'The Thing Itself' : Archaeology in a Sci-Fi World
Project: The Total Library

This article was originally published at 3quarksdaily and io9

Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders his machine's ability to hasten their decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed to inhabit strands of history plucked from time's grander web. Unable to grasp a people’s history – the conditions that determine them – one will always misunderstand them.

Archaeology derives from the Greek word arche, which literally means the moment of arising. Aristotle foregrounded the meaning of arche as the element or principle of a Thing, which although indemonstrable and intangible in Itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that Thing. In a sense, archaeology is as much about the present instant, as it is about the fragmentary past. We work on what remains through the artefacts that make it into our museums, our senses and even our language. But to re-energise those artefacts, to bring them back to life, the tools we have access to do much of the speaking.

Like the unseen civilisations of H.G.Wells’ museum, these Things in Themselves lurk beyond the veil of our perceptions. It is the world in and of Itself; the Thing as it exists distinct from perceptions, from emotions, sensations, from all phenomenon, that sets the conditions of the world available to those senses. Perceiving the world, sweeping dust away from the objects around us, is a constant act of archaeology.

Kant called this veiled reality the noumenon, a label he interchanged with The-Thing-Itself (Ding an Sich). That which truly underlies what one may only infer through the senses. For Kant, and many philosophers that followed, The Thing Itself is impossible to grasp directly. The senses we use to search the world also wrap that world in a cloudy haze of perceptions, misconceptions and untrustworthy phenomena.

In another science fiction classic, Polish writer Stanislaw Lem considered the problem of The Thing Itself as one of communication. His Master’s Voice (HMV), written at the height of The Cold War, tells the story of a team of scientists and their attempts to decipher an ancient, alien message transmitted on the neutrino static streaming from a distant star. The protagonist of this tale, one Peter Hogarth, recounts the failed attempts at translation with a knowing, deeply considered cynicism. To Peter, and to Stanislaw Lem himself, true contact with an alien intelligence is an absolute impossibility:

“In the course of my work... I began to suspect that the ‘letter from the stars’ was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the coloured blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is ‘on his mind’, so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

In HMV and Lem’s better known novel, Solaris, the conviction that an absolute true reality exists under the dust of perception leads humanity down ever more winding labyrinths of its own psyche. For Stanislaw Lem the human mind exists in a perpetual state of archaeology, turning away from Itself in search of truth, but time and again finding Itself confronted as the very Thing that underlies the reality it is trying to decipher.

To transcend phenomena, to clear away the dust, one must, according to Kant, think. Thus his Thing Itself, derives from the Greek for 'thought-of' (nooúmenon) and further implies the concept of the mind (nous). Kant’s Thing Itself is accessed through pure thought. A clear enough mind, devoid of the bodily shackles of pain, pleasure or emotion, might see without seeing, sweeping away the perceptual cobwebs by guile alone. What Plato referred to as the only immortal part of the human soul, reason, becomes through Kant the dominant principle by which The Thing Itself may be reached.

In the short space I have allotted myself here, I have not the time, or the guile, to fully analyse the Kantian noumenon. Needles to say, countless thinkers, from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Hegel to Agamben, have grappled with the suppositions and presuppositions made to cohere and then crumble by Kant’s addiction to reason. What interests me about science fiction, and most readily about the works of Wells and Lem, is the attempt made to search for 'The Thing Itself' beyond the mind; beyond the human altogether.

Science fiction allows the creation of an imaginary set of conditions by which the human being may break their most burdonsome shackle: their own mind. Human timescales, bodies, forms of thinking and perception: each of these must be circumvented if one is ever able to grasp The Thing Itself. Kant’s principle of noumenon embodies a discourse on the limits of perception that has remained relevant to philosophy for millenia. The paradox of the archaeology – the arising – of an underlying reality is the defining principle of a thousand sci-fi tales.

For Stanislaw Lem our limitations become obvious once we are confronted with the existence of an intelligence which is not human. Lem’s novels seek to connect us with the absolute ‘other’: that most alien of Things, ourselves. Reality, for Lem at least, is composed in an indecipherable language. Humanity lives in an eternal stasis, unable to circum-navigate the new realities it constantly 'discovers' for itself. And in the end we find ourselves limited by the brains that think us, unable to distinguish the twinkle-twinkle from the little star:

“There exist, speaking in the most general way, two kinds of language known to us. There are ordinary languages, which man makes use of – and the languages not made by man. In such language organisms speak to organisms. I have in mind the so called genetic code. This code is not a variety of natural language, because it not only contains information about the structure of the organism, but also is able, by itself, to transform that information into the very organism. The code, then, is acultural...

Now to go straight to the heart of the matter, we begin to suspect that an ‘acultural language’ is something more or less like Kant’s ‘Thing-in-itself’. One can fully grasp neither the code nor the thing.”

Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

Fri, Sep 3, 2010  Permanent link
Categories: future, Philosophy, Communication, reality, perception, literature, archaeology, Sci-fi, writing, truth, imagination
Sent to project: The Total Library

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The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
Project: Polytopia

Voice: Alan Watts

Thu, Mar 12, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, universe, Philosophy, reality, perception, video, mind
Sent to project: Polytopia

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Writing (Hyper)text and Image: A Polyptychal Discursion
Project: The Total Library

The text below is an image of a Discursive (Hyper)text...

Please click it to read the full, unedited, Hyper(textual) version of this work:

Tue, Feb 24, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, technology, future, Mind, philosophy, art, perception, internet, text, writing, hypertext
Sent to project: The Total Library

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The Metaphor is the Message Part II: PalimpsestsPalimpsestsPalimpsests

This slice in hyperspace follows on from these past posts:

How things 'become': The infinity of definition

The Archaeology of 'The Book'

hypertext/?="The Metaphor is the Message" (Part I)

...and is a direct response to this post by Robokku:

Temporal Hypertext

Time is important in the definition of any model, hypertextual or otherwise. At the moment I am interested in how new technologies allow us new ways to see, to realise the world around us. This constant re-definition of our realities can actually add temporality to mediums which previously had none.

Modern technology has allowed art historians to 'look' at paintings with new, multidimensional, eyes. Shine certain wavelengths of light onto a Picasso painting and it becomes possible to read marks under the surface of the paint. What's more, apply several different wavelengths of light to the same painting and multiple layers, painted by the artist at various different times, become visible.

In a sense, once an available technology has re-examined the painting its process is more obvious: the non-temporal becomes temporal. Each layer is like a snap-shot of the artist's process, their vision, even their 'mistakes'. The laser/x-ray imposes a kind of hyper[textu]ality upon the painting which previously was unavailable (but not absent - only hidden). Of course this causes the art historian to weep with joy, but it also causes an exponential explosion of interpretation from that moment onwards. Any further examination of the painting now occurs in hyper-reference. The painting can never be seen as merely 2-dimensional again.

The example I have given can be extended to countless other mediums and medias. Film has its cutting room floor / multiple editions. Ancient manuscripts have their palimpsestic layers, just as the painting does. In fact palimpsest is THE word to use here, as it applies to all medias.

Examine the outside of an old brick building and very often you will find the outline of a window that was bricked in, a foundation that no longer leads to an out-house, or a patch of brickwork that had to be fixed. Even the photograph has had its dimensionality extended. These are remnants of temporality, just like the layers under the painting: the word is a palimpsest, and I've grown used to using it often.

Now here's the bit which leads back to my original post. and acts as in answer to Robokku's questions...

How does/can this palimpsestic awareness apply to the future of information/expression? The internet contains copies of its former self, hidden not so far from view. Wikipedia has its history section and google has its cache. The Internet Way Back Machine allows ghostly simulacra of webpages to be pulled out of the deep freeze. My 1998 homepage is alive, somewhere.

But is this layering of information the same as a palimpsest? I am not sure. Binding time together with human reality are the narratives that anthropomorphises it. Follow the xray-defined marks under the painting's surface and you can actually see the former brushstrokes of the artist, layer after layer, hour after hour: time is made real in the narrative story of the artist's action.

This kind of narrative arc does not really exist in internet archives. The user is taken out of the equation and all that is left is a username editing the entry on 'Defenestration' for the 12th,17th or 26th time. A ghost of personhood can be seen, but it is far inferior to the powerful force of just one single hidden Picasso brushstroke.

How can we infuse our new metaphors with these narrative dimensions?

I linked to a Seed magazine conversation in my Archaeology of the Book piece that NEEDS to be read (or watched) again and again. Please come back after the layers have realigned themselves and add some layers of your own to this (or Robokku's) post.

Thu, Apr 24, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, art, Mind, time, hypertext, metaphor, palimpsest

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hypertext/?="The Metaphor is the Message"
Project: The Total Library, Polytopia

Readers: Do you think in hypertext?

The era of the linear tome is dead, information is a web - who'd have thought it - a net of knots in time and space, a palimpsest with infinite, self-referential layers.

I find that the model of hypertext has become the metaphor via which my thoughts, my research, finds form. I can't read one book at a time. Instead I skip between many, following an annotation in one, buying a bibiliographed reference, dipping into books by the same or similar authors in the bookstore, scribbling notes in one book about another. I make the world my internet; the library my world wide web.

Less I describe my journeys in hypertext, how about I carve them in hypertext, for you to explore?

Here's a hypertextual mind-map of some of my recent travels as reader. Click the to interact hypertextually**



I started this post because I am interested in the metaphors we use to model the world. As our understanding of the world evolves, so do our metaphors. As the metaphors shift, so our models are re-moulded in ever newer forms. The forms metaphors take say a lot about the culture they emerged from. The model, in many aspects, is not important: The metaphor is the message.

For example...

Over the millennia religions, philosophers, scientists and psychologists have cultivated countless metaphors for the soul; mind; consciousness. By looking at just a handful of the metaphors that were prevalent at different times in history, one begins to notice fascinating messages about the cultures that bore us:

If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950's I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand after a talk I had given at the University of Utah and asked a question I had been waiting for for a couple of years: "Isn't the human brain just like the world wide web?". The brain always seems to be one of the most advanced technologies that we humans currently have. - Rodney A. Brooks

As new technologies/theories are invented, we tend to use them as metaphors to explain the world around us and within us. Consciousness isn't the only human attribute we blindly re-metaphorise.

In recent years the Gaia Hypothesis has become very successful at explaining climate change, ecology shifts or the ever-constant salinity of the oceans as the workings of Planet Earth's immune system. The model here posits Earth as an organism, inspired at a time in history when Biological, Darwinian science was reaching its peak. Newton's mechanistic universe was probably influenced by the technically cutting-edge clocks that ticked so perfectly on his office wall. Richard Dawkins' 'meme theory' of language, for instance, came from a strong understanding of genetics.

Our language itself is packed full of artefacts of metaphor. Phrases and words that have become so absolute in our understanding of the world that we forget they all came from technologies we invented. Think of the phrase "letting off some steam". Or "mapping the territory"? Or "what makes him tick? Or "photographic memory". Engines, maps, clocks and photos have become interwoven into our linguistic frameworks, used to describe anger, ideas, other people's inner-realms and inner-mindscapes.

There are countless other models that grow out of technological or ideological changes. So too do cultural movements, in turn, become inspired by the models of the world that exist at the time. So we had the Cubists working shortly after Einstein's Relativity was being devised, or Andy Warhol reacting to consumerist, mass-produced culture by creating art that was also mass-produced. At present, architects are pursuing design down an organic-pathway, originally laid out by fractal modelling, organic chemistry, and evolutionary theory. Twisting the metaphor of the organism - a concept that philosophers of Biology try to model with their own metaphors - in order to design and implement more 'natural' human environments.

And the metaphors never stop. Mind is now a quantum computer, mind is a neural network, mind is the internet, mind is a hypertext...

And so I come back to my original point, hypertext, or more specifically the application of hypertext as a metaphor for reading, thinking, researching.

Somewhere in the feedback between culture, science, technology and thought there is an idea called 'human' that persists. Trying to raise this idea to anything above a metaphor is difficult, until we come to recognise the ripples in time and space that our models of reality leave in their wake. Tracing those models back through history and off into the future we begin to draw the outline of ourselves and our limitations.

Is it possible to use and abuse a metaphor, like hypertext, to map that territory, to permanently inscribe those lines in the sand? Even as I attempt to form my ideas into words the metaphors keep coming. Can our evolving metaphors of reality, of its perception be plotted? On a map? A hypertextual mind-map? An interlinking system of symbols, signs, cultures, ideas and relationships that feed into each other, grow forward and away from each other, merge and link back to themselves with enough clicks on the metaphorical mouse-button?

What metaphors are the message? and can Space Collective, and internet entities like it, espouse new messages in their models?

UPDATE: Part Two of this piece can be found here: Palimpsests/Palimpsests/Palimpsests

** I created this mind-map with online tool mindmeister.com. It is far from a perfect, hypertextual representation of my thoughts as they relate to books. For one thing, the mind-map can only be manipulated into a tree structure, so that branches move outwards, but never come back to link with each other across branches.

Apart from this, the mind-map is merely a tool for you to explore, click on some of the links ( ) and generally interact with. Mind Meister allows for the possibility of collaborative mind-maps, could there be possibilities for Space Collective Projects etc? If you would like to expand my mind-map then let me know and I can add you in as a collaborator.

The metaphor is the message.

Fri, Apr 18, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, Mind, hypertext, metaphor
Sent to project: The Total Library, Polytopia

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An Appendix: Logos vs Mythos

This post is an appendix to The Next Great Revolution in Reality. Also, please read the first part of this post for more thoughts on the role myth has to play on forward-looking thinkers:

Since this post was originally written I have come to realise the true significance of the two main modes of thought expressed therein. The mythos of religious belief has, over the past few centuries, become prey to the savage logos of scientific rationalism.

I come to the words of Karen Armstrong, in her epic, pocket-sized title 'A Short History of Myth' to elaborate this point further:

Scientific logos and myth were becoming incompatible. Hitherto science had been conducted within a comprehensive mythology that explained its significance. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-62), a deeply religious man, was filled with horror when he contemplated the 'eternal silence' of the infinite universe opened up by modern science.

When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as thought lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, now what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does no drive people to despair.

This type of alienation has also been part of the modern experience...

...Mythical thinking and practice had helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness, and to come through it with a degree of acceptance. Without this discipline, it has been difficult for many to avoid despair. The Twentieth Century presented us with one nihilistic icon after another, and many of the extravagant hopes of modernity and the Enlightenment were shown to be false...

...Logos has in many ways transformed our lives for the better, but this has not been an unmitigated triumph. Our demythologised world is very comfortable for many of us who are fortunate enough to live in first-world countries, but it is not the earthly paradise predicted by Bacon and Locke. When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Our societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or an initiation, with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology. There is a moving and even heroic asceticism in the current rejection of myth. But purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live the unacceptable.

We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths... We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexercised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.

Uniting these two modes of thought is akin to solving the mind/body problem, combining modernism with postmodernism and making the Newtonian and Quantum universes compatiable all at once! Yet, who can deny that there is something fundamental missing from a completely rational understanding of reality?

Of course the obvious answers that surface are usually:

"A scientific view of the world is my spirituality."

or

"Buddhist meditation is compatiable with science."

But these responses kind of miss the point. The role of myth is as a mode of thinking. Mythos and Logos represent the two ways we interact with the universe. At the moment many of us seem to be missing half the picture, and even those who do aspire to having a spiritual aspect to their thought end up viewing their 'myth' with Logos tinted spectacles. For example, being convinced that Jesus actually rose to heaven misses the mythological component of his story - again, in the words of Karen Armstrong:

A myth was an event which in some sense had happened once, but which also happened all the time.

Jesus as mythos is a constant affirmation of the cycles of death and rebirth which occur in each one of us every day of our lives. Surely a much more significant truth than any historically understood figure who got crucified for saying nice things about people.

How can we reclaim our mythos?

Sun, Jan 13, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, future, evolution, Philosophy, thought, human, religion, Science, Ideas, culture, progress, myth, history, mythos, logos

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The Next Great Revolution in Reality

This post was originally composed for my blog and published many moons ago. Since its conception my position on the three movements of thought outlined below has evolved considerably. To reflect this I have also posted an appendix here. Please do not overlook the original post for the wonderful insights of its commenters.

I hope you enjoy this experiment in thought:

—————————————————————-
According to Freud there have been three great scientific revolutions that completely re-drew the boundaries which border human reality:

• Copernican: Where our geocentric perspective of the cosmos was revolutionised by the concept of the human world, the Earth, as being one mere weave within the infinite cosmic tapestry of creation.
• Darwinian: Where our view of man as the pinnacle of God's reality was overthrown by the idea that life evolved from nothing. The revolution in which our egocentric universe was crushed under the image of mankind as 'mere' hairless, ape descendants.
• Freudian/Psychological: Where the self which governs all action within our minds was displaced by the notion of the unconscious. The control we perceive as consciousness is nothing but waves lapping on the shores of the innumerable archipelagos of reality the brain rules over.
  

Each of these revolutions was to displace mankind as centre of our world and thus humiliate our egocentric position. Yet, parodoxical as it may seem, these scientific upheavals have increased our intimacy with reality, adding meaning to our existence without invoking religion.

We are but one species amongst millions of mutation-governed organisms, ruled over by the nature of brains we have little understanding of and cast on our single planet afloat an infinite cosmological sea. Each shift exposing a deeper purpose, without God; each individual note when composed together dictates the flowing melody that is our existence.

I believe it is only a matter of time before the next great revolution in science; in reality arrives on our doorsteps. A shift in perspective that attains equal scientific, social and theological significance as the ones outlined above. Once again, this revolution will alter the nature of reality, as perceived by us, at the most fundamental level. So I ask you...

What will it be? Has it already begun? And finally, will religion still be able to find a foothold on the human psyche once it has happened?

Let your Earth-bound, ape-evolved, unconscious imaginations go wild on this one...

(The appendix for this post, and a question in its own right, can be viewed here...)

Thu, Jan 10, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, future, evolution, Philosophy, thought, human, religion, Science, Ideas, culture, progress, myth, history

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How Things "Become" Part I: The Infinity of Definition

Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity.

~ John Berger, Ways of Seeing

The perceiver's position in an architectural, or merely physical space, determines the dimensional imperatives of that person's mental qualia. It is interesting to note that each viewer of a rainbow stands at the centre of their very own optical illusion; that light, once split into its component colours, streams - within the constraints of nature - upon a mathematically defined axis, of no more or less than 42° relative to each perceiver's location. There is no definitive rainbow, indeed no absolute dimension from which one could view a rainbow, a horizon or simply a piece of architectural design. The ethereal qualities of light juxtaposed upon an infinity of possible perspectives extends interpretation into the realm of chaos. Throw into consciousness the essence of 'what it is like to be' (known in philosophy of mind as 'qualia'), and human caprice may very well define the clarification of any meaning as a pure impossibility.

In art, the act of interpretation grows newer tendrils of abstraction by which to strangle anyone vivacious enough to attempt to verify it – yet attempt to we must. I intend to show that the application of consciousness upon the interpretation of art is what defines it. This definition, in contrast to the kind of definition for words one might find in a dictionary, will not dwell arrogantly upon the assumption that art (or words for that matter) can be 'defined' at all. My definition of the word 'definition' from now on will be to 'add new dimensions and qualities to the universe itself in the examination and multiplication of qualia, thereby giving reality a greater clarity'.

That the human universe can be defined at all is ultimately a consequence of consciousness. To 'give reality greater clarity' is merely to multiply the 'what it is like to be' or the 'beingness' of any entity or concept. The more these kinds of being are multiplied, the more ways there are to perceive the universe and since the universe itself is nothing but perception, consciousness (in all its forms) may very well take credit as the creator of 'the real'. Just as a greater number of pixels gives an image a higher definition, so any multiplication of 'being' within the universe brings a higher definition to what has 'become'* . That which is perceived may be thought to be a minor segment of a text, a play of light on a skyscraper or a wavelength of colour in a rainbow – what in fact consciousness perceives is a universe being given better clarity in the very act of its perception. An exponential autopoiesis of 'becoming':

A poem should not be but become.

~ Charles Bernstein, Rough Trades

That kinds of being can multiply is nothing special. Nature itself has blindly found, over the past few billion years of evolution, many new ways in which to 'become' itself. The application of amoeba 'being' lends a different definition to reality than bat 'being'. A bat, in turn, has a sonar 'beingness' utterly distinct from any human, and thus must experience a very different universe from ourselves. Where human consciousness wins out over other types of ‘being’ is in its application of language. Language, in this sense, can be understood as a virus:

From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word...

~ William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded

...and like any parasitic virus, language, and its forms, multiply and subsume their host – hijacking its nervous system for their own ends. Consciousness is subsumed by language, therefore the human universe is defined through language, just as part of a bat's universe might be said to be defined through sonar (or sound). To aid in the multiplication of language forms; to bring greater clarity to a universe, humans must apply their language 'being' within reality. Art can be seen as language in a broad sense, but in this essay I will concentrate on those modes of language which apply most fervently to the art of poetry: writing, reading and becoming.

Here an admission of restraint must be given: in order to throw so many broad terms into my examinations (i.e. art, consciousness, form, language, writing, reading, becoming, etc.) I am tightening the very tendrils of interpretation which threaten to choke me. To ignore the limitations of my own analysis would be to contradict myself, and therefore to void each word as I wrote it. Therefore I will attempt to utilise the methods of one for whom the constant redefinition of his own negation of definition was second nature...

In his 1977 essay 'The Death of the Author' Roland Barthes argues that writing destroys all traces of the writer. This classic post-modern position assumes ownership of a text to be that of culture itself, finally labeling the writer as an instance of language. "Life" says Barthes, "never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.". The multiplicity of emergent meanings for a text allows readership to become the ultimate act of understanding, thus finally, giving the reader a broader, more holistic power over a text's meaning:

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations to dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.

~ Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author

According to Barthes, the clarification (or 'becoming') of a text involves acknowledging dimensions beyond the plane of the text as expedited by its writer. The topology of writing suddenly loses its Cartesian dimensionality: the constituents of meaning have exploded:

For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate enfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite – that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.

~ David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning

* (Of course this means that any absolutely defined digital camera image would have to be made up of an infinite resolution of pixels – "I'd like a camera with at least ∞ megapixels please" – true 'becoming' would have to be plotted on an exponentially divergent curve. All infinitesimal steps in clarification are worthy of acknowledgment simply because true definition is infinite.)

(This piece was originally posted on my site, www.huge-entity.com some months ago.

For those of you who are interested, read Part II of this piece here:
The Codification of Artistic Species...)

Thu, Dec 20, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: consciousness, art, language, quotes, Fiction, human, Maths, Weird, Humour, Literature, Writing, Nonsense, Ideas, Reality

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