semiotics
∞
Babel, in Paraphrase
Recently I have been wandering my city with a camera and sketchbook, looking at the ways our use and design of spaces speak about what we value.
Seeing often requires unhasty attention, or training, or both. I can't claim to have training in architecture, but I am trained in semiotics, and I suppose some of my grandfather's years as a toolmaker and my father's career as an engineer have rubbed off on me. Whatever the cause, I care about design.
The ancient story of the Tower of Babel (found in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis) is also a story about design, and semiotics.
It's also a story worth unhasty attention. One hasty version goes roughly like this: everyone on earth shared a common language and common vocabulary. The people, moving to a new place, decided to build a tower to heaven, so they baked bricks and began to build. But they did not finish it; their language became many languages, and they spread out in many directions, divided from one another.
The Bible has a number of stories like this, short tales that seem to be making some simple and clear point. But as we ponder them unhastily - which is what theologians often do - we become more aware of how little we know. The obvious becomes the obscure, and the quotidien becomes mysterious.
A simple story becomes an invitation to slow down even more, and to consider. Selah, it says to us.
At first blush, the story of Babel appears to be a story of human hubris, and of God frustrating that hubris. It could be a simple parallel to the expulsion from Eden, or to the flooding of the earth in the story of Noah: there are limits, and if you transgress those limits, you will make your lot in life worse.
Lately, as I've slowed down my reading, I've been noticing something else: the bricks. The Bible does not often talk about the ethics of technology. There are passages that speak of things like the ethics of weaving, of sharing resources, and of the production, preparation, and distribution of food. But there are not many passages that name a particular human invention in the context of ethics. One of those inventions is named in several places: bricks.
The passage in Genesis 11 talks about bricks as a substitute for stone. When I was young I often worked as a stonemason and bricklayer. That experience may be what draws me to this passage. Bricks are easy to make, and easy to cut. We can standardize them, which makes building walls much faster.
The downside of bricks is related to their upside: they're easy to break, or to cut, or to erode. They don't last as long as stone, and if they're not well-reinforced, they are not as resilient against natural disasters. Some ancient stonemasons figured out how to cut and lay stones that can be jostled by an earthquake and then settle back into position, but bricks often collapse when the ground shakes beneath them. Bricks are easy to use, but they are not as reliable as stone. In comparison to many kinds of stone, bricks are a short-term investment.
This makes me wonder: what was the problem with the Tower of Babel? Was it the fact that the people were trying to build a tower to heaven? Or was it that they were trying to build one badly, or cheaply, or fast? Was it a problem of hubris, or a problem of materials and design? Genesis 11 does not answer that question directly. It leaves it as an open question for us.
Which is just what we should expect, if Genesis 11 conveys any truth. Think about this: how would this story have been told before the Tower of Babel was built? If the story is right, then before the Tower was built, the story would have been told in a language everyone would understand. But now that we have tried to build it (whatever that means) the story must be told in words that are confused, for people who are scattered and divided and who do not share vocabulary.
To paraphrase this: somehow, our use of bricks resulted in making it harder to connect with one another. And it's not clear how.
But somehow, it is a story that hundreds of generations have found worth repeating, even if our words fail to say with precision why that is so.
Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the way we continue to build walls of bricks. And what those bricks say about us, and what we value.
Since writing this, I started reading Christopher Alexander's book, The Timeless Way of Building, recommended to me by some friends in Sioux Falls. This line in particular stands out as serendipitous:
Seeing often requires unhasty attention, or training, or both. I can't claim to have training in architecture, but I am trained in semiotics, and I suppose some of my grandfather's years as a toolmaker and my father's career as an engineer have rubbed off on me. Whatever the cause, I care about design.
The ancient story of the Tower of Babel (found in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis) is also a story about design, and semiotics.
It's also a story worth unhasty attention. One hasty version goes roughly like this: everyone on earth shared a common language and common vocabulary. The people, moving to a new place, decided to build a tower to heaven, so they baked bricks and began to build. But they did not finish it; their language became many languages, and they spread out in many directions, divided from one another.
The Bible has a number of stories like this, short tales that seem to be making some simple and clear point. But as we ponder them unhastily - which is what theologians often do - we become more aware of how little we know. The obvious becomes the obscure, and the quotidien becomes mysterious.
A simple story becomes an invitation to slow down even more, and to consider. Selah, it says to us.
At first blush, the story of Babel appears to be a story of human hubris, and of God frustrating that hubris. It could be a simple parallel to the expulsion from Eden, or to the flooding of the earth in the story of Noah: there are limits, and if you transgress those limits, you will make your lot in life worse.
The passage in Genesis 11 talks about bricks as a substitute for stone. When I was young I often worked as a stonemason and bricklayer. That experience may be what draws me to this passage. Bricks are easy to make, and easy to cut. We can standardize them, which makes building walls much faster.
The downside of bricks is related to their upside: they're easy to break, or to cut, or to erode. They don't last as long as stone, and if they're not well-reinforced, they are not as resilient against natural disasters. Some ancient stonemasons figured out how to cut and lay stones that can be jostled by an earthquake and then settle back into position, but bricks often collapse when the ground shakes beneath them. Bricks are easy to use, but they are not as reliable as stone. In comparison to many kinds of stone, bricks are a short-term investment.
*****
This makes me wonder: what was the problem with the Tower of Babel? Was it the fact that the people were trying to build a tower to heaven? Or was it that they were trying to build one badly, or cheaply, or fast? Was it a problem of hubris, or a problem of materials and design? Genesis 11 does not answer that question directly. It leaves it as an open question for us.
Which is just what we should expect, if Genesis 11 conveys any truth. Think about this: how would this story have been told before the Tower of Babel was built? If the story is right, then before the Tower was built, the story would have been told in a language everyone would understand. But now that we have tried to build it (whatever that means) the story must be told in words that are confused, for people who are scattered and divided and who do not share vocabulary.
To paraphrase this: somehow, our use of bricks resulted in making it harder to connect with one another. And it's not clear how.
But somehow, it is a story that hundreds of generations have found worth repeating, even if our words fail to say with precision why that is so.
Maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with the way we continue to build walls of bricks. And what those bricks say about us, and what we value.
*****
Update:Since writing this, I started reading Christopher Alexander's book, The Timeless Way of Building, recommended to me by some friends in Sioux Falls. This line in particular stands out as serendipitous:
"But in our time the languages have broken down. Since they are no longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down: and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live." (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 225
∞
Guns and Aesthetics
A number of times in the last few months the issue of aesthetics and firearms has arisen, notably in connection with the recently proposed ban on what are called assault weapons. I say "what are called assault weapons" because it's difficult to decide which weapons should be included in that category. The assault weapons ban tries to categorize them by asking whether they meet at least three out of a short list of criteria.
Many guns are semiautomatic - that is, each pull of the trigger fires a round and then loads the next round - without being assault weapons. Most of the duck hunters I know use semiautomatic shotguns, for instance. Their guns only hold three rounds (as stipulated by the law that governs the hunting of migratory waterfowl) but those three rounds can be fired in rapid succession, and most of the guns can be quickly made to hold more than three rounds - usually up to five. Some small-game guns that fire .22 caliber rounds (one of the smallest and least powerful bullets commonly available) are also semiautomatic; and I'd guess most of the handguns sold today are semiautomatic as well. But few of these guns qualify as assault weapons.
Critics of the ban point out that for this reason (among others) the criteria for assault weapons are merely aesthetic. Banning guns on the basis of aesthetics will do little or nothing to solve the problem of gun violence, they say.
I haven't looked into the statistics, but I would guess that most gun deaths in the United States involve semiautomatic handguns and not assault weapons.
Which leads me to the question of whether the aesthetics of guns matters.
My answer is not about what laws we should enact, but about whether aesthetics matters anywhere. And the answer is that every one of us knows that aesthetics always matters. It affects the kind of car we drive, the clothes we wear, the way we wear our hair. Even those who profess that they don't care about these things almost certainly do care. Everyone who studies advertising and marketing knows; songwriters and filmmakers know; everywhere we turn we find a human environment in which we have made important choices on the basis of how the visual aspect of our belongings and edifices makes us feel.
The Best View In Warsaw
When the Nazis were retreating from Warsaw they dynamited the city, block by block, leveling nearly every building in the city. After the war, the proud Poles gathered photos and paintings and rebuilt the city, brick by brick, to look just as it had before the war. No doubt this was much harder than simply rebuilding, but they knew: aesthetics matters. It is the expression of people who will not be put down. Visual culture can be used to rally a nation, to embolden hearts, to renew hope.
Years ago, when I was working in Poland, one of my students offered to take me to the top of the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw. The building was a "gift" from Moscow, and the building rises from a huge footprint to a soaring tower that overlooks all of Warsaw. When we reached the top and gazed out on the city, Tomek said to me "This is the best view in all of Warsaw."
"Because the tower is so tall that you can see everything?" I asked.
"No," he quickly replied. "It's because this is the only place in Warsaw where you can't see this damned tower!" The building was a "gift" but it was also a visible reminder of Russian Soviet power. Everything from the wide footprint to the dizzying height to the architectural style was an aesthetic expression of domination. The Soviets knew: aesthetics matters. Visual culture can be used to intimidate and oppress.
You Are A Sign
Regardless of what you think of the proposed ban on certain kinds of guns, this should be obvious. Go to a gun shop or a gun show sometime and ask yourself whether aesthetics matters in guns. It might not matter enough to inform our laws, but the guns we make and buy for ourselves ought to tell us something about what is in our hearts. The thing we hold in our hand, like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, is something we project to others, a word we are silently and visibly speaking. As I have written before, the gun is not a neutral element in this speech. It is a word we speak, but it can be a word that speaks us, too. Let me tell you what every polyglot knows: some words in some languages open up new thoughts that you didn't think to think in your native tongue. The technologies we deploy may be the same; as may the visible aspect of those technologies. Nothing is ever neutral; as Peirce said, everything - everything - is a sign, and we ourselves become signs as well.
This doesn't answer the question of what kind of laws we should have. I think that question is secondary to this question: what kind of people should we be?
Many guns are semiautomatic - that is, each pull of the trigger fires a round and then loads the next round - without being assault weapons. Most of the duck hunters I know use semiautomatic shotguns, for instance. Their guns only hold three rounds (as stipulated by the law that governs the hunting of migratory waterfowl) but those three rounds can be fired in rapid succession, and most of the guns can be quickly made to hold more than three rounds - usually up to five. Some small-game guns that fire .22 caliber rounds (one of the smallest and least powerful bullets commonly available) are also semiautomatic; and I'd guess most of the handguns sold today are semiautomatic as well. But few of these guns qualify as assault weapons.
 |
| Which ones are the dangerous ones? |
I haven't looked into the statistics, but I would guess that most gun deaths in the United States involve semiautomatic handguns and not assault weapons.
Which leads me to the question of whether the aesthetics of guns matters.
My answer is not about what laws we should enact, but about whether aesthetics matters anywhere. And the answer is that every one of us knows that aesthetics always matters. It affects the kind of car we drive, the clothes we wear, the way we wear our hair. Even those who profess that they don't care about these things almost certainly do care. Everyone who studies advertising and marketing knows; songwriters and filmmakers know; everywhere we turn we find a human environment in which we have made important choices on the basis of how the visual aspect of our belongings and edifices makes us feel.
 |
| They aren't just vehicles for our bodies, but for all the other things we wish to convey as well. |
The Best View In Warsaw
When the Nazis were retreating from Warsaw they dynamited the city, block by block, leveling nearly every building in the city. After the war, the proud Poles gathered photos and paintings and rebuilt the city, brick by brick, to look just as it had before the war. No doubt this was much harder than simply rebuilding, but they knew: aesthetics matters. It is the expression of people who will not be put down. Visual culture can be used to rally a nation, to embolden hearts, to renew hope.
Years ago, when I was working in Poland, one of my students offered to take me to the top of the Palace of Science and Culture in Warsaw. The building was a "gift" from Moscow, and the building rises from a huge footprint to a soaring tower that overlooks all of Warsaw. When we reached the top and gazed out on the city, Tomek said to me "This is the best view in all of Warsaw."
"Because the tower is so tall that you can see everything?" I asked.
"No," he quickly replied. "It's because this is the only place in Warsaw where you can't see this damned tower!" The building was a "gift" but it was also a visible reminder of Russian Soviet power. Everything from the wide footprint to the dizzying height to the architectural style was an aesthetic expression of domination. The Soviets knew: aesthetics matters. Visual culture can be used to intimidate and oppress.
You Are A Sign
Regardless of what you think of the proposed ban on certain kinds of guns, this should be obvious. Go to a gun shop or a gun show sometime and ask yourself whether aesthetics matters in guns. It might not matter enough to inform our laws, but the guns we make and buy for ourselves ought to tell us something about what is in our hearts. The thing we hold in our hand, like the car we drive and the clothes we wear, is something we project to others, a word we are silently and visibly speaking. As I have written before, the gun is not a neutral element in this speech. It is a word we speak, but it can be a word that speaks us, too. Let me tell you what every polyglot knows: some words in some languages open up new thoughts that you didn't think to think in your native tongue. The technologies we deploy may be the same; as may the visible aspect of those technologies. Nothing is ever neutral; as Peirce said, everything - everything - is a sign, and we ourselves become signs as well.
This doesn't answer the question of what kind of laws we should have. I think that question is secondary to this question: what kind of people should we be?
∞
Drawing Outside The Lines: Marginalia and E-Books
I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I stopped using it several years ago. The books I most wanted weren't (and many still aren't) available for it, and it was hard to use it as I like to use books.
You see, I am an annotator. I draw in books.
Everyone told me when I was a kid that you should NOT draw in books. But I can't help it.
Last summer my sister-in-law, seeing me read with a pencil in my hand, asked me if I always do that. I hadn't really thought about it as unusual until then, but yes, I guess I do. That way my reading becomes a kind of conversation with the book. The author writes, and I write back.
It is becoming a bit easier to annotate e-books, but we have a long way to go, perhaps because we have structured our computers to think in a linear fashion. Computers think in stoichedon, in lines and ranks, like soldiers in formation. Which is a good way to organize information, but it's not the only way, because it's not the only way lines can move. "Idea mapping" or "mind mapping" is another way. This can be expanded to three dimensions or more, as well. Think of a way a line can move and you have another way of taking notes.
Over the years I have devised my own shorthand for note-taking. For some things, I borrow old conventions of abbreviation and expand them, like this:
And so on. Some words, like selah, have entered my annotative vocabulary because they say so much so briefly. (See footnote 3 here, about "selah.")
At times, I've also found it helpful to invent new symbols, pictograms of whole ideas, sentences that can be written a single picture. I can do these with a flick of the pen, but they're much harder to incorporate into a digital text.
I draw lines from one page to the next to connect ideas. I circle names when they first appear in a text so that I can find them again. I draw vertical lines beside paragraphs to quickly highlight long sections of text. A double line emphasizes that highlighting.
I draw maps, and sketch pictures. Sometimes I write in other languages, other alphabets, when those other languages get the idea down more quickly, or more carefully. I haven't written music in books, but I don't see why you couldn't.
And all of that becomes an icon of a conversation. The annotated page is no longer text; it is an image, and a symbol of a set of relations between ideas and authors.
When I was in grad school, José Vericat (who did not know me from Adam) kindly gave me a list of books belonging to Charles Peirce and housed in one of Harvard's libraries. Peirce died in 1914, but his lines and words still illuminate his reading of those pages.
Another bit of scholarly generosity was shown to me a few years ago when I was working on my book on the environmental vision of C.S. Lewis at the Wade Center. The director, Christopher Mitchell, learned of my interest in Lewis's reading of Henri Bergson. Mitchell brought me Lewis's copy of Bergson's Évolution Créatrice to peruse. Every page is covered with marginalia written by Lewis as he recovered from his war injuries.
I think my favorite part of Thomas Cahill's book, How The Irish Saved Civilization, was seeing the facsimiles of marginal paintings - including some racy self-portraits - by monks who copied books in Ireland in the middle ages.
My point in this long blog post? Keep drawing in books. And maybe I'll get another Kindle someday if they can figure out a way to make it easy for me to draw outside the lines. And to preserve those drawings for posterity.
You see, I am an annotator. I draw in books.
Everyone told me when I was a kid that you should NOT draw in books. But I can't help it.
Last summer my sister-in-law, seeing me read with a pencil in my hand, asked me if I always do that. I hadn't really thought about it as unusual until then, but yes, I guess I do. That way my reading becomes a kind of conversation with the book. The author writes, and I write back.
It is becoming a bit easier to annotate e-books, but we have a long way to go, perhaps because we have structured our computers to think in a linear fashion. Computers think in stoichedon, in lines and ranks, like soldiers in formation. Which is a good way to organize information, but it's not the only way, because it's not the only way lines can move. "Idea mapping" or "mind mapping" is another way. This can be expanded to three dimensions or more, as well. Think of a way a line can move and you have another way of taking notes.
Over the years I have devised my own shorthand for note-taking. For some things, I borrow old conventions of abbreviation and expand them, like this:
could - cd
would - wd
should - shd
something - s/t
everything - e/t
nothing - n/t
because - b/c
nevertheless - n/t/l
And so on. Some words, like selah, have entered my annotative vocabulary because they say so much so briefly. (See footnote 3 here, about "selah.")
At times, I've also found it helpful to invent new symbols, pictograms of whole ideas, sentences that can be written a single picture. I can do these with a flick of the pen, but they're much harder to incorporate into a digital text.
I draw lines from one page to the next to connect ideas. I circle names when they first appear in a text so that I can find them again. I draw vertical lines beside paragraphs to quickly highlight long sections of text. A double line emphasizes that highlighting.
I draw maps, and sketch pictures. Sometimes I write in other languages, other alphabets, when those other languages get the idea down more quickly, or more carefully. I haven't written music in books, but I don't see why you couldn't.
And all of that becomes an icon of a conversation. The annotated page is no longer text; it is an image, and a symbol of a set of relations between ideas and authors.
When I was in grad school, José Vericat (who did not know me from Adam) kindly gave me a list of books belonging to Charles Peirce and housed in one of Harvard's libraries. Peirce died in 1914, but his lines and words still illuminate his reading of those pages.
Another bit of scholarly generosity was shown to me a few years ago when I was working on my book on the environmental vision of C.S. Lewis at the Wade Center. The director, Christopher Mitchell, learned of my interest in Lewis's reading of Henri Bergson. Mitchell brought me Lewis's copy of Bergson's Évolution Créatrice to peruse. Every page is covered with marginalia written by Lewis as he recovered from his war injuries.
I think my favorite part of Thomas Cahill's book, How The Irish Saved Civilization, was seeing the facsimiles of marginal paintings - including some racy self-portraits - by monks who copied books in Ireland in the middle ages.
My point in this long blog post? Keep drawing in books. And maybe I'll get another Kindle someday if they can figure out a way to make it easy for me to draw outside the lines. And to preserve those drawings for posterity.