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Dialectics of Determinism
Calvino is a brilliant writer whether he is conjuring a fictional universe or when, as here, he brings his imagination to bear on the practice of writing itself.
In the essay, Cybernetics and Ghosts, actually a lecture delivered in 1967, he tackles head on the issue of computationally-produced literature. He uses the argument I feel most resonance with, which reminds us that human authors are really not much better than machines.
Human language is itself a discrete combinatorial system no less than any algorithm a machine might be induced to follow; and the writer himself is little more than a conduit for language, rather than the originator of novel art.
Whether discussing the finite algorithms of life (DNA) or the wealth of human discourse (literature), Calvino notes:
The processes that appeared most resistant to a formulation in terms of number, to a quantitative description, are now translated in mathematical patterns.
The essay decentres our notions of the Romantic author and the primacy of human agency; and of course provokes us to wonder about the future of human / machine collaboration.
Tags: algorithm authorship electronic literature machine narrative
Beginner's Guide to Foucault Texts
The newcomer to Foucault's work may consider tackling the entirety of a book like 'The History of Sexuality' or 'Discipline and Punish' a bit too much too soon. Instead, those readers may prefer to sample Foucault in the form presented in this commonly used reader.
Extracts from most of the major texts, and covering many of Foucault's themes, are reproduced here with a useful Introduction by Rabinow. Foucault on authorship, truth, power, the archeaology of knowledge, the geneaology of discourse, the practices and techniques of the self - are all represented here.
Also particularly noticeable from the extracts in this reader is the regularity with which Foucault uses a sort of negative rhetoric: "I do not intend to write a history of this or that... by author I do not mean this that and the other... we identify with neither this, nor with that..."
Foucault is very often at pains to tell us what he is not saying, and readers who are put off by these disclaimers may be forgiven for wondering what exactly it is that he is saying.
Tags: authorship discipline discourse foucault identity knowledge power practices self
Unsynopsis
I had planned to go through Merleau-Ponty's preface to this book, line by line, and as I did so, make detailed notes, in order that I could record an understanding of the text.
It soon became clear however, that these detailed notes, in order to fully express that understanding, would necessarily be word-for-word identical to the original.
And as Borges' Pierre Menard's new Quixote would have been a much more rich text than the identical original, so my new verbatim text itself would have been a much more profound exposition of the usefulness of phenomenological approaches to understanding the world.
However, I realised I could not post my synopsis here, because although my text would have been a thoroughly original reproduction of the text, it would nevertheless have infringed Merleau-Ponty's copyright - and therefore, I have desisted in my plan to do so.
Tags: author authorship originality phenomenology postmodernism reflexivity
Original
This chapter doesn't actually exist
Tags: author authorship literature originality postmodernism reflexivity
Translations
We tend to focus on 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' when we think of Benjamin's relevance to media and theory, but his essay, 'The Task of the Translator' is also a really interesting exploration and meditation on what at first glance appears to be a straightforward task: translating text from one language to another.
Benjamin's essay really exposes this apparent simplicity for the much more ambiguous, collaborative and creative process that translation must be... indeed you realise that in, for example, poetry, translation is not only impossible, but goes beyond 'adaptation' into the act of creation, with the source text as inspiration.