somewhere between a draft for the story line of a movie and listening to Žižek

From Words to Numbers: Narrative, Data, and Social Science (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences, Series Number 22)

I read the 336 pages of Franzosi’s book as if it was somewhere between a draft for the story line of a movie and listening to Žižek (with his characteristic “philosophical bitchiness”). In a sense I am kind of like him (“emotional”), but even though I “envy” him/some of his stories, since I had never daughters who would give me mindful instances of such loving pleasure, I would still not see the point of making it “personal”. Why would people care about me not liking to comb my hair (I would rather shave my head), seeing it as an afeminated waste of time?, about not even owning a TV set, not being on social media and liking to sniff my girlfriend parts? Franzosi has not only post-mortem back and forths with Giordano Bruno, but speaks to “the people of 2520” (are we really going to make it that far?) and to AI robots. He even writes a “farewell to the reader” and, no, I didn’t find an “ode to the idiots who’ve read my book”. At times I felt like dropping it. I thought he was just joyfully making fun of his readers in quite a protagonistic way.

Many of Franzosi’s citations I found very interesting for my own reasons. Unamuno is also one of my favorite poets and he used stanzas from him one of which I didn’t like, agree with (animals are definitely sentient! (309)). Thank you! His not only metaphoric, but meta-metaphoric style of writing shamelessly cites other authors to back his points’ aspects in an encyclopedic way without actually explaining the big questions that started his points. Exempli gratia: one of his recurrent themes was “silence” (et/versus “emphasis”). Is he talking about what Quine calls “unspoken statements” (“Word and Object”, page 12)? Politicians, police and such are the masters of “silence” (their surrogate for -smarts-, they call themselves “intelligent” …). Our rulers know their thing about “silence”, no wonder they both dislike Trump and have persecuted Assange unrelentlessly.

When will the book about Fascism come out? More interestingly I would like for Franzosi to take the time to look into parallel narratives of repression (or “social control”, as “good Christian” “freedom lovers” call it). The kinds of political narratives underpinning ideologies deserve more study. A good example are the kinds of narratives being aired about Angela Merkel before and after Nordstream 2. So Russia feeds economic powerhouse Germany with more and cheaper gas, but simply because USG didn’t like the idea they easily mess with Germany and the whole of Europe even motivating the start of a war and once again (this time for a change!) “freedom loving” a country/people right in Europe! I also wonder if anyone has taken the time to study the media narratives from differing ideologies during “the winning end of the cold war by ‘Western democracies’” culminating with der Wende in East Germany.

The relation of texts/narratives to “reality” and how it influences people’s minds is a topic which deserves study. There have been three moments in the history of mankind in which we briefly stopped being “the V monkey”. Ancient Athens when they fought off invasion/enslavement by the hugely more powerful Persian empire for which they saw they needed to invent “democracy”, Florence during renaissance times when they invented “capitalism” and when Russia pretty much single-handedly beat the … out of Nazis (yes, the “later narratives” have been that “‘America’ won WWII for Europe” (as they told Solzhenitsyn!), computer wiz Alan Turing did by cracking the enigma machine, …). How did texts/narratives play into those historical moments? and, if they didn’t, then, what is the point of trying to “find”/rationalize any relevance in them?

I have always had a hard time taking seriously people who call inquiries into social matters “science” (meaning they share in the status of “-empirical- sciences”). Apparently as part of his confusion about what science is and means, Franzosi mentioned that there is also “silence and emphasis” in scientific reports (7) without qualifying his statement! (Did he mean the social narratives within the scientific reports wining for funds and such?) Lying and manipulating doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when it comes to -empirical- sciences. Anyone could set up and experimental rig and expose the nonsense. Now, psychologists say that “they watch behavior”!?! To me even computer related topics are more like carpentry. I don’t see the “science” in them. As a corpora research kind of tech monkey I totally misinterpreted the title of his book. I think of words kind of like pointers (the algorithmic construct in the C and C++ languages) in a reference global corpus of all that is done (not just written /said, kind of like Simmel) not as counting numbers. Many “social scientists” as they call themselves, use Math and concepts they adopt from the empirical sciences in ways that would strike as odd to actual scientists cultured on such matters.

Yes, there were alchemists (as part of the incipient “omne omne est”, “lege, lege, relege, ora, labora et invenies” mindset of the Zeitgeist, prior to the scientific revolution), but as Lennon used to sing “Imagine!” if Newton would have mixed his alchemical obsessions with his investigation about “natural philosophy” in his Principia. To me one of the best books ever written was Euclid’s “Elements” and, as in the case of Shakespeare, we don’t even know much about those authors.

Large part of the book is dedicated to coding. I would like to see a list of coding kinds of ambiguities and conflicts. From the corner from which I see reality coding is a dangerous form of cleverhansing. Why did Franzosi spend the time and funds coding when he seemed to have the actual texts in electronic form? Why not studying those text banks as corpora? Also, most importantly, “when you lose the original words”, you lose the web of connections among them which structure (their generality („das Hegelsche Allgemeine”), that is) are very important in determining and describing actions and motives. Where could I find the texts in Russian and Inuit that Popp and Colby used for their research about folktales?

I “feel” that, like in music, conceptual “silence” is meaningful. My three Ls are Spanish, German and English (shamefully enough, the three of them European) and (probably because I could say I grew up in a music school, I am not a visual person) even the space character doesn’t feel the same in my three languages (not even within the same paragraph in the same language). People who have read my poetry (hsymbolicus wordpress poems “lies …”) have asked me why do I leave blank spaces and at times obviously avoid exploiting basic adjective and predicative functions in language, why do I write in such substantive, “unfinished” ways … I wouldn’t exactly know why, but “silence” may have to do with it.