Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe

The Logic of Likeness

Paul North

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781942130499
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

An imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and art A butterfly is like another butterfly. A butterfly is also like a leaf and at the same time like a paper airplane, an owl's face, a scholar flying from book to book. The most disparate things approach one another in a butterfly, the sort of dense nodule of likeness that Roger Caillois once proposed calling a "bizarre-privileged item." In response, critical theorist Paul North proposes a spiritual exercise: imagine a universe made up solely of likenesses. There are no things, only traits acting according to the law of series, here and there a thick overlap that appears "bizarre."Centuries of thought have fixated on the concept of difference. This book offers a theory that begins from likeness, where, at any instant, a vast array of series proliferates and remote regions come into contact. Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe follows likenesses as they traverse physics and the physical universe; evolution and evolutionary theory; psychology and the psyche; sociality, language, and art. Divergent sources from an eccentric history help give shape to a new trans-science, "homeotics."

1. Everything is like everything in some respect.

This may not be the first thing you think of when you think of likeness, but it is usually the second. First there is an immediate spark, “this — like — that.” Likeness strikes and wakes you, if only for a moment, from your ontological slumber. The strike expresses itself in an awkward syntagm: “This here like that there.” Suddenly and without warning, a far thing comes close. The world gets edited, a gap gets spliced out, one character shimmies up to another. A thing, distant in space from another thing, overlaps with the other thing in one or more of its qualities. After the first impact of a likeness, though, whenever you should consider the matter further, if you take even one further step toward the phenomenon, thinking through its ramifications or its potential origins, you arrive at a realization. Everything is like everything in some respect. Upon arriving at this premise, it becomes much easier to dismiss likeness as a principle. The premise is much too general to be useful — it seems to say “It’s all about the same.” “Nothing stands out.” As if to confirm this, when I want to say that something is totally unique, I say, “the likes of which I never saw,” which means, conversely, everything else would be the likes of which I have seen, many times over.

Where you can go from this most general premise is unclear, if already at the very beginning of an inquiry into likeness you are stuck in the perspective of everything. What can be learned from such a position, which is all positions and no position at all? “Everything” says a lot, and saying so much, it says very little. The premise that everything is like everything in some respect seems empty or nearly empty, since on first hearing, it sounds like a merely descriptive statement. It sounds like: given time enough and energy enough, if you sorted painstakingly through everything there is, you would find that each thing in the universe is like every other thing in at least one way, and often probably more. And the more likenesses you catalog, the harder it becomes to distinguish anything from anything. An experiment in indistinction — nothing escapes the leveling, dulling gauze of similarity.

The expanded premise, everything is like everything, is not only a reference to a set of things, however; it also carries a specific sense. A difficulty lies in the semantics of the premise; an opaque spot makes it hard to connect its sense to the idea it is supposed to give sense to. “Is like” is never really said of everything altogether in its generality; it is said of something specific in its specificity. Likeness characterizes the detail — concrete, empirical, particular — and since no detail is specified in the general premise, therefore no trait is concretized, perceived, or singularized in the phrase “Everything is like everything in some respect.” Insofar as it refers to any and all details, the phrase refers to none in particular and thus does not correspond to the sense of likeness.

This dilemma is worth unfolding. A single detail blocks out the All, but the All blocks out every single detail. Because it addresses “everything,” the premise denies that there are details, whose existence as details, that is, as not general, is what allows likenesses to form in the first place. Another way to say this is that a likeness world cannot be described with the word “everything.” Even if it were demonstrably true, even if you had time enough, if somehow you could show that the proposition “Everything is like everything in some respect” held, a description this general would fail its object, which is unfailingly specific, concrete, empirical, and temporally limited each time it happens. Further, if you did go one by one through all the phenomena, you would also find, beyond the incommensurability of the detail with the All, a huge, if not infinite set of unexpected juxtapositions. Likenesses need not be restricted to categories familiar to us. If everything is like everything, given that this phrase makes any sense at all, one butterfly is like another butterfly, no doubt, and it is also true that an elephant is like an atom bomb, a praying mantis like a lover, a word like an object — strangeness blooms in likeness’s garden. And yet the strange is soon pruned. Where it describes a potential infinity of peculiar partners, the premise, everything is like everything in some respect, comes to look banal. Where the likeness of an elephant to an atom bomb can be counted as one among a pleroma of likenesses, strangeness gets flattened into normalcy, irregularity into regularity. In turns, then, banal, absolutely detailed, and indeterminate, the premise is also often, under a slightly different perspective, self-evident. It makes immediate intuitive sense that everything should be like everything in some respect, and like other immediate intuitions, it offers little information. It tells you what you already know.

You are like your parents — hardly worth the breath to say it, a self-evident truth and a piece of cultural knowledge no one would think to question — with an even more peculiar and less remarked upon addendum that your parents are like their parents, and so on. In truth, there are as many instances of this self-evident fact as there are new generations; each level adds little information to the initial flat truth. Right there where it is like its progenitor, the new generation is not new. Likeness is the not new in the new, which is to say again, it is a phenomenon of little information. Now more than ever, this type of low-information phenomenon needs to be studied.

Another example lies even closer to home and more deeply embedded in our cultural understanding. A butterfly is like a butterfly — this may be the definition of self-evidence, a tautology or a mere identification. The definition has its complexities — this kind of sentence may serve two distinct semantic functions. As Gertrude Stein’s favorite sentence does — “A rose is a rose is a rose” — it may indicate a vivid, singular experience, not comparable with any other, the most incomparable phenomenon that can only be named, never explained. A rose is unlike anything other than itself, and refuses paraphrase. Or it may serve just as easily to indicate a complete mundanity and total uniformity. A rose is not in any way unlike itself, a rose uniformly rose — nothing new in it and never will be. Further, every rose is uniformly rose.

How to reconcile these two meanings, the most singular singularity and the most general generality? Like any being, a butterfly is totally unique and purely general at the same time, a paradox that philosophical millennia have yet to dissolve. It is butterfly, nothing but butterfly, all butterfly and purely butterfly — absolutely like itself, and in being absolutely like itself, there is nothing else that it is like. If something else were this much like it, it would be subsumed into the butterflies and lose its distinction. It would lose its distinction and become a butterfly, which, it is understood, is indistinct with respect to itself.

It hardly counts as knowledge to say that a butterfly is like itself, and no more so to say this butterfly is like that butterfly. Knowledge is when we say: this butterfly is a nymphalid whose habitat stretches from Japan to India. Knowledge is when we use Latin, Kallima inachus, when we move the locus of distinction to the genus. Knowledge is when we add a description that holds in all cases: in the dry season, Kallima behaves in the following way. It flutters, appearing to fall onto a tree branch, where, when its wings are closed showing their brown undersides, it is the spitting image of a dead leaf. When you want knowledge, avoid the obvious, the banal, the detail poor, and the indistinct — and that also means avoid what is too much like what you already know, both what is too like itself or too like every other. Old knowledge is already no longer knowledge. At just this point, at the point of deep habituation or almost perfect likeness of one moment or one entity to the next, the nearest, oddities begin to emerge. Within banal, almost uniform, old, obvious knowledge, blossoms the bizarre.

So it is with Kallima: a butterfly may be like itself and also like a leaf.¹ This would be a category error if we didn’t first tame the suggestion by giving it an official name, “mimicry,” a purpose, “anti-predator adaptation,” and an etiology, natural selection — all of which purportedly belong to the butterfly and not to the leaf, making the likeness into a semblance and thereby changing the category from a homeotic to an ontological one. A mimic is a semblance of another being, not its sibling or clone or child. Suspend for a moment, however, the will to being, cause, purpose, and name. Take the statement on its face. This is often the best way to find/make likenesses, to take statements on their face. Butterfly and leaf are alike; they enliken one another. From this position, other potential likenesses suggest themselves. Take a bumblebee, a school bus, and a journalist. They are alike in yellowness. Alike in carrying and transmitting important things. Alike in punishing you when you misbehave. In one light, the resemblance of the radically nonsimilar is encompassed by the premise, everything is like everything in some respect. At first dull, banal, and so on, the premise turns interesting again. Where is the limit to its extension? What phenomenon, real or imagined, ideal or material, will not be touched by it? The premise leads you down strange alleyways, to wild gardens of mismatched and antithetical things; and nevertheless, when you extend the strings of unexpected likenesses out to infinity, in order to encompass truly everything, no matter how strange they seem at first glance, heaped together in a virtually horizonless scape, again the world comes to seem flat, features vanish into indistinction, and the strange dissolves back into the ordinary.

Out of this effect you could formulate a rule, one that points to a contradiction to be analyzed more carefully later. The more striking a likeness, the farther it will spread out along its pathways, pulling more and more phenomena into its purview; the farther it spreads out, the closer it comes to generality; the closer to generality, the less striking any single likeness seems; the less striking any single likeness seems, the less like likeness the phenomenon becomes and the more like indeterminacy or even sameness. Likeness, from a far perspective, presents a self-diminishing tendency. From bumblebee, school bus, and journalist, we could, for instance, move to a string of all yellow things, including all things said to be yellow, like journalists but also like cowards, and then we could move further on to the string of all colored things, and then to the delirious series of all colored and uncolored things that are alike in being colorable, and so on — until in the end, once again, we have very little information.

Between a banality of sameness and a delirium of difference likeness likes to hide. This may well have been the problem it posed to theory all along, from the time of the earliest European ontologies up to empiricism and current scientism. When other fundamental phenomena are around, likeness hides. The basis for this is that you cannot tell whether it tends toward uniformity or toward difference. It is not different enough from uniformity to be picked up by epistemic frameworks. The question underlying the tension or confusion that likeness suffers, caught between difference, tending toward absolute difference, and uniformity, tending toward absolute uniformity, is this one, I believe: are likenesses all alike? This question is really asking whether there is one special quality called “likeness,” that is shared out equally among like things or, on the other hand, whether you can identify anything unique about likeness at all. Is likeness a distinct mode, or does it name something that participates in all modes and in which all modes participate?

When you say everything is alike, you see the world as sunk into an undifferentiated, homogeneous gel. When you affirm “Everything is like everything,” the premise may therefore repulse you, as though likeness were an invitation to indifference, an excuse for mysticism or depression unto death. With regard to difference and sameness, you can take the premise in two ways. That everything is like everything in some respect could mean all things are alike in a similar way. This picture is gray. Like a cloud on a cloudy day in a month of rain, it depresses our faculties. The premise, however, does not say “Everything is like everything in the very same respects.” Nor does it say everything is alike in one single respect, as would be the case with substance ontology. Assume the respects in which everything is alike are multiple. Multiple respects, multiploid likenesses — one thing could then be like many others in various of its (and their) respects. This picture is motley. Like a shapely cloud among multiform clouds in a blue sky, it may invigorate us. How can the decision be made between the two pictures, gray and motley, depressing and invigorating? This may be the biggest problem for the initial stage under the force of the preliminary premise.

To see the conflict more vividly, take the case of what evolutionary biologists call “mimicry.” A butterfly is like a leaf. It must be conceded that the leaf that the butterfly is like is also like another leaf. And so it must be asked: are the two likenesses, butterfly-leaf and leaf-leaf, alike? Yes and no. Are the respects in which butterfly is like leaf the same as those in which leaf is like leaf? Yes, and again, no. Things don’t become less complicated here. Look at one aspect of the organism, the undersurface of Kallima inachus’s wings. In the dry season, the wing underside can be called “brown,” as can the leaf; indeed all the leaves around it can be called “brown” as well (Figure 1). Are these browns the same brown? In part, no — because color in nature is not a pointlike datum, but a mottled, marbled, or streaked group of overlapping stains, as unlike as alike, spreading over an expanse, over wing, up and down leaf, through the patina of another leaf and another, such that the color name “brown” is first a nominal designation and second also a wish for uniformity in an object. “Brown” is an approximation for the purposes of classifying beings, a comparison to an ideal standard. Here is a good moment to note what will be emphasized again later — that a name and a phenomenon are not best described as matching, but rather as alike in some respect.

In the series leaf-leaf-lepidopter, you observe three motley, stained expanses. They do not match, and they don’t have to match to be alike. Lay one over top of another, and some points roughly correspond. Others do not. Etiology has a role to play here — brown in the wing underside is an adaptive strategy, and so let’s say that mutation, adaptation, and selection are the brushes that paint the wing to an extent that, from a certain distance, to a certain eye, it will not be perceived as unlike the leaf’s brown. Likeness in this case is a bare minimum. “The lowest possible likeness so as not to be perceived as very unlike by a hungry bird,” you could say, for instance. In the leaves, in contrast, brown is more like a failure of adaptation — a nonadaptive, status-quo response to drought, a limited succumbing to the dearth of water in the dry season, a sacrifice of greenery while the tree conserves its life. The leaf brown may be more thorough, less artful, a maximal brown of death, as opposed to the minimal brown of the life adaptation of the butterfly, which is, you could say, an evolutionary decoration, as opposed to the leaf’s loss of evolutionary color. To be sure, the mechanisms for producing color are also incompatible in leaf and wing.

Figure 1. Kallima Butterfly. Plate II in Animal Coloration by Frank Evers Beddard. London, Swan Sonnenschein & co., 1892.

All of this is apparent, and yet it shows, when you move further into these sorts of phenomena with an ear for likeness, that the objects, leaf, leaf, and lepidopter, are alike in similar respects and they are alike in unlike ways. From a certain distance, in a certain frame — later it will be given the name “atmosphere” — the three nominally separate items, nymphalid and two leaves, approach each other in color, where they are alike in like respects to a particular depth of analysis. From one distance, “brown” is a point at which the three distinct beings become indistinct. Yet within the colors — brown, brown, brown — there are also undoubtedly subtle and not so subtle unlikenesses across any fraction of any expanse that we call only for the sake of efficiency “brown.”

1.1. Some likenesses are alike in a like way, and some likenesses are alike in unlike ways.

That is, the respect in which something is like is not the only determinant of likeness. Likeness also knows manners or ways. Leaves and butterflies are alike in respect of body and, in certain cases, in respect of color, and yet color likeness (respect: brown) and body likeness (respect: leafiness or wingyness or wingyleafiness) do not share a manner. Color, for example, is a likeness in the way it reflects light into the eye of a predator or a scientist. The paper-thinness and specific aerodynamism of wing and leaf are alike in the way they flutter, say, in a breeze. Another way to say this is that likeness in color respec...