[FRIAM] the racist woo peddler

[Steve Smith]

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