<html><head><meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark"></head><body><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">From 00eacd3a5e8d8dab39e30d56a8f7c73c7cd8423f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: grr &lt;grr@lo2.org&gt;
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2024 01:09:13 -0400
Subject: break chapters out into individual files,  hopefully helps editors

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+\chapter{}
+
+The limitations of the new information
+languages, the limitations of the machines,
+storages, operating systems, circuitry, machine-compatible logic, programs diminish
+what was once far richer. The old words
+were broader; they packed complexes of
+implication within them; their ambiguities
+allowed for richness and latitude, for rethinking, redefinition from time to time.
+They contain treasuries of implication within them; the \enquote{amounts} of information they
+contain are staggering. Consider Eliot's \booktitle{The Wasteland}:
+
+How do you represent, in terms of specification, and thus bits of information (if that
+is even the way to put it) the endless galaxy of implications contained in Eliot's poem?
+In the first place the poem is a rhythmic index, a memory-system. The allusive and
+apparently self-contained word or phrase opens up into other poems, and histories.
+That is to say they are references to memory
+storages. The first line reads \textquote{April is the cruelest month...} 
+\emph{All} Aprils included;
+the April of Chaucer, the April/Easter of the
+crucifixion, \booktitle{The Divine Comedy}, all the
+Aprils contained in \booktitle{The Golden Bough}, and
+all the rites of spring, sacrifices and renewals
+to insure fertility, of dying and being planted
+in the earth to spring up in a new form. Are
+we to mix our terms here? For example,
+political, social, economic conditions, to say
+nothing of genetic evolutionary and \enquote{adaptive strategies} 
+and continuities to be considered as the stuff of literary concerns\ldots\ at
+least not \emph{directly}.\footnote{Although the naturalists had tried to meld science into literature.}
+Nor had passion, hatred, character, conflict,
+ceremony been allowed to be part of science.
+But once we consider the universe to be
+language, information, then fiction and
+magic permeates it all. When experience and
+reality are processed by computer, the usual
+domains and disciplines are mixable. Once
+discrete realms shatter again, their languages
+melt, float, interface. Multi-lateral Pythagoreanism. But then, hadn't this modern fusion
+of realms been anticipated by dreams and surrealism,
+but in a non-quantified, anti-particleized way?
+
+Agriculture itself as a metaphor for death,
+all resurrection, and conversely. In ancient
+thought, of course, the spoken and acted-out
+rite is a ceremony pre-operational to planting: it is a planning and management 
+system. It \emph{precedes} the actuality of material life, as the modern rite of manipulating the memory of past and future wheat crops inherant
+in money \emph{precedes} ali spring plantings and
+growths.
+
+There is the question of metaphor and
+simile, which the computer \emph{cannot} handle
+unless given specific instructions, and then
+within a limited set of circumstances (which
+may grow, but becomes unwieldy). Metaphor
+is a form of \emph{fused association}, sometimes of
+completely \emph{unrelated} terms (except in the
+mind ofa poet, novelist, or advertising copywriter), to create a third term, but in a pecu-
+liar way. In the world of program-driven
+computers, one list of items may be matched
+to another list. What is compared are two or
+more strings of \emph{stored-up impulses} (given in
+one or another set of computer languages).
+Beneath, on the level of circuitry and
+machine-language, something different happens than thought. \emph{Items are not being
+compared.}
+
+All items in natural language are not
+bounded by the compartmentalization required by a computer: they have no true
+boundaries. Truly different sets of items
+\emph{cannot} be compared unless a tedious and
+endless program is written on the order of "if
+[\![ this \ldots\ ]\!] then [\![ that \ldots\ ]\!]" 
+An algorithm describing the way metaphors are generated can
+be easily written; it cannot be implemented
+or generated by a computer language. The
+instructions could be written such that
+\enquote{whenever \enquote{April,} then \enquote{cruel}}, but only
+applies to these terms whenever \enquote{April} and
+\enquote{cruel} appear. But supposing that another
+poet appears, working out of another framework, to speak of April in conjunction with
+the autumns of the southern hemisphere?
+
+In order to unlock the poem's meaning,
+one already has to have access to a vast
+knowledge of literary, religious, anthropological, political, historic, mythological and
+psychological compilations (and those edited) in order to summon up the full text of
+references. The way the fragments are allusively juxtaposed may be analogized to the
+way information is stored, organized and
+sequenced on a disc ... in non-sequential
+fragments with memory addresses. Well and
+good.
+
+It may be said that the retrieval process of
+the brain-body is somewhat like the retrieval
+process in a computer, but there are significant differences. (That is if anyone knows
+what goes on in the brain). The computer was
+orginally likened to the brain. The terms
+were reversed and the brain was likened to
+the computer, leading to ridiculous assesments—tried out experimentally—that the
+brain \enquote{processed} information in an on and
+off way. Later this was modifed and it was
+said that the brain \enquote{parallel-processed.} The
+mental processes are associational and quasi-random, and frequently get confused, yielding felicitous mixes. The computer processes
+are much more rigid and limited. It is when,
+in the poem, the fragments are fused that the
+difference becomes more apparent. The
+computer cannot fuse associations into a
+seamless whole.
+
+Fiction, drama, poetry, non-quantifiable
+psychology and other traditional modes of
+discourse are partial but stand for wholes;
+they have long incorporated complex modes
+of organization of people, events, matter into
+dramatic sequences ... novels, plays, epics,
+poems, psychological theories ... Creating
+indices, hierarchies, queues, maps, models,
+simulations, translations, sets, classes are
+some of the problems raised by information
+handling. Each reorganization raises these
+problems again and again in new ways.
+
+All literary works contain, among other
+things, indices and every such work solves
+the problem of hierarchy, or of queueing
+without specifically delineating these modes
+of sorting as problems. Literaure does not
+accept polarities as absolute oppositions.
+Dialectics is the emanation of crippled and
+self-constrained minds ... the realm, really,
+of accountants. Hierarchy? It's all in Dante.
+Sets? Borges deals with them wittily. Indexes? See Eliot. In literature (and literary
+psychology ... such as Freud's or Jung's) all
+these modes are dynamic, allusive, \emph{multireferential.} 
+As for set-theory, this is, of
+course, the mathematician's and logician's
+whimsey. As in life, literature shatters sets.
+
+In real life, all sets are fuzzy. For example;
+in a complex, transnational, transtemporal
+holding company which owns other companies and parts 
+of companies and constantly seeks to conceal itself behind a thousand
+portals represented by the shell-names of
+companies distributed in a lot of countries,
+which is the set of all sets? The subsidiary or
+subset may contain (by control) the set of all
+sets. In fact, taken all in all, the contiguity of
+economic (and political) activity eventually
+links and sends the representations of each
+part of itself at incredible speeds to every
+other economic and political body \emph{in the
+world} these days, especially in the age of
+advanced telematics. In the modern world,
+America, France, the USSR
+(since transnationals overlap their boundaries) ... are indeed fuzzy sets, better expressed in literary
+language... indeed, the language of \booktitle{Finnegan's Wake}. (And one may say that a set,
+called for convenience Mafia, is conjoined
+and interpenetrates those sets called corporations and those sets called governments
+through other interpretive realms called
+politics, by using a set-violating, economic
+activity called bribing... It is, to be sure,
+primarily and economic organization, but
+on the other hand, requires primitive rituals
+as part of its sustaining power.)
+
+The way of the fiction writer and mythmaker is a function of long stores of knowledge, arrayed in certain ways, drawing from
+a taken-for-granted memory bank. The world of information processing is a world of partial faiths and fictions. Tests for truth that
+match reality are meaningless in this world: inner consistency is what counts.
+
+In literature (its application to the new information world will soon emerge) one
+converts the experiences of the self and
+others into words. (What sensors does one
+use to acquire the experience of others?
+Through what set of filters --- ideas, technology, legends, myths, psychological and social theories, artificial memory/intelligence --- 
+does one sift one's own personal experience?) The writer uses imagery, similes,
+symbols, signs, translations, conversions, comparisons,
+metaphors, tropes, compact representation, character, emotion, conflict,
+drama in certain limited situations. All
+dictated by a body of traditions. Experience,
+real people, furniture, space, action, geometry, geology, geography are converted into
+evocative words and are arranged into some new structure, perhaps
+more neatly --- or more amusingly, or startlingly --- than in life.
+Fiction, poetry, drama are programs designed
+to transmit energy which \emph{amplifies} as it goes
+through its \enquote{circuits.} There is selection.
+One cannot write about everything.
+
+The compilers and refiners, the preservers and organizers, the abridgers who assembled and trimmed the treasure, the great
+canon of literature (surely there was always editing and censorship involved), assert that
+their Great creations represent whole populations ... Man and Woman writ large. But
+in fact these are \emph{sampling} techniques, which
+can provisionally be said to have been invented by the Greek Tragedians. But what is
+left out? Among other things, the living stuff
+of humans, which involves neuronic, hormonal, enzymatic, chemical, metabolic, genetic, electromagnetic activity had not been
+fit for literary language. Yet one could come
+up with a prototypical set of biological reactions accompanying (indeed, initiating and
+sustaining) mythological, literary and religious prototypes and archetypes.
+
+When Proust bites into the tea-soaked
+Madeleine, the taste is a stimulus to releasing memory which then pours out and is
+recorded as a printout. We have a report of
+Proust's brain operating, but in another language. We could also write a biochemical
+essay which replicates the event. We could
+also say that Proust wrote a treatise on information storage and retrieval, on the long and
+short-term memory, in which the tea-soaked
+Madeleine is the key word, and the instruction, that begins the memory dump.
+
+When a marketing study is prepared,
+psychology and sociology is used to create
+the stimuli, the association of ideas that will
+generate the \emph{feeling} which reaches the memory to release biochemicals, electrical charges,
+symbols. All emotions, behaviors, dramas
+and tastes are tallied, sampled and compared with standardized and representative
+beings: prototypes, concurrent archetypes:
+the hypostatic buyer. Frequently life-signs are monitored by biological telemetering
+equipment. But, at the same time, the marketers must try to turn diverse populations
+into Standard Consumers; infecting the archetypal consumer's memory with prototypical
+hunger. Persuasion.
+
+\emph{True} archetypes, \emph{original} archetypes, prototypical figures, their deeds and emotions
+are communicated down through the ages.
+From time to time their attributes are altered
+to adjust to newer ages. These are used as
+templates to force people into those imageforms. Consider that message called \emph{Oedipus}
+and how it has been used again and again.
+But were such recorded, aboriginal events
+prototypical? Who, what set of people made
+them that way and why? If Jung talks about
+the collective unconcious, one must not only
+ask, \enquote{who collected it?}, but who keeps
+reminding us? And what are we not reminded of? Who speaks of the archetypal
+revolutionary, the primal guerrilla?
+
+Some set of \enquote{orginal,} transcribed events
+and characters are made into standards,
+broadcast and rebroadcast. Those who follow
+are made to resonate to the original
+signal. People through the ages are made
+into transcievers. The emotion of a perhaps
+once-lived life in turn gains power to motivate people across time and space. In fact,
+the people, the transcievers, the relays, are
+frequently more emotionally moved by these
+compulsive fictions than by their own life or
+the people they live among. They are taught
+to screen their own experience through
+these long-transmitted stereotypes, reassessing their own lives, comparing, matching,
+referencing, denying what they are in fact
+living out, viewing what is around them
+through mediational scrims.
+
+Some humans, fearing death, watch the
+butterfly emerge from its chrysalis, or they
+see the seed planted, going into the winterdead ground, and grow up as grain, and
+dream of the time when they can metamorphose, transubstantiate into angels and gods.
+The whole algorithm of agriculture is described in Christian thought, represented by
+a human\slash divine figure in its metamorphoses
+into divinity. So they invent varieties of
+immortality. The way to immortality lies
+through death; it begins with a dissolution, a
+liquidation and ends with a reconstruction,
+recombination, resurrection.
+
+But the progrssive series of deaths and
+resurrections lead somewhere. (Not \enquote{true}
+death, for energy and matter are conserved.)
+If we view the world, the universe in a
+quantum-operational sense,
+in which the observor intervenes in the observed, then, as
+we have said, \enquote{Mind} permeates the universe and must constantly be sustained and
+reproduced or the universe will cease to
+exist. Thus, \emph{all} the instruments of perception, of past and present, place mind in the
+univese and the universe in\slash as\slash of mind. True, the referential frameworks change and
+the rules change. Thus dreams permeate through skins, flow through all boundaries
+and are shuttled back and forth in history;
+empty space becomes a plenum which manifests itself into sometimes virtual entities,
+fields of particles and waves, sometimes real
+and permanent entities which are viewed
+with astonishment. Life is an illusion; the
+flow, the dance, the perpetuation and evolution of language is all, and bodies lyse into
+language, symbols, matter, space, velocity, energy, bodies, money... (Perhaps humans
+resist this liquidity. When humans are converted into economic symbols, one form of
+capital, the being is liquified, transsubstantiated into capital. What is capital but a set of
+numbers which will metamorphose again into factories or other humans?) The first law
+of thermodynamics tells us that matter and energy are conserved. Then the instruments
+that view these events are also conserved. That is to say mind is eternal. (Really?) And
+perhaps, so is time. And clearly we can see the whole program of the birth, life and
+death of the universe speeded up for us in a reconstructive program.
+But more, we can now populate our computer with a plethora
+of virtual, interconnecting and concurrent spaces and minds, as the Kaballists had proposed so long ago. Perhaps we will see
+them, since these fictions will have themselves become instruments of perception.
+
+In the pre-Judeo\slash Christian past, the metamorphoses were circular or cyclical, 
+happening without any purposive, long-range
+strategy. The Jews and Christians introduced
+two complementary --- yet opposing --- long-range strategies; non-repeating, goal-oriented
+history, which led to collective immortality,
+out of which sprung metaphysical evolution. Events in time were arranged in an
+ascending sequence leading to collective
+death, transfiguration, resurrection and escape into paradise ... a reuniting with that
+from which they had originally been seperated from.
+
+With the advent of the industrial-scientific-technological-capital
+revolutions, the transformation programs \emph{appeared} to be secular. Events were arranged into a \emph{non-}Judeo\slash Christian, long range strategy of transcendance. \emph{Qualitative}, metaphysical transubstantiation was replaced by an accretive, recombinatorial, technology-assisted march
+toward transubstantiation (since everything
+can be prised apart into units, numbered and
+rearranged). This invention was called progress, though still incorporating the old notions of immortality. At certain stages, the
+accumulation would reach a critical mass
+and a quantum leap into a new period would
+take place. Permanent revolution. This was a
+reaction to that perpetuated, obsessive dream
+of a faded paradise, the Roman Empire, and
+the descent into Feudal chaos. How many
+expulsions from timeless and non-progressive paradisos haunt our \emph{collected memory}?
+This kind of thinking led to concepis of
+rational forecasting, retrocasting, planning,
+management.
+
+But since events had to be scheduled in a
+practical, materialistic, exponentially rising
+line, in order to gain escape-velocity,
+in order to escape entropic fate, it was clear that
+man's ascendant journey required a series
+of engineered metamorphoses. The mechanisms of natural evolution seemed to be
+gone. And anyway, Man wouldn't let any
+new form that emerged from him, challenge
+him. This meant that the journey toward
+immortality required tapping the earth's and
+the universe's energy. And if one were to
+harness the universe's energy, that would
+cost a lot, and anyway, most people, while
+fearing death, were not nescessarily interested in immortality: the enterprise had to be
+sold. Enter \booktitle{Faust}.
+
+\booktitle{Faust} stands for a key word, one of many
+in a directory of transcendance strategies.
+\booktitle{The Divine Comedy} is another. \booktitle{Faust} is
+dynamic and action-oriented: Dante is static.
+Dante (and The Church) encouraged saving
+of energy and cutting down of indulgence-expenditure --- called sin --- while Faust encouraged profligacy as a means toward
+progress.
+
+One general form of the transcendance
+algorithm runs this way: Hero seeks, or is
+impelled to seek knowledge; hero has dream,
+or dies, or passes into another realm; the
+new, or next world is revealed; hero comes
+back, or leaves directions in the form of a
+book. Note the role of knowledge or information.
+
+\booktitle{Faust} is the great poetic myth representing
+the transition from the medieval to the modern age, from medievalism to capitalism,
+from agricultural\slash feudal society to industrial
+(and then to the information society), from
+one kind of magic to another. (And it is
+Eliot's lament that we had taken the wrong
+path.) \booktitle{Faust}'s ascent is built around one
+concrete and one mystic project. The concrete project involves a dam and land-reclaimation. 
+\booktitle{Faust} is in every marketing strategy
+the computer and software manufacturers
+generate. The mystic project is the transubstantiation of, the rejection of the body and
+the earthly life, earthly events and time,
+history, and mundane procreation, utilizing
+a meta-sexual image. \booktitle{Faust}
+becomes, as it were, one of the programs of modern society.
+The dependance on mystic knowledge, information, is very strong.
+
-- 
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