Error Gorilla

Your Face: Sean (Face 378)

July 03, 2009, 10:23pm

The Laws of Meta

1. Iteration is reiteration. If you remove the time element, all language acts are reiterations of each other, in a continuous circle Humperson called the “great totentanz of signification”. Humperson did not discount the possibility of original communicative acts, but declared that the first time a new thought occurred it was, by virtue of its novelty, incomprehensible and incommunicable, and therefore not a communicative act at all. He therefore consigned original communicative acts to a parallel universe, the mysterious “world of origins” — a place completely barred to mere mortals. “Originality exists,” he said, “— but not for us.”

2. The great are devoured by the small. Since every statement is a summary of a pre-existing statement, knowledge is doomed to shrink and wither endlessly. Each summary loses some of the value of the one before it, while seeming to add to its value. Summaries are like banknotes, promises to pay the bearer on demand which, asserts Humperson, cannot be fulfilled, because a summary is a shorter, less valuable version of the thing it refers to, just as promissory paper is less valuable than gold. A demand for the full payment of implicit or promised meanings would cause a semantic “run on the banks” which, warned Humperson, would cause the whole system to collapse. Luckily, quipped Humperson, “one summary does not make a swallow”.

3. No critical statement is exempt from its own strictures. Every statement which seeks to summarize and critique a pre-existing statement (in other words every statement except for those in the mysterious “world of origins”) will tend to exemplify, in itself, the things it deplores in the original statement, thus opening itself up to the same critique, and so on, recursively. And incrementally, for a summary of a statement tends to exemplify its faults more succinctly and intensely.

4. Dependency is destiny. Since the “world of origins” is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent — doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases). Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.

5. The soul is soulless. In later years, perhaps because of the onset of deafness and other ailments, Humperson became something of a mystic, a dabbler in “meta-metaphysics”. He changed his name to Noman R. Humperson, explaining that moving the “R” in this way drew attention to a secret message within his name: “No man are human person.” By this, Humperson understood that no-one is any more human than anyone else — or, in fact, human at all — just as no statement is any more meaningful. Influenced by Adorno’s idea that “in the end, soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption,” Humperson declared he had “discovered” a fifth and final Law of Meta. To extract the soul from something, he said, was to extract the soul from something. Summaries and translations — precisely because they try — must inevitably fail to capture the essence of the things they start from. Since summaries, in attempting to capture essence or soul, inevitably discard it, and since all statements are summaries, there is no such thing as soul, except insofar as soul is the wish, precisely, that there should be soul — the wish, in other words, that zero and one should come to be the same number. This wish became the basis for a sort of mathematically-based religion Humperson was working on at the time of his death.

Click Opera: Proposal for a Wikipedia page about Norman Humperson, father of “the laws of meta”

July 03, 2009, 9:22am

fuckyeahdepechemode:

timdobrovolny:

Depeche Mode - Never let me down again

Live in Berlin 10/06/2009

July 03, 2009, 12:12am

This footling idiot discovers the only medium through which he might grasp what the hell Mills is on about.

July 02, 2009, 8:41pm

jhnbrssndn:

First the bad news: contrary to langer’s speculation and, indeed the laws of nature, I can confirm that Mills is real. So now the rest of us guys just have to resign ourselves to the cold, hard fact that we’ll never be as intelligent, as funny, as attractive to women, as wise beyond our years; and that it’s already been done, and and even if we could do it, we would only ever be Buzz Aldrin to Mills’ Neil Armstrong (“Second comes right after first!”).

The good news is that Mills is his blog made flesh, but in a really good way.  The man is not only fizzing with insightful and thought-provoking ideas and observations, but is also funny, engaging and fascinated by other people.  As it has been with the other Tumblrers I have met IRL, I am honoured to call him a friend.  Especially as he paid for lunch.

There’s really little more to add, except that I very nearly mounted Mills there and then. He really is intellectual catnip for the boys. I’m going to nominate him for a Boner Party entry. Not that I want you to feel left out, John. I mean, I would… but I’d be thinking about Mills.

June 29, 2009, 6:05pm