Editing or writing ?

There is more to writing than putting words next to each other, and there is more to writing hypertext than throwing together a bunch of links. When writing text, I have certain goals; when I come across text I dislike, there are certain reasons why I do not like it. You're about to read an attempt to describe these reasons and goals; it is incomplete, subjective, and honest.

Writing hypertext copy
The two pitfalls of writing hypertext copy are links and emotions. Links are a new stylistic element that writers must learn to handle. The emotional problem is harder: we must snap out of the "host" or "provider" role, must get away from the excitement of guiding another person through the text, and get back to - just writing.

Editing and publishing
Editing doesn't necessarily happen after the first text has been written, but it deserves to be thought of as an independent discipline. Most of what people do on the World­Wide Web is really editing, not writing.

Maintenance
"This document is under construction." Of course it is. The World­Wide Web is changing; new browsers appear; the language HTML changes; people change jobs and homepages; and writers learn more about their subject.

Jutta Degener

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

Why automated search tools ?

Hypertext's original idea was to take advantage of electronic data processing to organize large quantities of information that would otherwise overwhelm a reader.

Two hundred years ago, the printing press made possible a similar innovation - the encyclopedia. Hypertext's older cousin combined topical articles with an indexing system to afford the researcher one or perhaps two orders of magnitude increase in the volume of accessible information. Early experience with hypertext suggests that it may ultimately yield an additional order of magnitude increase, by making directly accessible information that would otherwise be relegated to a bibliography. Hypertext's limiting factor appears not to be the physical size of some books, but rather the ability of the reader to navigate increasingly complex search structures.

Currently, additional increases in human information processing ability seem tied to developing more sophisticated automated search tools, though the present technology presents possibilities that remain far from fully explored.

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

Hypertext as reification of post-structuralist theory

Code and literature have come together before — for the first time and most famously in hypertext.

Whereas literary programming embeds bits of writing in code, in an attempt to further the communicative potential of that code, hypertext embeds bits of code in writing so as to make that writing more navigable. Simply put, hypertext is writing that contains links to other pieces of writing. There is really nothing more, in principle, to it than that. Hypertext is one of those curious technologies that was widely theorized about in advance of being created and used. The theory of hypertext, as devised and disseminated at this institution (Brown University) and others like it, positioned hypertext as the reification of post-structuralist theory.
Many grand claims have been made for it, and many lines drawn in the sand. The tendency to idealize it into some sort of potential textual utopia is what leads to the (tongue-in-cheek) name of this website. Post-structuralist literary theory has a series of tropes which align around the idea of the demotion of the author as fountain-head of meaning ("Death of the Author"), the radical plurality of texts (multi-vocal, eclectic), and the decentered nature of some avant-garde literature. Hypertext, it was thought, would be the literal embodiment of these ideas. It would usher in a new era of 'wreaders' (from writer/reader) who would take up these shiny hypertextual scalpels and remake texts in their own image.

Instead of passively submitting to a linear (and therefore, the argument ran, hegemonic and authoritarian) stream of text, the audience was supposed to jump in and choose the textual strands that they favored, reading in an order chosen by themselves, entering and exiting the text at any moment...

Jeremy Ashkenas

Recursive functions and hypertextuality

To know whether a course in a hypertext will halt, it is necessary to know whether recursive functions are involved in the choosen algorithm, which is still an unsolved mathematics problem to me.

Recursive functions and loops are equivalent in expression; any expression involving loops can be written using recursion, and vice versa. Thus the termination of recursive expressions are also undecidable in general. Most recursive expressions found in common usage (ie. not pathological) can be shown to terminate through various means, usually depending on the definition of the expression 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

Playing with citations

Exergue means literally the place on a coin beneath the design where the date and location of it’s making occurred.

For Derrida, this section of the letter “plays with citation.” In his book about Fever of Archives, Derrida begins by explaining how archives are both “traditional and revolutionary; at once institutive and conservative.” The crux of this for him is “archival violence.” He then explains how the inscription of the archives occur, through printing and circumcision. Derrida argues that in order for an archive to exist it must be constructed to live in an external space,

“there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression,”

and then he associates this with the Freudian death drive. For as Derrida writes, “There would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.”

Derrida connects the printing of documents or inscription with circumcision, “it leaves a trace of an incision right on the skin: more than one skin, at more than one age.”

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

TimeWawe Zero

My favourite of the more unusual theories attached to 2012 is the Timewave Zero system, the brainchild of the late Terence McKenna. He believed "time" had more active properties — novelty and habit — and created a computer program of a time-scale wave that pictured the ebb and flow of "novelty" through history and into the future. Quite coincidentally, the wave peaked — or ended — in 2012. At that point, McKenna posited, artificial intelligence or time travel may occur.

So on December 21, 2012, I may head down to the Glenelg foreshore again and wait to catch another "wave" — in the form of McKenna's singularity. If time escapes its linear constraints, spirals into infinity or turns around on itself to touch the past, I might just get to see Don Dunstan in full swing again, megaphone in hand. Groovy.

Duska Sulicich is an Age editor.

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

Paris out of Troy

In Troy, Hollywood’s recent retelling of an ancient fracas, Orlando Bloom, who plays Paris, gets to keep his prize — Helen played by Diane Kruger.

In this version the playboy prince is not killed by Philoctetes but is shown leaving the burning city of Troy with Helen. He lives to fight another day. The ending may seem unexceptionable for our ‘liberated’ times. But earlier versions all had Paris getting his ‘just deserts’. However, was Paris really to blame for his alleged crime of passion? Didn’t Goddess Aphrodite promise him the love of the world’s most beautiful woman in exchange for the golden apple? (The Goddess of Discord Eris originally created the golden globe inscribed with the words ‘to the fairest’ out of pique for not having been invited to a marriage party on Mount Olympus! She then tossed it into the party and watched the fun as three powerful goddesses fought over the fruit. Rather than risk the ire of the losing parties, the gods passed the potato to Paris who was known for his artless honesty.) It’s another matter that the shepherd-turned-prince was so besotted by beauty that he did not bother to read the fine print — Helen was already married to the powerful King Menelaus who had the backing of dozens of warrior-princes. So would Paris have been better off in choosing brains instead of what the Goddess Athena promised along with skill in war in lieu of the apple?

Or should he have been more impartial and chosen Hera, arguably the most beautiful of the three goddesses, who promised him kingdom of Asia and Europe for the apple? A bigger question relates to binary stereotypes and puritanical mind-sets that tend to pit beauty against brains or pleasure versus duty and virtue. Why couldn’t Paris have the option of choosing beauty with brains? That is the thesis of AC Grayling’s latest book The Choice of Hercules which starts with the Greek hero who said ‘no’ to a life of ease and chose the greatly harder life of a lion-killer mercenary and stable-cleaner. Grayling argues however that in the original Epicurean ideal, pleasure and virtue are not at all mutually exclusive.
Nastily effective religious propaganda separated the two. In fact, the ‘good life’ should involve both, and by identifying one’s strengths and behaving in a sensible, courteous fashion, you can get onto that ‘middle path’. Have the flashy Ferrari along with the freedom of the monk.

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

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...