Re: <nettime> times of the sign digest [noemata x2, sondheim, chandavarkar]

[solipsis <solipsis@hevanet.com>]

>"The inarticulate cry which seemed to be the voice of light." * Hermes
Trismegistus

"tardyons are luxons." *Daniel M. Kirchman


Seed-toe:
Serendipities : language & lunacy
by Eco, Umberto

    In many ways my own feeling about codework comes not from a conscious
and deliberate
attempt to explicate its meaning but rather finding myself thinking about
codework as I am
pursuing some mundane activity like reading, or wiping a tiny smudge from an
interferometry
mirror with a piece of lens paper, lubing the lm guides on the transfer axis
of an industrial
production robot, or simply mooning at the sky thinking about the earth as a
kind of junkyard
of perception and praxis.
    There was a marvelous Zen painter, a Master Zen Painter whose name was
Sengai who lived
in the mid Eighteenth century whose work embodies the essence of humor in
the Zen tradition.
I happen to come across one of his images the other day in a book and it set
off a kind of semi-autonomous
subroutine of sorts about being and the nature of meaning, and also the
nature of being meaning.
The book of course is the Kodansha ISBN 4-7700-2328-6, and the image is the
thirtieth plate:

30. Dragon and Tiger*

What is this?
Its called a dragon.
People burst into laughter
And I, too, have a good laugh.

A cat or a tiger?
Or, Watonai?

"Sengai's pictures do not look like a dragon and a tiger, and yet they are a
dragon and a tiger.
    Watonai, the hero of a puppet play called Kokusen'ya gassen (The Battles
of Coxinga, 1715)
by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), goes to China with his parents and
subjugates a fierce tiger.
Sengai draws a tiger, and the picture not only turns into a cat, but it also
looks like Watonai's face.
What, then, should be the answer to Sengai's question, "What is this?""

    Indeed, what is this? Since our last commentary brings up the issue of
proportionality as an entre'
to the discussion of systems, I think perhaps I will reverse that order, by
way of another specific
example as an entre' to the discussion of distinctions in the
phenomenological labor of 'execution,' or
as I prefer, 'actuation'. Strangely enough the example will again come from
an alternate 'lesser' tradition
than that of the Western X-tian inflected Philosophical canon, the Maya.
    In the Linda Schele and Peter Mathews book _The Code of Kings_ which is
not without its own brand
of controversy within the field of Maya studies, there is a section on
Architectural Symmetry, and which
introduces the work of a graduate student named Christopher Powell who
discovered the method by
which the Maya had been able to achieve the use of the golden mean within
their architectural designs
by the use of a woven cord. "Powell told us that his Yukatek teachers told
him that using the cord makes
their houses like flowers because of the inherent relationship of their
proportions." And there is a beuatiful
poem in transliterated Mayan about the use of the cord by the gods to design
and construct the cosmos
in this section which I won't copy out, but you can read it for yourself on
page 35 of that volume.
And this brings us to the conclusion of that section which is another key to
the discussion: "To
us the most revealing thing about Powell's discoveries is that this way of
measuring things and the proportionality
it naturally generates does not require special knowledge, like abstract
geometry, to use it. The cord
gave a harmonious proportionality to everything the Maya did in their art
and archetecture, and it joined
their human-made art to the symmetries that permeate the natural world. To
create the harmonies of the
cosmos, the gods used the same method of measure as a weaver, house builder,
and cornfield maker.
But cord measuring also revealed the innate symmetries of nature, so that in
reality, Maya art and daily life
harmonized with cosmic symmetry without the necessity of conscious design."
    I think this is a good example to use as it sort of alludes to the
codework notion of the skein. In a sense
there need be no doubt that that is exactly why I chose the example and also
because we were all already
thinking, and especially because the IS was already actuating, without
conscious design, it was producing
a conflation of symmetry and violence, humor and movement, phenomenon, and
the burden of phenomenon,
phenomenology. "The quality of a theory is the relation between basic
assumptions and derivations.
The luxon theory is able to summarize the law of conservation of energy, the
special theory of relativity,
E=mc2, and the fundamental physical concepts of mass and energy into only
three words: tardyons are luxons.
Each matter with rest mass (tardyons) consists of particles with light
velocity (luxons). All theoretical objections
against this hypothesis fail due to the existence of glueballs. In September
1997 out of pure light,
physicists create particles of matter. This proof: You can make really every
type of matter out of luxons -
this table and this chair and this paper and everything. An extraordinary
success of luxon theory!"
This is a quote from the Luxon website at http://www.tardyon.de/ which is a
fine example of seeing and through
that seeing creating a lens. It also brings to mind the famous phrase
uttered by John Wheeler and his famous paper,
It from Bit, where wheeler famously declares: everything classical,
including energy, matter, spacetime and even empty space,
emerges from this bit soup (also called quantum ether or quantum foam)
because the universe started as a bit bang..
    And this emergence is the labor of code, or one might say this physical
world is the immanence of code, code in the
form of the actuation of luxon inertia, or veritas, claritas, or any of a
multitude of terms taken from the historical plasma
of descriptive elements conjoined to the primal actuation by the tongue of
linguistics, as in certain descriptions of quantum mechanics
which being algebraically closed, become equivalent to bouncing a light beam
around inside a hollow mirrored sphere as
in the ghastly story presented by Edogawa Rampo, The Hell of Mirrors, a
tongue of mirror which attaches like a skein
as in the google folk tale
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=%22joined+at+the+tongue%22
late of NW native cosmology where two frogs are conjoined at the tongue. So
is code and its actuation conjoined
in the tongue which is the light of matter as waves of energy are pulsed
along these skeins, the nursery of being
is conjoined to the graveyard of reason, and in that work, and the work of
all wordplay, all codeplay, all sexplay,
is set the attribute bit of the Theory as spectacle instead of as
participation, and codework answers this nonparticipatory side of theoria,
the image, as an image, for the first time presented kosmos as a spectacle,
a theoria, that such an image put order
on display, as it were, in the garbled cloak of its skeins speaking, can be
seen to underscore the view of Anaximander
as presiding at the birth of theory, and contrary to what we know to be the
case, it is indeed so if one accepts the [un]usual
modern view which stresses the speculative, non-participatory side of
theoria, and interpolates, by reading backward,
{or as in riding backwards like an Apache shaman} an assumed evolution from
theory-as-contemplation to theory-as-opposed
to practice. But there is another dimension (there is always another
dimension, infinite dimensions) to the whole question, for,
when theory was born, Anaximander was not just the presiding midwife, he was
also the baby in the life of a collective
consciousness, the movement from compactness to differentiation is
comparable to the birth and growth of an individual
human being (See Stephen J. Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny) and who leaves
the compactness of life in utero (an excellent album)
where child is mother and mother is child, to acquire an increasingly
differentiated understanding of the work, uh, word, i mean, world,
in the absolute darkness of the womb (of this plagiarism) the child can, at
the most, have only four senses-taste, hearing,
smell, and touch and only at birth, with the first and most definitive
separation (into the blizzard of color) does the child acquire its
fifth sense and begin to SEE.. This seeing and the separation it
presupposees can be taken as emblematic of the birth of theory..
    And so we ask ourselves, "What happens if the mental of metaphysical
surface has the upper hand in this pendular movement?
In this case the verb is inscribed on this surface (as in a proto-disc of
matter) that is, the glorious event enters a symbolic relation
with a state of affairs, rather than merging with it; the shining, noematic
attribute, rather than being confused with a quality,
sublimates it, the proud result, rather than being confused with an action
or passion, extracts an eternal truth from them.
What Carroll calls "Impenetrability," and also "Radiancy" is actualized for
recent etymologies have shown, apparently with
some conclusiveness, that the primary and original meaning of theoros was
that of spectator. This modern claim is based
on the derivation of theoros from thea (seeing, spectacle), and horao (I
see), Furthermeow, theoroi were ambassadors
to sacred festivals who left (were separated from) their native city to
attend festivities elsewhere, and the assumption has been
that these ambassadors observed, but did not paraticipate. But a closer look
at the ancient sources shows that many theoroi
did in fact participate by offering sacrifices (this text) and by taking
part in the dances and games.. and that text descends
back into its source code: ISBN 0-262-13292-3 and is replaced with another
piece of the actuation which will perform
another poignant piece of deliteralization in the stream. read/call// The
Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art
by Cesar Paternosto only to point out what in the 1930's Ubbelohde-Doering
called the "Concacha Stones" also called the
Saihuite stones which John Hemming believes were the site of the sanctuary
oracle of the Apurimac.
    So that there is no need to turn from the actuation back into actuation,
the mirror is already awake, and the furred
and winged snake, that segmental and pulsing causality of the sentence which
led you, is a meaning and an interruption
of meanings, or otherwise, What happened on the way to the Colliseum?

Well, we heard a demon who spoke through the trunk of a tree..

And that at the same time is the Reductio Ad Absurdum and the Dede-terminism
of Sememeiosis,
Two Dunce-caps joined by a bisecting radiality, or maybe not dunce caps, but
gnome hats,
gnomon, or maybe remember they found an ancient greek computer years ago and
they x-rayed it..
(Is it good? How do the Jain think?)

lq
http://www.hevanet.com/solipsis/blogger.html


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