11.22

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors
By ROBERT SAPOLSKY

"Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath."
...
"This neural confusion about the literal versus the metaphorical gives symbols enormous power, including the power to make peace"

Full article here:


The implications of this article highlight my interest in language, and why I focus on its use in particular as an emancipatory device. It was while apprenticing with a shaman (2007-09) I began my interest in the power of metaphor to create physical realities. I knew I would never make a proper shaman, as the guides I kept getting were writers (notably: ee cummings and Simone de Beauvoir), and they would tell me to get out of my trance and go write, already. However, through the process of study, I saw numerous instances where people would use Shamanic techniques to access what I would describe as images or metaphors. I was always more blown away by the images, or stories that people would share after journeying, rather than assuming any kind of other-worldly presence. The main content of the journey would result in a metaphor shift (the bear came to me and gave me a tool that lets me adopt a mode of being that I desire). In a very powerful and physical way it enables someone bodily to inhabit a different story. I saw lifelong physical problems disappear after the right body-metaphor was discerned and a ritual was performed to release it.

In a similar vein, I have been thinking about my use of fabric when thinking about language and its connection to sovereignty. As a kid learning to sew my Grandmother would often condemn my fabric choices saying “Those types of fabric don’t work together. Their qualities are too different, they will pull apart if you try and put them together”.
As I have begun to develop my own practice in textiles, I have learned through the ingenuity required by quilting that any type of fabric can be joined to any other type of fabric, as long as you can figure out an appropriate stitch.





Like William Morris I am for a slowness in production as a form of emancipation, as a protest against the alienation of capitalist labour. I am for a language that acts as a stitch, one that will allow the union of two very different, seemingly incompatible ways of being, or views of the world.


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Last night I had a dream about the Reformation, except it was happening now. The IMF had come to London, and were assessing how it could save the economy. I waited in a cement parking lot with my friends. There were parallel meetings of academics, trying to figure out how to counteract whatever damage the IMF was planning.
Conclusions were reached, and we read the newspaper to find out what they proposed as a solution. I was horrified to discover that they didn't want to change anything other than getting rid of the zoo. I was weeping, saying "There aren't any animals left in the city anyway, and now they're taking away the only ones we have." I wondered if perhaps it wasn't such a terrible thing, as the animals were in cages, so at least they would be free. But then my friend reminded me that meant the animals would be killed, as an animal bred in captivity cannot survive when released in the wild.
I wondered about the dissolution of trade borders, and through this the dissolution of Nations, and how this is returning us to the way things were before the Reformation. Since the transformations of that time were in large part brought about by new technology, I wondered what technology it was that contributed the most to the current state of affairs.
In my dream the answer was Facebook. If it has not created it, FB at least exists as the largest symptom of the dissolve of the individual, of the border between public and private, which was one of the largest components of Modernity begun in the reformation (for more about this, read Richard Senet - The Fall of Public Man). Facebook allows for the simulation of an individual identity, while all components of the individual are collected by data agencies, and lumped into 'interest groups' or marketing categories. It is the biggest actor in this drama, mimicked in many smaller ways in the rest of culture. The notion of individuality is a romantic residue that is purely symbolic, exploited by the market. Even philosophy is positing the self as a construction that evolved to serve the function of allowing one organism to communicate with another, that can be dissolved by meditation or psychedelic drugs. (Thomas Metzinger)

I realized I was sitting in a cement parking lot, philosophizing, and that I wasn't getting any rest by dreaming about this. I made a note to remember these thoughts (I have to remember: ZOO, FB, IMF), and finally slept dreamlessly for the rest of the
night.


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