Back in ’98 I sent this quotation to a friend with a keen interest in Ovid and the Metamorphoses.
And though shapes change, though each moment dies into the next, though no thing is being made to last, something is happening. Each moment bears life forward.
Mary Caroline Richards. Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person. (Wesleyan University Press, 1964)
And so for day 730
12.12.2008
Oracular exhortation by Michael Joyce.
We can re-embody reading if we see that the network is ours to inhabit. There are no technologies without humanities; tools are human structures and modalities.
Notes Toward an Unwritten Non-Linear Electronic Text, “The Ends of Print Culture” (a work in progress) Postmodern Culture Volume 2, Number 1, September 1991
And so for day 729
11.12.2008
I suspect this was writing produced while participating in Fadi Abou-Rihan‘s seminar on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Jaspers on Kant i.e. synthetic versus analytic judgements. Introducing the quotation, I wrote at the time that “I think that this distinction may help with explicating the empiricity of Oedipus.”
Analytic judgements are present in thinking apart from experience, where we discern nothing new and merely clarify things that were known unclearly. Synthetic judgements, on the other hand, are present in all our empirical knowledge. By perception and observation we find out what belongs together, what follows what.”
I have in my print out of this quotation an arrow sketched in pencil and leading to this statement (also in pencil): narrativity passes through perception. And then back to the thread (my previous comment on the quotation is typewritten): “The question may then become one of whether Oedipus is a product of a synthetic a posterieri judgement. Then how does one move to the universality of Oedipus (or any given structure) as a product of a synthetic a priori judgement.”
Scrawled along the bottom of this prose are two lines in a large and generous hand:
The marker of novelty
new vs clarification
Interesting re-juxtaposition of terms. [Not a single question mark dots the page of this relentless questioning].
And so for day 728
10.12.2008
Michael Riordon in fine form in the preface to Eating Fire: family life, on the queer side
We live in a relational universe. […] Moving through our lives, we define ourselves not only as the insular I, but in relation to others: parent, friend, teacher, priest, lover, nurse, cop, boss, and all the rest. To navigate this crowded landscape, but without the usual map, we queer folk have to improvise as we go. This is a gift, and one of our talents.
Gotta love those italics. Is our.
And so for day 727
09.12.2008
J. David Bolter in Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age distinguishes an epoch of tool use from one of machine use. It is useful to be reminded of such a distinction when the common discourse often conflates tools and machines. He moves from speculating about the ancients and their failure to adopt machines to a set of considerations about the imbrication of technology and world view.
[T]here was something in the world outlook of the ancients (perhaps the reliance on slavery) that kept them satisfied with traditional sources of power and did not compel them, like later Europeans, to seek to increase efficiency, invent new prime movers, and in general expand their control and domination of nature.
The result was a simple but elegant technology of the hand rather than of the machine. The ancient craftsman worked with tools that became extensions of his hands in the manipulation of his materials. There was no real mass production. Although a pottery shop in Athens might employ seventy men who worked from specified designs, each thrown pot carried to some extent the impress of the hand that made it. Also, all technical discoveries were the product of clever observation and innovation without a theoretical basis, for the relationship between science and technology, so much a part of our own industrial society, did not exist.
And one wonders what power sources will emerge in the transition to a networked culture. No telling from which quarter elegance might flow.
And so for day 726
08.12.2008
Coffee with Oscar Wilde by Merlin Holland is a lovely fictional interview. Our hero towards the end suggests a move to a more potent drink.
Do you fancy a glass of absinthe? Just one, mind you — more can be disturbing. After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
An intriguing back-handed homage to the “fée verte” (the “green fairy”). A nice triple turn.
And so for day 725
07.12.2008
I was no doubt thinking of thaumaturgical properties when I characterized inscription and incantation as parallel under the rubric of mobilité du signe
inscription: leaving trace
incantation: pushing out talking
When I meditate upon this further, I come to realize that “leaving trace” involves a degradation of sorts — it’s a crumb, a trickle, that is left behind. I also realize that “pushing out talking” is akin to a lapsing into vocalization that may be pure sound, a set of traces.
And so for day 724
06.12.2008
From a note dated 30/07/97
[…] highly intriguing formulation: the production of randomness in a literary (machine) text is a safeguard against entropy. In one sense this is a homeopathic theory of semiotics. A certain degree of nonsense is incorporated in a text to make it travel… self-incorporated enigmas power the vehicle… Also the invitation to play a game of chance functions as an attraction. I almost want to say that REGs [Random Event Generators] capture audiences.
By coincidence the recto of the note paper contains an earlier [17/07/97] reference to the work of Francisco Varela on emergence and enaction (See “Whence Perceptual Meaning? A Cartography of Current Ideas” in F. Varela and J.-P. Dupuy Understanding Origins: Contemporary Views on the Origin of Life, Mind, and Society)
And so for day 723
05.12.2008
In a passage with various takes on the question “What kind of man was he?”, Neil Bartlett captures the constant re-invention that inflects our lives.
When someone asks you to describe your lover, each time you give a different account. He changes slightly, you continually struggle to bring the picture into focus, to select the right medium and pigments, to say what kind of man he really is. He does the same for you.
From Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde
And so for day 722
04.12.2008
