A wonderful straightedge of a book, Lorraine Daston's Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
There is this wonderful book written by Lorraine Daston called
Rules: A Short History of What We Live By
(The Lawrence Stone Lectures. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022 ISBN 9780691156989).
I say wonderful because it is one of those histories which illuminates by way of the taphonomy of etymology, of usage in their historical contexts, rather than, say, a list of dates which sort out a series of WTFs for us to marvel at. I mean Stratigraphy is important, especially for nationalist arguments of place but…
— ouch! I was trying to write this more simply, and there I go weaving in archaeological methods into a review of a history book <shakes head, will I ever change>. There I go trying to explain something by immediately mixing my metaphors. (Just because you mix your drinks does not mean you are making a cocktail.) Even if the metaphors are from an allied discipline —how is that going to help?
Is it a sure thing?
What is your context? What are your methods, what methodology informs your methods? What epistemology informs your methodology? What neurodiverse assumptions inform your epistemology that you refuse all ontologies and say epistemologies trump any ontologies, those products of epistemological evolutionary and historical processes? Yeah, explain all that everytime, see how far you get. The rules I model are not shared. Not yet.
What method then? What model? No point being yourself? Hmmh.
What do you expect your audience to share, such that you can take a usage for granted, what do you need to explain, what do you need to reference, what do you need to link, what is important, what is important but that everyone knows, what is it you are trying to say, is it important at all? They do not understand, do you think this makes you special? No, I would be special if I could explain it better. I wish.
Help.
I do wish I could write straight literature that moralises personal transformation—simplistic genre pictures, the high fantasy where flat characters are banned. I wish I could work to rule in order to destroy that sense of literature, escapism that it is. But I digress.
Maybe I should start the beginning here in the middle, with a quote about a working contronym.
The contronym here is that of the ① rule as model, a straightedge for behaviour, say, for a ruler like a king, versus the particular rule ② as explicitly defined particular measure or failure thereof. Both require comparison, this is the movement they both share, but we worry about the products, not how they formed, thus we can end up with the following notice:
Lorraine Daston similarly points out that for much of its history the word algorithm refers to the usage as model to be measure against in terms of behaviour, not the particular specific set of details or “instructions” to be iterated. Recently this secondary notice has dominated, even as we used large language models to parrot how we use language. I guess it is a return of the repressed, which is why we worry so much. What model, what straightedge, will this tech then world for us? Rule over us?
I argue contronyms survive in usage because, well, we use them according to a human and/or animal movement, real, metaphoric or abstract, in reality and/or the world, and that a definition or meaning is an outcome of that movement, which ends up in different places, deferred routines, or with now differed bits. These pieces of meaning is a product of reflection or hindsight. Subsequently clearly defined as resolute bits of information.
But our usage, much like reality, does not care what we do. All we can say when questions are raised about a contradiction or error or paradox is “Well, what I meant was…”
Movement precedes meaning, just as flow precedes movement.
I live. I move. I think. I animal. I human. I world.
You too.
(If you feel excluded here because you identify as a plant, an algae or an oak, well, your identification is a movement still, a movement back to the flow, because complexity already. Desire for simpler lives arise in complexity: see #cottagecore, see my desire above to write straight literature moralising personal transformation which bans the flat character from Eden, see the desire for authoritarian rulers to fix “stuff” to make paradise out of the straightedge of hindsight).
(When I was about twenty my preferred pronoun was you). (How’s that for transformation?)
You may have noticed that computer programming starts with defining things like functions. As do old-style debating point style guides, begin with a definition they say. It’s a defense mechanism, building walls. Building generally.
Beginning with a definition is good because it is important when beginning something to start somewhere. Doesn’t matter where really. Now, where was I? Where did I begin?
I read in my Douglas R Hofstadter, (when I was about that same 20 years old, you know) that this model of clarity arose when we sat down to model how we did mathematics, and that mental labour was then written out in a series of steps (an ordered list of sorts) that we could then map to mechanical or electronic systems (binary code). You can see here how the model use of the word algorithm (as model) was lost to the outcome/s of the mental process. Lost to the “algorithms”, the lines of code, the programming/programmes that guarded data, a dragon sitting on a golden hoard.
The mental movement unites them but we don’t use it that way. That would require us to be aware of it, note it, hindsight it, communicate it.
Share it successfully to a wider audience.
A book describing all that could be transformational.
Originally written up at substack A wonderful straightedge of a book, Lorraine Daston's Rules: A Short History of What We Live By