Philosophical notes…
Meaning after Data
Just read through an interesting review on digital humanities and the emerging shift from literature to data, by Stephen Marche, "Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities," LA Review of Books,
http://bit.ly/Rs8F7w. Marche, it seems to me, is not against digital humanities as such. Rather his concern is for the hubristic utopianism that pretends that digitisation of data will save the humanities. This relates to my own research on the religious meaning of the codex book at the moment. As Marche puts it:
“Google Books, in its way, represents an even more profound shift than the printing press, because it ends the relationship to the codex which began much earlier, in the fourth century. Binding together texts into portable libraries was one of the original Christian acts. For the Romans, texts were isolated events contained in scrolls. The ferocious squeamishness of hundreds of librarians and writers and scholars who resist this disbinding of literature today isn’t mere self-interest. The end of the book is a kind of sacrilege to them, and they’re not wrong. Cutting open the book is literally a return to the forms and modes of paganism...
...Meaning is mushy. Meaning falls apart. Meaning is often ugly, stewed out of weakness and failure. It is as human as the body, full of crevices and prey to diseases. It requires courage and a certain comfort with impurity to live with. Retreat from the smoothness of technology is not an available option, even if it were desirable. The disbanding of the papers has already occurred, a splendid fluttering of the world’s texts to the winds. We will have to gather them all together somehow. But the possibility of a complete, instantly accessible, professionally verified and explicated, free global library is more than just a dream. Through the perfection of our smooth machines, we will soon be able to read anything, anywhere, at any time.
Insight remains handmade.”
Recently, I've tried to think through the meaning of writing after Derrida, and Lyotard, etc. What's often missed is the strange set of side comments and footnotes that they made on writing itself. As Derrida recognized, this concern for writing goes back to Plato's record of Socrates' aside on the priority of speech (most famously in the Phaedrus). It's as if the need to record and repeat is part of philosophy itself somehow and digital media is the latest radicalisation of this tendency. Radical both in its change, and in its return to the root (radix) of the problem.
As book historians attest, the codex provided a set of techniques which we developed to make meaning. Pages cut, margins spaced, paragraphs, periods and breaks, all designed to humanise information, aid the memory, and connect us to the infinite abyss poeticized in Gilgamesh all those years ago. And yet, we stand today in a collective amnesia of this history of the book, a blind eroticism of the latest iPhone, or the milliseconds it takes Google to produce its limited results. Little care or concern is voiced for what we are losing in this shift to data.
"Insight remains handmade," Marche writes. A simple summation of the small side comments and technical reviews, which concern themselves with the digital devices' strain upon our eyes and hands. Will these comments lead to some sense of the ease with which these grim data reepers help or hinder the meaning making work which we linguistic animals must labor to achieve?
Let me be clear, I am not a luddite. My aim is simply to point out the need for ancient humanist techniques and not to leave it to a few tech executives and focus groups at Apple or Google. Just as Nietzsche declared God to be dead, which decried our feeble theologies more than the life of transcendent deities, so too, we must remind people that Steve Jobs is dead. It is not his corpse that should concern us, but the spectre of a single magician who would be responsible for the fragile, finite, human struggle we are in.
A Review of 20th Century Philosophy
“When and why did philosophy lose its bite? How did it become a toothless relic of past glories? These are the ugly questions that Jim Holt’s book compels us to ask. Philosophers became insignificant when philosophy became a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The great philosophers of the past covered all these disciplines. Until the nineteenth century, science was called natural philosophy and officially recognized as a branch of philosophy. The word “scientist” was invented by William Whewell, a nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher who became master of Trinity College and put his name on the building where Wittgenstein and I were living in 1946. Whewell introduced the word in the year 1833. He was waging a deliberate campaign to establish science as a professional discipline distinct from philosophy.
Whewell’s campaign succeeded. As a result, science grew to a dominant position in public life, and philosophy shrank. Philosophy shrank even further when it became detached from religion and from literature. The great philosophers of the past wrote literary masterpieces such as the Book of Job and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. The latest masterpieces written by a philosopher were probably Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1885 and Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Modern departments of philosophy have no place for the mystical.”
Freeman Dyson, "What Can You Really Know?" NY Review of Books - http://bit.ly/VgSYBJ
Rowan Williams on Contemplation
“… contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
Archbishop of Canterbury's address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome - http://bit.ly/Q3kErr
Banning Panhandling
“‘Our sense is that cities are responding to the increasing number of chronically or visibly homeless people due to the economic crisis,’ said Heather Maria Johnson, a civil rights lawyer for the group. ‘Rather than addressing the issue of homelessness, they are adapting measures that move homeless people out of downtowns, tourist areas or even out of a city.’”
Reinventing the Book
“‘I’m finding my literary skills incredibly valuable in software development, which is not something I would have expected. ... My ability to very precisely verbally describe how a reader engages a text, what a reader needs, turns out to be a huge asset in software development.’”
"Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book," The Atlantic, http://bit.ly/SKMSNj
IOT on the Ontological Argument
“In the eleventh century St Anselm of Canterbury proposed that it was possible to prove the existence of God using reason alone. His argument was ridiculed by some of his contemporaries, but was analysed and improved by later thinkers including Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Other philosophers have been less kind, with the Enlightenment thinker David Hume offering one possible refutation. But the debate continued, fuelled by interventions from such heavyweights as Immanuel Kant and Kurt Gödel; and it remains one of the most discussed problems in philosophy.”
Melvyn Bragg discusses the Ontological Argument on the BBC Radio 4 program, In Our Time, http://bbc.in/STH9Q1
The Writing Revolution
“For years, nothing seemed capable of turning around New Dorp High School’s dismal performance—not firing bad teachers, not flashy education technology, not after-school programs. So, faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.”
A Portrait of Kermit Oliver
A thoughtful biographical essay on the artist designer for Hermès, a recluse who works the nightshift as a postman. Tremendous talent tinged with terrible tragedy.
“‘What was the purpose of everything that’s happened?’ Kermit said, his voice rising. ‘Some ancient writings feel that the God of this world is not the God that created it.’ He closed his eyes and paused. ‘Let me put it this way: Do you think God created tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis and everything as a punishment for people? Or is that just coincidence?’ Kermit stopped, suddenly reticent. He sat still, but his long and weathered hands twisted and turned in his lap. He wrung them out like a dishrag. ‘Life is chaos,’ he said. He looked out the window. ‘Some of us survive it. Some of us don’t.’ ”
Structuralism's Samson
“The ghosts of ideas and people move in and out of time and mind, liable to appear in quotidian moments. Shortly after first sitting down to begin this conversation, Macksey asked his guest for a match. A shuffling through the stacks of papers and books that cover the table in his library soon followed. His guest found a match‑book and held it up. “No, they’re empty,” Macksey says, before noticing the script logo of a Swiss tobacco manufacturer on the cover. “They’re Davidoff. I haven’t had Davidoff since Jacques Derrida was here.””
Your Brain on Pseudoscience
“An intellectual pestilence is upon us. Shop shelves groan with books purporting to explain, through snazzy brain-imaging studies, not only how thoughts and emotions function, but how politics and religion work, and what the correct answers are to age-old philosophical controversies. The dazzling real achievements of brain research are routinely pressed into service for questions they were never designed to answer. This is the plague of neuroscientism – aka neurobabble, neurobollocks, or neurotrash – and it’s everywhere.”