Of Kony and Constellation

I did some digging – I’m not the Oxford English Dictionary, and I can’t say for sure that any particular use of “constellation” marks its first appearance in the sense that interests me here – Eugen Gomringer‘s Constellations (from 1954 onwards, example above) may be relevant in an avant-garde way– but my search brought me to a post by Liz Danzico at Bobulate titled Celestial History, in which Liz wrote:

Teaching constellations is an exercise in storytelling. You see, dots, these anonymous light encrusted patterns, must be memorized and categorized, and it’s only through stories that one can make sense of them. Starting with the north star, and systematically creating relationships in the winter sky among Hercules and Sagittarius, Libra and Polaris, we told tales. We’d trade stories on top of the old stone building in the middle of dark campus until late into the night. Creating these stories, giving Hercules a relationship to Cassiopeia — true or not, good or not, believable or not, it didn’t matter — what mattered were that patterns were found and marked.

Marking patterns and making content accessible through stories is what we do. And often, still, when we begin, we’re in the dark.

*

This post in turn lead Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket to write a quick note of praise, Explosions in the sky, which drew a comment from Tim of Short Schrift that said:

After the Copernican revolution, a constellation isn’t even a constellation. Instead, it’s a two-dimensional flattening of a three-dimensional reality. Actually, we should probably say a FOUR-dimensional reality. The light from stars at varying distances, leaving their sources at various times in the distant past, gets mistaken, from our earthbound point-of-view, as a simultaneous two-dimensional pattern.

BUT! That distortion, that accident, produces something extremely powerful — both imaginatively and practically.

Take “constellational thinking” and apply it to something besides stars in space. Let’s say — history.

Over here, you’ve got the Roman Republic, over there, the French Revolution. Distant in time, distant in geography, no kind of causal proximity let alone a relationship between them.

But bam! Slap them together. View them as a single event, a collapse of time.

Now you begin to see the French Revolution the way part of the Revolution saw itself, as an explosion of the continuum of history.

Now — and sorry if I slow-played this — you’re in Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Now you’re performing a genuinely three-dimensional nonlinear reading of historical time.

Consider that process, spelled out in the phrases “Distant in time, distant in geography, no kind of causal proximity let alone a relationship between them. But bam! Slap them together. View them as a single event, a collapse of time.”

Consider how that “fits” the same Arthur Koestler model of thinking I was on about yesterday in my post Nancy Fouts and the heart of the matter, in which I described:

the “release of cognitive tension” that occurs when some form of analogy, similitude, overlap allows the mind to join conceptual clusters from two fields in a “creative leap”

*

Well, I’m not along in finding this sort of thing useful. Here’s bethr from Mixed Bits writing on tumblr:

Constellational thinking

Omigosh… I’ve been using this phrase in numerous conversations for at least 4 years, usually when attempting to describe how I seem to process information and think, in contrast to the linear thinking which is more prevalent and encouraged in my profession. I’ve never heard anyone else use this phrase…it excites me that others have applied the same phrase and metaphor to the same idea and have articulated it much better than I ever have.

*

And Walter Benjamin:

Page 2 of 3 | Previous page | Next page