t need to make this into a God. We don’t need to make it a monster.
We have a tendency to broker one-way relationships with perceived allies and employ historical narratives to justify this. We can appropriate history to serve our opinions designed to excel in a chaotic information market, and we can do the same with power politics. On the margins of the Right you may encounter charming vagabonds attempt this with Islam, going so far as to cite the Koran to cast them as allies against a shared enemy. There’s occasionally a token Muslim that has wandered into our spaces that nods along to these enthusiastic, leading questions but they are cunning enough to know it’s all upside for them. As Muslim extremists are operating rape gangs in your neighborhood while shielded by Muslim moderates, we craft peculiar stories about how they are spiritual brothers in a global war. It matters not that an actual accord isn’t brokered between either side, what matters is that we are writing a story starring them that sounds vaguely rational but functions more akin to an system of card counting amateurly innovated to flip the script on the casino.
We have a tendency to broker one-way relationships with perceived allies and employ historical narratives to justify this. We can appropriate history to serve our opinions designed to excel in a chaotic information market, and we can do the same with power politics. On the margins of the Right you may encounter charming vagabonds attempt this with Islam, going so far as to cite the Koran to cast them as allies against a shared enemy. There’s occasionally a token Muslim that has wandered into our spaces that nods along to these enthusiastic, leading questions but they are cunning enough to know it’s all upside for them. As Muslim extremists are operating rape gangs in your neighborhood while shielded by Muslim moderates, we craft peculiar stories about how they are spiritual brothers in a global war.
It doesn’t matter if it is true, it matters that it serves an immediate political interest. You have the power to spin tall tales of the Bronze Age to provide insight on Israel, you can put “Ur-” in front of literally anything to conjure a sandy hieroglyphic of whatever trend you want to legitimize. Half the intended audience respects how shattered their apathy is by the audacity of the nonsense, and the other half is simply mesmerized by something new. Rather than integrating new information on a reckless search for meaning, we end up salvaging scraps from citations to justify our priors then laundering them into the public consciousness with cutting edge tactics of persuasion.
Understanding is buckling under the pressure of meta-analysis; we step outside the hermeneutic cycle and place that within a larger superstructure wherein we are no longer trying to grapple with understanding but set Understanding Traps for others. We, the surprisingly multi-ethnic assassins of discourse, muttering through shiteating smirks “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
Are we trying to manipulate people with this introduction of a new form of propaganda? If so, then this simply fulfills the standard definition of propaganda. A covert op innovated for an information war we barely fathom, its covertness betrayed by our inability to cease announcing it. I am drawn towards what it is we are communicating and question whether it inspires a quest for meaning, thus necessitating this gangrape of accuracy.
I believe art is an attempt to communicate something undeniably human outside of the agenda of narratives. I have explored the role of art as distilled human context in a previous article titled “Utopian Trauma” so I will not extrapolate that further here. Art is achieved in the same creative space where play occurs, although both are distinct. Play has a to-and-fro movement not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end. It renews itself in constant repetition, discovering itself through the participant which is synthesized into it. Play only becomes art when it undergoes transformation into structure, thereby a transformation into truth. Through the play of art, reality – both our material world and what which lives behind it, permeates it – raises up reality into truth. This is what demands investigation. This is the ouroboros of tradition what grows ouroborii from its eyes.
I believe it’s important to recognize that most of the relics from history were not designed to communicate an explicit message to the observer, they were to capture a deeper essence. From artisan crafts to megalithic structures, they invite us into their world with a seized vitality apart from what we attempt with our coned plots. I situate art alongside rituals due to their association to this state of play, their formation of limitless reality into structure, meaning subsequently architected inside this structure, and most importantly its anchoring to a space that overlaps with everything outside our material realm.
We have explored the decline and fall of the enchanted ritual during the transition from cyclical time to linear time in a piece titled “Ontological Blood Sacrifices To Apocalyptic Logos.” Suffice it to say, the divine ritual – sacrifices, solstices, and orgies alike – was to temporarily interface with the paranormal world, thereby exacting a small measure of dominance over it. It formed a plateau jutting into new negotiated region outside of time space. Only by opening ourselves to supreme outsideness can we locate the pearl of meaning that demands understanding, demands repeated consumption, demands an audience with eternity. This is Stonehenge. This is the Hall of the Bulls at Lascaux. This is Paradise Lost.
Are you capable of birthing a masterpiece that opposes the entropy of millennia? That’s a lot to ask of the average free subscriber. That’s not what I am even close to implying. What I am screaming is we are losing the ability to discern the difference between an organ and a tumor. When we practice purposefully cynical historical revisionism, we are merely staging a pantomime of dazzling lies, bombastic irony, and wicked psychoanalysis. Sediments of shattered and disfigured complexity don’t actually stack well when they’re each proposed as bashfully robust ontologies.
Discourse abounds due to algorithmic metrics. Truth is important, yes, but these wicked things we do are ephemeral and will be appropriately dismissed when we win. You do want to win, don’t you, anon?
I maintain we still have the capacity to both uncover and encode the depth of particulars without the amplification of false universals. The Darwinism of Localized Truth will not anesthetize your desire to dominate the darkness – to search for the meaning, the reason, the story shrouded by peculiarities. But it’s not The Story, is it? The Darwinian bedlam between tribal truths isn’t a relationship between islands of decoupled subject and subordinate object, rather it is embodied agents of tradition struggling for higher order understanding. We are doomed if we allow the technic of persuasion to lead the development of the civilizational canon. If you want to do what needs to be done, you don’t need to read more as much as you need to learn how to read.
I often take my young son down to a creek not far from our house where one time he mistook pond scum for lily pads. I should read this article to him.