Given my latest psychological principle (the latest of my ongoing attempts to intuitively understand the societal phenomena that swirl around me), “in absence of a clear advantage, expect oscillation”, I am now wondering if there is an idealized Fourier space representation of cultural movements – that is, a theoretical way to convert the categorical periods, such as “modernism”, “classicism”, “baroque”, etc., into actual quantities and then to transform those quantities into frequency space for analysis. It makes no sense, and yet it verges on the edge of making sense because it seems the sort of thing an omniscient entity could do – to objectively quantify the similarity between two historical periods. It isn’t like the comparison has never been made before… anyone attempting to classify a piece of artwork or music must be able to extract some sort of rule that indicates “this is baroque”, for example.

Perhaps the quantities utilized could be more easily measurable things, such as “famous constructivist arguments” vs. “famous deconstructivist arguments” or, even better, “average hair volume” (now THAT’s oscillatory!)

The idea, of course, isn’t to analyze such stupid trends, but to get an idea of the common evolution of societal trends in general. For example, the average hair volume, as stupid a thing to measure as it seems, might be correlated with something less quantitative, such as the musical style of the time.

See? You can sort of dredge some sense out of it.