Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT, 2001.
“In this respect the computer fulfills the promise of cinema as a
visual Esperanto” (xv, 78).
I wonder here, and in the later comments about the universality of the
interface, about the distinction between a recovered universal language
and an artificial one. Esperanto invokes questions of “ease,” which I
believe my friend Bradley discusses in his
dissertation.
Is the simplest language the most perfect? The Modistae, Bishop Wilkins,
Leibniz, Chomsky and several others seem relevant here.
Professor Royce remarks that my opinion that differentials may quite
logically be considered as true infinitesimals, if we like, is shared
by no “mathematicians outside of Italy.” As a logician, I am more
comforted by corroboration in the clear mental atmosphere of Italy
than I could be by any seconding from a tobacco-clouded and bemused
land (if any such there be) where no philosophical eccentricity misses
its champion, but where sane logic has not found favor.
(“Infinitesimals.” Science 11.272 [16 Mar. 1900]: 431)
I haven’t, by any means, read all of the secondary literature on
Banville’s Book of Evidence, but the reviews and occasional critical
pieces I have looked at have not, I think, completely addressed the
significance of Haslet’s penultimate remarks. Canon-Roger’s article in
European Journal of English Studies was especially good on the
painting, I thought.
For instance, before the glass screens were put up, wives and
girlfriends used to hide in their mouths little plastic bags of
heroin, which were passed across during lingering kisses, swallowed,
and sicked-up later, in the latrines. I was greatly taken with the
idea, it affected me deeply. Such need, such passion, such charity and
daring—when have I ever known the like? (214)
Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens:A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1944.
New York: Roy, 1950.
Did you know that the odds on Anne Boleyn’s brother Rochford’s acquittal
were ten to one? Regarding the previous Homo book I wrote about:
I know of no sadder or deeper fall from human reason than Schmitt’s
barbarous and pathetic delusions about the friend-foe principle [. .
.] “war is the serious development of an emergency.” (209-10)
Polymath Cosma Shalizi has an entertaining
review of
Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I have a paper in various
stages of revision on the rhetoric of Wolfram’s book, and Shalizi’s
discussion of Wolfram and the taxonomy of crankishness is very apt
there. In fact, I invoked his guano comparison in the version I read at
a conference.
I have to register disagreement in a few places, however. I suspect that
there have to be correlations between any useful version of “complexity”
and what is visually interesting to the cortex of an East African plains
ape. Wolfram is indeed vague on that point, and I appreciate
quantitative measures of complexity as an abstract principle, but I’m
not convinced that it is as arbitrary as Shalizi thinks it is. I’ve read
Investigations and am intrigued to learn of the apparent existence of
a cult devoted to it (shape spacers?), though I very much appreciate
that Shalizi has also been annoyed by Lakoff’s definition of cognitive
science (the worst display of which I’ve encountered is in Philosophy
in the Flesh).
Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Trans.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, 1998) invokes Hegel on the
perfectability of language: “[it] is the perfect element in which
interiority is as external as exteriority is internal.” A pregnant
statement, to be sure. I haven’t read Kantorowicz’s (mentioned by
Agamben on p. 91) The King’s Two Bodies, but I wonder how influential
Bloch’s Les Rois Thaumauturges was for its argument. Freud’s use of
Karl Abel (a “now discredited linguist”) and his “On the Antithetical
Meaning of Primal Words” is explored, and the Group Psychology essay
would probably be worth paying more attention to in the development of
biopolitical discourse, I suspect. Sorel and Le Bon and
recapitulationist crowd logic seem to me to be important to Agamben’s
argument, but I haven’t read his subsequent work yet, so I’m not sure
how this has developed. The discussion of the lupine taboo and the
bizarre spectacle of the poena culli (and the anecdote recounted in
565d and e of the Republic) led me to think of “The Hero as Werwolf”
in divers ways. Celine, also, for the homo sacer proper.
I thought–and immediately rejected–that this might be base-related.
Why I rejected it, I don’t know, as, you may guess, that’s in fact
what’s happening here. But anyway, you find another sheet of paper with
“10612” written on it, indicating that it’s the code to the junction box
which you can use to turn on power to the shopping mall you’re at
after-hours on Christmas Eve in a desperate attempt to buy the
aforementioned ballerina for your daughter. The control panel only has
0-4 buttons and a five-digit display.
I’m curious if there has been a sustained fictional treatment of a
culture/civilization steadily planning for a highly improbable total
disaster scenario chosen randomly from a field of many. Posner’s
Catastrophe, among others, brought this to mind.
Key graf from Christensen:
Much of the growth of the offshore economy has been driven by British
lawyers and accountants. As early as the 1920s, they pioneered the use
of trusts, shell companies, transfer mispricing, re-invoicing, dummy
wire transfers – which give the impression a company is operating out
of a tax haven rather than its actual location – and special purpose
vehicles. Dodging tax was the prime motive, but inevitably, as Baker
explains, laundering narco-dollars and paying off corrupt officials
involve the same processes as tax evasion.
Upton Sinclair published Mental Radio in 1930, a curious work
describing his wife’s telepathic abilities. There are more drawings and
transmitted drawings per page than you’ll find in in the average
Sinclair. There’s a mention of the late professor Quackenbos of
Columbia, author of many books on hypnotism (32), and a description of
how Craig, his wife, became worried about Jack London on a trip to
California. Two days later they read of his death (22-3).