Knife-Edge Systems.

These are systems which, like the almost-brain again, almost work, indeed which do work on occasion, but which nevertheless do not work every time on demand, or when activated. Though chaos theory and fuzzy logic have just begun to take a look at such systerrns,l° in general, traditional mainstream science still rules them out completely; experiments must work on every occasion, they must be repeatable when carried out by different people, and complete stability within the bounds of reasonable possibility, must be secured for the word "scientific" to be used at all.

This idea of something being "almost real" (collectively strong imaginative forces) as against something that is hardly real (collectively weak imaginative forces) holds the key to one of Fort's main ideas: that there are no completely false systems, just as there are no completely "real" ones. There are embryo states, which are possibilities, not falsehoods; there are partial truths that are only half-lies and so on. This fundamental Fortean axiom allows for fuelless en­gines, the almost-brain and a host of other "damned" things, to at least enter the spectrum of possibilities at the low-energy end of the scale of imaginative realisations. This is quite the opposite view of established science, which even today is still locked in absolute yes/no, real/false paradigms.

Fort thus created a much-needed general theory of the anomalous event which is largely devoid of the antiquated and largely degenerate apparatus of goat's feet, rituals, and spells, although in speaking of such things, we must not commit the Fortean sin of exclusionism, and create our own system of "damned" or excluded things. In Fortean terms, "not working" means, as we have seen in the case of the fuelless machines, and the absent brain again, not working very often, or even not working very well. Typical of such "damned" and "rejected" systems are the ouija board or astrology; these might be called knife-edge systems in that parts mightwork in part, as almost-discarded para­digms. Like batteries, such things may still have a little cultural life-sap in them.

Thus Sonnabend sees scientific truths not as necessarily true or false, but as faltering things in a withering context of dying cultural approximations. It goes almost without saying that a lot of people would not want a fuelless engine, just as they would not want a partial brain. But the fact that they patently do not enables Sonnabend to see poltergeists for example, ghost rappings, appearances, as system-strains rather the "normal" versus the "par­anormal," and the forces which determine what thing is more or less "real" than anything else are forces in a kind of war within the collective imagination. Hence Sonnabend has got rid of the absolutely wretched idea of the "paranor­mal" versus the "normal".

For him, the Amazing Randi would have just as much difficulty in showing that what he did was not "paranormal" as Geller would have in showing that what he did was "paranormal". The onus of proof is therefore equal for either party, for in a Fortean world model, everything is a question of intermediate degree:

“Some trees have buds that are not permitted to develop. These are known as dormants, and are held in reserve, against the possibility of a destruction of the tree's developed leaves. In one way or the other, there are reservations in every organism. We think of inter-mundane isolations that have been maintained, as once the Americas were kept separate from Europe, not by vast and untraversable distances, but by belief in vast and untraversable distances. I have no sense of loneliness in thinking that the inorganic sciences that are, by inertia, holding out for the isolation of this earth, have lost much power over minds. There are dissatisfactions and contempts everywhere."

Thus the interesting consideration from his point of view is not whether a thing will work or not, but by how much. In this sense, he is a most non­Aristotelian philosopher, and this kind of thinking is very near to what today we call fuzzy thinking in computer programming. In these Fortean terms, whether something works, or is "real" (to any degree), or is true, or false (to any degree), depends on what might be called the state of the institutionalised forces within fields of belief, governed bythe state of the prevailing resources of the imagination. Therefore Fort replaces what we usually experience as "real" by allowance schedules consisting of fields of belief sanctions that are anything but uniform and static. He sees the imagination as an almost-live animal grazing on such fields. Such a belief-animal chews the cud of the entire complex of social, psychological, and intellectual formulation, and is a creature

Knife-Edge Systems

“... that is working out its development in terms of planets and acids and bugs, rivers, and labour unions and cyclones, politicians and islands and astronomers. Perhaps we conceive of an underlying nexus in which all things, in our existence, are different manifestations - torn by its hurricanes and quaked by the struggles of Labour against Capital - and then for the sake of balance, requiring relaxations. It has its tougher hoaxes, and some of the apes and some of the priests, and philosophers and wart hogs are nothing short of horse play; but the astronomers are the ironies of its less peasant­like moments - or the deliciousness of pretending to know whether a far­away star is approaching or receding. This is cosmic playfulness; such pleas­antries enable Existence to bear its catastrophes. Shattered comets and sickened nations and the hydrogenic anguishes of the sun- and there must be astronomers for the sake of relaxations."

Under a Fortean microscope there appears to be not a single scrap of the world which could be called mundane; because when we look at it closely, what we would like to call the ordinary or the conventional splits, cracks, falls apart as great gaps in knowledge, received experience, and factual perception, are revealed by Fort's relentless Sonnabend. Both the explanation and the mun­dane, in his terms, emerge as pure control. As such, both are pieces of cultural camouflage, and to see anything purely in terms of them is rather like seeing British life and culture solely in terms of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.