Postmodern

The word "postmodern" itself was minted by the French academic Jean-Francois Lyotard in the early 1980s in an effort to assess the changes in the culture, values, and education of the Francophone peoples in the wake of the social upheavals of the Vietnam era.

But it was the "ontology" of Husserl and Heidegger, to which Derrida reacted during this early period,and which he sought to de-Teutonize in order to accomodate the new forms of cultural and social-psychological critique that had emerged with figures like figures like Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan and to re-invigorate the deeply embedded tradition of structural linguistics, invented by Ferdinand de Saussure, in France as central to philosophy.

Most of what we know as "deconstruction" had this largely linguistic, neo-Marxist, anti-phenomenological, a-theological origin. As a footnote it is highly ironic that what in the past decade has become known to theologians as "postmodernism" tends (with the exception perhaps of Žižek) tends to be highly idealistic, phenomenological, anti-linguistic, anti-psychological, and a-political.

Posted by Carl Raschke

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Jean-Philippe Pastor

Le BLOG de Fabien TARBY: Alain Badiou s'explique... Politique, Art, Amour, Savoir, Philosophie...

Le BLOG de Fabien TARBY: Alain Badiou s'explique... Politique, Art, Amour, Savoir, Philosophie...

Manipulating texts

The ease of cutting, copying, and otherwise manipulating texts permits different forms of hypertextual composition, ones in which the researcher's notes and original data exist in experientially closer proximity to the text than ever before.

According to Michael Heim, as electronic textuality frees writing from the constraints of paper-print technology, "vast amounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediately below the electronic surface of a piece of writing. . . .

By connecting a small computer to a phone, a profession will be able to read `books' whose footnotes can be expanded into further `books' which in turn open out onto a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition". The manipulability of the scholarly text, which derives from the ability of computers to search databases with enormous speed, also permits full-text searches, printed and dynamic concordances, and other kinds of processing that allow scholars in the humanities to ask new kinds of questions.

Moreover, as one writes, "The text in progress becomes interconnected and linked with the entire world of information".

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Jean-Philippe Pastor

New writing space

The point is what Jay David Bolter called "the late age of print," and the transitional nature of the precipice on which we balance is apparent at the metabole.

Many of the texts to which it offers links are linear print-texts transcribed to HTML for the web-browsing screen. But at least a few others take advantage of the web's inherent multimedia, networking, and hypertext capabilities to subvert traditional notions of print literacy. In short, Metabole has become, in its short history, less an online writing lab that performs electronic experiments in remediation than a sharply struck point about the interrelationships of technology and literacy, simultaneously questioning the ideology of print and creating a writing space in which textual transactions renegotiate literate behavior.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Jean-Philippe Pastor

Zizek on democracy

That’s ideology today. We don’t believe in democracy—nobody.

You make fun of it and so on, but somehow we act as if it works. It’s a very strange situation, because there are—some of us old enough still remember them, old days when the public face of power was dignity, belief. And privately you mocked it, you made fun, and so on, no?

Now we are, I think, approaching a very strange state, where the public face of power is becoming more and more openly indecent, obscene. Look at Sarkozy in France. Look at Berlusconi in Italy, who is systematically undermining, for over five years now, the minimum of dignity of the state power. I mean, you are again and again surprised how is this possible. You know, after those sex scandals, two weeks ago, his lawyer, Berlusconi’s lawyer, made a public official statement, where he said that the claims that Berlusconi is impotent are lies and that Mr. Berlusconi is ready to prove this in court. Now, how? How—what did he mean?

You know, there is a level of obscenity, but this shouldn’t deceive us. We really live in cynical times, not just in this cheap sense they don’t take themselves seriously, but in the sense that—how should I put it?—the ironic self-undermining, making fun of yourself, is in a strange way part of the game. It’s as if the system can function even if it makes fun of itself.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Jean-Philippe Pastor

Speed of human intellect and hypertext

The idea for organizing information, which allowed the user to select and display any stored section of information was first imagined by Vannervar Bush.

The “Memex” couldn’t be built then in 1945. It wasn’t until 1960 that Theodor Nelson, who studied computer programming had an idea of “hypertext”. It was not until 1968 that the prototype for the hypertext was developed by Douglas Englebart. The Augment system he developed was used in organizing the government’s research network, called the ARPAnet. This first internet linked all information as “group memory” with it’s appropriate documents to with government projects. 1975 Andries Van Dam , a computer engineer collaborated with Mr. Scholes, an English professor at Brown University.

By making hypertext available in different windows this Non-linear learning style reinforced new ideas and methodologies. It’s interesting to note that with hypertext linkage readers could now go through books at the speed of human intellect. I’m sure we have all experienced having to look in numerous books for the information needed for a research project.With this new introduction of hypertext, slowly boundaries of specialized careers are being removed. The controversy of text plagiarism soon erupted as Publishing industry protected their profit by forming copyright laws. In regards to claims of owning words, I also agree with keeping text free, it is just the ideas such as an invention that a person should be recognized for in their own right. Hypertext opened many doors to new ideas and inventions that groups of differently trained professions would otherwise not have collaborated with each other. To try and ban these is a constriction of future advances in all fields.

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Labels: Englebart, hypertextuality, linearity, memex Jean-Philippe Pastor

How to write Ebooks ?

Historically speaking about hypertextuality is a bit like the 1910s in film studies; there were attractions, practices and very little understanding of what was actually going on, not to mention lots of money to be made and lost.

As we study hypertext and computer games, we need to have some idea of digital media as well as of rhetoric of textuality as a whole. For that purpose (especially for games as Eskalinen put it) we'll use the theories of Espen Aarseth, Roger Caillois, Warren Motte and David Parlett in particular. They form a filter through which the possibly heuristic findings and borrowings from various neighbouring disciplines and predatory theory formations are viewed, tested, modified and transformed.

While discussing articulation, materiality, functionality, typology and orientation, among other things, we are confronting the bare essentials of the traditional rhetoric and linguistic situation: the manipulation or the configuration of temporal, spatial, causal and functional relations and properties in different registers.

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Jean-Philippe Pastor

Unified body of a e-text

Traditional rules emphasize the utility and intentional coherence of a text.

They direct scriptor's' attention to points of arrival and departure, arguing that they must decide what readers need to know at either end of a hypermedia link in order to make use of what they find there. To determine what users need to know, the author must assume some unified or teleological understanding of the text !

In much the same vein, they contend that hypertext presentations need to preserve contextuality and provide a means by which the user can see the fragment's place in the coherent whole. The complexity and multiplicity of the hypertext, a complex system of documents and exhibits, reduces at some conceptual level to a unified body of information, a training manual or a course text. According to traditional views, while it is true that this hypertextual material could not be presented as effectively in a book, the difference is of degree not of kind.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Jean-Philippe Pastor