island94.org

From Jacques Racière’s The Future of the Image (translated by Gregory Elliot):

The imprint of the thing, the naked identity of its alterity in place of its imitation, the wordless, senseless materiality of the visible instead of the figures of discourse–this is what is demanded by the contemporary celebration of the image or its nostalgic evocation: an immanent transcendence, a glorious essence of the image guaranteed by the very mode of its material production. Doubtless no one has expressed this view better than the Barthes of Camera Lucida, a work that ironically has become the bible of those who wish to think about photographic art, whereas it aims to show that photography is not an art. Against the dispersive multiplicity of the operations of art and games of signification, Barthes wants to assert the immediate alterity of the image—that is, in the strictest sense, the alterity of the One. He wants to establish a direct relationship between the indexical nature of the photographic image and the material way it affects us: the punctum, the immediate pathetic effect that he contrasts with the studium, or the information transmitted by the photograph and the meanings it receives. The studium makes the photograph a material to be decoded and explained. The punctum immediately strikes us with the affective power of the that was: that —i.e. the entity which was unquestionably in front of the aperture of the camera obscura, whose body has emitted radiation, captured and registered by the black chamber, which affects us here and now through the ‘carnal medium’ of light ‘like the delayed rays of a star.

Fortunately, Racière repudiates a hierarchical distinction:

…the semiologist who read the encoded message of images and the theoretician of the punctum of the wordless image base themselves on the same principle: a principle of reversible equivalence between the silence of images and what they say. The former demonstrated that the image was in fact a vehicle for a silent discourse which endeavored to translate into sentences. The latter tells us that the image speaks to us precisely when it is silent, when it no longer transmits any message to us. Both conceive the image as speech which holds its tongue. The former mad its silence speak; the latter makes this silence the abolition of all chatter. But both play on the same inter-convertibility between two potentialities of the image: the image as raw, material presence and the image as discourse encoding a history.

Biblical news from Academia:

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew. …

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.

The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth” …

She writes in her thesis that the new translation fits in with ancient texts.

According to them there used to be an enormous body of water in which monsters were living, covered in darkness, she said. …

She concluded that God did not create, he separated: the Earth from the Heaven, the land from the sea, the sea monsters from the birds and the swarming at the ground.

That doesn’t make for great dogma, but it fits in with my thoughts on consciousness: it’s the continual process of creating meaning by separating something from the nothing at the corners of our consciousness (not to mention beyond it) that is the world around us. The fun of consciousness is taking control of that process of separation—which is why I spent so much time rewriting that last sentence.

This year’s Symposium on Values, Spirit and Business has the theme “How to Grow Your Business by Integrating the Gandhian Philosophy of Satyagraha”.  The Wikipedia has this to say on Satyagraha—and that “passive resistance” is not descriptive of its tenets—:

Gandhi contrasted satyagraha (holding on to truth) with “duragraha” (holding on by force), as in protest meant more to harass than enlighten opponents. He wrote: “There must be no impatience, no barbarity, no insolence, no undue pressure. If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want of faith in one’s cause.”

I was forwarded this from Angelina, who apparently read it on the side of her Starbucks cup (emphasis mine):

“There is a subtle difference between a mission and a promise. A mission is something you strive to accomplish — a promise is something you are compelled to keep. One is individual, the other is shared. When a mission and a promise are one and the same . . . that’s when mountains are moved and races are won.”

Hala Moddelmog,

American Pie Presents: Beta House divx

Pres. and CEO,
Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

The last sentence is mostly pablum, but from yesterday’s post about dialogue and creating a shared community, I think it’s important to think about not only what your own committment is, but also the expectations you are committing to with others.  In other words, a mission is a statement, a promise is a contract.

For Christmas, my friend Danielle bought me the book, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.  It’s getting a little long in the tooth near page 150, but I really like how they go about building up their argument.  Specifically, how they define Destinctions.

I’ve been accused in the past (by my own mom, for one) of being semantic.  Well, this is all of semiotics (of which semantics is just one part, along with syntactics and pragmatics).  So too bad.

The book builds upon the idea of “knowing how we know” and argues from the basic standing that “all doing is knowing and all knowing is doing” or “everything said is said by someone”.  They begin with the point that in creating knowledge, we are performing an act of Distinction: separating something from its background based upon certain criterion.  This something (being, object, concept, etc), is called a Unity.  Conversely, each time we refer to something (a Unity) in conversation, we are performing an act of Distinction.  A unity can be anything from a person, to a species, to an object, to a color, to an emotion, to a concept, to 1 of 100 different names for snow (which is an urban legend, by the way.

Jackie Brown dvd

buy Disturbia I found that to be an incredibly interesting way of breaking down understanding.  Building upon the core idea of Unity, I wanted to propose some additional building blocks of meaning that are commonly used in conversation, rhetoric and didactics (and easily found elsewhere on this blog).

A Dichotomy is choosing between two unities that are mutually exclusive.  Dichotomies (and false dichotomies) are easily used and abused in arguments and rhetoric—some go so far as to say the West is an Argument Culture where middle alternatives are ignored.

A Continuum is a linear series capped by two Unities.  Sometimes there is meaning along the line, but the meaning primarily is a function of proximity to one unity or the other.  Probability is a simple continuum, capped at one end by absolute certainty, and absolute non-certainty at the other.

A Plane (or Field) is an flat-area bounded by multiple  unities.  Creating meaning from one’s position within the plane becomes more difficult to communicate unless in close proximity (or far distant) to a unity.

A Space

• Shrink movie

is the most complex construction of meaning in which many unities are “mapped” out.  For such a construction, pointing out significant features (low-points, high-points, etc.) are the only way to communicate meaning about a space.

Ending with spaces, it’s interesting to note that the realm of human understanding (as bounded by our senses and cognition) is still a simplification of the complete space of possibility.  Even so, simpler and simpler constructions are made in order to successfully communicate.

Of course, definitions need not be static.  Because of that, I propose two ideas of movement or state change.  Flow is the change from one state of unity to another; a meta-dichotomy.  A frog may flow through the states of egg, tadpole, and adult.  A Cycle is a flow that iterates multiple times.

And for recursions sake, by defining these concepts, or applying these definitions to something, we are performing an act of distinction.

Via some fun copy on BoingBoing Gadgets (“These “Toastabags” (phonemologically Bostonian, apparently…”) and someone’s analytical comment

• Passenger 57 download

, I came across a way to cleave English speakers: those that pronounce R’s (rhotic), and those that don’t(non-rhotic). From the wikipedia page on Rhotic and non-rhotic accents:

English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic (pronounced /ˈroʊtɪk/) and non-rhotic, depending on when the sound typically represented in spelling with the letter R is pronounced. Rhotic speakers pronounce written /r/ in all positions, while non-rhotic speakers pronounce /r/ only if it is followed by a vowel sound (see “linking and intrusive R”), and not always even then.