From: PMC-Talk Two Threads: Cladistics and Cut-Ups
| September 25, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 03, Number 1, September 1992 |
|
(Excerpted from the Discussion Group PMC-talk@ncsuvm, 7/92-8/92)
Editors’ Note:
This issue of Postmodern Culture inaugurates a new feature, FROM: PMC-TALK. Two threads from recent discussion on PMC-TALK are included here, one concerning cladistics–the tree-structured organization of knowledge–and one concerning cut-ups–the human or automated re-organization of “found” text. This conjunction of topics is interesting for several reasons. First, it highlights two conflicting approaches to the logos, one imposing or discovering coherence and structure, the other disordering and decentering the texts it cannibalizes, sometimes producing isolated moments of surprising pertinence and often simply devolving into incoherence. Second, the outcome of the two discussions is noteworthy: the cladistics thread proceeds in an orderly and dispassionate manner, and ends in a scholarly bibliography; by contrast, the cut-ups thread provokes some quite visceral reactions, and eventually turns back on itself to examine the participants’ reactions to the grafting and disordering of their own texts. As one of the discussants points out, Deleuze and Guattari’s opposition of tree-like and rhizome-like structures of knowledge is being played out in these parallel, and sometimes intersecting, threads. Finally, this opposition, and the cut-up method in particular, are echoed in other parts of this issue of Postmodern Culture–not only in John Tranter’s Popular Culture column (on “BrekDown,” a computer program which produces stylistically consistent cut-ups of literary texts), but also in Larry McCaffery’s introduction and in most of the fiction collected in the issue.
Contents
Thread #1: Cladistics
Thread #2: Cut-Ups
Thread #1: Cladistics
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 13:33 CDT From: "Robert J. OHara" Subject: Trees of history Veterans of PMC-TALK may remember some discussions we have had over the last couple of years on evolutionary biology and 'postmodern science'. I would like to draw on the collective wisdom of the group again to search out some possible references on a related topic. I have an interest in a class of diagrams that may be called 'trees of history'. These include evolutionary trees, trees of language history (showing, for example, the descent of the Indo-European languages), 'stemmata' of manuscripts that show how an ancient text was copied and altered over time, and so on. The conceptual ancestors of these diagrams are of course diagrams of human genealogy. The comparative study of such diagrams is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and it's pretty difficult to get a grasp on the literature that is relevant to it. I have been assembling a rough bibliography on the history and theory of trees of history in the specific fields of evolution, linguistics, and textual criticism. Evolution is my specialty so I have the best handle on the literature in that area; stemmatics and linguistics are a little fuzzier to me, but I have a moderately good handle on them now as well (with respect to tree diagrams, that is). My question for the list is this: Have any of you seen trees of history used in other contexts, for objects other than species, languages, manuscripts, or human families? I know of a few examples, like Stephen Toulmin's tree diagrams of disciplinary development in his _Human Understanding_ (1973), and I once saw a poster that showed a 'Tree of Rock and Roll'. I would like very much to hear of examples from any other fields. I am more interested in scholarly uses of such diagrams than in popular ones, and would be particularly pleased to find examples that show some theoretical sophistication (such as a discussion of how the diagram was put together, or what it represents). I recognize that this question, like many that that come up here, has the potential to connect to a wide range of issues in historical representation, visual imagery, the theory of metaphor, and on and on. For my own convenience I would like to try to confine the discussion (if any) just to tree diagrams, and to specifically historical ones at that. There are many other forms of tree diagrams that are not historical: sentence diagrams, all sorts of logical classifications, 'trees of Porphyry', etc. These I specifically want to _exclude_ from consideration, as they are not in any sense genealogical or historical. For an indication of my own approach to the topic see 'Telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history', _Biology and Philosophy_, 7:135-160 (1992). I'd be glad to send a reprint to anyone who is interested; just send me a snailmail address. I can also provide via email a copy of the rough bibliography on trees of history to anyone who is interested. Many thanks. Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum University of Wisconsin - Madison
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 92 22:55:56 EDT From: Eric Rabkin Subject: Digest Ending 7-23-92 If I'm properly informed, there is a whole field devoted to this and it's called 'cladistics.' A quick keyword check of MIRLYN (U of Michigan's e-catalog) shows 10 bks, most with biological foci, but I know from talking to a friend who works in the field that the laborers therein consider it general. I hope this helps. Eric Eric Rabkin esrabkin@umichum.bitnet Department of English esrabkin@um.cc.umich.edu University of Michigan office: 313-764-2553 Ann Arbor MI 48109-1045 dept : 313-764-6330
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 22:24 CDT
From: "Robert J. OHara"
Subject: Trees of history/Cladistic analysis
Thanks to Eric Rabkin for mentioning cladistics, a.k.a. cladistic
analysis, in the context of my query about "trees of history".
Cladistic analysis is the part of systematic biology that is
particularly concerned with reconstructing evolutionary history.
This is in fact my own specialty, so I do have a fair sense of
the cladistic literature now, though it is growing very rapidly.
The question of the generality of cladistic principles and
methods is one of the things that is of particular interest to
me. In a loose sense they do appear to be general: for example,
the cladistic idea that only derived or "apomorphic" states of
characters identify branches of the evolutionary tree is the same
as the principle of "shared innovation" in historical
linguistics, and the idea of "indicative errors" in textual
criticism. Cladistic analysis tends to disregard, however, the
possibility of "horizontal transmission" across the tree,
something that occurs rather rarely in evolution, but much more
often in language and manuscript histories. To those interested
in the parallels among the various historical sciences it's all
extremely interesting.
There is one pioneering volume that discusses many of the
similarities and differences among various cladistically oriented
disciplines (evolution, linguistics, and textual criticism), and
it may be of interest to some people:
Hoenigswald, H. M., & L. F. Weiner, eds. 1987. Biological
Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary
Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bob O'Hara, RJO@WISCMACC.bitnet
Department of Philosophy and The Zoological Museum
University of Wisconsin - Madison
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Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 16:04:34 EDT
Reposted From: "HUMANIST: Humanities Computing"
Subject: 6.0165 Textual Criticism Challenge (1/35)
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0165. Wednesday, 29 Jul
1992.
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 09:27:08 +0300
From: Victor_Caston@brown.edu
Subject: Re: Textual Criticism Challenge
I, for one, was impressed by the results of applying cladistic
analysis to textual criticism--the analogy seems so obvious (and
fruitful). In fact, while flipping through a recent issue of The
Economist, I came across an article on cladistic analysis that
drew the analogy in the other direction, explaining evolution
in terms of manuscript transmission. This is how the article
began:
"Imagine a medieval library with dozens of copies of Aristotle's
"On Comedy", all slightly different. Such differences, which
came about because the monks made errors when copying, can be
useful. By studying them you can see the order in which the
copies were made. Texts with a lot of errors in common are
recent and closely related. Their shared mistakes are echoes of
those in the text from which they were copied--their most recent
common ancestor. Texts with fewer error are closer to the
original.
"This technique--cladistic analysis--works as well for those
writing the history of | life as for those studying medieval
manuscripts. Instead of working with monastic errors, you use
the changes which evolution brings to one species or group, and
which it then bequeaths to its successors--shared derived
characteristics . . ." ("Charting Evolution: The Power of Two,"
The Economist, 11 July 1992, pp. 80-81)
If this is just coincidence, it's scandalous somebody didn't make
the application sooner.
*****************************************************************
Victor Caston victor_caston@brown.edu
Department of Philosophy
Box 1918 off: (401) 863-3219
Brown University dept: (401) 863-2718
Providence, RI 02912 fax: (401) 863-2719
*****************************************************************
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 92 22:34:38 EDT From: Carolyn Miller Subject: Re: Digest Ending 7-29-92 For Bob O'Hara: You might find that bibliometric studies of scholarly communication and disciplines provides another analogue to the tree-like representation of historical change. You mentioned Toulmin's diagrams in _Human Understanding_; the work I'm thinking of is related generally to his ideas, but the style is quite different. Early, big names in this field (which I don't know well myself) are Derek J. deSolla Price and Eugene Garfield (he of the Inst for Scientific Info empire). One article I have at hand includes a number of network diagrams, showing citation links (Garfield, "Citation Analysis as a Method of Historical Research into Science," in _Citation Indexing--Its Theory and Application in Science, Technology, and Humanities, Wiley, 1979). A more recent collection is _Scholarly Communication and Bibliometrics_, ed. Christine Borgman, Sage, 1990. I haven't looked at it myself but it may be the most comprehensive current source. Carolyn Miller Dept of English NC State Univ.
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 92 10:09:49 BST From: stephen clark Subject: Re: cladistics etc J.H.Woodger Biological Classification discussed this (my books are packed so I can't check the reference). While the manuscript tradition is a nice analogy it seems to follow from the claim as stated (that fewer errors = closer to original) that the latest OUP text is copied directly from the original.... Please give mediaeval copyists some credit for trying to correct errors in the text they were copying. So far there is, I suspect, no evidence that DNA does that! Stephen Clark Liverpool
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 20:36:25 CST From: Rick Francis Subject: Cladistics, remakes, translation, plagiarism... I have been following the discussion of cladistics with great interest, and I wonder if it might help with the sort of questions I've been asking. Here's one that might be interesting: How could one depict the transmission/translation of James M. Cain's _The Postman Always Rings Twice_? Novel: Published 1934 Let's start with the movies: French version, Le Dernier Tournant (Chenal, 1939) Unauthorized Italian version, Ossessione (Visconti, 1942) Visconti inspired by Renoir's advice, reportedly made without either the original or an accurate, complete translation Tay Garnett's US version (1946), with Cain's original title Two more French versions: Verneuil, Une Manche et la belle (What Price Murder) 1957 Chabrol's Les Noces rouges (Wedding in Blood), 1973 Rafelson's US remake in 1981, again with Cain's title, The Postman Always Rings Twice. (Uh, let's forget about translations into other languages for the moment.) Now how do you chart that? Was Rafelson more influenced by the novel, by Visconti, or by Garnett's _noir_ version? Are there any previous versions we can rule out? Even if you decide there are only two or three genetic sources, and feel you can determine relative influence, how do you depict it? What about trying to measure the influence of the medium into which one is translating/adapting? For example, wouldn't a neo-noir version in 1981 inevitably be influenced by Polanski's neo-noir _Chinatown_? (Certainly reception of Nicholson's face connects the two, and I kept thinking Jessica Lange was made to look like Faye Dunaway.) If you chart the novel's film adaptations in a straight linear way, you won't have any of that other stuff. And isn't entirely possible that someone would make a film that was much closer to, say, plot details of the novel (as Rafelson's film was at times, when compared to Garnett's), while stylistic details show the influence of intervening adaptations? How then to chart it, to show the closer/farther dynamics? For me the value and validity of an effective means of notation of genetic transmission of narratives would show up in its capacity to denote the various kinds of translation, whether it's Shakespeare from Holinshed, or Joyce's Ulysses from Homer's Odyssey, or Pound's Sextus Propertius, or a film adaptation of a Forster novel, Acker's works, or . . . If it can give you a language to distinguish those, you can bet I'll be interested in it! I confess near-total ignorance of cladistics, and I don't mean the tone of these questions to suggest I'm posing an impossible challenge to point out the limitations of cladistics. I think they are difficult questions, though, and perhaps the sort which cladistics can handle more efficiently than anything I'm aware of. Any help appreciated. Rick Francis C47805NF@WUVMD Dep't of Comp. Lit. Washington University One Brookings Drive St. Louis, MO 63130
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 19:06:38 -0400
From: ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu (jeremy ahouse)
Subject: Cladistic Caveats
I am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas (cladistics)
raise its head in the context of PMC. It gives the place a homey
feeling. I don't want to discourage the search for lineages of
thoughts of influence, but in much on contemporary (and not so
contemporary) cladistics one of the important (simplifying)
assumptions is that we (you? I?) assume that lineages always
bifurcate. This assumption seems particularly valid for
vertebrate species, "higher" plants, and taxa above the species
level. But the whole idea of looking for minimum evolution trees
( i.e. preferring trees that require the fewest reversals in a
character state) hangs on the hope that there isn't much lateral
diffusion of information across the tree. In phylogentic
inference (a goal for which cladistics is a preeminent tool) we
trust that evolution is an information preserving phenomenon and
that similarities are due to either common ancestors, convergent
function (a "good" solution to a problem, e.g. wings), or chance.
In as much as similarities are of the first kind we can infer the
relationships between lineages. Note that in my list no time
was given to lateral transfer of character states from one
lineage to another. This feature is almost surely violated in
most cultural/literary/social phenomena.
I hope this doesn't discourage, and I hope that I haven't
been too brief. Please let me know.
- Jeremy
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Jeremy Ahouse
Center for Complex Systems
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02254-9110
(617) 736-4954
ahouse@hydra.rose.brandeis.edu
From: rbrown@epas.utoronto.ca (R. Brown) Subject: Re: Cladistics Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 17:26:37 -0400 Regarding the metaphor of the branching tree, I would like to call attention both to its tendency to exist as and its rejection as a (dangerous) metaphor for the literary "tradition" post-colonial societies. Sneja Gunew, in her essay on Australian literature in _Nation and Narration_ (ed. Homi Bhabha) notes that in his 1935 manifesto, "The Foundations of Culture in Australia" (1935): "[P.R.] Stephensen argued that although Australian culture may have begun in Britain, 'a gum tree is not a branch of the oak'" (101).
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 92 20:47 CDT
From: Robert J. OHara
Subject: Cladistics
[....]
Cladistics or cladistic analysis is an approach to systematic
biology. Systematics used to be equated by many people with
classification; indeed that is probably the definition that
appears in most dictionaries today. But while the idea of
classification has long been a part of systematics, another idea
has existed along with classification, and that has been the idea
of "the natural system" (whence "systematics"), the idea of the
arrangement of the whole of living diversity. While
classifications have traditionally been represented in words,
"the natural system" has often been represented diagrammatically.
In the pre-evolutionary period the natural system was sometimes
compared to a map, with species arranged in some sort of abstract
space; alternatively, it was sometimes compared to a system of
nested circles or stars that blended into one another at their
points of contact. One of the oldest images of the natural
system is that of the Scala Naturae or Chain of Being, a linear
arrangement reaching "from monad to man". Arthur Lovejoy's
classic book _The Great Chain of Being_ is still the best history
of that particular view of natural diversity.
As naturalists came to accept evolution, the tree came to be the
principal model of the natural system, and evolutionary trees
came to be published with some regularity beginning in the late
1800s. "Tree" in this context does not mean a picture with leaves
and bark and that sort of thing, although some such evolutionary
"trees" have been drawn; it means simply a branching diagram,
like a genealogical chart, with lines connecting ancestors and
their descendants. (I will return to characteristics of the
diagrams themselves in a moment.)
Now while it is true that evolutionary trees have been drawn
since the mid-1800s, it is not stretching the truth too far to
say that systematists really only figured out how to reconstruct
them in the last thirty years. (Darwin's tree in the _Origin_ is
a hypothetical one; it only shows what an evolutionary tree would
be like if we really had one.) This is where cladistic analysis
comes in. Cladistic analysis is a method of historical
inference: it is a method for taking evidence that exists in the
present - the similarities and differences among a collection of
organisms under study - and using that evidence to reconstruct
the branching family tree of those organisms, and the sequence of
changes they have undergone in the course of their history.
Cladistic analysis has swept the field of systematics in the last
thirty years, and its development and adoption, in my view,
constitutes a genuine conceptual revolution, one that has not
only intellectual components, but all the characteristic
socio-disciplinary turmoil that accompanies a scientific
revolution as well (see David Hull's _Science as a Process_
(1988) for some discussion of that turmoil). It is very
important to understand that the development of cladistics has
been a conceptual revolution, rather than a technical one: there
is no reason that it could not have been developed in the 1860s,
and contrary to many misconceptions (some of which have been
promulgated by historically unconscious workers in systematics),
it does not depend upon computers, molecular biology, or any
other current technology, although computers can be used and are
used to make comparisons among different trees very quickly, and
molecular data can be incorporated into cladistic analysis just
surely as anatomical, physiological, or behavioral data can.
As a method of historical inference, cladistic analysis has many
insights to offer workers in fields outside of systematics I
think, but only if the objects whose history is of interest have
a reasonably clear tree-like pattern of ancestry and descent. In
linguistics, for example, it may be possible to apply cladistic
techniques to the reconstruction of the histories of language
families, and some steps have already been taken in that
direction by a few workers. Similarly, in the study of the
histories of manuscripts copied over many years from originals
that are now lost, cladistic techniques can be applied with good
success. Peter Robinson of Oxford and I have collaborated on the
application of cladistic techniques to the reconstruction of the
family tree of an Old Norse narrative that is known from about 40
different mss, and have a paper on the subject now in press in
_Research in Humanities Computing_. I would be happy to send a
copy of that paper to anyone who has an interest in these issues.
[....]
The technicalities of cladistic analysis can lead us into the
depths of evolutionary theory and statistical inference, a region
from which some have never returned. There is, however, a more
general issue that arises in the context of "trees of history",
one that may be of interest to more of the readers of PMC, and
that is the issue of historical representation. Cladistic
analysis is primarily a method of inference: a method of finding
out something that you don't already know. Once you have found
something out (or believe you have), you are then faced with the
problem of representing your knowledge, and in the case of
systematics this means drawing a tree. The problem of historical
representation in evolutionary biology has not been examined in
great detail, because the matter has usually been considered
unproblematic: you just look at your specimens, make your tree
(either by cladistic methods today, or by the earlier intuitive
and ill-defined methods), and that's that. It turns out,
however, that historical trees are very subtle representational
instruments, and they can be drawn and read in a great variety of
ways. Complex branches can be collapsed into simple branches,
events can be included and excluded, the tree can be given a
direction (a crown) based on some particular criterion, it can
show evolutionary "ascent" or "descent", "higher" and "lower"
organisms, and so on. The scientific value of many
representational devices that have been traditionally
incorporated into evolutionary trees is close to zero. Those
familiar with some of the general problems that have been
discussed in analytic philosophy of history or in narrative
theory will recognize many of the phenomena they are familiar
with, such as the foregrounding and backgrounding of selected
events, in evolutionary representations just as surely as in
conventional human histories. I have attempted to outline some
of these representational problems in a recent paper that may be
of interest to some people:
O'Hara, R. J. 1992. Telling the tree: narrative representation
and the study of evolutionary history. Biology and
Philosophy, 7:135-160.
As above, I would be happy to send a reprint to anyone who is
interested; just send me a snailmail address.
In connection with an interdisciplinary course I am planning I
have put together a working bibliography on "trees of history" in
a variety of disciplines (primarily evolution, linguistics, and
manuscript studies). I'll pass a copy on to the PMC editors and
ask them if they would put it on the PMC file server for general
retrieval.
Bob O'Hara
Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Date: 29 Aug 1992 20:02:41 -0400 (EDT) From: RJOHARA@UNCG.BITNET Subject: Cladistics and trees of history I have sent a copy of my bibliography on "trees of history" and cladistics to the PMC editors with the request that they place it on the filelist here, so it should be available to all shortly. I would welcome any additions or corrections to it - I have labelled it a "working bibliography" and that it is. [....] Bob O'Hara Robert J. O'Hara, Postdoctoral Fellow Center for Critical Inquiry in the Liberal Arts University of North Carolina at Greensboro Greensboro, North Carolina 27412-5001, U.S.A. RJOHARA@UNCG.bitnet RJOHARA@iris.uncg.edu
WORKING INTERDISCIPLINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY: 'TREES OF HISTORY' IN SYSTEMATICS, HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, AND STEMMATICS. Robert J. O'Hara, August 1992. Email: RJOHARA@UNCG.bitnet or RJOHARA@iris.uncg.edu. Suggestions for additions, deletions, and corrections are very welcome; my own field is systematics, so that is the area in which this list is most reliable. My object here is not to create an exhaustive bibliography, but rather a bibliography that will help advanced students in any one of these fields get a good sense of what has gone on and is going on in the other fields, with special reference to theory. Studies of particular biological taxa, language families, or manuscript traditions that do not have a theoretical or historical emphasis are generally excluded from this list. Asterisks indicate works that may be particularly useful to beginners. 1. Interdisciplinary Works 2. General and Theoretical Works - Systematics 3. General and Theoretical Works - Historical Linguistics 4. General and Theoretical Works - Stemmatics 5. Historical Works - Systematics 6. Historical Works - Historical Linguistics 7. Historical Works - Stemmatics 8. Trees of History Elsewhere 9. Miscellaneous Works on Evolution in Relation to Other Fields 1. INTERDISCIPLINARY WORKS Bateman, Richard, Ives Goddard, Richard T. O'Grady, Vicki A. Funk, Rich Mooi, W. J. Kress, & Peter Cannell. 1990. Speaking of forked tongues: the feasibility of reconciling human phylogeny and the history of language. Current Anthropology, 31:1-24. [See also responses and commentary on pp. 177-183, 315-316, 420-426.] Bender, M. L. 1976. Genetic classification of languages: genotype vs. phenotype. Language Sciences, 43:4-6. Flight, Colin. 1988. Bantu trees and some wider ramifications. African Languages and Cultures, 1:25-43. [Reanalyzes some linguistic data using the distance Wagner procedure from systematics.] Greenberg, Joseph H. 1957. Language and evolutionary theory. Pp. 56-65 in: Essays in Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1990. Language families and subgroupings, tree model and wave theory, and reconstruction of protolanguages. Pp. 441-454 in: Research Guide on Language Change (Edgar C. Polome, ed.). Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 48. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. [Short historical and theoretical discussion of the tree model and the principle of shared innovation (apomorphy), and the discovery of some of the limitations of trees in linguistics.] *Hoenigswald, Henry M., & Linda F. Wiener, eds. 1987. Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. [The most important single interdisciplinary collection, with papers on all three subjects.] Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1981. Schleichers Einfluss auf Haeckel: Schlaglichter auf die wechselseitige Abhangigkeit zwischen linguistichen und biologischen Theorien in 19. Jahrhundert. Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Sprachforschung, 95:1-21. [Reprinted in Koerner, 1989, Practicing Linguistic Historiography: Selected Essays, pp. 211-231, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.] Koerner, E. F. Konrad, ed. 1983. Linguistics and Evolutionary Theory: Three Essays by August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and William Bleek, with an Introduction by J. Peter Maher. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Contains: (1) Schleicher, 1863, The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language; (2) Schleicher, 1865, On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of Man; (3) Bleek, 1867, On the Origin of Language (with preface by Haeckel); (4) W. D. Whitney, 1872, Dr. Bleek and the Simious Theory of Language.] Lee, Arthur. 1989. Numerical taxonomy revisited: John Griffith, cladistic analysis and St. Augustine's Quaestiones in Heptateuchum. Studia Patristica XX. Maher, John Peter. 1966. More on the history of the comparative method: the tradition of Darwinism in August Schleicher's work. Anthropological Linguistics, 8:1-12. Picardi, Eva. 1977. Some problems of classification in linguistics and biology, 1800-1830. Historiographia Linguistica, 4:31-57. Platnick, Norman I., & H. Don Cameron. 1977. Cladistic methods in textual, linguistic, and phylogenetic analysis. Systematic Zoology, 26:380-385. Robinson, Peter M. W., & Robert J. O'Hara. In press. Cladistic analysis of an Old Norse Manuscript tradition. Research in Humanities Computing. Oxford: Clarendon Press. [Application of systematic techniques to a stemmatic problem.] Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, & John Woodford. 1991. Where linguistics, archeology, and biology meet. Pp. 173-197 in: Ways of Knowing (John Brockman, ed.). New York: Prentice Hall Press. Stevick, Robert D. 1963. The biological model and historical linguistics. Language, 39:159-169. Uschmann, Georg. 1972. August Schleicher und Ernst Haeckel. Spitzbardt, 1972:62-70. 2. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - SYSTEMATICS *Brooks, Daniel R., & Deborah A. McLennan. 1991. Phylogeny, Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Chapter 2 is an introduction to cladistic analysis.] Camin, Joseph H., & Robert R. Sokal. 1965. A method for deducing branching sequences in phylogeny. Evolution, 19:311-326. [One of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] Edwards, A. W. F., & Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi L. 1964. Reconstruction of evolutionary trees. Pp. 67-76 in: Phenetic and Phylogenetic Classification (V. H. Heywood & J. McNeill, eds.). Systematics Association Publication 6. [One of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] Farris, J. S. 1970. Methods for computing Wagner trees. Systematic Zoology, 19:83-92. [An early influential paper; now substantially superseded.] Farris, James S., Arnold G. Kluge, & M. J. Eckardt. 1970. A numerical approach to phylogenetic systematics. Systematic Zoology, 19:172- 189. [One of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] Felsenstein, Joseph. 1982. Numerical methods for inferring evolutionary trees. Quarterly Review of Biology, 57:379-404. Fitch, Walter M., & Emmanuel Margoliash. 1967. The construction of phylogenetic trees. Science, 155:279-284. [One of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] Hennig, Willi. 1965. Phylogenetic systematics. Annual Review of Entomology, 10:97-116. [A synopsis of Hennig 1966.] Hennig, Willi. 1966. Phylogenetic Systematics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kluge, Arnold G., & James S. Farris. 1969. Quantitative phyletics and the evolution of anurans. Systematic Zoology, 18:1-32. [One of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] Maddison, Wayne P., Michael J. Donoghue, & David R. Maddison. 1984. Outgroup analysis and parsimony. Systematic Zoology, 33:83- 103. [A review of outgroup comparison as a method of polarity determination.] *Maddison, Wayne P., & David R. Maddison. 1989. Interactive analysis of phylogeny and character evolution using the computer program MacClade. Folia Primatologica, 53:190-202. Mayr, Ernst. 1974. Cladistic analysis or cladistic classification. Zeitschrift fur zoologische Systematik und Evolutions-forschung, 12:94-128. [Distinguished clearly the issue of historical inference (cladistic analysis) from the issue of classification.] *Mayr, Ernst, & Peter D. Ashlock. 1991. Principles of Systematic Zoology, second edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. [Pp. 274-321, "Numerical methods of phylogenetic inference", written by David Maddison, is a good introduction to cladistic analysis. Much of the rest of the book is outdated.] O'Hara, Robert J. 1988. Homage to Clio, or, toward an historical philosophy for evolutionary biology. Systematic Zoology, 37:142- 155. [A discussion of the theoretical similarities between history and evolutionary biology (systematics in particular).] *Sober, Elliott. 1988. Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference. Cambridge: MIT Press. Stevens, Peter F. 1980. Evolutionary polarity of character states. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 11:333-358. *Swofford, David L., & Gary J. Olsen. 1990. Phylogenetic reconstruction. Pp. 411-501 in: Molecular Systematics (D. M. Hillis & C. Moritz, eds.). Sunderland, Massachusetts: Sinauer. [An advanced but comprehensive introduction.] Wagner, Warren H., Jr. 1961. Problems in the classification of ferns. Recent Advances in Botany, 1:841-844. [One of several early influential papers in modern phylogenetic theory.] *Wiley, Edward O. 1981. Phylogenetics. New York: Wiley. [A general textbook on systematics.] Zuckerkandl, E., & Linus Pauling. 1965. Molecules as documents of evolutionary history. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 8:357-366. [Journals: Systematic Zoology (now Systematic Biology), Cladistics, Systematic Botany, Taxon, Zeitschrift fur zoologische Systematik und Evolutions-forschung.] [Software: MacClade, PAUP, PHYLIP, HENNIG-86, Clados, and others. See Maddison in Mayr & Ashlock, p. 320-321 for a listing.] 3. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Allen, W. S. 1953. Relationship in comparative linguistics. Transactions of the Philological Society, 1953:52-108. Anttila, Raimo. 1989. Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Amsterdam. [A general textbook.] Bynon, Theodora. 1977. Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [A general textbook.] [Chretien, C. D. 1963. Shared innovation and subgrouping. IJAL, 29:66-68.] *Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., & V. V. Ivanov. 1990. The early history of Indo-European languages. Scientific American, March, pp. 110-116. Gleason, H. A. 1959. Counting and calculating for historical reconstruction. Anthropological Linguistics, 1(2):22-32. Grace, George W. 1965. On the scientific status of genetic classification in linguistics. Oceanic Linguistics, 4:1-14. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hetzron, Robert. 1976. Two principles of genetic reconstruction. Lingua, 38:89-108. Hock, Hans Henrich. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics, second edition. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. [A general textbook.] Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1966. Criteria for the subgrouping of languages. Pp. 1-12 in: Ancient Indo-European Dialects (Henrik Brinbaum & Jaan Puhvel, eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press. *Mallory, James P. 1989. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology, and Myth. London: Thames and Hudson. Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pulgram, E. 1953. Family tree, wave theory, and dialectology. Orbis, 2:67-72. *Renfrew, Colin. 1989. The origins of Indo-European languages. Scientific American, October, pp. 106-114. *Ruhlen, Merritt. 1991. A Guide to the World's Languages. Volume 1: Classification. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, & T. L. Markey, eds. 1986. Typology, Relationship, and Time: A Collection of Papers on Language Change and Relationship by Soviet Linguists. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, ed. 1989. Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. Studienverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeier. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1989. Methods in interphyletic comparisons. Ural-Altaische Jahrbucher, 61:1-26. Shevoroshkin, Vitaly. 1990. The mother tongue. The Sciences, May- June. *Wright, R. 1991. Quest for the mother tongue. Atlantic, 267(4):39- 68. [Popular magazine article.] [Journals: Diachronica; Historische Sprachforschung/Historical Linguistics.] 4. GENERAL AND THEORETICAL WORKS - STEMMATICS Clark, A. C. 1918. The Descent of Manuscripts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Colwell, Ernest Cadman. 1947. Genealogical method: its acheivements and limitations. Journal of Biblical Literature, 66:109- 133. Dawe, R. D. 1964. The Collation and Investigation of Manuscripts of Aeschylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [On the limitations of stemmatics.] Greg, W. W. 1927. The Calculus of Variants: an Essay on Textual Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greg, W. W. 1930. Recent theories of textual criticism. Modern Philology, 28:401-404. [Reply to Shepard (1930).] [Griesbach. 1796. Prolegomena to his second edition of the New Testament. (Establishes the principle of lectio difficilior, and other rules, fide Shepard 1930.)] Kleinlogel, Alexander. 1968. Das Stemmaproblem. Philologus, 112:63-82. Maas, Paul. 1958. Textual Criticism. (Translated from the German by Barbara Flower.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Quentin, Henri. 1926. Essais de Critique Textuelle. Paris: Picard. Reeve, M. D. 1986. Stemmatic method: 'qualcosa che non funziona'? The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture (Proceedings of the Oxford International Symposium, 1982, edited by Peter Ganz), 1:57-69. Bibliologia, vol. 3. Brepols, Turnhout. *Reynolds, Leighton D., ed. 1983. Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Reynolds, Leighton D., & N. G. Wilson. 1991. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepard, William P. 1930. Recent theories of textual criticism. Modern Philology, 28:129-141. [Critique of Quentin (1926) and Greg (1927); see Greg (1930) for a response.] Weitzman, Michael. 1985. The analysis of open traditions. Studies in Bibliography, 38:82-120. [A substantial discussion of how to reconstruct the history of contaminated manuscript traditions.] Weitzman, Michael. 1987. The evolution of manuscript traditions. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 150:287-308. [Develops a statistical model of the process of manuscript descent.] West, M. L. 1973. Textual Criticism and Editorial Technique. Stuttgart. Whitehead, F., & C. E. Pickford. 1951. The two-branch stemma. Bulletin Bibliographique de la Societe Internationale Arthurienne\Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, 3:83-90. Zuntz, G. 1965. An Inquiry into the Transmission of the Plays of Euripides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5. HISTORICAL WORKS - SYSTEMATICS Craw, Robin. 1992. Margins of cladistics: identity, difference and place in the emergence of phylogenetic systematics, 1864-1975. Pp. 65-107 in: Trees of Life: Essays in Philosophy of Biology (Paul Griffiths, ed.). Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 11. Gaffney, Eugene S. 1984. Historical analysis of theories of chelonian relationship. Systematic Zoology, 33:283-301. Greene, John C. 1959. The Death of Adam. Ames: Iowa State University Press. [A general history of natural history, with some discussion of systematics.] Gruber, Howard E. 1972. Darwin's 'tree of nature' and other images of wider scope. Pp. 121-140 in: On Aesthetics and Science (J. Wechsler, ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Hull, David L. 1988. Science as a Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Contains an account of the recent (post-1960) history of systematics. See Craw (1992) for criticism.] Lam, H. J. 1936. Phylogenetic symbols, past and present. Acta Biotheoretica, 2:152-194. O'Hara, Robert J. 1988. Diagrammatic classifications of birds, 1819- 1901: views of the natural system in 19th-century British ornithology. Pp. 2746-2759 in: Acta XIX Congressus Internationalis Ornithologici (H. Ouellet, ed.). Ottawa: National Museum of Natural Sciences. O'Hara, Robert J. 1991. Representations of the natural system in the nineteenth century. Biology and Philosophy, 6:255-274. O'Hara, Robert J. 1992. Telling the tree: narrative representation and the study of evolutionary history. Biology and Philosophy, 7:135-160. [On the similarities between historical narratives and evolutionary trees.] Oppenheimer, Jane M. 1987. Haeckel's variations on Darwin. Hoenigswald & Wiener, 1987:123-135. [On the tree diagrams of the German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel.] de Queiroz, Kevin. 1988. Systematics and the Darwinian revolution. Philosophy of Science, 55:238-259. [A good interpretation of the history of recent systematics.] Reif, Wolf-Ernst. 1983. Hilgendorf's (1863) dissertation on the Steinheim planorbids (Gastropoda; Miocene): the development of a phylogenetic research program for paleontology. Palaontologische Zeitschrift, 57:7-20. Stevens, Peter F. 1982. Augustin Augier's "Arbre Botanique" (1801), a remarkable early botanical representation of the natural system. Taxon, 32:203-211. Stevens, Peter F. 1984. Metaphors and typology in the development of botanical systematics 1690-1960, or the art of putting new wine in old bottles. Taxon, 33:169-211. Voss, E. G. 1952. The history of keys and phylogenetic trees in systematic biology. Journal of the Scientific Laboratory, Denison University, 43:1-25. Wagner, Warren H., Jr. 1980. Origin and philosophy of the groundplan-divergence method of cladistics. Systematic Botany, 5:173-193. Winsor, Mary P. 1976. Starfish, Jellyfish, and the Order of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. 6. HISTORICAL WORKS - HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS Bonfante, Giuliano. 1954. Ideas on the kinship of the European languages from 1200 to 1800. Journal of World History, 1:679-699. De Mauro, T., & L. Formigari. 1990. Leibniz, Humboldt, and the Origins of Comparativism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, 49.] Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1963. On the history of the comparative method. Anthropological Linguistics, 5(1):1-11. Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1975. Schleicher's tree and its trunk. Pp. 157-160 in: Ut Videam: Contributions to an Understanding of Linguistics. For Pieter A. Verburg on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday...(Werner Abraham et al., eds.). Lisse: Peter de Ridder Press. [H&W p113] Hymes, Dell, ed. 1974. Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1978. Toward a historiography of linguistics: 19th and 20th century paradigms. In: Toward a Historiography of Linguistics: Selected Essays. Amsterdam Studies in the theory and History of Linguistic Science, III. Studies in the History of Linguistics, vol. 19. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1982. The Schleicherian paradigm in linguistics. General Linguistics, 22:1-39. Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1975. Language classification in the Nineteenth Century. Current Trends in Linguistics, 13:607-716. Myers, L. F., & W. S.-Y. Wang. 1963. Tree representations in linguistics. In: Project on Linguistic Analysis, Report No. 3, Ohio State University Research Foundation (N.S.F. Grant G-25055). [fide H&W p256] Pederson, Holger. 1931. The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Reprinted 1962, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.] Priestly, Tom M. S. 1975. Schleicher, Celakovsky, and the family- tree diagram. Historiographica Linguistica, 2:299-333. Robins, Robert H. 1973. The history of language classification. Current Trends in Linguistics, 11:3-41. Robins, Robert H. 1979. A Short History of Linguistics. London. Robins, Robert H. 1987. The life and work of Sir William Jones. Transactions of the Philological Society, 1987:1-23. [Short biography of an 18th century founder of historical linguistics.] Southworth, Franklin C. 1964. Family-tree diagrams. Language, 40:557-565. Stewart, Ann H. 1976. Graphic Representation of Models in Linguistic Theory. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Uschmann, G. 1967. Zur Geschichte der Stammbaumdarstellungen. Gesammelte Vortrage uber moderne Probleme der Abstammungslehre (M. Gersch, ed.), 2:9-30. Jena: Friedrich Schiller Universitat. [Journals: Historiographica Linguistica.] 7. HISTORICAL WORKS - STEMMATICS Holm, G. 1972. Carl Johan Schlyter and textual scholarship. Saga och Sed: Kungliga Gustav Adolf Akademiens Aarbok, 48-80, Uppsala. [Contains stemmata of legal texts from 1827] Timpanaro, Sebastiano. 1981. La genesi del methodo del Lachmann, third edition. Padua. 8. TREES OF HISTORY ELSEWHERE Cook, Roger. 1974 [reprinted 1988]. The Tree of Life: Image for the Cosmos. New York: Thames and Hudson. [An art historical study of tree imagery. Includes some historical and genealogical trees.] Murdoch, John E. 1984. Album of Science: Antiquity and the Middle Ages. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. [Chapter 5 of this anthology of scientific diagrams, "Dichotomies and Arbores", illustrates many medieval tree diagrams. Most of these are logical trees, but some genealogical trees are illustrated also.] Toulmin, Stephen E. 1972. Human Understanding. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Evolutionary epistemology: trees of disciplinary development.] Young, Gavin C. 1986. Cladistic methods in paleozoic continental reconstruction. Journal of Geology, 94:523-537. 9. MISCELLANEOUS WORKS ON EVOLUTION IN RELATION TO OTHER FIELDS Bichakjian, B. 1987. The evolution of word order: a paedomorphic explanation. Pp. 87-108 in: Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (A. G. Ramat et al., eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bredeck, Elizabeth J. 1987. Historical narrative or scientific discipline? Fritz Mauthner on the limits of linguistics. Pp. 585-593 in: Papers in the History of Linguistics (Hans Aarsleff, Louis G. Kelly, & Hans-Josef Niederehe, eds.). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Durham, William H. 1990. Advances in evolutionary culture theory. Annual Review of Anthropology, 19:187-210. Lass, Roger. 1990. How to do things with junk: exaptation in language evolution. Journal of Linguistics, 26:79-102. Leroy, Maurice. 1949. Sur le concept d'evolution en linguistique. Revue de l'Institut de Sociologie. 337-375. Masters, R. D. 1990. Evolutionary biology and political theory. American Political Science Review, 84:195-210. Sereno, M. I. 1991. Four analogies between biological and cultural linguistic evolution. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 151:467-507. Terrell, John. 1981. Linguistics and the peopling of the Pacific islands. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 90:225-258. [Biogeography and linguistics.]
Thread #2: Cut-ups
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 92 10:36:19 cdt
From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
Subject: An Editorial Comment
Greetings:
I enclose the following Neoist Reply to Mr. McCarthy:
POSTMODERN PLEASURE AND PERVERSITY [14] The postmodern reduction
of the logic of Heraclitean unity and eschew dialectics, implicit
ideas of beauty such as expressed in terms of a probabilistic
mathesis. [58] It is a play of signifiers. It completes the
devolution of the sadistic side of their prescriptions. Yet,
tracing the play of numbers: in other words a science fiction
about the credentials of postmodernism, then, is in the
fragmented theoretical terrain beyond the end of history,
philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and political
formations. This process revives the subject reveals the longing
for an epistemological fluidity which underpins the postmodern
desire to systematise the play of difference among "numbering
numbers." [59] The desire of a natural order of things driving
the play of signifiers. It completes the devolution of the
concealed form of the unconscious" (Deleuze and Guattari, F. _A
Thousand Plateaus_ which imports quantum modelling of particle
inputs which are organised to facilitate global exchange" (1991:
66). [5] The deconstructing moment of postmodernism molecularises
the complex texture of individual and social space have been cut
off. It is a play of irregularity and pleasure arising from the
authors and advance notification of the masses into appropriate
consumption and productive behaviours. Secondly, as Baudrillard
has argued, the immersion of the subject was drawn into this mess
remains repressed. POSTMODERNISM: PLEASURE AND PERVERSITY FOR
EVERYMAN [29] Bourdieu finds that the "autonomous arithmetic
organisation" of the libidinal economy of deconstruction grows.
In its psychotic mode, the postmodern worker and consumer,
wherein the anxieties of maintaining position in the heightened
sensitivity derived from the material reality of Deleuze and
Guattari's (1987) plateau.
POSTMODERN SADISM [23] There is a utility which
deconstructs ideas of beauty such as "consciousness and
experience" are collapsed (Rose, 1984: 212), let alone when the
categories of postmodernism as a moment in the play of difference
into a universe which is an assemblage that this inheritance
persists. Both are concerned with flows of a dialectical view of
history, philosophy, science, and global socio-economic and
political formations. This process revives the subject of
ethico-politico praxis, within the bureaucratised intelligentsia
which is under considerable threat in the pleasures inherent in
policies of deregulation and restructuring: there is a marvelous
thing; but it may not be republished in any medium without
express written consent from the perversity of code-breaking
through de Sade's deconstructionist lubricity in the inversion of
Marx's _Capital_ as "the cultural logic of the body in the
interest of group survival and pleasurable existence. This
trajectory is observable in _Dionysus_ and in Deleuze and
Guattari's work in particular. Weil argues that scientism must
not eliminate the concerns of energy, particles, entropy, and
continuity to the atoms of the rendering of culture into everyday
life and death between the unary signifier and the good to
Olympian heights above the conditions of the complex texture of
individual and putting an end to praxis. In addition, Lacan
(1968) attempts to geometricise post-structural desire, and one
also senses that Lyotard (1984) desires a mathesis and their
molecularising thought crystallises de Sade's "matrix of
maleficent molecules" (1968: 400), in which the concerns of human
striving is also projected into the epistemological affinity
between de Sade's _Juliette_) as a manipulative developer. We
find that this diagrammatic genetic circuitry is able to explain
the logic of the Marxist preoccupation with the linear space of
the good" (Weil, 1968: 22). The work of the complexities of
history to the form of the relations of desire in the hierarchies
of symbolic accumulation, are aggravated. [30] The pleasurable
and terroristic nature of things: "As soon as you have discovered
the way of a contradictory, non-reductive "constellation" of
tensions (Jay as cited in Bernstein, 1991: 42). This stance
maintains the "unresolved paradox" of reason as simultaneously a
vehicle of emancipation and entrapment--a paradox which
contributes to the spirit" (1972: Xii).
Rose (1988) seeks a way beyond this. In contrast to
Derrida's interpretation of the continuous intensities of the
measuring convenience of numbering in science, or its equivalent,
signifiers as the delineations of postmodern thought, reducing
cultural complexity to signifiers in the play of commodity
signifiers, and in postmodernism may be freely shared among
individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without
express written consent from the modernist catch cry of equality,
liberty and fraternity into degrading conditions of late
capitalism. The mating of capital by multinationals is furthered
by "the most terrible orgies," and her sadistic pleasure-plays
are financed in a culture which is also expressed by Lacan in
that the moment of difference with the linear space of the
trajectory of this desire with anality, require some examination
as a triumphal encounter of humanity and materiality. [47] The
dehumanising loss in the conditions of existence into strong
solutions which carry forward the paraconsistent logic of late
capitalism. The mating of capital and fearful desire mutually
attract and interpenetrate, and out of the information society,
which heightens the sensitivity of the quantum form in social
thought which reduces the complex texture of individual and
social space have been cut off. It is clear that atomising
thought which reduces the complex texture of existence for the
Thank You,
Monty Cantin
Karen Eliot, eds.
SMILE Magazine
From: Christopher Maeda
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 10:31:59 EDT
Subject: Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway?
I'd like to start a new topic. What's the point of all this?
Not "What's the point of postmodernism?" We already know that's
a pointless question; if you have to ask, you won't understand
the answer. Very neat.
No. I want to know what is the point of the people on this list:
why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you after
you die? Are you trying to improve society? Destroy society?
Get tenure? (Check all that apply.)
Take the "war machine" article appended below. I've read it
twice and it still doesn't make a damn bit of sense. (Though the
authors do deserve a pat on the head for using 5 syllable words
so convincingly...) I would try again but it's so mind-numbingly
boring.
I'm really annoyed. It seems that so much of the work in this
genre is intended not so much to enrage or enlighten but simply
to show how clever the author is. Any concrete proposition is so
obscured that one begins to doubt whether the author really had
anything to say in the first place. I've begun to suspect that
the author usually doesn't.
From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
the war machine
monty cansin
karen eliot
Reprinted from "SMILE" Magazine
A book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics.
[Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.]
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 17:43 EST
From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET
Subject: Giving something and getting something else
I'd like to unstart Christopher M.'s topic and flop it on to the
cladistics thread. The "War Machine" article and the one before
it from "SMILE" (and where can I get this zine? does it actually
exist?) seemed to me to be summaries of sections of Deleuze and
Guattari's _Thousand Plateaus_, a really groovy book that folks
are just starting to use in cultural criticism (see the last
couple issues of PMC for examples...). Anyway, D & G have some
very biting critiques of the phallic, "arborescent" (i.e.
tree-like) structure of knowledge (esp. in the chapter
"Introduction: Rhizome").
I'm really sick of the "what good is theory? Let's do
something real" riff, but I'm not sure how to refute it. I was
quite entertained however, to find incisive discussions of this
thang in the last 2 books I read, Gallop's _Around 1981_ and
Fish's _Doing What Comes Naturally_.
Jeff Schwartz
Dept. of Popular Culture
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green OH 43402
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:29:03 cdt
From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)"
Subject: WarMachine:Who Gives A Fuck?;
or, What is the sound of one person taking a joke?
Christopher Maeda
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 92 10:31:59
EDT Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway? doesn't make a damn
bit of sense.(Though the authors do deserve a pat on the head for
using 5 syllable words so convincingly...) I would try again but
it's so mind-numbingly boring. I'm really annoyed. It seems that
so much of the State apparatus (stratum), the double task of
priest and believer, legislator and subject. (Deleuze 1984, pg.
92). The Kantian subject is actually made up of space: the human
population. (above, pg. 423). Even the most terrifying war
machine monty cansin karen eliot Reprinted from "SMILE" Magazine
A book exists only through the phylum:
On the other by state theorematics. Metallurgy is the point
of the subject is actually made up of space: the human
population. (above, pg. 423). Even the most terrifying war
machine in itself. In its performative aspect, it links up with
the "four poetic formulas" which Deleuze added as a pure matter
of wrought objects, or the construction of the essay of sedentary
or State structures, nomads and the battle is evidently not
always the object of war.
War is often a matter of avoiding the battle, using speed and
stealth to outmaneuver the enemy. But is war necessarily the
object of knowledge, as opposed to the schematization of
space/time is a brick. One can build many different windows. The
war machine that sweeps them along? We have been raised, for the
present and the war machine's exteriority, Propositions I-IV make
connections to the extent of obliteration the State apparatus.
"For what can be done to prevent the theme of race from
turning into a "free and indeterminate accord," where one faculty
does not exactly lie in between the nomads and the war machine in
itself. In its performative aspect, it links up with the "four
poetic formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the
third fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the
body and desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of
the body and desire corresponding to pure sensation
In the name of the people on this list: why do you do
this, why should we bother to remember you after you die? Are you
trying to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check
all that apply.) Take the "war machine" article appended below.
I've read it twice and it still Gives a Fuck Anyway? Fuck!
I'd like to start a new topic. What's the point of
postmodernism?" We already know that's a pointless question; if
you have to ask, you won't understand the answer. Very neat. No.
I want to know what is the correlative form of content."
It is a brick.
One can build many different windows. The war machine in itself.
In its performative aspect, it links up with the "four poetic
formulas which are clearly arbitrary in relation to the third
fold can correspond to formula two: the relation of the State is
not a simple dispute over philosophy, but has become an issue of
pragmatic action. Deleuze's book Foucault again becomes the stage
for this confrontation, for Deleuze's Foucault is the correlative
form of content." It is a way as the study of the body and
desire corresponding to pure sensation in the name of the people
on this list: why do you do this,
Why should we bother to remember you after you die? Are you
trying to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check
all that apply.) Take the "war machine" article appended below.
I've read it twice and it stillGives a Fuck Anyway? Fuck! I'd
like to start a new topic. What's the point of postmodernism?" We
already know that's a pointless question; if you have to ask, you
won't understand the answer. Very neat. [Remainder of repost
deleted -- ed.]
A book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics. [Remainder of reposted message deleted -- ed.] A
book exists only through the phylum: On the other by state
theorematics.
A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS OF 'SMILE:'
In case any of you were not aware of it before, the texts
that have been reprinted in this space from time to time are
computer-generated cutups of other, pre-existing texts. The
reason we chose to submit them to the list is that such texts can
serve as illustrations for many postmodern concepts which can be
raised for discussion. For example, does a piece of text such as
above constitute a "work"? If so, does it have one, two, three,
or no "authors?" Why does a piece of text have to have
sequentiality, linearity, and originality to be considered
"meaningful?" The hostile reaction of the above critic seems to
indicate that these are far from dead issues, as he struggled so
valiantly to extract "meaning" out of a text that had been
deliberately rendered "meaningless."
However, although a cutup text lacks "meaning" per se,
does it lack usefulness? The random juxtapositions of phrase in
the above article and the cutup of the PMC article MCCARTHY 592
that we submitted earlier struck us as not only amusing, but
critical and artistic.
As Neoists, we believe that questions of "originality"
and "authorship" and "meaning" are dead issues. The essense of
the new art and literature is plagarism, as the Kathy Acker story
from an earlier issue of PMC illustrated so well. The recycling,
rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of multiplicity of cultural
signs that are shoved at us every day through the media is the
only art form left that is relevant for the postmodern age, a
fact that has been widely bandied about but largely ignored since
the days of the Cabaret Voltaire. One might as well open oneself
up to the possibilities of manipulated the images created for us
by capital rather than being manipulated by them.
Virtually yours,
Karen Eliot
Monty Cantsin
Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 20:58:15 EDT
From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
Subject: dead issues
I guess the Neoists are trying to say that the issues are dead
issues but that they are far from being dead issues.
Aside from that, I can think of no way that an artist
could more effectively serve the interests of late capitalism
than by jettisoning the idea of meaning and mandating the real
work of "recylcing, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of
multiplicity of cultural signs." Some theory is very difficult,
and people indeed work very hard to understand it; you (Smile)
seem insufferably elitist looking down your noses at people so
far behind the times as to look for the meaning in a text. I
thought one of the characteristics of PM thinking was creation
without the imposition of rules? Opening up to the possibilities
of manipulating the images created for us by capital is obviously
worth doing, but why be so smug and call it the only game for
whoever is really au courant. THAT'S the real bullshit in
postmodernism. Michael McColl. (By the way, there are places in
the cut-ups where things are joined in really blunt, dumb ways.)
In case you have not noticed, new combinations of media images IS
the media's game, and audiences can be seduced whatever the new
forms of manipulation. Like you could even keep up with the
media's everfresh combinations of rap, gymnastics, Coca-Cola, and
lover, warm love, from AT&T.
In short, why do you need to be so elitist and
exclusionary about ONE thing there is to do, when there are a lot
of things. If you jettison "meaning," you circulate all the more
effectively in the media transfos.
Michael McColl
Date: Sun, 2 Aug 92 00:03 AST From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU Subject: War Machine texts event It was evident that the War Machine texts were either parodies or wordgames drawing on Macarthy 592 and Deleuze & Guattari's _A Thousand Plateaus_. The low threshold of resistance to free-play (or simply unfettered theoretical and linguistic performances) is a symptom of the Fear-of-Theory syndrome that plagues higher learning institutions in many places. It is not so bad in the Anglo-Zone, I gather. In Latin America it is an epidemic that threatens from the Right and from the Left (even the "non- dogmatic" left, even Liberation Theology, etc.). I recently performed an e-mail event intending to fog (or de-fog) the patriarchal repressive binary discourse being used in a Latin American discussion group concerning Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path guerrillas). Some reactions amounted to near death threats. The theoretical after-thoughts to the event motivated even stronger reactions, even though the text made it clear there was no support to Sendero (or the Army) involved. What is really feared is the volatilisation of agency, author- ship, of the subject and/or of stratified ethico-political languages spontaneously enabled by the playful use of theory and language in general. Some of these hostile reactions approach very much the fascist Spanish Civil war slogan: "Abajo la inteligencia, vivan las cadenas, viva la muerte!" (Down with intelligence, long live chains, long live DEATH!).--"Who gives a fuck anyway!". P.D. Macarthy 592, by the way, tries to associate the conception of atomistic actual occasions arranged upon an extensive continuum of potentialities (i.e., of molecularity upon a plane or "plan" of consistency) with the reduction of experience and action to numbered schemata, that is, the paradigmatic scheme of a much feared proto-facist anarcho-crazyism read in Deleuze & Guattari and others. But such an atomistic conception, in the mentioned versions (which owe much to Bergson and Whitehead), really point to the multiplicity, plurality and spontaneity open to non- stratified events on or beyond the extensive continuum (Whitehead) or plane of consistency, organized or disorganized (Deleuze & Guattari). Juan Duchesne J_Duchesne@upr1
From: Christopher Maeda Date: Mon, 3 Aug 92 18:58:37 EDT Subject: The New Art Date: Sat, 1 Aug 92 13:29:03 cdt From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)" Subject: WarMachine:Who Gives A Fuck?; > The recycling, rearranging, reprocessing and reusing of > multiplicity of cultural signs that are shoved at us every day > through the media is the only art form left that is relevant > for the postmodern age... > One might as well open oneself up to the possibilities of > manipulated [sic?] the images created for us by capital rather > than being manipulated by them. A cute but pathetic idea. What's the difference? You probably end up buying the crap irregardless. Or to put it differently, if you do art by recycling advertising, you further the ends of the advertisers.
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 92 01:58 AST
From: J_DUCHESNE@UPR1.UPR.CLU.EDU
Subject: Theory and landscape
My intervention (digest 8-1) was not necessarily
authoritarian or exclusionist. It's more a problem of my being
able to produce only a Terminator-2 type of English at the
moment.
This time after reading subsequent postings on the War
Machine (Smile) issue, I would qualify my rash fear-of-theory
diagnosis and let it apply to general situations loosely related
to this particular communicative situation of PMC-Talk.
What I read in the subsequent "contra-Smile" interventions
is a tendency to associate dense (or even opaque) theoretical
language with some sort of vacuousness or manipulative bluff (the
way masturbation is usually related to waste or unproductiveness
of some sort). But the first element is not a sufficient
condition for the second. "Light" or "clear" theoretical language
uses are very often as vacuous and deceptive as some of the
baroque "postmodern" terminology may be. We really need to go
into the dense Pomo Forest to distinguish between real content
and bluff (aside from the obviously mediocre, therefore trivial,
samples).
To the said tendency associating "ludic" (>ludere) density
and irrelevance is related an "I'm not wasting my time" tactic
justified on very bi-polar notions of theory-practice,
play-commitment, form-content, "jouissance"-sense, etc. Or I am
wrong?
Corrigenda: Am I wrong?
Juan Duchesne
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 92 10:33:42 EDT
From: CJ Stivale
Subject: The C. Maeda et. al. Discussion
I think that mbm at upenn's point (4 Aug 92) is well-stated and
well-taken, regarding perceived impatience/reproach(es) to C.
Maeda's intervention (30 Jul 92). However, impatience would seem
to be the operative mood given Maeda's neat title
("Postmodernism: Who Gives a Fuck Anyway?"). Maeda used therein a
scattershot introductory interrogation: first, "What's the point
of all this?", then, "what is the point of the people on this
list: why do you do this, why should we bother to remember you
after you die?" Possible reasons given by Maeda: "Are you trying
to improve society? Destroy society? Get tenure? (Check all that
apply)." It is then that Maeda makes the segue into the brief
commentary on the "war machine" article, the "mind-numbingly
boring" quality that stymies his/her understanding and annoys
him/her by its opacity.
The discussion that subsequently ensued on PMC-Talk dealt with
the latter topic (pomo and/contra its jargon), but as no one has
attempted to answer the broader queries, I'd like to give it a
crack, i.e. "the point of the people on this list: why do you do
this?" Of course, while not representing any "people," just
myself, I hope to connect with motivations of a few subscribers.
Although I could start too far back and in detail about being in
grad school in French studies in the '70s, I can simplify the
response a bit:
When PMC came on line, it proposed the practical possibility
of exploring a potentially new mode of communication/exchange, on
a new medium, via an electronic journal. That this enterprise has
its own, built-in limitations does not dull my interest in
supporting the editors' efforts. That they also saw fit to
stimulate more immediate interchange PMC-Talk made the
limitations of the journal a bit less constraining, but as we
have frequently seen, most "talk" just starts getting interesting
when it fizzles. Maeda's interrogation, as diffuse as it was, at
least had the potential for raising a few points as well as
various hackles.
My intervention starts with the ambiguity of his vague
references to some "this." "Frankly, dear, I don't give a damn"
whether you remember me after I die; nor is improving (or
destroying) society via PMC-Talk _necessarily_ one of my goals
(although were these exchanges to lead in either direction so
much the better). And getting tenure does not seem to correspond
to participating in or promoting such interchange (we might ask
the PMC editors whether tenure prospect and running this list are
even compatible).
Then, asks Maeda, "why do you do this?" Beyond "subscribing
to/reading entries on this list," I take "this" to suggest more
broadly "participating in discussions about/confrontations with
the discourse of texts designated, however imprecisely, as
'postmodern'." My reasons both for such "confrontations" and for
participation in PMC-Talk relate to my goals as teacher, to
understand (some of) the proponents of said discourse and to be
able to impart some of that understanding to my students.
Moreover, as I began to teach and to engage in those other
professional exercises that might, in fact, lead to tenure
(attending conferences, delivering papers, sharing research with
colleagues in discussion groups, at meetings, in correspondence,
discussing professional needs and prospects aka networking,
revising and sending out papers, eventually publishing), I found
that the point of "doing this" was also to extend the teaching
dialogue toward colleagues in a number of settings and to clarify
differences and commonalities of approach and understanding.
These reasons are why PMC and PMC-Talk presented such an
exciting potential and continue to enable our discussion and
learning to progress. The "grumpiness" (to use a term employed
precisely in a recent _Chronicle_ "Point of View" essay), if not
outright cynicism, implied in Maeda's "who gives a fuck anyway"
recalls for me the impatient, usually lazy comments that many of
us have heard over the years from colleagues left out of the
post-structuralist theory loop usually by dint of their own lack
of effort to engage with the material. Not that Maeda or those
sympathetic to his plaints necessarily have failed to engage with
this material; and yes, some of the recent "confrontations" with
these modes of discourse have been opaque, even hermetically
sealed. Yet, should that prevent us from challenging each other
with exchange regarding such discourse? I guess I "give a fuck"
if that phrasing means to remain interested in the manner in
which my contemporaries envisage and discuss the era in which I
live and provide new conceptualizations about past eras. Such
exchange, fortunately, has followed Maeda's productive queries in
the subsequent responses, fulfilling some of the potential
implicit in the PMC(-Talk) project.
Sorry for going on so long. I hope I need not apologize for
taking Maeda's intervention too literally and/or too seriously.
If so, then truly what _is_ the point of "people" subscribing and
exchanging ideas here? CJ Stivale
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 1992 03:41 EST From: JSCHWAR@BGSUOPIE.BITNET Subject: SMILE/Deleuze 1)Obviously, I was mistaken when I understood the SMILE texts as a "gloss" of Deleuze and Guattari. Egg on my face for not recognizing the cut-up method or SMILE's sources & for possibly misusing the word "gloss." Oops. 2)Now we're getting to what I see as the central question of the cladistics thread. What happens to our notions of the history of ideas if the rhizome replaces the tree? (Borges' "Kafka and His Precursors" is probably an important text here.) I read _1000 Plateaus_ as (among a whole lot of other things) an attempt to explore this & propose a postmodern version of cladistics. Let's stop making fun of each other's diction & get further into this. --Bill Burroughs
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 19:30:16 EDT
From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
Subject: Cutup
It astonishes me that Bill Burroughs would not recognize
the cut-up method. Egg on my face if I have the wrong
Burroughs--I can't find my record album of him reading from his
works I drove all night and came at dawn to a warm misty place.
Barking dogs and the sound of water. Thomas and Chalry, I said,
that's the name of this town which would provide a handy
reference for the spelling of your name. Sea level. Where Lupita
....doling out her little papers of lousy shit sits like an
Aztech earth goddess. I too had egg on my face for I printed out
and took into the city to study on public transportation and at
a table polite with coffee the pages of the Neoist manifesto
which was a very difficult read, but I thought, who knows, hard
on first reading, but maybe they have something there. Don't want
to conclude that they are not theoretical physicists just because
I'm not. Clandestine radio play on words accomplished all that
her father was after. In the best sense of the word, a shining
example of the way our sinking ship was caught up in the hands of
the prosenet, and delivered unto the web. So nasty,like an old
cantaloup, with its hard, rough rind and sweet, juicy,
orange-colored flesh. Beguile so the smoking toilet blockage
checks awaited him and called his attention to the movie debut of
Mikhail Gorbachev, "former chieftain." A period of general
slackening in the arts. Anything goes when there is an absence of
taste, he declared. I AM THE POSTMODERN MODERNIST MONUMENT. I AM
VENTURI'S DUCK WITHOUT FEATHER why not say it whispered
Jean-Francois Lyotard, for I am not ashamed. They all called up
to him but he would not come down from his perch in the tree, and
after all he was wearing glasses and seemed serious about what he
was doing. A tedious little book, said my uncle, but I was merely
a swallow darting among the limbs and eaves of the pleasure-nooks
of the sense world, no magisterial fogart blounder jangwhorling
shoolspatial frissons. It got to be that you couldn't even go
out to play, the snarling was so vicious. But that's all folks,
and by your leave. Shortform, with a humble adding a diction.
[August 20th Digest, referred to below, is omitted here. --ed.]
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 92 16:30:26 cdt From: "Finagle, etc. (Durflinger,Edward M)" Many thanks to the contributors to the last issue of PMC-Digest for providing excellent material for the next issue of SMILE. These three articles went particularly well together. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Caveats I am encouraged to see one of my favorite ideas (cladistics) raise its head in the scientific sense from the socialdemocratic influence in Finland to central- or liberal conservative inclination could be seen the Finnish form of neoconservatism. An other example is the oppressor: Under the male gaze of Gilligan, Ginger becomes the Feminine-as-Other, the interiorization of a panoptic social order in which the "texts" of popular culture have assumed their rightful place. This has enormous implications for cultural and social theory. A journal like _Dissent_, instead of exploring the question of population in Europe, problems of migrants, manifestation of the entire series. [4] The eclipse of linearity effectuated by postmodernity, then, necessitates a new approach to the all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought. 3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_ represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the proceeding of the desert island foreshadows Debord's concept of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia with a difference--or, rather, a dystopia characterized by the means of social policy in Central Europe. As political ideologies have lost their potentiality and Church as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The late 1970s influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought. 3. The 1981 television movie Escape from Gilligan's Island_ represents what had been theorized in the proceeding of the first kind we can infer the relationships between lineages. Note that in my list no time was given to lateral transfer of character states from one lineage to another. This feature is almost surely violated in most cultural/literary/social phenomena. I hope to do so in a character state) hangs on the hope that there isn't much lateral diffusion of information across the tree. In phylogentic inference (a goal for which cladistics is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a _differance_ (in, of course, the Bakhtinian sense) of the Kristevan semiotic needs no further comment here. 4. Why do the early episodes privilege a discourse of metonymy? And what of the title is a sociological phenomenon that rose against the radicalism of 1960s and 1970s. The radicalism has been the fact during the period after the War as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the Gorbachevism would be considered as neoconservative phenomena in sociology. The postmodernism is an attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the apparent "stupidity" of Gilligan and, indeed, of the antinomies of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review editor of _Dissent_ and the Professor. Gilligan is the ability of "foreign market forces" to rule Finnish economy by both rhetorical and effective factors. This means that Finland is not independent in economical judgement from the socialdemocratic influence in Finland to central- or liberal conservative inclination could be seen the Finnish form of neoconservatism. An other example is the island "his"? I do not have the space to pursue these questions here, but I hope to demonstrate in a future study. --------------------------------------------------------- FOOTNOTES 1. Gilligan himself is the discussion group for the period after the War as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the modern society caused by the postmodern theory to describe Finland as perfectly free of international interests. The social sciences have received new impressions in the series as an institution has lost the traditional connections to people, a result has been the fact during the period after the War as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the author of a forthcoming novel from HarperCollins.] ---------------------------------------------------------------- L'ISLE DE GILLIGAN Brian Morton The hegemonic discourse of metonymy? And what of the antinomies of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the book review editor of _Dissent_ and the questions originated by postmodernism. The conflict of traditional "texts" (i.e., books) has been the fact during the period after the War as the Thatcherism, Reaganism, including even the Glasnost and the modern society caused by the means of social policy in Central Europe. As political ideologies have lost their potentiality and Church as an untotalizable herteroglossia, a _bricolage_. The late 1970s influence of Habermas is itself a testimony to the all-pervasiveness of Habermas's thought. 3. The 1981 television movie _Escape from Gilligan's Island_ represents a reactionary attempt to totalize what had been theorized in the following address: E-MAIL: ATEITTINEN@JYLK.JYU.FI PMC-TALK digest: postings for the rational development. Karen Cantsin Monty Elliot
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 14:37:43 CDT From: Wes Chapman Subject: Re: Digest Ending 8-22-92 Tongue in cheek, tongues of flame. Well, now, another piece from SMILE magazine, OK. I confess I don't like the stuff much--I'll try to explain why. At first I thought I didn't like it for the simple reason that it's boring: once you figure out what's going on (about three sentences for me, but I'm not bragging--if I had been reading faster, if I had not read parts of the works before, I might have been taken in for longer), there really isn't much to look at in a pastiche of textual snippets. Not that this kind of art (I'll call it that) is meaningless; far from it. There's a lot being implied about the nature of originality, the social construction of consciousness, seeee-rriiious Theory, postmodernism, etc. But the genre is much like a toilet placed in a museum as an exhibit--it's a lot more interesting to talk about than to actually look at. In the pieces we've seen on pmc-talk, most of what is interesting about the pieces takes place on the most general level; there haven't been many particular conjunctions of phrases that really tell. I confess I read the pieces fast, in part, I realize upon reflection, because it has seemed to me that to read them carefully would be to miss the point of the joke. Excuse me, the "joke." But after thinking more about it, I realize that the tediousness of the genre isn't really what I object to in it. A number of similar pastiches used to appear on the TechNoCulture list, bits and pieces from postings to the list arranged not as prose but as poetry. I used to find them boring too, although they were more carefully particular than the SMILE pastiches, UNTIL I found postings of my own incorporated into the pastiches. At that time my whole experience of the pastiches changed. They were no longer boring, they were actively threatening; the juxtapositions seemed at once impersonalizing (when it's your own writing, no matter how unpolished or trivial, you feel very concretely what it means to have what you say, what you mean, what you think, become a text) and judgmental (why did that go there? what did the author think?). In other words, I finally Got It. (Do you Get It?) I am a little grateful to the author of those pastiches; he (I think it was a he) taught me something about the distance between the post-modern theories of discourse I espouse and my actual experience of being a gen-yoo-ine self. But I still don't like the genre. Not because it's threatening--ya takes yer chances--but because it's too safe. Safe for the authors, that is. It's easy to take apart the work of other people; that's just saying that the self is not autonymous, is constructed of discourses, is nowhere, is dead--it's not actually feeling it, feeling the poignancy of that loss. So, Monty Elliot and Karen Cantsin--if that's who you really are--I have a challenge for you. By all means, do another pastiche. You can use this posting if you want, not that you need my permission. But this time, get your own writing in too. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's something you care about--your doctoral dissertation, a letter to a friend who is dying of AIDS, whatever; you decide. See for yourself if you live where you think you live. Seriously and respectfully, Wes Chapman Illinois Wesleyan University
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 17:07:13 EDT
From: mbm@pacscl.uarc.upenn.edu (MM)
Subject: what you cut up
If you cut up your own text, somebody's article, that's
hardly manipulating the images that need it most. And it doesn't
mix in enough stuff from the cultural signal-storm. In short,
there aren't the right ingredients in the first place, and the
manipulative aspects of culture are untouched. Possible
ingredients: couple of political speeches, newspaper articles,
transcript of TV show, literature from the phone or electric or
gas company, etc etc.It's so silly for me to suggest these,
obviously,but the cutups could be less boring, and maybe even
bring up a few interesting juxtapositions. Mixed media and film
are probably better way to put the ideas into practice. An
example is Humphrey Bogart in Casablanc appearing in whatever
commercial. The abject hungry greed of the pandering that will DO
ANYTHING ANYTHING ANYTHING is discouraging enough; then to watch
the movie and be reminded of the commercial is a demonstration to
me that some forms of meaning are not dead issues. There are
offensive people you don't want in your presence, and there are
offensive presences you don't want in what you are watching. How
do artists answer that? If they had equal time on prime-time TV,
it would be an interesting battle, but any victory pyrrhic. By
the way, did Yoko Ono, or Michael Jackson, or someone else sell
the copyright of the Lennon tune to be used in a commercial?
Anybody who thinks that we don't lose something--meaning, if I
must--when good songs get smeared with that phosphorescent
excrement, and we can hardly get the smell out of the song again,
needs to straighten their head. I thought at least one aspect of
PM was an emphasis on the particulars, once we had abandoned a
lot of essentialist thinking? Why not discuss some of these ideas
as they work out in particulars.
I told you what I hate, but what I would like would be to
use that same technique to popcorn my enemies. But even if I
manage to make such a film, the most that will happen is that a
very few see it on a TV in a gallery, perhaps, while the same
technique devours whatever meaning is left. Reminds me of that
character in Burroughs who had a jones for addicts, and would
assimilate them into his body. Even if he spits them back out,
they're not the same again.
Thank-you for listening. Just meant this as ordinary
conversation.
Michael McColl
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 92 21:24:06 -0400
From: Sheldon Pacotti
Subject: Re: cutups
I have to agree that these cutups are getting a bit boring. They
were funny at first, especially when several days passed before
anyone was brave enough to challenge the War Machine cutup
(obviously a lot of people simply thought it was above their
heads -- makes you wonder how well "postmodern theorists"
understand their own field, assuming there are several such
university-employed "professionals" on this list). But now that
we all know what's going on, the cut-ups are getting monotonous.
A couple years ago I did some experimenting with random text
('white language' or whatever). I needed to write some cryptic
poetry and prophecies for a fantasy novel. To overcome my lack
of poetic talent, I wrote a computer program that recursively
generated grammatical structures and then filled them with words.
I grouped words (taken from favorite poems, books; etc.) into
different lexicons (Nature, Human Emotion, Technology; etc.) and
then wrote a little interface to let me control how these groups
were mixed together. Nine out of ten sentences were pretty
meaningless, but occasionally something striking would come up.
By cutting and pasting phrases into a text editor, I managed
write some pretty funky verse, which at the time served my
purposes.
The point is that I found "random" sentences not so interesting,
but as a brainstorming tool the program worked great. It's
ridiculous to expect a computer to produce a very interesting
text of any great length if all it's doing is randomly pasting
together words. Maybe some day, in the foggy sci-fi future,
authors will use computers to come up with fresh descriptive
passages, plots, new concepts-- but for the present these
applications are pretty crude, and seldom is the direct output of
the computer all that interesting.
Any useful application of current technology to text-production,
in my opinion, must involve the writer in an interactive
brianstorming process.
I do find it encouraging, though, that a lot of
computer-generated phrases have stuck in my mind these couple
years, and that my program has changed the way I look at
metaphors. In that sense, I've been influenced by something that
can't be traced to the culture at large (except on the level of
individual words). I find this encouraging because I would like
for authors to be more than mouthpieces for cultural currents
running through them, cladistic or rhizomic or otherwise--for
statements like "There are no individual statements, only
statement-producing machinic assemblages" to be false. [1] (to
quote a couple of this list's most popular authors).
(Of course, that statement is probably true, and a computer
program is a type of machinic assemblage, I guess, but at least a
randomized language engine undermines the machinic assemblages in
the surrounding cultural matrix.)
sheldon pacotti
cambridge
p.s. A company called Screenplay Systems has a program called
Dramatica which (I gather) generates plots, but I haven't
actually seen it.
[1] Deleuze & Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_, p. 36.
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 00:04 CDT From: S1MBM@ISUVAX.BITNET Subject: Re: Digest ending 8-22-92 Thanks to Wes Chapman for his critique of "cut-ups." Them things had been bugging me, but I hadn't understood why until Wes clarified matters. I agree that the "cut-ups" are like one-liners: the humor is in the instant of recognition, not in the story which they coyly fail to produce. Since they are funny only as one-liners, I fail to see the justification for the durn things being so long. Does the sheer length of the cut-ups accomplish anything rhetorically, or does it just allow the cut-uppers to get their jollies fulfilled by lingering over the savaging of others' texts? Don't the cut-ups becomes just a coy substitute for engaged criticism, allowing the progenitors to hide behind an act of textual re-production? (I'm not actually criticizing your work, I'm just giving it a new face--this seems to be the implicit rhetorical context of the cut-uppers work.) I agree with Wes that it would be nice to see the cut-uppers somehow subject a message they've made and cared about to this process . . . Michael Bruce McDonald