Material Sign Processes and Emergent Ecosocial Organization by Jay Lemke
“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”-
Meeting the Requirements
For Friday Fictioneers – May 3, 2013
Wobbling within our habitation – wandering and confused, almost wondering why, but still composing, constructing, rearranging and conceiving it again in different light at different angles in differing times from different points of view, almost like a structure or a form foaming out of content like both sides of a two-way mirror – what we’ve made of what we’re made of – making tremendous spackled multi-entried exits and shifting permeable boundaries – you push, I push, we pull – it changes – look again and reconsider, same as considering anew or forever beginning while still it’s taking shape, working it over even when we’re not working – not really – detail upon detail after detail ever only under one single purpose – to be functional.
N Filbert 2013
It’s complicated
“In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar substances with the same chemical structure can become quite different in their reality and form”
-Michael Gazzaniga-
“On the evolutionary tree, we humans are sitting at the tip of our lonely branch…We have the same roots as all living organisms. All those similarities are there. Our cellular processes depend upon the same biology, and we are subject to the same properties of physics and chemistry. We are all carbon-based creatures. Yet ever species is unique, and we are too. Every species has answered the problem of survival with a different solution, filling a different niche…Homo sapiens entered a cognitive niche…
…in one sentence Garrison Keillor captures humanness…such a simple sentiment, yet so full of human complexity…
BE WELL. DO GOOD WORK. KEEP IN TOUCH.“
-Michael Gazzaniga-
Another strong recommendation from me for those interested in the what’s and how’s and some where’s and when’s of being a particular we.
Updating Margins
Greetings all you who take the time to peruse my blog. I thank you. Let me begin this by saying how I have missed creating blog entries that feel creative to me, that require me to a degree that is nourishing and satiating, rather than feel like marginal notes to my studies. Thank goodness for a few projects and Friday Fictioneers that spur me to some dedicated time spent “creating” purposively – differently from intellectual processing toward understanding. And yet…
As I emerge into a brief pause between semesters, I find myself bewildered with experience and an oddly felt “freedom” that spawn confounding questions in me. As I completed my final semester paper this week, my mind and body revved to the thought that fictions, essays and poems that participate in the structure of my desk – beckoning and ready as I researched away – can be grasped and delighted in, engaged at will, enter my cranial conversation…but this is also true of my researching – I have been consistently able to construct academic projects that involve and enable my immersion in those things that inspire and enthrall me – that feed my “what do I want to know?” urges. So where this different nuance of feeling/experience in reading?
This is the question occupying me currently (or field of questions). As I re-entered Robert Musil’s writings these past few days, while skimming and browsing an unbelievable desk laid with exquisite appetizers (Hejinian, Okri, Danto, Deleuze, Shklovsky, Creeley, Fante and so on) I recognized a feeling I can only describe as “insight.” My preferential selections do not differ much between resources for academic work and resources for some other purpose. I am driven to “know” what I am driven to know – it is continuous, related, dynamic. Any sources from any genre or field or discipline that provide a certain “something” accomplish it. What felt like “insight” was the recognition as I ranged over very different styles (Floridi, Serres, Wittgenstein, DFW, Larry Levis and so on) that what I seek consistently (and an effect that Musil invariably realizes for me) is work that I must achieve, that challenges, that invents, wrestles, requires change and adaptation, innovation and labor on my part to be ingested, understood. That forces dialogue between my micro-world of knowledge and understanding and another. Be it in the mode of expression, the language employed, the ideas, questions and concepts examined or points of view – it must be something that invigorates and surprises, invites dialogue and conversation toward meaning and understanding to occur. Writing that requires change to be engaged.
At the same time I recognize that I read differently different writings. I expect poetry, aphorisms, fragments to require percolatory time, as if the texts and spaces sprinkle my mind-lawn and will find their way to the roots in their own time. I expect logical writings, perspectives or positions to argue with me, to have asked questions beyond what I have had the knowledge to ask, therefore pushing whatever I contain toward corrections and new formulations – adaptation and growth. If writing asks that I be passive, within sentences it is set aside.
These are the questions I’m formulating and troubling in this margin –
- How are freedom and restraint – affordances and constraint related (particularly in relation to my felt experience of reading selections – and to what purposes (“academic” vs. – ?) (is there a versus? or is my criteria for reading homogenous regardless of “assignments” or artifact?)
- Related: compositions – whether related to schoolwork or blog or journal or artistic projects – are they dissimilar in any way other than forms of expression, manifestation and items? Or is all processing and expressing work similarly creative, inventive – processes toward meaning?
- Can I begin to dissolve my penchant for categories and tasks, loosen a little my instinct of organizing complexity? Do I want to? Why?
These are my offering for today – reports from the margins, the notations always accruing and collocating in my experience – given air through a shifting of immediate responsibilities…
“To accept questions consists in immersing oneself in the search for the answers that answer them. Furthermore, the questions specify the answers that they admit.”
-Humberto Maturana-
attached: a phenomenal recollective account of the theory of Autopoiesis – of creatively self-organizing systems like ourselves and our molecules that stuns me. I invite you to read and differently consider your experience of the world:
Humberto Maturana – Preface to “Tree of Knowledge”
“the pursuit of knowledge does not mean conquest, but invention, the establishment of new relations, which supplement already existing ones and can transform them, make them branch out into unexpected dimensions, rather than deny them, or discredit them as manifestations of opinion, illusion, ‘culture.'”
-Isabelle Stengers-
attached: a powerful account of “knowing” and how we conceive/relate to the acquisition of knowledge. Again, if these sorts of things interest you and you are not familiar with her work – I highly encourage you to browse this writing:
Isabelle Stengers – Do We Know How to Read Messages in the Sand?
And again, I thank you for indulging me in sharing some of my process of living
through this blog…
All my Words are Silent 