Hypertextual data mining

An immediate goal of text data mining is to construct synopses of the hypertextual material: summaries of the topics which are covered by the texts in data base according to criteria defined by the scriptor.

Another goal is to identify salient points: concise lists of different topics, if possible in order of importance, adjustable in depth.

An important goal is also taxonomy (keywords in the data base): determination of the topics in the documents which are (or should be) of interest to the reader. This is to be followed by classification: the grouping of documents containing different topics, either as defined by the scriptor, or as defined by the information content. The most valuable help for the hypertextual reader consists of the identification of dependencies of the different topics on each other, especially of unexpected relationships.

Textual Lability

Texts are sites for transformation.

That texts do not only signify inherently, but also in relation to other systems of meaning, to other texts and cultural norms, and that their aesthetic is inseparable from determinants exterior to linguistic properties, are the underlying notions of the metabolean Hypertext concerning Literature and Transformation.

Transformation means not only change, metamorphosis, and transfiguration, but also creation and that, as we read and compare texts, we add another dimension: the relationship between the text and ourselves, in other words, the transformation of the text by the individual reader.

Computing technologies

Hypertextual writing provides a model for re-thinking the relationship between technology and all forms of cultural production.

The purpose of this is not, however, to suggest that philosophy was necessarily in some way cognisant of a future possibility of hypertext, nor is it simply concerned with a retrospective glance at philosophy from the position of current computing technologies.

Rather, it is to examine how philosophers are aware of their own position against and within contemporary developments in the sciences and electronic media, and that philosophy incorporated material from these developments into its texts.

Lability and body

Definition of term: lability. Term, lability (n.) Definition, Characteristic ofsomething that tends to change.

Labilty is actually independence of structure from the physical substrate, facilitating more replication and other functions of body. Structures originally imbedded in the substrate developed more independence. Things like pressure, waves, and electric current, can already move across the substrate - so techniques of moving bits without moving atoms are actually billions of years old. Crystal structures can replicate more complex patterns within the same material; living organisms pass features and behavioral patterns to physically unconnected bodies; information technology allows structures to travel between different substrates and change representations (which is basically the same thing but one level of abstraction higher - it is passing semantics between different syntactic substrates).

Boundaries

The boundaries of the human subject are constructed rather than given. Conceptualizing control, communication and information as an integrated system, cybernetics radically changed how boundaries were conceived.

Gregory Bateson brought the point home when he puzzled his graduate students with a question koan-like in its simplicity: "Is a blind man's cane part of him?"

The question aimed to spark a mind-shift. Most of his students thought human boundaries are naturally defined by epidermal surfaces. Seen from the cybernetic perspective coalescing into awareness from during and after World War II, however, cybernetic systems are constituted by flows of information.
In this viewpoint cane and man join in a single system, for the cane funnels to the man essential information about his environment. Similarly for a deaf person's hearing aid, a voice synthesizer for someone with impaired speech, and a helmet with a voice-activated firing control for a fighter pilot.

Who's on line ?

Identity politics enter a new phase of complexity on the network. As things now stand, users work within a politics of performativity, rather than essences, although some may choose to "perform" a particular "essential" role, e.g., I might self-consciously position myself as a white U.S. American woman ( Yes i am !).


Although most netters use their own names and legal identities, many choose "handles," and some netters have several such identities. I know women who use gender-neutral or masculine-sounding handles on the net for a variety of reasons. (The one most usually given is that one gets more respect that way.) A colleague of mine in sociology used an electronic bulletin board to extend class discussion in a class concerned with race and ethnicity, in which the participants were racially mixed. She reported that participants, often choosing to be anonymous, were able to discuss issues much more freely—not simply because their names weren't known, but because their racial/ethnic identity could be acknowledged or ignored (or perhaps even disavowed) post by post

No subject/object

In creating a postmodern cyborg subjectivity, Haraway acknowledges changes in our conception of the various binary structures which modernist notions of subjectivity were founded upon.

High modernist works such as The Scream illustrate the split in the subject, a division between the subject's inside and outside, which the modernists define as alienation. This division and its implications "are no longer appropriate to the world of the postmodern," as Fredric Jameson notes. Strict distinctions between signifier and signified, subject and object, reality and representation have collapsed in the wake of the late twentieth century's poststructuralist critique. Haraway's extension of this critique into the line dividing organic and inorganic matter is as much a product of postmodern/poststructuralist thinking as a contribution to it.

Likewise, when Haraway states that "the cyborg is a creature in a postgender world", she acknowledges the fragmentation of gender as a binary structure, as well.

Cyborg's subjectivity

As Donna Haraway puts it, " Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert"...

Thinking about cyborgs provides a way to talk about bodies without losing sight of the material (or technological) conditions that ground their lived experience.
As we learn that bodies are susceptible to technological augmentation and enhancement, we find that the so-called natural body isn't quite so natural, unconstructed, or innocent after all.

But talking about cyborgs means talking as much about technology as about bodies, and talking even more about how received conceptions of both bodies and technology uphold the very structures and processes that gave rise to such distinctions in the first place. As technological reconstructions of the body become commonplace, it is necessary to confront technology's political dimension, as a power to shape individuals -- to shape the body politic. Just as cyborgs integrate a variety of technological prostheses in order to constitute their own subjectivities, hypertext writing allows both reader and writer to weave their own meanings from a set of disparate textual elements.

Otherness

There have been a number of critical responses to the aforementioned accounts of subjectivity. We will consider two of them in particular.

The first concerns the priority that these accounts (and not only these accounts) give to our epistemological relations to the world over our ethical relations. Emmanuel Levinas argues that subjectivity does not originate in our capacity to know the world, but in our capacity to respond ethically to the other. Our ethical relation to the other, Levinas argues, is foundational to our other relations.

The second critique comes from Jacques Derrida. There are at least two important points which he makes. Firstly, along with the phenomenologist and the hermeneuticist, he maintains that knowledge requires language. But against them, he maintains that language can never really be adequate to the phenomenon which it is meant to express. The thing will always differ from the sign which we use to refer to it. This has interesting implications for the way we think about knowledge. Continuing in a similar vein, Derrida maintains, secondly, that the various systems that we develop to organize and structure knowledge cannot simply be said to be "out there" in the world, and that we will need to examine more thoroughly other considerations which may inform or influence the development of these structures and systems.

Solidarity

Human beings have many different and incompatible modes of speaking.

It is impossible to form a unity of these modes of enunciation or of the person who speaks. Furthermore, we cannot refer or appeal to subjectivity as the source of meaning in the act of speaking ! The analysis of statements operates therefore without reference to a cogito statements.

With Foucault, we know also that subjectivity and consciousness are constituted on the basis of complex power-knowledge relations.

Subject positions

Many French thinkers argued that the "subject", the "author" does not exist.

The subject does not exist prior to the roles in social practices and discourses which have a subject form. There is no original subject, no essential agency. We are addressed and articulated differently in different discourses. All that remains are different subject positions: the subject itself is fragmented. So, to understand who we are, people in the West today, we should look for the dominant discourses that construct our subjectivity. ... Sexuality is certainly in this respect the most important one.

Intimate and anecdotal

Although the contemporary social and political context can be felt in recent works, overall, French literature written in past decades has been disengaged from explicit political discussion (unlike the authors of the 1930s-1940s or the generation of 1968) and has focused on the intimate and the anecdotal. It has tended to no longer see itself as a means of criticism or world transformation...

Ancient "New criticism"

When French Theory arrived in american literature departments, New Criticism was waiting for it.

Text-focused New Criticism (with its famed "close readings")inculcated some of the same attitudes and critical stances advanced by Barthes's 'Death of the Author' or Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses.

Nevertheless, there were differences between the two movements: the New Critical wishes to demonstrate the wholeness of the poem as a complex structure and texture, as a difficult but triumphant balancing act of affirmation and irony; whereas the Deconstructive takes us to the aporias of the text, the radically figural nature of language, its incapacity ever to coincide with the world it wishes to name.

Yet, a critic with a tool full of New Critical tools can easily add the techniques of Deconstruction.

Moralistic humanism

Today, it's a shame to consider french intellectual life, which has retreated from the thrill of theory into the banality of a moralistic humanism.

American literature and philosophy

Claire Parnet says in her dialogues with Deleuze that perhaps one of the reasons why Americans never really developed a cultural institution of philosophy is because they never felt a need for it—for philosophical systems.

For Americans "philosophical" thought found its way into literature instead, literature being a much more rhizomal and less arborescent form of thinking (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987).

Compare Rimbaud's "drunken" voyage to Whitman's walk through "leaves of grass", and it becomes a question of the relation between surface and depth. In the end Rimbaud had to escape to the desert, to reach an exterior that had been there for the American poet all along (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983b: 41, 42).

"Theory already existed in America, but in a more pragmatic form"(Lotringer, 2001)

Continental political philosophy

Much of what we think of as being "French theory" today is the result of the kind of literary criticism that was carried out in prestigious universities like Yale during the 1980s.

Academicians and graduate students who were interested in Continental political philosophy found in french theories the necessary keys they needed to critique contemporary, American capitalist society.

Some of us attempted to bring these strains of French thought together, either from the literary or from the political end. And there were good reasons for such attempts, even if at times the actual results were less than satisfactory.

New langage, new platform

French Theory, if anything a synthesis, has been mistranslated, misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misaligned, and Americans in general have missed the point, if not the boat.

French Theory is characterized as like a new language that many students and professors alike have been loathe to learn for various reasons. Its detractors and the press generally have been so vehement as to suggest preemptive strike. The editors, having been publishers of many of these writers, are clearly sympathetic, but are ironic rather than defensive. While French Theory as a fad may be a dead issue, many of the issues have already been absorbed, or as in the case of Deleuze, have yet to be considered.

Aspects of this attitude pervade from the first essay by Derrida, who bemusedly refers to the impossible work of deconstruction that should have died, but is still around, to the final supplement which looks back at the Sokal hoax, returned in sequel form, but still plagued with postmodern problems like: What is the purpose and point of this fraudulent entry? The very indeterminacy of meaning of the whole affair, over and above the fake text itself, actually reinforces the conceptuality associated with the author of the first essay, Derrida...

Langage, utopia, law

America always oscillated between the modes of Utopia and Law.

French theory (or rather its adventure in america as thought made its way into theory ) was the result of the pressures between those two locked together tectonic plates, making the REAL originator of ‘french theory’ to be --- america!
and perhaps the next advances in said theory will be made in america...

Such theory would then be a creature of borders, caught between shifting plates; as such it would also be an uncanny, even vaporous, provocation, never quite visible enough on either side of the plates, always in a process of uncertain sedimentation.

Collaborative

No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.

Excitment over emerging new publishing theories -- and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings -- this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital.

Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O'Reilly, is an "architecture of participation" -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.

Despotism of reason is not good reason

However, regardless of its trapping, French theory, has had a powerful influence on American thought for more than twenty-five years.

French theory galvanized the European side of American philosophy in a way that not even the Frankfurt school had been able to accomplish after the war. Philosophers like Habermas, and Marcuse, were still far too connected to traditional Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist philosophy, to achieve the level of popularity that thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard, came to enjoy in this country—even if at times, for all the wrong reasons. Explicit in the philosophy of the Frankfurt school was a 19th century Hegelian faith in Reason. No such faith exists, or existed from the outset, in French theory.

In fact, one can easily interpret French theory as a response to the despotism of Reason, and the fascistic social, economic, and psychic structures—micro and macro—to which it gave birth. Hence, the American-French series of the questioning of reason.

Web 2.0 / Hypertextual.net

Don't think of the Web as a client-server system that simply delivers web pages to web servers. Think of it as a distributed services architecture, with the URL as a first generation "API" for calling those services.
In fact, the Web has developed into a wide platform for innovation across many media and devices - from mobile to Tablet PC, telephone to search. The next generation of web applications will leverage the shared infrastructure of the web 1.0 companies like EBay, Paypal, Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, not just the "bare bones transit" infrastructure that was there when we started...
Web 2.0 is about making actually the Internet useful for computers.
Yesterday’s challenge of producing elegant and database-driven Web sites is being replaced by the need to create Web 2.0 'points of presence'"

Mobile literature

Tens of thousands of Japanese cell-phone owners are poring over full-length novels on their tiny screens.

In this technology- enamored nation, the mobile phone has become so widespread as an entertainment and communication device that reading e-mail, news headlines and weather forecasts - rather advanced mobile features by global standards, is routine.

Now, Japan's cell-phone users are turning pages. Several mobile Web sites offer hundreds of novels classics, best sellers and some works written especially for the medium. It takes some getting used to. Only a few lines pop up at a time because the phone screen is about half the size of a business card. But improvements in the quality of liquid-crystal displays and features such as automatic page-flipping, or scrolling, make the endeavor far more enjoyable than you'd imagine. A library in one hand.
In the latest versions, cell-phone novels are downloaded in short installments and run on handsets as Java-based applications. You're free to browse as though you're in a bookstore, whether you're at home, in your office or on a commuter train. A whole library can be tucked away in your cell phone ... a gadget you carry around anyway

Old stories

Is the decline of English civilisation confirmed by the subsequent deterioration of its literature to the present day?

W.H. Hudson already stated in English Literature Of The 19th Century:

"That a great chapter in the annals of our literature came to a close about the beginning of the seventh decade of the nineteen century is universally admitted by historians and critics."— Part III, Chapter I

Modern Use Of English Condemned:

The use of English in contemporary works stands condemned by the textbooks of the twentieth century that set down the correct use of English needed for clear understanding. These works include Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gower (1948), and Modern English Usage (1926) and The King's English (1908) by Fowler. The growing vagueness creeping into modern expression was also condemned by George Orwell in Politics And The English Language (1946).
The decay of english language is so widespread and continual that Lord Dunsany claimed in 1943 that he could tell within ten years when any book of the twentieth century was written by the progress of the decay.

literature and its decline

Once upon a time, literature was the standard of academic excellence.

Young men and women read great books, driving them to contemplate the human condition. The college years were about students transforming themselves into reflective adults, and literature offered the passageway. Books instigated arguments over morality and iniquity. “Romeo and Juliet” provided students with pick-up lines. “Gulliver’s Travels” and “Pride and Prejudice” provoked debates over the proprieties of human social interactions.
Before international relations, anthropology, psychology and political science became trendy subjects, literature was understood as a repository of knowledge.

No longer, it seems. Literature is not high on the list of majors, nor is it a requirement for those studying hard science. Pre-med, engineering, architecture, computer science and business majors can often graduate from college without taking a single literature class.
Is literature not functional enough for modern-day students because it lacks empirical facts?

“Can anyone think that there is more understanding to be gained about the human heart from Freud than from Shakespeare?” asks Myron Magnet in an essay in City Journal. “Can anyone think that the studies of Margaret Mead or Alfred Kinsey tell us anything nearly as true as Ovid or Turgenev?”

Truth and Decline

Since Hegel’s time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy, in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs. In the literary culture which has been emerging during the last two hundred years, the question “Is it true?” has yielded pride of place to the question “What’s new?”

Heidegger thought that that change was a decline, a shift from serious thinking to mere gossipy curiosity. (See the discussions of das Gerede and die Neugier in sections 35-36 of Sein und Zeit) Many fans of natural science, people who otherwise have no use for Heidegger, would agree with him on this point. On the account Richard Rorty is offering, however, this change is an advance. It represents a desirable replacement of bad questions like “What is Being?”, “What is really real?” and “What is man?” with the sensible question ...

“Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of themselves?”

Enlightenment and decline

What does that mean "to decline"?

As Oswald Spengler said, the idealists of the early democracy regarded popular education as enlightenment pure and simple - but it is precisely this that smooths the path for the coming Caesars of the world. And we know now that he was partly right about that point.

In "The Decline of the West" (1922), the 19th century was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this 20 th century blood and instinct have regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, was nearing its end...

The masses have accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars like Hitler, Mussolini or Staline, the strong men, and have obey them. Life has descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism...

Rome in a day

The decline of Rome, as Gibbon said, was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.

Our world today

With metabole, we are always after the decline (meta-ballein...). This principle maintains that our world today continue to be a world because it works after the decline in its main structures.
It is a condition of its existence .

After the decay is removed, and the filling is placed, problems can actually occur. It is our live to cope with this kind of situation.