On My Mind III
Analogy is destiny
Just how that destiny works out, in
detail, is open and surprising. And if we are fortunate, analogy not only shows
some sort of similarity but it illuminates each moment of the analogy,
suggesting ways we might think anew about each of those moments.
I have spent much of
career teaching in departments of city and regional planning, and so the city
is often on my mind. How can the city and the urban be so versatile we might
ask? I do not believe that our ideas of city and urban are so vague that they
will analogize to anything. So, what is the nature of that object or identity,
the city, that allows for its multifoldedness? When an analogy proves remarkably
productive, we want to ask, what are the deeper features of these objects that
enable their presenting themselves in the moments of the analogy. The question
that then remains, the big one, is what is it about the city and the urban that
enables this theatrical presentation. I suspect it is the density and variety
of people and peoples, the dynamics of migration and technological change, and
the intense economy of cities--all make a contribution.
Analogy may be destiny,
but we also want to understand the sources of that destiny. In effect we are
trying to escape the limitations of our methods and insights. This, of course,
is the nature of scholarly and scientific and philosophical work.
1. What is really
going on?,
is the motivating question for me. Of course, any answer will have to take into
account the level of explanation one believes is the mechanism or motive for
what is apparent and complex. Often, what we might want is a more general
theory, or, conversely, one that is more microscopic. Some of the time, we want
an explanation at the same level as the phenomenon, but one that makes us aware
of features to which we had paid insufficient attention or did not realize were
relevant. Some of the time, a poignant analogy is effective—albeit one will
then ask, Why should this analogy be so powerful?
A
second aim, already mentioned, is: We are seeking “an identity in a manifold
presentation of perspectives or profiles” (to borrow the phenomenologists’
theme). We have many ways of looking at a situation, and we want to know just
what it is that allows it to be so presented to us in those many ways. We may
also have analogies of analogies, what are called syzygies, and again we are
asking what is it about these phenomena and situations that allow for their
presentations and the analogies.
Any such account of what
is really going on, or of just what
is that identity that allows for
multiplicity, is likely a way-station on the path to what might be called
deeper or more generic understanding. As far as I can see, we might say, It is turtles all the way down, when our
understanding is analogized to turtles sitting on turtles. On the other hand,
we find it deeply satisfying to go further in our explanations.
Genericity and
reductionism only go so far. Usually we have specific concrete particular
phenomena we want to understand and we need to get our hands quite dirty in the
nitty-gritty of the particular. Whatever immanence we might find in the novelty
of the phenomena and the world, that novelty appears in particular cases. And
what we call creativity is instantiated in particular cases or situations or
objects. Only later might we attribute such novelty to more general or
reductionist accounts, once we find that identity in the manifold of its presentations
of the novel and surprising.
I do not believe that
the city is anything we want it to be, that perspectives are subjective and, it
is argued, they are arbitrary, that your standpoint is probative. Rather, how
does our notion of a city allow for multitude presentations, and how is each
presentation illuminating for the others.
The ancients would say
that what we are seeing in analogy is poesis,
that is, acts of making, acts that transform and continue the world, knowledge
made manifest in its production. If we are presented with challenging
circumstances, much as a Special Forces soldier might experience in the field,
we rise to the occasion and through poesis
discover possibilities we had not imagined. In effect, what was thought to be
impossible or too hard is shown to be possible and straightforward, albeit we
have now taken our situation in ways we had not previously imagined. Put
differently, we might have the “practical skills and acquired intelligence
responding to a constantly changing…environment”—what is called métis.[i] There is a Japanese
phrase, translated as Luck is in the
Leftovers, namely, we find our luck by working through to the very end.
So, Alexandre
Grothendieck, a mathematician who flourished in the 1950s through the
mid-1970s, would, through the most general of reconceptualizations, make it
possible to understand mathematical situations that were heretofore too hard.
In effect, his vision and mathematical structures, were like a rising tide that
swept away the barriers along the shore.[ii] He claimed that what he was doing was “stupid,”
deliberately ignoring all the previously hard-won details, so as to find a more
deep and general theory.
Another
poignant analogy is improvisational
theater. Apparently impossible situations as presented to the actors by a
member of the audience are made tractable just because the actor allows her
emotional capacity and her chosen role to come to face head-on with what makes
little sense, by listening very carefully to the description of that situation
and so hearing much more than the audience member intends, and she allows her
intelligence to go to work on what is presented rather than on what she might
prefer to have been presented. Improvisation works when the actual challenges
are taken on in their full strength and one finds ways of meeting those
challenges rather than slinking away from them. What is crucial is that one
acts in the moment and one listens deeply and then reacts without overthinking.
It is a matter of trusting one’s experience. As we shall see, the kinds of
decisionmaking I shall be describing will be apparently speculative and
intuitive, but it is well-grounded as well. It would seem to be in the end
beyond conventional analysis, but that does not make it less rational—albeit a
different sort of rationality.
For
many of these analogies, if they are not to be very rough metaphors, actual
technical details matter, whether they are mathematical or technological or
descriptive. Then the analogy is substantial, and might be rigorously
suggestive when we want to think about a city, rather than its being a
throwaway—even if in its employ the analogy is not checked in detail. For
example, mathematical chaos theory is often mentioned in social science, but
actually as a throwaway. Rarely is a social mechanism offered that would
produce chaos as the theory prescribes, that is, an equation. The terms-of-art
are employed with an aura of mathematical accuracy, but in fact they are
impurely metaphoric, and do not at all depend on the structure of chaos as
technically understood. Now, such a bastard analogy itself may well be helpful,
but it has nothing to do with actual chaos theory, and could be employed
without any such mathematical account actually existing.
Analogy is surely destiny, but a specific
analogy may not be our destiny in the particular realm we occupy. So we search
for better analogies, ones that allow us to discover what is really going on.
Mathematical and physical models have proved productive, especially as they
have been supplemented by computational and biological models. At the same
time, there are ways of being in the world that demand very different
analogies, not to be encompassed by mathematics and natural science.
The examples I have
employed, the analogies I have described and analyzed, are practical, used all
the time by technical experts. Moreover, these analogies are employed thoughtlessly,
as the way the world is. Only when we are misled by the analogy, that is, our empirical
experience denies the analogy we are using, do we then stop and think, and
either check if our sense of the world is accurate or see the analogy for what
it is, a very rough and tentative metaphor, and decide we have been misled by
our thoughtless thoughtways. To be thoughtless is no sin if you can get away
with it and the world delivers on your expectations. But if the convenient
analog proves to have misled us, then we might return to thinking, to find a
better analogy, one that will serve us well as did the misleading one, and will
not mislead us in new situations.
more to come
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