I made a joke on twitter the other day about NFTs and Keats and a friend asked for a translation. I went for a walk and thought about it and realized I had more thoughts than fit in a tweet so here we are.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as I understand them are digital artifacts that point or refer to something else (a work of art, potentially a concept). Similarly, there’s a way of thinking about language where words are arbitrary “tokens” that refer or point to the actual things we’re talking about.
Poetry, and especially metaphor, mess with the literal version of this way of thinking about language because it uses language in intentionally ambiguous ways. One example of this is Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” which concludes:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
from John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn“
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
There are several literary theoretical approaches that have tried to adopt the systematic rigor of mathematics and apply it to the study of literature and human society. I associate this sort of thinking to the varieties of techno-utopianism we see from time to time (e.g., we’re gonna build a city with blockchain!)
Opposed to that impulse is one that says we can never arrive at an all-encompassing system and will always have to make due with incomplete and uncertain systems (and maybe that’s a good thing). Going back to Keats, he wrote in a letter to his brothers about “Negative Capability” which he described as being “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” and
Suggested listening: Hard Drive by Cassandra Jenkins