Complex textual structure of the Real

Even the most conservatively narrative history is filled with complex textual structure, discursion, and linkage. T

This fact does not depend on postmodern analysis or literary theoretic argument, nor does is derive from a novel philosophical or methodological stance; the structures we have discussed all appear, for example, in Thucydides' opening chapters. We need not fear that hypertext will slash apart or cherished narrative simplicity, for this narrative simplicity never existed.

Letting go our irrational fears of electronic writing and leaving aside nostalgia for an imaginary literary past, we can explore afresh the opportunities hypertext offers. Linearity was never an option for historical writing; hypertextuality can make complex structure concrete, clear and responsive to both the author and reader.

It is a shame that too much of the popular perspective on hypertext does not yet recognize this, and that hypertext punditry so often caters to fear and nostalgia.

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Not present time

Our present experience of time has to do with something that is not present, or one could say, is present in the form of non-presence – like a ghost or a spectre.

Derrida speaks of “the experience of the non-present”. Phrased in the shakespearian terms used in Spectres of Marx, time is always out of joint. There is no presence that is not involved with the future and the past, the air is always full of ghosts. This of course holds for every point in time. Time is always already out of joint, not present to itself. The concept of “Messianicity” tries to formulate this out-of-joint structure.

In his text Marx & Sons, Derrida tries to clarify why this Messianicity is “without” Messianism, and he names two conditions that this conception should exclude. It should exclude (firstly) the memory of a determinate historical revelation, whether Jewish or Jewish-Christian, and (secondly) it should exclude a determinate Messiah-figure.

Thus, the messianic for Derrida names a universal structure of experience, a structure, he says at one point, that functions as a quasi-transcendental ground for all particular Messianisms. Let me read to you a passage from Marx & Sons:

“The figures of Messianism would have to be (…) deconstructed as ‘religious’, ideological, or fetischistic formations, whereas Messianicity without Messianism remains, for its part, undeconstructible, like justice. It remains undeconstructible because the movement of any deconstruction presupposes it.

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Individual man

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

Gregory Bateson

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Labour time

Marx demonstrates that time is manifested in the material world through a process that expresses transhistorical features in the emanation of time through human creative activity, and historically specific elements in the socially constructed forms of time that reflect the material conditions of the particular society in which they appear.

It suggests, moreover, that he shows how time is shaped by both human agency, in the form of class struggle over the appropriation and control of time, as well by deterministic forces as seen in the role of institutional structures and the movement and reproduction of capital. Again, it endeavours to show that Marx develops the notion that absolute time, which is an historically specific concept, plays a crucial role in capitalist society as a measure of exchange-value and labour time, and that it co-exists with relative time, which emanates through different production processes as multiple and discontinuous temporalities.


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Hegel's interpretation of time

This a text from Mike Johnduff.


Division Two, Chapter Six, xvi... The extent to which an even more radical understanding of time than Hegel's makes itself evident in Kant, will be shown in the first division of the second part of this treatise.

The reference to the first division of the second part of course doesn't mean anything, because this portion was never published. I haven't read Heidegger's book on Kant yet, which is supposed to answer some of the issues that first division of the second part would have posed, but I'm just thinking now that, given Heidegger's interpretation of the historizing potential of Dasein, Kant would have a more radical understanding of time than Hegel.

Hegel reduces time down to history. And while Heidegger's view of time is probably closest to Hegel's with respect to the the degree to which he accords it importance and determining power over Being, Heidegger we know is farthest from Hegel in interpreting things as present-at-hand or as realized potentials, and thus might have more affinity with the indeterminate and yet primordial phenomenon of time in Kant.

That is, Hegel reduces time right down to the now, and then extends this now out to encompass history. Kant leaves time intederminate--it has no relation to history other than as the factor which makes it possible. Because it is a possibility or a categorical determinant of existence for Kant, then, it might be closer to the act of stretching-itself-along or temporalizing itself historically that Heidegger has in mind when he says Dasein historizes. And because this potential is so determinate yet not present-at-hand at all in Kant, it might then be said to be more "radical:" it hits more at the nature of temporality as it determines Being.

While Hegel gives time such an important place in its ability to detemine Being, he ultimately undoes this importance in making it something present-at-hand. Kant of course leaves time mostly unelaborated as a concept--that is, when compared to Hegel--but it remains less present-at-hand than in Hegel and thus more powerful.

Posted by Mike Johnduff


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What is a chain of events according to Walter Benjamin

Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, Walter Benjamin sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.

He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high.

Blowing from Paradise. That which we call progress, is this storm.

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Print encourages closure

With the development of print, Western culture moved even further away from a hearing dominated sensory world to one governed by sight.

More than writing, "print suggests that words are things" says Walter J. Ong's in his book Orality and Literacy. With the interiorization of this view writing/printing was no longer done with the intent to recycle knowledge back into the spoken world (as it was in, for example, Medieval university disputations); things were no longer necessarily written in order to be read out loud.

In addition, print embedded the word in space more absolutely than did writing . Through print, words become things that can be arranged on a page as they are in indexes, tables of content, lists and labels (an extreme example being the arrangement of w ords in the poetry of e.e. cummings).

Finally, Ong suggests that print encourages closure, a feeling of finality that was never present in, for example, oral storytelling.

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Internet access

The most important Web anniversary of all is 30 April 1993.

That's the day that Cern put the web in the public domain, thereby ensuring that the world would have a single system for accessing the Internet, instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without the web, yet well into the 1990s, internet access was the reserve of the privileged few, mainly academics.

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Writing as a condition of science

Writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science and possibly its object — but first, the condition of the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity.

Before being its object, writing is the condition of science.

The strictest notion of a general science of writing was born, for nonfortuitous reasons, during a certain period of the world's history (beginning around the eighteenth century) and within a certain determined s stem of relationships between “living” speech and inscription.
Historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing; to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples without writing and without history. Before being the object of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field of history — of historical becoming. And the former presupposes the latter.

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Only True Event

In a recent essay, Jameson declares that history in the modern sense is an invention of the European bourgeoisie designed to tell the story of the cultural revolution through which it rose to hegemony in Europe.

The story of "the transition from feudalism to capitalism," suggests Jameson, "is what is secretly (or more deeply) being told in most contemporary historiography, whatever its ostensible content." Further more, Jameson argues, this view of history makes the bourgeois cultural revolution "the only true Event of history".

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Paper-based book

Several essays (R. Chartier, E. Souchier, E. Eisenstein, J. Svenbro, L. Canfora...) provide information about the history and development of the book.

They remark that the paper-based book, like the alphabet, was once the latest technological rage and was met with resistance, like the computer, from the establishment because books are more than delivery systems for information. They are a way of life developed over centuries. Our concepts of authors, readers, the canon of texts, and texts as intellectual property were not inevitable but were the cumulative results of part social and political choices....

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Advent of writing

Historians draw a distinction between prehistory and history, with history defined by the advent of writing. The cave paintings and petroglyphs of prehistoric peoples can be considered precursors of writing, but are not considered writing because they did not represent language directly.

Writing systems always develop and change based on the needs of the people who use them. Sometimes the shape, orientation and meaning of individual signs also changes over time. By tracing the development of a script it is possible to learn about the needs of the people who used the script as well as how it changed over time.

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Paper-based book

Several essays provide information about the history and development of the book. They remark that the paper-based book, like the alphabet, was once the latest technological rage and was met with resistance, like the computer, from the establishment because books are more than delivery systems for information. They are a way of life developed over centuries. Our concepts of authors, readers, the canon of texts, and texts as intellectual property were not inevitable but were the cumulative results of part social and political choices....

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