Te Ipu Pakore

The saga will continue . . .

2009-08-08T10:58:00.002+12:00

This blog will continue at wordpress (http://seansturm.wordpress.com/).

I'll continue to post from time to time on writing, music, writing music, thinking, teaching and learning, teaching and learning writing . . .

Transactional Analysis: Scripts or Life-narratives

2009-08-06T07:38:00.013+12:00

(From wikipedia [edited])

TA (see Eric Berne, Games People Play [New York: Grove Press, 1964]) introduces the idea of a "Life (or Childhood) Script," that is, a story one perceives about one's own life (a life story), to answer questions such as "What matters?," "How do I get along in life?" and "What kind of person am I?." This narrative is often stuck to no matter the consequences, to "prove" one is right, even at the cost of pain, compulsion, self-defeating behaviour and other dysfunction. (Scripts are addressed most fully in Berne's What Do You Say After You Say Hello? The Psychology of Human Destiny [Grove P, 1972]).

Scripts

A script is a life plan, directed to a reward.
A script is decisional and responsive, i.e., decided upon in childhood in response to perceptions of the world and as a means of living with and making sense of the world. It is not just thrust upon a person by external forces.
A script is reinforced by parents (or other influential people and/or experiences).
A script is for the most part outside awareness.
A script is how we navigate and what we look for, the rest of reality is redefined (distorted) to match our filters.

Each culture, country and people has a mythos, that is, a legend explaining its origins, core beliefs and purpose. According to TA, so do individual people. A person begins writing their own script at a young age, as they try to make sense of the world and his place within it. Although it is revised throughout life, the core story is selected and decided upon typically by age 7. As adults it passes out of awareness. A life script might be "to be hurt many times, and suffer and make others feel bad when I die," and could result in a person indeed setting himself up for this, by adopting behaviours in childhood that produce exactly this effect. Though Berne identified several dozen common scripts, there are a practically infinite number of them. Though often destructive, scripts can just as easily be positive or beneficial.

[The term comes from "behaviourist" linguistics: a behavioural script is a sequence of expected behaviours for a given situation, routine, habitual or practised, cf. Shrank's linguistic script s in AI (R.C. Schank & R. Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding [Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum Assoc., 1977]). Memory is episodic, i.e., organized around personal experiences rather than semantic categories; thus, scripts are generalized episodes or schemas. In behaviour, individuals make inferences to scripts by filling in missing information in the schema; scripts enable case-based reasoning [CBR] on the four R's: retrieve, reuse, revise, retain.]

Redefining and Discounting

Redefining means deliberately (but unconsciously) distorting things to match our preferred way of seeing the world. Thus a person whose script involves "struggling alone against a cold hard world" may redefine others' kindness, concluding that others are trying to get something by manipulation.
Discounting means taking something as worth less than it is. The person might give a substitute reaction that does not originate as a here-and-now adult attempt to solve the actual problem or choose not to see evidence that would contradict their script. Types of discount can include passivity (doing nothing), over-adaptation, agitation, incapacitation, anger and violence.

Injunctions and Drivers

TA identifies twelve key injunctions that people commonly build into their scripts. These arepowerful "I can't/mustn't . . ." messages that are embedded in a child's belief and life-script:

Don't be (don't exist)!
Don't be who you are!
Don't be a child!
Don't grow up!
Don't make it in your life!
Don't do anything!
Don't be important!
Don't belong!
Don't be close!
Don't be well (don't be sane)!
Don't think!
Don't feel!

In addition, there is the so-called episcript:
"You should (or deserve to) have this happen in your life, so it doesn't have to happen to me" (magical thinking on the part of the parent[s]).

Against these, a child is often told other things he or she must do. These are the drivers:

Please (me/others)!
Be perfect!
Be strong!
Try hard!
Hurry up!
Be careful!

Thus, in creating their script, a child will often attempt to juggle these drivers, example: "It's okay for me to go on living (ignore don't exist) so long as I try hard."

This explains why some change is inordinately difficult. To continue the above example: When a person stops trying hard and relaxes to be with their family, the injunction You don't have the right to exist that was being suppressed by their script now becomes exposed and threatening. They may feel a massive psychological pressure which they themselves doesn't understand, to return to trying hard, in order to feel safe and justified (in a childlike way) in existing.

Driver behaviour is also detectable at a very small scale, for instance in instinctive responses to certain situations where driver behaviour is played out over five to twenty seconds.

Broadly speaking, scripts can be tragic, heroic or banal (or non-winner).

Joseph Heath—Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism

2009-08-02T10:07:00.003+12:00

Something new from the co-author of The Rebel Sell . . .

A blurb:

Every day, people use financial claims to support an array of social or political opinions, rooting everything back to the money. But how much of what they say is actually true? Joseph Heath, author of the international bestseller The Rebel Sell, sets out to show how most of our commonly held beliefs about economics are just plain wrong. Free of the financial jargon aimed to confuse unsuspecting citizens, Filthy Lucre draws on everyday examples to show the 6 favourite fallacies of the right, and then the 6 of the left.

An excerpt. An interview.

Maieusis

2009-07-22T13:49:00.010+12:00

It is assumed that maieutics was created by the historical Socrates, because Socrates discusses it in Plato’s Symposium and Thaetetus. But the method may well have evolved out of Orphic practice, to which the idea of reminiscence and the practice of catharsis are central; it was certainly a technique characteristic of the Socratic School.

However, it does differ from what is more typically called the Socratic method, a.k.a. elenchus (elengkhos, "refutation," "testing"), which aims to help the interlocutor understand that what they think is a true idea is really a false prejudice

it aims to correct—or, at least, understand—error (= looking for assumptions, including fumble-rules and leaping/stumbling logic, i.e. enthymemes [a.k.a. “rhetorical syllogisms,” with missing warrants and backings], in their thinking about a question or problem

This is Socrates as gadfly.

Maieutics aims to draw some innate idea from the interlocutor

it aims to elicit truth (= using their experience and expertise to understand their question or problem)

This is Socrates as midwife.

Elenchus works on those who think they know something, but really don’t; maieutics works on those who know something, but don’t know that they do.

Alternatively, the two methods can be understood as parts of a process.

The basic elements of the Socratic dialogue are the question and answer [elenchus—aporia], the debate [maieutics—anamnesis] and the conclusion [aletheia].

So there are three phases:

elenchus: The student responds to the teacher’s question, (hopefully or faithfully) assuming that what they say is true. The philosopher asks further questions until the student comes to the conclusion that what they took to be true was mistaken or a mistaken assumption [= a negative, a.k.a. privative, method or method of doubt—aporia].
maieutics: Now freed from prejudice, the student is invited to continue the dialogue in pursuit of a truth (assumed to be [!]) innate in them [= a positive method or method of invention—anamnesis].
aletheia [“truth”]: Truth, what was hidden [-letheia], is what is revealed [a-letheia] in the process.

Engineering Flow

2009-07-13T08:03:00.014+12:00

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi ("Chick-send-me-high") identifies nine factors that accompany the experience of flow in a practice or process, i.e. a "game":

1. You are clear about the rules of the game and your expectations of it—and your goals are achievable.

2. You find the game neither too easy nor too difficult (= a balance between skill and challenge).

3. During the game, you focus closely, i.e. intently and narrowly, and . . .

4. . . . adjust your behaviour immediately in response to moves in the game (= an uninterrupted feedback cycle).

5. As a result, you experience a merging of action and awareness, that is, . . .

6. . . . you feel absorbed in the activity itself, yet . . .

7. . . . in control.

8. Thus, the game feels timeless and . . .

9. . . . effortless.

Flow is thus ecstatic (ek-stasis: "outside-standing," i.e. standing outside, or rather, to one side of the everyday world and your everyday concerns) and engaged (en gage: "under pledge," i.e. fully committed to a task, knowing exactly what to do and how to do it).

Csíkszentmihályi conceives of flow as developmental: all going well, you can stay in the "flow channel," in which challenges and skills increase together by increments. This diagram is adapted from Flow (1990, 74):

Starting from position A in Figure 1, you move into an anxiety zone if the challenges of the game increase without a corresponding increase in skills (position B). To get back into the flow channel, any combination of skills improvement and decrease in difficulty will suffice, but the best (or most "fluid") move is a horizontal one, an increase in skills that enables you to move to position D. In a like manner, you can improve your skills while the difficulty of the game holds constant; you move from position A to position C, whereupon boredom sets in. To achieve flow you need to move toward position D by seeking a more challenging job. Of course, then position D becomes the new position A, and the cycle starts all over again.

See "Play and Intrinsic Rewards," Journal of Humanistic Psychology 15 (1975) 41-63 and Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1990).

Altermodern Manifesto: Postmodernism is Dead [like it was ever alive!]

2009-07-10T22:06:00.013+12:00

By Nicolas Bourriaud, for the Tate Triennial [3 Feb. to 26 Apr.] 2009:

A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation—understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture [a.k.a. global or "trans-national" modernity: "borders," "exiles," "energy" (?)]
Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live [mobility]
Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe [itineracy]
Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation [multiculturalism = atomic entities in suspension (cf. colloids), i.e. "rough" aggregates of simple entities; creolism = molecular entities in solution, i.e. "smooth" aggregates of compound entities]: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture [art ex hybridity]
This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing [polyglotism]
Today's art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves [art pro hybridity: "docu-motion," "heterochronia"]
Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication [art per hybridity: "archive," "viatorisation"]

So, this (like Augé's supermodernity) is another way of saying what Fredric Jameson said many years ago: that postmodernism is just reconfigured, revaluated modernism.

Cf. his manifesto:

Many signs suggest that the historical period defined by postmodernism is coming to an end: multiculturalism and the discourse of identity is being overtaken by a planetary movement of creolisation; cultural relativism and deconstruction, substituted for modernist universalism, give us no weapons against the twofold threat of uniformity and mass culture and traditionalist, far-right, withdrawal. . . .
If twentieth-century modernism was above all a western cultural phenomenon, altermodernity arises out of planetary negotiations, discussions between agents from different cultures. Stripped of a centre, it can only be polyglot. [Thus, "[w]e are entering the era of universal subtitling, of generalised dubbing."] Altermodernity is characterised by translation, unlike the modernism of the twentieth century which spoke the abstract language of the colonial west, and postmodernism, which encloses artistic phenomena in origins and identities [?]. . . .

The artist becomes "homo viator," the prototype of the contemporary traveller whose passage through signs and formats refers to a contemporary experience of mobility, travel and transpassing. This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time.

Themes [ed.]:

energy: sustainability rather than the single explosive force
travel: forms based on the experiences of travel—or travel as the form itself
archive: chaining or clustering together signs from contemporary and historical periods
docu-motion: fact melded with fiction
heterochronia: existing within many times; questioning the notion of what is considered contemporary
exiles: exploring the positives and negatives of exile
borders: crossing not only national borders, but also the traditional artistic borders of form and medium
viatorisation: the viator—traveller—giving movement and dynamism to form.

Marc Augé Interviewed: "Places and Non-places—a Conversation with Marc Augé"

2009-07-09T21:18:00.017+12:00

Augé interviewed (cf. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity [1992; Verso, 1995]):

[1.] For me, place has never been an empirical notion. Anything can become a place, every space can be one, if in one manner or another encounters take place there that create social ties. A space can be either a place or a non-place, or a place for some and not for others. One classic case is the airport, which is a very different case for someone who works there regularly, with colleagues and relationships, and someone who passes through once only, or by chance.

[2.] The second point is that in the sometime nostalgic visions that we have of the past, we tend to consider the new as something that twists the nature of what existed before [past + vs present -]. And so place is good because we meet people and we establish relationships there, while the non-place is bad because there everyone is a stranger to everyone else [i.e. these new non-places are socially estranging].

That was not and is not my intention [i.e. to append valuations to these different spaces—yet is not the positive valuation of space apparent in the extract from "Non-Spaces" below?]. It is necessary to attempt to characterize whatever is new in the contemporary world and, in my opinion, what is new is a change of setting, a shift in references, which implies that spaces are no longer perceived in the same way. Non-places could be seen, approaching them from another vantage point, as the heirs to everything that has created discomfort or annoyance in the history of human spaces [i.e. these non-places are estranging per se].

However, when reflecting upon the meaning of travel, we should consider that this negative definition of the non-place rules out the possibility of adventure. Encounters often take place in a space that is not yet symbolized, which cannot prescribe social relations; in a nonplace the notion of the unknown, the mysterious appears. Knights errant, the Knights of the Round Table, in the stories handed down to us from the Middle Ages, set off in search of adventure.

That is, once upon a time, non-place was positive/cataphatic (i.e. known thru affirmation): it represented adventure and mystery (now it is negative/apophatic [i.e. known thru denial]: it represents rootlessness and estrangement). Perhaps the non-places Augé discusses are positive too?

See Adam Greenfield, "On making non-place into place":

You know where this definition begins to break down, though? When you spend way too much time in non-place. All of a sudden, in a process that somewhat resembles a figure/ground reversal, these putatively anonymous and interstitial zones take on texture and resolution of their own. . . . [Then, one] can no longer see non-places . . . as entirely flat and featureless: I’ve learned that everything has texture if you see it often enough.

Indeed.

This place/non-place stuff is old hat (viz. Heidegger [in Malpas] and Foucault), but has spawned a new kitsch industry of "aesthetic pandering" for non-places like airports and other transport terminals, supermarkets, multinational corporate retail outlets, etc., as Dylan Trigg suggests at Side Effects; this is not to say that we haven't pandered for place thru the many avatars of Blut und Boden ideology (as Flusser suggests in his discussion of kitsch Heimat-worship): cf. the Heideggerian Edward Casey on place as "the bedrock of our being-in-the-world" (Getting Back Into Place [Indiana UP, 1993] xvi-xvii):

Place, at least in the view of the anthropologist, is a space long taken over by human beings and where something is said about relationships which human beings have with their own history, their natural environment and with one another.

Cf. Augé, "Non-Places," Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture, and the Everyday, ed. Alan Read (Routledge, 2000) 7-12:

Just as imagination takes us forward into the realm of the purely possible—into what might be—so memory brings us back into the domain of the actual and the already elapsed: to what has been. Place ushers us into what already is: namely, the environing subsoil of our embodiment, the bedrock of our being-in-the-world. If imagination projects us out beyond ourselves while memory takes us back behind ourselves, place subtends and enfolds us, lying perpetually under and around us. In imagining and remembering, we go into the ethereal and the thick respectively. By being in place, we find ourselves in what is subsistent and enveloping.

Free Modifiers

2009-07-08T07:41:00.007+12:00

Free modifiers (or sentence adjuncts) are grammatical structures that do not sound complete (unlike independent clauses) and that are set off from other structures with a pause (in speech) or a punctuation mark (in writing).

They can be identified by these characteristics:
1. They are not necessary to make the sentence complete.
2. They can be located anywhere in a sentence, beginning, middle, or end.
3. They are most often punctuated with commas.
4. They are usually identified by the first word in the phrase.

There are seventeen kinds, falling into six groups, namely, one each for five parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition [the other three parts of speech—pronoun, conjunction and interjection—aren't usually used in free modification]) and one comprising five types of clause:

verbal clusters: present participial, past participial, infinitive [= verbal + modifiers or a noun], as is, detached (Jim opened the door, but later closed it)
nominal clusters: noun (A skilful burglar, Jim opened the door [a.k.a. an appositive]), list, such as
adjectival clusters (Curious about the noise, Jim opened the door) [= adjective that emphasises the noun]
adverbial clusters (Unfortunately, Jim opened the door) [= adverb that emphasises the noun]
prepositional phrases (Like a butler, Jim opened the door)
altered clauses: subordinate, free relative (which, for which), free absolute (His fingers trembling, Jim opened the door [= noun + free modifier]), free that (His goal—that the door be open—was achieved), quote-attributing clause

3 positions: initial, medial, final

Note also resumptive (He finally faced his biggest fear, a fear that had plagued him since he joined the team) and summative (He finally faced his biggest fear, a debilitating obstacle that had plagued him since he joined the team) modifiers [N.B. they can modify any kind of word, phrase or clause].

Commas

2009-07-06T14:11:00.008+12:00

We use commas to prevent possible confusion or misreading, i.e. for semantic reasons, but they have essential syntactical functions too:

to separate independent clauses (those with a subject and a predicate [a verb with or without a complement]) when they are joined by the coordinating conjunctions and, but, for, or, nor, so, yet [the F-A-N-B-O-Y-S] (but not necessarily before and, but, or or when the clauses are short, and not when the and links two verbs [a compound predicate] rather than two clauses)
The minutes would pass, and then Einstein would stop pacing as his face relaxed into a gentle smile. [N.B. Most people, according to my mother, skip cleaning in the corners; but, she used to say, they don't skip payday.]
after introductory clauses (e.g. beginning with after, although, as, because, if, since, when, while), phrases (i.e. participial and infinitive phrases, absolute phrases, nonessential appositive phrases and long prepositional phrases) or words (e.g. however [transitional expressions], well [interjections], yes or no) [except when the clause or phrase is short and omitting the comma doesn't cause confusion. N.B. 1. Commas are not used after phrases that introduce inverted sentences. N.B. 2. A clause has a finite verb; a phrase does not—though it may have a verbal.]
When you write, you make a sound in the reader's head.
to set off non-essential clauses, phrases and words (e.g. modifiers, appositives, absolute phrases [a part of a sentence not grammatically connected to anything else]), contrasted elements, parenthetical expressions, interjections
Some people lie, as my grandmother observed, because they don't know how to tell the truth. The ringed planet, Saturn, can be seen at dawn. His temper being what it is, I don't want a confrontation. Human beings, unlike oysters, frequently reveal their emotions. Language, then, sets the tone of our society. Now is the time, my friend, to stop smoking.
to separate three or more parallel words, phrases or clauses written in a series, including co-ordinate adjectives
to set off all geographical names, items in dates (except the month and day), addresses (except the street number and name), and titles in names
to shift between the main discourse and a quotation

Pagan Singles 1986-2000

2009-07-06T07:53:00.007+12:00

An overview from Simon Grigg and a comprehensive listing from the great Trevor Reekie (and a potted history of Nixons/EyeTV):

Pagan was far and away the most successful independent label, and had a massive influence. . . [It] managed to balance indie eccentricity with hits (and indeed was renown for turning those eccentrically indie records into hits) and was a goldmine, much plundered by the majors.

Yah!

From Trevor's listing (most of these vids/tracks are online at Sean's Myspace) . . .

PAG 1101 The Nixons - House of Flowers / Sometimes I Think ('93)

Before they went to America and changed their name to Eye TV. I truly loved The Nixons. They were onto a sound.

PAG 1112 The Nixons - Tick Tock / Cold / Shallow Sun / Drone ('94)

Recorded with Malcolm Wellsford. This was to set up the debut album.

PAG 1121 The Nixons - Basement Static / Higher ('94)

The band had all their gear stolen so they recorded an acoustic album. By this time Luke Casey was drumming and they were showing huge potential. They’d done one tour of America.

PACD 1131 Eye TV – Immaculate / Venus / Turn Around / Basement Static ('95)

(Tks 2,3 & 4 were recorded live at CBGB’s, New York). The band changed their name because there was already an American band of the same name. Eye TV toured the States again to support the release of their album there.

ANT 009 Eye TV - Wish It All Away / Call Me / Soul Sane Man / Slave to Love ('97)

Finally Eye TV got close to the hit that took too long to come. Finally radio and Eye TV started to connect.

ANT 013 Eye TV - Just The Way It Is / Whatever You Do ('99)

First big chart single for Eye TV. Huge at radio.

ANT 020 Eye TV - One Day Ahead ('00)

Their 2nd top 20 single in a row. Eventually surfaced on the album Fire Down Below. I saw them play this at Sweetwaters 99 and it soared. They never sounded better.

Wuji to Wanwu

2009-07-04T10:47:00.009+12:00

The (11th century CE) Taijitu shuo 太極圖說 "Explanation of the Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate," written by the Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073 CE; this is his representation of the system of emanations), was the cornerstone of Neo-Confucianist cosmology. His brief text synthesized Confucianist metaphysics of the Yijing with aspects of Daoism and Chinese Buddhism. In the Taijitu diagram, wuji is represented as a blank circle and taiji as a circle with a center point (world embryo) or with broken and unbroken lines (yin and yang).

Zhou's key terms Wuji and Taiji appear in the famous opening phrase wuji er taiji 無極而太極, which Adler notes could also be translated "The Supreme Polarity that is Non-Polar!"

Non-polar (wuji) and yet Supreme Polarity (taiji)! The Supreme Polarity in activity generates yang; yet at the limit of activity it is still. In stillness it generates yin; yet at the limit of stillness it is also active. Activity and stillness alternate; each is the basis of the other. In distinguishing yin and yang, the Two Modes are thereby established. The alternation and combination of yang and yin generate water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. With these five [phases of] qi harmoniously arranged, the Four Seasons proceed through them. The Five Phases are simply yin and yang; yin and yang are simply the Supreme Polarity; the Supreme Polarity is fundamentally Non-polar. [Yet] in the generation of the Five Phases, each one has its nature. (tr. Adler 1999: 673-74)

Robinet explains the relationship:

The taiji is the One that contains Yin and Yang, or the Three (as stated in Hanshu 21A). This Three is, in Taoist terms, the One (Yang) plus the Two (Yin), or the Three that gives life to all beings (Daode jing 42), the One that virtually contains the multiplicity. Thus, the wuji is a limitless void, whereas the taiji is a limit in the sense that it is the beginning and the end of the world, a turning point. The wuji is the mechanism of both movement and quiescence; it is situated before the differentiation between movement and quiescence, metaphorically located in the space-time between the kun 坤, or pure Yin, and fu 復, the return of the Yang. In other terms, while the Taoists state that taiji is metaphysically preceded by wuji, which is the Dao, the Neo-Confucians says that the taiji is the Dao. (Isabelle Robinet, "Wuji and Taiji 無極 • 太極 Ultimateless and Great Ultimate," in The Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio [Routledge, 2008] 1058)

The Vampire: Reflections upon Seeing "Let the Right One In"

2009-07-03T23:35:00.025+12:00

A quintessentially modern myth—despite its apparent antiquity. The vampire represents a seductive atavism [atavus L forefather]: history (of a particularly timeless kind: the ancient), blood (but without rootedness—or a parody of it, e.g. sleeping in shallow native soil), desire (but without procreation, or as co-dependent, or as parasitic), etc. Powers old and new (or ancient, but strangely modern): familiars, telepathy, flight, powers of transformation, fascination and regeneration . . .

It is modern, then, in its location of such seductive attributes in the past: the exotic past, i.e. the past as another country (where they do things differently [L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between 1]), another version of the dualism of Ricoeur's hermeneuticists of suspicion: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud; the weighty past (that reveals that we have never been modern [Bruno Latour]), i.e. the tropes of historicism, diachronic and synchronic: evolution, historism and contextualism, coincidence and correspondence.

It is a Taijitu yin yang—or yang-yin—thing: out of the wuji (the empty circle of timeless quiescence) comes the essential modern fiction—the simple dialectic of dark and light, old and new, self and other (see "Wuji to Wanwu").

Baglione's Eros and Anteros is emblematic of this dialectic:

Sacred Love versus [defeating] Profane Love, Giovanni Baglione (1602–1603), a.k.a. Eros and Anteros.

Genevieve Warwick reads it according to Alciati's emblem:

Nemesis, who vanquishes all, painted the winged enemy of winged Love, bow against bow, and fire against fire, that he might suffer what he made others suffer; and this once-bold boy, still carrying his arrows, now cries in misery. Three times he spits, and in the deep of his bosom (what a wonder!) fire is burned by fire. Love consumes the mad passions of Love. (Alciati, "Anteros, amor virtutis, alium Cupidinem superans" [emblem 72], Emblemata [1984, 250]—from the Greek Anthology, quoted in Genevieve Warwick, Caravaggio: Realism, Rebellion, Reception [U Delaware P, 2006] 62)

I prefer to think that here we see modernity—young Hermes armed and winged—with Eros and Anteros at his feet. He feigns to strike at Eros, while Anteros hides behind his legs. He is Freud psukhopompos or Nietzsche kunikos.

Friedrich Schiller, "Kassandra/Cassandra" (1802)

2009-07-03T11:40:00.005+12:00

Nur das Irrthum ist das Leben,
Und das Wissen ist der Tot.

Error is life [life is error], and knowledge is death.

Wer erfreute sich des Lebens,
Der in seine Tiefen blickt!

Who can enjoy life who sees into its depths!

Friedrich Schiller, The Poems of Schiller, Complete: Including All his Early Suppressed Pieces, trans. Edgar Alfred Bowring (John W. Parker, 1851) 153-57.

The Philosophy of "As If," a.k.a. fictionalism: another erratological method

2009-07-02T20:45:00.025+12:00

Hans Vaihinger [1852-1933], The Philosophy of "As If" [Philosophie des Als Ob]: A System of Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind, 2nd ed., trans. C. K. Ogden (1911 [wr. 1880s], 1924/1935; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

From wikipedia [ed.]: In Philosophie des Als Ob, [Vaihinger] argue[s] that human beings can never really know the underlying reality of the world, and that as a result we construct systems of thought and then assume that these match reality: we behave "as if" the world matches our models. In the preface to the English edition of his work, Vaihinger expresses his principle of Fictionalism: "an idea whose theoretical untruth or incorrectness, and therewith its falsity, is admitted, is not for that reason practically valueless and useless; for such an idea, in spite of its theoretical nullity, may have great practical importance."

Vaihinger's summary of the Philosophy of "As If" in the autobiographical chapter that begins the English edition (xlv-xlvii):

A dichotomy exists between science, which concerns itself with matter in motion, and philosophy, which concerns itself with sensations (this antinomy cannot be mediated by reason, only through intuition and experience).
The "striving" or struggle for existence that exists in all matter has evolved into will (the will to live and to dominate others) in human beings.
Consciousness/thought is a means to the end of, i.e., serves, the struggle for existence, in other words, the will; thus, consciousness/thought is biological.
Such a means tends to develop in excess of its end—and can emancipate itself to become an end-in-itself;
thus thought can become theoretical (thought about thought) . . .
. . . and set itself impossible problems (like trying to solve the antimony of mind and matter).
Such problems can only be solved "by looking backwards, by showing how they arose psychologically within us," i.e. by finding their biological conditions of possibility.
Therefore, this philosophy is "anti-rational or irrationalist," i.e. not grounded in reason: i.e. . . .
. . . thought is biological, and . . .
many thought-processes/-constructs are "consciously false assumptions [as-ifs or fictions], which either contradict reality or are even contradictory in themselves, but which are intentionally thus formed in order to overcome difficulties of thought by this artificial deviation and reach the goal of thought by roundabout ways and by-paths."
This "un-real" as-if world is as important as the "real" world—in fact, more important in ethical and aesthetic matters.
Our given reality is our sensations.
Science deals with the regularities of this reality[; philosophy with the irregularities (?)].
Much in this reality is fitting [regular], but much is not—but though some of us console ourselves with the fiction that there is a Higher Spirit that created or regulates the universe . . .
. . . it is senseless [i.e. irrational] to question the meaning of the universe

He prefaces this list by saying, as 1. suggests, "We do not understand the world when we are pondering over its problems, but when we are doing the world's work" (xlv). To do this, we must often make do with "as ifs," "consciously false ideas," which he equates with Kant's appearances. A "[f]iction is . . . merely a more conscious, more practical and more fruitful error" (94).

Note:

a fiction: an assumption known to be false—but useful [a heuristic: "a part of that ars inveniendi which, in former times, was usually appended to Logic" (105)]
a hypothesis: an assumption that is probable [a provisional idea requiring experiment or evaluation]

The four characteristics of fictions:

an "arbitrary deviation from reality, that is, . . . contradiction of it"—and, ultimately, self-contradiction (97), which means that . . .
they "disappear in the course of history [through experience] or through the operation of logic [through thought]" (98),
they are known to be fictional: "the fiction is just a fiction" (ibid.), and . . .
. . . expedient: "means to a definite end" (99).

Thus, "truth . . . is merely the most expedient error" (emphasis given; 108; see Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense").

Categories of fiction:

artificial classification: dichotomy, the Linnaean system
abstractive (neglective, i.e. reductive) fictions: models, e.g. Adam Smith's assumption that human beings are egoistic, the analogy of psychic phenomena with mechanical processes, etc., linguistic roots, a mean or average (human being), approximation, the Socratic method
a. schematic fictions, e.g. the simple (isolated) case, b. paradigmatic fictions or imaginary cases, c. utopian fictions, incl. the state of nature, d. the (arche)type
tropic or symbolic (analogical) fictions, cf. the myth or poetic simile, esp. in physics, metaphysics and theology, e.g. substance, categories, . . .
juristic (legal) fictions, and . . .
personificatory fictions: soul, energy, force
summational fictions (often mnemonic), i.e. general ideas
heuristic fictions
practical (ethical) fictions: freedom, the (standpoint of the) ideal
mathematical fictions: (empty) space, (empty) time, etc.
abstract generalisation, including mathematical and physical fictions like . . .
unjustified transference: zero cases, negative/imaginary/irrational numbers, fractions;
infinity; [14] matter; [15] the atom, and other [16] physical fictions, as well as . . .
metaphysical fictions [my term] like [17] the thing-in-itself and [18] the absolute (17-84)

Cf. C. K. Ogden, Bentham's Theory of Fictions (1932; Routledge, 2007)—see below; Alfred Adler, in Heinz and Rowena R. Ansbacher, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (Harper, 1956) on the personality construct of a fictional final goal; Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (OUP, 1967) on Vaihinger as a methodologist of narrativity; James Hillman, Healing Fiction (Continuum, 1994), which identifies the tendency to literalize, rather than "see through our meanings," with neurosis and madness (110[-12]). See also Barry Stampfel, Hans Vaihinger's Ghostly Presence in Contemporary Literary Studies," Criticism (Summer 1998).

Not Speaking the Truth

2009-07-02T13:34:00.010+12:00

Here's the thing: aren't you irredeemably sick of trying to speak the truth about the world? Know that seeking it out: tracking it down—or ambushing it, if you are a person of power—always returns dead ends.

Take refuge in the fictive: the world is not furtive; it hides in plain sight. Seduction (L. "leading [or being led?] astray") is the only strategem. Seduce and be seduced shall be the only law.

Seduction, however, never belongs to the order of nature, but that of artifice—never to the order of energy, but that of signs and rituals. (Jean Baudrillard, Seduction [1979; NWP 1990] 2)

No! Signs and rituals: yes—but they are entirely natural. That is what we as homo insapiens do, after all: circulate and recycle stuff and nonsense.

Follow this law of nature:

Don't be yourself (unless you have to); don't dissemble (any more than you want to).
Don't think; use what you have at hand.
Follow threads.
Learn the ways of the world by walking them, but don't think that you have to walk far.
Walk often with your eyes closed (bearing in mind that others are ahead of and behind you); walk less with your end in mind (close is good enough).
Believe in a world without end: leave loose ends; unravel others'.
Know you will end where you began.

Wittgenstein: Showing off in Art

2009-07-02T11:10:00.016+12:00

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Notebooks 1914-1916, G.H. vonWright and G. E. M. Anscombe, eds., Oxford: Blackwell, 1961. 109.

This same distinction between what can be shewn by the language but not said, explains the difficulty that is felt about types—e.g., as to the difference between things, facts, properties, relations. That M is a thing can't be said; it is nonsense: but something is shewn by the symbol "M." In [the] same way, that a proposition is a subject-predicate proposition can't be said: but is shown by the symbol.
. . . Therefore a THEORY of types is impossible. It tries to say something about the types when you can only talk about the symbols. But what you say about the symbols is not that this symbol has that type, which would be nonsense for [the] same reason: but you say simply: this is the symbol, to prevent a misunderstanding. E.g., in "aRb", "R" is not a symbol, but that "R" is between one name and another symbolises. Here we have not said: this symbol is not of this type but of that, but only: this symbolises and not that. . . . (1914)

The existence of objects, properties and relations can only be shown, not stated. The fact that our language has words for these "entities" shows that they exist; any attempt to say what they show—or, indeed, to assert facts—about the world, as most philosophy does, will result in nonsense (pseudopropositions). So "disputes [about what exists] . . . disappear . . . when we understand the roles played by different types of word in the construction of propositions" (Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein [Granta, 2005] 38-39). “What can be shown, cannot be said” (TLP 4.1212).

Thus:

Language is made up of propositions, not words, and
the world is made up of facts [complex, i.e. articulate], not objects [simple].
Facts correspond to (true) propositions about the world.

Denis McManus calls this correspondence "the con-formity of thought and world," thus "intelligibility as con-formity":

[T]houghts and the world share "forms," with the "intelligibility" of thought imagined as something like a fit, an isomorphism, between the "form of thought" and the "form of the world" [i.e., not "the particular way in which . . . the world happens to be," but its "'logical' or 'metaphysical possibilities': the objects that happen to exist within it, as well as those that could happen to exist in it"]. (The Enchantment of Words: Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [OUP, 2006] 5)

The question for him is how this conformity is acquired or comes to be.

Likewise, artists don't understand the world, they understand the language of art. They show it rather than saying it.

Boo to Beauty

2009-06-26T07:27:00.006+12:00

Roger Scruton, "Beauty and Desecration," City Journal 19.2 (Spring 2009)

"We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness."

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. . . .
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue.

Beauty is what artists and philosophers since the Renaissance say art aims at. But artists and philosophers, like most other human beings, often say and do very different things. Donatello's "David" is "beautiful"; his "Mary Magdalene" very much not (unless you extend the definition of beauty to include the beauty of suffering, or something of that ilk, which move would make Grosz's grotesques beautiful too).

To be obsessed with beauty, to see beauty as truth—and somehow transcendental, is to side with Plato against Aristotle, who sees beauty as form, and to ignore other aims for art, like catharsis in Aristotle's reading of tragedy or ecstasy in Longinus's reading of the literary sublime - rather more "earthly" notions. Scruton, the (early modern) lover of beauty, is as reductive as the (late modern) lovers of ugliness. Surely art does a lot of stuff—unless you want to subsume a whole lot of stuff under "beauty," as I think Scruton does (or "truth," as Heidegger does).

See Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939) or Vilem Flusser, "Taking Up Residence in Homelessless," a.k.a. "The Challenge of the Migrant" (1985; 1993; 2003).

Kenosis: Dying a Criminal's Death

2009-06-24T12:11:00.013+12:00

κένωσις (kénōsis), means an "emptying," from κενός (kenos), "empty."

Phillipians 2.5-8 (KJ):
2:5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
2:6 Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
2:7 But made himself of no reputation [made himself nothing or emptied himself (ἐκένωσε, ekénōse)], and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
2:8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

[5] Think like Jesus: [6] Though he was God, he didn't cling to his God-ness. [7] Instead, he gave up his status, choosing to become a servant and to be made human. As such, [8] he humbled himself before God and died a criminal on a cross.

In Christian theology, kenosis is the concept of the 'self-emptying' of one's own will and becoming entirely receptive to God. The kenotic ethic is the ethic of Jesus, considered as the ethic of sacrifice. The Phillipians passage urges believers to imitate Christ's self-emptying.

Something similar might happen in peak experiences like flow in art or sport, a syncope of the self. But, paradoxically, the self-emptying seems to be accompanied by a sense of self-fulfilment, a sense that the peak experience expresses the self (hence, for Maslow peak experiences are characteristic of the self-actualized). (Alternatively, some feel that once the self is emptied the void fills with "the world," hence the sense of plenitude that often accompanies peak experiences.)

The issue here is what is emptied in the self-emptying: the history of the self (not usually, because artistic and sporting experience is based on internalised practice and learning, i.e. they utilise memory), the sense of self (yes, if you mean the focus on an external object [thing or goal]; no, if you are an "autobiographical" artist), etc.?

Less lofty, but as beholden to this dynamic, are tropes like the trainee artist as apprentice, art as mere craft or a kind of slavery, experience (human or bodily) as the material of art, etc., etc.

syncope: in rhetoric, cutting letters or syllables from the middle of a word (a metaplasm, i.e. an orthographical figure); in medicine, a faint or loss of consciousness—but also, perhaps, a "bracketing" (ἐποχή, epokhé) of the self.

epokhé: the theoretical moment where all judgments about the existence of the external world, and consequently all action in the world, is suspended. This concept was developed by the Greek skeptics, in particular, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, and plays an implicit role in skeptical thought, e.g. Descartes' method of doubt. The term was popularized by Husserl, who elaborates the notion of "phenomenological epoché" or "bracketing" in Ideas I. Through the systematic procedure of phenomenological reduction, one is thought to be able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.

What I am suggesting here is a kind of inverse epokhé, but we might go one step further: on the basis of claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrho, the Skeptic, argued that we should suspend judgment or withhold assent. It is not that we have no rationale to choose one way of action or another; rather, one kind of life or action cannot definitively be said to be "correct." Instead we ought to live according to custom, law, and tradition.

Noli me tangere

2009-06-24T10:07:00.016+12:00

Noli me tangere, meaning "don't touch me," is the Latin version of words spoken, according to John 20:17, by Jesus to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection. The original phrase, Μή μου ἅπτου, in the Gospel of John, is better represented in translation as "stop clinging to me."

The touch-me-not suggests the tendency to "cling to," i.e. mourn, dead ideas etc. But when does remembrance (narcissistic object-identification) become fixation (disavowal of an object) [see below on Freud]? Assuming a preference for embodied cognition, perhaps when it ceases to be bodily/affective, when it becomes transfigured into something merely mental/ideal. [= the not]

But does that eliminate faith, which keeps alive a dead idea, or does it just capture the tendency of remembrance to fix a thing to identify it? Or are there just better and worse ways to remember something: recollection, nostalgia, worship, obsession, forgetting (that is not forgetting), etc.?

Or maybe the touch-me-not is actually an injunction from the Father, suggesting that the idea etc. in medias res of its transfiguration is off limits, especially to embodied cognition [= the not-yet] . . .

Or maybe it suggests (reality-)testing the idea etc. by taking it out to your "brethren," rather than dwelling on it in isolation [= the yet] . . .

John 20:17: "Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God."

Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia": Mourning is characterised by a loss of interest in the outside world, melancholy by a(n apparently unjustified) loss of self-esteem: "In mourning the world has become impoverished and empty, during melancholia, it is the ego itself [kenosis: the 'self-emptying' of one's own will and becoming entirely receptive to God]" (246). However, the melancholic loss of self-esteem is actually directed at the love object itself. The subject, instead of withdrawing cathexis from the object, unconsciously identifies with the now-hated object to which he or she remains ever more firmly attached.

[identification:] O loved → O identified with, thus S = O [= regression]
→ [abandonment: ] O lost, thus S lost [= ambivalent choice]
→ [disavowal:] O hated [sadism], thus S hated [masochism]

This pathological development stems on the one hand from the narcissistic nature of the initial object choice, which by its nature promotes narcissistic regression, and on the other hand from the ambivalence of the choice and the predominance in it of the sadistic impulse, which here assumes masochistic form.

But in melancholia as in mourning, it is essentially the work consisting in finishing with the object (by degrading it or declaring it dead) that will "strike dead" the dead and release the subject.

(Sigmund Freud, "Trauer und Melancholie," Intern. Zschr. ärztl. Psychoanal 4 [1915]: 277-287; G.W. 10, 428-448; "Mourning and Melancholia," SE 14 [1916-1917g]: 243-258)

Innovation has always depended less on how smart you are than how connected you are (apparently)

2009-06-24T07:24:00.004+12:00

"Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior"
by Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, Mark G. Thomas
Science 324.5932 (5 June 2009): 1298-1301.

Abstract: The origins of modern human behavior are marked by increased symbolic and technological complexity in the archaeological record. In western Eurasia this transition, the Upper Paleolithic, occurred about 45,000 years ago, but many of its features appear transiently in southern Africa about 45,000 years earlier. We show that demography is a major determinant in the maintenance of cultural complexity and that variation in regional subpopulation density and/or migratory activity results in spatial structuring of cultural skill accumulation. Genetic estimates of regional population size over time show that densities in early Upper Paleolithic Europe were similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa when modern behavior first appeared. Demographic factors can thus explain geographic variation in the timing of the first appearance of modern behavior without invoking increased cognitive capacity.

Greater population density → increased "cultural [symbolic and technological] complexity" or "development." Social networking, i.e. the transmission of ideas and skills, fostered the emergence of more and more complex innovations.

It has often been thought that boosts in brain power or advances in language in homo sapiens led to modern human behaviour. But it seemed to take a long time for these resources to pay off.

That is, "you can have individuals who are really great at inventing ideas and concepts and ways of approaching the world, but you need a certain population density to be able to have that stuff catch hold and spread," as Richard Potts of the Smithsonian told LiveScience.

Is this a clue that reciprocity, i.e. sociability, might be the precondition of human cognition, that humans are smart(er) because they collaborate (better than other animals) [= embedded cognition]? (It's not because we are smart and decide to work together.)

For a critique, see John Hawks on "Learning, Population Size, and 'Modern Human Behaviour.'"

Fumblerules

2009-06-23T11:08:00.012+12:00

Fumblerules are writing rules that contradict their advice, such as "don't use no double negatives" and "eschew obfuscation" (they are thus self-referential paradoxes).

See The alt.usage.english FAQ, quoting George L. Trigg, "Grammar," Physics Review Letters 42.12 (19 Mar 1979) 747-48 and William Safire, "The Fumblerules of Grammar," New York Times (11 Apr. 1979): SM4.

Here are some of Trigg's:

Make sure each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
Just between you and I, the case of pronoun is important.
Watch out for irregular verbs which have crope into English.
Verbs has to agree in number with their subjects.
Don't use no double negatives.
Being bad grammar, a writer should not use dangling modifiers.
Join clauses good like a conjunction should.
A writer must be not shift your point of view.
About sentence fragments.
Don't use run-on sentences you got to punctuate them.
In letters essays and reports use commas to separate items in series.
Don't use commas, which are not necessary.
Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
Its important to use apostrophes right in everybodys writing.
Don't abbrev.
Check to see if you any words out.
In the case of a report, check to see that jargonwise, it's A-OK.
As far as incomplete constructions, they are wrong.
About repetition, the repetition of a word might be real effective repetition - take, for instance the repetition of Abraham Lincoln.
In my opinion, I think that an author when he is writing should definitely not get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that he does not really need in order to put his message across.
Use parallel construction not only to be concise but also clarify.
It behooves us all to avoid archaic expressions.
Mixed metaphors are a pain in the neck and ought to be weeded out.
Consult the dictionery to avoid mispelings.
To ignorantly split an infinitive is a practice to religiously avoid.
Last but not least, lay off cliches.

Erratology encourages students to make (and teach) their own fumblerules to break (and learn) the disabling rules of the institution. By thus risking the authority they are lent by the institution, they exercise their sovereign right to write.

erratology: Erratology uses as a heuristic the principle that rules exist to be broken/that exceptions disprove the rule (against Cicero's exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis in his defence of Balbo [56BCE]); through erratology you can learn by making mistakes rather than proceeding by trial and error - or learning from your mistakes. It is a variant on Winston Weathers' deformative grammar, "Grammar B" (see Peter Elbow's essay, "Collage: Your Cheatin' Art").

And the same goes for writing teachers: they too must risk mistakes—and their authority . . .

Cf. Muphry's (or Merphy's) Law:
"In neither taste nor precision is any man's practice a court of last appeal, for writers all, both great and small, are habitual sinners against the light; and their accuser is cheerfully aware that his own work will supply (as in making this book it has supplied) many 'awful examples'" (Ambrose Bierce, "Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults" [1909]).

The law, as set out by John Bangsund, states that:

if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written;
if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book;
the stronger the sentiment expressed in (a) and (b), the greater the fault;
any book devoted to editing or style will be internally inconsistent.

("Scenes of Editorial Life: Muphry's Law," John Bangsund's Threepenny Planet [Mar 1992])

The Fern as an Iterated Function System

2009-06-23T07:32:00.009+12:00

From Curran Kelleher, "Recursive Structures and Processes," MIT Open Courseware (24 Aug. 2007) 10-12.

1.2.7 Iterated Function Systems [= "a method of constructing fractals; the resulting constructions are always self-similar" (wikipedia)]

Iterated Function Systems (IFS) take a single point and move it around repeatedly, plotting a point on the screen for each move. The point is moved according to a mapping function, which is chosen probabalistically from several possible mapping functions.

["The fractal is made up of the union ['collage'] of several copies of itself, each copy being transformed by a function (hence 'function system'). . . . The functions are normally contractive. . . . Hence the shape of an IFS fractal is made up of several possibly-overlapping smaller copies of itself, each of which is also made up of copies of itself" (wikipedia).]

Fern
[Barnsley's fern, cf. Michael Barnsley, Fractals Everywhere (Academic P, 1988)]

The fern IFS is a system of four mapping functions. Each of these functions is a mapping from the outermost rectangle to another, smaller rectangle. The system is comprised of the following four functions, which map from any point inside the outermost black rectangle . . .

1. to a point on the green part of the stem (1% of the time)
2. to a point in the red rectangle, the lowest left branch (7% of the time)
3. to a point in the dark blue rectangle, the lowest right branch (7% of the time)
4. to a point in the light blue rectangle, which spirals everything upwards and smaller (85% of the time)

Figure 1.1: The rectangles used in the coordinate transformations (approximately), and the image generated by our program.

Here is Java code which implements this IFS:

Is this algorithm recursive? The code itself is not recursive, it is just repetitive. However, the mappings are recursive, because they are applied to themselves eventually. The ﬁlling in of the fractal object happens because of the randomness introduced by selecting probabilistically which of the four mappings to apply.

See wikipedia.

Strange loop

2009-06-22T12:40:00.006+12:00

A strange loop arises when, by moving up or down through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started.

An example: the endless apprenticeship of University life, i.e. how when, after years of drudgery as an ignorant slave to an all-knowing master or masters, you take a step (by dint of many tiny steps) up the ladder, only to find yourself ignorant slave to another all-knowing master or masters. Commonly known as the academic smackdown.

There are more productive strange loops like the Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower (see example).

See also M. C. Escher's Ascending and Descending.

The Writing Zone according to Ecological Systems Theory (addendum)

2009-06-22T11:49:00.001+12:00

"Successful" writing in the institutional system of the University takes two forms, one "positive," one "negative."

In the "negative" form, the student, like Schreber in his paranoia, fends off disaster by appeasing the mysterious forces of the powers-that-be, producing writing by trial and error that mimics the conventions of academic style (as we know, the more "successful" students are those skilled in mimicry who learn the conventions without scruple and produce entirely what the institution says it expects from them).
In the "positive" form, like Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the student produces writing by courting disaster, by making mistakes their own in an effort to remake the institution in their own image.

(Does this characterisation sound right? If it sounds like paranoia—and wishful thinking—it aptly captures the institutional environment in which it was written.)

The Writing Zone According to Ecological Systems Theory

2009-06-21T12:45:00.016+12:00

See Urie Bronfenbrenner, The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979).

The theory (see wikipedia) specifies four types of nested environmental systems, with bi-directional influences within and between the systems.

The four systems:

1. Microsystem: the individual's immediate environments (family, school, peer group, neighborhood, and childcare environments);
2. Mesosystem: the direct connections between immediate environments (i.e., a child’s home and school);
3. Exosystem: the environments that only indirectly affect the individual (such as parent's workplace);
4. Macrosystem: the larger cultural context (Eastern vs. Western culture, national economy, political culture, subculture).

Later, a fifth system was added:

5. Chronosystem: the patterning of environmental events and transitions over the course of life.

Cf. Te Whariki version ("ECE" = Early Childhood Education):

One version of the ecology of the writing zone of the academic writer relies on a simplified version of this diagram—with only three systems: the microsystem of the individual, the exosystem of the institutional writing classroom, and the macrosystem of the social/national context.

Students come to the institutional writing classroom aiming to learn what they take to be the rules of that system and easily become trapped in that system, to the exclusion of their self (interior life: personal/cultural history, etc., i.e. experience and expertise) and the "real world" (life outside the institution, i.e. society, national history, etc, i.e. context).

(Obviously, insofar as we take students to be embodied and embedded "cognizers," and these aspects of their selves to be socioculturally determined, the micro- and exosystem overlap in an inside-outside relationship [like a Klein bottle].)

This entrapment takes the form of paranoid rule-following, most of which is untaught, i.e. received wisdom, and improvised, i.e. learnt by trial and error (unconsciously erratological).

See Freud's "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides)," i.e. The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber, intro. Colin McCabe (Penguin, 2003). The psychotic Schreber suffers a "world catastrophe," after which he disavows reality (Umwelt) and invents an alternative reality (Eigenwelt) with its own logic, where symbols become concrete and symptoms are projected as real.

Oddly, students misread the institutional clues about the rules in relatively consistent ways (which might suggest that the institution supplies or conditions these mis-rules, thus providing a mix of information and mis- or disinformation, probably because its existence depends on students assuming the position of ignorance). In other words, there is a definable set of transformations of academic style, much as the elements of Schreber's delusions seem to mirror (i.e. consistently and inversely)—and their relationships to mimic—conventional ones.

The task of the writing teacher is to enable the student to see, adapt to, and make use of the mesosystems that mediate between their microsystem (Innenwelt) and the exosystem (writing class within the academic institution, i.e. their immediate Umwelt), and between that exosystem and the social/national context (the "real world," i.e. their mediate Umwelt; this is a modification of the idea of a mesosystem). To do so is to allow students to see the system as a system: to get distance on it by dint of thinking from the outside in or inside out, thereby turning its vicious circle into a virtuous one (i.e. setting up a positive rather than negative feedback loop).

a Klein bottle, orig. Kleinsche Fläche (Klein surface), misread as Kleinsche Flasche (Klein bottle):

Reflecting on the Craft of Writing

2009-06-21T08:56:00.012+12:00

Excerpts from Richard Sennett on the craftsman in us all in "Labours of Love" (see The Craftsman [Yale, 2008]—and Kalefa Sanneh on the return of craft, i.e. slow thinking/learning):

The "end" [telos] of craft is engagement [flow] . . .
The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake. Theirs is practical activity, but their labour is not simply a means to another end. . . . It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication, but the craftsman exemplifies the special human condition of being engaged. [. . .]

It requires deep thinking, i.e. problematising and reflexivity . . .
All craftsmanship is founded on skill developed to a high degree. By one commonly used measure, about 10,000 hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician. As skill progresses, it becomes more problem-attuned, such as the lab technician worrying about procedure—whereas people with primitive levels of skill struggle just to get things to work. At its higher reaches, technique is no longer a mechanical activity; people can feel fully and think deeply about what they are doing, once they do it well. [. . .]

One learns a craft by making mistakes on purpose (i.e. the path to truth goes by error ["erratology" or, strictly, hamartology]) . . .
[T]he principle of reasoning backwards, from effects to causes, underlies all good craftsmanship. . . . Sometimes, in discussions of education, this recognition is reduced to the cliché of "learning from one's mistakes." Musical technique shows that the matter is not so simple. I have to be willing to make errors, to play wrong notes, in order to get them right eventually. This is the commitment to truthfulness. . . .

Thus, learning a craft requires "dwell[ing] in waste" [argos] . . .
This musical quest addresses one of the shibboleths in craftsmanship: the ideal of "fit-for-purpose." In tools, as in technique, the good craftsman is supposed to eliminate all procedures that do not serve a predetermined end. The ideal of fit-for-purpose has dominated thinking in the industrial era. Diderot's Encyclopedia in the 18th century celebrated an ideal paper-making factory at L'Anglée, in which there was no mess or wasted paper [!]. Today, programmers similarly dream of systems without "dead ends." But the ideal of fit-for-purpose can work against experiment in developing a tool or a skill. . . [A] craftsman . . . has instead to dwell in waste, following up dead ends. In technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter problems; he or she creates them in order to know them. Improving one's technique is never a routine, mechanical process.

And the path to/of craft is roundabout [and aggregrative] (not direct [and cumulative]), i.e. "arduous and erratic" . . .
To develop skill requires a good measure of experiment and questioning; mechanical practice seldom enables people to improve their skills. Too often we imagine good work itself as success built, economically and efficiently, upon success. Developing skill is more arduous and erratic than this.

Craft involves three key dispositions: "to localise [concretise], to question [qualify] and to open up [contextualise and evaluate]" . . .
Three abilities are the foundation of craftsmanship: to localise, to question and to open up. The first involves making a matter concrete; the second, reflecting on its qualities; the third, expanding its sense. The carpenter establishes the peculiar grain of a single piece of wood, looking for detail; turns the wood over and over, pondering how the pattern on the surface might reflect the structure hidden underneath; decides that the grain can be brought out if he or she uses a metal solvent rather than standard wood varnish. [And it is "synaesthetic"—or, to extrapolate) embodied and embedded . . .] To deploy these capabilities the brain needs to process visual, aural, tactile and language-symbol information simultaneously.

Cupid's Evil Twin: Amor/Eros and Thanatos/Mors

2009-06-11T12:33:00.012+12:00

Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.470-74. Cupid = Eros = Kama. See wikipedia.

Cupid's cult was closely associated with that of Venus; in fact, his power was supposed to be even greater than his mother’s, since he had dominion over the dead in Hades, the creatures of the sea and the gods in Olympus. Some of the cults of Cupid suggested that, like Mors/Thanatus/Letus, he was the son of Night (Nox) and Hell (Erebus), and that he mated with Chaos to produce both men and gods.

He is frequently invoked as fickle, playful, and perverse, and thus often depicted as carrying two sets of arrows: one set gold-headed, which inspire love; and the other lead-headed, which inspire hatred.

His twin by (Freudian) affinity would be Mors or Letus/Letum, i.e. Thanatus [Thanatos], god of non-violent death. (He too is the son of the goddess of night, Nox [Nyx; see (Hesiod, Theogony 212, Homer, Iliad 14.250, Pausanias 5.18.1, Seneca, Hercules Fur. 1068] or Nox and Erebus (Hyginus, Preface, Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.17); strictly speaking, he is the brother of the personification of sleep, Somnus [Hypnos].) In Roman sculptural reliefs, he was portrayed as a youth holding a down-turned torch and wreath or butterfly (symbolising the soul of the dead).

See Freud on Thanatos (a.k.a. destrudo or mortido), a fundamental death instinct or drive that counterbalances the instinct or drive of beings to do only what they find pleasurable (Eros, a.k.a. libido), and by which organisms are driven to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state; this is an entropic principle (entropy being the idea that nature tends from order to disorder in isolated systems; entropy = a measure of disorder, multiplicity, or unavailable energy). It manifests itself as destruction or aggression, self-directed (masochism) or otherwise (sadism).

Stigmergy

2009-06-09T09:59:00.043+12:00

(The Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising Workshop at the ANU, 16-17 July 2004 + stigmergy)

The term "stigmergy" was originally proposed in 1959 by the French scientist, Pierre-Paul Grasse, in his study of social insects, and more specifically, while observing termite building behaviour (1959).

For example, ants exchange information by laying down pheromones on their way back to the nest when they have found food. In that way, they collectively develop a complex network of trails, connecting the nest in the most efficient way to the different food sources [= navigation].

Other eusocial creatures, such as termites, use pheromones to build their complex nests by following a simple decentralized rule set. Each insect scoops up a mudball or similar material from its environment, invests the ball with pheromones, and deposits it on the ground. Termites are attracted to their nestmates' pheromones and are therefore more likely to drop their own mudballs near their neighbours'. Over time, this leads to the construction of pillars, arches, tunnels and chambers [= construction].

Grasse defines stigmergy:

the coordination of tasks and the regulation of constructions does not depend directly on the workers, but on the constructions themselves. The worker does not direct his [sic] work, but is guided by it. It is to this special form of stimulation that we give the name Stigmergy (stigma, wound from a pointed object[, i.e. mark or sign]; ergon, work, product of labour = stimulating product of labor). (In [and tr.] Holland and Melhuish [1999] 2)

The term stigmergy describes the influence that information derived from the local environmental effects of the activities of previous individuals has on the current behaviour of individuals [= feedback "in action"].

Camazine et al. (2001) refer to stigmergy as the process of information gathering from work in progress – from the environmental effects of the work rather than directly from fellow workers. As they describe it, in continuing with the social insect analogy:

instead of coordination through direct communication among nestmates, each individual . . . adjust[s] its building behaviour to fit with that of its nestmates through the medium of the work in progress. (24)

Stigmergy is the way a system organises itself through the collective behaviour of individuals within its environment. As the individual moves through the environment, it gathers or emits information, or interacts with the environment, i.e. leaving traces, i.e. cues, in work or otherwise, that stimulate the work of other individuals, who do the same in turn. Over time, a pattern of construction emerges out of this coordinated action. [It is also known as swarm intelligence.] (The theory does not explain how or when construction ends or how errors made during construction are dealt with.)

Stigmergy can explain the transfer of information among individuals, when each individual needs to determine what to do and where a direct line of information from one individual to another individual does not exist; transfer instead occurs through

the stimulus of previous individuals’ information [sematectonic (A - T - ?): from sema (sign, token) and tecton (craftsman, builder) (Wilson 186)] and
construction activities embedded in the environment [stigmergic (A - T - A): acc. to Wilson, stigmergy is a subset of sematectonic behaviour].

Figure 9.3, "Stigmergy – information flow" summarises this process. Here the work previously accomplished by one or more individuals is imprinted in the environment as a cue/stimulus for other individuals.

Figure 9.3. Stigmergy – information flow.

Note that stigmergy is not restricted to eusocial creatures, or even to physical systems. On the internet there are many emergent phenomena that arise from users interacting only by modifying local parts of their shared virtual environment.

Such self-organised ucs intelligence or collaboration = deep thinking (generated unawares), like deep learning (delivered unawares). Can it be mobilised? Perhaps. It can perhaps be "fed back." The teacher activates the feedback process by "imprint[ing] . . . information via cues and/or stimulus" on the environment.

See Pierre-Paul Grasse, "La reconstruction du nid et les coordinations interindividuelles chez bellicositermes natalensis et cubitermes sp. La theorie de la stigmergie: essai d’interpretation du comportament des termites constructeurs," Insects Sociaux 6 (1959): 41-80.

E.O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000) 186.

Also: distributed cognition, extended mind, situated cognition.

The Honeymoon Killers

2009-06-08T21:08:00.008+12:00

V1:
G – Bm – F#sus4 – GM7.F#7
G – Bm – F#sus4.F#7 (12/8)

Murder most foul in the kitchen:
you shot me down
when I was in for the kill,
with another drink in my hand
and a line on my lips.

“So who were you stalking outside?”
you said to my frown.
“Well, I was . . . she was a friend.”
“What were you doing with your hand?”
wiped the smile off my lips.

PC:
G5 – D/F# – A7sus4 – Bm –

Oh, bury me in the garden
cos I want to come up roses—
things are getting messy in the house
party as the shit flies.
But as we said all along,
we’re not Adam and Eve,
living for the sweet Hereafter.
We don’t want tears and laughter,
it’s sex and slaughter for the Honeymoon Killers.

C:
[chords as verse]

A lonely heart can kill like a suicide pill,
so suck it up and do what you will—
kiss her goodbye . . .

V2:

Oh, the lights are much too bright in here
under the grill,
as she roasts me slowly:
“Oh, it was just the vodka talking
when I gave her the lip.”

"Bury Me in the Garden": http://trad.appspot.com/song/Bury_Me_in_the_Garden: "Bury me in the garden, mother, mother. Bury me in the garden, mother, mother, mother dear. Bury me in the garden." "O, the moonlight shines so bright, way down in the garden ’neath the sycamore tree."

“In the Garden”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Garden_(song), http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/i/t/g/itgarden.htm

Writing in the Zone

2009-06-05T10:06:00.029+12:00

The drama of the writing room

The writing teacher enables learners to explore the limits of their writing zone (cf. Vygotsky: zone of proximal development; scaffolding), perhaps to understand, perhaps to enlarge or deform it.

They should learn where their writing zone fits within - or rather, overlaps with - the institutional zone (IZ), or, speaking in terms of writing per se, how their idiom maps onto the institutional idiom (II).

An aside:

The writing teacher is not a mentor, i.e. who knows more, i.e. has access to distal knowledge beyond the proximal knowledge of the student [the hand-up or or hands-up model].
Instead they model an exploratory or open mode of being within the writing zone [the many hands make light work model].

The writing room becomes a place of drama (Gk "action, deed"), where everyone actively learns by enacting what they know, rather than a place of edification, where learners passively receive and rehearse knowledge from the teacher. This is in keeping with the principle of the distributed intelligence of the writing room, i.e. we're all in this together: teachers are learners; learners teach the teachers and each other; we all at once teach and learn.

Learning—and the writing of—Grammar B enables one to deform the Ii, as:

a "negative" (or privative) method: learning to do right by doing wrong, i.e. learning the rules of Ii by making conscious "errors" (un-errors) that make them explicit, a.k.a. erratology
a "critical" (or private) method: learning, through this process, to deform Ii, i.e. to find a space of freedom (a private or temporary autonomous zone) within the IZ, a.k.a. ?

Thus, they learn the rules of the Ii/IZ to be able to break or bend them in their own interests.

The writing teacher as guide

The writing teacher is like Stalker (Guide) in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), who works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone to the Room [the writing room as hypertopia], which is said to grant "the deepest, innermost" wishes [the desire of writers].

He guides a sceptical writer (Writer [radical learner]) and a credulous professor (Professor [conservative learner]) out of the city into the Zone, in which the residual effects of an unspecifed visitation or catastrophe have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply [the unreal world of the IZ].

Once in the Zone, he tells them that they must do exactly as he says to survive the dangers that are all around them [the leap of faith into the chaotic hypertopia of the writing space]. No harm comes to any of the three men; there is a tension between disbelief of the need for his elaborate precautions, and the possibility that they are necessary. He alone knows the rules of the Zone, having learnt them from his mentor "Porcupine" and can sense the dangers around them.

As they journey, the characters share their reasons for wanting to visit the room: Writer wants inspiration [freedom]; Professor wants recognition [affirmation]. Interestingly, Stalker takes on faith the powers [enchantment] of the room (because he says he's never been in there, i.e. his job is just to lead) - and bemoans the loss of faith in society [the disenchantment of modernity].
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film and http://skywalking.com/wwwboard/messages/847.html.)

Stalker, Writer and Professor (and the fourth figure is Tarkovsky, a.k.a. Porcupine):

Zone of proximal development [зона ближайшего развития; ZPD]: the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help, i.e. "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes [Harvard UP, 1978] 86).

Image: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~rallrich/learn/zone.html

"ZPD": zone of personal and/or professional development

Scaffolding: a process through which a teacher or peer supports the student in his or her ZPD as necessary, and tapers off this support as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building during construction, i.e. "Scaffolding refers to the way the adult guides the child's learning via focused questions and positive interactions" (Nancy Balaban, "Seeing the Child, Knowing the Person," in W. Ayers, To Become a Teacher (Teachers College Press, 1995) 52)

Porcupine: a.k.a. hedgehog, see Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (after Archilochus: πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἐχῖνος δ'ἓν μέγα, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"). Hedgehogs view the world through the lens of a single defining idea; foxes do not, drawing on a wide variety of experiences to understand the world. The Fox may be the black dog of Stalker. (See http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/published_works/rt/HF.pdf).

Three Kinds of Inference

2009-06-02T11:14:00.009+12:00

Figure 1. Three Kinds of Inference

The terms “Fact,” “Rule,” “Case” are medieval nicknames for the propositions that would be called the “conclusion” (C), “major premiss” (MP) and “minor premiss” (mp) respectively, in the simplest form of deductive syllogism.

Thus, we have the following scheme:

1. Deduction takes a Case, a mp of the form X => Y,
matches it with a Rule, a MP of the form Y => Z,
then adverts to a Fact, a C of the form X => Z.

2. Induction takes a Case of the form X => Y,
matches it with a Fact of the form X => Z,
then adverts to a Rule of the form Y => Z.

3. Abduction takes a Fact of the form X => Z,
matches it with a Rule of the form Y => Z,
then adverts to a Case of the form X => Y.

Even more succinctly:

Table 2. Three Kinds of Inference

http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg06871.html

Scholar, author inspired decades of English literature students

2009-05-31T16:10:00.005+12:00

NZ Herald (30 May 2009)
Bill Williams

Dr Terry Sturm, CBE, professor of English. Died aged 67.

Almost every student of English since 1980 at Auckland University would have felt Terry Sturm's influence during their studies.

He held a professorial chair at the university from 1980 until his retirement in 2005, and was an eminent critic and scholar of Australasian writing, especially New Zealand popular fiction.

He played a leading role in placing New Zealand literature at the centre of the academic curriculum.

He edited various standard literary reference works including two editions of The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, and the drama section of the Oxford History of Australian Literature. His literary biography An Unsettled Spirit: The Life and Frontier Fiction of Edith Lyttleton was the product of 15 years of research in New Zealand, Australia and England.

In 2005, he edited a selection of Allen Curnow's verse written under his pseudonym Whim Wham.

Assisted by a Marsden Fund grant, Sturm spent the past few years researching and writing a definitive literary biography of Allen Curnow.

His work met a setback when the memory stick from his computer was stolen last August, taking a large part of the first draft with it. The biography, if published, will be the first full-length study of Curnow's work.

Terence Laurie Sturm was born in Auckland in 1941 and went to school in Henderson. He completed his MA at Auckland University before undertaking postgraduate work at Cambridge University and at the University of Leeds, where he received his PhD.

He lectured in English literature at Sydney University from 1967 and left in 1980 to take his chair at the University of Auckland.

Sturm was involved in literary arts administration for many years. He was on the NZ Literary Fund and the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and in 1997 became first convener of the Humanities Panel of the Marsden Fund.

In 1990, he was made a CBE in recognition of his services to literature.

John Morrow, Dean of Auckland's Arts Faculty, said Sturm was deeply valued as a colleague and a friend.

He is survived by his wife Linda and sons Jonathan, Mark and Tim.

See also: "Literary scholar Prof. Terry Sturm dies" and "Biography last brave act by literary scholar"

Kavan’s place in NZ literary history (by Lawrence Jones)

2009-05-31T15:53:00.006+12:00

Otago Daily Times (30 May 2009): Books 49, rev. of Anna Kavan, Anna Kavan's New Zealand, ed. and intro. Jennifer Sturm (Random House, 2009).

ANNA KAVAN is probably known in New Zealand, if at all, primarily for her rather unflattering portrait of the country in "New Zealand: Answer to an Inquiry," published in 1943 in Horizon. This book, the fruit of eight years of research by Jennifer Sturm, has attempted to change that situation, to bring about the recognition of "Kavan’s role in the literary history of New Zealand."

Sturm has done this by editing and publishing for the first time Kavan’s manuscript "Five Months Further or What I remember about NZ," together with a full biographical introduction, notes, an account of Kavan’s correspondence with Ian Hamilton (pacifist, conscientious objector and writer of the account of his imprisonment, Till Human Voices Wake Us), and an essay on her as a New Zealand writer. In addition, the Horizon essay is included as an appendix.

Sturm in her introduction and her other commentary attempts to set the record straight about Kavan, especially in her relationship to New Zealand. On the one hand, she is shown as a ‘‘troubled and emotionally abject woman’’—self-absorbed, addicted to heroin (and alcohol), dependent on men in a series of unhappy relationships, depressed and mentally unstable; on the other hand, Sturm from a feminist psychological perspective defends her against the masculinist criticism of such as Frank Sargeson and Denis Glover and presents her as the victim of bad parenting and male prejudice, one who if she could not find a secure home in this world could show herself in her writing to be ‘‘an astute and meticulous recorder of experience, a collector of images and illustrations’’.

Her experience in New Zealand in 1941-42 was ‘‘a Pacific interlude in a turbulent life’’ so that New Zealand ‘‘came to represent a respite and a haven, adding a little colour to an otherwise sombre literary palette’’. Thus there is a case to be made for her as a New Zealand writer, one who had ‘‘more of New Zealand in [her] writing’’ than can be found in the writing of Katherine Mansfield.

Sturm perhaps overstates the case of Kavan as a significant "New Zealand" writer (only a handful of her 20 published books deal with New Zealand), but she has in this book, as C.K. Stead states in the foreword, made available for readers "an essentially 'New Zealand' work, previously lost to us—a piece of recovered history."

Kavan’s manuscript, made up of 18 stories that form a slightly fictionalised autobiographical account of her stay at Torbay with Ian Hamilton and her wartime sea journey from New Zealand to England afterwards, is worth recovering. In her first story Kavan described her strategy as being not to fight history but to ‘‘simply submit and record what happens," and she does this with sensitivity and insight. She captures the feel of life in Torbay — the sea and sky and shore; the eccentric neighbours; the Maori man with "two faces," caught between his given Maori and his assumed Pakeha identities; the slow rhythm of communal life; the very different world of Sargeson and the North Shore intelligentsia.

She also captures the feel of the strange, dreamlike yet dangerous journey to England, the ship a self-contained, seemingly timeless world that left her "feeling unequal to facing life apart from [it], just as a person who has been ill a long time shrinks from living without the buffer of his disease."

Kavan’s account is an attractive piece of impressionistic observation of the self and the worlds which it passes through, not a major New Zealand text but a welcome one, while Sturm’s editorial material adds considerably to our knowledge of an interesting international writer.

Muscae Volitantes

2009-05-21T12:22:00.001+12:00

Second nature (from L. secundum naturam, "according to nature," lit. "following nature")

2009-05-19T09:57:00.008+12:00

Logics: a reminder

2009-05-18T19:07:00.017+12:00

a. Deduction allows deriving b as a consequence of a (deriving the consequences of what is assumed [synagögé or anagögé]) = applying a law

b. Induction allows inferring a from multiple instantiations of b when a entails b (inferring probable antecedents as a result of observing multiple consequents [epagögé, "bringing in"]) = inferring a law

c. Abduction allows inferring a as an explanation of b (inferring the precondition a from the consequence b [apagögé—note that Peirce translates this term as retroduction]), a.k.a. "inference to the best explanation" = assuming a law (i.e. a hypothesis)

Peirce's definition of abduction differs: it is "the inference of the truth of the minor premiss of a syllogism of which the major premiss is selected as known already to be true while the conclusion is found to be true," i.e. it supplies the middle premise of an enthymeme. What is called abduction above, Peirce calls . . .

d. Retroduction, which is "reasoning from consequent to [hypothetical] antecedent" (C. S. Peirce, "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" [1908], CP 6.469-70). Peirce sometimes calls it "Hypothetic Inference." It "depends on our hope, sooner or later, to guess at the conditions under which a given kind of phenomenon will present itself" (Letter to F. A. Woods [1913], CP 8.385-88). Cf. the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Thus, we can infer the conditions of possibility of a state of affairs, e.g. a problem in argumentation, existing.

Cybersemiotics

2009-05-18T18:54:00.007+12:00

Topoi 2: strange logics/hypertopias

2009-05-18T14:07:00.012+12:00

The panoply of possibilities (truths, many worlds, the field of argument) > a reality (Truth, the world, an argument).

= the collapse of the wave-function in observation—or in writing, the assumption that you must reduce your argument to a singular position.

Cf. Kochen & Specker (1967): every statement about a quantum system must
a. rely on a host of assumptions, and/or
b. refuse to obey the standard rules of logic (which are distributive and use the Boolean operators "and," "or," and "not").

Standard logic and mathematics fit the topos of set theory. (They are straight.)

Quantum logics do not. (They are fuzzy and strange.)

Isham has identified the topos of quantum theory, the logic of which serves for the quantum and real worlds, i.e. it is distributive (C. J. Isham and J. Butterfield, "Some Possible Roles for Topos Theory in Quantum Theory and Quantum Gravity," Found. Phys. 30.10 (2000): 1707-35).

But, rather than finding a topos that fits (inductively [yields a law]), we can also opt for a certain topos (abductively [yields a hypothesis or possibility]). (See Robert Matthews, "Impossible Things for Breakfast, at the Logic Café," New Scientist [14 April 2007], online at <http://fastblogit.com/media/logic_cafe.html>.)

That would allow us to assume a partial truth to be true—or a hypertopia to exist as a genuine possibility.

Topoi

2009-05-18T12:44:00.008+12:00

Topos (Gk "place"; i.e. "place to find ['invent'] something") referred in classical Greek rhetoric to a standardised method of constructing or treating an argument, i.e. categories that help delineate the relationships among ideas (i.e. stock predicates), and stock concepts. The arguments based on these topoi were divided by Aristotle into "common" and "special" groups:

a. common (categories): laws, witnesses, contracts, oaths, comparisons of similarity, difference, or degree, definitions of things, division of things (whole/parts, for instance), cause and effect, and other items that could be analyzed, researched or documented;

b. special (concepts): justice or injustice, virtue, good, and worthiness.

Curtius expanded this concept in studying topoi as commonplaces: reworkings of traditional material, particularly the descriptions of standardised settings, but extended to almost any literary meme. They might be more-or-less stock characters (ethoi), topics (topoi), settings (kairoi), argument strategies (like types of exposition [logoi] or narratives [mythoi]), etc.

In physics, a topos is something a little different . . .

Escribir Es Nacer

2009-05-15T14:28:00.007+12:00

Hijo de la oraciòn,
cada mañana
dejo el seno del cántico,
me desnudo del himno que se eleva
a la gloria de Dios
y desde el polvo
me atrevo a murmurar
tristes palabras.

Escribir es nacer,
dejar la cristalina
morada de inocencia
donde ya no estoy.

Mi verso tiene formas maternales;
es nube sobre el mar
y una gota de lluvia,
es niño que en la arena se entretiene
con las espumas y las caracolas
Mi padre está en los cielos
y yo me siento alegre,
nacido de su Verbo,
de donde salgo cada día.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Altolaguirre

Snowflakes and Icebergs

2009-05-15T14:18:00.012+12:00

= a. isomorphic form in writing, b. deep learning

The snowflake

There is an isomorphic, even fractal (especially, perhaps, when the isomorphism is more than merely structural, i.e., when it's semantically loaded), relationship between the structure of the sentence, paragraph and essay, viz.

a. essay: intro (with TS), body (with aspects of the T in the t-s's), and conclusion (returning to the TS)

b. paragraph: t-s (intro), evidence (body) and argumentation (conclusion)

c. sentence: S + P

Or you might say that it is a structure-preserving mapping relation.

[T(S) = thesis(-statement)
t-s = topic-sentence
S= subject
P = predicate

An isomorphic (ἴσος isos "equal" + μορφή morphe "shape") structure is structurally identical, i.e., if two objects are isomorphic, then any property which is preserved by an isomorphism and which is true of one of the objects is also true of the other.
A fractal (L fractus, "broken" or "fractured") is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole," a property called self-similarity (B. B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature [W.H. Freeman and Company, 1982]). A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration (recursive feedback).]

The iceberg

a. Deep and shallow learning are not attributes of individuals: one person may use both approaches at different times, although he or she may have a preference for one or the other.

b. They correlate fairly closely with motivation: "deep" with intrinsic motivation and "surface" with extrinsic, but they are not necessarily the same thing; either approach can be adopted by a person with either motivation.

(There is a third form, known as the “achieving” or strategic approach, which can be summarised as a very well-organised form of surface approach, and in which the motivation is to get good marks. Learning is construed as a game, so that acquisition of technique improves performance.)

The features of deep and surface approaches can be summarised thus:

Deep	Surface
Focus is on “what is signified”	Focus is on the “signs” (or on the learning as a signifier of something else)
Relates previous knowledge to new knowledge	Focus on unrelated parts of the task
Relates knowledge from different courses	Information for assessment is simply memorised
Relates theoretical ideas to everyday experience	Facts and concepts are associated unreflectively
Relates and distinguishes evidence and argument	Principles are not distinguished from examples
Organises and structures content into coherent whole	Task is treated as an external imposition
Emphasis is internal, from within the student	Emphasis is external, from demands of assessment

(based on Ramsden 1988)

(See F. Marton and Säljö, "On Qualitative Differences in Learning—1: Outcome and Process," Brit. J. Educ. Psych. 46 (1976): 4-11; "On Qualitative Differences in Learning—2: Outcome as a function of the learner's conception of the task" Brit. J. Educ. Psych. 46 (1976): 115-27.)

The Surface learner is trying to "suss out" what the teacher wants and to provide it, and is likely to be motivated primarily by fear of failure. One study has suggested that efforts by teachers to convey that what they want is deep learning only succeeds in getting surface learners to engage in ever more complex contextualising exercises, trying to reproduce the features of the deep approach from a surface basis (P. Ramsden, D. Beswick and J. Bowden, "Effects of Learning Skills Intervention on First Year Students' Learning," Human Learning 5 [1986]: 151-64).

[James Atherton, http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm]

Or you can look at it slightly differently: deep learning is something you deliver sotto voce—or sotto agua, to use the iceberg metaphor—along with the surface learning (which should be strategically, rather than extrinsically, motivated): modelling, reflecting, critically reading, in a way that is charitable, positional and "de-authorising," i.e. contextual and co-constructed.

It's the Same Old Story: Meme Likelike Youyou - Maybe We Can Wewe

2009-05-15T12:04:00.010+12:00

That is to say, mythogenetics: agentive and intentional memes enact narrative memes . . .

How about stories as "grammatical games" that consist chiefly of nouns (agents) and verbs (actions)—and, by extension, adjectives and adverbs. Verbs as "intentional memes"—with nouns as agentive memes, perhaps (see http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/10/fractal_stories.html).

From game design theory (see also—by way of a contrast—"We hate memes, pass it on . . ." http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/06/12/we-hate-memes-pass-it-on/).

How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method

2009-05-15T11:20:00.014+12:00

From "How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method" by Randy Ingermanson:

Our fundamental question is this: How do you design a novel?
For a number of years, I was a software architect designing large software projects. I write novels the same way I write software, using the "snowflake metaphor." OK, what's the snowflake metaphor? Before you go further, take a look at this cool website [http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/frac/koch/koch.html].

At the top of the page, you'll see a cute pattern known as a snowflake fractal [see above]. Don't tell anyone, but this is an important mathematical object that's been widely studied. For our purposes, it's just a cool sketch of a snowflake. If you scroll down that same web page a little, you'll see a box with a large triangle in it and arrows underneath. If you press the right-arrow button repeatedly, you'll see the steps used to create the snowflake. It doesn't look much like a snowflake at first, but after a few steps, it starts looking more and more like one, until it's done.

The first few steps look like this:

I claim that that's how you design a novel—you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story.

The same might be true of building up evidence to support your thesis or point (which, in a standard five-paragraph essay, might be viewed in its three aspects—or sides, i.e. like triangulation).

Stanley Fish on Theory Minimalism (2000)

2009-05-14T12:52:00.004+12:00

In 2000, Fish wrote . . .

I have just returned from the AALS (American Association of Law Schools) meeting in Washington, where I was a member of a panel considering the state of legal theory at the beginning of the new century. I gave my standard stump speech (called "Theory Minimalism"), which always makes the same three points:

1) if by theory you mean the attaining of a perspective unattached to any local or partisan concerns but providing a vantage point from which local and partisan concerns can be clarified and ordered, the theory quest will always fail because no such perspective is or could be available; [theory as a vantage point, i.e. a supra-contextual "grounding," is unavailable, cf. Heidegger on theoria (= the God's eye view, i.e. the theos-eye]

2) the unavailability of that supra-contextual is in no way disabling because in its absence you will not be adrift and groundless; rather you will be grounded in and by the same everyday practices—complete with authoritative exemplars, understood goals, canons of evidence, shared histories—that gave you a habitation before you began your fruitless quest for a theory; [. . . but you're grounded in everyday, i.e. historical and therefore revisable, practices anyways] and

3) nothing follows from 1) and 2); knowing that resources of everyday life are all you have and knowing too that such resources are historical and therefore revisable will neither help you to identify them nor teach you to rely on them with a certain skeptical reserve; the lesson of 1) and 2) goes nowhere; if grand theories provide no guidance (because they are so general as to be empty), the realization that grand theories provide no guidance doesn't provide any guidance either. [. . . BUT, knowing this won't make everyday practices any easier to identify or be sceptical about, i.e. they aren't available as a "ground" either.]

End of story, end of theory as an interesting topic.

I like this argument because no one else does. Those on the right don't like it because they have a stake in believing that without the foundations of fixed and absolute verities, the world will go to hell in a handbasket. Those on the left don't like it because they have a stake in believing that in a world where truths are always being revised and authorities dislodged, we can sweep old structures away and begin from scratch to build the just society. This means that I am never in danger of persuading everyone or even many; and that means that I'll never have to give up the argument because there will always be those who don't get it and complain (as did two members of the audience) either that I have undermined certainty and stability, or that I haven't.

The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution: "Darwinism"

2009-05-10T08:48:00.004+12:00

Richard C. Lewontin, "Why Darwin?," The New York Times Review of Books 56.9 (28 May 2009).

The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles:

1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the principle of variation).

2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability).

3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).

One can hardly imagine anything that would have better justified the established social and economic theories of the Industrial Revolution than the claim that our very biological natures are examples of basic laws of political economy [thus, "Darwinism" = "Biological Competitive Capitalism"].

i.e.

The theory of competitive socioeconomic success is a theory about the rise of individuals and individual enterprises as a consequence of their superior fitness [the few over the many].

but

The theory of evolution by natural selection, in contrast, is meant to explain the adaptation and biological success of an entire species as a consequence of the disappearance of the less fit [the many over the few].

THUS

If we seek a true originality in the understanding of Darwin and Wallace, it is to be found in their ability to adapt a theory meant to explain the success of a few to produce a theory of the success of the many [i.e. "Darwinism" is socialist—or, historically speaking, Utilitarian].

What it lacked is an understanding of heredity. Mendel saved the theory: his experiments on peas demonstrated that inheritance was not based on the blending of some fluid-like material, but by the passage of particles that maintained their individual properties even when mixed together in a hybrid [thus, DNA].

In full historical justice, if we are to personalize our modern explanation of evolution we should call it not "Darwinism," nor even "Darwin-Wallacism," but "Darwin-Wallace-Mendelism."

Interpenetralium

2009-05-03T08:28:00.009+12:00

Mind-world/world-mind meld: the interpenetration of the internal psychical and physiological systems of the individual and the external environment.

Imago Templi = Sophia = Penetralium
but here the Truth is in the weft of inner and outer

legendary psychasthenia

A concept developed by the social theorist Roger Caillios, legendary psychasthenia refers to the ability of some animals to alter their appearance in response to their physical environment. A chameleon, for example, changes color in order to blend into its surroundings. Caillois compares this biological phenomenon to psychological experiences of subjects who perceive themselves becoming absorbed into, or mixed up with, the physical space surrounding them (one of his examples is the fear of the dark). For Lacan, this idea offers a useful model of a transformation in an individual through an encounter with an external stimulus.

transitivism

Child psychologist Charlotte Buhler observed that very young children often do not distinguish sharply between their own experiences and those of others—if one child falls and is injured, for example, another child may cry.

Lacan presents such references to external, formative influences on the development of the ego to support his argument that ego does not emerge sui generis—out of itself—but is the product of a dialectical interaction between the psyche (Innenwelt) and the external world (Umwelt)—an interaction perpetuated in life in the interaction of the subject and the other.

It comes down to . . .

Kohler's gestalt moment, in which the elements of a task or problem—or a self—come together: the ah-ha experience (Aha-Erlebnis), e.g. in the mirror stage [cf. Nietzsche on Apollo/Orpheus and the principium individuationis],

versus

the fragmented body, where the infant experiences his or her body as uncoordinated, vulnerable, and insufficient; this propels the infant toward identification with the (apparently) unified and stable imago of the mirror reflection or of the caregiver (or of the Umwelt, perhaps), though he or she remains haunted by the contrary image of their fragmentation [cf. Nietzsche on Dionysus Zagreus/Pentheus, torn apart by the maenads = σπαραγμός, sparagmos].

Cf.
1. Niran Bahjat Abbas, Thinking Machines: Discourses of Artificial Intelligence (LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006) 97-98.
2. John Keats: "Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge" (Letter to George and Thomas Keats [21 Dec 1817], in H. E. Rollins (ed.), Letters of John Keats, vol. 1 [1958] 193-94).

The Death of Geoff Park

2009-04-19T21:47:00.001+12:00

The Rings of Saturn

2009-04-15T22:53:00.010+12:00

Your eyes have changed—
I can see the blue,
as if you’ve opened up to the view.
And if that feels strange,
well, it’s true: you’re created
from fragments of shattered moons . . .

Trust yourself
to do what you do—
the Golden Age is
within us too.

Return from whence you came;
the Great Year comes round again.

Swallow your dark thoughts—
you know they are your children—
and watch them grow into better, not bitter things.
And if that feels strange,
well, it’s true: you’ve created
a world from your shuttered dreams.

Trust yourself . . .

Key—A lyric written to commemorate my fortieth year, when I first noticed that my eyes had developed a blue ring around the iris.

Saturn, a.k.a. Cronus (Father Time), ate his children to stop them from usurping his power; I use the image to represent turning one's dark fears/desires to the "good." His was the Golden Age of Greece. I associate his reign with the return of the Great Year (the 40,000 year cosmic cycle) and Alexander Cockburn's idea that each of us bears a Golden Age within us, for me that being represented by my recognition that it's our evils that make us who we are—just as we are made of star-stuff transmuted.

The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Wallfahrt) is, of course, a W. G. Sebald memorial history (1995; London: Harvill Press, 1998).

Herald post on separate Maori prison units

2009-04-15T13:50:00.001+12:00

Hallucigenia (In Wildness Is the Beauty of Earth)

2009-04-04T09:58:00.012+13:00

If you’re lost between floors
and your wait is getting you down—
a fortnight of dying bored
in the here and now—
remember . . .

There is no private language.
When we speak in tongues
everyone understands,
the world will move.

Animals, birds and trees,
people who we love to please:
spell your name in numbers—
in wildness is the beauty of Earth.

Hallucigenia: do what you will.

If you’re between stations
on the road that’s bringing you home—
a lifetime spent alone
on the never-never—
remember . . .

There is . . . [etc.]

Key—A song about the number 14: a fortnight; the fourteenth floor (which is really the lonely thirteenth); the fourteen-legged hallucigenia; the stations of the cross; Jacob Boehme's notion (or numerological conceit) of the number 14 as representing the Spirit moving in nature; 14 as the number of David, the author of the Book of Numbers; the number of charity (caritas: grace)

Black Hands (Every Street)

2009-04-02T22:08:00.015+13:00

—You have to take the extremes into account to reach the reality (thus, the Bains v. the Wittgensteins)

In Every Street
a “nervous splendour” —
oh, the drama
that plays out behind closed doors:
gunshots and bloodstains
no-one can see,
hidden lenses on the pain
of lost sons and mother-lovers.

Lost in the slow burn
of everyday things,
“how sad, how sad,”
he says to black hands.

“Sorry, you are the only one
who deserved to stay.”

In Every Street,
a “nervous splendour” —
hurts beaten down with
words unspoken,
mountains of linen and clothes:
targets in the dust and the dirt.

Lost in the slow burn
of everyday things,
“I saw him, I saw him”:
black hands are coming.

“Sorry, you are the only one
who deserved to stay.”

Blood seems to go everywhere.

[Cf. “The mask of sanity”: manie sans delire (Philippe Pinel [1801], a.k.a. J. C. Prichard’s “moral insanity” [1835] → psychopathy)]

You have to take the extremes into account to reach the reality: Maarten Kleintjes, the National Manager of the Police Electronic Crime Laboratory. It is the via externa or extrema—the outside/outward/strange/foreign or outermost path; Kleintjes continues: "the truth will lie somewhere in the middle" (via media)—not necessarily: there is some truth in excess.

a "nervous splendour": Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein. A Family at War (Doubleday, 2009).

black hands: the day before the murders, Bain was rehearsing in the chorus of a university production of Oedipus Rex; a scene of the tragedy is sometimes performed with actors wearing black gloves.

“how sad, how sad”: Wittgenstein on Georg Trakl’s death (9 June 1914); see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius 119.

A Beautiful Thing Can Never Perfect Be (Before Sunrise)

2009-03-22T08:53:00.004+13:00

Verse 1:
Oh, the fatal flaws in your skin;
the floor of the room we’re in . . .
we trace lines in our favourite place,
as we chase away the days.
Beautiful things we knew—and had
we known what was to come,
we would’ve lived like lovers
in a movie, crying out for more.

Prechorus:
But we live the only way we know—
yes, it will have to do . . .
One, two, three,
for you and me,
count the ways
a beautiful thing can go astray,
day dawn grey.

Chorus:
Before sunrise
everything was cool.
You were my eyes;
we knew no rules.
Thanks to you and me
a beautiful thing can never perfect be.

Studying Writing Studies

2009-03-22T08:13:00.011+13:00

Current issues of the teaching flow:

Fractals: mapping a/one's characteristic sentence, i.e. grammar, onto essay structure as a pseudo-fractal. E.g. parataxis (juxtaposition): "Tell me, how are you?"

Essay structure understood rhetorically—on the model of hypo-/parataxis. E.g. anadiplosis as the model for linking markers at the beginning of new paragraph (gradatio is even better: "My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,/ And every tongue brings in a several tale,/ And every tale condemns me for a villain" [Richard III, 5.3.194]).

An ABC of syntax

Using children's language learning as the model for understanding academic writing: children improvise, then begin to learn the rules and exceptions through practice, then become over-vigorous in their application of the rules under the impetus of error correction: erratology [science of mistakes]. The same thing happens at University, if we rigorously impose an erratological academic grammar on students: grammar A ["academic"]). Of course, students often think such an approach is what is required to learn academic rigour. Through teaching, rather than obsessively correcting, grammar B ["bad"], we can recapture the improvisation and practice phases of language learning, and thereby liberate students from the aporia of erratology. Then they are freed into the possibilities of Grammar C ["crafty," thus the craft of grammar].

David Starkey (ed.), Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2001).
Winston Weathers, An Alternate Style: Options in Composition (Hayden, 1980).

To Side with Daedalus

2009-03-01T22:06:00.003+13:00

Where exactly does the weight of this writing moment, or rather, moment writing, lie? (Not in the hand like a gold coin—like a weight on your eye.)

This is what I thought, watching my daughter playing, hearing my son counting, hoping it was my wife not my son scrabbling in the kitchen drawer, standing in the shower thinking, waiting to get out without forgetting what I just been thinking I might write in time to husband it into life.

Originally I wrote “significance”—or rather, spoke it sotto voce all’interno del cranio—but “weight” better captures the way the desire to write bears down upon you, as you wait for the moment to arrive.

It’s not so different a weight from the father weight.

Time is not money; money is time. The adage “money buys you time” is false: it allows you to avoid spending time doing something; it allows you to not have to wait for something. That you must spend time writing as you wait for it to arrive is a truth of writing—or rather, this is one way writing is true. But writing also lies because it erases the time you invested in it.

Fatherhood does not.

On the haka

2009-02-11T20:39:00.000+13:00

Sean's Music

2008-11-21T08:08:00.000+13:00

Does Religion Make You Nice? Does Atheism Make You Mean? By Paul Bloom

2008-11-14T07:52:00.003+13:00

Religious people are nicer to others, i.e. more charitable, because they think someone, i.e. God, is always watching them; surveillance makes be behave morally.

And in the god-fearing US, this is empirically true: religious Americans are nicer, i.e. more charitable—and happier—than their atheist counterparts.

But in godless Scandinavia, people in general are nicer to each other.

According to Paul Bloom, religion offers us
a. factual beliefs, such as the idea that there exists a single god that performs miracles, and
b. moral beliefs, like the conviction that abortion is murder.
c. There are religious practices, such as the sacrament or the lighting of Sabbath candles.
And there is
d. the sense of community that a religion brings with it—the people who are part of your church, synagogue, or mosque.

Perhaps the positive effect of religion in the real world is tied to this last component. Perhaps humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others.

The Scandinavians have a strong sense of community, whereas in America, community is reserved for the religious, that is, American atheists are often left out of community life by their religious counterparts, so are less happy.

So, religion might make you happier to be part of a community and, therefore, more generous to the other members of that community, but belonging to a religious group (or any other group, of course) can lead to indifference—or worse—toward those outside of that group.

New Historicism as Self-Fulfilling Process

2008-08-23T08:03:00.005+12:00

From "The Six Essentials: Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality" by William H. Calvin (Journal of Memetics <http://www.williamcalvin.com/1990s/1997JMemetics.htm>).

Example: History as a Darwinian Process

History qua history—what it includes, what it leaves out, and how these change over time—provides us with a memetic example of these six essentials at work [i.e. (1) pattern—(2) a copied pattern—(3) with occasional chance variations, (4) variations that compete for limited space, (5) the competition being biased by an environment (= natural selection), (6) new variants occurring preferentially around the more successful of current patterns (= the inheritance principle)]. Of the many happenings, some are captured in patterned sentences that describe who did what to whom, why, and with what means.

Some of these patterns are retold (copied), often with little confusions (variation) and conflations (superpositions). Alternative versions of stories compete for the limited space of bookstore shelves or the limited time of campfire storytelling. There is a multifaceted environment that affects their success, the association of the described events to those of everyday life. In particular, the environment contains mental schemas and scripts; as Aristotle noted and all four-year-olds demanding bedtime stories seem to know, a proper narrative has a beginning, middle, and end—and so "good stories" fare much better in the memorized environment. (Especially those conveyed by historical novels that strengthen the narrative aspects!) Finally, because historians rewrite earlier historians, we see Darwin's inheritance principle in action: new variations are preferentially based on the more successfully copied of the current generation of historical stories, and so history has a drift to better and better fits to language instincts (such as chunking and narratives) because current relevance is shifting and ephemeral.

After many generations, only those stories of timeless relevance are left alongside the likely-ephemeral contemporary ones. Quality emerges, in some sense, as in the way that the nine-part epic tales studied by Misia Landau (youth sets out on a quest, fails, returns, sets out again with a helper, survives a new set of trials and tribulations, finally succeeds and returns home, and so on) seem to have emerged in many cultures from the retelling of simpler narratives, generation after generation. Our modern origin stories, the anthropological scenarios about human ancestors during the tribulations of the ice age climate changes, are even said to follow the epic template!

Can history, as we know it, run on a reduced set—say, without the inheritance principle? (Imagine storytellers always reviewing a videotape before telling the story again, so variations were always done from an unchanging "standard version.") Certainly, a pattern that copied and varied, with retelling biased by resonances with current memories of the current population, would be impressive—but the anchoring of the center of variation to the standard version would keep stories from drifting very far and prevent the recursive bootstrapping of quality.

Suppose that, instead of eliminating inheritance, we loosened the environmental influence—say, individuals' memories for unique episodes faded within a year. The often-told tales would simply drift, adapting to current concerns, losing those of the antepenultimate generation. It would be about like the whale songs that drift from one year to the next. What you would lose, lacking a good memorized environment that persisted a lifetime to overlap several generations, would be shaping up of quality (those timeless stories with universal relevance, the resonance with episodes recurring only twice in a lifetime, and so forth).

My first "knock-out mutation" sounds, of course, like what we try to train scholars to do ("Avoid secondary sources! Read the original!"), while my second is merely an exaggerated version of the ahistoricism of preliterate societies (the Navajo emigrated from the Yukon to the American Southwest about 500 years ago, but this great migration has been lost to them, recovered only through a linguistic and genetic analysis of the Athabascan peoples). History, however, is not merely the retention of facts: it involves detecting patterns and attempting to understand them -- and this involves making good guesses and refining them. That intellectual endeavor is, I suggest in How Brains Think, another full-fledged Darwinian process.

Competition between concepts is, of course, one of the ways in which science advances; evolutionary epistemology treats this as a Darwinian process. The advance of science differs from ordinary history because the environment biasing the competition between concepts involves a broad range of testing against reality.

Croesus pushing his barrow (of money)

2008-08-16T10:46:00.010+12:00

"All Blacks: Time for the greats to stand up and be counted in Cape Town" by Peter Bills.

"Smith was asked about the pressures of trying to build a new-look All Blacks side and keep winning every Test match during that process. Images of Croesus trying gamely to push his stone up a hill came flooding to mind as Smith outlined the philosophy behind the task."

Sports journalism: home of the cloche, the mashed metaphor and paronomania. I think he means Sisyphus, does he not? (See Odyssey 11.593—and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus.)

[Sisifo, by Titian (1548-49)]

In his archaic rugby primitivism about greats and great emotion, Bills summons up the shade of Camus's Sisyphus, condemned to repeat forever the same meaningless task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it roll down again—in the spirit of its concluding clou: "The struggle itself . . . is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

[Croesus Receiving Tribute from a Lydian Peasant, by Claude Vignon (1629) ]

Croesus is more apposite to modern mechanised rugby—renowned for his wealth and for receiving tribute from doting colonials (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croesus).

The retronarrative of (r)evolution(/evilution)

2008-07-28T08:24:00.001+12:00

We don't seem to be able to shake the idea that we live like we read (I blame sacred texts). Debates about evolution are prey to this idolus tribus (human illusion):

"Evolution doesn't, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. [Hence the foibles of] the [human] mind: our meagre reasoning capacity is an afterthought, spatchcocked on to the ancestral systems that have the reins where practical decision-making is concerned. If only our higher mental functions could dominate; alas, the lizard-brain parts have seniority" (Review of Kluge by Gary Marcus and The Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow).

Umm. Evolution = accident and no value, i.e. no narrative except in hindsight, thus ≠ design and/or providence/progress, i.e. there is no god in the machine, no font of sacred or secular values, even if it fits our retro narrative.

The Neverending Store-ree!

2008-07-11T13:23:00.013+12:00

a.k.a. eν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα. "I know that I know nothing," says Socrates, according to Plato ("I know nothing," said Sergeant Schultz, meaning the same thing, being as he was a acknowledged Sophist). Thankfully, I too find myself in that position. But what is that nothing that I know?

By a Lacanian twist, the idea of the real, i.e. the Thing itself, springs to mind. But you can't know that. In other words, you can't know the Thing - it is not a thing at all: no-thing (these Continental punsters!). Or what about Heidegger's Nothing, with which we come into contact through the experience of anxiety? I know that feeling; that's what life is about, isn't it (putting aside joy for the moment)? When the world of Fantastica is devastated by the Nothing in the stab in the groin when you conceive a child, or less fatally, in the summons from the IRD or some other tug of your string by the faceless masters.

But seriously, this confession of ignorance is the premise of maieutics: the craft of intellectual midwifery, for want of a better word (from the Greek μαιευτικός [maieutikos]: pertaining to midwifery). The Socratic method is premised on the idea that the truth is latent in every reasonable human being but has to be "given birth" in response to questions or problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maieutics). Or to put it better, on the idea that truth doesn't reside in the entrails - or bowels - of the teacher (only to be read once they're dead - or in their carefully guarded excretions).

Such a confession returns us to the mystery with which Heidegger believes philosophy begins (which he takes from Leibniz): "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (see his essay "What is Metaphysics?," which title is his own sly in-joke: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/heidegger5a.htm). Who knows? I know that I don't. I'm not the Taxman: "Let me tell you how it will be . . ."

The Utility of Storms

2008-07-10T23:15:00.007+12:00

Christopher Christian Sturm on "The Utility of Storms" (July 11): The Reflections on the Works of God in Nature and Providence for Every Day of the Year, tr. Adam Clarke (Baltimore, 1822) 322-23.

"We should consider the phenomena of nature so, that the wisdom and goodness of our heavenly Father may be clearly apprehended by our understanding, and make the deepest impression upon our heart: and this duty should appear to us the more indispensable, because it is so much neglected by a multitude of inattentive, ignorant, and ungrateful people. It is true, that God sometimes makes use of natural phenomena to punish the sins of men: but these particular cases do not prove that he does not propose chiefly, and in general, the benefit and welfare of the whole.

Universal nature affords incontestable proofs of this. At present, let us consider a single phenomenon, which is well calculated to convince us of this; and concerning which, we have great need to have our ideas rectified. Are we not, in general, accustomed from our youth to pronounce the words, thunder and lightning, with terror? Such is our injustice, that we never think but on those extremely rare cases, in which tempests have been prejudicial to a very small part of the universe: we shut our eyes against the great advantages which result from them to the whole of the creation. Alas! we should soon change our tone, if God, irritated by our murmuring and ingratitude, were to deprive us of the blessings which thunder and lightning produce. It is true, we are not capable of pointing out all the advantages resulting from them: but the little which we know may suffice to fill our hearts with gratitude toward our great Benefactor."

Hmm. What about Desert Storms—and Shock and Awe? Sounds a little like what Naomi Klein calls the "disaster capitalism" of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School—and the Jaws of Bouche and Hell-he-burnt-on (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism). Can you hear, can you hear the thunder?

William Ellis on an "affecting instance of infanticide"

2008-07-08T07:56:00.010+12:00

A thoughtless thought-experiment

From William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, ch. 13 (http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-EllPol-EllPol4-c13.html):

"We have long known that the Sandwich Islanders practised infanticide, but had no idea of the extent to which it prevailed, until we had made various inquiries during our present tour. . . . The Society Islanders buried the infants they destroyed among the bushes, at some distance from their houses; but many of the infants in the Sandwich Islands are buried in the houses in which both parents and child had resided together. In the floors, which are frequently of earth or pebbles, a hole is dug, two or three feet deep, into which they put the little infant, placed in a broken calabash, and having a piece of native cloth laid upon its mouth to stop its cries. The hole is then filled up with earth, and the inhuman parents themselves have sometimes joined in treading down the earth upon their own innocent but murdered child."

The principal grounds were apparently:

"to satisfy hunger,"
as a sacrifice to marauding sharks,
out of "idleness" (because a child hinders their nomadic lifestyle or is sickly or cries too much).

Ellis continues his thoughtless thought-experiment: "The bare recital of these acts of cruelty has often filled our minds with horror, while those who have been engaged in the perpetration of them have related all their tragical circumstances in detail with apparent unconcern."

The tragical foibles of casual parents, ae? Who could imagine I would end up thus: interred in a "broken calabash," cries smothered with "native cloth" . . .

Vigilantes or vigilance?

2008-07-07T10:13:00.001+12:00

In response to "March organiser demands action" at the Herald (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=30&objectid=10520287).

There has been a strong response from politicians, local and national, to calls for "vigilante" patrols in South Auckland to protect "Asians" from petty crime.

The Herald quotes Peter Low:

The East Auckland importer said he had vigilantes in training to stop further attacks. Groups of 20 people attend six workshops teaching them martial art skills and how to handle various situations. Women were also being taught how to look after their handbags. He is hoping to have the groups patrolling South Auckland streets within the next few months. If authorities don't allow the vigilante groups, the AAG will consider hiring Triads, Mr Low said.

In fact, the whole brouhaha turns on a linguistic misunderstanding. Low meant to say "vigilance" - not "vigilantes." Just like he meant to say that citizens should "forearm" themselves, rather than "arm" themselves against threats to their person and property.

This became clear in the course of Kathryn Ryan's interview on RNZ's Nine to Noon programme this morning (though Ryan failed to pick it up and press him for a more idiomatic phrase). "Vigilantes" of course presses public buttons more effectively than "vigilance" - which is, in any case, what the police (and poilticians) would have us display in the face of criminals.

For Ryan's interview, see her page at NatRad (http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/20080707).

Arohamai.

Te Ipu Pakore

2008-02-23T08:56:00.013+13:00

Te Ipu Pakore: the broken vessel . . . I am forgotten as a dead man out of time: another ghost settler trapped between worlds, living by correspondences. I cannot return (to who knows where) because my vessel is broken on the shore; my mind holds nothing (I forget why, but it is happily so).

A view through the cornucopia of the Gate of Horn—though the landscape is not exactly plentiful . . .

This is the view from our cottage, now obscured by ti tree, flax and an eight-lane motorway, from what I like to think of as Te Ipu Pakore: Arch Hill.

* * *

Four centuries ago, the Wai-o-Hua, the dominant power on the Tāmaki isthmus with several thousand warriors, a federation of tribes formed under Hua-O-Kaiwaka and linked to the Te Arawa tribe Ngā Oho, build fortifications against invasion from the north. 178 years ago (c. AD1740), Arch Hill is the site of the decisive "Broken Calabash attack" on Wai-o-Hua by Ngāti Whātua-o-Kaipara. Ngāti Whātua hoped to take Te Ipu Pakore ("the broken calabash"), the principal water source for the nearby Maungawhau Pa and - for that reason, perhaps - a wahi tapu. The paramount chief of Wai-o-Hua, Kiwi Tāmaki, is killed and they abandon the pa for a last stand at Mangere. Ngati Whatua kill the warriors, take the morehu women as wives and establish mana whenua over Tāmaki Makaurau.

In 1820, the Ngāpuhi chief Hongi Hika acquires muskets and over the next few years attacks Tāmaki repeatedly. He destroys the Ngāti Pāoa and Te Kawerau-a-Maki settlements to the west of the isthmus; after a decisive defeat at the battle of Te Ika-a-Ranganui near Kaiwaka in 1825, Apihai Te Kawau, chief of the Ngāti Whātua, abandons the isthmus and takes his people into exile. When the ghost settler Dumont D’Urville visits in 1827, he is startled to find the fertile isthmus depopulated: "We did not notice any trace of inhabitants, nothing but one or two fires a very long way off in the interior. There can be no doubt that this extreme depopulation is due to the ravages of war." Ngāti Whātua cautiously return to the Manukau about 1836 and, out of fear of being overwhelmed by Ngāpuhi, invite William Hobson to site the colony of New Zealand’s capital on the isthmus in 1840.

With the coming of the hordes of ghost settlers, the spring and its stream become a gathering place. Women come to collect water and wash clothes, men to wash their horses, milk cans and tools. It goes rancid, falls into disuse and remains so until submerged in ashphalt in the 1960's.

* * *

Could it be that the scent of water is what attracts me to such places? I am a divining-rod, a body whose heartwood has never hardened? Or is it that water can find the level, as they say—something we find hard to do in life? It will not rest on permeable ground, but finds its nadir. To follow that scent peels back the occult layers of the palimpsest; the water, like magic ink, supplies the negative charge to draw out what the positivists would have stay hidden.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a deep and tenebrous unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.

- Charles Baudelaire, "Correspondences," The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

Here begins life by correspondence.

E. Cameron et al, A Field Guide to Auckland: Exploring the Region's Natural and Historical Heritage (Auckland: Godwit 1997).
A. Jamieson, "Volcanic Auckland," New Zealand Geographic 16 (Sep. 1992): 90-113.
R. C. J. Stone, From Tamaki-Makau-Rau to Auckland (Auckland: AUP, 2001).