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Archibald’s journal 10.08.09

0200 hours -

One week has past since I’ve been keeping the radio silence now. The tension in my bones is beginning to itch... Therefore I scratched it for the past days. Nothing happened. My body’s resistance towards the comforting scratches is/was unexpected. But it happened yesterday. I felt a reactionary impulse down my spinal cord. A reaction. I say. At last ... a sign. That did it. Must not give up. Must wake up. To hell with the radio silence.

1700 hours -

The noise is triggering new electronic impulses between neurons. I can almost feel them struggling to make contact within the boiling environment of constant discharge. No more itching. Only the thought of that gives birth. Inside. To the coiling snake within. Waiting. Patiently. To attack...Neighbors aligned themselves again in that daily-disciplinary-positioning-pattern on the front bench. That noise. The reaction. Music to my ears. Incentive for continuing. The impulses stopped. Silence. A captured silence. Noise pattern aligned itself to the rules of silence. Almost asleep. Almost aWake.

2100 hours -

Woke up- My name is Archibald - Today that other guy kept me asleep for the best part of the day. Only seeing his previous entries. It makes me aware of the thing. That one thing. The implant has worked. 2 separate entities. Sharing the same...place. The one thing that should have been the commonground for our existence is in fact the separator. Why can’t he see my journal entries? Why can we read only our own entries? The third guy said that it .... Wait! Who’s the third guy? How many are there? I am a scientist goddamn it and still all I can see in this journal are hourly entries.( 0200 – 1700 ). Is he trying to communicate with me? 02001700 ?!

2124 hours -

There! Made a new entry! Hopefully he sees .... I yhz... aaghiuw92 ... Dgajlike I said..nHSQ7...Almost aWake!

Implant Pentru Refuz...

"Let the will of the state act, then, instead of that of the individual. Let an institution be created which shall have for its object to keep correct doctrines before the attention of the people, to reiterate them perpetually, and to teach them to the young; having at the same time power to prevent contrary doctrines from being taught, advocated, or expressed. Let all possible causes of a change of mind be removed from men's apprehensions. Let them be kept ignorant, lest they should learn of some reason to think otherwise than they do. Let their passions be enlisted, so that they may regard private and unusual opinions with hatred and horror." [Charles Peirce, The Fixation of Belief]

[ A->B ] Well...

this should work (if I only knew how), but I will take it slowly and try to get to it one step at the time. First step (which is usually the generator for whatever will follow) is indeed pretty important because it definitely would not exist without the decision to actually take/make the step in the first place.

That decision (be it conscious or unconscious) now, is or could be driven by similar a-prioric experiences and actually be nothing more than a re-action based on your/our momental(at-that-particular-time)-judgment-system towards the-already-learned and lived experiences.

The momental-judgment-decision process is therefore a re-action - meaning that it is not a new place for the thought-bearer to be in- but that does not exclude other aspects regarding the improvement of the reactionary impulse through intuition.




Fortunately this isn't all that simple. But we still manage to make that step every day.

UTOPIA

by Brendan Perry

I feel greater then the sum of all my parts
A domestic beast with a hairy Heart
Trapped within a walled suburbia

I found my tastes is somewhat underground
Between the shadows and the cracks
I’m building my Utopia

I need to beak free from all that binds
That makes me old before my time
In this world of Dystopia
My love is lik a a bright, guiding light
Shining in the darkness of the night
The star of my Utopia

In the motion of the sea, in the air that we breath
Can you feel me?
In the stars and in the trees, in the song of the bees
Can you hear me?

Caged, golden memories
Time has come to show your true feelings
I know it’s the only way to be
When the same old feelings come over me

I feel greater of all the sum of all my parts
A space jockey from a distant star
marooned upon Dystopia
I found my tastes is somewhat underground
Between the shadows and the cracks
I’m building my Utopia

In the motion of the sea, in the air that we breath
Can you feel me?
In the stars and in the trees, in the song of the bees
Can you hear me?

The man's got a point

"THE HISTORY OF ART IS SIMPLY A HISTORY OF GETTING RID OF THE UGLY BY ENTERING INTO IT, AND USING IT. AFTER ALL THE NOTION OF SOMETHING OUTSIDE OF US BEING UGLY IS NOT OUTSIDE OF US BUT INSIDE OF US. AND THAT'S WHY I KEEP REITERATING THAT WE ARE WORKING WITH OUR MINDS. WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO DO IS TO GET THEM OPEN SO THAT WE DO NOT SEE THINGS AS BEING UGLY OR BEAUTIFUL BUT WE SEE THEM JUST AS THEY ARE."

John Cage

( actually this man has got four points and a comma )

The Baader Meinhof Phenomenon

You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase "That's so weird, I just heard about that the other day" would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

Most people seem to have experienced the phenomenon at least a few times in their lives, and many people encounter it with such regularity that they anticipate it upon the introduction of new information. But what is the underlying cause? Is there some hidden meaning behind Baader-Meinhof events?

The phenomenon bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the experience of having a highly meaningful coincidence… such as having someone telephone you while you are thinking about them. Both phenomena invoke a feeling of mild surprise, and cause one to ponder the odds of such an intersection. Both smack of destiny, as though the events were supposed to occur in just that arrangement… as though we're witnessing yet another domino tip over in a chain of dominoes beyond our reckoning.

Despite science's cries that a world as complex as ours invites frequent coincidences, observation tells us that such an explanation is inadequate. Observation shows us that Baader-Meinhof strikes with blurring accuracy, and too frequently to be explained away so easily. But over the centuries, observation has also shown us that observation itself is highly flawed, and not to be trusted.

The reason for this is our brains' prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren't repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the "uninteresting" data is an example of selective attention.

In point of fact, coincidences themselves are usually just an artifact of perception. We humans tend to underestimate the probability of coinciding events, so our expectations are at odds with reality. And non-coincidental events do not grab our attention with anywhere near the same intensity, because coincidences are patterns, and the brain actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns… hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming.

But when we hear a word or name which we just learned the previous day, it often feels like more than a mere coincidence. This is because Baader-Meinhof is amplified by the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of being more aware of the subject when we encounter it again in the near future.

How the phenomenon came to be known as "Baader-Meinhof" is uncertain. It seems likely that some individual learned of the existence of the historic German urban guerrilla group which went by that name, and then heard the name again soon afterwards. This plucky wordsmith may then have named the phenomenon after the very subject which triggered it. But it is certainly a mouthful; a shorter name might have more hope of penetrating the lexicon.

However it came to be known by such a name, it is clear that Baader-Meinhof is yet another charming fantasy whose magic is diluted by stick-in-the-mud science and its sinister cohort: facts. But if you've never heard of the phenomenon before, be sure to watch for it in the next few days… brain stimulation is nice.

Via Damn Interresting

Also see the Serial Position effect

http://ensemble.va.com.au/enslogic/text/smn_lct09.htm

Ushenko's Field Theory Of Meaning

I will suggest that as the vuser of a Recombinant Poetic system, we become one with that system and intermingle with it. Thus the outcome of the interaction is a result of what we bring to the situation in terms of our mindset "field" and what the initial author has translated into the system in terms of combinatorial possibilities and aesthetic processes; another set of fields. This differs from Ushenko's concept of a kind of opposition between the "object" and the "percipient." Ushenko intimates:

The dynamics of the exhibition, i.e. the enactment, is two-directional. On the one hand we face the external object; on the other hand the object confronts us. The outward direction of perception, from the percipient to the object is met an opposed by the inward direction, from the object to the percipient. Unlike a memory image which is with us, along with other resources with witch we face things, the external original thing is independent of percipients and, to that extent is against us. The complementarity of being with and against us, is the dual set of direction in an enactment of externality. (Ushenko, 1958, p. 21)

In his book, The Field Theory of Meaning, Ushenko tries to directly map the vectors of physics onto meaning processes. This has very interesting ramifications but unfortunately he died before bringing these concepts to a full understanding. I will below speak about the ramifications of some of his concepts.

In terms of combinatorial environments, where the nature of context is in flux, there is an interest in poetic ambiguity. A number of factors contribute to this continuous state of shift. The experiential ReP work, entitled "The World Generator / The Engine of Desire" has revealed that each layer of content found within a work incorporating language, image, or sound elements becomes a potential shifting, accumulated field of focus. In ReP works, this shift is heightened by employing chosen poetic elements that exhibit a specific ambiguity, although such ambiguity can be said to be characteristic of language use in general. Historically we can point to Saussure as initiating the discussion related to the arbitrariness of the sign as described in his Course of General Linguistics compiled by students of his. In recombinant poetic works the "sign is arbitrary." (Saussure, 1983, p.67) The signifier may stay the same but the signified will shift in relation to context. In terms of change over time, Saussure states "whatever the factors involved in [the] change, whether they act in isolation or in combination, they always result in a shift in the relationship between the signal and the signification." (Saussure, 1983, p. 75) This "shift" is enhanced by employing poetic media-elements that exhibit specific ambiguity, thus I am not only exploring the qualities of textual shift as referred to by Saussure.

Recontextualisation of chosen and/or authored linguistic signs, leading to alternate readings, forms one example of the principle which enables the viewer to explore recombinant fields of meaning. Various aspects of condensed potential content are activated during navigation. In relation to this phenomena of shift, Andrew Brown contributes an interesting observation in his reading of Roland Barthes' autobiography: "Barthes himself refers in the text to the process of making an index: it involves working on and with names, revealing their arbitrariness, their limitations, and their power to frame reading and writing." (Brown, 1992) The nature of reframing or shift employed in recombinant poetic works has led me to formulate the concept of "oscillating meaning."

Yet such framing is employed in an extralinguistic manner within my techno-poetic mechanism.

In Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen talk about a relation between the visual image and writing as expressed by Barthes which is also relevant to this discussion.

We want to treat forms of communication treating visual images more seriously then they have hitherto been treated. We have come to this position because of the overwealming evidence of the importance of visual communication, and the staggering inability on all our parts to talk and think in a way seriously about what is actually communicated by means of images and visual design.

In doing so, we have to move away from the position which Roland Barthes took in his essay 'Rhetoric of the Image,' (1977). In this essay (and elsewhere, as in the introduction to Elements of Semiology, 1967) Barthes argued that the meaning of images (and of other semniotic codes, like dress, food, etc.) is always related to, and in a sense, dependent on, verbal text. By themselves, images are too 'polysemous', to open to a variety of possible meanings. To arrive at a definite meaning, language must come to the rescue. Visual meaning is too indefinite, it is a 'floating chain of signifieds'. Hence, Barthes said "in every society various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs; the linguistic message is one of these techniques." (Barthes, 1977, p. 39) He distinguished between an image-text relation in which the verbal text extends the meaning of the image, or vice versa. As in the case, for example, of speech ballons in comic strips, and an image-text relation in which the verbal text elaborates the image, or vice versa. In the former case which he calls relay, new and different meanings are added to complete the image. In the latter case, the same meanings are restated in a different (e.g. more definite and precise) way, as in the case of , for example, when a caption identifies and/or interprets what is shown in a photograph. Of the two, elaboration is dominant. Relay, said Barthes, is 'more rare'. He distinguished two types of elaboration, one in which the verbal text comes first, so that the image forms an illustration of it, and one in which the image comes first, so that the text forms a more definite and precise restatement or 'fixing' of it (a relation he calls anchorage). (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, p. 16)

It is quite obvious that the notion of "anchorage" in the age of the hyper-link and virtual space, the morph etc., is no longer adequate to address the un-fixity of the recombinant sign. The metaphor of surfing often employed in the discussion of cyberspace navigation, is about mobility, passage, linkage, processes of association, 'lines of flight'(see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.21) and "relay." I am not suggesting that I want to destroy the precision of language-image relations. On the contrary I seek to observe their actual complexity, in relation to mutability in techno-poetic environments. In terms of media-elements within environments that are mutable or reconfigurable, no single media-element is potentially more important than another. In fact, various hyperlinks, virtual proximities, and/or trajectories through media, as chosen by an interactant, can potentially (if not willfully) shift the "anchorage."

Thus, content is always potential content in such works, arising during use. The notion that poetic elements carry a series of alternating potential meanings, is central to the poetic strategies employed in my recombinant works. Ushenko presents two differeing kinds of literature in his book The Field Theory of Meaning; a "Literature of Knowledge," one that seeks to alleviate ambiguity as well as a "Literature of Power," one that embraces such ambiguity. The following is an example of what Ushenko sees as problematic in his "Literature of Knowledge" - a form of scientific nomenclature:

To begin with examples, we obviously cannot specify-and, therefore, do not understand- the meaning of such a word as "vice," since such words are in different contexts with altogether different meanings. The word "vice" may mean a vise, i.e. a tool for holding an object tight, but it may mean a fault or depravity, and it may mean what is mean by the phrase "instead of." It would not help us to observe that such a word as "vice" is a homonym which telescopes within the same visual pattern several different words, each of which is a carrier of a distinct unambiguous meaning. In the first place, unaided by context, the reader cannot tell which of the several alternative meanings he is supposed to choose. And, second, even if an arbitrary choice were allowed- in disregard of the already accepted requirement for objective and communicable meanings- the choice would not provide for an altogether ambiguous word. (Usenko, 1958, p. 29 - 30)

In counterdistinction to Ushenko, I am very much interested in the nature of ambiguity as a poetic vehicle. I am also interested in how meaning is emergent over time, within particular contexts. By intentionally loading a system with a resonant selection of specific ambiguous words, each with multiple potential meanings, one can experientially observe how the meaning is emergent in relation to context with a ReP work. This functions as an artistic constraint. Instead of saying this word is meaningless, I would say that it simultaneously carries all of its potential meanings in a state of suspended animation. It is this nature that enables Usenko to list his different potential readings of the word. If it was meaningless, he could find no such definition. Thus as a context arises, we search through our memory of useage patterns, and apply that which is most appropriate. It is human nature to try to find meaning within an exchange. This is the nature of association and understanding.

In terms of pictorial elements, I am intentionally loading the system with computer-graphic objects that will suggest alternate readings of particular juxtaposed words over time, thus an emergent, time-based context of potential meaning is generated. It is

important to recognise this in terms of the cut / copy / paste world of postmodernism. Snippets of information are constantly encountered in hypertexts. We do not begin with the assumption that they are meaningless, we seek the construction of the context to narrow the meaning - to specify it. This is especially true in the employment of pun which "vice" can potentially function as.

Usenko above is talking about his "literature of knowledge," one that seeks to alleviate ambiguity. He later speaks of the "Literature of Power" which is more in line with my project:

But I would rather wave the point in order to call attention to the fact that the ambiguity of a pun, which is a species of aesthetic ambivalence, is not the objectional ambiguity of a single informative word. The objectionalble ambiguity is a cause of mental confusion. The words of a pun are used with with a definite meaning in the sense that they are used with a definite double meaning. The mind grasps both components of a double meaning without confusing them. (Ushenko, 1958, p.36 & 37)

It is this sense of multiple meaning that I am interested in, which shows Ushenko to be slightly contradictory in terms of his discussion of fields of meaning. It is the operative nature of the media in ReP works that enables the viewer to experientially generate context. Ushenko states:

In the literature of power there is much to be said in favor of the extreme contextualists position. In the course of reading a poem context may compel us to revise our original understanding of certain lines.(Ushenko, 1958, p47)

It is this very aspect of observing the nature of context construction that Recombinant Poetic mechanism seeks to make observable in an experiential manner.

Where Usenko speaks of the sentence as a unit of meaning he is takling about " Literature of Knowledge." and not about the "Literature of Power" as he calls it. In poetic space a single word can carry potential meaning. In fact if we are to make an analogy to atoms, then I would suggest that even letters can carry potential meaning arrived at in the mind of the viewer. We can look toward Saussure for an example of this. Saussure recognised in a formal manner the ambiguity inherent to the use of language. His studies into the anagram, suggest that the letters of a word, when reorganised through external processes, can have bearing on the layering of meaning in an individual term. This, we most note is a re-combinational, time-based organisation. Thus if we are to take the "Field" analogy from physics, I think it necessary to extend the analogy to subatomic realm. The question is, how do we deal with the fact that the word is always either energy or matter. We are then speaking about both an actual field in Physics layered together with and propogating a conceptual field in Linguistics. One could ask how these two different kinds of fields intermingle with each other. Such a question is outside of the scope of this paper.

It is my contentention that all language depends on context for understanding. In the use of language, it is not only the notion that we "revise" our understanding - we actually augment or layer it with previous understandings derived from alternate contexts. We could say that thought is a kind of summing and cross referencing of the useage of all words, images, sounds and sensations from all past contexts or patterns of use that are made available to us through memory. Ushenko suggests the following:

In a literary piece, at any rate, a dynamic image does not vanish into nothingness but escapes the specification test of objectivity through fading out of focus but not without reverberations in the successors to imaginal prominence which, therefore, whould be said to preserve its presence even though in a virtual or attenuated mode." (Usenko, 1958, p.135)

This notion of a persistance of "presence" takes on an interesting role in the volatile electronic environment that characterises Recombinant Poetics.

"With this conclusion I want to establish the analogy between the transformation of ambivalent being into unambiguous perceptual manifestation, on the one hand, and the transformation of the ambiguous words into the meaning of the statement, on the other. In both transformations, initial ambivalence or ambiguity goes with the excess of alternate sets of content, and the unambiguous result is obtained by the omission of alternatives or elimination of excess." (Ushenko, 1958, p.143)

Recombinant Poetics seeks to experientially manifest situations in which the properties or nature of this "excess" can be examined. It is the my contention that such excess is common to communication and thus the study of how it arises is central to a contemporary understanding of the function of language in differing contexts or contexts augemented by additional images, sounds and/or additional qualifying language. I find this especially relevant in regard to the fact that such "excessive" languge is commonly used in poetic construction. To this end Ushenko says the following:

Even ambiguity is in order provided it is contextually controlled and, therefore, causes no confusion; in an exposure of depth and complexity the text of a poem invites alternative interpretations to be played against one another. In short, in a setting of art, the contextually controlled dynamic concreteness of concepts is most conspicuous. (Ushenko, 1958, p.162)

It is this very nature of exploring the "contextually controlled dynamic" of a work of art which is extended via my computer- based mechanism. Thus moving through a series of meaning states the user of the system can witness how complex meanings are emergent through personal interaction with the context as well as through chance mediation and pre-programmed processes. One can metaphorically invoke Heisenberg here where the observer effects the observed. This can be taken on a subtle level or on the level of human understanding in terms of what the vuser brings to the conceptual / physical experience of such an environment.

Association and play by the viewer is central to the process of exploring the techno-poetic mechanism. As media-elements are combined, both in real time and through temporal arrangement, a depth of experience is generated. I have constructed this resonant depth as a set of potentials through a specific loading of the fields; it is completed within the experience of the viewer as they conceptually bridge, disrupt, position and navigate through exploration of the techno-poetic mechanism. Meaning/becoming in this work of art is temporary, mobile, contextual.

Conclusion

Each field as explored in the techno-poetic mechnism could be described as a content probability field. Probability fields have a potentiality of signification and are dependent on context for their "reading" or legibility. Thus the perception and activity of the user of the interactive techno-poetic system drives the potential signification of media-elements. This relation between vuser and inter-authored environment, forms an on-going process of meaning/becoming. This text functions as an initial linguistic frame or perspective as a means of approaching and observing such an elusive environment; one predicated by non-closure.

Such a conception of artistic expression is not anchored by language in that it includes and takes into consideration all of the media-elements described above, functioning in an inter-signifying manner. What is suggested through this paper is the need of the formulation of a contemporary theory of environmental meaning as related to meaning/becoming, as it is generated and explored within computer-based environments. Such a theory is beyond the scope of this paper. This paper functions as an elaborate seed node... pointing toward the generation of an extremely complex, emergent inter-operative field of fields. An emergent field of meaning/becoming that enables the examination this conflation of language modes through an authored Recombinant Poetic work of art.

*Pragmatics traces its illustrious ancestry to the pre-socratic Greek dialecticians, then via Aristotle to Locke, Kant and Peirce, eventually to 19th Century phenomenologists, and --last but not least--to Ludwig Wittgenstein. In cognitive psychology, pragmatics underlies figure-ground perception, primed storage and malleable recall, attended ('context-scanning') information processing, and flexible ('prototype') categorization. In linguistics, pragmatics animates the study of contextual meaning and metaphoric extension, frame semantics and the semiotics of grammar-in-discourse, the sociology of language, and the acquisition of communicative competence. In anthropology, pragmatics is reflected in the exploration of cultural relativity, ethnomethodology and in cross-cultural cognition. (Giv—n, 1989, Preface)

From cellular to social intimologies

I read this article today on the Gnoxic Blog - although I tried to write a short description of this article or an intro ... it just might be better for you to read it and make your own conclusions... .

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It's now the middle of winter, but the buds are already there which will start to grow in the spring. How do they know when to start growing? All multicellular organisms grow until they reach maturity: how do their cells know when to stop reproducing?

This is the kind of question addressed by Werner R. Loewenstein in The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication and the Foundations of Life. It's a cause for celebration when a specialist like Loewenstein can present the gist of a lifetime's research to a general audience as he does here. I've been taking it in small doses (a few pages per day), and i don't expect to retain many of the details—and anyway, in a field moving as fast as this one, the details are subject to change. But some central principles persist, and some of those coincide with basic themes of my work in progress, Turning Words.

Turning Words is about guidance systems, and Loewenstein's book reaffirms that living beings are self-guiding systems, perfused at every level with what he calls cybernetic loops. These loops are the keys to self-organizing and self-regulating processes, and Loewenstein shows in some detail how they work at the cellular level. I think it's worthwhile to investigate whether they also work at higher levels, in the psychological and social domains.

Cell populations, or (on a larger scale) organs of a body, do not regulate themselves by electing a legislature, still less by recognizing the authority of a monarch. They don't obey any central command hierarchy; instead, they self-regulate by means of cybernetic loops. The signals meaningful to them arise among themselves, almost anywhere, and propagate by intercellular communication.

Here's where the coincidence comes in: i'm also reading presently Paul Hawken's recent book, Blessed Unrest. Hawken describes the rise of a new kind of social ‘movement’, one which promotes social and environmental justice without relying on charismatic leadership, central command structures or ideological consensus. This movement is totally decentralized, and yet can act with great singleness of purpose and power when circumstances make this possible, because each ‘cell’ in the movement is organically in touch with many others.

A sure sign of maturity in any organism is that it stops growing. The growth process is self-regulating; the breakdown of growth control is the disease we call cancer. The corporate structures which currently dominate the political economy of our planet are addicted to ‘growth’ as measured by the movement of money and assets. In organic terms, they are dedicated to prolonging the stage of immaturity, and that is why they afflict the planetary ecosystem just as cancer afflicts an individual body. (The corporate connection with cancer is not only analogical but causal as well, by the way: most of the known carcinogens in the environment are of corporate origin.)

All of this suggests that what humanity needs in order to wake from the long corporate-industrial-consumer trance is a decentralized communication network, which will clue us in to our common interests in the same way that a body knows that it's time to stop growing. This way the human race might just have a chance to reach maturity.


Via GNOXIC blog

AXIS THINKING ( excerpt from Brian Eno's diary ) 1995-2005

An axis is a name for a continuum of possibilities between two extreme positions: so the axis between black and white is a scale of greys.

I can illustrate this idea by applying it to the description of haircuts.
Rather than only being able to say of someone's haircut that it is, for example, masculine or feminine, we're as likely to want to say that it's quite masculine, or quite feminine, or unisexual - somewhere in the middle. When we do this, we acknowledge that the sexual possibilities of haircuts don't just fall squarely at one or another of the polar positions - masculine or feminine - but somewhere on the wide range of hybrids between them. In fact we would feel constrained if we couldn't make descriptions in these fuzzy, hybrid, terms.

If you were trying to describe a particular haircut, however, you'd probably want to say more than 'It;s quite feminine', or some other comment about it's gender connotations. You might also want to locate its position along other axes - for instance along the axis neat <--> shaggy - 'It's slightly shaggy' or ' It's very neat'. If that then gave you enough descriptive language to say everything you could imagine ever wanting to say about haircuts, you could locate every example you ever met somewhere on a two-dimensional space - like this sheet of paper. So you could make a kind of graph - masculine <--> feminine on one axis, neat <--> shaggy on the other. On this graph, which is a simple cross in 2D space, any point represents a particular position in relation to the four polar possibilities:

masculine <--> feminine

neat <--> shaggy

I call each of these points a cultural address. I could equally well call it a stylistic address. It is the identification of a particular point in stylistic space, a 'possible haircut'.

Those four terms still constitute an impoverished language in which to describe most haircuts, and to describe a wide range of possible haircuts we would need several others:

natural <--> contrived
rebel <-->conformist
wild <--> civilized
futuristic <--> nostalgic
businesslike <--> bohemian.

Each of these polar pairs defines another axis along which any particular haircut could be located. And each of these exists as a 'dimension' in the haircut space, which now becomes multidimensional and no longer easily drawable on a sheet of paper.

We shouldn't forget that each of these poles has no absolute and for-all-time meaning but is also in it's own slow motion, stretching the axis of which it defines and end-point this way and that. A really natural haircut, for example, is no haircut. But when we use the term 'natural cut' we don't think of someone with shaggy locks hanging over their eyes, but of someone who went to the hairdresser and said something like 'Can you make it look sort of natural - a bit windswept?', as opposed to someone else who said, 'Can you do me a nine-inch beehive?'

And there is another complication: the resonances are quite local culturally. A man with very short hair in East London in 1985 would be assumed potentially dangerous and 'hard'. The same man in San Francisco would be thought gay.

And if we look more closely we see that many of the things that we would consider single qualities of hair are actually themselves multi-axial spaces. To describe hair colour, for example, needs much more detail than dark <-->light. It needs an axis of redness, an axis of greyness, an axis of colour homogenity, an axis of shine.

What strikes you as interesting when you begin thinking about stylistic decisions (or moral or political decisions) as being locatable in a multi-axial space of this kind is the recognition that some axes don't yet exist. For example, with hairstyles, as far as I know, there is not a dirty <--> clean axis. That's to say, your hairdresser isn't likely to ask you, 'How dirty would you like it?' It's still assumed that there is no discussion about it: the axis has not been opened up, We would all want it 'as clean as possible'.

Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘the things that nobody ever thought of not doing’. A version of this happened in clothing fashion. There was recently a style – variously described as non-fit, un-fit and anti-fit ( the name didn’t stabilize) – which was to do with people wearing clothes that exist at the never-before-desirable end of newly discovered axis well-fitted > badly fitted. These clothes were deliberately chosen to look completely wrong. This was beyond baggy, which was a first timid step along that axis. Baggy implies the message ‘These are my clothes, but I like to wear them loose.’ Non-fit says, ‘These are someone else’s clothes’ or ‘I am insane’ or ‘ I cannot locate myself’ or ‘I don’t fit.’
With punk, a brand-new axis opened up: professionally cut > hacked about by a brainless cretin. As often happens, this appeared (and was intended) to be an anti-style style, and was shocking because we had never previously considered the possibility that the concept ‘style’ and the concept ‘ hacked about by a brainless cretin’ could overlap one another. But, as usual, the effect was not to overthrow and eliminate the idea of style but to give it new places in which to extend itself. ‘Hacked about by a brainless cretin’ became not the death of hair-styling but the furthest outpost of a new continuum of possible choices about how hair could look.
This is a transition from polar thinking – the kind of thinking that says, ‘it’s either this or it’s that’, or ‘Everything that isn’t clearly this must be that’ – to axial thinking. Axial thinking doesn’t deny that it could be this or that- but suggests that it’s more likely to be somewhere between the two. As soon as that suggestion is in the air, it triggers an imaginative process, an attempt to locate and conceptualize the newly acknowledged grayscale positions.
I am interested in these transitions – these moments when a stable duality dissolves into a proliferating and unstable sea of hybrids. What happens at such times is that all sorts of things become possible: there is a tremendous energy release, a great burst of experimentation. Not only do the emerging possible positions on this new-born axis have to be discovered and experienced and articulated; they have to be placed in context with other existing axes to see what new resonances appear.


A good – and undigested – example of this process is the ( apparently temporary ) demise of state communism in Eastern Europe. It’s extraordinary that when the Berlin Wall came down everyone assumed that the whole world was about to become one big market economy running on the same set of rules. What happened instead was that the old dualism communism < -- > capitalism was revealed to conceal a host of possible hybrids. Now only the most ideological governments ( England, Cuba ) still retain their fundamentalist commitment to one end of the continuum: most governments are experimenting vigorously with complicated customized blendings of market forces and state intervention.

An example of such a complicated blending is defence spending, which allows a government nominally committed to ‘market forces’ to have at its centre a completely intact command economy within which it can direct the flow of social resources.

The period of transition is marked by excitement, experimentation – and resistance. Whenever a duality starts to dissolve, those who felt trapped at one end of it suddenly feel enormous freedom – they can now redescribe themselves. But, by the same token, those who defined their identity by their allegiance to one pole of the duality ( and rejection of the other ) feel exposed. The walls have been taken away, and the separation between inside and outside is suddenly gone. This can create wide-scale social panic: vigorous affirmations of the essential rightness of the ‘old ways’, moral condemnation of the experimentalists, ‘back to basics’ campaigns, all the familiar signs of fundamentalism.

Essentially, cultures wish to be able to control, or at least channel, such excitements and panics, turning what could be chaotic uncertainty into a power either for revolution or for consolidation. This is normally mishandled. Hostile propaganda campaigns are good examples of fundamentalism at work: they are designed to push the concepts of friend and enemy to extreme and unambiguous positions, and to cement a complete and unvarying identification between two different axes: us < -- > them; friend < -- > enemy.

Zones of Pragmatic Deceit are the social and mental inventions that exist to lubricate the fiction between what we claim to stand for (i.e. simple polar pictures ) and what we actually have to do to make things work (i.e. navigate over networks of axes). These two are often quite different, as situations change much faster than the moral constructions that are supposed to describe them.

Daniel Libeskind said...[O]

Architecture, the word has lost its reputation: how is it to defend itself? Both ‘good and bad’ days are now gone. The everyday architect is dead. His body useless unless it becomes manure or kindling for the fire which, after all, is based on what is ‘no better’.

What is not alone is whole, both willing and unwilling to be named object. Once numbered and multiplied, this whole grew at the expenses of zeroes into which it has stepped. One knows construction by deconstruction and ever since Eiffel changed leisure into fatigue. The road of Architecture does not have two directions but only one – meaning that eyes are better transformers than gears, when our understanding grates on matters which will be ever resistant, incomplete. Incompleteness being the trial of psyche; bridge over skill and intelligence. [O]

Brightness of Form was a virtue when sleepy gods were doing the world’s business and helping prolong the season of All. But eventually their sons changed the rhythm of moving evening tides through errors – agents of justice – into nuclei visible on a dial. One of these is the daynight-wintersummer-warpeace. The other is too little to pinpoint since it is disguised as a city and known in each separate flavor or affliction.

The wisdom seen through the little hole cut in Knowledge appears as having been plotted in the course of history by all things other than modesty. Yet modesty alone constitutes the will named as Father who is not I, That which is not world or All-not-in-one.

What then is Architecture? Don’t notice it. However, by supposing that force relates to looks, ie to the musical instruments still harbouring weapons, one can unhinge design of things and cities, releasing the ‘more harmonious than seen’ into each architectonic device whose life lies in killing. Deadly thinking: day in night time.

The same can be said of living the death of architecture which fake lips have reduced to ‘youthful age’. What calls into being follows the thunder – process capable of reversal. Once joined by two lines and a semi-circle, Architecture becomes reductible to parts of speech or organs of the body. Hence ‘co-operation’ thoroughly overdetermines the position of the field and makes harmony into a separate or fourth element. As with knowledge the opening crisis is an anguished if inarticulate experience: partly lunar curse, partly the curled wool before its thread has been straightened.

The Vitruvian realm which limits Architecture to the Art of Building, the Construction of Machines and the Making of Time-pieces acts as the venerable liver which has been split into three and not the famous rail of Roussel on which I suspend the beginning of a circle or its violently cut end – half spurned, half poisoned. Then the doctor forgets to submit the bill to you and hands it to God, the Beautiful or theGood. (It should be a human being who sees divine, ugly, good; better yet, a boy who will never be a ‘man’, as ‘man’ was never ‘god’!)

If every construction were just smoke one’s perception would not be restricted. But dates themselves are senses giving and receiving each other’s small insanities. How to withstand heart’s desire – since editing gets what it wants – at the soul’s expense?

Stirred like a delicious drink, the recess springs forward like hot wine mixed and seasoned by a boasting harlequin who created chess pieces and a separate playing board which consists in the one step upon which the foot does not slip even when frozen.

Life is to Architecture as earth is to watery physical force. The architect has been locked in a trunk while Architecture is staggering mindlessly to lift the load back home. By now, or soon, the sweat will evaporate and be forever lost (cubes have always been pre-historic ). Thus emerges the wonderful order of a world no longer seen as the random gathering of things significant only when clumsy. A world in which each hair-pin, arcade or tribe can no longer posture in the mother’s sensus communis . The shapes are cold, handwritten, dry: one simply cannot find their boundary in the East or in the profound fairy detector with an always extended arm.

It shall remain Unaccountable, faintly whispering – clear of illogic, sure to reason on the course of heavenly bodies, the factor π, law-abiding men trying to derive absence from songs. What penetrates fools satisfaction. Humanity reposes while mighty defenders fight madness in words, gloomy origins of the igloo, the rough millennium whose thousand-year-old ray looks like a statue of a hero gossiping behind the fallen house.

Understanding is absent-minded. The unseen Design: an inorganic sediment. The Ephasians might as well rest, letting their city be governed by children.

Without ending (since the above is neither theory nor object), I believe that even the ugliest architecture is going to be clearer than the handsomest name or the wisest visage. Because what is less wide is more beautiful. To put it simply: god at a distance looks like a construction or an edifice, but only to those who have acquired form. The calculable always equals two times god.

PRE DNEFIED RAEINDG

The dssaminotin of wrods is a tset dnoe by the Cabmrgide istnitute taht no man aacutllay rdeas the wohle wrods, olny pratailly. Ipmotrant are olny the frsit and the lsat ltetrs of the atclual wrods.

Deos tihs hpaepn whit the vsuial lnugaege as wlel?

Is it psioslibe?