Don’t think of an elephant !
Come on, you’re not really trying. Have another go. Don’t
think of an elephant !
Mm. Better. All right, does this help?
This is not an elephant. This is Dinky, a piano-playing
dingo from central Australia who has performed on Piccadilly Radio, Manchester.
Did that make it easier for you? I hope so. And then there’s
the elephant in the room. Don’t think of him either. While trying not to think
of that particular elephant, or of any elephant, please accept the observation
that this noble beast has a peculiar and very valuable role to play in
communication. Perhaps you will agree that the elephant deserves better
recognition as an informational asset, and should be awarded his own symbol, an
emoticon or similar, to indicate when he
is in the room. Though such a device would itself, of course, for reasons
of safety as well as of propriety, have to be invisible.
Meanwhile, can we please have some silence. OK.
“There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at
all, just a distant hum”. Recognise it? Part of the lyric of a song called
“Hide and Seek” by Howard Jones, who once upon a time performed on Piccadilly
Radio, Manchester.
Nothing at all. A distant hum. Silence. The sound of
silence. A bear farting in the forest while Bishop Berkeley was lying
unconscious after a tree that he hadn’t heard fell on him. Mains hum. The
pulsing of blood in the ears. Deafness. Beethoven’s deafness. It’s getting
louder all the time, isn’t it. The silences in Beethoven’s later works. The
silence between. Meaningful silence. Louder, please. Ludwig, are you there? Da
da da da. Morse V. V for Victory. We
shall catch it on the beaches.
Noise out of silence; something out of nothing. Meaning out
of meaninglessness.
Oh, get on with it.
The hazardous nature of modern information handling was
brought home to me unintentionally the other day by a very good friend, to whom
I had mentioned, without elaboration, my virtual band, The Catford Tendency.
This august institution, whose illustrious, rhodium disc-awarded,
stadium-filling history extends back into the mists of time, has no web
presence as such, and is known only to my immediate family and a few friends. Sufficiently
intrigued to conduct a search, evidently, and presumably via the default
method, my friend unearthed a reference to “Catford’s tendency”, from an
obscure journal, relating to John Catford, who founded a school of linguistics
in Edinburgh and was a noted expert on phonetics. And, seemingly, had
tendencies.
Oh dear. Not right at all. What’s known in the trade as a
false drop, a factoid that bears no relation to the truth, an inappropriate
Venn overlap, a Boolean blunder, an illusion of knowledge. The “Catford” in The
Catford Tendency is London S.E.6 and the “Tendency” was inspired by the name of
a militant organisation a few decades back. Like the names of all musical groups
it is both deliberate and arbitrary, and is so named for perfectly good reasons
that I won’t go into.
How often do we retrieve nonsense? How often do we realise
it is nonsense? Well, at this very
moment, probably you do.
Google, assuming that was the search tool invoked, works (to
the extent that anyone knows, and to put it simplistically), by measuring the
statistical proximity of terms. The more that people use those terms together,
in their searching, and the more they co-occur in the documents retrieved, the
stronger is the assumption of a valid semantic link. From the adjacency of
words Google builds up a simulation of knowledge, mostly very plausibly so, and
sufficiently so that it can make a pretty good go at “understanding" what
something means. It’s all about association, and mostly it works well. Whole
subject areas can be fabricated thus, and texts translated quite well into
other languages. Occasionally it doesn’t get things right, and when it fails,
it reveals, just for a moment, a vertigo-inducing image of a whole cyber-can of
worms. That’s what happened to me the other day.
Unlike older, pre-millennial “text retrieval” systems, which
depended upon laborious human indexing of selected vocabulary items and not on
automatic full term indexing, today’s search engines have no sense of meaning. Well,
of course, they’re just pieces of software, they have no sense of anything. They
are entirely computational, mathematical, semantically blind, associating away
there in the dark. Human indexers would compile a thesaurus (later generally
known as a taxonomy) of broader, narrower, and synonymous terms. Their method
was based on meaning, on human understanding, and on the classification of
knowledge developed over many years by librarians and others. Google doesn’t employ
knowledge in the same way. Given its central role in so many activities I sometimes
find this pretty scary. Corporate foundations built in Silicon Valley,
intellectual foundations built on sand.
This means that (even in its entirely non-conscious way) Google
will never “get” a joke, or appreciate wordplay or a remote allusion. It
doesn’t do meaning, it just computes statistical usages and associations. It
wouldn’t, for instance, realise that there is absolutely no reasonable relevant
connection between a synthesiser-friendly 1980s popstar with spiky hair and a
wild antipodean pooch howling and plonking randomly on an old, beat-up,
stand-up piano far away in the dusty outback west of Alice - although it might
pull out “Piccadilly Radio, Manchester” as a commonality (something which we
might be able to use creatively, admittedly). Nor would it “get” the Holmesian
dog that didn’t bark in the night. What is extremely
interesting is that it wouldn’t index the elephant in the room. For obvious
reasons it won’t even know it’s there.
In various parts of the world there is currently much
concern over freedom of speech. Dreadful fates await those who say the wrong
thing or harbour ”incorrect thought”. Abuse, trolling, hate campaigns, physical
assault, dismissal from post, withdrawal of funding, censorship,
de-platforming, arrest, torture, and being “disappeared” are among possible
outcomes according to where one lives. People want to say things but are afraid
to. Many people want to say the same things. We live in frightening,
self-righteous, unfunny, unforgiving and illiberal times where so often the
rules of tolerance are set by the congenitally intolerant and enshrined in
convenient spur-of-the-moment legislation. Hastily airbrushed legacies, instant
wisdom, hysterical historical rewrites, Bebelplatz revisited, the Heinrich
Heine warning trotted out once more. “Ah, but it’s different this time”. ‘Course
it is. It always is.
The worse things get, there will be more elephants seeking
room-space, elephants of many different shapes and sizes and colours and styles.
We will need to be better able to create, identify and “read” them, as
projections thrust up into mental space. To paint elephants in the sky will
become a necessary skill, perhaps like those Dalinian beasts with surreally
spindly legs, hovering and hallucinatory in cognitive space; we will need to
learn how to see them, to know what they mean, and to share them with others.
Like elaborate Joycean multilingual puns (James, that is, not William), and as
demonstrated by many writers, artists and musicians, we need to be able to
project multiple allusions to a point where they focus and intersect, a point whence
an exact meaning is extractable. Intersections where the fringes of ideas, the
haloes of sounds and the outer suburbs of verbal connotations conjoin silently to
say something precise and legible to those who have learned how. All free from
the censor, since there is nothing there to remove; all free from the algorithms
of the search engine, since there is nothing to index; all free from the secret
policeman, since there is no evidence, not even encrypted evidence. But – like
the wise old elephant in the room – there all the same. Massively there. Free.
We see already, in certain unhappy parts of the world, how
the oppressed are resorting to non-linguistic codes and symbols, abandoning the
potentially self-condemnatory traces of electronics or written texts for the
transient, the semiotically offbeat, the irregular and the allusive. To
transmit meaning reliably but without the usual indicators of what it is
actually about. To erect multilevel
cognitive edifices significant to intended recipients but indeterminate to the ambient
enemy. To create sense out of nonsense and messages out of silence. While persecution
because of a desire for freedom of speech is nothing new, today’s everyday technologies
leave readily traceable and permanent accusatory footprints. Ironic, wouldn’t
it be, that – in our informationally intense societies, in our gadget riddled
lives - in order to communicate while remaining free we should retreat from the
definite, recoil from the word, abandon the recordable signal, subvert
conventional language, and learn to express
ourselves in varieties of silence. For now, though, we need to return to the
elephant.
This is The Elephant. He himself is towards the right of the
picture.
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