We love to think in dichotomies: us & them, up & down, good & bad, etc. They’re part of our cultural and cognitive furniture. I'm particularly susceptible to them. The problem is that binaries, and categorization in general, are often more distracting than useful. I’ve been trying to focus on what’s between the categories, and that got me thinking about tentpoles.
Even when we don’t divide the world up into contrasting pairs, we try to partition the world into sets of things where every element is included in exactly one subset (see also mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories).
An obvious example in my world is the problem of regulatory classification. In the words of David Bach & Jonathan Sallet (2005; full references to this paper and other citations can be found at the end):
In the eyes of most regulators and industry observers, correctly categorizing VOIP provides a shortcut through regulatory uncertainty. Yet precisely this is the problem with classification. . . . In short, while efforts to categorize new VOIP services according to existing regulation have taken center stage, the growing disjuncture between the political objectives reflected in these categories and future policy priorities could break open the debate and throw VOIP into even greater regulatory limbo.
The problem (or one of them) is that categories aren’t part of the given world; we generate them after the fact. For example, different languages categorize differently: unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (голубой, goluboy) and dark blue (синий, siniy) (Boroditsky, 2009). Another classic is the long-running debate over how to define species; there are at least 26 recognized species concepts. Categories are everywhere, and this page is riddled with them; as Bowker & Star (2000) point out, “Every link in hypertext creates a category. That is, it reflects some judgment about two or more objects: they are the same, or alike, or functionally linked, or linked as part of an unfolding series.”
I’ve realized I need to work harder to see the space between categories. An image that has helped me is to see the category labels as tentpoles: while they’re essential to creating the space in a tent, but they’re just a means. The volume they enable to be created between is more important than the poles themselves. One can create similar spaces with different numbers and arrangements of poles; and contrariwise, the same poles can create very different spaces if they’re deployed differently. Like the poles in a nomad’s tent, one can customize the space to one’s needs (public vs. private spaces) and the settings (e.g. in the open, or against a rock outcropping).
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| Sahara desert, Morocco (pxfuel) |
Some work I’ve been reading recently plays into these images. Paul Veyne in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (1988), states his book’s hypotheses as follows:
At each moment, nothing exists or acts outside these palaces of the imagination (except the half-existence of “material” realities—that is, realities whose existence has not yet been accounted for and which has not received its form: fireworks or a military explosive, in the case of gunpowder). These palaces are not built in space, then. They are the only space available. They project their own space when they arise. There is no repressed negativity around them that seeks to enter. Nothing exists, then, but what the imagination, which has brought forth the palace, has constituted.
This idea that value is in the space between is very old. I’ll close with Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu:
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.
Coda: More on binaries and categories
We think in terms of oppositions like life & death, raw & cooked, nature & nurture, male & female, us & them, etc. etc. Life’s clearly not that simple, and thinkers like Hegel and Lévi-Strauss have proposed third terms to resolve or mediate such oppositions. (Of course, I love the fact that Lévi-Strauss thought that trickster of many Native American mythologies acts as a “mediator”) In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche introduced the Dionysian and Apollonian as in an eternal struggle in people’s lives; to him, the greatest art (and specifically, the tragedies of Aeschylus) integrates the two.
At the moment, the polarities I’m obsessing about are logos and its complements like mythos, and pathos and ethos; and objectivity and subjectivity.
There are other ways to think about these partitioning categories. One is as the axes in a multi-dimensional space, with the wrinkle that in spaces where each axis corresponds to the real number line, each is a continuum along the (-∞, +∞) poles. Two axes span a 2-dimensional space, three a 3-dimensional one, and so on; the analogy with tent-poles is obvious.
One can also see each category as a different perspective. A study of worldviews (cf. Koltko-Rivera, 2004) offers many flavors. Stephen Pepper, for example, talked about six “world hypotheses”: animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism; in Florence Rockwood Kluckhohn’s scheme, an individual’s worldview is defined by their orientation with respect to six concerns: human nature, mutability, “man-nature,” time, activity, and relationality. A weakness of perspectives is that they presume a pre-existing object (in the previous examples, “worldview”); however, one can argue as Veyne does that the very terms used to describe reality are what creates reality: the poles create the tent, and the tent’s configuration determines which poles are at the center vs. the sides.
Update 16 Feb 2022: Copy edits.
Bibliography
Bach, D., & Sallet, J. (2005). The Challenges of Classification: Emerging VOIP Regulation in Europe and the United States. IE Working Paper WPE05-19. http://cee.ie.edu/sites/default/files/The%20challenges.pdf
Boroditsky, L. (2009). How does our language shape the way we think? Edge.Org. https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Revised edition). The MIT Press.
Koltko-Rivera, M. E. (2004). The Psychology of Worldviews. Review of General Psychology, 8(1), 3–58. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.1.3
Veyne, P. (1988). Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (P. Wissig, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo5971512.html
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