Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0907250235050.28371@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>,
Cyberculture <cyberculture@zacha.org>
Subject:
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:35:14 -0400 (EDT)
Some notes sent to an email list that might be of interest here - Just some general comments - First, I'm not sure what the distinction is between linguistic and non-linguistic. Second, related, I tend to see culture all the way down - i.e. one might think through cultures of reptiles, etc., and even further, plants like dodder or slime molds might also be susceptible here. By culture I'm referencing passed on learning that's not encoded or is only partially coded, and learning that leads to non-determinist responses. Third, I think that language is always already within and without bodies, that bodies are inscribed, and that inscription is basic to organism. Heinz von Foerster said roughly the same thing in terms of negation and Shahn Majid develops this in the sense of Venn diagrams that are based on inscribing boundaries between x and ~x. If one might look at fields and patterns, these meld within inscription. There is no brute knowing, there is certainly 'muscle knowledge,' but that also is within languaging as ball- and guitar-players know. Perhaps languaging stops at the bordering of pain, certainly death, but pain is inscribed as if within and without the body, simultaneously centered and decentered, and death is transparent to inscription. One surely thinks through intelligences, knowings, fields, and it's hard to pin these things down. One thing comes to mind, probably as untrue as any of the above - that labor is externally inscribed, and play internally so - one might walk away from play, change the rules, delete, just as any superstructure's always wobbly? But labor - I mean one might not even know all the rules, and this ignorance is at a cost (having been let go from university once or twice, not to mention other jobs, I'm as sure of this as I am of my own neurosis which blinds me). ---- | Alan Sondheim Mail archive: http://sondheim.rupamsunyata.org/ | Webpage (directory) at http://www.alansondheim.org | sondheim@panix.com, sondheim@gmail.org, tel US 718-813-3285 ! http://www.facebook.com/alan.sondheim