theory

space / place

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"Give place, let the prisoner by; give place." -- the first English use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionnary

In the Physics, esp. book IV, Aristotle proposes a theory of place (topos) that rejects Plato's theory of space. The topos is a place of belonging. It is distinct from the body, which is defined by length, width, and depth. Yet there is a definite relationship of community or conflict between the nature of bodies and the nature of places: every physical element seeks "its" place, the place that belongs and corresponds to it, and it flees from any other opposed to it. For Aristotle "the motions of simple bodies (fire, earth, and so forth) show not only that place is something but that place has some kind of functional significance (potentia also force)" (cf. posture) although this power is not definable (like the forces of attraction and repulsion in modern physics)

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space

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According to Sun Ra "Space is the place".

"The fascination which space seems to hold for philosophy is only equalled by the fascination which the idea of system holds for architects." (Christian Girard, Architecture et Concepts Nomades, p.72)

(cf. Roland Barthes' distinction between l'esprit de syst me and l'esprit syst matique .)

In this document, space is no longer considered unitary, as having a single essence, concept, or function. This is perhaps an indication of an outlook that is suspicious of the repressive ambition of a universal space which suppresses multiplicities, catastrophes, and incommensurabilities. One way to break with strategy is to fragment space. A typological approach to space in architecture, and a sensitivity to metaphor as crucial to theorization, indicate a move away from a singular concept of either space or theory.

The following taxonomy of spaces is a mixture of disciplinary divisions (art history, philosophy, etc.), technological divisions (writing, Cyberspace), territorial divisions (urban space), and subjective divisions (psycho-sexual, personal).

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social space

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"The paranoid person takes up too much social space" (Donna Haraway)

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre reclaims space as a primarily social problematic. For Lefebvre, the proliferation of this and/or that space, eg. literary space, ideological space, the space of the dream etc. is a general consequence of of the concept of mental space (p.3) through the epistemologico-philosophical thinking of western Logos (in both science and philosophy). (see philosophical space ) Lefebvre unmasks this mode of thought as a powerful ideological tendency, expressing the dominant ideas of the dominant class, through the concept of abstract space.

The very proliferation of descriptions and sectionings of space is for Lefebvre an example of the endless division of labor within present-day society. Lefebvre sees spatial practice as the projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects, elements and moments of social practice. (p.8) If he uses terms of language or contemporary theory, he is also at pains to recontextualize them as produced by a social subject. For example, he believes that a coded language (of space) may be said to have existed on the practical basis of a specific relationship between town, country and political territory, a language based on classical perspective and Euclidean space, and that that system collapsed in the twentieth century. But, he adds, if spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise. (p.17)

The task is thus a dialectical one, and both things in space and discourse on space do no more than supply clues to this productive process which subsumes signifying processes without being reducible to them. (p. 37) (see also representation)

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style

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Inherent to the concept of style is an idea of historical necessity. A true style, like the Baroque of the seventeenth century, is not copied from a previous epoch, but arises out of some structural necessity, out of the manifest needs of man and society. "Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and meaningful expression through which the personnality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible." (Meyer Shapiro, Style, in M. Philipson Ed., Aesthetics Today, p.137) (cf morphology) Style is an essential object of study for the historian of art. For the synthesizing historian of culture or the philosopher of history, style is the manifestation of the culture as a whole, the visible sign of its unity. The style reflects or projects the "inner form" of collective thinking and feeling. 

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Surveillance

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Surveillance

Computer profiles generate objects for surveillance - they instruct or train the observer in what to watch and how to watch for it. Police, psychiatrists, educators, physicians, to name just a few groups, increasingly use profile technology for early or pre-identification of various traits within preselected populations - if you match enough elements of the profile, you could become atarget, even before any trait has manifested itself. To prepare the observer, to train the observer to see, and in the last instance, to be the observer's eyes, this is the imaginary of the simulation of surveillance.

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subject

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At issue within the philosophical tradition is the relation of the subject to thought. (see also consciousness ) Ever since Aristotle the nous had been separate from the psyche. "At the moment of its manifest emergence in the Cartesian formulation, the subject is not in fact a psychic reality, but a pure Archimedean point." (Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History) 

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surface/depth

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In "The Mass Ornament", Siegfried Kracauer claims that "An analysis of the simple surface manifestations of an epoch can contribute more to determining its place in the historical process than judgements of the epoch about itself," and that "the very unconscious nature of surface manifestations allows for direct access to an understanding of these conditions." 

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technology

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technology

Technology is usually understood as having a primarily practical concern with altering the world, while science has a cognitive concern with knowing it.(see tech philos) In this sense, technology is more a "knowing how" than a "knowing that." (following the distinction made by Gilbert Ryle.) 

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teleology

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In the Timaeus, Plato pictured the natural world as the product of a divine craftsman who looked to the world of eternal being for his model of the good and then created a natural order that was as good as it possibly could be. ("Teleology", by James C. Lennox, in Keller and Lloyd, eds. Keywords in Evolutionary Biology ) This model is the origin of what is sometimes referred to as "external teleology." The "externality" is twofold: the agent whose goal is being acheived is external to the object, and the value is the agent's value, not the object's. (This is much closer to the idea of the machine) 

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theory

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As opposed to the weird science section, the theory section is devoted to terms that come from criticism, from literary studies, and the humanities. The basis for this bipartite structure came from my interest in the borrowings and polyvalent meanings of terms, the ways that the same term might take on opposite valences. A prime example of this reversibility is chaos. (a key reading was Chaos Bound, by Katherine Hayles) For cultural theory, chaos is opposite of order. But for the "new sciences" chaos can be understood as a new extension of order. Order itself moves back and forth between reassuring stability and coercive power. Hayles desribes "The politics of chaos" as " local knowledge versus global theory." My interest is thus to see how the meanings of terms need to be understood in variable contexts. This document seeks to map out some of the convergences, overlaps, shifting perspectives, and outright conflicts between contemporary criticism and sciences. 

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textual space

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The textual space of the printed page has come to be seen as arbitrary and self-contained. The arbitrariness is a result of the alphabet, referring to sounds in an arbitrary (and contextual) way, to the concept of the linguistic sign, which after Saussure, was described primarily as an arbitrary link between signifier and signified, and to the culture of the printed book, which has striven towards legibility through typographic simplicity and the exlusion of pictorial attributes to the page itself.

But at different moments in the history of writing, the surface has been endowed with pictorial qualities. Picture writing, which is generally thought of as the historical precursor of phonetic writing, refers through stylized images. The bridge from picture writing to phonetic writing was the realization that picture elements could be identified with sounds in language. Through the process of phonetization and abstraction, writing becomes a secondary system depending on spoken language for its meaning. (much of Derrida's work is a criticism of this idea...presumably because the system which is supposed to be secondary has become so important.) see writing.

An example of orchestrated simultaneity on the page is Blaise Cendrars' and Sonia Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France , which combined poems, maps, and illustrations on a sheet two meters long.

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topos

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The Greek word topos meant literally a place, and ancient rhetoric used the word to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought. For the Ancients, particularly for Aristotle, topoi were rubrics with a logical or rhetorical value from which the premisses of argument derive. In the Renaissance, topics became headings that could be used to organize any field of knowledge. 

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tree

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tree

The image of the tree, of branching phylogenies, has come to underly all our thinking about organisms and evolution. It is a "canonical icon" whose influence can be described as an " unconscious hegemony."The hierarchical structure expresses the pattern of branching speciation, of successive, unending, natural wedging through natural selection which forms the "tree of life." The tree combines the "ladder" of evolution, from lower to higher lifeform -- and with man at the top -- with the "cone" of increasing diversity. (Steven Jay Gould in Hidden Histories of Science) As Gould points out, the latter is factually incorrect. The Cambrian explosion was the moment of greatest diversity. The former is, of course, an anthropocentric bias. 

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truth

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Plato and Euclid developed an indissoluble partnership between geometrical and philosophical ideas of truth. The Platonic concept of the theory of ideas was possible only because Plato had continually in mind the static shapes discovered by Greek mathematics. On the other hand, Greek gemetry did not achieve completion as a real system until it adopted Plato's manner of thinking. (see Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge.) The concepts and propositions that Euclid placed at the apex of his system were a prototype and pattern for what Plato called the process of synopsis in idea. What is grasped in such synopsis is not the peculiar, fortuitous, or unstable; it possesses universal necessary and eternal truth. (see transcendence / immanence) This is the space of universal truth that differs from the spaces of a kind of truth that funtions only in the context of local pockets, a truth that is always local, distributed haphazardly in a plurality of spaces, with regional epistemologies.

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utopia / heterotopia

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In an article entitled "Other spaces; the principles of heterotopia", Michel Foucault looks at spaces which are in rapport in some way with all the other arrangements of space in a given society, but yet in some way contradict them. 

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unity

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For Kant, the categorial principle of unity is a requirement for the very concept of nature. As he puts it in the Prolegomena to the Critique of Pure Reason, "nature is the existence of things, considered as existence determined according to universal laws." For Kant, the idea of God serves to symbolize or "schematize" the highest form of systematic unity to which empirical knowledge can be brought, the purposive unity of things. (B714)

According the Kant, the idea of space, a priori, is that of a unity. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defined space as "the form of all phenomena of the external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility, under which alone external intuition is possible." (p.26) (For Ernst Cassirer, the recognition of non-Euclidean geometries seemed to mean renouncing the unity of reason, which is its intrinsic and distinguishing feature." (see scientific space )

In the Critique of Judgement, he realizes that the absolute conditions of experience are not enough, and that experience depends on our ability to arrange the particular laws of nature according to the idea of a system. The empirical unity of nature in all its diversity is not identical with the categorical one, not constitutive of our experience, but a regulative one.

It is the business of our understanding to introduce unity into nature. For a scientist to succeed at his task, he must assume that something corresponding to this unity actually exists in nature to be discovered.

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virtual

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"Reality is that which is, 'virtuality' is that which seems to be." (Ted Nelson)

Traditionally, for something to be virtual meant that it possessed the powers or capabilities of something else. In the late 1950's, scientists developed what they called "virtual computers" -- machines quick enough to handle several users sequentially while giving each user the impression of being the only one using the computer.

In this same sense, a propagating information structure, such as a "glider" in the "game of life" (see cellular automata) is a virtual machine. For Christopher Langton, behaviors themselves can constitute the fundamental parts of non-linear systems, virtual parts, which depend on non-linear interections between physical parts for their very existence.

The Danish physicist Benny Lautrup distinguishes between "real" computer organisms and "virtual" ones. The virtual computer organisms are those designed to be completely dependent on a specific habitat inside the machine -- in games, in cellular automata, or in virtual environments such as the Tierra simulator. The environments for real computer organisms, known as computer viruses, are real computers, real hardware, mainframes, or networks.

Or is the virtual that which could be ? ......

...."Could be !"

If techno-usage stresses the dematerialized, computational capacities of the virtual, the philosophical tradition that passes through Bergson and Deleuze stresses the latent potentialities of the virtual.

Etymologically, virtual means full of virtue, virtue being taken here as the capacity to act.

Virtue / virtual / virtuous (see virtual reality ) Does the etymology of virtue from vir suggest anything?

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