solipsis on Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:54:03 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> times of the sign digest [noemata x2, sondheim, chandavarkar] |
>"The inarticulate cry which seemed to be the voice of light." * Hermes Trismegistus "tardyons are luxons." *Daniel M. Kirchman Seed-toe: Serendipities : language & lunacy by Eco, Umberto In many ways my own feeling about codework comes not from a conscious and deliberate attempt to explicate its meaning but rather finding myself thinking about codework as I am pursuing some mundane activity like reading, or wiping a tiny smudge from an interferometry mirror with a piece of lens paper, lubing the lm guides on the transfer axis of an industrial production robot, or simply mooning at the sky thinking about the earth as a kind of junkyard of perception and praxis. There was a marvelous Zen painter, a Master Zen Painter whose name was Sengai who lived in the mid Eighteenth century whose work embodies the essence of humor in the Zen tradition. I happen to come across one of his images the other day in a book and it set off a kind of semi-autonomous subroutine of sorts about being and the nature of meaning, and also the nature of being meaning. The book of course is the Kodansha ISBN 4-7700-2328-6, and the image is the thirtieth plate: 30. Dragon and Tiger* What is this? Its called a dragon. People burst into laughter And I, too, have a good laugh. A cat or a tiger? Or, Watonai? "Sengai's pictures do not look like a dragon and a tiger, and yet they are a dragon and a tiger. Watonai, the hero of a puppet play called Kokusen'ya gassen (The Battles of Coxinga, 1715) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), goes to China with his parents and subjugates a fierce tiger. Sengai draws a tiger, and the picture not only turns into a cat, but it also looks like Watonai's face. What, then, should be the answer to Sengai's question, "What is this?"" Indeed, what is this? Since our last commentary brings up the issue of proportionality as an entre' to the discussion of systems, I think perhaps I will reverse that order, by way of another specific example as an entre' to the discussion of distinctions in the phenomenological labor of 'execution,' or as I prefer, 'actuation'. Strangely enough the example will again come from an alternate 'lesser' tradition than that of the Western X-tian inflected Philosophical canon, the Maya. In the Linda Schele and Peter Mathews book _The Code of Kings_ which is not without its own brand of controversy within the field of Maya studies, there is a section on Architectural Symmetry, and which introduces the work of a graduate student named Christopher Powell who discovered the method by which the Maya had been able to achieve the use of the golden mean within their architectural designs by the use of a woven cord. "Powell told us that his Yukatek teachers told him that using the cord makes their houses like flowers because of the inherent relationship of their proportions." And there is a beuatiful poem in transliterated Mayan about the use of the cord by the gods to design and construct the cosmos in this section which I won't copy out, but you can read it for yourself on page 35 of that volume. And this brings us to the conclusion of that section which is another key to the discussion: "To us the most revealing thing about Powell's discoveries is that this way of measuring things and the proportionality it naturally generates does not require special knowledge, like abstract geometry, to use it. The cord gave a harmonious proportionality to everything the Maya did in their art and archetecture, and it joined their human-made art to the symmetries that permeate the natural world. To create the harmonies of the cosmos, the gods used the same method of measure as a weaver, house builder, and cornfield maker. But cord measuring also revealed the innate symmetries of nature, so that in reality, Maya art and daily life harmonized with cosmic symmetry without the necessity of conscious design." I think this is a good example to use as it sort of alludes to the codework notion of the skein. In a sense there need be no doubt that that is exactly why I chose the example and also because we were all already thinking, and especially because the IS was already actuating, without conscious design, it was producing a conflation of symmetry and violence, humor and movement, phenomenon, and the burden of phenomenon, phenomenology. "The quality of a theory is the relation between basic assumptions and derivations. The luxon theory is able to summarize the law of conservation of energy, the special theory of relativity, E=mc2, and the fundamental physical concepts of mass and energy into only three words: tardyons are luxons. Each matter with rest mass (tardyons) consists of particles with light velocity (luxons). All theoretical objections against this hypothesis fail due to the existence of glueballs. In September 1997 out of pure light, physicists create particles of matter. This proof: You can make really every type of matter out of luxons - this table and this chair and this paper and everything. An extraordinary success of luxon theory!" This is a quote from the Luxon website at http://www.tardyon.de/ which is a fine example of seeing and through that seeing creating a lens. It also brings to mind the famous phrase uttered by John Wheeler and his famous paper, It from Bit, where wheeler famously declares: everything classical, including energy, matter, spacetime and even empty space, emerges from this bit soup (also called quantum ether or quantum foam) because the universe started as a bit bang.. And this emergence is the labor of code, or one might say this physical world is the immanence of code, code in the form of the actuation of luxon inertia, or veritas, claritas, or any of a multitude of terms taken from the historical plasma of descriptive elements conjoined to the primal actuation by the tongue of linguistics, as in certain descriptions of quantum mechanics which being algebraically closed, become equivalent to bouncing a light beam around inside a hollow mirrored sphere as in the ghastly story presented by Edogawa Rampo, The Hell of Mirrors, a tongue of mirror which attaches like a skein as in the google folk tale http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=%22joined+at+the+tongue%22 late of NW native cosmology where two frogs are conjoined at the tongue. So is code and its actuation conjoined in the tongue which is the light of matter as waves of energy are pulsed along these skeins, the nursery of being is conjoined to the graveyard of reason, and in that work, and the work of all wordplay, all codeplay, all sexplay, is set the attribute bit of the Theory as spectacle instead of as participation, and codework answers this nonparticipatory side of theoria, the image, as an image, for the first time presented kosmos as a spectacle, a theoria, that such an image put order on display, as it were, in the garbled cloak of its skeins speaking, can be seen to underscore the view of Anaximander as presiding at the birth of theory, and contrary to what we know to be the case, it is indeed so if one accepts the [un]usual modern view which stresses the speculative, non-participatory side of theoria, and interpolates, by reading backward, {or as in riding backwards like an Apache shaman} an assumed evolution from theory-as-contemplation to theory-as-opposed to practice. But there is another dimension (there is always another dimension, infinite dimensions) to the whole question, for, when theory was born, Anaximander was not just the presiding midwife, he was also the baby in the life of a collective consciousness, the movement from compactness to differentiation is comparable to the birth and growth of an individual human being (See Stephen J. Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny) and who leaves the compactness of life in utero (an excellent album) where child is mother and mother is child, to acquire an increasingly differentiated understanding of the work, uh, word, i mean, world, in the absolute darkness of the womb (of this plagiarism) the child can, at the most, have only four senses-taste, hearing, smell, and touch and only at birth, with the first and most definitive separation (into the blizzard of color) does the child acquire its fifth sense and begin to SEE.. This seeing and the separation it presupposees can be taken as emblematic of the birth of theory.. And so we ask ourselves, "What happens if the mental of metaphysical surface has the upper hand in this pendular movement? In this case the verb is inscribed on this surface (as in a proto-disc of matter) that is, the glorious event enters a symbolic relation with a state of affairs, rather than merging with it; the shining, noematic attribute, rather than being confused with a quality, sublimates it, the proud result, rather than being confused with an action or passion, extracts an eternal truth from them. What Carroll calls "Impenetrability," and also "Radiancy" is actualized for recent etymologies have shown, apparently with some conclusiveness, that the primary and original meaning of theoros was that of spectator. This modern claim is based on the derivation of theoros from thea (seeing, spectacle), and horao (I see), Furthermeow, theoroi were ambassadors to sacred festivals who left (were separated from) their native city to attend festivities elsewhere, and the assumption has been that these ambassadors observed, but did not paraticipate. But a closer look at the ancient sources shows that many theoroi did in fact participate by offering sacrifices (this text) and by taking part in the dances and games.. and that text descends back into its source code: ISBN 0-262-13292-3 and is replaced with another piece of the actuation which will perform another poignant piece of deliteralization in the stream. read/call// The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art by Cesar Paternosto only to point out what in the 1930's Ubbelohde-Doering called the "Concacha Stones" also called the Saihuite stones which John Hemming believes were the site of the sanctuary oracle of the Apurimac. So that there is no need to turn from the actuation back into actuation, the mirror is already awake, and the furred and winged snake, that segmental and pulsing causality of the sentence which led you, is a meaning and an interruption of meanings, or otherwise, What happened on the way to the Colliseum? Well, we heard a demon who spoke through the trunk of a tree.. And that at the same time is the Reductio Ad Absurdum and the Dede-terminism of Sememeiosis, Two Dunce-caps joined by a bisecting radiality, or maybe not dunce caps, but gnome hats, gnomon, or maybe remember they found an ancient greek computer years ago and they x-rayed it.. (Is it good? How do the Jain think?) lq http://www.hevanet.com/solipsis/blogger.html # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net