MetaBlog

What’s new about social media?

2011-11-05T10:27:00.002+01:00

According to dweinberger:

I’m on a panel about “What’s Next in Social Media?” at the National Archives tonight , moderated by Alex Howard, the Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media, and with fellow panelists Sarah Bernard, Deputy Director, White House Office of Digital Strategy; Pamela S. Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives. It’s at 7pm, with a “social media fair” beginning at 5:30pm.

I don’t know if we’re going to be asked to give brief opening statements. I suspect not. But, if so I’m thinking of talking about the context, because I don’t know what social media will be:

1. The Internet began as an open “address space” that enabled networks to be created within it. So, we got the Web, which networked pages. We got social networks, which networked people. We are well on our way to networking data, through the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data. We are getting an Internet of Things. The DPLA will, I hope, help create a network of cultural objects.

2. The Internet and the Web have always been social, but the rise of networks particularly tuned to social needs is of vast importance because the social determines all the rest. Indeed, the Internet is a medium only because we are in fact that through which messages pass. We pass them along because they matter to us, and we stake a bit of selves on them. We are the medium.

3. Of all of the major and transformative networks that have emerged, only the social networks are closed and owned. I don’t know how or if we will get open social networks, but it is a danger that as of now we do not have them.

Interconnectedness

2011-10-22T10:12:00.002+02:00

Hypertextuality

Hypertextuality is a postmodern theory of the inter-connectedness of all literary works and their interpretation.

The prefix 'hyper' is derived from the Greek 'above, beyond or outside'. Hence hypertext has come to describe a text which provides a network of links to other texts that are 'outside, beyond and above itself'.

According to Gerard Genette in Palimpsestes, a book about hypertextuality, "hypotext" refers to the source of the text, as well as to previous editions or versions of it. Hypertext is related to paratext, which includes information that accompanies the text itself (illustrations, preface or introduction).

References

^ Genette, Gérard (1997). Palimpsests: literature in the second degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-7029-1. OCLC 36001432.http://books.google.com/books?id=KbYzNp94C9oC. Retrieved 6 April 2009.

see http://www.hypertext.belarus.pomorze.pl/

ekstremalna jazda quady warszawa w super cenie - stare monety ceny - monety kolekcjonerskie 2 zł - monety i banknoty -katalog monet ceny

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Move paradigm in hypertextuality

2011-07-12T09:46:00.005+02:00

This text is Apture enhanced (click or underline words you need ton inspect).

Some hypertext theorists take an extreme view of the notion that readers should be expected to move by example or paradigm. A group of theorists calling themselves only "The Critical Art Ensemble" argue,

the tyranny of paradigms may have some useful consequences (such as greater efficiency within the paradigm), but the repressive costs to the individual (excluding other modes of thinking and reducing the possibility of invention) are too high. Rather than being led by sequences of signs, one should instead drift through them, choosing the interpretation best suited to the social conditions of a given situation .

Again, paralogic hermeneutics is remarkably prepared to agree. Kent states that the piece of communication (icon, sentence, utterance) is forever separated from the consequence of its existence. Kent revisits Derrida on this subject:

Our inability to reduce every use of language to one hermeneutic strategy come about because of the iterability of the sign or sentence; as Derrida phrases it, 'the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e., abandoned it to its essential drift'.

In refusing to predict the inventive accommodation that allows for communication, proponents of paralogic hermeneutics do accommodate the nebulous nature of hypertextual movement. When I surf the web, I rarely end in a predictable spot. Therefore, I find myself paying closer attention to my path and the connections between seemingly disparate web texts. This attention to the connections often helps me to recognize patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. More traditional texts, in attempting to control "drift", may try to keep readers moving along a certain track, but if an individual traces her own path toward understanding a concept, there are inevitably twists and turns that create a road to knowledge that no other mind would, or could re-create.

Predictable spot

2011-07-11T20:05:00.001+02:00

When I surf the web, I rarely end in a predictable spot.

Therefore, I find myself paying closer attention to my path and the connections between seemingly disparate web texts. This attention to the connections often helps me to recognize patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. More traditional texts, in attempting to control "drift", may try to keep readers moving along a certain track, but if an individual traces her own path toward understanding a concept, there are inevitably twists and turns that create a road to knowledge that no other mind would, or could re-create.

While the challenge of hypertextual drift may prove too much for some literary theories, paralogy and, in particular, paralogic hermeneutics seems well equipped to deal with the phenomenon. There are differences between the old way and the new, but i can show that a theory which informs paper-based technology helps to accurately describe the reality of matching author, text, and reader in the world of hypertext as well.

New writing technology approaches the origin of langage

2011-06-26T10:43:00.001+02:00

A significant feature of hypertext environments is their capacity for inclusion, their construction of a vast and necessarily unfinished order of documents striving to represent the knowledge (and the agon) of a discipline.

My former hypertext phonereader/metabole - hypertext essay - was based upon 20 different topics.

This one hypertextopia/metabole focuses on three philosophers and three of their personal philosophical principles:

Walter Benjamin and his replacement of Plato's theory of forms and Ideas by a theory of linguistics and textual writing. Paradoxically, new writing technology approaches the origin of langage.
Martin Heidegger and his latest ontology of permanent mutation: at last, Being has to be metabolized.
Cornelius Castoriadis and his creating "social imaginary signification" that cannot be deduced from rational or real, empirical elements or specific forces.

As yet, no boundless writing space exists, so I have had to try to create my own simulacrum of a textual domain. I have tried to exploit hypertext's capaciousness by offering extended passages from some of authors I cite. The current state of copyright law, however, precludes posting works in their entirety (and frankly, scanning or typing that much stuff would have been too tedious and time-consuming anyway). I have, therefore, included less than 10% of any given work to comply with the "fair use" provisions of the law.

Sometimes, all you will want is a standard bibliographical reference -- just enough to enable you can to get the book or article and read it in its entirety, without my noisome interjections, distracting comments, and distorting editorial decisions. Simple references to page numbers will occur in the text and the full bibliographic information will occur on the list of works cited (a link should take you directly from an author's name to the bibliography). An extended passage from the cited work is available whenever a citation is associated with this symbol )°°°°°°°°°°°°°°) .

There are approximately 11658 nodes and 180.000 links in this hypertext essay.

NOW enter the Hypertext _ Hypertextopia

MetaBlog english different posts

Rejoignez le Journal de l'Hypertexte en anglais (posts du jour différents de ceux ici présents) -
Connectez-vous sur hypertextual.net l'Hypertexte Principal de la Solution -

Diffusion du flux

Tous les eBooks accessibles sur Phonereader.GoogleBooks

Entrez dans la Bibliothèque pour readers mobiles de Phonereader.eu

Materiality matters

2011-06-18T11:45:00.004+02:00

Starting out from the fact that there is a crucial link between the sensory–motor experience of the materiality of the support and the cognitive processing of the text content, the study conducted by Morineau ﬁnds that the e-book does not provide the external indicators tomemory in the way that a print book does.

In the e-book, the connection between the text content and the material support is split up, allowing the technological device to display a multitude of content that can be altered with a click. The book, by contrast, is a physicallyand functionally unitary object where the content cannot be distinguished from thematerial part. Hence, they conclude that the e-book ‘does not serve as an unambiguous index to indicate a ﬁeld of knowledge on the basis of its particular physical form’ (Morineau et al., 2005, p. 346). This is an interesting conclusion in a time when different versions of the e-book (iRex Technologies’ iLiad, or Amazon’s Kindle, for instance) and other mobile technologies (such as mobile phone novels in Japan: see Ito, Okabe &Matsuda, 2005) are again being launched as potentially replacing the print book (both inand out of schools), after their dismal and quite spectacular failure a decade ago. Once again, the question begs itself: will we be reading novels on screen – perhaps on our mobile phones – in the future?

see Anne Mangen

see FrenchTheory

Augustine and metaphysics

2011-06-11T12:02:00.003+02:00

Jean-Luc Marion claims that the word ‘metaphysics’ does not apply to ancient thought at all – despite the fact that Heidegger regularly cites Aristotle as exemplifying ‘the onto-theo-logical structure of metaphysics.’

Scholars such as P. Aubenque, J.-F. Courtine, T. De Koninck, F. Nef have shown that Aristotle's plural and aporetic investigations do not constitute an ontotheology in the sense developed by the commentators such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Simplicius, or by Avicenna, a theory in which the notion of being, whether analogical or univocal, acts as a pivot in a systematic ontology of universal ens commune grounded in the divine summum ens. But in a broader, simpler and more radical sense, Aristotle is surely a metaphysician, identifying being as ousia, substance, and grounding beings causally in the supreme being, the divine 'self-thinking thought.' Let us not forget the phenomenological bearing of Heidegger's thought. It is from the intellectualization of the phenomenon of the ontological difference between beings and their being that metaphysics emerges; and metaphysics from the start is ontotheology, that is a logos about being. Heidegger wants to return to a different kind of logos, a legein that sets forth being and beings in their primary phenomenological senses, before the construction of a metaphysical logos.

Marion's position has the effect of cutting off Augustine from the history of metaphysics, and situating him in an extraterritorial realm of purely Christian thought. With the phenomenological purism that is his hallmark, Marion can thus clear the ground for a ‘reduction’ of Augustine in terms of a number of ‘saturated phenomena’ such as divine truth that enlightens conscience or the ineffable divine ultimacy. These phenomena are severed from their close relationship to Neoplatonic experience of similar realities, or rather, in Augustine’s own view, of the same realities.

see Joseph S. O'Leary

see Journal de l'Hypertexte en philosophie

Super Hard

2011-05-12T08:36:00.000+02:00

Every time I see this picture. I think super hard. I dream that my sleepless nights and my smile and my passion for wanting to do something good in this world is going to pay off. I hope that all the countless opportunities I don’t have because of my circumstance aren’t going to matter. That maybe one day I can have a happy home with a special someone and live my life creating and shaping this world. I want to give it hope. Give a future little one hope.

He gives me so much hope. More hope and joy than I ever express to him, to anyone. And all I think is “ Hey old chap, maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m not trying enough.” but for fucking sake’s it’s so hard to try so hard all the time and see so little of it become anything but I still think. I don’t give up that easy.

Frenchtheory

Journal de l'Hypertexte

Hypertextopia

Online Wording

2011-05-05T19:31:00.006+02:00

Word processing. Online wording. MOOs. Visual rhetoric. New media. Open source software. Blogs. Wikis. Social networking. Audio. Video, Virtual worlds. And folks jump on that particular bandwagon. Then that technology gets "old" and something new comes along. But the lasting work is the work that doesn’t harness itself to a fleeting technology. The lasting work is the work that links across various iterations of technologies to get at the big-picture, key items we’ve been addressing as a field: Issues of access and equity. Issues of power. Issues of language. Issues of composing. Issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity. Issues of pedagogy. How does, for example, communication in Twitter relate to earlier work on communication in MOOs and chats? What findings from those studies of earlier cultures of techno-usage should be considered when studying the latest, "newest" technology?

See frenchtheory.com

See Journal de l'Hypertexte (french)

Literary theory in the digital age

2011-03-20T10:17:00.002+01:00

Hyper/Text/Theory
Essays on literature and literary theory in the digital age

George Landow was amongst the early few to spot the similarities between modern literary theory and the technological possibilities of hypertext programmes. This is the third of his publications which explore connexions between them. The general argument he makes is that the digitization of text coupled with the associative links of hypertext represents a development of revolutionary potential.

It makes new literary forms available, blurs distinctions between existing genres ['boundary erasure'] and makes possible anything from multimedia compilations started by authors but completed by their readers, to texts which are ‘unreproducible’ because of their size and their constant revision.

His introductory essay is an invigorating mixture of reports on hypertext projects and visionary ideas of the kind promoted by Jay Bolter and Nicholas Negroponte. Unfortunately, his fellow contributors fail to match his standard. The other essays deal with non-linearity as one of the essential features of hypertext, the politics of this branch of IT, and what promotes itself as new writing – ‘hypertext fiction’, a somewhat dubious notion over which there is still much debate.

They range enthusiastically over topics as diverse as Wittgenstein’s notebooks, films and narratology, and forms of classical rhetoric. But much of their exposition is clogged with silly jargon ['texton', 'scripton', 'screener'] which is depressingly rife amidst professionals in the field of cultural studies.

At their worst the essays deal in speculation rather than reporting
on practical experiences or successful projects. Mireille Rosello for instance at one point drops to the level of conceptual art when she spends two or three pages describing what an imaginary hypertext programme could be like. Since there are unsung technical writers out there in the field constructing hypertext programmes for real right now, this is a feeble and self-indulgent substitute. There are just too many questions raised, not enough empirical data or answers.

One further dispiriting feature is the tendency of the authors to draw
on the same material, and even worse to quote each other. It is one thing for them to [quite understandably] cite Ted Nelson as a hypertext visionary, but when yet another reference to Thomas Pynchon occurs in the fourth or fifth essay, one wonders if these aren’t the papers of some post-graduate club. This suspicion is reinforced by the tendency for them all to quote from the same fashionable cultural theorists – Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, and Lyotard. The collection ends with a piece of post-Modernist tosh by Gregory L Ulmar which weaves a tissue of non-sequiturs around a contrived verbal connexion between Wittgenstein [again] and Carmen Miranda.

In Landow’s own survey of current programmes and projects [written, one supposes, circa 1993/94] it is interesting to note how often he describes the hypertext systems available by using the telling metaphor of a ‘web’ of connexions. The World Wide Web which was under development at that very time now makes available many of the linkages dreamed of from Vannevar Bush onwards. And most importantly, they are available not merely for some technological elite as in the past, but for whoever wishes to use them. This is a democratizing influence which will have a profound effect upon the construction, assembly, and cross-linking of information – and Landow knows it. One of the driving forces behind this collection of essays is to make these possibilities known. I imagine that a further post-WWW volume is on its way right now – but I hope he writes the book himself.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

George P. Landow, (ed) Hyper/Text/Theory, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp.379, ISBN 0801848385

Textuality with Roland Barthes

2011-01-29T10:09:00.004+01:00

In S/Z , Roland Barthes describes an ideal textuality that precisely matches that which has come to be called computer hypertext -- text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web , and path: "In this ideal text," says Barthes,

the networks [réseaux ] are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable . . . ; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language" (emphasis in original; 5-6 ).

Physical appearance

2011-01-14T08:45:00.003+01:00

Immersed in societies that thrive on and reciprocally feed mass media communication, we have been living in an "information age" for decades.

But the label has only recently been applied to contemporary society, in response to the rapid integration of computer technology into practices of communication and production, and fails to indicate the extent to which computerized technologies impact our culture in unique and significant ways when compared with the technologies which preceded it. Computerized networking offers an era of rapid information exchange-of an interpersonal dialectic-which is continually modified and updated, all according to a variety of languages at play. An individual's physical appearance is neither implied nor relevant in the computerized network environment which defies those spatial and temporal laws of nature which govern our physical bodies. Language is exchanged unhindered by the usual distractions of physical appearance, gesture, and tone of voice, which are only rarely avoided in other communication technologies such as television, radio, and telephone.

text from Rhizome

Jean-Philippe Pastor

2010-12-31T09:06:00.001+01:00

057mm.jpg hosted at ImageShack.us

2010-12-16T15:48:00.001+01:00

Visit jppastor's (my) ImageShack profile

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, and others!

Indexing system

2010-12-14T07:56:00.004+01:00

Hypertext, made famous by the World Wide Web, is most simply a way of constructing documents that reference other documents. Within a hypertext document, a block of text can be tagged as a hypertext link pointing to another document. When viewed with a hypertext browser, the link can be activated to view the other document. Of course, if you're reading this document, you're already familiar with the concept.

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.

Augmenting basic hypertext with graphics, more complex user input fields and dynamically generated documents adds considerable power and flexibility to this concept. Hypertext, though still useful for its original goal of organizing large quantities of information, becomes a simple, general purpose user interface that fits neatly into the increasingly popular client-server model. It does not seem difficult to image a day when restaurant orders, for example, will be taken using a hand-held hypertext terminal, relayed directly to the kitchen for preparation, and simultaneously logged to a database for later analysis by management.

Characteristics of good hypertext

The flexibility of hypertext gives free range to the author's creativity, but good hypertext appears to have some common characteristics:

Lots of documents. Much of the hypertext's power comes from its ability to make large quantities of information accessible. If all the text in your system can be printed on ten pages, it would be just as simple to read through it from beginning to end and forget all this hypertext silliness. On the other hand, if there are ten million pages of text in your system, then someone could follows a link on atomic energy and ultimately hope to find a description of the U-238 decay process.

Lots of links. If each document has just one link, then it is little more than normal, sequential text. A hypertext document should present the reader with several links, offering a choice about where to go next. Ideally, a document should present as many relevant links as the reader can easily comprehend and select among.

Range of detail. The great advantage of hypertext is that it permits readers to explore to a breadth and depth that is simply not feasible in print. To make this accessible, available hypertext documents should range from the broadest possible overview of a subject, down to its gritty details. Imagine the Encyclopedia Britannica, all thirty-odd volumes of it, searchable online and with each article possessing links to a half dozen reference documents with even more detailed subject coverage. This is the potential of hypertext.

Correct links. This may seem trivial, but it's amazing how many Web links point nowhere. In general, be careful linking to any hypertext document not under your direct control. Can you count on it to be there later?

Guidelines for a hypertext reference system

Hypertext seems best suited for reference material, so here are my suggested guidelines for creating hypertext reference systems, with the Internet Encyclopedia offered as an example:

Reference documents. Start by assembling a good set of core reference material. In the Encyclopedia's case, the RFCs that document standard Internet protocols form this core. Ideally, the reference core should consist of extremely detailed documents, offering the highest possible degree of completeness. A general reference work on physics might start with a large collection of scientific papers.

Topical articles. Augment the core reference material with articles at a broader level of detail. Systematic organization of these articles, perhaps using an outline as a framework, is essential to making them accessible to the reader. The articles should be focused, and short enough to be easily digestible in one piece.

Search engine. A good search engine is invaluable for any large collection of documents. The Internet Encyclopedia uses a search model based on searching outward from a particular page, in order to facilitate both topical and keyword searches.

Extras. These can include graphics, audio and video clips, problems and exercises, student courses, simulations, sample programs, ordering forms, database tables, and revision histories, to name a few.

Perception of art

2010-12-05T11:28:00.002+01:00

Jameson relates the bourgeois attitude toward art as separate from social reality directly to the ideology of bourgeois individualism.

This ideology leads to the perception that private life is sharply distinguished from the public world of politics in a way that parallels the bourgeois tendency to treat art as a self-enclosed realm separate from the social and political world. But this perception of art does not elevate it as somehow superior to everyday reality; instead it merely renders art irrelevant, diminishing its function in life. Similarly Jameson insists that the ostensible privileging of the private over the public that is central to bourgeois individualism actually impoverishes private life by obscuring the domination of the individual by capitalism and creating a false illusion of individual autonomy.

Far from creating the strong, independent individuals mythologized by bourgeois ideology, capitalism "maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking".

See Metabole

Baudrillard and Heidegger in the past

2010-10-19T21:52:00.000+02:00

Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2

Fast forward from the material governing the previous post, to May of 1999, to what amounts, in other words, to a thirty year jump. We are near the end of Baudrillard's career now rather than its beginning, and Baudrillard is doing a series of Wellek lectures at the University of California, Irvine. In the third lecture, entitled the "Murder of the Real," Baudrillard rehearses a theme that has been more or less a constant to his work since The Perfect Crime, namely that reality has died, been ex-terminated, and has not and never will be resurrected. Indeed, it's corpse may never even be found. He notes:

For reality is but a concept, or a principle, and by reality I mean the whole system of values connected with this principle. The Real as such implies an origin, an end, a past and a future, a chain of causes and effects, a continuity and a rationality. No real without these elements, without an objective configuration of discourse. And its disappearing is the dislocation of this whole constellation.
This argument is bound up, for Baudrillard, with virtualization and virtual reality, and a critique of new information technology. I have never been particularly convinced by his critiques of these technologies, but I do find the cultural inference he draws from them to be accurate; in other words, whether virtual reality itself does anything to dissolve the real, the discursive field that enables something like the term "virtual reality" is evidence already that the dissolution has taken place, that it has become susceptible to qualification, subdivision, and hyper-realization.

This collapse of reality is an argument for which Baudrillard is particularly well known, but it will come as no surprise that the Heidegger of Being and Time is also dedicated to a dissolution of the metaphysical reality principle, though his reasons for thinking this dissolution are far more subjectal in orientation (again, at least that's the case back in 1927).

Continue reading "Baudrillard and Heidegger, 2" »

I fall on the bias

2010-10-06T15:29:00.007+02:00

The burning issue with philosophers is not between philosophy and rhetorics (for a philosopher, philosophy always wins this game), but between Platonists and Aristotelians and thence, to complicate the symmetry, between Aristotelians and the Social Sciences and heidegerrians and analytic philosophy and so on... As usual, I fell on the bias across the controversies of this kind.

As you know, this propensity to situate my arguments across seeming dichotomies marks my work in every texty i wrote. Pragmatists and idealists; Marxists and esthetes; urban radicals and agrarian conservatives; psychological and sociological theorists: i would continuously take a position that fell on the bias — not simply in the middle, not finding some common ground between them in a weak compromise, but cutting across their positions, envisioning an alternative...

Jean-Philippe Pastor

Difference in itself

2010-10-04T19:19:00.003+02:00

Still, despite Deleuze's distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology.

Namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze's initial adherence to Bergson's creative evolutionism no less than his later "break" with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze's effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the elan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the elan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own
philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism--and specifically, to Bergson's
derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference--without in any way abandoning his own commitment to
internal difference.

As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson's argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, "show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time".

voir http://www.situation.ru/app/index.htm

Always changing

2010-09-23T18:56:00.003+02:00

A society is a collection of individuals. It can be organized in a variety of different ways, and is always changing. A static society is virtually impossible, because its composition of unique individuals is always changing. Just like the atoms and molecules in our bodies are always changing - but always organized by our genes and certain processes into this thing we call "self.

Now, for the short time each of us exists, we are a unique, but dynamic collection of "hardware" and "software." Not only are the information, value and belief systems we hold constantly changing; the body and brain themselves are constantly changing. This is partly due to aging, partly due to stress, happiness and a variety of other factors we are only beginning to understand - and many others we may never understand.

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

Vital difference

2010-09-22T19:41:00.003+02:00

It is precisely this realism and the biological basis of differentiation that Deleuze eschews in his effort to arrive at a (philosophical) principle of difference in itself.

The roots of such a principle--a principle that will underwrite both Deleuze's philosophical Aufhebung of biology in Difference and Repetition and D+G's marginalization of the organism in A Thousand Plateaus--can be found in Deleuze's interpretation of vital difference as internal difference in Bergsonism.

Introduced in the context of an effort to distinguish Bergsonian creative evolution from Darwinism, this interpretation foregrounds Bergson's stress on the indeterminacy of vital
difference in order to present the Elan vital as the ultimate and purely internal cause of differentiation above and beyond any resistance matter offers to life, and indeed in place of
such resistance. Before expressing itself as material differentiation, that is, the Elan vital differs from itself: it is difference in itself.

What this means is that vital difference is virtual and that expressed difference is the
actualization of virtual life.

from Mark Hansen
Princeton University

Changing concepts

2010-09-17T19:26:00.004+02:00

Creation of Concepts

For Rawls: Indeterminate “ideas” (such as the rights of individual) inform the creation of “concepts” (such as Justice and Original Position), which allow for systematic “conceptions”; principles for deciding which concepts are arbitrary.

With Rawl’s constructivism, the content of the concept (for example Justice) is procedurally constructed not from historically loaded ideas, but as the outcome of a dialogue between ideas. This is definitely not the same as Deleuze.

Deleuze does not see the creation of concepts (i.e. Philosophy) as the result of a conversation. In “What is Philosophy” Deleuze describes a “horror” of discussions within Philosophy. This is his account of a ‘rhizome-book’ of movement in concepts (in Patton’s paper above).

Deleuze sees distinct concepts, but something “passes between them”. So internal consistency, but “exo-consistency” between changes. Source of mobility through these connections. ”Relations to concepts provide pathways to others”. This is linked to the plane of immanence, and the (changing) image of thought; searching for different image of thought. An account of “Becoming Just” contour configuration, constellation.

Patton sees the mobility provided by Deleuze as a useful awareness, thinks it is apparent that the creation of Justice is exemplary of Deleuze’s concept creation: Justice (Rawls) is a mobile concept (Deleuze). Conception of Justice becomes historical as “incremental conceptions”. ”Subject to assumption that firmly held convictions change”. Patton examines how Rawls was Looking at Justice as primary social concept, but focussed on Stability, as he wanted to say the Just was more stable. Through the forces between concepts, the one effected the other.

Conceptual personae

From What is Philosophy, by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari:

“The conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors, the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosdopher’s “heteronyms,” and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae.”

For Rawls; Rational, Citizens, and Reasonable.
For Deleuze: ”Friend of concept” (Nietzsche, Blanchot), set up to measure forces outside of philosophy . Future transformations. Becoming.

from http://blog.neonascent.net/

Joyful way of thinking

2010-09-16T09:26:00.003+02:00

In psychoanalytic terms, Hegel’s ontology is fundamentally mournful, while Heidegger’s ontology is fundamentally melancholic.

Brent Adkins argues that the solution to this antinomy is found in Deleuze and Guatttari’s Anti-Oedipus, where they take us beyond the limits of mourning and melancholia by refusing both. The result is a new (joyful) way of thinking about death that does not require philosophy to be a constant meditation on death.

Deleuze believed that life is desire, and that there are two distinct ways of thinking about desire. The first is that we only desire because we lack something. The other is called productive desire, in that we desire to make new connections, not necessarily because we lack connections, but because we want to try something new. Deleuze would argue that Heidegger and Hegel would think that desires are based on a lack of something. Deleuze ultimately believed that life is not about living to fill a lack or a void, but rather to make connections. Because Deleuze conceived of desire as productive, his conception of death is joyful rather than mournful or melancholic.

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Solow-Swan model on the brink

2010-09-10T10:23:00.004+02:00

A property of the Solow-Swan growth model which is a bit disturbing is the fact that, at steady-state, all ratios -- the capital-labor ratio, output per person and consumption per person -- remain constant.

This is a bit of a disappointment for it implies that standards of living do not improve in steady-state growth. This is not only despiriting, it is also empirically dubious: it contradicts at least two of the "stylized facts" of industrialized economies laid out in Kaldor (1961) -- namely, that the capital-labor and output-labor ratios have been rising over time and that the real wage has been rising.

Of course, just because industrialized countries, and others besides, have experienced ever-increasing per capita consumption and output over the past three centuries does not, by itself, "contradict" the Solow-Swan model. After all, out of steady-state, we can easily have changing ratios. So, one possible explanation for the "stylized facts" that is consistent with the Solow-Swan model is simply that industrialized nations are still in the process of adjusting and just have not reached their steady-state equilibrium yet. And why not? It is not unreasonable to assume that adjustment to steady state might take a very long time (cf. Sato, 1963; Atkinson, 1969).

But economists are a rather impatient sort. They like to believe that economies tend to be at or around their steady-states most of the time (a noble exception is Meade (1961)).

As a consequence, in order to reconcile the Solow-Swan model with the stylized facts, it is tempting to argue that there has been some sort of "technical progress" in the matter.

join me on Twitter

Determined path

2010-09-03T10:32:00.000+02:00

The treatment of e-lit as something with “no fixed or absolutely determined path” seems to imply an absence of any path at all, which of course isn’t true: hypertext authors often steer the reader in a particular direction by carefully choosing link placement.

Plus, it’s certainly possible to have one or more series of single-path nodes within an otherwise link-rich text.

Web evangelists

2010-08-10T07:43:00.002+02:00

Internet missionaries can be terribly annoying.

Part of the reason—especially to the print dinosaurs among us—is that they're so correct. Broken old media businesses will change or die. Younger audiences will not just read or watch; they must tweet, blog, and update their status, preferably all at once. More broadly, digital networks are reshaping culture, economics, and politics. That's beyond debate. Like most zealots, however, the Web evangelists often seem self-righteous and oblivious to ambiguity.

This trait threatens to limit their appeal even to the already converted.

2010-08-07T08:04:00.002+02:00

As I read both Carr and Shirky over the past couple weeks—who both seek parallels between the rise of the internet and digital social media and the invention of the printing press in the 16th century—I couldn’t help thinking about medieval manuscripts.

Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition. The medieval books we admire so much today are distinguished by the remarkable visual images, in the body of a text and in the margins, that scholars have frequently compared to hypertexted images on internet “pages.”

The function of these images in illuminated manuscripts has no small bearing on the hypertext analogy. These “miniatures” (so named not because they were small—often they were not—but because they used red ink, or vermillion, the Latin word for which is minium) did not generally function as illustrations of something in the written text, but in reference to something beyond it. The patron of the volume might be shown receiving the completed book or supervising its writing. Or, a scene related to a saint might accompany a biblical text read on that saint’s day in the liturgical calendar without otherwise having anything to do with the scripture passage. Of particular delight to us today, much of the marginalia in illuminated books expressed the opinions and feelings of the illuminator about all manner of things—his demanding wife, the debauched monks in his neighborhood, or his own bacchanalian exploits.

Books of commentary, known as “glosses,” included conversations among different commentators across time that surrounded a central text, such as a Bible passage. The wisdom of the rabbis or Christian sages would be preserved through decades and centuries, with new commentators sometimes being added as successive copies were produced. Over time, the original contexts for these comments were forgotten and their relevance to the central text became obscure, so they became part of the interpretive project of reading a book. Often, the commentary became more significant than the central text itself.

see drescher

Work of Art

2010-07-26T17:51:00.003+02:00

Heidegger's way of thinking has left a rich legacy for post-modern philosophers, particularly for Jacques Derrida who has greatly influenced philosophy and literature in the modern times.

Derrida, like his mentor Heidegger, understands that in the Western philosophy, the meaning of being has been determined by metaphysics of presence. However, unlike Heidegger, Derrida does not begin his philosophical career with a question on being. Nor does he take up philosophical positions -- traditional or otherwise.

The purpose of the present study is the critical evaluation of Derrida's claim that he deconstructed one of Heidegger's most important essays -- "The Origin of the Work of Art" -- by which he tries to overcome the metaphysics of presence.

The book presents an in-depth analysis of Heidegger's question of the meaning of being, and Derrida's critique of western logocentrism and his philosophy of deconstruction. It delves into the origin of the truth of the work of art -- studying the essence of thing, equipment and work of art, as philosophised by Heidegger. It discusses truth as the strife, taking orginary strife as the essence of the meaning of being. It also includes Derrida's criticism of the restitution of the truth of the work of art, and an evaluation of the differential structure of the truth of the painting -- as a work of art. A comparative study of the philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida has been given under 'non-originary origin of truth' and 'difference as the origin'.

References have been given at the end of each chapter to facilitate easy understanding of the concepts discussed in the text. Besides, there is a comprehensive bibliography giving primary as well as secondary sources from which the book has drawn. The book shall be highly useful to the students and teachers of Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics and the researchers in these fields.

Difference at the Origin : Derrida's Critique of Heidegger's Philosophy of the Work of Art
Paul Manithottil, Atlantic Pub, 2008

Things understood by computers

2010-07-15T13:49:00.003+02:00

What is the Semantic Web?

The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.

• The Beatles was a popular band from Liverpool.
• John Lennon was a member of the Beatles.
• "Hey Jude" was recorded by the Beatles.

Sentences like the ones above can be understood by people. But how can they be understood by computers?

Statements are built with syntax rules. The syntax of a language defines the rules for building the language statements. But how can syntax become semantic?

This is what the Semantic Web is all about. Describing things in a way that computers applications can understand it.

The Semantic Web is not about links between web pages.

The Semantic Web describes the relationships between things (like A is a part of B and Y is a member of Z) and the properties of things (like size, weight, age, and price)

"If HTML and the Web made all the online documents look like one huge book, RDF, schema, and inference languages will make all the data in the world look like one huge database"

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Double reading

2010-07-03T09:42:00.002+02:00

According to Simon Critchley, the principle of alterity within a deconstructive praxis can be found in the strategy of 'double reading'.

'If the first moment of reading is the rigorous, scholarly reconstruction of the dominant interpretation of a text, its intended meaning (vouloir-dire) in the guise of a commentary, then the second moment of reading, in virtue of which deconstruction obeys a double necessity, is the destabilization of the stability of the dominant interpretation' (Critchley, p.26). The second moment contradicts the text with itself, opening its intended meaning to an alterity that goes against what a text was purported to say or mean. (An example of a double reading in music can be found in Gerd Zacher's Kunst einer Fuge [Art of a Fugue].) Derrida often articulates this double reading around what is called undecidables.

Critchley claims that 'it is precisely in the suspension of choice or decision between two alternatives, a suspension provoked in and through an act of reading, that the ethical dimension of deconstruction is opened and maintained' (Critchley, p.88).

Deconstruction is characterized by the impetus to clear the way for an experience of the other. An affirmative strategy. An affirmative strategy of transformation. Of transforming and transgressing Western thought. To get ready for the coming of the other.

See Cobussen who wrote this text.

Think in multiplicity

2010-06-29T12:51:00.003+02:00

Derrida emphasizes the affirmative character of deconstruction, the ethics of deconstruction.

Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness (a sort of gratuitous chess game), but an openness towards the other ... an otherness that has been dissimulated or appropriated by the logocentric tradition ... The very activity of thinking, which lies at the basis of epistemological, ontological, and veridical comprehension, is the reduction of plurality to unity and alterity to sameness ... To think philosophically is to comprehend, to include, to seize, to grasp and master the other, thereby reducing its alterity.

Deconstruction may therefore be understood as the desire to keep open a dimension of alterity which can neither be reduced, comprehended, nor, strictly speaking, even thought by philosophy' (Kearney, p.123-4, my italics). The crucial 'methodological' point is that it is possible to discern the operations of different ways of meaning simultaneously. To think in multiplicity. Derrida's argument is that the unconditional arises as the interruption, or non-closure, of any determinate context.

See Cobussen

Disrupting a text

2010-06-24T14:47:00.003+02:00

Deconstruction disrupts a text from the inside out. (Cobussen)

This means that deconstruction operates from within a text, from within the vocabulary of the text that it deconstructs. It necessarily operates from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of the subversions from the old structure, borrowing them structurally (cf. Of Grammatology, p.24). Derrida shows that every text is always permeated by multiple meanings. But this heteronomy is relegated to the background by the author, by a reader or by the context in such a way as to favor one meaning over another. Such manifestation of power is revealed and questioned in deconstruction. For that reason, deconstruction is not a discursive or theoretical 'play', but a practical-political affair; it is the taking of responsibility (cf. Music, Deconstruction, and Ethics).

Derrida's major criticism on logocentrism (on Western thought, in general) is its continuous attempt to control the other, (thereby) reducing it and merging it into the same. The other inspires us with fear because it cannot be reduced to the same; and so it needs to be counteracted. Derrida does not want to do away with traditional philosophy and logical-discursive language altogether; he acknowledges the value of rational discussion and the importance of reason. However, he wants us to be more susceptible for realms outside of that rationality, for moments where the discursive order is broken and invaded.

Derrida acknowledges that the desire to deconstruct may itself become a desire to actively re-appropriate the text through mastery, to show the text what it 'does not know'. He who deconstructs assumes that he at least means what he writes. But there is also an opposite side to the desire for deconstruction. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality, we are given the pleasure of the bottomless, the joy of freedom (cf. Of Grammatology, p.lxxvii).

See Cobussen

Read a text

2010-06-22T10:26:00.003+02:00

In the most simple and general terms, deconstruction in the Derridean sense means to read a text according to a certain way or strategy, a precise and careful strategy, but also one that shakes the ground under one's feet.

It is a praxis in which Derrida specifically aims to transform philosophical, linguistic, theological, or aesthetic texts. Deconstruction shows us the possibility of continually ascribing different or additional meanings to texts; it acknowledges the fundamental ambiguity of signs and texts and the impossibility of controlling them. Deconstruction implies transplantation, the ability to remove a sign or text from its present context to another context. In this way, deconstruction highlights the heterogeneity of a sign or a text. It wants to show the impossibility of a (sign-)system to close, to arrive at a definite meaning. Of course, attempts to demarcate meanings take place all the time, but the demarcations are based on conventions and are always tentative ('for the time being').

Transplantation. But transplantation also always means transformation. Deconstruction establishes a transgression, a shifting of meaning that in turn is never definitive. There is no expectation of a final moment of truth. Rather, there is an ongoing process of the shifting of rules that govern the relationships among (the elements of) systems. A short example. We write, and in this writing there is a potential for rewriting. Transformation implies that 'change' is a change in way of meaning - a becoming. See Cobussen.

Cobussen and deconstruction

2010-06-21T10:07:00.002+02:00

[1] What 'is' deconstruction?

The use of the quotation marks should make clear that the question cannot in fact be posed like this. cf. Deconstruction: Between Method and Singularity.) A first option for a description of deconstruction is offered by the dictionary. In the French dictionary, Littré, the meaning of deconstruction progresses along two lines. (1) Grammatical. Deconstruction means change, the disruption of the construction or the composition of the words in a sentence with the purpose of producing other, new meanings with the same words (i.e., not to deny them!). (2) Mechanical. Deconstruction indicates disassembling, taking apart, dismantling, disintegrating (Derrida often uses the word 'demontage.

The first description in particular shows that destructive and constructive aspects are at work simultaneously. Deconstruction not only encloses and unlocks, it also gives access to new spaces. Deconstruction means a dismantling in order to create something new. The grammatical meaning puts more emphasis on the affirmative nature of deconstruction than the mechanical meaning of the word.

Adorno, Prynne and Lyric Poetry

2010-06-20T10:59:00.004+02:00

This is going to require a preamble, I’ve said before that I have no problem with poets who write with a political objective nor would I denigrate a poem just because I don’t hold with it’s political stance. My two favourite contemporary English poets, Prynne and Hill, write from opposite ends of the political spectrum and I’m comfortable with that because I don’t read poetry to be politically persuaded. I’ve also said before that I think it’s a mistake to endow poetry with powers that it doesn’t actually have. By this I don’t in any way wish to deny the power of poetry to enable us to radically challenge the way that we think about things. I also recognise that poetry is immensely influential in shaping the culture of any society but let’s not forget that it is one of many forms of creative expression and each of these has its own strengths.
Now for the confession, I’ve been on this planet for 54 years without reading any Adorno. Unforgivable, I know, but I’ve never felt the need to get to the bottom of Critical Theory even though the Frankfurt School has a reputation for intellectual rigour and ‘sound’ Marxian thought.
Being aware of this lacuna in my reading, I’ve been psyching myself up to start working out the finer points of negative dialectics. The other reason for tackling Adorno is that I’m various types of dialectical analysis since reading Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’ last year. I’ve re-read David Harvey’s description and examples, I’ve also read Stalin’s explanation and examples. I have to say that I’m not convinced by any of these, Benjamin seems to miss the point whilst Stalin is incredibly facile. David Harvey (who is a personal hero) tends to over complicate things and throws in elements that shouldn’t really be there. Adorno therefore is my last hope in getting to the bottom of dialectics but then I came across an essay entitled ‘On lyric poetry and society’ which seemed to offer a useful short-cut.
I got through the first few pages without finding any thing too disconcerting then; “My thesis is that the lyric work is always the expression of a social antagonism. But since the objective world that produces the lyric is an inherently antagonistic world, the concept of the lyric is not that of a subjectivity to which language grants objectivity.” Adorno goes on to point out Romanticism’s link with the folk song, Prynne makes the same point in Field Notes and John Wilkinson has pointed out the importance of work songs and sea shanties in Prynne’s poetry. I don’t however accept that lyric work is always the product of social antagonism, nor do I accept Adorno’s view that some lyric poets are privileged because they are capable of grasping the universal through ‘immersion in the self’ or ‘to develop as autonomous subjects capable of freely expressing themselves”. This seems more than a little far-fetched, I’d need to know precisely what is meant by ‘immersion in the self’ and isn’t ‘autonomous subject’ an oxymoron? Nevertheless it is clear to me that Prynne’s view of the Romantics is very close to that of Adorno.
The essay continues with the introduction of two poems which Adorno says he will treat as philosophical sundials telling the time of history. The first poem is “On a walking tour” by Edward Morike which is ostensibly about a visit to a small town and the poet’s experience of happiness. Adorno commends it as it skilfully blends the classical elevated style with the romantic private miniature and is particularly impressed with the tact by which this is achieved.
At the end of this discussion Adorno writes: “In industrial society the lyric idea of a self-restoring immediacy becomes- where it does not impotently evoke a romantic past – more and more something that flashes out abruptly, something in which what is possible transcends its own impossibility”. Normally I would groan at this point and despair of ideologues ever getting rid of tautology but I have to ask whether this transcending the impossible business is at the heart of the Prynne project. We know that he has an antagonistic relationship with the ‘witty circus’ of discourse which he sees as corrupted and I now have to consider whether the poems are actually striving for the impossible by means of a ‘self-restoring immediacy’. It does appear to explain the very enthusiastic and detailed analysis contained in ‘Field Notes’ as well as some of the more lyrical (if truncated) passages in the later poems.
Adorno then introduces a poem by Stefan George which is a kind of pared-down love song and remarks that it is written in a kind of German that could be a foreign language to German speakers. He refers to the use of the word ‘gar’ in the poem and concedes that critics have said that it serves no purpose in the lyric. Adorno counters this by remarking that “great works of art succeed precisely where they are most problematic”. Adorno concludes by saying of George “this very lyric speech becomes the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen”.
Is this what Prynne is after? His work is recognised as problematic and his project would seem to be about creating a discourse that is less corrupt.
I have to say that most of this essay is far removed from my own views on the place of poetry, I also have to say that I still don’t understand the Romantics but it does enable me to understand a bit more about Prynne’s motivation in writing the way that he does. The essay is available for download on the incomparableAAAARG.org site.

Remediation

2010-06-17T21:33:00.003+02:00

Bolter argues that digital hypertext is the remediation of the printed book.

Published between the first and second editions of Writing Space, Remediation: Understanding New Media (coauthored by Richard Grusin, MIT Press, 1999) focuses on the relationship between visual digital expressions (such as computer games and the World Wide Web) and earlier media forms (such as film and television). Bolter argues that digital forms both borrow from and seeks to surpass earlier forms, and he gives this process the name “remediation.”

With Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer, bolter is also reexamining Benjamin's concept of aura. He wants to see how aura (or the decay of aura) manifests itself in new media forms, such as augmented and mixed reality. His current paper is entitled: “New Media and the Permanent Crisis of Aura.”

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

Stars

2010-06-16T20:16:00.001+02:00

To Earth

If stars are really well over 6000 light years away, how could light have had time to travel from them to Earth?

Two logically possible answers have serious problems:

God created the starlight on its way: this suffers grievously from the fact that starlight also carries information about distant cosmic events. The created-in-transit theory means that the information would be ‘phony’, recording events which never happened, hence deceptive.

The distances are deceptive: but despite some anomalies in redshift/distance correlations (see Galaxy-Quasar ‘Connection’ Defies Explanation), it’s just not possible for all stars and galaxies to be within a 6000-light-year radius—we would all fry!

But if light were billions of times faster at the beginning, and slowed down in transit, there would be no more problem.

Kolb and autobiography

2010-06-15T17:31:00.000+02:00

- There is a sort of literary genre of hypertext which seems very widespread, which is that of autobiography or writing personal Web pages. Do you think this kind of autobiographical hypertext writing has some particular features which deserve attention? Do you think it changes somehow the way we can write about ourselves?

David Kolb - I think it has. It is not so much the hypertext as the fact that anyone can publish on the Web, that everyone has a printing press, as it were, and therefore can make their life available. What the hypertext then adds is the ability to add pictures, to quickly write, and change quickly if need be, and to produce fairly good visual effects without too much effort. Although not all Web pages with personal autobiography have such good effects. There is another thing involved: if you look at literary hypertext, even if published on CD-ROM or disk and therefore rather incomplete in themselves, you see that autobiography often shows up. Not necessarily that the story or the characters are autobiographical, but rather that the author inserts autobiographical segments which you may find your way to. In one hypertext story called Woe by Michael Joyce you suddenly find yourself reading something that says: "Well, I am writing this at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Macintosh computer. It is a very cold day and I’ve been writing since 9 in the morning... ". Suddenly you have the author, truly or not, bringing in an autobiographical element. It is very tempting. I have found myself when writing hypertext putting in a few self-reflections questioning the form of what I was writing. It is a move which seems very natural because you can always link off in different directions. I think the other attraction of the Web, and I’ve seen this when my students write autobiographical things, is the feeling that what you do is suddenly available to a very large audience. Perhaps not too many people will see it but it is available. It is not like a personal diary which you keep or even something which you make to show your parents or your fellow classmates; it is open and that takes on either solemnity or a sense of fun, depending how you do it, which can be quite stimulating.

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

Future of narrative

2010-06-14T06:48:00.000+02:00

Hypertextual continually returns to the theme of changing, transformation and role of narrative, perhaps in an attempt to draw the reader into questioning the future of narrative, specifically as it relates to new media.

Hypertextual wants to define narrative as giving a context in which we can explore -- and subsequently come closer to understanding through further illumination - web behaviors and the numerical condition. We believe that narrative is a method through which we can isolate scriptor's traits, project them beyond ourselves, and contextualize them in a medium which can be used to understand reading behaviors and cultural society.

Narrative under this description seems to accord very well with projectionist theories of religion, specifically Feuerbach. Ludwig Feuerbach, in his work, “The Essence of Christianity”, explains religion as man’s projecting his own humanity beyond himself into a transcendent reality in order to understand his own characteristically human experience.

Hypertextual works like this projection. An ideality. The text is projected in a transcendent ideality. And the author is identified with his own words.

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi !" used to say Gustave Flaubert !

Words and life in Derrida's Dissemination.

2010-06-13T08:48:00.002+02:00

Decentering is the essential concept of Derrida's Dissemination. The origin of what we define today as a post structural principle can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophy, to Plato's defense of the "living spoken word" against the "cadaverous rigidity of writing". What Derrida does in his book is subverting Plato's general premise or simply reducing it to a circular reasoning, therefore to inconsequentiality.

Logos, a living, animate creature, is thus also an organism that has been engendered. An organism: a different body proper, with a center and extremities, joints, a head, and feet. In order to be "proper", a written discourse ought to submit to the laws of life just as a living discourse does. Logographical necessity [...] ought to be analogous to the biological, or rather zoological, necessity [...] Otherwise obviously it would have neither head nor tail. (79)

Of course there is a straight analogy between the spoken word and its supposed origin, the human body. But, at the same time, assuming that the written word is cadaverous is a false syllogism.

Sperm, water, ink, paint, perfumed dye: the pharmakon always penetrates like a liquid; it is absorbed, drunk, introduced into the inside, which it first marks with the hardness of the type, soon to invade it and inundate it with its medicine, its brew, its drink, its potion, its poison. (152)

Exactly because of the fact that the oral speech submits to biological rules, it is, like any form of written expression, uncontainable and fluid. What to Plato was a limit of the written word -- no head and no tail -- is actually the primary condition of the spoken word itself, of any form of communication.

The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstructing it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. (63, bold added)

This quotation leads us beyond the dichotomy of spoken/written word to the electronic environment: the web. It is true, and I find it amazing, that every new technology, like writing a long time ago, is somehow legitimated, or simply defined, by comparing it to the physical entity of the human body. And it is exactly out of the growing importance of biology in the last two centuries at least that we are talking of decentering. The attention has moved from an absent center, God, to a present "decenterer", the human being. The text is

Straightway plural, dived or multiplied, this is also because of its power of germination or germinal differentiation , which will proceed to engender or will have given birth to a whole chain of other sentences (338) There is always a sentence that has already been sealed somewhere waiting for you where you think you are opening a virgin territory (340, bold added)

Precisely because speech is a living entity, as Plato says, that it is intrinsically based on proliferation and reproduction, on engendering and multiplication. To me, decentering doesn't mean the "lack" of a center, but its mobility, flexibility and unsteadiness. The center is not a unifying principle anymore, but a variable. It reflects the differentiation in the democratic principle of life itself, where each individual is finally free to set himself as the center of his or her environment.

Monica Lancini, 1999

Dissemination and Contamination

2010-06-06T13:04:00.002+02:00

Dissemination and Contamination
PhD: The Dissemination of Science Fiction

In this brief chapter I will examine the movement of dissemination – which is the process of grafting – and how we may view this in light of genre; ie what can be termed generic contamination. It should be noted that the process of dissemination is not contingent on the presence of genre and should be viewed in the broader spectrum of textuality. As such, much of what is said here can apply to any other textual entity, not just the generic mark. Here, however, I will restrict myself to a general examination of dissemination and how genre contamination can be regarded as an instance of dissemination and insemination.

First, we should look at what dissemination means, in Derrida’s terms. At its most basic “[d]issemination generalizes the theory and practice of the graft without a body proper” (Derrida, 1972a: 10, italics in original) thereby focussing on the concept of the graft which is a concept related to Derrida’s notion of the trace and the mark. It is not originary in any sense; while it may have an origin the graft always produces (itself) and advances only in the plural. It is a singular plural, which no single origin will ever have preceded. Germination, dissemination. There is no first insemination. The semen is already swarming. The “primal” insemination is dissemination. A trace, a graft whose traces have been lost. (Derrida, 1972a: 334)

This is why the graft has no body proper, since it is part of a process which is inevitable in any text, according to Derrida. It is this process which is so significant for Derrida, not just here but in all of his dealings with text and meaning. One of the theses of dissemination is “the impossibility of reducing a text as such to its effects of meaning, content, thesis, or theme.” (Derrida, 1972a: 7) For Derrida, it is always the marginal and the liminal which exerts a peculiar influence on the text; radically absent yet very real in its effects. Meaning, therefore, is not fixed for Derrida but rather something which is in a constant process, always writing and rewriting itself, always multiplying and rushing outwards.

Dissemination is the division of meaning; the tendency of textual meaning to move out in all directions and so resist closure. Or as Vincent B. Leitch puts it, “[t]he “work,” now called text, explodes beyond stable meaning and truth toward the radical and ceaseless play of infinite meanings spread across textual surfaces – dissemination.” (Leitch, 1983: 105, italics in original) Dissemination, then, becomes the endless play of meaning both as divided and doubled; because words have too many meanings there will be an indefinite number of meanings, meanings proliferate.

In discussing dissemination Derrida plays on the double meanings of seed/term/germ and semantics, all of which constitute the effect of dissemination. (Derrida 1972a: 334) Dissemination is therefore not a negative process which must be contained; but rather it is the necessary precondition for writing to exist at all: “The heterogeneity of different writings is writing itself, the graft. It is numerous from the first or it is not.” (Derrida, 1972a: 390) Such an understanding of textuality is intertextuality in the way that Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes both use it.

In Roland Barthes’ words, the author becomes the scriptor (Barthes, 1977: 145) and any understanding of a text which does not to some extent quote, cite, or reproduce another text is questioned. Instead, texts are understood as the always ‘already-written’. Derrida agrees with this notion, when he argues that textual samples

can only be read within the operation of their reinscription, within the graft. It is the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the thickness of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating allogene through which the two texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically into the other and become regenerated in the repetition, along the edges of an overcast seam. (Derrida, 1972a: 389-390, italics in original).

Let us for now turn instead to polysemy and its connection with dissemination. Derrida is insists that dissemination is different from polysemy; being multiple and indefinite. “In diverging from polysemy, comprising both more and less than the latter, dissemination interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin what is actually an after-effect of meaning.” (Derrida, 1972a: 17) Dissemination, in its affinity with the trace, points out that there is no originating moment, and this is its opposition to polysemy, since:

Polysemy always puts out its multiplicities and variations with the horizon, at least, of some integral reading which contains no absolute rift, no senseless derivation – the horizon of the final parousia of a meaning at last deciphered, revealed, made present in the rich collections of its determinations. [...] All the moments of polysemy are, as the world implies, moments of meaning. [...] The concept of polysemy thus belongs within the confines of explanation, within the explication or enumeration, in the present, of meaning. it belongs to the attending discourse. Its style is that of the representative surface. It forgets that its horizon is framed. The difference between discursive polysemy and textual dissemination is precisely difference itself, “an implacable difference.” This difference is of course indispensable to the production of meaning (and that is why between polysemy and dissemination the difference is very slight). (Derrida, 1972a: 384-385)

The difference between polysemy and dissemination may thus be very slight, but it remains significant. While polysemy generates meaning from within the text, on premises accepted by the text, dissemination generates meaning from without; it imports meaning into the text and not always accepted meanings, if we briefly speak of the intentions of the text. Dissemination, as opposed to polysemy, turns the work into text, opening it for the larger movement of textuality and intertextuality. As Joseph N. Riddel points out:

The literary text is a play of textuality, not simply in the obvious sense that a “work” of art always originates in the historical field of predecessors. Its own play of difference mirrors its displacement and reappropriation of other texts, and anticipates the necessary critical text which must “supplement” it. (Riddel, 1976: 589)

Derrida puts it slightly differently: “Even while it keeps the text it culls alive, this play of insemination – or grafting – destroys their hegemonic center, subverts their authority and their uniqueness.” (Derrida, 1972a: 378) This echoes Barthes notion of the always ‘already-written’ and allows us to realise that texts are no longer as unique as once thought, but must instead continually defer their meanings to previous texts, as well as later texts which will in turn also transform them. The movement of texts and their meanings are not locked in a strictly forward-moving motion; Riddel points out that later texts are anticipated by earlier ones and Derrida states that “[e]ach grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory.” (Derrida, 1972a: 390) Arguing further for the intertextual origins of every text, Leitch writes:

The disorienting effect of the invading predecessors resembles the disruptive functions at work in the sign: a play of differences operates, bringing about, not fullness of meaning, but generic disturbances and discontinuities – random flights of signifiers. In place of pure signifiers, though, we have here contaminating pieces of various intertexts. The sign, as such, is constituted as originarily intertextual. (Leitch, 1983: 98)

This is the deconstructive move of reversing and displacing the typical conceptual order: text and sign are no longer whole and original, they are instead always already composites of earlier texts and signs. The process of dissemination and grafting, that is, pointing out the inherently interdependent nature of the text amounts to an overturning of the typical conceptual order, or, as Jonathan Culler succinctly puts it: “The graft is the very figure of intervention.” (Culler, 1982: 141)

While the graft may be the site of the intersection between multiple texts, let us for now rather look at the further implications of dissemination. I mentioned earlier that dissemination is intertextuality in the sense that also Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva uses the concept. It is telling to compare their writings on intertextuality, since it provides us with a broader spectrum for Derrida’s term. Kristeva writes that,

Whatever the semantic content of a text its condition as a signifying practice presupposes the existence of other discourses. [...] This is to say that every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it. (Kristeva, quoted from Culler, 1981: 116)

Earlier texts thus impose something on the present text, and it is this imposition which not only makes texts what they are but also why intertextuality as a concept destroys authority and uniqueness; no longer does meaning originate with the author but is imposed from the outside by earlier texts, themselves imposed on by even earlier texts. This chain is never-ending. This is why Barthes writes of the author becoming a scriptor, since author implies a unique individual creating original material. Rather, according to Barthes, the author must be conceived off as piecing together already existing texts in new ways, hence the reference to the ‘already-written.’ This process is inevitable and not necessarily conscious.

Derrida’s notion of dissemination is perhaps more radical than Kristeva’s and Barthes’ since for Derrida dissemination occurs even at the most basic level of the sign. While Kristeva and Barthes do not speak of using whole texts when stringing together new ones, it is unclear at what level the intertextual process moves on. For Derrida, it lies at the very core of language and so must be thought of to originate at the level of the sign. As Culler points out: “Linkings that stress the etymology or morphology of a word, bringing out the rift or gap at the heart of draft, outline, plan, are ways of applying torque to a concept and affecting its force.” (Culler, 82: 142) In other words, the sign itself carries within it already the seeds that will eventually deconstruct it.

For Derrida, then, there is no difference between textuality and intertextuality it is the same process. Truth, or meaning, in a given text becomes naturally suspect in such an environment, as Leitch points out:

The lesson of textuality as intertextuality is that truth in (of) literature is an illusion: there is only always the deracinating play of myriad differences. Infinite meanings are broadcast across textual surfaces. In deconstructive theory, such dissemination takes the place of truth. (Leitch, 1983: 99, italics in original)

This may sound as the ultimate in textual nihilism where any hope of unity or stability is forever lost and the text is utterly shattered and in the worst case completely redundant and useless, since we can never decide irrevocably which meaning is the most appropriate. The text has lost all meaning since it has an infinite number of meanings; the text is hollow. It is evident that there is a degree of semantic indeterminacy in Derrida’s proposition of dissemination and it is here that we may tie back into postmodernism. Indeterminacy is one of the most vital aspects of postmodern culture (though it existed prior to postmodernism, of course) and Ihab Hassan describes indeterminacy as the tendency to “delay closures, frustrate expectations, promote abstractions, sustain a playful plurality of perspectives, and generally shift the grounds of meaning on their audiences.” (Hassan 1987:73). Meaning is not something definite in postmodern culture, there is no single truth which may stabilise meaning, instead meaning becomes a object which may be playfully examined and reexamined constantly.

Clearly Derrida’s project is not to eradicate all meaning but instead to investigate how meaning is produced, and he insists that dissemination is thus always also insemination (Derrida 1972a: 304) and that this insemination creates what he terms the graft. As Culler states “Meaning is produced by a process of grafting…” (Culler, 1982: 134) and as Derrida asserts:

To write means to graft. It’s the same word. The saying of the thing is restored to its being-grafted. The graft is not something that happens to the properness of the thing. There is no more any thing than there is any original text. (Derrida, 1972a: 389)

Leitch argues: “The Derridian operation of grafting is a postmodern tactic designed to cross traditional boundaries in order to promote fruitful intersections among isolated disciplines and textual traditions.” (Leitch, 1996: 41, italics in original). As we can see from Leitch’s quote grafting is not only part of the very process of writing, but can also be used as a specific strategy. Grafting is thus a way of making sense or meaning from a text, what is grafted onto the present text may differ but it will always alter the text; here we find a parallel meaning to Kristeva’s concept of one discourse imposing on another. For Derrida, this is how meaning arises, whether we know of the imposing discourse.

Michel Foucault makes the same point when he in The Archeology of Knowledge states that a text “is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.” (Foucault, 1969: 23) Such a network, then, must be seen as what frames a text and makes meaning possible. Indeed, in “Signature Event Context” Derrida argues how context is one way of controlling aspects of a text, but also that in the end, “[e]ventually, one may recognize other such possibilities in it by inscribing or grafting it into other chains. No context can enclose it. Nor can any code…” (Derrida, 1972b: 317) It is not possible to restrict the text to only one meaning, just as it is not possible to claim that a text belongs to only one network or field of discourse; a text is composed of many different elements from many different networks. A text is thus always contaminated by other texts from disparate fields.

It is this realisation which carries us into Derrida’s concept of contamination. He discusses contamination primarily in relation to genre, though it does crop up briefly in Dissemination. Significantly, in relation to genre contamination works similar to dissemination in the way it overflow and breaks boundaries. In Derrida’s conception, genre instates a line which must not be crossed, a certain norm whatever it may specifically be. This norm, as we have seen, is never natural but always constructed by certain standards. This is the law of genre. It is precisely this law which enables us to interpret texts, which indicates not just the necessary existence of genre but also the impossibility of genreless texts: “a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always genre and genres.” (Derrida, 1980: 65)

The trait that marks membership comes to form what Derrida terms an internal pocket by the process of invagination and this pocket is larger than the whole. (Derrida, 1980: 59) I will argue that invagination is the same process as grafting, since what we find is that another discourse imposes upon a text and inseminates it with meaning. The confluence of the sexual metaphors here are not to be mistaken for it is clear that meaning is given birth by this process of insemination and invagination.

Trace or graft, the movement is the same; just as the generic mark does not belong to the text because it is a trace, so too does the graft not truly belong in the text. The use of the word “contamination” makes the process sound negative since it implies impurity, which must be a conscious decision to fly in the face of a desire for purity of genre. We may instead choose the phrasing “participation without belonging” since this does not carry the same negative connotations, and Derrida also the terms interchangeably: “Here now, very quickly, is the law of abounding, of excess, the law of participation without membership, of contamination, etc.” (Derrida, 1980: 63, italics in original)

As we can see, this is exactly what the very concept of dissemination indicates; the graft does not truly belong in the text, since it comes from the outside, yet it remains a necessary part of the text and is indeed constitutive of the text: “What interests me is that this re-mark – ever possible for every text, for every corpus of traces – is absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry, or literature.” (Derrida, 1980: 64) We can see here again how texts are viewed as being forever framed by other texts and discourses outside itself. As Leitch puts it: “What are texts? Strings of differential traces. Sequences of floating signifiers. Sets of infiltrated signs dragging along ultimately indecipherable intertextual elements.”(Leitch, 1983: 122)

I do not agree that these traces or grafts must necessarily remain indecipherable. To be sure, such traces may be very difficult to follow and it will be by their very nature be impossible to locate any specific origin since that is by definition impossible, but that does not mean that the textual graft may not still be described and analysed. Indeed, Derrida suggests as much when he writes that “one must elaborate a systematic treatise on the textual graft.” (Derrida, 1972a: 214) Derrida himself mentions footnotes, epigraphs and titles, in essence much of what Gerard Genette describes in Paratexts, but there seems to be no particular limit specifically what type of graft may be studied.

Jonathan Culler is very excited about a study of grafts, pointing out that one of deconstruction’s primary aims is to identify grafts; points of juncture and stress occur where texts have been spliced together. He states that “a treatise on textual grafting would attempt to classify various ways of inserting one discourse in another or intervening in the discourse one is interpreting” and would do so by treating “discourse as the product of various sorts of combinations or insertions” and exploring “its ability to function in new contexts with new force.” (Culler, 1982: 135)

It is just such as treatise that I wish to embark on, examining instances where metaphors from the sf genre has become dislodged from its traditional field and exploded outward into other, seemingly incompatible, fields. As such, this dissertation can be seen as the process of a ‘double reading’ of the science fiction genre ‘against’ literature, theory, culture; in essence textuality. The junctures where sf has been spliced with other texts would thus grant these metaphors new force in their ability to function in new contexts.

Such a project remains valid because of Derrida’s point that: “Each grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory.” (Derrida 1972a:355) and so we realise that the number of different texts which contain within them textual samples from the sf genre are affected by this generic participation or contamination, which is both dissemination (from the genre) and insemination (into the text in question). Because every sign, or genre for that matter, can be cited, it can also break from its ‘original’ context and so “engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion.” (Derrida, 1972b: 320) It is these new contexts and new forces which will be the topic of the following chapters.

References

Barthes, Roland (1977). Image-Music-Text, Stephen Heath (ed), Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks.
Culler, Jonathan. Pursuit of Signs, Florence, Routledge, 2001.
Culler, Jonathan (1982). On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1972a). Dissemination, London & New York: Continuum, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques (1972b). Margins of Philosophy, Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques (1980). “The Law of Genre”, Critical Inquiry, 7:1 (1980: Autumn).
Foucault, Michel (1969). The Archeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.
Hassan, Ihab (1987). The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, Ohio State University Press.
Leitch, Vincent B. (1983). Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press.
Leitch, Vincent B. (1996). Postmodernism – Local Effects, Global Flows, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Riddel, Jospeh N. (1976). “From Heidegger to Derrida to Chance: Doubling and (Poetic) Language”, boundary 2, Vol.4 No. 2 (Winter, 1976), 569-592.

From
New Mappings
today repeats the future

Graphic expression

2010-06-01T07:59:00.003+02:00

Recognising the specificity of writing, glossematics did not merely give itself the means of describing the graphic element.

It showed bow to reach the literary element, to what in literature passes through an irreducibly graphic text, tying the play of form to a determined substance of expression. If there is something in literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice, to epos or to poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously isolating the bond that links the play of form to the substance of graphic expression. (It will by the same token be seen that “pure literature,” thus respected in its irreducibilty, also risks limiting the play, restricting it. The desire to restrict play is, moreover, irresistible.)

This interest in literature is effectively manifested in the Copenhagen School. It thus removes the Rousseauist and Saussurian caution with regard to literary arts. It radicalises the efforts of the Russian formalists, specifically of the O.PO.IAZ, who, in their attention to the being-literary of literature, perhaps favoured the phonological instance and the literary models that it dominates.

Notably poetry. That which, within the history of literature and in the structure of a literary text in general, escapes that framework, merits a type of description whose norms and conditions of possibility glossematics has perhaps better isolated. It has perhaps thus better prepared itself to study the purely graphic stratum within the structure of the literary text within the history of the becoming-literary of literality, notably in its “modernity.”

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Becoming unmotivated of the symbol

2010-05-30T13:03:00.003+02:00

In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated of the symbol. In his terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol:

Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.

[Elements of Logic, Hartshorne and Weiss]

Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mistake here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognised that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of “the arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in the non-symbolic, in an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs.” But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: “So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.”

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Writing

2010-05-26T11:21:00.002+02:00

The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself about the essence of his object in the form of a question of origin: “What is writing?” means “where and when does writing begin?”

The responses generally come very quickly. They circulate within concepts that are seldom criticised and move within evidence which always seems self-evident. It is around these responses that a typology of and a perspective on the growth of writing are always organised.

All works dealing with the history of writing are composed along the same lines: a philosophical and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems in a few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts.

We have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical wealth of information.

Long form textuality

2010-05-19T07:54:00.004+02:00

With E-Readers here are the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, new forms of narratives, invention. New modes of storytelling. A rise in importance of texts and meaning. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed

The thing is to understand why we historically haven't read long-form text on screens and how the e-readers are wedging themselves in the middle of everything.

We got to separate good and bad hypertextuality.

The key difference between Formless and Definite Content is the interaction between the content and the page (their fusion actually). Formless Content doesn’t see the page or its boundaries. Whereas Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it. It edits, shifts and resizes itself to fit the e-page. In a sense, Definite Content approaches the page as a canvas — something with dimensions and limitations — and leverages these attributes to both elevate the object and the content to a more complete whole.

Formless Content is unaware of the container.

Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas. Formless content is usually only PDF. Definite content usually has some hypertextual elements along with text.

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Where You can find the best Ebooks on the Web

2010-05-16T13:02:00.013+02:00

1. Free French Ebooks

2. Free English Ebooks

3. French Ebooks

4. English Ebooks

5. Main Ebooks Search Engine

6. Publishers

Thanks to ebouquin for the list (i completed)

Metabolean Hypertextopia

2010-05-16T10:27:00.003+02:00

Metabolean Hypertextopia

This website was first created in 2005, built to serve as a central location to link to the diverse online materials available on the Internet.

At that time, Internet mobile portals did not yet exist. What rhetoric pages on the Web did exist were heavily colored by the perspectives of their host institutions. This site hoped to publish what resources it could, and to link to all, serving as a central "map" to the rest. Even so, many people referred to it as the Metabolean Site; some people refer to it that way to this day, even though the site has physically moved to another place.

And today, of course, there are far more resources online than we could index adequately with a single online editor--even if s/he wrote HTML day and night. So this website is today based on a modern content management system, one that allows volunteers, reviewers and editors to collaborate to post new materials, and to link to the complex web of online resources located across the Internet that comprise the complex network of rhetoric resources online.

So we're developing an extensive collaboration here, within a modern web publishing system that will allow our volunteers to spend as much or as little time as they choose, and will allow us to offer any state-of-the-art web technologies (e.g. blogs, threaded discussion boards, database-driven content pages, streaming media, etc.) we believe useful to the site.

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Rhetorics and Technologies

2010-05-12T12:03:00.003+02:00

Recognizing an increasingly technological context for rhetorical activity, the thirteen contributors to this volume illuminate the challenges and opportunities inherent in successfully navigating intersections between rhetoric and technology in existing and emergent literacy practices.

Edited by Stuart A. Selber, Rhetorics and Technologies positions technology as an inevitable aspect of the rhetorical situation and as a potent force in writing and communication activities.

Taking a broad approach, this volume is not limited to discussion of particular technological systems (such as new media or wikis) or rhetorical contexts (such as invention or ethics). The essays instead offer a comprehensive treatment of the rhetoric-technology nexus. The book's first section considers the ways in which the social and material realities of using technology to support writing and communication activities have altered the borders and boundaries of rhetorical studies. The second section explores the discourse practices employed by users, designers, and scholars of technology when communicating in technological contexts. In the final section, projects and endeavors that illuminate the ways in which discourse activities can evolve to reflect emerging sociopolitical realties, technologies, and educational issues are examined.

The resulting text bridges past and future by offering new understandings of traditional canons of rhetoric--invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery--as they present themselves in technological contexts without discarding the rich history of the field before the advent of these technological innovations. Rhetorics and Technologies includes a foreword by Carolyn R. Miller and essays by John M. Carroll, Marilyn M. Cooper, Paul Heilker, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Debra Journet, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Jason King, James E. Porter, Stuart A. Selber, Geoffrey Sirc, Susan Wells, and Anne Frances Wysocki.

http://twurl.nl/n4pjgz

Kant and schemata

2010-04-13T10:14:00.002+02:00

A Bit on Kant's Schematism

It should be noted how Kant’s proposal for connecting the sensible and the conceptual, though superficially straightforward, is at another level extremely perplexing. Is a transcendental schema a thought about time, or is it time as thought in a certain way? Our ways of referring to transcendental schemata inevitably assimilate them, it would seem, to one side or the other of the concept/intuition divide.

Moreover, it appears necessary to do exactly this, if we are to answer the question of what they are, or say anything contentful about them. The cost of the assimilation, however, in either direction, is to make them apparently unfit for their designated mediating role: if they are either concepts with a special relation to intuition, or intuitions as formed conceptually, then they seem to presuppose the very possibility of connecting the sensible and the conceptual which transcendental schematism is invoked to explain.

Kant may declare that transcendental schemata are irreducibly sensible-and-intellectual, and that this is how the question of their identity should be answered. If so, Kant’s original division of our representations into intuitions and concepts is not exhaustive, for there is a third class, about which we can say very little, other than that it is dependent on and somehow derivative from the others. We can specify it in terms of the transcendental role to which the problem of relating concepts and intuitions gives rise, but the manner of its derivation, and the nature of schemata, we cannot specify. Note, it is not just that we can say relatively less about schemata than we can about intuitions and concepts, and that we cannot identify their ultimate source; we are equally ignorant of the grounds of our faculties of sensibility and understanding. Transcendental schemata remain in a special sense hard to grasp, because they are required to combine in themselves two kinds of property, or representational functions, the seeming immiscibility of which is precisely what made us introduce them in the first place. That this is nevertheless Kant’s own view of the matter is, plausibly, what is suggested by his statement that schematism is ‘an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover’ (A141/B180-1).

Sebastian Gardner: I've been accused of obsession with the schematism, but the intuition-concept gap is for me the core problem that Kant runs into, and I have never been able to find an adequate solution in Kant for it.

Here's Paul Guyer's unsatisfactory explanation:

Thus, in the case of the categories our concepts are not “homogeneous” with our objects, and some intermediary has to be found in order to make them so. But this is not the case with our other concepts, which are inherently homo- geneous with their objects. A pure mathematical concept like circle is homogeneous with our experience, because it describes its object in terms of properties that can be directly presented in experience – that something is a curved, closed line every point of which is equidistant from its center is the kind of thing we can observe because the pure form of all our outer intuition is spatial. And an empirical concept like plate or dog is already homogeneous with its object because it includes predicates that correspond immediately to observable properties of objects, whether those properties are pure, like the circularity of a plate, or empirical, like its non- porousness or like the furriness or noisiness of a typical dog. If you're willing to accept that Platonic concepts like "plate" and "dog" have exact referents in the real world, then fine. But Kant doesn't (since he thinks the application of all concepts is normative and prescriptive and subjective) and his whole project is to figure out a way to salvage conceptual mental content out of a non-conceptual world.

Anyway, I mention this because I was just thinking about how much of modern philosophy grows out of exactly this particular problem. Kant wasn't the first to come up with it, but I think it's his formulation of it and failed solution to it that echoes in Russell (who tries to pull the same trick solution), Heidegger (who tries to punt the problem away), and many others.

And ultimately there's something a little pleasing in Kant's ceding of this problem to "art," which is a rare concession on his part.

See sebastien Gardner

Cyborg Institute

2010-04-11T10:44:00.002+02:00

Exploring the Intersections of Contemporary Technology, Culture, and Communities.

The Cyborg Institute is a research cooperative that explores interaction between computer systems and their users, as well as the links between the emergent technological and sociological phenomena.

Our current work centers on digitally-mediated collaboration and cyberculture. In the pursuit of our goal, to develop more effective and empowered methods and habits, we employ a diverse set of tools and critical perspectives.

Our work progresses in the open, primarily on the wiki.

From time to time we may also work directly with individuals and teams to facilitate projects of mutual interest. If you are interested in the kinds of issues and questions we pose or are doing related work, we would very much like to work with you and help support your efforts in whatever way we can. Above all we invite you to participate!

— the Cyborg Institute Team

It's all about the context

2010-04-10T19:38:00.002+02:00

A Context is a collection of data, often stored in a Map or in a custom class which acts as a struct with accessors and modifiers.

It is used for maintaining state and for sharing information within a system.

See this PDF for an indepth description.

Though it can be used for efficient and effective data sharing, you should note that many are wary of the Context pattern as an anti-pattern.

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Marco Roth: Derrida, an Autothanatography

2010-04-08T19:18:00.001+02:00

Derrida: An Autothanatography Marco Roth in n+1:

A man's death from pancreatic cancer at the age of seventy-four will not change any of this nor resolve old disputes. Death is not a metaphor, although there certainly exists a powerful rhetoric of death and nothing calls up rhetorical excess like death.
And yet I want to mourn Derrida in a way that I've never felt about public figures or writers. I want to make hyperbolic claims about the end of an era: the last great generation of intellectuals, Derrida and Edward Said in the last year. They are passing. We couldn't grasp them when they lived. Will we even bother now they're dead? That's a selfish fear behind an odd sentiment. Does complexity matter? And to whom? Especially now when we prefer certainty, loyalty, iterability, and information (preferably the kind that confirms what we know already), when Bernard Lewis and Bernard Henri Levy are the house intellectuals of choice? How good those two must feel to know that they've at least lived long enough to see their ideological enemies buried.

Only an American would pair Said and Derrida as representatives of a hope for the future of thinking and education that was always more than just fashionable theory, although fashion itself is a decayed form of hope. The fashion for theory and the words "Orientalism" and "Deconstruction" was as much a result of intelligent, angry and alienated Americans fastening on to a promise without quite grasping the training and the commitment to lonely thinking through a fixed tradition required to make it a reality. Despite its rapid politicization, "theory" in America or la pensée 68 in France, was not going to change the world (if by world we mean government). Theory, however, could and did change individual lives.
Briefly, it redeemed difficulty and especially a discomfort some people felt intuitively about subject and object, language and self. Those people who felt they stood on shaky foundations suddenly had a home for their native anti-foundationalism. They too could become theorists. Think of it as a job creation program for all intellectual nerds, outcasts and misfits, people whose kind of intelligence meant that they weren't even comfortable around most other intelligent people. The betrayal by the American system of higher education of those who'd enrolled enthusiastically in these job placement programs is a sad but minor footnote to the history of the 1990s. I don't mean the dwindling number of jobs for French, German, and philosophy PhDs or the corporatization of the University, although that's part of it. The betrayal began before, when those who showed glimmers of interest in theory were led to think that their curiosity would be nurtured into knowledge by a series of occasional course offerings and visiting instructors who rarely stayed long enough to ground a program. Instead of finding themselves in an academy, however, these students found themselves in the agora, fighting for money, time, attention, and space against better organized guilds. Theory did not, in itself, corrupt the young. The siege mentality surrounding theorists and theory did.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:16 AM Permalink

Network analysis

2010-04-05T17:51:00.002+02:00

Network analysis is the study of social relations among a set of actors. It is a field of study -- a set of phenomena or data which we seek to understand.

In the process of working in this field, network researchers have developed a set of distinctive theoretical perspectives as well. Some of the hallmarks of these perspectives are:

focus on relationships between actors rather than attributes of actors
sense of interdependence: a molecular rather atomistic view
structure affects substantive outcomes
emergent effects

Network theory is sympathetic with systems theory and complexity theory.

Social networks is also characterized by a distinctive methodology encompassing techniques for collecting data, statistical analysis, visual representation, etc.

Social Relations

Social relations can be thought of as dyadic attributes. Whereas mainstream social science is concerned with monadic attributes (e.g., income, age, sex, etc.), network analysis is concerned with attributes of pairs of individuals, of which binary relations are the main kind. Some examples of dyadic attributes:

Kinship: brother of, father of
Social Roles: boss of, teacher of, friend of
Affective: likes, respects, hates
Cognitive: knows, views as similar
Actions: talks to, has lunch with, attacks
Flows: number of cars moving between
Distance: number of miles between
Co-occurrence: is in the same club as, has the same color hair as
Mathematical: is two links removed from

Topics

1. Substantive effects of social network variables

Attributes of ego network --> access to resources, mental/physical health
Network closeness --> influence, diffusion
Similarity of position --> similarity of risks, opportunities, outcomes

2. Substantive determinants of social network variables

Personality --> centrality?
Similarity --> friendship ties? (Homophily)
Reduction of cognitive dissonance --> transitivity?
Strategic "networking"

3. Network determinants of network variables

Relationship between density and centrality

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Enhanced Memory for the Unexpected

2010-04-04T16:50:00.000+02:00

Surprise! Neural Mechanism May Underlie an Enhanced Memory for the Unexpected

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2010) — The human brain excels at using past experiences to make predictions about the future. However, the world around us is constantly changing, and new events often violate our logical expectations.

"We know these unexpected events are more likely to be remembered than predictable events, but the underlying neural mechanisms for these effects remain unclear," says lead researcher, Dr. Nikolai Axmacher, from the University of Bonn in Germany.

Dr. Axmacher and colleagues, whose new study is published by Cell Press in the February 25 issue of the journal Neuron, investigated the relationship between novelty processing and memory formation in two key brain structures, the hippocampus, and the nucleus accumbens. The hippocampus plays a key role in memory formation while the nucleus accumbens is involved in processing rewards and novel information. Previous work had suggested that information transfer between these structures may be associated with enhanced memory for unexpected items or events.

Obtaining direct information on the electrical activity of these structures deep in the brain is usually impossible in humans. However, the researchers used the opportunity to record from two groups of patients with electrodes implanted in these regions: Epilepsy patients awaiting surgical treatment of severe epilepsy, and patients with treatment-resistant depression undergoing deep-brain stimulation. Both groups of participants studied pictures of faces and houses in grayscale that were usually presented on a red or green background, respectively. Occasionally, a picture would have an "unexpected" configuration, such as a face on a green background. Subjects were subsequently tested for their memory of the expected and unexpected items.

The researchers discovered that unexpected stimuli enhanced an early and a late electrical potential in the hippocampus and the late signal was associated with a memory for the unexpected picture. In the nucleus accumbens, there was only a late potential which was larger during exposure to unexpected items. "Our findings support the idea that hippocampal activity may initially signal the occurrence of an unexpected event and that the nucleus accumbens may influence subsequent processing which serves to promote memory encoding," explains Dr. Axmacher.

The authors are careful to point out that one limitation of their study is that the recordings from the hippocampus and nucleus accumbens came from two separate groups of subjects, so their data provide an indirect measure of the functional connectivity between these two brain areas. However, their findings do provide fascinating new insight into this complex brain circuit. "Taken together, these are the first results that speak to the relative timing of expectation effects in different regions of the human brain, and they support models of accumbens-hippocampus interactions during encoding of unexpected events," concludes Dr. Axmacher.

Meaning is deferred

2010-03-29T11:41:00.002+02:00

Saussure's 'theory of the sign' defined a sign as being made up of the matched pair of signifier and signified.

Signifier

The signifier is the pointing finger, the word, the sound-image.

A word is simply a jumble of letters. The pointing finger is not the star. It is in the interpretation of the signifier that meaning is created.

Signified

The signified is the concept, the meaning, the thing indicated by the signifier. It need not be a 'real object' but is some referent to which the signifier refers.

The thing signified is created in the perceiver and is internal to them. Whilst we share concepts, we do so via signifiers.

Whilst the signifier is more stable, the signified varies between people and contexts.

The signified does stabilize with habit, as the signifier cues thoughts and images.

The signifier and signified, whilst superficially simple, form a core element of semiotics.

Saussure's ideas are contrary to Plato's notion of ideas being eternally stable. Plato saw ideas as the root concept that was implemented in individual instances. A signifier without signified has no meaning, and the signified changes with person and context. For Saussure, even the root concept is malleable.

The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary (Saussure called this 'unmotivated'). A real object need not actually exist 'out there'. Whilst the letters 'c-a-t' spell cat, they do not embody 'catness'. The French 'chat' is not identical to the English 'cat' in the signified that it creates (to the French, 'chat' has differences of meaning). In French, 'mouton' means both 'mutton' and a living 'sheep', whilst the English does not differentiate.

Saussure inverts the usual reflectionist view that the signifier reflects the signified: the signifier createsthe signified in terms of the meaning it triggers for us. The meaning of a sign needs both the signifier and the signified as created by an interpreter. A signifier without a signified is noise. A signified without a signifier is impossible.

Language is a series of 'negative' values in that each sign marks a divergence of meaning betweens signs. Words have meaning in the difference and relationships with other words.

The language forms a 'conceptual grid', as defined by structural anthropologist Edmund Leach, which we impose on the world in order to make sense.

Lacan defined the unconscious as being structured like language and dealing with a shifting set of signifiers. When we think in words and images, these still signify: they are not the final signified, which appears as a more abstract sensation. In that we can never know the Real, the external signified can neither be truly known.

Jaques Derrida criticized the neat simplicity of signs. The signifier-signified is stable only if one term is final and incapable of referring beyond itself, which is not true. Meaning is deferred as you slide between signs.

See Mind.org

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Pattern processing

2010-03-28T09:16:00.002+02:00

A template is a document pattern or part of a document that you keep stored to make new documents.

They can define the layout, fonts, margins, and other features of a document. Word processing, desktop publishing, and HTML editing programs sometimes call these "style sheets". You might also hear templates called "stationary", like in Outlook Express.

Whatever you call 'em, they sure can make life easier.

~ David -- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Ontological principle

2010-03-27T14:40:00.003+01:00

I have not entirely thought this through yet, but as I was driving back from the college today it occurred to me that the issue that loosely binds the Speculative Realists together is not that of overturning variants of Kantianism, correlationism, or philosophies of access. All of these critiques of the many variants of the philosophies of access are indeed central issues that need to be addressed, but in one way or another I think these projects can all be read as effects, symptoms, of a far more fundamental metaphysical principle. Or better yet, the critique of the philosophies of access is a negative formulation of a more basic and fundamental positive affirmation. This thought, though it will no doubt sound disappointing, almost banal, once I formulate it as a principle, was one of those moments where you feel as if you’ve been struck by lightning, blinded, or hit in the gut with a sudden philosophical idea where everything feels as if it’s being drawn together. Or perhaps again, it was the flash of a fundamental commitment, a drawing of the line, that you were trying to articulate all along.

Whitehead had his ontological principle:

That every condition to which the process of becoming conforms in any particular instance has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in process of concrescence. This category of explanation is termed the ‘ontological principle.’… This contological principle means that actual entities are the onlyreasons; so that the search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities. (PR, 24)

Leibniz had his Principle of Sufficient Reason:

…[T]here can be no fact real or existing, no statement true, unless there be a sufficient reason, why it should be so and not otherwise,
although these reasons usually cannot be known by us. (Monadology, §32)

Lucretius had his metaphysical principle:

This terror, then, this darkness of the mind,
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light,
Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
But only Nature’s aspect and her law,
Which, teaching us, hath this exordium:
Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.
Fear holds dominion over mortality
Only because, seeing in land and sky
So much the cause whereof no wise they know,
Men think Divinities are working there.

What then would be the affirmation, the declaration, at the heart of object-oriented philosophy? What the Speculative Realists, and realists and materialist in general, seem to be declaring, regardless of the diversity of their various positions, is an ontic principle about the nature of beings or entities. This principle can be stated in exceedingly simple terms that are nonetheless rife with profound consequences. Very simply it states:

The Ontic Principle: There is no difference that does not make a difference.

Alternatively it could be articulated as “Latour’s Principle”, as Latour is one of the few philosophers to have clearly stated this principle in fundamental terms. As stated by Latour the principle would run:

Latour’s Principle: There is no transportation without translation.

Given the current hegemonic forms of theory reigning today, the importance of the Ontic Principle can be more clearly articulated in terms of Latour’s formulation, for Latour’s formulation– especially as articulated in the magnificentReassembling the Social –most deeply hits at the heart of basic assumptions about language, culture, and society at the heart of questions asked by the most celebrated theoretical options of our day. When Latour refers to “transportation” he is referring to the relationship between two “actors” (Latour’s all purpose word for entities or objects, whether they’re living or physical, human or non-human, animal or mineral, etc.). Thus for example, in Lacanian terms, transportation might refer to the relation between a signifier and an entity such as the two doors as described in his famous example from “The Instance of the Letter”. For Lacan, the two doors are nothing more than bearers or vehicles of the signifiers /Ladies/ and /Gentlemen/, such that any talk of the entities involved, the doors themselves, the people that use these doors, etc., is irrelevant. In other words, in a manner similar to the relationship between concepts and intuitions in Kant, the being of the doors is exhausted in their function as bearers of these two diacritically defined signifiers. The doors themselves contribute nothing to being. Just as Saussure argued that the signifier is not to be located in the sound, the articulation, but rather the pure differential among phonemes that has only an ideal existence, the only function served by the doors in Lacan is as a material embodiment or actualization of this ideal, diacritical relation. To be sure, Lacan will argue that there is also the real and the imaginary. Yet in all cases these will be defined negatively as functions of the signifier. As Žižek endlessly repeats, the real is not something other than the symbolic, but is a particular twist within the symbolic itself.

A similar moment occurs in Plato’s famous analogy of the divided line as developed in Book VI of the Republic. When Plato articulates the first stage of belief moving beyond doxa into the domain of genuine episteme, the first level of true knowledge is to be found in dianoia and, in particular, mathematical reasoning. The ontological correlate of dianoia or discursive reasoning is to be found in the domain of mathematical objects. However, if Plato places discursive reasoning and mathematical objects beneath noesis or direct intuition of theforms, then this is because in Plato discursive reasoning still relies on diagrams (icons as Peirce would put it), mathematical writing, inscription, etc. Just as Lacan will later renounce the imaginary dimension of mathematics by virtue of its reliance on images, Plato too sees the mathematical as a partially corrupted version of the “real” objects: The Forms. Thus, while each lower level on the divided line does, indeed, contribute some difference, this difference is always articulated in negative terms as a departure from true reality or as something that depends on something else, something mediated through something else, in its being. If eikasia or imagining is the lowest level of knowledge, then this is because it is mediated in a variety of ways, requiring a medium within which the image can be produced (e.g., a pond), a catalyst of reflection (e.g., sunlight), an object to be reflected (e.g., that tree over there), and the form in which the object participates (e.g., the form of a tree). Each mediation is also a degradation, departing further from the Form or true reality which is treated as the only form that matters. Not only, as Deleuze remarks in the sublime eleventh chapter ofExpressionism and Philosophy, is the entity (the reflection) reduced to a mere bearer or transport of the Form (what Deleuze there refers to as the “participated”), but this participation is actually treated as a violence or degradation of the form or theonly difference that truly matters.

When Latour declares that “there is no transportation without translation” his point is that there is no relation between entities that does not involve some labor of translation. To illustrate this declaration– and such principles can only really be declarations or fundamental commitments –we would do well to begin by taking the term “translation” rather literally. Suppose we are discussing Toscano’s translation of Badiou’s Logiques des mondes (pssst, Alberto, when’s it finally coming out?). Logiques des mondes cannot simply be transported into English, but rather English must be made to speak French and French must be made to speak English. The transportation of a text from one language to another language is not a transport that occurs without remainder, without any transformation, but requires an entire labor that produces something new in the process that is a simulacrum of the original (in Deleuze’s sense, not Baudrillard’s sense), but also different as well. The medium of English contributes something that wasn’t there before, just as the French also functions as a catalyst for all sorts of unforeseen adventures in English. To say that there is no transportation without translation is to say that there is no entity, no being, that does not contribute a difference in the process of being transported into something else or in interacting with something else.

Henceforth, should one adopt the Ontic or Latour’s Principle, it follows that no entity can any longer be treated as a mere beareror vehicle of another entity. If an entity is treated as a mere vehicle of another entity, whether that entity transporting itself be the symbolic, categories, essences, forms, language, the “transcendental”, the “police”, the social, power, etc., then we should immediately consign the position to flames; recognizing simultaneously that the position in question is both itself an entity and therefore an actor and that it is fundamentally mistaken ontologically. As a result of this position we are able to articulate the most fundamental anti-humanism yet imagined, for immediately humans are disbarred from having a central or hegemonic position in the order of beings insofar as they only contribute one difference among others. The difference contributed by the human, whether in the form of a transcendental subject, Dasein, society, or language is neither more nor less than the difference or translation contributed in the encounter of a tree and lightning. As a result, we get an ontology far more exotic than those so far imagined– should it be called an “onticology”? –for difference, that which makes the difference, can come from anything from the smallest particle of matter to a collective naming itself the Aztecs, to the individuals that make up that collective, the pots they use, the rivers in the region, volcanoes, etc., etc., etc.. All of this must be counted. If this principle must be called the Ontic Principle, then this is because it sings the hymns of all beings, rather than striving to reduce all beings to one being, seeing all the others as nothing but derivative corruptions. Granting this– and when has philosophy ever been anything more than a meditation on difference in one form or another? When has the question ever been anything other than “what are the differences”? –philosophy then becomes a meditation on those various ways in which difference makes a difference. For how could difference be difference if it did not first differ from itself?

I am deeply indebted to Graham Harman’s marvelous and forthcoming Prince of Networks in thinking this.

see Larvalsubjects

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Hyperlinking and Hypertexting

2010-03-26T08:24:00.003+01:00

An Hyperlink is an element in an electronic document that links to another place in the same document or to an entirely different document.

Typically, you click on the hyperlink to follow the link. Hyperlinks are the most essential ingredient of all hypertext systems, including the World Wide Web.

An Hypertext is a special type of database system, invented by Ted Nelson in the 1960s, in which objects (text, pictures, music, programs, and so on) can be creatively linked to each other.

When you select an object, you can see all the other objects that are linked to it. You can move from one object to another even though they might have very different forms.

For example, while reading a document about Mozart, you might click on the phrase Violin Concerto in A Major, which could display the written score or perhaps even invoke a recording of the concerto. Clicking on the name Mozart might cause various illustrations of Mozart to appear on the screen. The icons that you select to view associated objects are called Hypertext links or buttons.

Hypertext systems are particularly useful for organizing and browsing through large databases that consist of disparate types of information. There are several Hypertext systems available for Apple Macintosh computers and PCs that enable you to develop your own databases. Such systems are often called authoring systems . HyperCard software from Apple Computer is the most famous.

From Webopedia

- See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Terms whose meaning depends on the whole message

2010-03-25T08:09:00.003+01:00

The term "shifter" was introduced into linguistics by linguist Otto Jespersen to refer to those elements in language whose general meaning cannot be defined without reference to the message.

For Jakobson, a shifter is a term whose meaning cannot be determined without referring to the message that is being communicated between a sender and a receiver

Personal pronouns are shifters: the word "I" designates both the speaker or sender who says "I" and the "I" contained in the message that is sent.

For example the pronouns "I" and "you", as well as words like "here" and "now", and the tenses, can only be understood by reference to the context in which they are uttered.

Roman Jakobson developed the concept in an article published in 1957.

Before this article, "the peculiarity of the personal pronoun and other shifters was often believed to consist in the lack of a single, constant, general meaning."

Jakobson argues that shifters do have a single general meaning; for example the personal pronoun "I" always means "the person uttering I".
This makes the shifter a "symbol."

Jakobson concludes that shifters combine both symbolic and indexical functions and "belong therefore to the class of indexical symbols."

In this way, Jakobson questions the possibility of a context-free grammar, since the enunciation is encoded in the statement itself.

Also, since grammar is implicated in parole, the langue / parole distinction is put into question.

Following Jakobson, Lacan uses the term "shifter" (in English) to show the problematic and undecidable nature of the "I" (Je).

However, while Jakobson defines the shifter as an indexical symbol, Lacan defines it as an indexical signifier.

This problematises the distinction between enunciation and statement.

On the one hand, as a signifier it is clearly part of the statement.
On the other hand, as an index it is clearly part of the enunciation.

This division of the "I" is not merely illustrative of the splitting of the subject; it is that split.
"Indeed, the I of the enunciation is not the same as the I of the statement, that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement, designates him."

See article

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

Echographies of Television

2010-03-24T11:37:00.001+01:00

Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler:

Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews (2002)

In this important book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of “live” recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called “natural” conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been breached?

As Derrida and Stiegler discuss the role of teletechnologies in modern society, the political implications of Derrida’s thought become apparent. Drawing on recent events in Europe, Derrida and Stiegler explore the impact of television and the internet on our understanding of the state, its borders and citizenship. Their discussion examines the relationship between the juridical and the technical, and it shows how new technologies for manipulating and transmitting images have influenced our notions of democracy, history and the body. The book opens with a shorter interview with Derrida on the news media, and closes with a provocative essay by Stiegler on the epistemology of digital photography.

In Echographies of Television, Derrida and Stiegler open up questions that are of key social and political importance. Their book will be of great interest to all those already familiar with Derrida’s work, as well as to students and scholars of philosophy, literature, sociology and media studies.

Table of Contents
Artifactualities: Jacques Derrida.
Echographies of Television: Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler.
Chapter 1 Right of Inspection.
Chapter 2 Artifactuality, Homohegemony.
Chapter 3 Acts of Memory: Topolitics and Teletechnology.
Chapter 4 Inheritances – and Rhythm.
Chapter 5 ‘Cultural Exception’: the States of the State, the Event.
Chapter 6 The Archive Market: Truth, Testimony, Evidence.
Chapter 7 Phonographies: Meaning – from Heritage to Horizon.
Chapter 8 Spectrographies.
Chapter 9 Vigilances of the Unconscious.
The Discrete Image: Bernard Stiegler.
Notes

Translated by Jennifer Bajorek
Publisher Polity Press, 2002
ISBN 0745620361, 9780745620367
Length 174 pages

Involvement

2010-03-23T18:56:00.001+01:00

By Aaron C Sparenberg (Berkeley California) - See all my reviews

This is to serve as a rebutal to the earlier so- called review. De Man's war time involvement with the Dutch fascists was indeed unfortunate, as was Heideggar's espousal of nazism, as well Eliade's support of the Romanian fascists. This does not however take away from the beauty of their literary and philisophical works. Something that as a Jew I have had to grapple with. Derrida is an Algerian Jew, and was Paul de Man's close friend. His approach to reading is principly an ethical one. Perhaps you should turn your attention to his book on de Man. And perhaps also, you should reread the above book, or first read some other books on deconstruction, as your characterization of it was terribly off base.

Deconstruction in it's Derridean form is extremely subtle, requiring a mental agility to grasp the closeness of it's readings. You would be doing yourself a service by reapproaching it more with an attentive honestness not exhibited in the above review. As to the book in question, I have always enjoyed Paul de Man's work, however if you are not familiar with continental philosophy it may not be the best opening into that world-Derrida, Delueze, Cixous and later Hedeggar may prove more stimulating and enjoyable.

Allegorical elements

2010-03-22T08:38:00.002+01:00

An allegory is an abstract representation of principals or ideas through the use of characters, figures or events. It is also the classification for a creative work, such as a story or a play, which makes use of allegory. In most cases, allegory is the term used (rather than metaphor) when the symbolic representations reflect an aspect of human behavior or values.

The term allegory originated from the Greek term allegoria (speaking otherwise). It came into common use through plays, generally religious, which would act out human frailties in order to teach a lesson. Characters (often taking the form of animals) would actually be named for their representation. The betrayer would be named “betrayal”, the evil character named “evil” the faithful character named “faith”. The characters had few, if any, characteristics beyond their representation of a concept. These plays were publicly called allegories and were performed at religious gatherings.

Allegories took many forms over the years, such as fables and parables. The story of the tortoise and the hare is an allegory, expressing the belief that the slow and steady will always defeat the quick and prideful in the end.

While the old-time allegories were very direct in showing the audience what represented what, over time allegories became more subtle. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for example, the white whale is seen as an allegory for evil. In the Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the fight clubs are an allegory for modern man’s repressed primal instincts and the need to express them.

Most novels and plays contain some allegorical elements. Symbolic representations of emotions or dilemmas are such a common concept that often writers include them without even realizing they are doing so. Of course, the most masterful of writers are very conscious of the allegories they are creating, even when the allegories seem subtle to the audience.

by John Hewitt

For more information read:

The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition by C. S. Lewis

Allegories of Reading by Paul De Man

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell

Different voices

2010-03-20T09:30:00.000+01:00

The overall pattern of the metabolean project's hypertext has complexly linked nodes forming tangled sections that are linked in less complex ways to other regions. The sections fall into several large groups: philosophy, narrative scenes, poems, diary's notes etc... A lot of different voices appear in these regions and scenes.

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

Technotopia

2010-03-16T09:58:00.001+01:00

The virtual class has driven to global power along the digital superhighway.

Representing perfectly the expansionary interests of the recombinant commodity-form, the virtual class has seized the imagination of contemporary culture by conceiving a techno-utopian high-speed cybernetic grid for travelling across the electronic frontier.

In this mythology of the new technological frontier, contemporary society is either equipped for fast travel down the main arterial lanes of the information highway, or it simply ceases to exist as a functioning member of technotopia. As the CEO's and the specialist consultants of the virtual class triumphantly proclaim: "Adapt or you're toast."

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

Random House and e-books

2010-03-15T09:22:00.001+01:00

Ian Hudson, president of the Publishers Association and deputy chief executive of the Random House Group, believes while Ebooks reader presents a great opportunity, he did not feel e-reading is yet capable of doing for books what the iPod did for music.

He said: "In my view this is the best piece of equipment out there. But research has found that people have a high emotional attachment to physical books... so the industry is likely to be slower to change than the music sector."

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

Steady-state equilibrium

2010-03-13T12:32:00.003+01:00

This is a bit of a disappointment for it implies that standards of living do not improve in steady-state growth. This is not only despiriting, it is also empirically dubious: it contradicts at least two of the "stylized facts" of industrialized economies laid out in Kaldor (1961) -- namely, that the capital-labor and output-labor ratios have been rising over time and that the real wage has been rising. Of course, just because industrialized countries, and others besides, have experienced ever-increasing per capita consumption and output over the past three centuries does not, by itself, "contradict" the Solow-Swan model.

After all, out of steady-state, we can easily have changing ratios. So, one possible explanation for the "stylized facts" that is consistent with the Solow-Swan model is simply that industrialized nations are still in the process of adjusting and just have not reached their steady-state equilibrium yet. And why not? It is not unreasonable to assume that adjustment to steady state might take a very long time (cf. Sato, 1963; Atkinson, 1969).But economists are a rather impatient sort. They like to believe that economies tend to be at or around their steady-states most of the time (a noble exception is Meade (1961)).

As a consequence, in order to reconcile the Solow-Swan model with the stylized facts, it is tempting to argue that there has been some sort of "technical progress" in the matter.

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

What's the best feedback or RT ?

2010-03-11T12:41:00.002+01:00

All creative people want to do the unexpected.

Hedy Lamarr

Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.

Brian Aldiss

I like to employ a form of repetition, in which the same elements recur but in different and unexpected ways. rather than being discarded as soon as they are understood or passed over.

Graham Nelson

métabolehypertexte

Fond of Google as an author

2010-03-10T20:49:00.002+01:00

Thousands of aspiring authors from around the world can now totally sympathize with Google—because the search giant is also struggling to get a book deal.

Well, okay, so mostly they’re struggling to get regulatory approval of a book deal, and said book deal is more about licensing and ePub than actually breaking into the industry—but close enough, right?Anyway, Google looks like they’re getting to the point where they’re willing to give up just about anything to get this book deal through the EU. The latest concession is to allow two non-US members onto a board to administer its digital books settlement.

Bloomberg also reports that:Books that are commercially available and under copyright in Europe won’t be considered out of print under a proposed settlement with U.S. publishers over the company’s book-scanning project, Google said in a letter to several publisher associations in Europe.The deal is supposed to pertain to works that are out of print (but still in copyright) as well as public domain works. The European Commission “is seeking precise details on the exact scope of the settlement” and “how many European works or publications will potentially be affected.”Coming up on eleven months after the agreement was first announced, Google is still facing widespread regulatory scrutiny, as well as some protests from author groups, Amazon (via the Open Book Alliance) and others.

However, Google continues to pursue the deal (even in the face of the DOJ in the US). I think this is more than just Google not wanting to back down from their deal—I think this is a sign of just how serious Google is about their pending eBook foray.They already have deals with Sony and Interead, and either of those deals could also lead in to the hardware side of eBook readers. Now they need the content to back up those deals and really make a push to take on Amazon.If they get the necessary permissions for the nearly 500,000 books they’re proposing, Google could stand to take on Amazon—but Amazon would still have an advantage in current bestsellers.What do you think? Can old books from Google match up to Amazon?

Just how much will Google concede to get the deal through?

Jordan McCollum

Archaic stillness of the book

2010-03-08T09:03:00.002+01:00

Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.

This is the hard schooling of its new form. If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.

And before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colourful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight.

Excepts from Walter Benjamin One-Way Street

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

Material inscription in hypertext

2010-03-07T13:24:00.002+01:00

The condition of truth is the possibility of writing, that is, of a material inscription.

Rather than this inscription (mis)reflecting the truth—the argument which institutes ‘logocentrism’—its possibility is constitutive of truth as such. Thus, for Derrida, metaphysics constitutes its oppositions (the non-worldly/the worldly, the ideal/the material) by expelling into one term of the opposition the very possibility of the condition of such oppositions.
Derrida calls this general possibility of inscription arche-writing.

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

Moore's law today

2010-02-23T10:33:00.002+01:00

The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented.

Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.

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

Paratextual questions

2010-02-18T23:31:00.001+01:00

One problem with identifying the hyperlink as electronic literature's distinguishing characteristic was that print texts had long also employed analogous technology in such apparati as footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermining the claim that the technology was completely novel.

Perhaps a more serious problem, however, was the association of the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader/user. As a number of critics have pointed out, notably Espen J. Aarseth, the reader/user can only follow the links that the author has already scripted.

Moreover, in a work like afternoon: a story, looping structures are employed from which there is no escape once the reader has fallen into them, short of closing the program and beginning again. Compared to the flexibility offered by the codex, which offers the reader complete freedom to skip around, go backwards as well as forwards, and open the book wherever she pleases, the looping structures of electronic hypertexts and the resulting repetition forced on the reader/user make these works by comparison more rather than less coercive. As Aarseth astutely observed, the vaulted freedom supposedly bestowed by interactivity "is a purely ideological term, projecting an unfocused fantasy rather than a concept of any analytical substance".

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

Ebooks are short and different from traditional publishing

2010-02-16T18:34:00.002+01:00

Myths abound about print books being the right kind of book and eBooks are on their last leg. These ideas spring from traditional publishing.

Hopeful authors have read it many times--that a true book, one that will bring you reverent kudos, must be in print and must be long. And it must have a top agent and publisher. Maybe true five-ten years ago. Like you, I believed it at first and went down that rocky road to get an agent, then publisher. Way too hard and took way too long.

My first rule. Write a short book first. Notice famous authors such as Ken Blanchard did.

Second rule. Write a non-fiction, self-help book first, then a novel. You'll experience more success with a non-fiction. Then, you can use the profits to stay the long haul for your fiction. Follow my lead. First, I wrote print booklets or journals and sold them at the back of the room in seminars of the same name. This led to thousands of income each month. Then I read self-publishing books such as Dan Poynter's. Right track. But, then I realized one can write a print and an eBook at the same time. And, you can sell either from your own Web site. Or, you can take a 50% or less royalty and sell from someone elses's site.

Remember one great benefit of eBooks. The author gets by with little cost. You can send the books via email if you don't have a Web site yet, and you can offer them as downloads at your site.One great benefit of short eBooks. Your audience loves them. They don't want to spend a lot of time reading. They want quick solutions in an easy to read format. They don't want long books over 130 pages with too much extraneous information. Give them answers to their questions and you'll have a fan for life.The sad truth that no emerging authors wants to believe--that they can get the publisher to publicize, promote and market their book. Not true. It's amazing how many bookcoaching clients really want to turn it all over to someone else. The problem is it's way too expensive, and no one knows nor has more passion for a book than the author. It's not money that rules, but a creative approach to sharing your wealth.Another rule. If you can write a book, you can also write ad copy for the book's introduction, the short "tell and sell," the back cover, or the Web or email sales letter. You just need some coaching from a pro. Start a promotion savings account and spend a little to get the best words that will attract and give your audience enough information to make it easy to buy.

Join a telegroup that writes each week and exchanges files with each other. Of course make sure the bookcoach is savvy and knows how a saleable book is put together, knows short cuts to write fast, and clear, and gives you useful feedback to help your book grow and get born.What's your intention? To think it takes too much time, too much money and you aren't much of a writer? If you can get by your resistances, you can learn how to write --well. If you put a little daily attention on your book project, you can finish it. Take some small action today and feel powerful, because authors are a special breed-and the club is awaiting your good news.

Judy Cullins, 20-year Book and Internet Marketing Coach works with small business people who want to make a difference in people's lives, build their credibility and clients, and make a consistent life-long income.

Author of Write Your eBook or Other Short Book Fast and 10 others, she offers free help through her 2 monthly ezines, "The Book Coach Says. . .," and "Business Tip of the Month." at http://www.bookcoaching.com./ Email her at Judy@bookcoaching.com or Cullinsbks@aol.com Phone: 619/466-0622 -- Orders: 866/200-9743

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ -

See that post with different algorithms in metabole -

See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Electronic textual experiment

2010-02-14T20:04:00.000+01:00

Is there something personal in my work, other than my "personal" intellectual interests and political opinions?

There is always mention of mental relationship with otherness therefore. The work is also much more technically sophisticated, using HTML, Flash, sound software such as ACID, Photoshop, PHP, etc. At the end, the sound should be turned on for the whole thing because there is sound on the main menu page, but some pieces use sound and some don't.

Metabole is a collection of electronic textual experiments where the goal was to make philosophy interactive in a new and different way in each piece. I was experimenting with user interface design, and my goal was to have a unique user interface and programming in each text. For that reason, I did not make any traditional hypertext literature where you click on words in the text to get to new sections. Instead, each piece has its own kind of interaction. Some works are best seen as texts in their own right with fixed content, in which the user interaction just serves to explore the content, whereas other pieces are games or tools for users to create their own point of view. See the introduction for more on this.

In most texts, if there is fixed or dynamic content, it is on behalf of political reasons...

Meaning we create

2010-02-10T09:58:00.001+01:00

No meaning is given to us as a gift, any more than there is any guarantor or guarantee of meaning; it signifies that there is no other meaning than the one we create in and through history.

And this amounts to saying that democracy, like philosophy, necessarily sets aside the sacred. In still other terms, democracy requires that human beings accept in their actual behavior what until now they almost never have truly wanted to accept (and what, in our utmost depths, we practically never accept), namely, that we are mortal.

It is only starting from this unsurpassable--and almost impossible--conviction of the mortality of each one of us and of all that we do, that people can live as autonomous beings, see in others autonomous beings, and render possible an autonomous society.

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

Ideas and technology

2010-02-06T12:22:00.004+01:00

Tristao Da Cunha
It is technology. It doesn't affect ideas, theory or concepts.

Jean-Philippe Pastor
You're partly right. Deconstruction has learned us that the way we think interferes with the idea we express: support matters in itself

Reach Out
And metanarratives are the start of the ideas we express. If we deconstruct the metanarrative we might find freedom to think and express our own ideas xxxx

Jean-Philippe Pastor
and to do so, we must tackle with the difference between narrative and metanarrative...

Reach Out
Post-structuralism is so cool, that's a reification if ever there was one ...

Jean-Philippe Pastor

Anyway, I talk the way I write http://bit.ly/7ghOzI

Reach Out
Didn't Jaques Derrida write about the difference (differance) between talking and writing. ? So, talking and writing can indeed be the same ...

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

Heidegger: You made it for real Martin !

2010-02-05T14:22:00.006+01:00

Realism can mean many things.

For how I understand Heidegger, it simply indicates that intentional perception must be conceived as a directing-towards-the-extant-world. Such a directing is conceived in terms of a behavioral comportment, with perception being a form of doing.

Moreover, in order to think this concept of perception, we must reexamine the traditional dichotomy between the subjective and objective spheres. Heidegger makes a deeply insightful point that humans think of everything in terms of “being extant”, that is, in terms of a persistence, a “reality”, an occurring.

Moreover, in thinking of intentionality, we cannot discover it in terms of a relation between extant objects and therefore, we think “if it is not objective then it is something subjective” . However, because of our “mode of understanding” applies to even the realm of subjectivity, “the subject, again, is taken with the same ontological indeterminateness to be something extant” (ibid.); indeterminateness meaning that we have no real understanding of what we are saying when we declare “the subject” to be extant and constantly present-at-hand throughout our waking life.

On the contrary, precisely with the aid of intentionality and its peculiarity of being neither objective nor subjective, we should stop short and ask: Must not the being to which this phenomenon, neither objective nor subjective, obviously belongs be conceived differently than it thus far has been? (ibid.)

Moreover,

Intentionality is neither objective nor subjective in the usual sense, although it is certainly both, but in a much more original sense, since intentionality, as belonging to the Dasein’s existence, makes it possible that this being, the Dasein, comports existingly towards the extant.

“Comports existingly towards the extant”. Phrases to such an effect are littered through these sections on intentionality and perception.

The statement that the comportments of the Dasein are intentional means that the mode of being of our own self, the Dasein, is essentially such that this being, so far as it is, is always already dwelling with the extant. The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences merely inside its own sphere and is not yet outside it but encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.

Here we can see why Heideggerian ontology has often been adapted to underlay the theoretical structure of modern ecological – or situated – cognitive science, which is at odds with the innerpictorial sense-data theorists. Heidegger concurs with Gibson in his critique of cognitivist sense-data theories when he claims “To say that I am in the first place oriented toward sensations is all just pure theory. In conformity with its sense of direction, perception is directed toward a being that is extant. It intends this precisely as extant and knows nothing at all about sensations that it is apprehending” . “For the Dasein there is no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside”.

How people could read these sections and conclude that Heidegger wasn’t a direct realist or an externalist is beyond me.

Can we not put to rest any such notions with the following passage?

Does the perceivedness of a being, of an existent, constitute its existence? Are existence, actuality, and perceivedness one and the same? The window, however, surely does not receive existence from my perceiving it, but just the reverse: I can perceive it only if it exists and because it exists.

I therefore argue that Heidegger was not an antirealist who thought that our perceiving the world is what primordially constitutes the extant world. The world is extant without our perceiving it and we have a nonmediated access to it through intentional comportment. However, the intentional as-structure bestows significance upon the world, not because our perceptual systems are “constructing” it, but rather, because the as-structure filters our experience in terms of “obects” and “things” i.e. “entities”. In Being and Time, Heidegger defines “Being” as “that which determines entities as entities“. In Basic Problems, we see the same essential point:

This entity [nature] is intraworldly. But intraworldliness does not belong to nature’s being. Rather, in commerce with this entity, nature in the broadest sense, we understand that this entity is as something extant [occurrent], as an entity that we run up against, to which we are delivered over, which on its own part always already is. It is, even if we do not uncover it, i.e. without our encountering it in our world. Being within the world devolves upon this entity, nature, only when it is uncovered as an entity.

I rest my case.

Gary Williams

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

Heidegger and the object

2010-01-28T10:37:00.004+01:00

Levinas refutes the Heideggerian notion that the existents in our lives, whether they be bread, hammers, pens, etc. are simply tools, or “means of life.”

Levinas claims that, though we might need such tools, they are actually enjoyed.

This is the beginning of the concept he calls “living from…” Levinas claims, in opposition to the Heideggerian school of thought, that “existence is not exhausted by utilitarian schematism that delineates (existents) as having the existence of hammers, needles, or machines. They are always in a certain measure– and even the hammers, needles, and machines are objects of enjoyment…” says Levinas.

But according to Clark, this is simply wrong. Heidegger doesn’t think in the least that utility exhausts existence. Rather looking at how objects are encountered in one kind of relationship allows an existential analysis. There are other sorts of analysis – some hinted at – beyond what the focus is in Being and Time. And indeed the latter Heidegger often delves into those. (IMO) Now it is true that Heidegger argues that one way (perhaps the most important way) we encounter entities is through a break down of utility. The ready-at-hand allowing the present-at-hand to be presented to us.

However to suggest the only way to be with other occurrent entities is via utility is just plain wrong.

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

How can we cope now with deconstruction ?

2010-01-26T10:24:00.005+01:00

[...] Sitting on the Tube each morning, and before I close my eyes in bed last thing at night, I have for some time been mulling over two questions. First, what would a biography of deconstruction look like? Second, what would happen to the text of Derrida if it were read appreciatively from outside the field of Derrida studies?

The two questions are no doubt related, for writing a narrative biography of Derrida may not be considered a particularly deconstructive thing to do, and yet it is necessary. Similarly, reading his work in a non-deconstructive way would be something of a risk, but is inevitable. Mikics' book takes on the task set by my own nocturnal pondering and produces something almost unique in academic publishing: an engaged and positive humanist account of Derrida [...]

[Martin McQuillan applauds an outsider's appraisal of the giant of deconstruction]...

about the book written by David Mikics Yale University Press Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography

http://digg.com/u1LOhy

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

Derrida, the falling, the thrownness

2010-01-24T19:10:00.004+01:00

JD: (According to Heidegger) the categories of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit are intended to avoid those of object (correlate of the subject) and instrument.

Dasein is first of all thrown.

What would link the analytic of Dasein with the heritage of the subject would perhaps be more the determination of Dasein as Geworfenheit, its primordial being-thrown, rather than that of a subject which would come to be thrown, but a being thrown which would be more primordial than subjectivity and therefore also than objectivity.
A passivity which would be more primordial than traditional passivity and than Gegenstand (Gegenwurf, the old German word for object, keeps this reference to throwing, without yet stabilizing it into the stance of a stehen). I refer you to what I have said about the dé-sistance on the subject of the subject in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. I am trying to think through this experience of the throwing/being-thrown of the subjectile beyond the Heideggerian protocols about which I was just speaking and to link it to another thinking of destination, of chance and of destinerrance. Starting at “birth”, and possibly even prior to it, being-thrown reappropriates itself or rather ex-appropriates itself in forms which are not yet those of the subject or the project.
The question “who” then becomes: “who (is) thrown?” “Who becomes “who” from out of the destinerrance of the being-thrown?” That it is still a matter here of the trace, but also of iterability means that this ex appropriation cannot be absolutely stabilized in the form of the subject. The subject assumes presence, that is to say sub-stance, stasis, stance. Not to be able to stabilize itself absolutely would mean to be able only to be stabilizing itself. Ex-appropriation no longer closes itself; it never totalizes itself. One should not take these figures for metaphors (metaphoricity implies exappropriation), nor determine them according to the grammatical opposition of active/passive.
Between the thrown and the falling (Verfallen) there is also a possible point of passage. Why is Geworfenheit, while never put into question, subsequently given to marginalization in Heidegger’s thinking? This is what, it seems to me, we must continue to ask. And ex-appropriation does not form a boundary, if one understands by this word a closure or a negativity.

It implies the irreducibility of the relation to the other.

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

Event from the side of the object

2010-01-20T16:01:00.002+01:00

I think one difference from Heidegger in Derrida is that Derrida thinks the Event more from the side of the “object” than the side of Dasein the way Heidegger does.

Phenomena is not seen as a kind of correlation (as in Husserl) of an inside and outside (or even a place where they overlap). Rather “objects” (put in quotes to distinguish it from the Cartesian tradition’s sense) are in the phenomena itself. While in Being and Time on up to his discussion of Ereignis Heidegger focuses in on the clearing where we encounter beings – a kind of “hole” of “nothingness” that characterizes Dasein – Derrida focuses in on the Event within the “objects” themselves. This is a kind of escape from the phenomenal given to Dasein which is simultaneously productive.

One way to characterize this is that Derrida and Heidegger primarily differ in a difference of focus such that Heidegger is concerned with Being as Truth wherein things reveal themselves while Derrida is concerned with the ground of the objects in themselves without leaving the phenomenological tradition. (The way I think say Badiou does and I suspect the Object Oriented Philosophy folks like Harmon does).

Harmon mentions Derrida and postmodernism and suggests that what characterizes postmodernism is its anti-realist stances. Yet I’d note Derrida himself never adopts the label – even if some like Rorty try to marshal him to the cause. I’d also say that while Derrida focuses in on texts and how they undermine themselves pointing at something more, it is by the very notion of an external “reality” that imposes itself against our will to our anti-realism. As Derrida often puts it, things are complicated.

http://www.libertypages.com/cgw/2010/01/18/brief-thoughts-on-derrida/

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

Postmodern literay theory

2010-01-19T13:28:00.003+01:00

STUDENTS ON CAMPUSES ACROSS the USA are plugging into hypertext fiction, the new genre many English professors are calling the latest in postmodern literary theory.

Classes such as "Cyberculture" and "Technology and the Text" have cropped up on at least fifty campuses, a clear demonstration, proponents say, that the genre is more than a passing fad.

But what exactly is hypertext fiction? And how does it work?

Students find most of their hypertext assignments on computer disks or on the World Wide Web. While reading stories on a computer screen, students click on highlighted keywords, passages, or images that will take the narrative in different directions-pathways the students choose according to their own interests. For example, a story might begin with a dinner party. After reading a few paragraphs, one student might click on an image of the hostess, which will lead into a narrative on her childhood. Another student might click on a highlighted keyword, such as "corkscrew" or "ice pick," that leads into a description of an event that took place before the party. A third student could continue reading screen after screen in sequence.

"Hypertext fiction is a nonlinear form of computer-based storytelling that can merge text and image and that allows the reader-viewer to make selections about the story's direction," says David Paddy, a professor of English at Whittier College in California who uses hypertext fiction in his course on the postmodern novel. "Thus, while the author has laid out numerous textual pages and predetermined a series of paths that the reader can follow, the reader can change the nature of the story, depending on which direction he or she takes at the fork in the road. In this way, the reader becomes a near equal partner iii the creative process."

Paddy tries to pair hypertexts with literary equivalents such as Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars, which is arranged like a dictionary and allows readers to choose the narrative direction. Paddy finds hypertext similar to the "shuffle text" popularized in the 1960s. With shuffle text, the reader opened a box that contained a pile of loose-leaf texts and images that could be shuffled and read in random order. "The thing that is obviously unique about hypertext is the technological component," he says. "

But, ideally, we should try to view hypertext fiction not as written fiction that happens to be on a computer, but as a unique genre wholly shaped by its technological context."

"Hypertext fiction: The latest in postmodern literary theory". Academe. FindArticles.com. 19 Jan, 2010. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3860/is_199901/ai_n8839108/

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

MetaBlog

What’s new about social media?

Interconnectedness

Hypertextuality

See also

References

Move paradigm in hypertextuality

Predictable spot

New writing technology approaches the origin of langage

Materiality matters

Augustine and metaphysics

Super Hard

Online Wording

Literary theory in the digital age

Textuality with Roland Barthes

Physical appearance

Jean-Philippe Pastor

057mm.jpg hosted at ImageShack.us

Indexing system

Perception of art

Baudrillard and Heidegger in the past

I fall on the bias

Difference in itself

Always changing

Vital difference

Changing concepts

Joyful way of thinking

Solow-Swan model on the brink

Determined path

Web evangelists

Work of Art

Things understood by computers

Double reading

Think in multiplicity

Disrupting a text

Read a text

Cobussen and deconstruction

Adorno, Prynne and Lyric Poetry

Remediation

Stars

Kolb and autobiography

Future of narrative

Words and life in Derrida's Dissemination.

Dissemination and Contamination

Graphic expression

Becoming unmotivated of the symbol

Writing

Long form textuality

Where You can find the best Ebooks on the Web

1. Free French Ebooks

2. Free English Ebooks

3. French Ebooks

4. English Ebooks

5. Main Ebooks Search Engine

Metabolean Hypertextopia

Rhetorics and Technologies

Kant and schemata

Cyborg Institute

It's all about the context

Marco Roth: Derrida, an Autothanatography

Network analysis

Social Relations

Topics

Enhanced Memory for the Unexpected

Surprise! Neural Mechanism May Underlie an Enhanced Memory for the Unexpected

Meaning is deferred

Signifier

Signified

Pattern processing

Ontological principle

Hyperlinking and Hypertexting

Terms whose meaning depends on the whole message

Echographies of Television

Involvement

Allegorical elements

Different voices

Technotopia

Random House and e-books

Steady-state equilibrium

What's the best feedback or RT ?