On 8/20/20 3:56 AM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote: > The flowery sentiments expressed in that review miss something ...
I was pointing at the specifics of Abram's language/conception of "the Shaman", merely using this review to provide a little context for his quote, thereby avoiding my own rabbit-hole style attempts to frame and contextualize. Oh well... another dimension of my hamfisted clumsiness. > something that del Toro nails here: > > https://youtu.be/DGIH2nVRcIQ?t=2585 > > It's right to talk about all this in the context of (inapt) abstraction. But > it's equally right to adopt the tendency to violently abstract if that's what > the others around you are doing. I.e. it's a kind of 2nd order violence to > avoid abstraction when everyone around you is abstract[ed|ing]. It's *tone > deaf* to advocate sensual and psychological extension when everyone around > you is abstracted, like some 60 year old complaining about kids playing video > games and chatting with their "friends" on Discord. E.g. it's tone deaf to > focus on Lovecraft's racism, to *abstract* him out of his time and place and > apply 2020 standards to his prejudices, even if those prejudices were already > archaic and due to his own abstraction from his world and contemporaries. > > On the other hand, it would be tone deaf of me to ignore how utterly > offensive and deserving of ridicule those prejudices were and are. The > flowery happy talk of that review simply doesn't get at how dissonant the ebb > and flow of abstraction <-> concretization can be. this, however, is very apt to the main thread of the discussion, and I appreciate your calling out these tensions along the abstraction <-> concretization axis. The key of my Abram reference was that a Shaman can/must straddle/span the concrete/abstract from the perspective of the community they (strive to?) serve. I think MY constant deference to conceptual metaphor and the way it aggravates your ???? is probably a reflection of our disparate ways of trying to relieve (or exploit?) that tension. I'd be interested if you recognize this as the dimension of our dissonance or if there are other significant terms in the characteristic polynomial/eigenvector of our (mis)communications? Risking to (possibly) further aggravate this dissonance, I submit that I believe that the power of conceptual metaphor may well be this precise feature... that it both concretizes (in the body of the source domain of the metaphor) and abstracts (in the implicit or explicit source<->target mapping) at the same time... I can't for an instant argue that metaphor is not easy to misuse/misapply and perhaps acutely attracts that (ab)use? My strongest criticism of metaphor (conceptual or literary) is that it can be an "attractive nuisance". Of Babies so beautiful in their ugliness and Bathwater in it's flowery scents obscuring others, - Steve - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
