The Newtype Vocab #5

Repetition in difference

All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.

- The Vorrh Trilogy #1 by Brian Catling

Detail of Fulani wedding blanket from Mali superimposed on computer screen. From the cover of African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design by Ron Eglash

First of all, apologies this is coming in a day late! While I am a big proponent of decolonising and broadening the way we view and engage with time, I was hoping to get this out yesterday just as the sun was hitting its zenith in Lagos, but here we are.

I just wasn’t able to get the mental gears moving, apart from (or maybe because of) the fact that I have been pretty busy this past week. 

This edition of the Vocab is one that I have been looking forward to writing for a while now as the topic of repetition in difference and the tool for engaging with it - divination - is something that has fascinated me for a long while now and is a big part of Newtype practice. I hope I can communicate what I find utterly fascinating about it and its many expressions.

Keep safe and take care of yourself and your loved ones. We are all grinding this out together, it is in these moments we can see the distances we are capable of moving.

P.S. Special shout-out to my editor, first of all for reminding me about the divination anecdote below, suggesting I include it and also for being hella supportive!

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Most forms of divination are rooted in a particular perception of time that is cyclical - a waveform, not a wheel. This differs from the modern idea of time as an arrow let loose by some initial creation event, heading inexorably from past to future and to be honest, it matches the way the passage of time feels like to me. Time as a series of waves continually crashing on a shore, each wave unique and different, but echoing the ones that came before. 

Repetition in difference.

And just like waves, their character shifts depending on the surrounding conditions. Sometimes calm and placid, at other times violent and full of power.

The Ancient Greeks had words for these different moods of time -

Chronos represents chronological time. The past, present and future; the next ten minutes; the next year; sequential time. Fragmented, essentially fungible - one hour as good as the other.

Kairos represents the right time. The correct opportunity to do something, that feeling you get when you want to slip out of a party unnoticed and you wait and wait and then suddenly you feel it and you walk out with no one the wiser. Kairos is time that a lot of us are aware of, but don’t think much on.

Aion is the Ancient Greek deity associated with the time that represents unbounded time. A time of myth and the ages. Where Chronos represents linear time, Aion represents cyclical time. Aion would represent the time associated with Ragnarok and Apocalypse, eras and movements.

Aion would be the time one would attune to in order to see the significance of ones actions in the “grand scheme of things”. Aion is also the time most associated with divinatory practice, even as people tend to go seeking divination to ask about chronological concerns.

For me, divination is about a deliberate engagement with the non-human and maybe even in a way, the beyond human. Not in the sense of supernatural entities - unless of course one is that way inclined - but in the sense of looking for meaning and shifts in perspective that are outside of linear human thinking, accessing that part of reality within us that usually lies out of reach - our subconscious - using that to alter our perceptions and hopefully gain insight and wisdom.

I once set up a divination as an art performance, part of a fashion installation held in Lagos for the fashion brand, Lagos Space Programme. I developed my own system and thought I would get just a few curious people and maybe some skeptics looking to cause some lighthearted trouble. What I ended up with was standing up for almost three hours dealing with a long queue of people asking me pretty personal and vulnerable questions. I look back now on the system I developed and cringe a bit at how “unsophisticated” it was, but that doesn’t really matter fundamentally. Allowing people to come out of their viewpoint a bit and giving them a non-mediated one to adopt can do wonders for generating new insight.

For those who gained some synchronicity and found insight through it that evening, it was amazing. After that, I stopped looking at it as just a private thing I engaged in and something that might be useful in creating some value for others as well.

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The Vocab

Repetition in Difference

Resonance is not about duplication but manifestation and amplification. Meaning and potential is found within repetition that occurs in difference. This is divination.

- Newtype Sutra V

Our brains evolved to discern and create patterns out of discrete stimuli, events and elements in our environment. This faculty generally operates in two modes. A focused mode, in which we narrow our concentration on a closed system, like when we are working on a problem or within a particular ruleset and a more diffuse mode in which we are looking at how things connect or fit within a wider system. 

Being able to discern and map out meaningful patterns within a wider system is also a hallmark of systems thinking and other design approaches. We have developed our capacity to do this in smaller and more specialised domains over time, but it remains a struggle to engage with wider, entangled systems.

Various forms of divination were practiced around the world and while dismissed today as an archaic, superstitious or outright false means of trying to predict the future and give meaning to present events, divination is arguably not only still practiced today, I believe it still offers something more interesting than “mere” prognostication.

Divination is a mode of sensitivity to one’s internal and external environment. To the happenings, objects and stories present and generated within them, and the patterns that are formed from their imperfect repetition. A divination system therefore becomes an instrument for reading and riding the waves of time and for mindfully engaging with the wider environment around us.

This process can trigger the transition into a form of time called Diviner’s Time, a concept put forward by Weird Studies’ Phil Ford. In Diviner’s Time, meaningful coincidences occur all around you, one after the other forming a web of meaning. The friend you hadn’t spoken to in a long time that calls you just after you thought about them randomly with a request you needed right then. Reading a book about cats and then meeting someone wearing a cat T-shirt on the train before you have a meaningful encounter. As creatures of narrative, these incidents can provide texture to otherwise mundane occurrences and in certain instances, guidance, new perspectives and opportunity if one is open to letting them.

It can also create a framework in which problems can be looked at from different angles. A quick divination session can unearth issues that have lain hidden by presenting symbolism that aligns

The divination process is not an empirical science subject to laws of reproducibility and consistency - sometimes, a coincidence is meaningless and what provided insight before, may not lead anywhere a second time. An openness to possibility and a submission of the diviner’s will to this non-human “logic” of nature and existence is simultaneously what makes this process work and also what occludes it from full human understanding and manipulation.

Context

Games and playgrounds can be forms of divination. It is no coincidence that a lot of games are either derived from or used for divination. They have their own internal logic that lies outside of broader human society and playing in these domains provides meaning and symbolism that one would not readily get in daily life, especially as games encourage experimentation and society generally does not.

Shifting ones perspective via symbolism and randomness may not directly lead to insight, but the act of shifting itself is important and can increase the occurrence of eureka moments.

Notes

Repetition in difference is a key and subtle concept. Meaningfulness is not measured in degrees of similarity but in how the difference echoes the original signifier. In practice, the repetition becomes a poetic facsimile and not a straight copy of the original and it is in that poetry that meaning can emerge.

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Library Recommendations

On Neoliberalism and the Politics of Divination - An Interview With Joshua Ramey

Weird Studies Episode 66 - On Diviner’s Time (Linked earlier in the body of the newsletter)

Rush to the Future by Richard Stanton

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Newtype is based in Lagos, Nigeria but is available to work in wisdom ecologies all over the world. If any of this resonates with you, I am available for talks, workshops, consulting and organisational strategy.

The Newtype Vocab is work produced by Yegwa Ukpo under a CC-BY-SA license. So please use it however you like without asking permission: just give credit, and use the same license for derivative works.