Log24

Saturday, April 10, 2021

Possibility

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:31 pm

The previous post, on a Joyce symposium in
Utrecht on June 15-20, 2014, suggests a review
of this  journal in June 2014.  From June 21
of that year —

"Without the possibility that
an origin can be lost, forgotten,
or alienated into what springs
forth from it, an origin could
not be an origin. The possibility
of inscription is thus a necessary
possibility, one that must always
be possible."

— Page 157 of The Tain of the Mirror:
Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection ,
by Rodolphe Gasché, Harvard U. Press, 1986

Related art suggested by the above modal logic

Nietzsche, 'law in becoming' and 'play in necessity'

Nietzsche on Heraclitus— 'play in necessity' and 'law in becoming'— illustrated.

Sunday, March 28, 2021

Logocentric Citation

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:29 pm

From the RSS feed of The Chronicle of Higher Education ‘s site
Arts & Letters Daily  this evening —

“Despite the wide scope of his bibliography and reception,
Derrida was a specialist in a subfield of his own design,
more or less: the philosophy of writing, which upends
the privileging of speech over writing that has dominated
Western metaphysics since Plato. This ‘phonocentrism’
(which Derrida yarns into ‘logocentrism,’ and eventually,
‘phallocentrism’) starts from a false premise, that the
moment of utterance in Aristotle’s view is somehow more
rhetorically ‘present’ than the kairos of writing….”

Andrew Marzoni,  March 10, 2021:
“Outside the Text: Jacques Derrida resists
easy canonization in a new hagiography for the Left.”
https://thebaffler.com/latest/outside-the-text-marzoni

A related image from this  journal
on that same date, March 10, 2021:

Gap Dance

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:40 pm

“Plato and Hegel always recognized the importance of the  gap:
they invoke the gap (the opening, the separation, the division)
and they put it to work. The inescapable gaps that cannot  be bridged,
that cannot  be filled, play a central role in Derrida’s thought and in
our response to his death. The gaps in Derrida’s work resist the  gap;
they swerve, deviate and wander (écarter ) – gaps move . When someone
or something takes pre-cedence  (goes first, goes before, goes on ahead
and gives up its place ) a gap is opened. There (are) only gaps, the gaps
that Jacques Derrida has left behind him and  in front of him: the
pre-cedence of gaps. This tracing of gaps (écarts ) is a preface to an
impossible  mourning, a mourning that one must at once avoid and
affirm. It keeps returning to Derrida’s Dissemination  (1972)….”

— Page vii of The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida ,
by Sean Gaston (Continuum Books, London/New York, 2006)

Later in the same book —

Monday, March 25, 2019

Espacement

(Continued from the previous post.)

In-Between "Spacing" and the "Chôra "
in Derrida: A Pre-Originary Medium?

By Louise Burchill

(Ch. 2 in Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Eds.),  Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics , Lexington Books, October 14, 2010)

"The term 'spacing' ('espacement ') is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those of différance  (characterized, in the text from 1968 bearing this name, as '[at once] spacing [and] temporizing' 1), writing  (of which 'spacing' is said to be 'the fundamental property' 2) and deconstruction (with one of Derrida's last major texts, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy , specifying 'spacing ' to be 'the first word of any deconstruction' 3)."

1  Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie  (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 14. Henceforth cited as  D  .

2  Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. A. Bass, in Writing and  Difference  (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 217. Henceforth cited as FSW .

3  Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy  (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 207.

. . . .

"… a particularly interesting point is made in this respect by the French philosopher, Michel Haar. After remarking that the force Derrida attributes to différance  consists simply of the series of its effects, and is, for this reason, 'an indefinite process of substitutions or permutations,' Haar specifies that, for this process to be something other than a simple 'actualisation' lacking any real power of effectivity, it would need “a soubassement porteur ' – let’s say a 'conducting underlay' or 'conducting medium' which would not, however, be an absolute base, nor an 'origin' or 'cause.' If then, as Haar concludes, différance  and spacing show themselves to belong to 'a pure Apollonism' 'haunted by the groundless ground,' which they lack and deprive themselves of,16 we can better understand both the threat posed by the 'figures' of space and the mother in the Timaeus  and, as a result, Derrida’s insistent attempts to disqualify them. So great, it would seem, is the menace to différance  that Derrida must, in a 'properly' apotropaic  gesture, ward off these 'figures' of an archaic, chthonic, spatial matrix in any and all ways possible…."

16  Michel Haar, “Le jeu de Nietzsche dans Derrida,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger  2 (1990): 207-227.

. . . .

… "The conclusion to be drawn from Democritus' conception of rhuthmos , as well as from Plato's conception of the chôra , is not, therefore, as Derrida would have it, that a differential field understood as an originary site of inscription would 'produce' the spatiality of space but, on the contrary, that 'differentiation in general' depends upon a certain 'spatial milieu' – what Haar would name a 'groundless ground' – revealed as such to be an 'in-between' more 'originary' than the play of differences it in-forms. As such, this conclusion obviously extends beyond Derrida's conception of 'spacing,' encompassing contemporary philosophy's continual privileging of temporization in its elaboration of a pre-ontological 'opening' – or, shall we say, 'in-between.'

For permutations and a possible "groundless ground," see
the eightfold cube and group actions both on a set of eight
building blocks arranged in a cube (a "conducting base") and
on the set of seven natural interstices (espacements )  between
the blocks. Such group actions provide an elementary picture of
the isomorphism between the groups PSL(2,7) (acting on the
eight blocks) and GL(3,2) (acting on the seven interstices).

Espacements
 

For the Church of Synchronology

See also, from the reported publication date of the above book
Intermedialities , the Log24 post Synchronicity.

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Espacement: Geometry of the Interstice in Literary Theory

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 3:28 am

"You said something about the significance of spaces between
elements being repeated. Not only the element itself being repeated,
but the space between. I'm very interested in the space between.
That is where we come together." — Peter Eisenman, 1982

https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/
parrhesia03/parrhesia03_blackburne.pdf

Parrhesia  No. 3 • 2007 • 22–32

(Up) Against the (In) Between: Interstitial Spatiality
in Genet and Derrida

by Clare Blackburne

Blackburne — www.parrhesiajournal.org 24 —

"The excessive notion of espacement  as the resurgent spatiality of that which is supposedly ‘without space’ (most notably, writing), alerts us to the highly dynamic nature of the interstice – a movement whose discontinuous and ‘aberrant’ nature requires further analysis."

Blackburne — www.parrhesiajournal.org 25 —

"Espacement  also evokes the ambiguous figure of the interstice, and is related to the equally complex derridean notions of chora , différance , the trace and the supplement. Derrida’s reading of the Platonic chora  in Chora L Works  (a series of discussions with the architect Peter Eisenman) as something which defies the logics of non-contradiction and binarity, implies the internal heterogeneity and instability of all structures, neither ‘sensible’ nor ‘intelligible’ but a third genus which escapes conceptual capture.25 Crucially, chora , spacing, dissemination and différance  are highly dynamic concepts, involving hybridity, an ongoing ‘corruption’ of categories, and a ‘bastard reasoning.’26 Derrida identification of différance  in Margins of  Philosophy , as an ‘unappropriable excess’ that operates through spacing as ‘the becoming-space of time or the becoming-time of space,’27 chimes with his description of chora  as an ‘unidentifiable excess’ that is ‘the spacing which is the condition for everything to take place,’ opening up the interval as the plurivocity of writing in defiance of ‘origin’ and ‘essence.’28  In this unfolding of différance , spacing  ‘insinuates  into  presence an  interval,’29 again alerting us to the crucial role of the interstice in deconstruction, and, as Derrida observes  in Positions ,  its  impact  as  ‘a movement,  a  displacement  that  indicates  an  irreducible alterity’: ‘Spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other.’30"

25. Quoted in Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, eds., 
Chora L Works. Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman  
(New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997), 15.

26. Ibid, 25.

27. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy.
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982), 6 and 13.

28. Derrida, Chora L Works , 19 and 10.

29. Ibid, 203.

30. Derrida, Positions , 94.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Language Game

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:29 am

In which Plato continues to thank the Academy.

From the Academy, a lead balloon for 9/11 —
continued from March First, 2002.

A search today for the name Eisenman
(see previous post) yields the following :

"We need a cameo from Plato, a safecracker,
a wrinkle or two to be ironed out, some ice,
some diamonds, and, above all, laughter
for this irony of ironies."

Jeffrey Kipnis, "Twisting the Separatrix,"
Assemblage  No. 14, April 1991, MIT Press

Friday, February 1, 2013

Get Quotes

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:01 pm

For Tony Kushner fans:

For logic fans:

IMAGE- NY Times market quotes, American Express Gold Card ad, Kevin Spacey in 'House of Cards' ad

John Searle on Derrida:

On necessity, possibility, and 'necessary possibility'

In the box-diamond notation, the axiom Searle quotes is

.

"The euclidean property guarantees the truth of this." — Wikipedia

Linking to Euclid

Clicking on "euclidean" above yields another Wikipedia article

"In mathematics, Euclidean relations are a class of binary relations that satisfy a weakened form of transitivity that formalizes Euclid's 'Common Notion 1' in The Elements : things which equal the same thing also equal one another."

Verification: See, for instance, slides on modal logic at Carnegie Mellon University and modal logic at plato.stanford.edu.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Scholarship in 1961…

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Before Derrida's writings on Plato and on inscription

A remark by the late William Harris:

"Scholarship has many dark ages, and they do not all fall
in the safe confines of remote antiquity."

For more about Harris, see the previous post.

Discussing an approach to solving a geometrical problem 
from section 86e of the Meno , Harris wrote that

"… this is a very important element of method and purpose,
one which must be taken with great seriousness and respect.
In fact it is as good an example of the master describing for us
his method as Plato ever gives us. Tricked by the appearance
of brevity and unwilling to follow through Plato's thought on
the road to Euclid, we have garbled or passed over a unique
piece of philosophical information."

Harris, though not a geometer, was an admirable man.
His remark on the Meno  method is itself worthy of respect.

In memory of Harris, Plato, and pre-Derrida scholarship, here
are some pages from 1961 on the problem Harris discussed.

A pair of figures from the 1961 pages indicates how one view of the
section 86e problem (at right below) resembles the better-known 
demonstration earlier in the Meno  of how to construct
a square of area 2 —

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Manning and Khora

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:26 am

A weblog post from Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012—

"Today is the 120th anniversary of Cardinal Henry Edward Manning's death."

A Reluctant Sinner  (Thanks to Andrew Cusack for the link.)

If Manning is a saint, then Saturday was his feast day.

Some background— Manning in this journal.

See also Saturday's Derrida at Villanova. The link there to
previous posts on that topic leads to a post on Derrida's promotion
of his neologism différance as a version of Plato's khôra.

I prefer Manning's discussion of a closely related concept,
the scholastic philosophers' materia prima .

See Hugh R. King's 1956 paper sneering at the scholastics'
concept, and Heisenberg's much better-informed remarks
on the related concept of potentia

IMAGE- Excerpt from 'The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas' by John F. Wippel

For a related fictional account of a religious quest for "possibilities"
and "excluded middles" between "zeroes and ones," see
Ingraffia on The Crying of Lot 49 .

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Thing Itself

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:29 am

Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker  magazine—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111020-Derrida.GIF

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111020-Topia122.GIF

Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—

"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"

A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…

Coxeter exhuming Geometry

Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."

A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Tombstones.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.

The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .

The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—

The Diamond Star

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110905-StellaOctangulaView.jpg

See Configurations and Squares.

That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero  from March 28, 2003.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Brightness at Noon, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"What exactly was Point Omega?"

This is Robert Wright in Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.

Wright is discussing not the novel Point Omega  by Don DeLillo,
but rather a (related) concept of  the Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

My own idiosyncratic version of a personal "point omega"—

Image- Josefine Lyche work (with 1986 figures by Cullinane) in a 2009 exhibition in Oslo

Click for further details.

The circular sculpture in the foreground
is called by the artist "The Omega Point."
This has been described as
"a portal that leads in or out of time and space."

For some other sorts of points, see the drawings
on the wall and Geometry Simplified

Image-- The trivial two-point affine space and the trivial one-point projective space, visualized

The two points of the trivial affine space are represented by squares,
and the one point of the trivial projective space is represented by
a line segment separating the affine-space squares.

For related darkness  at noon, see Derrida on différance
as a version of Plato's khôra

(Click to enlarge.)

Image-- Fordham University Press on Derrida, differance, and khora

The above excerpts are from a work on and by Derrida
published in 1997 by Fordham University,
a Jesuit institutionDeconstruction in a Nutshell

Image-- A Catholic view of Derrida

For an alternative to the Villanova view of Derrida,
see Angels in the Architecture.

Saturday, June 28, 2008

Saturday June 28, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm
The God Factor

NY Lottery June 23, 2008: Mid-day 322, Evening 000


The following poem of Emily Dickinson is quoted here in memory of John Watson Foster Dulles, a scholar of Brazilian history who died at 95 on June 23.  He was the eldest son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a nephew of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, brother of Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles, and a grandson of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles, author of The True Church.

I asked no other thing,   
No other was denied.   
I offered Being for it;   
The mighty merchant smiled.   
 
Brazil? He twirled a button,           
Without a glance my way:   
"But, madam, is there nothing else   
That we can show to-day?"


"He twirled a button…."

Plato's diamond figure from the 'Meno'

The above figure
of Plato
(see 3/22)
was suggested by
Lacan's diamond
Lacan's lozenge - said by some to symbolize Derrida's 'differance'
(losange or poinçon)
as a symbol —
according to Frida Saal
of Derrida's
différance
which is, in turn,
"that which enables and
results from Being itself"
—  according to
Professor John Lye

I prefer Plato and Dulles
to Lacan and Lye.
 

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Wednesday October 24, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:26 am
Adieu:
A Story for Dobbs

Internet Movie Database on screenwriter Lem Dobbs:

"Trivia:
Son of painter R.B. (Ron) Kitaj.

Took his pseudonym from the character Humphrey Bogart played
in 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.'"

Bogart and Robert Blake in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Click for details.

NY Lottery Oct. 21, 2007: Mid-day 512, Evening 430

October 21 was the day
that R. B. Kitaj died.
For what Kitaj called
"midrashic glosses"
on the numbers and
the lucky sums, see
4/30, 5/12, and
Eight is a Gate.

Screenwriter Joan Didion:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live….

We interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling."

David Cohen on R. B. Kitaj:

"He has come to be fascinated… by the kabbalah, finding in it parallels to the world of art and ideas. Every morning, after a long walk, he winds up at a Westwood café surrounded by pretty UCLA students where he studies the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, before working for an hour on his memoirs."

Levinas Adieu:

Levinas, and Derrida, on the Adieu

Click for source.

"There is no teacher
but the enemy.
"

— Orson Scott Card,  
Ender's Game

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Tuesday June 19, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:49 am
Let No Man Write
My Epitaph

— Title of a novel
by Willard Motley

"Recall the passage in the Odyssey when he [Ulysses] encounters the Cyclops Polyphemos. Trying to disguise himself, to hide himself, Ulysses calls himself Outis– nobody, no man, personne. Here, in a strategy of simple erasure, the Subject masks his singularity behind no one, das Man (here in a sense that does not depend on the Heidggerian distinction between the authentic Dasein and the inauthentic das Man). In French, Outis is translated as personne, meaning no one, no particular subject."

— Jacques Derrida, "Summary of Impromptu Remarks," pp. 39-45 in Anyone, ed. by Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli International, 1991)

"In A GOOD YEAR, more than one reference is made to the secret of comedy. It's all in the timing, two characters explain." —Review at epinions.com

Time of this entry:

11:49:59

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Wednesday December 13, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

 Best Wishes for a
C. S. Lewis
Christmas

 

 C.S. Lewis

Image of Lewis from
Into the Wardrobe

What on earth
  is a concrete
  universal?”

— Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

For one approach to an answer, click on the picture at left.

Update of 4:23 PM:

The Lewis link above deals with the separation of Heaven from Hell.  The emphasis is on Heaven.  A mysterious visitor to this website, “United States,” seems to be seeking equal time for Hell.  And so…

Storyboard

Based on Xanga footprints of Dec. 13, 2006
from m759’s site-visitor “United States”
(possibly a robot; if so, a robot with strange tastes).

TIME OF     DATE OF             PAGE VISITED   
VISIT         PAGE VISITED 

1217 040520  Parable
1218 060606  The Omen
1220 051205  Don’t Know Much About History
1225 030822  Mr. Holland’s Week (And in Three Days…)
1233 030114  Remarks on Day 14 (What is Truth?)
1238 040818  Train of Thought (Oh, My Lolita)
1244 020929  Angel Night (Ellis Larkins)
1249 040715  Identity Crisis (Bourne and Treadstone)
1252 050322  Make a Differance (Lacan, Derrida, Reba)
1255 050221  Quarter to Three on Night of HST’s death
1256 040408  Triple Crown on Holy Thursday
1258 040714  Welcome to Mr. Motley’s Neighborhood
1258 030221  All About Lilith
0103 040808  Quartet (for Alexander Hammid)
0104 030106  Dead Poet in the City of Angels
0109 030914  Skewed Mirrors (Readings on Aesthetics)
0110 050126  A Theorem in Musical Form
0125 021007  Music for R. D. Laing
0138 020806  Butterflies & Popes (Transfiguration)
0140 060606  The Omen (again)
0156 030313  ART WARS: Perennial Tutti-Frutti
0202 030112  Ask Not (A Bee Gees Requiem)
0202 050527  Drama of the Diagonal, Part Deux
0202 060514  STAR WARS continued (Eclipse and Venus)
0207 030112  Ask Not (again… Victory of the Goddess)
0207 030221  All About Lilith (again… Roll credits.)

“How much story do you want?”
— George Balanchine
 

Monday, October 9, 2006

Monday October 9, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am
ART WARS:
To Apollo

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason….”
John Outram, architect

To Apollo (10/09/02)
Art Wars: Apollo and Dionysus
(10/09/02)
Balanchine’s Birthday
(01/09/03)
Art Theory for Yom Kippur
(10/05/03)
A Form
(05/22/04)
Ineluctable
(05/27/04)
A Form, continued
(06/05/04)
Parallelisms
(06/06/04)
Ado
(06/25/04)
Deep Game
(06/26/04)
Gameplayers of Zen
(06/27/04)
And So To Bed
(06/29/04)
Translation Plane for Rosh Hashanah
(09/15/04)
Derrida Dead
(10/09/04)
The Nine
(11/09/04)
From Tate to Plato
(11/19/04)
Art History
(05/11/05)
A Miniature Rosetta Stone
(08/06/05)
High Concept
(8/23/05) 
High Concept, Continued
(8/24/05)
Analogical Train of Thought
(8/25/05)
Today’s Sermon: Magical Thinking
(10/09/05)
Balance
(10/31/05)
Matrix
(11/01/05)
Seven is Heaven, Eight is a Gate
(11/12/05)
Nine is a Vine
(11/12/05)
Apollo and Christ
(12/02/05)
Hamilton’s Whirligig
(01/05/06)
Cross
(01/06/06)
On Beauty
(01/26/06)
Sunday Morning
(01/29/06)
Centre
(01/29/06)
New Haven
(01/29/06) 
Washington Ballet
(02/05/06)
Catholic Schools Sermon
(02/05/06)
The Logic of Apollo
(02/05/06)
Game Boy
(08/06/06)
Art Wars Continued: The Krauss Cross
(09/13/06)
Art Wars Continued: Pandora’s Box
(09/16/06)
The Pope in Plato’s Cave
(09/16/06)
Today’s Birthdays
(09/26/06)
Symbology 101
(09/26/06)

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Thursday August 11, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:16 am

Kaleidoscope, continued

From Clifford Geertz, The Cerebral Savage:

"Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns consist in the disposition of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is, they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than their individual properties considered separately).  And their range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its operation. And so it is too with savage thought.  Both anecdotal and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of 'the odds and ends left over from psychological or historical process.'

These odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images drawn from myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore….  as in a kaleidoscope, one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however ill-formed or irregular.   But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are detachable from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of a similar sort….  Levi-Strauss generalizes this permutational view of thinking to savage thought in general.  It is all a matter of shuffling discrete (and concrete) images–totem animals, sacred colors, wind directions, sun deities, or whatever–so as to produce symbolic structures capable of formulating and communicating objective (which is not to say accurate) analyses of the social and physical worlds.

…. And the point is general.  The relationship between a symbolic structure and its referent, the basis of its meaning,  is fundamentally 'logical,' a coincidence of form– not affective, not historical, not functional.  Savage thought is frozen reason and anthropology is, like music and mathematics, 'one of the few true vocations.'

Or like linguistics."

Edward Sapir on Linguistics, Mathematics, and Music:

"… linguistics has also that profoundly serene and satisfying quality which inheres in mathematics and in music and which may be described as the creation out of simple elements of a self-contained universe of forms.  Linguistics has neither the sweep nor the instrumental power of mathematics, nor has it the universal aesthetic appeal of music.  But under its crabbed, technical, appearance there lies hidden the same classical spirit, the same freedom in restraint, which animates mathematics and music at their purest."

— Edward Sapir, "The Grammarian and his Language,"
  American Mercury 1:149-155,1924

From Robert de Marrais, Canonical Collage-oscopes:

"…underwriting the form languages of ever more domains of mathematics is a set of deep patterns which not only offer access to a kind of ideality that Plato claimed to see the universe as created with in the Timaeus; more than this, the realm of Platonic forms is itself subsumed in this new set of design elements– and their most general instances are not the regular solids, but crystallographic reflection groups.  You know, those things the non-professionals call . . . kaleidoscopes! *  (In the next exciting episode, we'll see how Derrida claims mathematics is the key to freeing us from 'logocentrism' **— then ask him why, then, he jettisoned the deepest structures of mathematical patterning just to make his name…)

* H. S. M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes (New York: Dover, 1973) is the great classic text by a great creative force in this beautiful area of geometry  (A polytope is an n-dimensional analog of a polygon or polyhedron.  Chapter V of this book is entitled 'The Kaleidoscope'….)

** … contemporary with the Johns Hopkins hatchet job that won him American marketshare, Derrida was also being subjected to a series of probing interviews in Paris by the hometown crowd.  He first gained academic notoriety in France for his book-length reading of Husserl's two-dozen-page essay on 'The Origin of Geometry.'  The interviews were collected under the rubric of Positions (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981…).  On pp. 34-5 he says the following: 'the resistance to logico-mathematical notation has always been the signature of logocentrism and phonologism in the event to which they have dominated metaphysics and the classical semiological and linguistic projects…. A grammatology that would break with this system of presuppositions, then, must in effect liberate the mathematization of language…. The effective progress of mathematical notation thus goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics, with the profound renewal of mathematics itself, and the concept of science for which mathematics has always been the model.'  Nice campaign speech, Jacques; but as we'll see, you reneged on your promise not just with the kaleidoscope (and we'll investigate, in depth, the many layers of contradiction and cluelessness you put on display in that disingenuous 'playing to the house'); no, we'll see how, at numerous other critical junctures, you instinctively took the wrong fork in the road whenever mathematical issues arose… henceforth, monsieur, as Joe Louis once said, 'You can run, but you just can't hide.'…."

Monday, June 6, 2005

Monday June 6, 2005

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Order and Disorder

From “Connoisseur of Chaos,”
by Wallace Stevens, in
Parts of a World, 1942:


I

A.  A violent order is a disorder; and
B.  A great disorder is an order.
    These Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)               

IV  

A.  Well, an old order is a violent one. This proves nothing.
    Just one more truth, one more
    Element in the immense disorder of truths.

B.  It is April as I write. The wind
    Is blowing after days of constant rain.
    All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
    But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
    To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
    A great disorder is an order.
    Now, A And B are not like statuary, posed
    For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
    On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.

V

    The pensive man . . . He sees that eagle float
    For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

Related material:
“Derrida on Plato on writing says ‘In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply EXTERNAL to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.’ “

Peter J. Leithart

See also

Skewed Mirrors,
Sept. 14, 2003


“Evil did not  have the last word.”
Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone
a last a loved a long the


PARIS,
1922-1939

“There is never any ending to Paris.”
— Ernest Hemingway

Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Tuesday April 5, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:17 pm
Art History:
The Pope of Hope

At the Vatican on
Shakespeare's Birthday
(See Log24.net,
Oct. 4, 2002)

See also the iconology
what Dan Brown in
The Da Vinci Code
  calls "symbology" —
of Pandora's Box
at Log24.net,
March 10, 2005:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050310-Nell2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

"Man and woman are a pair of locked caskets,
each containing the key to the other."

Baroness Karen Blixen

"Karol Wojtyla had looked into
the heart of darkness–
and at the heart of darkness
discovered reason
for an indomitable hope.

He lived on the far side of
the greatest catastrophe
in human history,
the death of the Son of God,
and knew that evil
did not have the last word.
This is the key…."

Richard John Neuhaus,
April 4, 2005

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050405-JoyceGeometry.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Finnegans Wake, p. 293,
"the lazily eye of his lapis"

 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050403-StPetersSq3.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

Perette Elizabeth Michelli on the Ovato Tondo:

 

"Notice how the Pope turns out to be
at the center of the breaking and
redefining of the Classical system."

"Derrida on Plato on writing says 'In order for these contrary values (good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be in opposition, each of the terms must be simply EXTERNAL to the other, which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all possible opposition.' "

Peter J. Leithart

See also


Skewed Mirrors
,
Sept. 14, 2003

"Evil did not  have the last word."
Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005

Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone
a last a loved a long the

PARIS,
1922-1939

"There is never any ending to Paris."
— Ernest Hemingway

For the first word, see Louis Armand on
Lethe, erinnerung, and riverrun.

See also the following passage,
linked to on the Easter Vigil, 2005:

  You will find to the left of the House of Hades
    a spring,
  And by the side thereof standing
    a white cypress.
  To this spring approach not near.
  But you shall find another,
    from the lake of Memory
  Cold water flowing forth, and there are
    guardians before it.
  Say, "I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven;
  But my race is of Heaven alone.
    This you know yourselves.
  But I am parched with thirst and I perish.
    Give me quickly
  The cold water flowing forth
    from the lake of Memory."

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Tuesday March 22, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:01 pm

Make a Différance

From Frida Saal's
Lacan The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Diamond.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. Derrida:

"Our proposal includes the lozenge (diamond) in between the names, because in the relationship / non-relationship that is established among them, a tension is created that implies simultaneously a union and a disjunction, in the perspective of a theoretical encounter that is at the same time necessary and impossible. That is the meaning of the lozenge that joins and separates the two proper names. For that reason their respective works become totally non-superposable and at the same time they were built with an awareness, or at least a partial awareness, of each other. What prevails between both of them is the différance, the Derridean signifier that will become one of the main issues in this presentation."

 


From a Contemporary Literary Theory website:

"Différance is that which all signs have, what constitutes them as signs, as signs are not that to which they refer: i) they differ, and hence open a space from that which they represent, and ii) they defer, and hence open up a temporal chain, or, participate in temporality. As well, following de Sassure's famous argument, signs 'mean' by differing from other signs. The coined word 'différance' refers to at once the differing and the deferring of signs. Taken to the ontological level†, the differing and deferring of signs from what they mean, means that every sign repeats the creation of space and time; and ultimately, that différance is the ultimate phenomenon in the universe, an operation that is not an operation, both active and passive, that which enables and results from Being itself."

From a text purchased on
Make a Difference Day, Oct. 23, 1999:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Fig39.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.22. Without using the Pythagorean Theorem prove that the hypotenuse of  an isosceles right triangle will have the length The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Sqtr2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.  if the equal legs have the length 1.  Suggestion: Consider the similar triangles in Fig. 39.
23.  The ancient Greeks regarded the Pythagorean Theorem as involving areas, and they proved it by means of areas.  We cannot do so now because we have not yet considered the idea of area.  Assuming for the moment, however, the idea of the area of a square, use this idea instead of similar triangles and proportion in Ex. 22 above to show that x = The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Sqtr2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. .

 

— Page 98 of Basic Geometry, by George David Birkhoff, Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University, and Ralph Beatley, Associate Professor of Education at Harvard University (Scott, Foresman 1941)



Though it may be true, as the president of Harvard recently surmised, that women are inherently inferior to men at abstract thought — in particular, pure mathematics*  — they may in other respects be quite superior to men:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050322-Reba2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The above is from October 1999.
See also Naturalized Epistemology,
from Women's History Month, 2001.

* See the remarks of Frida Saal above and of Barbara Johnson on mathematics (The Shining of May 29, cited in Readings for St. Patrick's Day).


† For the diamond symbol at "the ontological level," see Modal Theology, Feb. 21, 2005.  See also Socrates on the immortality of the soul in Plato's Meno, source of the above Basic Geometry diamond.

Friday, July 25, 2003

Friday July 25, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:59 pm

Realism in Literature:
Under the Volcano

Mexican Volcano Blast
Scares Residents

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 11:13 p.m. EDT Friday, July 25, 2003

PUEBLA, Mexico (AP) — Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano shot glowing rock and ash high into the air Friday night, triggering a thunderous explosion that panicked some residents in nearby communities.

Here are 3 webcam views of the volcano.   Nothing to see at the moment.

Literary background:

Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano,

Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star,

A Mass for Lucero,

Shining Forth,

and, as background for today’s earlier entry on Platonism and Derrida,

The Shining of May 29.

Vignette

For more on Plato and Christian theology, consult the highly emotional site

Further Into the Depths of Satan:

“…in The Last Battle on page 170 [C. S.] Lewis has Digory saying, ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato.’ Now, Lewis calls Plato ‘an overwhelming theological genius’ (Reflections on the Psalms, p. 80)….”

The title “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” along with the volcano readings above, suggests a reading from a related site:

Gollum and the Mystery of Evil:

“Gollum here clearly represents Frodo’s hidden self. It is ‘as if we are witnessing the darkest night of the soul and one side attempting to master the other’ (Jane Chance 102). Then Frodo, whose finger has been bitten off, cries out, and Gollum holds the Ring aloft, shrieking: ‘Precious, precious, precious! My Precious! O my Precious!’ (RK, VI, 249). At this point, stepping too near the edge, he falls into the volcano, taking the Ring with him. With this, the mountain shakes.’ “

In the above two-step vignette, the part of Gollum is played by the author of “Further Into the Depths of Satan,” who called  C. S. Lewis a fool “that was and is extremely useful to his father the devil.”

See Matthew 5:22: “…whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” 

Friday July 25, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:24 pm

For Jung’s 7/26 Birthday:
A Logocentric Meditation

Leftist academics are trying to pull a fast one again.  An essay in the most prominent American mathematical publication tries to disguise a leftist attack on Christian theology as harmless philosophical woolgathering.

In a review of Vladimir Tasic’s Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought, the reviewer, Michael Harris, is being less than candid when he discusses Derrida’s use of “logocentrism”:

“Derrida uses the term ‘logocentrism’… as ‘the metaphysics of phonetic writing’….”

Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2003, page 792

We find a rather different version of logocentrism in Tasic’s own Sept. 24, 2001, lecture “Poststructuralism and Deconstruction: A Mathematical History,” which is “an abridged version of some arguments” in Tasic’s book on mathematics and postmodernism:

“Derrida apparently also employs certain ideas of formalist mathematics in his critique of idealist metaphysics: for example, he is on record saying that ‘the effective progress of mathematical notation goes along with the deconstruction of metaphysics.’

Derrida’s position is rather subtle. I think it can be interpreted as a valiant sublation of two completely opposed schools in mathematical philosophy. For this reason it is not possible to reduce it to a readily available philosophy of mathematics. One could perhaps say that Derrida continues and critically reworks Heidegger’s attempt to ‘deconstruct’ traditional metaphysics, and that his method is more ‘mathematical’ than Heidegger’s because he has at his disposal the entire pseudo-mathematical tradition of structuralist thought. He has himself implied in an interview given to Julia Kristeva that mathematics could be used to challenge ‘logocentric theology,’ and hence it does not seem unreasonable to try looking for the mathematical roots of his philosophy.”

The unsuspecting reader would not know from Harris’s review that Derrida’s main concern is not mathematics, but theology.  His ‘deconstruction of metaphysics’ is actually an attack on Christian theology.

From “Derrida and Deconstruction,” by David Arneson, a University of Manitoba professor and writer on literary theory:

Logocentrism: ‘In the beginning was the word.’ Logocentrism is the belief that knowledge is rooted in a primeval language (now lost) given by God to humans. God (or some other transcendental signifier: the Idea, the Great Spirit, the Self, etc.) acts a foundation for all our thought, language and action. He is the truth whose manifestation is the world.”

Some further background, putting my July 23 entry on Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in the proper context:

Part I.  The Roots of Structuralism

“Literary science had to have a firm theoretical basis…”

Part II.  Structuralism/Poststructuralism

“Most [structuralists] insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless.”

Part III.  Structuralism and
Jung’s Archetypes

Jung’s “theories, like those of Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss, command for myth a central cultural position, unassailable by reductive intellectual methods or procedures.”

And so we are back to logocentrism, with the Logos — God in the form of story, myth, or archetype — in the “central cultural position.”

What does all this have to do with mathematics?  See

Plato’s Diamond,

Rosalind Krauss on Art –

“the Klein group (much beloved of Structuralists)”

Another Michael Harris Essay, Note 47 –

“From Krauss’s article I learned that the Klein group is also called the Piaget group.”

and Jung on Quaternity:
Beyond the Fringe –

“…there is no denying the fact that [analytical] psychology, like an illegitimate child of the spirit, leads an esoteric, special existence beyond the fringe of what is generally acknowledged to be the academic world.”

What attitude should mathematicians have towards all this?

Towards postmodern French
atheist literary/art theorists –

Mathematicians should adopt the attitude toward “the demimonde of chic academic theorizing” expressed in Roger Kimball’s essay, Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss.

Towards logocentric German
Christian literary/art theorists –

Mathematicians should, of course, adopt a posture of humble respect, tugging their forelocks and admitting their ignorance of Christian theology.  They should then, if sincere in their desire to honestly learn something about logocentric philosophy, begin by consulting the website

The Quest for the Fiction of an Absolute.

For a better known, if similarly disrespected, “illegitimate child of the spirit,” see my July 22 entry.

Monday, March 24, 2003

Monday March 24, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:52 pm

Orwell’s question, according to
an admirer of leftist Noam Chomsky:

“When so much of the BS is right out in the open,
why is it that we know so little about it?
Why don’t we see what’s right in front of our eyes?”


Oscar
Deep Chomsky:
Lying, Truth-Telling,
and the Social Order
 
 
 
 
 Michael
 Moore

“First of all, I’d like to thank the Academy….”
— Quotation attributed to Plato

The New Yorker of March 31, 2003, discusses leftist academic Noam Chomsky.  The online edition provides a web page listing pro-Chomsky links.

Chomsky’s influence is based in part on the popularity of his half-baked theories on linguistics, starting in the 1950’s with “deep structure” and “transformational,” or “generative,” grammar.

Chomsky has abandoned many of his previous ideas and currently touts what he calls The Minimalist Program.

For some background on Chomsky’s recent linguistic notions, see the expository essay “Syntactic Theory,” by Elly van Gelderen of the Arizona State University English Department.  Van Gelderen lists her leftist political agenda on her “Other Interests” page.  Her department may serve as an example of how leftists have converted many English departments in American universities to propaganda factories.

Some attacks on Chomsky’s scholarship:

The Emperor’s New Linguistics

The New Grammarians’ Funeral

Beyond Chomsky

Could Chomsky Be Wrong? 

Forty-four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken

Call for Papers, Chomsky 2003

Chomsky’s (Mis)Understanding of Human Thinking

Anatomy of a Revolution… Chomsky in 1962

…Linguistic Theory: The Rationality of Noam Chomsky

A Bibliography

Some attacks on Chomsky’s propaganda:

LeftWatch.com Chomsky page

Destructive Generation excerpt

The Sick Mind of Noam Chomsky

Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers

Chomsky and Plato’s Diamond

Like another purveyor of leftist nonsense, Jacques Derrida, Chomsky is fond of citing Plato as a precedent.  In particular, what Chomsky calls “Plato’s problem” is discussed in Plato’s Meno.  For a look at the diamond figure that plays a central role in that dialogue, see Diamond Theory.  For an excellent overview of related material in Plato, see Theory of Forms.

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