mind / body
If distinctions are "frames" for observing and describing identities, we will need a theory of frames, including, as Derrida would say, a frame for the theory of frames. In the Parergon quote, Derrida twists the theory of the frame to directly connect its inside and outside. The lack of a theory of the frame is directly connected to the place of lack within the theory.
Read Morea child's definition of a net: "a lot of holes tied together with string"
Stuart Kaufman has described the formation of networks as a phase transition that occurs as the number of connections is increased between a random graph of points. As a general feature, when the number of connections reaches half of the number of points, the majority of the points become linked in a giant cluster. Kauffman believes that we should think of the genetic program not as a serial algorithm but as a parallel distributed regulatory network .
As a general model, the network applies not only to the "intertwingled" pieces of text in a hypertext but also to the linked computers in a connected system such as Internet, to pattern-recognition systems such as the immune system, or to organisms such as the slime mold, that are made up of individual cells responding to gradients and forming larger and more differentiated entities. The ability of the brain to synchronize and coordinate activities in different parts, called reentry, is another networked process. Theorists of complexity describe the behaviour of such systems as emergent.
Problems are assumed to become intractable when they become tangled, yet models of rhizomes and networks that value links are a kind of countermodel.
Read MoreFor Nietzche, "pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics." "Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself." "If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." (Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo)
On the other hand, ritual may be seen as a way to keep memory alive without the experience of pain. Bataille echoes Nietzche's description of the role of religious sacrifice. He describes sacredness as the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. (p.22)
"Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt." Samuel Johnson. "To have pain is to have certainty , to hear about pain is to have doubt." (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 13)
Like consciousness, pain as a philosophical issue raises the questions of subjectivity and of other minds. Wittgenstein rejected the classical status of pain as the paradigm of direct intuition. When one is in pain, he said in the Philosophical Investigations, one cannot say, except perhaps as a joke, that one knows one is in pain. Say that one cannot doubt it and leave it at that, he suggested.
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