Physical appearance

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

Figures of speech

The various rhetorical uses of language (such as metaphor, idiom, and chiasmus) that depart from customary construction, order, or significance. Attempts to draw strict distinctions between figures and tropes have largely been abandoned.

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Adorno's view of language

As I read him, Adorno's view of language is close to Nietzsche's in "Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense":

language as not a re-presentation of some precedent standard-setting reality, but rather a tool, or even a weapon, a survival adaptation, like the claws and fangs of the tiger.

(Adorno would of course find Nietzsche's imagery disagreeably fierce; likewise he might think the figuration of "weapon" and "tool" too suggestive of instrumentality.)

Like Hegel, like Lacan, Adorno finds in the slippage or "nonidentity" between reality and language--what "The Essay as Form" calls "the non-identity of presentation and subject matter" in the first epigraph above--the space where desire and will, and critique, and art, make their case and their campaign against "what is." Such motifs in Adorno as "dialectic," "concept," and "negation" are functions of that performative agon language incites between conflicting human interests and indeed between human interests and material circumstance itself. When Adorno writes that "dialectics means intransigence towards all reification" (Prisms 31), it is clear that "dialectics" operates in language and in thought--or I'd better say, in language-and-thought, because I can't see any sense in which Adorno separates the two: indeed, their correlation is not only everywhere assumed in the Adorno force-field, but virtually named in the Hegelian category of "the concept." When Adorno alludes to "the kinetic force of [the] concept" (Philosophy of Modern Music 26), he is evoking the power of "the concept" to unfreeze, unfix, set back into kinesis, the congealed and hardened petrifications of ideology-- to enact, in other words, what Hegel memorably calls "the power of the negative."

"Negation" is the alternative to, indeed the critique of, /adequatio/: not the mind's deplorable failure to see things as they really are, but on the contrary, the mind's "dialectical" dissonance ("non-identity") with what is, in which is coiled the critical potential of affect and critique.

To this extent, "the power of the negative" is convertible with the power of "dialectic" itself--and this is a kind of power activated in semiosis: in language and in thinking: in /making/ meaning, not in more or less accurately (or "adequately") /discovering/ (and then "representing") it. Like Hegel, Adorno puts "negation" in the place where "representation" used to be--and if that way of putting it risks exaggeration, I'll hope to find my license in Adorno's maxim that in matters like these "only exaggeration is true."

Steven Helmling

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L'origine du langage

L'origine du langage


Walter Benjamin conçoit le langage comme l'héritage de la faculté de percevoir des ressemblances.

Il serait ainsi l'application principale de la faculté mimétique. Il constituerait en somme le milieu dans lequel les choses se rencontrent, non plus comme originellement dans l'esprit du Grand Poète mais maintenant dans leurs essences, leurs substances les plus fugitives et les subtiles, "dans leurs parfums mêmes" dit Benjamin, et entrent en relation les unes avec les autres (mimesis).

C'est en somme à l'écriture et toute son histoire que le Grand Poète a abandonné dans le temps ses anciens pouvoirs.

Il y a donc comme une sorte de conception "créationniste", onomatopéique de l'origine du langage chez Walter Benjamin, sans que toutefois les ressemblances originelles aient une quelconque ressemblance sensible avec tout ce qui est... C'est là un moment très problématique de la théorie du langage chez Benjamin. Il rapproche ce faisant son approche de la théorie des formes et des essences chez Platon.

Pour autant, Benjamin s'oppose aux théories conventionalistes du langage. Tout comme il n'accepte pas les conceptions idéalistes et même mystiques du langage pour lesquelles les mots et les choses finissent par s'identifier.

Il s'agit avant tout pour lui de retrouver le langage des choses: saisir par une nouvelle écriture et une nouvelle pratique de la lecture les constellations dans lesquelles se révèlent une vérité plus profonde que celle que l'on accorde habituellement à la "connaissance" de la chose. C'est ici tout l'objet de la "critique" au sens que l'auteur de "La tâche du traducteur" donne à ce terme.

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More human-like in my computering

Cognition's Semantic NLP technology, please visit http://www.cognition.com/.

Cognition Technologies, based in Los Angeles, has developed a revolutionary Semantic Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology which adds word and phrase meaning and "understanding" to computer applications, enabling them to be more human-like in their processing of information. Cognition's Semantic Map, the underlying technology developed over the past 23 years, is the largest and most extensive in existence.

Applications and technologies which utilize Cognition's Semantic NLP(TM) technology are positioned to take full advantage of Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web).

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XML's experience

Depending on whom you talk to, Extensible Markup Language is either the centralized solution for managing cross-platform and cross-agency data sharing, or it's a bloated monster that's slowly taking over data storage and forcing too much data through networks during queries.

Which view is accurate?

In general, I believe XML's flexibility and cross-platform capabilities far outshine any negatives. But if XML files are not properly planned and managed, there is a good possibility that you could experience XML bloat. To understand how XML files can become a system-management headache, it's important to understand a little about how XML evolved. The idea of markup languages originated in the publishing industry. Editors used to scribble notes and symbols on sheets of text. Those markups were shorthand messages to typesetters indicating that some text should be set as headlines, others as body text and certain words in bold, italic, etc. As the world migrated to electronic documents, a need arose to make those markups machine-readable.
In the mid-1970s, the Standard Generalized Markup Language evolved as a way to embed markup messages into lines of text. Soon the streamlined Hypertext Markup Language emerged as the Web evolved. Thanks to basic HTML, many people are now familiar with the beginning <> and ending tags that format special data elements on a Web page. Plus, such files remain readable by people. So far, so good. But what's good and/or bad about XML? It grew out of that same concept but with two major differences.

1) An XML file is not meant to carry any display information or page formatting. Instead, it separates data content from the presentation layer of a Web page or any other application that needs to import the file. An XML file contains metadata about itself, categorizes various components of the file, and labels various data elements within the file using opening and closing tags -- Like this.

2) XML really does mean extensible. Although HTML is limited to a couple dozen sets of tags, XML can be extended as needed, as long as those who need to exchange data agree on the schema. An XML schema is a set of data tags and rules about how those tags should be used to identify types of data within a document or data collection. Once a schema is finalized, it can be used to identify and share information in a specific way.

Government data managers have developed several government-specific XML schemas to enable data sharing among multiple systems. Total system compatibility might not be necessary if two systems are at least able to import and export XML files and provide a directory that indicates where the files are kept and what data they contain. But XML bloat occurs when files are poorly constructed or not equipped for the jobs they must perform.

There is a strong temptation to cram too much information into files, which makes them larger than they need to be. When an agency needs only part of the data, if often has to accept the whole file, including long blocks of text. And when an agency needs to support more than one XML schema, it can end up with redundant data that must be exported in more than one set of files. Clearly, XML bloat is an issue that cannot be ignored. But the advantages of XML are such that it's not wise to throw the baby out with the bathwater and dump XML all together. Luckily, technologies are evolving that can help with XML bloat. First is the evolution of platform-based XML solutions that offer a single system to author, tag, store and manage XML files. They also allow developers to set the policies for dynamic XML integration into other documents or applications. Mark Logic is one of the best-known purveyors of such solutions, though other companies, such as TigerLogic Corp., are making headway. Second is the idea of XML file-size reduction.

The World Wide Web Consortium is developing specifications to support binary encoding of XML within Simple Object Access Protocol messages. The SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism and the XML-binary Optimized Packaging standards hold significant promise. Of course, binary XML would eliminate a key advantage of text-based XML because it would no longer be human-readable. Each government agency would need to decide if that type of solution is right for its needs. Taken together, those solutions have the potential to tame XML bloat and keep that powerful solution the likely choice for cross-platform development for the next several years.


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Theory of meaning and circularity

Intention-based semantic theories are still popular and are actively pursued.

But they have not entirely succeeded in reducing meaning and psychology to actions and utterances. If meaning is defined as acting so as to induce belief and action in another, theories of meaning must be grounded in non-semantic terms to avoid circularity. And there is some doubt whether this can be done. Individuals act according to beliefs, and the communication of these beliefs eventually and necessarily calls on public beliefs and language.

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Underlying structure

Chomsky argued that our astonishing creativity with words, and the phenomenal ease with which children learn a language, meant that language users employed and intuitively recognized an underlying structure.

Not a structure, moreover, resting on phonemes or individual words as Ramon Jakobson would have it, but a sort of fundamental, proto-syntax. Any well-formed sentence, for example, contains a noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VB). From this we could create all possible sentences: The old tutor well described the difficulties. Or: The difficulties were well described by the old tutor. By transformation rules the deep structure can be converted to surface sentences with the correct syntax.

But what of: The old tutor elaborated the difficulties? The meaning is practically the same: we might chose either. But is this a different transformation or a different deep structure? And how do we make the choice or substitution? Critics say that Chomsky's grammar is simply formalizing what is still a mystery.

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What is a signification

A signification is indefinitely determinable (and the ‘indefinitely’ is obviously essential) without thereby being determined. It can always be marked out, provisionally assigned as an identitary element to an identitary relation with another identitary element […] and as such be ‘a something’ as the starting point for an open series of successive determinations. These determinations, however, in principle never exhaust it.

The ‘being of signification’, Castoriadis goes on, has been inadequately de-
scribed by «the distinctions between proper and figurative meaning, central
signification and semantic aura, denotation and connotation»
In fact there is no denotation opposed to connotations, there are only connotations or as
Castoriadis argues, «every expression is essentially tropic»
All language is essentially the ‘abuse of language’. Any formal rule of language, any structural
setting of language, is only applicable insofar as it allows for creation of significations in the sense of letting the creative organization of the magma prevail. Being in language means to accept that there is no final and in this sense determinate response to the issue of identity, that is, to ‘accepting to be in signification’s possibility of taking their bearings in and through what they say in order to move within it […] to use the code of designations in order to make other significations appear».

What is grammar

In the context of this essay grammar is understood to be that system of rules, what semiotics describes as langue, that one necessarily ascribes to in a language community. Without this grammar we are condemned to a series of idiolects. To not use grammar (whether a formal gramamr or a colloquial grammar) is to risk intelligibility and comprehension in quite fundamental ways, and it is this that makes a grammar a formal system. Hypertext (and classical cinema) may have commonly accepted styles but these are not grammars in the sense of langue. They do not constitute the possibility of utterance in advance, as is the case in our usual experience of language.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links

A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information

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Writing is not a sign of a sign

The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system.

For the same reason, writing in general is not “image” or “figuration” of language in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign” signifies writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider at the appropriate moment will become inevitable.

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Mind and connectionism

The major points of controversy in the philosophical literature on connectionism have to do with whether connectionists provide a viable and novel paradigm for understanding the mind.

One complaint is that connectionist models are only good at processing associations. But such tasks as language and reasoning cannot be accomplished by associative methods alone and so connectionists are unlikely to match the performance of classical models at explaining these higher-level cognitive abilities. However, it is a simple matter to prove that neural networks can do anything that symbolic processors can do, since nets can be constructed that mimic a computer's circuits. So the objection can not be that connectionist models do not account for higher cognition; it is rather that they can do so only if they implement the classicist's symbolic processing tools.

Implementational connectionism may succeed, but radical connectionists will never be able to account for the mind.

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Symbol as a negative moment

According to Paul de Man, the Coleridgean symbol represents the "negative" moment of the romantic dialectic; the positive moment is allegory, a system of signs in which the relation of a sign to signified is superseded by tile relation of signifier to signifier in a temporal sequence.

"Whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference".

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Bottom-up or top-down hypertextual approach

The fundamental problem that semantic web needs to solve is explaining the meaning of things to computers.

There are several approaches to this, all of which in principle can work.

There are companies and technologies that are doing it bottom up - by embedding semantical annotations (meta-data) right into the data. The opposite camp is exploring the top-down approach, which relies on analyzing existing information.

The ultimate top-down solution would be a fully blown natural language processor, which is able to understand text like people do.

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Unreflected attitude to language

Paul de Man begins with an opposition between allegory and irony.

Allegory is a naïve or unreflected attitude to language. We think that there is a real world and that our language is then a sign of that world. Irony, by contrast, shows that the supposed ‘nature’ that precedes the sign. The self that we supposedly lost is produced through the poem; the poem creates or institutes the division between self and sign. However, any idea that the ironic poem could overcome allegory – or a division between sign and self – is itself naïve.

Any explanation of irony is itself a narrative, is itself always caught up in allegory.

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Metaphor is rooted in the beliefs

Where is metaphor actually grounded?

Not in logic, nor literary theory. There is no purely literal language in terms of which metaphor may be evaluated and objectively assessed. Along a broad front in cognitive psychology and social anthropology, metaphor is currently subject to extensive analysis, but the findings can only be partial, and relative to the discipline involved. What is becoming clearer is that metaphor — like linguistic theory and theories of speech acts — is rooted in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.

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Underlying structure

Chomsky, in contrast, argued that our astonishing creativity with words, and the phenomenal ease with which children learn a language, meant that language users employed and intuitively recognized an underlying structure.

Not a structure, moreover, resting on phonemes or individual words as Ramon Jakobson would have it, but a sort of fundamental, proto-syntax. Any well-formed sentence, for example, contains a noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VB). From this we could create all possible sentences: The old tutor well described the difficulties. Or: The difficulties were well described by the old tutor. By transformation rules the deep structure can be converted to surface sentences with the correct syntax.

But what of: The old tutor elaborated the difficulties? The meaning is practically the same: we might chose either. But is this a different transformation or a different deep structure? And how do we make the choice or substitution? Critics say that Chomsky's grammar is simply formalizing what is still a mystery.

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Expressions of ideas

Once we use language (speech or writing) to refer to reality, that reality is linguistically formulated and therefore indeterminate.

Meaning is not something preexisting in the mind that we struggle to express. Like the main analytical schools of language philosophy from Hume onwards, and contrary to Saussure, we must not regard words as the expression of ideas.

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Truth conditions and communication

A theory of truth is not enough to interpret a language.

After all, if truth-conditions are all that matters, then how can anomalous sentences such as ‘“Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white and grass is green’ be verified as false? Davidson argues that because the language is compositional, it is also holistic: sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears. This holistic constraint, along with the requirement that the theory of truth is law-like, suffices to minimize indeterminacy just enough for successful communication to occur.

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Convention and language

"We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions".

Donald Davidson
– "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," Truth and Interpretation, 446

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