30.9.06
Metaphors out of time...
Can the use of a metaphor fail because it is anachronistic? In other words, is it possible to explain successfully an historic event using a literary metaphor that has no resonance with the time described or the worldview of its actors? Would we say a cave man saw through a magnifying lens, for example (although one can imagine a drop of water achieving the same feat)?
I am thinking in particular of an anthropology lecture that suffered a few weaknesses, one of which consisted of the use of mathematical fractals to explain the sorts of violent fractures and re-assembly of identities that everyone likes to say are endemic in the Balkans. A good 20 minutes or so were devoted to seeking correspondence between fractals (as something nearly phantasmagoric) and civil war .. or incipient civil war. The metaphor was not meant to evoke but was asserted as the thing itself, i.e. the ethnic divisions and civil conflicts that plague the Balkans are not merely a result but a living breathing example of a mathematical object, one whose rules are (a) abstract enough to be incomprehensible to most people living through ethnic civil strife and (b) on some level deterministic (although in a random and non-determined manner because that is the nature of fractals).
This was as troubling to me as the debate within a philosophy class on whether a glass of orange juice poured into the ocean undoes Marx's theory of surplus value, but will leave that to another day.
My problem with the use of the fractal as a metaphor is that for those living through the events, fractals have no meaning as a descriptor. And I think on some level we determine our myths to suit our actions and in re-playing certain stories, there are mitigating or underlying reasons therefor. There is a reason a metaphor employed in the Balkans in a given time has salience. And there are many such metaphors and fully developed narratives -- and they are indescribably volatile. So how do mathematical concepts employed as literary metaphors help us to further our understanding of the Balkans? Is this not then another literary ploy -- one grafted on top of all the other literary devices used by nationalists to further their venal ends? Is this not then another secondary means of incantation? We can all nod our heads and be no further the wiser.
Okay, the interesting part concerned the idea that the fractal is identical no matter the scale .. and one certainly does see village-level events (for example, a rape) transmogrified in no time into a crime against the nation. Or the revanchist tendencies to uphold the zadruga or patriarchal law as models for state development. But these are artifices .. intentional constructions with political and economic real-time motivations (as opposed to the sense of tragic history that is promoted as unavoidable fate).
Perhaps she is seeking a new model of analysis but frankly I'd rather lean on political economy. Having researched the war in Yugoslavia in grad school, I would think any scholar on the Balkans would be able to finger any number of real causes .. in the case of Yugoslavia, for example, a dive-bombing economy (gas crisis/commodity price depression/debt) leading to the failure of Tito's vision of a progressive and industrialized future married with draconian structural adjustment, which then sets the stage for nationalist movements as a power-play by vying minorities attempting to capture greater national resources.
If one wants to examine the role of literary metaphors, one could consider the ways in which the underlying political and economic developments led — not inexorably but because of specific actions coinciding with specific conditions — to a reassertion in the public imagination of patriarchical rural family (and the zadruga as its embodiment) and violent "private law" purposely conflated with the nation. In a nutshell. But at least I have asserted that it was the very power of metaphor corresponding with real political and economic developments that in a sense produced the war. And the war was a production — in a kind of grotesque dramatic Hollywood sense. Is it fair to use Hollywood as a descriptor? I would argue that the violence was very much a media tool. Sad because real lives were destroyed.
One cannot forget too the ways in which historic events are evoked in later times as explanations for current woes. And so reliance on ideas (so often newly fabricated) of "tradition" or a future course as pre-determined by the past are common recourses during times of penury etc. Our histories are our myths in that they reflect the past onto the future (what was must be). The mistake of any historian would be to accept such a deterministic vision, to be seduced by the myths .. and then fail to understand how converging interests/differences lend salience to those myths.
The greater mistake perhaps though is that of the anthropologist who forgets to look at history. And so I must return to this same lecturer and her second error -- which in a funny way spurred the first. As I recall (the essence .. some of the details might be hazy), after carefully conducting ethnography in a region of Bulgarian and Greek "Macedonia" she discovered two anomalies. In the first instance, there was a group of people who refused to identify themselves as belonging to a particular ethnicity in a place where identity is greatly weighted. In the second instance, there was a people who were spoken of with loathing -- I believe as a result of their collusion during World War II -- but their members were nowhere to be found.
What a little research in the archives might uncover is whether the two groups were in fact the same. In other words, do those who claim they have no special heritage do so because their heritage is in fact tainted in the eyes of the greater society? Perhaps this would be seen as a betrayal of the interviewees .. but at the very least the question should have been asked.
Lastly, I can only imagine that the lecturer used an extemporaneous metaphor -- one drawn perhaps from the current-day language of critical theory, information design or mathematics (or even the technical sublime) -- to explain historic dynamics not just in Bulgarian Macedonia (or Macedonian Bulgaria) but the entirety of the Balkans because she simply forgot that she herself exists in a moment of history, as do the groups of people she studies, but that her own path and those of her subjects do not neatly converge.
I am thinking in particular of an anthropology lecture that suffered a few weaknesses, one of which consisted of the use of mathematical fractals to explain the sorts of violent fractures and re-assembly of identities that everyone likes to say are endemic in the Balkans. A good 20 minutes or so were devoted to seeking correspondence between fractals (as something nearly phantasmagoric) and civil war .. or incipient civil war. The metaphor was not meant to evoke but was asserted as the thing itself, i.e. the ethnic divisions and civil conflicts that plague the Balkans are not merely a result but a living breathing example of a mathematical object, one whose rules are (a) abstract enough to be incomprehensible to most people living through ethnic civil strife and (b) on some level deterministic (although in a random and non-determined manner because that is the nature of fractals).
This was as troubling to me as the debate within a philosophy class on whether a glass of orange juice poured into the ocean undoes Marx's theory of surplus value, but will leave that to another day.
My problem with the use of the fractal as a metaphor is that for those living through the events, fractals have no meaning as a descriptor. And I think on some level we determine our myths to suit our actions and in re-playing certain stories, there are mitigating or underlying reasons therefor. There is a reason a metaphor employed in the Balkans in a given time has salience. And there are many such metaphors and fully developed narratives -- and they are indescribably volatile. So how do mathematical concepts employed as literary metaphors help us to further our understanding of the Balkans? Is this not then another literary ploy -- one grafted on top of all the other literary devices used by nationalists to further their venal ends? Is this not then another secondary means of incantation? We can all nod our heads and be no further the wiser.
Okay, the interesting part concerned the idea that the fractal is identical no matter the scale .. and one certainly does see village-level events (for example, a rape) transmogrified in no time into a crime against the nation. Or the revanchist tendencies to uphold the zadruga or patriarchal law as models for state development. But these are artifices .. intentional constructions with political and economic real-time motivations (as opposed to the sense of tragic history that is promoted as unavoidable fate).
Perhaps she is seeking a new model of analysis but frankly I'd rather lean on political economy. Having researched the war in Yugoslavia in grad school, I would think any scholar on the Balkans would be able to finger any number of real causes .. in the case of Yugoslavia, for example, a dive-bombing economy (gas crisis/commodity price depression/debt) leading to the failure of Tito's vision of a progressive and industrialized future married with draconian structural adjustment, which then sets the stage for nationalist movements as a power-play by vying minorities attempting to capture greater national resources.
If one wants to examine the role of literary metaphors, one could consider the ways in which the underlying political and economic developments led — not inexorably but because of specific actions coinciding with specific conditions — to a reassertion in the public imagination of patriarchical rural family (and the zadruga as its embodiment) and violent "private law" purposely conflated with the nation. In a nutshell. But at least I have asserted that it was the very power of metaphor corresponding with real political and economic developments that in a sense produced the war. And the war was a production — in a kind of grotesque dramatic Hollywood sense. Is it fair to use Hollywood as a descriptor? I would argue that the violence was very much a media tool. Sad because real lives were destroyed.
One cannot forget too the ways in which historic events are evoked in later times as explanations for current woes. And so reliance on ideas (so often newly fabricated) of "tradition" or a future course as pre-determined by the past are common recourses during times of penury etc. Our histories are our myths in that they reflect the past onto the future (what was must be). The mistake of any historian would be to accept such a deterministic vision, to be seduced by the myths .. and then fail to understand how converging interests/differences lend salience to those myths.
The greater mistake perhaps though is that of the anthropologist who forgets to look at history. And so I must return to this same lecturer and her second error -- which in a funny way spurred the first. As I recall (the essence .. some of the details might be hazy), after carefully conducting ethnography in a region of Bulgarian and Greek "Macedonia" she discovered two anomalies. In the first instance, there was a group of people who refused to identify themselves as belonging to a particular ethnicity in a place where identity is greatly weighted. In the second instance, there was a people who were spoken of with loathing -- I believe as a result of their collusion during World War II -- but their members were nowhere to be found.
What a little research in the archives might uncover is whether the two groups were in fact the same. In other words, do those who claim they have no special heritage do so because their heritage is in fact tainted in the eyes of the greater society? Perhaps this would be seen as a betrayal of the interviewees .. but at the very least the question should have been asked.
Lastly, I can only imagine that the lecturer used an extemporaneous metaphor -- one drawn perhaps from the current-day language of critical theory, information design or mathematics (or even the technical sublime) -- to explain historic dynamics not just in Bulgarian Macedonia (or Macedonian Bulgaria) but the entirety of the Balkans because she simply forgot that she herself exists in a moment of history, as do the groups of people she studies, but that her own path and those of her subjects do not neatly converge.
