I fall on the bias

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

Linear modes of thinking

Europe is divided between the pragmatic, empirical, inductive thinking of Anglo-Saxon and North Sea cultures and the rationalist, deductive thinking of the rest of the continent.

Anglo-Saxons are uncomfortable with theories and generalisations and concepts. They prefer to deal with data. Other Europeans are uncomfortable with dealing with data unless it is on the context of an idea or a system. The difference is reflected in the history of European philosophy and in the way our children are taught in schools, in the way football teams are managed and how we structure memos, reports and presentations.

What they have in common is that they are linear modes of thinking. They are based on logical reasoning, categorisation and a belief in cause and effect. Other ways of thinking - intuition, emotional intelligence, lateral thinking, free association and flashes of insight from nowhere – are mistrusted unless they can be logically substantiated.

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- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Linking categories

Christian Metz argued that the major mode of analysis for cinema (and by implication, hypertext) was based on syntagmatic relations, that is, meaning is principally developed and articulated through the expression of a partially autonomous temporal chain.

This is quite different to the model of natural languages, and extremely different to how we might understand poetry and other creative utterances. Based on this, Metz developed a bifurcating series of possible syntagmatic relations which can be considered to be the major combinations possible.

Metz's schema is derived from a series of simple oppositions, where each distinction revolves around what can be characterised as plot order (continuous or discontinous) and story time (continuous or discontinous). This generates a series of paired syntagmatic groups where each division is able to be further subdivided on the basis of these simple divisions.

The value of this schema for hypertext is significant. First, it offers a novel approach to considering link relations that may (or may not) prove fruitful in considering and developing a critical and creative awareness of hypertextual patterns. This clearly intersects with Bernstein's significant work on hypertext patterns, and this essay's contribution may be useful to the extent that it encourages writers and readers to rethink our assumptions about sequence.

Second, there are substantial theoretical implications embedded within Metz's approach, for the significant narrative unit identified by Metz is not the shot (the hypertext node), or the relation of one shot to another (the edit), but is in fact the larger sequential units produced by the combinations of shots.

Finally, Metz's work demonstrates the strongly contextual nature of these syntagmatic series, a context that traditional cinema narration attempts to saturate, and a context which is increasingly recognised as relevant to hypertext design.

The success of Metz's categories for hypertext lie not so much in their direct applicability but in allowing us to cast light on the role of syntagmatic segments in the production of meaning in hypertext. Metz recognises, as a result of his hierarchy, that such semantic or syntactic trees are unable to account for the varieties of possibility afforded, nor for how they are actually used by individual films, or readers.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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Categories for mining and objective world

It was Kant who pointed out that sensuous contact with the objective world did not of itself constitute experience, since without forms through which the sensuous contact with the world can be rationally understood, there can be no experience.

For example, a person totally untrained in geology learns nothing geological from a geological expedition.

The problem which Kant was unable to solve was the source of these categories which made possible the rational cognition of Experience. While recognising that it was the objective world beyond sensation which was the source of sensation, he restricted knowledge to the “possible objects of experience” and with the later positivists, rejected the possibility of knowledge of that “thing-in-itself” beyond experience.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts