In the video above, Michael Levin tries to draw strong parallels between individual and collective intelligence. I am trying to understand the intuitive distinction between the compound individual and the collective society of compound individuals. I have been arguing that the terms specified by process relational philosophy: *internal *and external relations, can help us proceed with more clarity.
If the previous exploration on ORIGINS pertained to the body as a compound individual, this module will try to understand the ORIGINS of *culture *as collective intelligence. We focus mostly on the humanimal, but, as Whitehead argued, the is a kind of “society of members” all the way down the stack, which function in the same manner as culture does in the higher animals.
Here, too, are epistemic weeds to walk through.
We swim in culture like a fish swims in water; and hence, from the very beginning, culture ingresses into us. Like the flamingo who is pink because she eats brine shrimp who in trun feed on algae which contain carotanoids that turn their feathers pink, we metabolize culture and it colors our subjectivity. This is the concept of ingress. When a group of people share the same cultural patterns, like a group of flamingoes sharing the same diet, a collective pattern emerges. This pattern then is transmitted generationally, with some mutations, constituting the “water” that the new generation will swim in, and which will ingress into their subjectivity.
Cultural “tools”
The “tools” of cultural have evolved over time. We can name them as:
- Somatic - postural
- Gestural - mimetic/ritualistic
- Aural - mythic/narrative
- Text - theoretic/philosophic
- Digital - ironic/meta-aware
Each of these tools functions as a means for intersubjective resonance and social cohesion. Small tribes of primates, for example, engage in hours of mutual grooming and specific postures to maintain their social bonds--- a classic example of somatic or postural social mediation. Eventually, the postures become ritualized versions of actual touch, such that a dominant male can merely make a threat display, instead of punching a competitor. Over time, the displays become more complex rituals, and the rituals are passed down through mimetic reproduction.
Further along the evolutionary journey, the sounds associated with gestures, and the rhythmic songs accompanying ritual become complete sentences, and sentences are turned into myths and stories. We have exited the animal domain, and entered into something uniquely human. Myths and narratives shift into theoretical, analytic and philosophical text-based tools, which comes to preeminence with the Axial age mind.
Language and the Imaginary
Human collectivity is probably unique among the collectivities of the biological world in the sense that it is not just experiential – but also imagined.
In his essay Between Experience and Imagination, from the book Landscapes of Collectivity in the Life Sciences, Daniel Dor articulates a new general theory of language that positions imagination at its very core:
Language is specifically designed to allow its speakers to communicate direcly with their interlocutors’ imaginations.
Like others who borrow from Merlin Donald’s seminal work on the Origins of the Modern Mind, Dor begins with communication as experiential mimesis. Primates and other animals communicate, transmit and cohere culture through mimetic reproduction. Offspring mimic parents, siblings mimic the successful trials of others, animals even mimic humans, creating cultural novelties. Language, construed as human language, Dor claims, abandons the experiential strategy in principle:
It works with a radically different strategy, which I call instructive. It allows speakers to systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intent--- instead of experiencing it.
The speaker’s intention is to create, in the receiver’s mind, an imaginal landscape --- what we have called a shared simulation --- which suitably replaces the need for an experiential introduction. Imagine Africa, instead of bringing them there.
The receiver is expected to decode the encoded instructions, raise the required past experiences from memory, and then imagine their intersection: reconstruct and recombine them to produce a new, imagined experience.
Therefore, over time, cultural communication has become *less experiential *and increasingly imaginal.
According to Dor and Donald, it took 2 million years of cultural evolution for the mimetic communication to evolve toward imaginal communication. Mimetic communication includes pointing and eye contact, gestures and other bodily movements, tone of voice, facial expression, mimicry and imitation. These evolved in human cultures as ways to systematically direct others toward specific experiences.
With mimesis, humans could embark on a totally new project: the collective mutual identification of experience
Human mimetics revolutionized the capacity of the collective intersubjectivity, through the intentional directing of co-experience. It constructed the potential state upon which language emerged, making its invention both possible and inevitable.
It made the invention possible because experiential mutual identification is the machinery required for the construction of language. The machinery was already there before language emerged.
There was a virtual constant rise in the amount and quality of information sharing capacity, as more information tended toward overwhelm, pushing the need for increasing carrying capacity. The rise in information sharing, however, only accelerated the deepening of dependency on the collective effect--- a circle we are still trapped in today.
While experience itself as a physical event in time, was abandoned as the currency of communication, it reapeared within a new function --- experiential trust. In other words, trust between the creator and the receiver of an imagined landscape, became the most valuable currency in the creation of a cultural collective imaginary. Language continued to evolve faster than the pace of people to reveal the imaginaries for what they were --- made-up worlds, created with little or no consent. The layers of complexity, Dor writes
dragged human societies and human individuals --- their behaviors and identities, cognitions and emotions, physiologies and genetic makeups--- into a fascinating web of coevolutionary spirals.
And there was another thing: language-based imagination completely revolutionized deception.
When language is based on experiential verification, belief is hard to come by, and deception is costly to maintain. With imagination as the basis of language, the difficulties simply disappeared.
Enter The Ironic
Prior to the Ironic/Meta-aware, the story of the evolution of culture follows a single trajectory with key features that expand culture in several dimensions:
- the distance across which communication is possible
- the speed of communication
- the size of the cohered group
- the extent of geo-social space across which cohesion is possible
- the gap between the medium and the subject-to-subject encounter
- the externalization and longevity of collective memory
- the virtualization (or simulation) of information
- the ur-reality of the social imaginary
Today we are witnessing another shift, associated with *metamodernism, *that accompanies the digital age revolution. It is a shift toward the ironic, made possible because the structures of social cohesion have become transparent with the emergence of a new, meta-aware mind that sees through the old tricks and therefore places them under suspicion. Culture has come under suspicion! There is a sense that culture has played a long joke and the joke is on you. Social media is littered with this kind of irony.
The key, though, is to sort the chaff of irony from the wheat of what is behind it--- the meta-aware mind. The mind that sees the game of culture, instead of the game of culture seizing the mind. What, for example, becomes of a shared social imaginary when the people realize, for the first time en masse, that it is ***imaginary! ***? We can’t think ourselves back into another one, and just pretend we don’t know it for what is it. Neither are we glib enough to merely produce an imaginary, and delude our children into it, *for their own sakes. *Because meta-mind is here to stay, and social imaginaries are not transmitted in the same way as propaganda.
Imagine the Lyrical
Jan Zwickey makes the distinction between lineal syntax and oneiric syntax.
Lineal syntax is to narrative and philosophical discourse what linear causality is to Newtonian physics. It implies a strictly cadenced, punctuated sequence of events --- be they worldly events or propositional ones.
Oneiric syntax (which gives rise to lyric philosophy in her later work), by contrast, is “to grasp that certain types of events form families: they ‘hang with’ one another.”
Lineal syntax enters into culture and collective consciousness in the presocratic,era in Greek history with the Homeric works. Prior to the Iliad, the myths and allegories consisted of a riot of events, all happening at the same time. By contrast, the Iliad tells a historic tale, replete with heroic and tragic arcs that follows sequentially from origin story fixed in place, (Troy) and the destiny of a *named people *(the Trojans). These narratives were suitable to the Axial age mind which fixed qualities into words, and then threaded them, linearly, into analytic propositions. The modern west was born.
The Lyric doesn’t want to pontificate to large masses of people. It wants to close the gap between the subject and subject, to close the gap between the subject and the object, to create intimate “close encounters” with the particulars. It’s the particularity, the Lyric shouts,* in which the universal resides!*
What happens when the members of a collective no longer cohere around a larger, synthetic imaginary, but are, rather intensely and intensively, preoccupied with the particulars of the local here and now --- of matters (what matters) here and now?
What is Lyric Culture?
Lyric culture is based on a lyrical approach to meaning-making, language and wisdom 1 Lyric culture involves a shift in reasoning, judgment, posture, gesture and perception; requires a shift in whole-part relations; and does not distinguish philosophy from art, literality from musicality, goodness from beauty. Lyric culture promotes intimacy the way that theoretic culture promotes literacy.
Jan Zwicky, not by coincidence a philosopher, poet, and musician, is the main author associated with Lyric Philosophy, but she finds fragments of it in ancient scripts. Lyric culture is grounded in Lyric Philosophy in the same way that the modern west is situated in Axial age Greek Platonism--- it completely metabolizes the past in order to build fecund ground for the incoming.
In her essay What is Lyric Philosophy, she presents 61 bare bones, the first 10 of which are:
- The characterstic formal properties of lyric thought are resonance and integrity.
- For lyric thought, the foundations of meaning lie in the world, and in human experience of the world, unconditioned by language.
- Lyric meaning can underlie and inform linguistic meaning, but it is, at the same time, broader in scope. Its root is gestural.
- To read analytic thought sympathetically is to be favorably disposed toward the presupposition that meaning is essentially a linguistic phenomenon, although, in any given case, the exact words may not matter. The reading of lyric compositions presupposes that, in signifcant ways, meaning exists prior to and independently of language---but that if language is to bear its trace, the choice of words must be exact.
- No two of lyric thought, philosophy, and poetry are identical with one another; but neither is any one fully disjoint from the other two.
- Philosophy’s eros is clarity. The eros of lyric is coherence.
- *Lyric *in this sense deliberately sets aside historical associations with Romantic poetry in order to focus on what it is we could be meaning when we use it to characterize Vermeer interiors, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Schubert’s use of diatonic tonality, and the poetry of Ezra Pound.
- My use of philosophy, too, sets to one side a characterization that identifes the discipline with systematic logico-linguistic analysis. That use is too narrow to capture our presystematic intuitions about what philosophy is. A good deni- tion will include the thought of Herakleitos, as well as that of the best Anglo- American analysts.
- Resonance is a form of clarity
- Philosophy is thinking in love with clarity.
Further Resources
Cohorts
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Footnotes
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I will be introducing Lyric Culture in a new SEEDS essay series early next year. Also, the first 2024 retreat at Sky Meadow will include reflections on Lyric Philosophy. ↩