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The Global Village

Submitted by Bobby Campbell on Wed, 09/02/2009 - 08:41

The Earth is surrounded by over 9,000 artificial satellites. Marshall McLuhan supposed that with the planet placed inside this "digital envelope," as the content of a medium of satellites, that the earth had become an artform. McLuhan saw the satellite environment as a kind of global proscenium arch, all the world literally a stage, spontaneous nature having given way to a programmable ecology. This "Echoland" would supposedly serve as the dramatis loci of the Electric Age, where information overload might negate the private outlook of individual points of view, and reincorporate public/tribal consciousness. (World wide web social networks?) Within tribal societies nothing is unconscious, it is a world of all-at-onceness, simultaneous resonances, w/ everything seen as effecting everything else.

McLuhan saw both great promise and great danger in this reversion to tribalism, having began his career as a Joyce scholar, he saw Finnegans Wake as illuminating safe passage through the maelstrom. McLuhan on Joyce: As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope". This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor", savage, the oral or sacral; "scope" the visual or profane and civilized."

(Pardon the partial rehashing of old material, I'm going back in and updating/serializing "THE STATE OF THE ART" for the BC website, and figured I may as well share it here too.)

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Wed, 09/02/2009 - 18:07
#1
Bogus
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3-Dimensional crosswords, anyone?

I like it Bobby! Didn’t some orator explain why he repeated what he said:

“First, I tell ‘em what I’m gonna tell ‘em, then I tell them, the I tell them what I just told them.”
“I have a dream...”
Out here, looking for hits, and raised profiles for ideas, we have to repeat.
  • For people who heard it before, did they get it? 
  • If they got it, did they remember where they heard it (can they find it again?)
  • And if they got all that, does it need saying again, for people who missed it first time around?
I don’t consider it totally an accident that I ended up working in libraries and archives.
We missed out on developing some stuff with Bob in his Tale of The Tribe course, from Shakespeare (who disappeared in his insistence on the importance of Joyce and Pound) – to McLuhan (who went out of fashion) – to Claude Shannon and several others.
The cross-correspondences between the guys of that generation (Burroughs valued his studies with Korzybski) escape us new kids quite often. I see Burroughs referencing McLuhan in The Third Mind - about ideogrammic communication:
INTERVIEWER: In Nova Express you indicate that silence is a
desirable state.
 
BURROUGHS: The most desirable state. In one sense a special
use of words and pictures can conduce silence. The scrapbooks
and time travel are exercises to expand consciousness, to teach me
to think in association blocks rather than words. I've recently spent
a little time studying hieroglyph systems, both the Egyptian and
the Mayan. A whole block of associations—boonf!—like that!
Words—at least the way we use them—can stand in the way of
what I call nonbody experience. It's time we thought about leaving
the body behind.
 
INTERVIEWER: Marshall McLuhan said that you believed heroin
was needed to turn the human body into an environment that
includes the universe. But from what you've told me, you're not
at all interested in turning the body into an environment.
 
BURROUGHS: NO, junk narrows consciousness. The only benefit
to me as a writer (aside from putting me into contact with the
whole carny world) came to me after I went off it. What I want
to do is to learn to see more of what's out there, to look outside,
to achieve as far as possible a complete awareness of surroundings.
Beckett wants to go inward. First he was in a bottle and
now he is in the mud. I am aimed in the other direction: outward.
 
INTERVIEWER: Have you been able to think for any length of
time in images, with the inner voice silent?
 
BURROUGHS : I'm becoming more proficient at it, partly through
my work with scrapbooks and translating the connections between
words and images. Try this: Carefully memorize the meaning of
a passage, then read it; you'll find you can actually read it without
the words' making any sound whatever in the mind's ear.
Extraordinary experience, and one that will carry over into
dreams. When you start thinking in images, without words, you're
well on the way.
 
INTERVIEWER: Why is the wordless state so desirable?
 
BURROUGHS: I think it's the evolutionary trend. I think that
words are an around-the-world, ox-cart way of doing things,
awkward instruments, and they will be laid aside eventually,
probably sooner than we think. This is something that will happen
in the space age. Most serious writers refuse to make themselves
available to the things that technology is doing. I've never
been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid
of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means
for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This
is one objection to the cut-ups. There's been a lot of that, a sort
of superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you
can't cut up these words. Why can't I? I find it much easier to
get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—
doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent
person—than from those who are.
 
INTERVIEWER: HOW did you become interested in the cut-up
technique?
 
BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and
painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I
know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, "Minutes to
Go," was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet.
I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the
publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities
of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of
course, when you think of it, "The Waste Land" was the first
great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the
same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in "The Camera Eye"
sequences in U.S.A. I felt I had been working toward the same
goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw
it being done
And Claude Shannon referencing James Joyce FW in his seminal (1948) work:
A Mathematical Theory of Communication
By C. E. SHANNON
The ratio of the entropy of a source to the maximum value it could have while still restricted to the same symbols will be called its relative entropy. This is the maximum compression possible when we encode into the same alphabet. One minus the relative entropy is the redundancy. The redundancy of ordinary English, not considering statistical structure over greater distances than about eight letters, is roughly 50%. This means that when we write English half of what we write is determined by the structure of the language and half is chosen freely. The figure 50% was found by several independent methods which all gave results in this neighborhood.
 
One is by calculation of the entropy of the approximations to English. A second method is to delete a certain fraction of the letters from a sample of English text and then let someone attempt to restore them. If they can be restored when 50% are deleted the redundancy must be greater than 50%. A third method depends on certain known results in cryptography.
 
Two extremes of redundancy in English prose are represented by Basic English and by James Joyce’s book “Finnegans Wake”. The Basic English vocabulary is limited to 850 words and the redundancy is very high. This is reflected in the expansion that occurs when a passage is translated into Basic English. Joyce on the other hand enlarges the vocabulary and is alleged to achieve a compression of semantic content.
 
The redundancy of a language is related to the existence of crossword puzzles. If the redundancy is zero any sequence of letters is a reasonable text in the language and any two-dimensional array of letters forms a crossword puzzle. If the redundancy is too high the language imposes too many constraints for large crossword puzzles to be possible. A more detailed analysis shows that if we assume the constraints imposed by the language are of a rather chaotic and random nature, large crossword puzzles are just possible when the redundancy is 50%. If the redundancy is 33%, three-dimensional crossword puzzles should be possible, etc.

 

 "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
          As he landed his crew with care;
     Supporting each man on the top of the tide
          By a finger entwined in his hair.

     "Just the place for a Snark!  I have said it twice:
          That alone should encourage the crew.
     Just the place for a Snark!  I have said it thrice:
          What I tell you three times is true."
 

RAW and Crowley both seemed to have great respect for Lewis Carroll. 

When I quoted The Mad Gardener's Song in the CC&C course RAW replied:

Dear Bogmag--

Yr poem from Lewis Carroll sums up this whole
course! Especially re: coincidence or conspiracy...

P S Crowley said this poem contains the
basic secret of Cabala.

 

 

"You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?"
Marshall McLuhan

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Thu, 09/03/2009 - 08:40
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Bobby Campbell
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Thanks Bogus!

I look forward to diving in more fully after school tonight.  Both of my classes, which on the surface seemed to be an american history class & an english composition class, turn out to be focused on media theory.  McLuhan showed up in my english reading assignment last night. :) 

Okay, off to work!

http://www.bobbycampbell.net

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Sat, 09/12/2009 - 22:38
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fly agaric 23
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fw AND THE Complexity OF Artificial LIFE.

?

I was up into the early hours reading a preview chapter from Joyce, Chaos and Complexity by Thomas Rice, the text began circling through the pages of Coincidance', in my mind, covering some of the connections between Quantum Physics, Taoism and Joyce in a very refreshing - peek - back into some of the topics RAW explored throughout his life, but in a slightly different context. I think that combined with some of the above principles from Shannon, the Quantum Mechanics vs. Relativity paradox - explored by Joyce in the Wake - and a stiff drink, make a good mix. Phew... THE COMPLEXITY OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE...

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6Jctoxe6lawC&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

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Sat, 09/12/2009 - 23:54
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fly agaric 23
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HERE WE GO!    

HERE WE GO!

 

 

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Mon, 09/14/2009 - 01:27
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borsky
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The Global Village

"Chaos Theory and James Joyce's Everyman" by Peter Francis Mackey looks promising too

 

"I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." - Marcel Duchamp

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Wed, 02/10/2010 - 12:21
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fuzzbuddy
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I just found a site called...

www.intelligencesquared.com which has a three minute video of Ezra Pound reading "WITH USURA"...

http://www.intelligencesquared.com/interviews-lectures-conversations/ezra-pound-reading-with-usura

and a very good (IMO) 20 minute video by Stephen Fry:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbvr0m_the-intelligence%B2-debate-stephen-fr_shortfilms

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Wed, 07/14/2010 - 18:29
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fuzzbuddy
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Some RAW on Ez

http://www.thehydramag.com/2010/07/14/toltec-on-safari-getting-at-the-galactic-consciousness/

 

 

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