we’re heading off to visit children and family in the Pac-NW for a week +…not sure how often I’ll “get back again” to ze blog, but aside from my amazing wife, I’m taking these….
Happy Trails….
Category: Current Reading
What I’m buried in this week or this moment
The Joy of Incompleteness
“By Godel’s theorem the following statement is generally meant:
- In any formal system adequate for number theory there exists and undecidable formula – that is, a formula that is not provable and whose negation is not provable
- A corollary to the theorem is that the consistency of a formal system adequate for number theory cannot be proved within the system”
“…there can be neither a first nor a last meaning; [anything that can be understood] always exists among other meanings as a link in the chain of meaning, which in its totality is the only thing that can be real. In historical life this chain continues infinitely, and therefore each individual link in it is renewed again and again, as though it were being reborn…”
-M.M. Bakhtin-
“And so the world is interior to our mind, which is inside the world. Subject and object in this process are constitutive of each other. This doesn’t lead to a unifying and harmonious vision; we can’t escape from a generalized principle of uncertainty. In the same way that as in microphysics, the observer disturbs the object, which disturbs the perception, in the same way the notions of object and subject are profoundly disturbed each by the other: each opens a crack in the other. There is, we will see, a fundamental, ontological, uncertainty in the relation between the subject and the environment…a new conception emerges both from the complex relation between the subject and the object, and the insufficient and incomplete character of the two notions. The subject must remain open, deprived of all decidability in itself; the object itself must remain open toward the subject and toward its environment, which, in turn, necessarily opens and continues to open beyond the limits of our understanding…
All this incites us toward an open epistemology…Epistemology is not pontifical nor judiciary. It is the place of both uncertainty and dialogics. In fact, all the uncertainties we have raised must confront and correct each another; there must be dialogue, without, however, hoping to stop the ultimate crack with an ideological Band-Aid.
“If this gap is recognized, then the gap becomes an opening of one toward the other, opening toward the world, opening toward a possible surmounting of the either/or alternative, toward a possible progress of knowledge…”
–Edgar Morin-
The Heart and its Branches
“I do not want to know about the human heart. I do not desire to speak at all about those indwelling, intimate reaches of the heart in which anguish is an undiminishing personal interrogation, much less to analytically enfetter those reaches.
I have the sense, the good sense, the decency, to have nothing to say.”
“Sick of all the you be’s? Well, what do you say, you be you and I’ll be me? What do you say? We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead. We can sleep while an old woman twangs away on a bad piano while rain keeps time in the empty street. We can listen to and count the closings of a child’s fist as he tries to catch a fruit fly. We can listen to the whistling of the bombs. We can listen to each other.
I do not want to know about the human heart.”
“I am not a man of science. I am not proficient in any branch of nature study. I do not know the difference between an amphibian and a reptile. I have no yearning for hard knowledge about the hard world. And yet I have no affinity for anything spiritual. In fact, I have a pronounced, conspicuous, and striking absence of an affinity for anything spiritual.
I know but one hard thing about the hard world and it is this: from the sum of all theories, as arranged in accordance with ascertained facts, we make a few assumptions, that we have actually ascertained facts, that we are actually here to ascertain them, and that there is actually a here.”
-Percival Everett-
“the word is a microcosm of human consciousness” – Lev Vygotsky
the Epilogue from Paul J. Thibault – Brain, mind, and the signifying body: an ecosocial semiotic theory
Dialogue
“You and I exchange lines of dialogue. Each line is a trap, a misuse, and each misuse is justified by some standard upon which we have previously agreed, if tacitly. Thereby appears the nature of meaning. It is a force that hazards to subjugate other forces, other meanings, other languages. We understand this all too well and yet, and yet – well, it is like the infirmity, the defect at the base of a dam. It will hold and it will hold and then it will give up, the dam will give up. As do we all…
“Believe what you like. Or, better, believe what you believe; it’s always easier, if you ask me. You would have me imagine that in some cases language really is just a simple transmission of rather functional, if not banal, messages between speakers. Not only is that not true, but it is necessarily untrue, even in the most functional of exchanges, say between two firemen or a pilot and her navigator or a surgeon and his operating-room nurse and here between you and me as you attend to me, where I use she and where I use he and even why I might have put she before he, or did not phrase the question as he following she.”
-Percival Everett-
A Meaning List
- Mikhail Bakhtin
- Jay Lemke
- Lev Vygotsky
- Humberto Maturana / Francisco Varela
- Bruno Latour
- Paul J. Thibault
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Mark Bickhard
- Charles S. Peirce
- Roman Jakobson
- V. N. Volosinov
- Robert Musil
- Kurt Ammon
- Alan Turing
- Jacob von Uexkull
- Kurt Godel
- et. al….
and not one without the other…
“The literary word resembles a person who roams at will” – Robert Musil
“The sentence not only derives its meaning from the words: the words derive their meaning from the sentence, and the relationship between page and sentence, whole work and page, is no different…the embracing and the embraced develop their meaning mutually out of each other, and the structure of a page of good prose is, analyzed logically, not something frozen but the vibrating of a bridge, which changes with every step one takes on it…”
“One can only explain that it is from all the details taken together, and through their mutual interpenetration, that the whole arises in a way that remains mysterious…a transformation of sense that eludes logic…but the meanings are related to each other, and when one grasps one meaning the others peep through beneath it…”
-Robert Musil – “Literati & Literature” –
“It is only meaningful to speak of originality where there is a tradition” – Robert Musil
“thus one could probably ‘dissect’ any writer whatever (formally, or according to subject matter, or even according to the intended meaning), and would find in him nothing but bits and pieces of his predecessors; by no means completely ‘taken apart’ and ‘newly assimilated,’ but preserved in broken shards”
“Thus in serious literature the peculiar situation emerges that the general ongoing tradition and the personal contribution of the individual cannot be separated from each other. In this process the continuum does not grow in any dimension other than extent, nor does the personal element gain a solid position. The whole consists of variations that randomly come to rest on each other.”
-Robert Musil, “Literati & Literature”-
All my Words are Silent 