R/Evolution:
Social Medicine in Illuminated Ink
1
OR
The Möbius Script
"aNOther
"s l i d e r u l e
"ON
"emOtiON cONteNt
"The City of God / R/Evolution
"Yahweh = Technological Extension of Consciousness
"The Messiah = Cyborg
"The Elect = Proficient Processors of Languageless Communication
"The Church = World Wide Web
"2nd Coming = Pentecostal State
"Hell = Offline Communication in Mother Tongue
"Millennium = General Cosmic Consciousness
–Philip Morais, "The Declaration of Interdependence"
"This new science of language and forms gives renewed salience to the accumulated knowledge of rhetoric and grammar. Tetrads reunite both of these sciences with dialectic (philosophy and logic and their children) and point towards the development of a rhetoric of grammar as well as towards a grammar of rhetoric, as a next stage. (Laws of Media 229)"
Gloss:
My attempt in my presentation was to present a rhetoric of grammar as well as a grammar of rhetoric as a next stage in the development of the laws of media where I would introduce new and modified tools in the process. The first clue of where to begin to look is in the passage above where McLuhan Jr. and Sr. mention "grammar," "dialectic," and "rhetoric."
2
OR
The Trivium is The Message
"McLuhan says:"nEw mEdium conTENT = oldEr mEdium
"Morais says:"old CONtent = new mediUM
"(coNditioN: old CONtent must be AUTHORized to be prACTiced as a new "mediUM, reCALL hardWEAR vs. softWEAR psychic warFAIR of Wikepedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica)"
–Philip Morais "a TOE in a GUT"
"trivium
"1. In the Middle Ages, the lower division of the seven liberal arts, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic."
–OED (second edition)
"grammar
"1. a. That department of the study of a language which deals with its inflexional forms or other means of indicating the relations of words in the sentence, and with the rules for employing these accordance with established usage; usually including also the department which deals with the phonetic system of the language and the principles of its representation in writing. Often preceded by an adj. designating the language referred to, as in Latin, English, French grammar."
–OED (second edition)
"dialectic
"1. a. Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of logical disputation; argumentative, logical."
–OED (second edition)
"rhetoric
"1. a. The art of using language so as to persuade or influence others; the body of rules to be observed by a speaker or writer in order that he may express himself with eloquence."
–OED (second edition)
Gloss:
Grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric are obviously specific references to the trivium. Marshall McLuhan wrote his doctoral thesis on an obscure Elizabethan pamphleteer named Thomas Nashe in which the trivium (categories into which all knowledge could be squeezed into) figured heavily. The thesis was called "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time."
The trivium, historically, divided knowledge into three camps: rhetoric which concerns how one communicates, dialectic which concerns sequential reasoning of typically logicians, grammar which concerns written words and their interpretation as well as interpretation of the world or "Book of Nature." The trivium, traditionally, further divided intellectual alliances into two camps: grammarians and rhetoricians were dubbed "Ancients" due to their reliance on tradition, dialecticians were dubbed "Moderns" due to their new "breakthrough" systems. I would only add this holds sway to today; that, in university life, those in Humanities are updated versions of "Ancients" as much as those in Sciences are updated versions of "Moderns"; that, despite chronicles of philosophy and of literature and of rhetoric, solely when each branch refracts through light of the other two proper holistic perspective surfaces, left-hemisphere with right-hemisphere in brain in one thunderclap of interlaced cognition via these Siamese triplets. Consider these following quotations below:
Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)
"Nashe represented the age-old claims of grammar (allied with rhetoric) for dominance in the trivium –which meant dominance of both the intellectual world and the political one ... (The Medium and the Light xi)"
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
"With Laws of Media we launch a fresh campaign in the war, against the futility of deploying the science of the Moderns of recent decades and centuries to deal with matters of media, as distinct from messages. (Laws of Media 10)"
Gloss:
The trivium, which Marshall McLuhan traced back to intellectual quarrels stretching 1500 years before, has changed little in its alliances. It is Eric McLuhan’s view that this type of organization had never been done before, which I would like to dispute. My exploration begins with situating Marshall McLuhan in the trivium as a modern-day retrieval of grammarian Thomas Nashe. First, though, some historical context on the fifth law of media since I believe this connects a rhetoric of grammar to a grammar of rhetoric.
3
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From Cliché to Archehype
"Satire contains hot content, hyperreality of figures with doubling grounds for Pope or Pynchon, for The Daily Show or South Park."
–Philip Morais, "dunciADS/ADS : ADS/dunciADS"
Glosses:
I: I believe Mark is right with this fifth law of media business.
Myself: Why?
Me: Complicated, complicated. Three distinct parts to this proposition.
I: I will begin with one fundamental flaw.
Myself: Which is what?
Me: Being correct and incorrect in pointing to this sentence for deciphering law number five: "Tetrads ... point towards the development of a rhetoric of grammar as well as towards a grammar of rhetoric, as a next stage. (Laws of Media
229)"
I: I will begin with why I believe Mark to be correct.
Myself: Shoot.
Me: Some etymology. "Tetrad" is, in one sense of the meaning of the word, synonymous with "tetractys." Consider Samuel Taylor Coleridge writing in Table Talk, issue of 24th of April (1832) "The adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God." Or Henry More in Conjectura cabbalistica; or a conjectural essay of interpreting the minde of Moses according to a threefold cabbala (1653) "It was a solemn Oath ... to swear by him that delivered to them the mystery of the Tetractys, Tetrad, or number Four. (More 82)"
I: Kabbalah! Theosophy! Outrageous! What’s next, secret societies?
Myself: Indeed, Freemasonry, if I do say so myself. Remember Theall in The Virtual McLuhan
: " ... his [Marshall McLuhan’s] concern with the role of Rosicrucianism, Masonry, and other occult groups in intellectual debates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Theall 194)" In fact, I recall Mark speaking in class about McLuhan fiddling around with numerology.
Me: Now consider OED’s (second edition) definition of "tetractys": "A set of four; the number four; esp. the Pythagorean name for the sum of the first four numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) regarded as the source of all things." If there are five laws of media plus five elements of rhetoric that equals ten derivable from those initial four laws according to Laws of Media. To use terms of another grammarian, those now five laws of media teach you how to "deconstruct" man-made technology, those five elements of rhetoric how to "construct" man-made technology. Some cross-reference: laws of media within laws media help "deconstruct" deconstruction, elements of rhetoric within elements of rhetoric help "construct" construction, laws of media within elements of rhetoric help "construct" deconstruction, elements of rhetoric within laws of media help "deconstruct" construction. I use qualifier "help" in each of the four clauses of the previous sentence because this is an almost complete set of cognitive tools, they are not excuses for not thinking, intuiting true insight, that would cause reversal of the medium, which, paradoxically, could only happen in the case of an independent thinker who would "fit" most snugly into these laws. This is not so much the mistake Mark and John Archibald Wheeler (in this Discovery article at ) make as much as propel into existence. Wheeler pushes anthropomorphism in that famous "Schrödinger cat" thought-experiment to a type of retrieval of animism that completely undermines current science and (this being our hidden ground in the article) senses his "heterodoxy" totally and contradicts himself with backpedaling like, "Does this mean humans are necessary to the existence of the universe? While conscious observers certainly partake in the creation of the participatory universe envisioned by Wheeler, they are not the only, or even primary, way by which quantum potentials become real. Ordinary matter and radiation play the dominant roles." Now Mark "overheats" the fifth law in the medium that is his essay by claiming it is satire when satire is the reversal of the fifth law. The fifth law is literally a "putting on", a skin, as much as content-wise a medium co-opts another. It is Mark’s tradition academic approach of "light on" McLuhan that summons forth Menippean satire for an answer.
I: Ah, Pythagorus (to return to our first sentence), whom ancient Greeks considered founder of mathematics and mysticism. Figures.
Myself: Spooky.
Me: Let me return to something spookier.
I: Spookier than that lightbulb spontaneously breaking in the middle of class?
Myself: Spookier than that, a medium the ghost of McLuhan apparently disapproves of.
Me: Okay, in the class notes Mark typed up on page two:
"[McLuhan’s Catholic Influence?]
"4 Is the Catholic influence present in their work? ENH: REV: OBS: RET ~ ...
"[Media Transubstantiation?]
"5 GOOD: EVIL: DEATH: RESURRECTION
" "Christ is the ultimate extension of man." The Medium and the Light
I think Mark is right but going about this in the wrong way again. To return, briefly, to Pythagoreanism: in intellectual history, particularly in reference to ancient Greece, this morphs into Platonism with its concern on realms of forms, whose true update is not so much Neoplatonism c/o Plotinus in the 3rd century C.E. as much as in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, which melds Plato’s ideas with Gnostics’ ideas in the emanation of the Tree of Life ex nihilo into ten Sephirah or names of God (variation on tetrad since 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 = 10). Now in Christian kabbalah (popular among secret societies) which emerged in the early Renaissance (promoted perhaps most notorious by "heretics" as Giodano Bruno (1548-1600)), according to Gershom Scholem in Kabbalah (paperback edition): "Human history, Reuchlin argued, could be divided into three periods. In the first or natural period, God revealed Himself to the patriarchs thorough the three-lettered name of Shaddai [Take this to be Understanding Media without presence of fourth law of media of retrieval retrieved in From Cliché to Archetype]. In the period of the Torah He revealed Himself to Moses through the four-lettered name of the Tetragrammaton [four laws in later Laws of Media]. But in the period of grace and redemption He revealed Himself through five letters, namely, the Tetragrammaton with the addition of the letter shin, signifying the Logos, thus spelling Yehoshua or Jesus [fifth law of media discovered by Mark, Jesus not satirizing God (pre-reversal, that is) but "wearing" His divinity more in the form of an exaggeration or misreading]. In the name of Jesus, which is the true Miraculous Name, the formerly forbidden name of God now became pronounceable. (Scholem 198)" Thus, as McLuhan states in The Medium and the Light, "Christ is the ultimate extension of man."
Now consider this from Laws of Media: "The logos of creation explicitly presents us with the created order as a speech in which the words are things and things are words, an awareness central to the present work. Medieval theologians and philosophers were simply updating the most ancient understanding of physics and cosmology. (217)" I discern definite patterns between The Kabbalah and the trivium, the former with three pillars which organize the ten Sephirah of the Tree of Life, the latter with three branches of knowledge. They are both Swiss army knifes, of sorts, for operating on varying preoccupations which nonetheless exhibit similiar tendencies: Neo-Platonic elements in Kabbalah basically correspond to grammar in the trivium because what roots both of these approaches is discernment of core functions from which all futurity emanates, Gnostic elements in Kabbalah basically corresponds to rhetoric in the trivium because they share preoccupation with pastness, with present being shadow or reflection of an otherness: consider how difficult postures of Democratic politicians become in the third quarter of the twentieth century without reference to the model of Roosevelt, how strange postures of Republican politicians become in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century without reference to the model of Reagan. Pure rhetoricians are ardent traditionalists as much as absolute grammarians are aggressive futurists, each nemesis of the other: Harold Bloom and Marshall McLuhan, both famously English professors or "Ancients" by training, would have little to agree upon for these reasons which explain their radically diverging stances. In fact, I would now like to turn to Harold Bloom since I believe he presents us with "a grammar of rhetoric" which he similarly locates in mystical Jewish texts and dubs "anxiety of influence."
4
OR
The Anxiety of Influence
"I: I believe Mark is right with this fifth law of media business."
–Philip Morais, "Inner Dialogue on Inner Dialogue"
Gloss:
Below follow Harold Bloom’s six revisionary ratios in the anxiety of influence. They are to be applied to poet and "misread" precursor since to this critic all reading is necessarily misreading, that is "belated" in the sense that it is always in relation to someone who has come before, everything reflecting something else which Gnosticism takes to its ultimate extreme in applying this to the cosmos. And, just as McLuhan in the tetrad takes grammatical literary techniques and applies them to all media, I will take these rhetorical literary techniques and merge them with their opposite: thesis of laws of media with antithesis of anxiety of influence into new synthesis or retrieval of the trivium/Kabbalah.
"SYNOPSIS: SIX REVISIONARY RATIOS
"1. Clinamen, which is poetic misreading or misprision proper; I take the word from Lucretius, where it means a "swerve" of the atoms so as to make change possible in the universe. A poet swerves away from his precursor, by so reading his precursor’s poem as to execute a clinamen in relation to it. This appears as a corrective movement in his own poem, which implies that the precursor poem went accurately up to a certain point, but then should have swerved, precisely in the direction that the new poem moves.
"2. Tessera, which is completion and antithesis; I take the word not from mosaic-making, where it is still used, but from the ancient mystery cults, where it meant a token of recognition, the fragment say of a small pot which with the other fragments would re-constitute the vessel. A poet antithetically "completes" his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough."
"3. Kenosis, which is a breaking-device similar to the defense mechanisms our psyches employ against repetition compulsions; kenosis then is a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. I take the word from St. Paul, where it means the humbling or emptying-out of Jesus by himself, when he accepts reduction from divine to human status. The later poet, apparently emptying himself of his own afflatus, his imaginative godhood, seems to humble himself as though he were ceasing to be a poet, but this ebbing is so performed in relation to a precursor’s poem-of-ebbing that the precursor is emptied out also, and so the latter poem of deflation is not as absolute as it seems."
"4. Daemonization, or a movement towards a personalized Counter-Sublime, in reaction to the precursor’s Sublime; I take the terms from general Neo-Platonic usage, where an intermediary being, neither divine nor human, enters into the adept to aid him. The later poem opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent-poem as to generalize away the uniqueness of the earlier work.
"5. Askesis, or a movement of self-purgation which intends the attainment of a state of solitude; I take the term, general as it is, particularly from the practice of pre-Socratic shamans like Empedocles. The later poet does not, as in kenosis, undergo a revisionary movement of emptying, but of curtailing; he yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor, and he does this in his poem by so stationing it in regard to the parent-poem as to make that poem undergo an askesis too; the precursor’s endowment is also truncated."
"6. Apophrades, or the return of the dead; I take the word from the Athenian dismal or unlucky days upon which the dead returned to reinhabit the houses in which they had lived. The later poet, in his own final phase, already burdened by an imaginative solitude that is almost a solipsism, holds his own poem so open again to the precursor’s work that at first we might believe the wheel has come full circle, and that we are back in the later poet’s flooded apprenticeship, before his strength began to assert itself in the revisionary ratios. But the poem is now held open to the precursor, where once it was open, and the uncanny effect is that the new poem’s achievement makes it seem to us, not as though the precursor were writing it, but as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work."
–The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom (14-16)
Gloss:
Out of respect for my original source I list this. Of course I find little practical use for what is spoken of above except in the sense that it illustrates how you can psychologically interpret or extend figures of speech which come to be associated with these rather unnecessarily esoteric choice of terms. That will be key: to be able to interpret figures of speeches figuratively. Last point: Harold Bloom does not associate litotes with "clinamen," it is purely my invention, though he does associate "irony" with it, and since McLuhan associates hyperbole and litotes with irony in Laws of Media, and Bloom already associated "daemonization" with hyperbole, I thought litotes no stretch for "clinamen."
REVISIONARY RATIOS WITH CORRESPONDING TROPES
"Kabbalah, if viewed as rhetoric, centers upon two series of tropes: first –irony, metonymy, metaphor, and then –synecdoche, hyperbole, metalepsis."
–Kabbalah and Criticism (Bloom 73)
LITOTE = CLINAMEN
"litote.
"A figure of speech, in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary; an instance of this."
–OED (second edition)
SYNECDOCHE = TESSERA
"synecdoche.
"A figure by which a more comprehensive term is used for a less comprehensive term or vice versa; as whole for part or part for whole, genus for species or species for genus, etc."
–OED (second edition)
METAPHOR = KENOSIS
"metaphor.
"The figure of speech in which a name or descriptive term is transferred to some object different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable; an instance of this, a metaphorical expression."
–OED (second edition)
HYPERBOLE:= DAEMONIZATION
"hyperbole.
"A figure of speech consisting in exaggerated or extravagant statement, used to express strong feeling or produce a strong impression, and not intended to be understood literally."
–OED (second edition)
METONYMY = ASKESIS
"metonymy.
"A figure of speech which consists in substituting for the name of a thing the name of an attribute of it or of something closely related."
–OED (second edition)
METALEPSIS = APOPHRADES
"metalepsis.
"A rhetorical figure mentioned by Quintilian, consisting in the metonymical substitution of one word for another which is itself figurative."
–OED (second edition)
ILLUMINATION OF TROPES IN LIGHT OF THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL
He’s just a pop star.
OR
He’s just a person like anyone else.
–Litotes c/o "reasonable" common public perception?
The eighties pop star.
OR
Thee pop star of the eighties.
–Synecdoche c/o BBC
What Elvis was to the fifties, Michael Jackson was to the eighties.
–Metaphor c/o Rolling Stone
The greatest entertainer that ever lived.
–Hyperbole c/o LL COOL J
That pedophile.
–Metonymy c/o "reasonable" common public perception?
The King of Pop.
–Metalepsis c/o Elizabeth Taylor
5
OR
Bloom in Bloom
"An anatomy of evolution etymology as a footnote on what precedes above"
–Philip Morais, "Countdown of Komboloia on Media Temps"
Clinamen (litote)
apophrades (metalepsis) Tessera (synecdoche)
askesis (metonymy) Kenosis (metaphor)
Daemonization (hyperbole)
Gloss:
Above is the "vicious cycle" Harold Bloom sees the anxiety of influence traveling through. An intriguing structure since it is sixfold and circular as much as a tetrad is fourfold and square and, of course, six plus four equals ten or "circled square" to speak in terms of retrievals; moreover, the anxiety of influence completely concerns itself with content as much as tetrads are directed in the total opposite direction. Below I offer alternate paths through the anxiety of influence in terms of reversals and thus present ways of identifying an environment or anti-environment through ties back to the trivium.
Grammatical: synecdoche to metonymy or vice versa. Cool.
Rhetorical: metaphor to metalepsis or vice versa. Hot.
Dialectical: litote to hyperbole or vice versa. Neutral.
Gloss:
How this ties to the tetrad is basically like this: the fifth law, itself an example of hyperbole in "wearing" another medium also exhibit an "attitude" toward that precursor that will be one of the six figures of speech spoken of above. A "grammar of rhetoric," in other words, begins in a "mapping" of the fifth law of media. And just as there can be more than one message and medium behind any effect you encounter, there can also be more than one precursor and misreading depending on which of its "faces" you manage you glimpse. Think of the fifth law, then, like the horse in The Wizard of Oz that keeps changing colours. Below follow two complementary examples for illustration.
Medium: Fifth Law
ENH: matching as making
REV: satire, irony
RET: rhetoric
OBS: grammar
5th Law Mapping: hyperbole (misreading) / tetrad proper (precursor)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar as Dialectic
Media Temperature: Neutral
Gloss:
The brilliant evasion here, in terms of the trivium, becomes how Mark completes tetrad grammar in thoroughly rhetorical terms, middle road of a "making" of a "matching."
Medium: Retrieved Trivium
ENH: pattern recognition
REV: stagnation of insight via dependance on method
RET: exploration
OBS: hypnotism
5th Law Mapping: Litote (misreading) / "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His
Time" (precursor)
Environment: Dialectic of rhetoric as grammar
Media Temperature: Neutral
Gloss:
The brilliant evasion here, in terms of the trivium, becomes how I take only move really left in this chess game of filling out bodies of knowledge, another middle road (of the dialectician this time) which creates hybrid energies out of thesis (McLuhan) and antithesis (Bloom).
6
OR
The Place of Marshaling McLuhan in the Learner in the Learning of Our Time
"Abandon -ismism if you want to put Humpty Dumpty back together again."
–Philip Morais, "The Declaration of Interdependence"
Applied Trivium
The trivium, to recap, divided intellectual alliances in two camps: one of grammarians and rhetoricians or "Ancients" due to their reliance on tradition, another of dialecticians or "Moderns" due to their new "breakthrough" systems. If this holds sway to today, if those in Humanities update "Ancients" as much as those in Sciences update "Moderns," can this organizational tool of the Middle Ages for pattern recognition more fundamentally perform this threefold analysis:
1) How to perceive an argument on its own grounds?
2) How to perceive an argument with additions/substitutions on its own grounds?
3) How to perceive an argument on grounds other than its own?
Certainly if this is applicable to highly tangled academic ventures, it is applicable to any information whatsoever online explorers discover. What superior compass can a rhetoric of grammar and grammar of rhetoric supply to virtual demands of living awash in languages?
I first consider an Ancient argument. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas Kuhn could possibly be more frequently cited than any other work in Humanities for the past twenty-five years. The book posits science consists of a series of "scientific revolutions" each instituting a new "paradigm" of thought and practice incommensurable with the old. Kuhn is a philosopher, a dialectician as much as a scientist, with a predilection toward tradition (past philosophers and philosophies) which align this thinker in an Ancient fold. At this point in the body of knowledge dominance by Sciences in the role of dialecticians is total, so philosophers have gone from artists to critics and sought refuge in incorporating other branches to their discipline at expense of "pure" philosophy, grammar in the case of phenomenologists. One of the founding texts of "science studies" obviously has an author who has taken up rhetoric in the position of historian of intellectual evolution to expose rhetorical negotiation in the supposedly reasoned dialectical "progress" of the scientific discipline and, in doing so, rightly contends this is its true grammar.
Now I consider a Modern argument. In Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science (1997) Alan Sokal with Jean Bricmont bash pretentious and amateurish misuse of recent physics by leading French theorists (Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Kristeva) to thoroughly make illicit any notion of "postmodern science," deadly ammunition to whose who reject claims by Humanities of "social construction" for Sciences. Sokal is a professor of physics, a "proper" dialectician these days, unable to turn to history of the rhetorician or more relativist organizations of the grammarian for regaining dominance for dialectic through Sciences in the trivium, striking back instead by playing a strong suit of the dialectician, a linear and sequential logical proposition. Bluntly, if people in Humanities held people in Sciences are liars, Sciences would counter hold people in Humanities are stupids and misunderstand out of that ignorance.
FOOTNOTE TO PARAGRAPH ABOVE: In 1996 Alan Sokal published an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," in elite critical theory journal Social Text to argue for postmodern "liberatory" science via an extreme relativism where he suggests pi not constant and universal but relative to an observer and subject to "ineluctable historicity." The hoax became an international front-page scandal. Postmodernism and poststructuralism which similarly unites rhetoric and dialectic à la Kuhn, had been hit in its soft underbelly. Socialists essentially, perhaps seduced by logical machinery like "dialectical materialism" of academic Marxists, could not resist freely drawing on undecidability and incompleteness inherent in quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and complexity theory.
I find this dichotomy wholly unsatisfactory: those "Moderns" in Sciences are stubborn, those "Ancients" in Humanities while uncomfortable with contradictions of the capitalist society seem suspiciously less motivated in living with contradictions where they nest intellectually. The trivium, which in Latin literally means "a place where three ways meet," offers a third way, a triadic structure which builds bridges, which claims artist-critic perspective via powers of discernment (criticism) and creative addition/substitution (art). In obsoleting "right answer" holy grails, "right answer" now being "right question" of the chameleon to cool these rather hot theoretical debates since pattern recognition is grammatical when used as a medium of assessment in the case of these thoughts on this presentation, rhetorical when used as a medium’s content in practice in the case of the actual presentation, and dialectical in structure, wholly holistic, completely untheoretical with questions for models whose aims are practical and derived from experience –my how and why if we must split hairs. Reconsider, in fact, the trivium in terms of these questions if it helps identification:
Rhetoric asks: What did this do?
Dialectic asks: What is this?
Grammar asks: What will this do?
I even took this environment "mapping" one step further and came up with "spaces." True to Kabbalah I began with one name for God, specifically, "Dio" in Italian which updates "Deus" from original Latin. Of course our alphabets are Latin alphabets so I let "Dio" dialectically represent language in the following manner to return to grammatical concerns of written words and their interpretation as well as interpretation of the world or "Book of Nature" of which all manifestation See OED (second edition). is of course experienced rhetorically:
Letter / Idea / Geometric Shape / Form & Correspondences with Length
D / synthesis / semicircle / lines with curves (BDGJPQR) = medium
I / antithesis / line / lines (AEFHIKLMNTVWXYZ) = long
O / thesis / circle / curves (OUCS) = short
Of course all of this is highly orthodox for highly unorthodox Mennipean satire: "At its most concentrated the Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern. (Anatomy of Criticism in eleventh printing page 310)" If we, further, let D = dialectic, I = rhetoric, and O = grammar, and organize strictly basic three-way combinations according to patterns we come up with these specific "spaces" made out of general "environments":
Group 1 (of single repetitions) or Tactile Space: DIO / OID / IOD / DOI / IDO / ODI
Group 2 (of triple repetitions) or Taste Space: DDD / III / OOO
Group 3 (of double repetitions) or Visual Space: IID / IIO / IOI / IDI / OII / DII
Group 4 (of double repetitions) or Acoustic Space: OOD / OOI / OIO / ODO / IOO / DOO
Group 5 (of double repetitions) or Olfactory Space: DDO / DDI / DID / ODD / IDD / DOD
The above should be understood to be of symbolic logic persuasion which represents triple division: first letter as numerator, second letter as denominator, both dividends to the divisor of the third letter. The propensity for "spaces" to emanate in groups of six brings trigonometry to mind with its fix functions for angles: sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant. Finally, we see twenty-seven different combinations, or three to the power of three, or three cubed and I have always thought of the tetrad as a cube.
Tetrad:
Simultaneous thunderclaps or inventories of effects of exfoliation in fractal tapestries to create causes in four quadrants of one cube which makes content of out medium whose message made you make what this is.
Anxiety of Influence Tropes on Fifth Law:
Photon traces in irritated skin of an hypersphere where Proteus is mask and originality style of psychic warfare in trick-pad where everyone has same face history buggers. Marlon Brando said in an interview with Truman Capote ("The Duke in His Domain" 1956) acting, not prostitution, was our first profession. After Last Tango in Paris (1973) The Wild One should’ve realize they were identical whether fourth walls go up in the morning or not.
Gloss:
Figures manifest hidden grounds and hidden grounds manifest figures, and so forth, in fractals; so, in a rhetoric of grammar and grammar of rhetoric, a cube of a tetrad exists in a hypersphere of anxiety of influence tropes on fifth law, in another cube of a tetrad, in another hypersphere of anxiety of influence tropes on fifth law, and so forth. Paradoxically, a tetrad makes a medium its content as much as a hypersphere makes a content its medium. A hypersphere makes a medium content in history; for example, horse carriages are precursors of cars, vine presses are precursors of printing presses. A tetrad makes a content a medium in foretelling future history of its practice; for example, a feminist putting to action what she reads in a critical theory text. All of this of course is dependant on how we organize consciousness, which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to discussion of another thinking tool.
Illuminating Light On/Light Through
"The theme of the letter and the spirit, a dichotomy deriving from writing, was frequently alluded to by Our Lord in his "It is written, but I say unto you." The prophets had usually been at war with the scribes in Israel. This theme enters into the very texture of medieval thought and sensibility, as in the technique of the "gloss" to release the light from within the text, the technique of the illumination as light through not on, and the very mode of Gothic architecture itself. (Paperback 130)" So writes Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Light seen to be metaphor for organization of consciousness itself for different modes of interpretation. A grammar of rhetoric and rhetoric of grammar retrieves this tool with light on being hot, objective observation, work of a job, with light through being cool, subjective participation, play of a role. James Joyce puts this far better than me in the famous opening to the "Proteus" chapter of Ulysses: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through [my emphasis] my eyes." This percept of "thought through my eyes" is apparently anatomically correct according to Stephen Jay Gould in the new bible of biology The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002) where our visual faculty is seen as evaginated out of "spinal cord, several parts of the brain ... in the morphogenesis of vertebrate eyes (Gould 1124)." According, further, to McLuhan for Beginners: "Sight comes first, he [Marshall McLuhan] claimed, because the eye is a specialized organ that permits perceptions of enormous complexity. Then come hearing, touch, smell and taste. (Gordon 60)" What thinking tool light on and light through merely contends and qualitative analyzes is how sight "conducts" symphony of the senses which really gets hard to wrap your mind around until you come to a grammar of rhetoric and rhetoric of grammar. If you want to read actual light on and light through theories of light itself consider what Newton thought of the phenomenon versus Goethe (recently retrieved by chaos theory), both "provable" in laboratory experiments which I guess returns us to Schrödinger’s famous thought-experiment with a cat. Essentially Newton was a reductionist, Goethe was a holist: redness is not necessarily a particular bandwidth of light like Newton would claim. It is a territory, an "undiscover’d country" to quote Hamlet of a chaotic universe with boundaries that are difficult to describe (at least with language), yet our mind or consciousness finds redness with regular and verifiable consistency.
FOOTNOTE ON PARAGRAPH ABOVE. An excellent edition of Goethe’s Zür Farbenlehre, more-or-less readily available, is Theory of Colors (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1970), with an introduction by Deane B. Judd.
I would like to continue with dissection of "light on" versus "light through" by turn to an anatomy of theory of vision. My primary source is this book Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler by David Lindberg. There have always been four theories of vision from antiquity to today. One, intromission theory, where images move into eye. Two, extramission theory, where attention moves out. Three, theory where intromission and extramission combine. Four, theory where there is some medium to mediate this process. (Footnote: our current orthodox theory of vision, proposed by Johannes Kepler in 1604, I think, conforms perfectly to McLuhan’s general critique of other assumptions print fosters in The Gutenberg Galaxy.) I shall skip summary of 2000 years of theories of vision to simply posit "light on" and "light through" "wears" all four like the fifth of media "wears" all four quadrants of the tetrad.
7
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Grammar of Rhetoric & Rhetoric of Grammar
"2 ORGANize is 2 CONtrol."
–Philip Morais, "The Declaration of Interdependence"
Tetrads on Tropes / Grammar Illuminates Rhetoric
Medium: Synecdoche
ENH: acoustic ratio of figures
REV: homogeneity of figures via visual quantity
RET: resonance as matching
OBS: four-part resonance
–Laws of Media 236
Medium: Metonymy
ENH: ignore qualitative
REV: qualitative as figure
RET: resonance as matching
OBS: four-part resonance
–Laws of Media 236
Medium: Metalepsis
ENH: Past in terms of Present
REV: Metaphor as connection, concept
RET: Making not matching history
OBS: Historical determinism
Gloss:
Sole creation. Not that unorthodox, once more, if you consider McLuhan devoted one entire book-length study to forms of metalepsis (From Cliché to Archetype). To my mind he was too set on having a "grammar of rhetoric" mirror a "rhetoric of grammar" (tetrad) and against his own best instincts reduced what should have been a succession of six (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 according to the original definition of "tetrad") to four (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 8 ?!) –metalepsis strangely excluded and litotes and hyperbole condensed into "irony" (Laws of Media 232) when they clearly deserved separate consideration (Laws of Media 209).
Medium: Litotes
ENH: smallness, size
REV: hyperbole
RET: iconic awareness, involvement
OBS: literal/realistic scale
–Laws of Media 209
Medium: Hyperbole.
ENH: grandness, size
REV: litotes
RET: iconic awareness, involvement
OBS: literal/realistic, scale
–Laws of Media 209
Medium: Metaphor
ENH: ratio, interval between the two situations
REV: connection, concept
RET: transformation/transfiguration
OBS: rational experience
–Laws of Media 235
Tropes in Tetrad / Rhetoric Illuminates Grammar
Medium: Tetrad
ENH = synecdoche
REV = metonymy
RET = metalepsis
OBS = litote
5th Law of Media = hyperbole
Tetrad clusters, chains, principle of media equivalency = metaphor
Vivisections of Vivisections / Post-Mortem
Tetrad’s Medium: Grammar of Rhetoric as Dialectic
Message: Neo-Platonism
Misreading: Hyperbole
Precursor: Kabbalah’s Tree of Life (Top 4 Sephirah)
Tropes’ Medium: Rhetoric of Grammar as Dialectic
Message: Gnosticism
Misreading: Litote
Precursor: Kabbalah’s Tree of Life (Bottom 6 Sephirah)
Medium: Anxiety of Influence
ENH: literary tradition
REV: determinism
RET: rhetoric
OBS: originality
5th Law Mapping: Litote (misreading) / Freud, Kabbalah, Walter Bate Jackson (precursors)
Gloss:
The brilliant evasion here, in terms of the trivium, becomes how Bloom presents a complete grammar (tropes with revisionary ratios) in totally rhetorical terms of the psychic defense mechanism (precursor/misreading).
Medium: Tetrad
ENH: Awareness of inclusive, structural process
REV: Technology (hardware) becomes software word
RET: Metaphor, logos
OBS: Dominance, logical method
5th Law Mapping: Hyperbole (misreading) / Innis, Eliot, Old Science (precursors)
–After Laws of Media 224
Gloss:
The brilliant evasion here, in terms of the trivium, becomes how McLuhan presents a historical ("matching") concern of rhetoric in totally grammatical terms of flipping from cliché to archetype in the retrieval quadrant via metalepsis ("making"), pastness completely made in terms of the present.
8
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How to How-to R/Evolution
"A new author is an old librarian who explores."
–Philip Morais, "The Declaration of Interdependence"
Medium: Understanding Media
ENH: acoustic ratio of figures / " ... comparatively, the content of a medium is negligible."
REV: homogeneity of figures via visual quantity / "... content of a medium is another medium"
RET: resonance as matching / spoken word (from scholasticism to radio)
OBS: four-part resonance / "ghost of tetrad haunting"
5th Law Mapping: Synecdoche (misreading)/ Harold Innis (precursor)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar
Media Temperature: Cool
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 236)
Medium: The Gutenberg Galaxy
ENH: ignore qualitative / "content of medium"
REV: qualitative as figure / "content of a medium is another medium"
RET: resonance as matching / "headline/glosses" in book that head "chapters"
OBS: four-part resonance / "ghost of tetrad haunting"
5th Law Mapping: Metonymy (misreading) / Max Weber, Humanists (precursors)
Environment: Grammar of Rhetoric
Media Temperature: Cool
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 236)
Medium: From Cliché to Archetype
ENH: Past in terms of Present / Creativity
REV: Metaphor as connection, concept / Eclectic stagings of Shakespeare, for example
RET: Making not matching history / "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot
OBS: Historical determinism / "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it"
5th Law Mapping: Metalepsis (misreading) / Carl Jung (precursor)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar
Media Temperature: Hot
Medium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time
ENH: smallness, size / All knowledge condensed into three camps
REV: hyperbole / "The two men, it turned out, were merely the latest combatants in a struggle
that had been going on, by then, for over 1500 years and which for hundreds of years showed no signs of abating. (The Medium and the Light, x)"
RET: iconic awareness, involvement / Trivium
OBS: literal/realistic scale / The ‘Right’ Argument
5th Law Mapping: Litote (misreading) / French Encyclopedists, New Criticism (precursors)
Environment: Dialectic of rhetoric as grammar
Media Temperature: Neutral
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 209)
Medium: Laws of Media
ENH: grandness, size / "I don’t consider it any exaggeration to say that confirming and detailing this tie, between speech and artefacts, constitutes the single biggest intellectual discovery not only of our time, but of at least the last couple of centuries. (Laws of Media ix-x)"
REV: litotes / "How often McLuhan’s colleagues dismissed his work as merely "interesting speculation" or "stimulating conversation" ... (Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger 279 paperback edition)"
RET: iconic awareness, involvement / Holism à la synaesthetic language of Eskimos (67)
OBS: literal/realistic, scale / Traditional quantitative measurements of ‘Old Science’
5th Law Mapping: Hyperbole (misreading) / Old Science, Vico, Bacon (precursors)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar as Dialectic
Media Temperature: Neutral
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 209)
Medium: The Medium and the Light
ENH: ratio, interval between the two situations / McLuhan media guru meets McLuhan devout Catholic
REV: connection, concept / "At a recent (1997) conference at York University in Toronto ... the new conventional line was revealed ... "McLuhan’s work was basically age-old Christian Humanism in modern dress. (The Medium and the Light xix)"
RET: transformation/transfiguration / Confessions by St. Augustine
OBS: rational experience / "conversion after sign"
5th Law Mapping: Metaphor (misreading) / G. K. Chesterton (precursor)
Environment: Grammar of Rhetoric
Media temperature: Hot
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 235)
Vivisections of Vivisections / Post-Mortem
Medium: Key Publications to Complete Understanding of Marshall McLuhan (The Thinker)
Message: How to Control and Comprehend Media in Order to Shape our own Destiny
(Archimedean Lever)
Misreading: Hyperbole / "McLuhan as Modern Satirist" chapter in Theall’s The Virtual
McLuhan, Bob Dobbs e-mail of Feb 20 2005 of Menippean Put-Ons of Publications
Precursors: Grammarians / I. A. Richards, French Symbolists, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis,
T. S. Eliot, Harold Innis
Light On/Through Bloom Canon
Medium: The Book of J
ENH: acoustic ratio of figures / J as an autonomous author
REV: homogeneity of figures via visual quantity / J is Bathsheba
RET: resonance as matching / J is to creative writing in ancient world as Shakespeare is to Early Modern England
OBS: four-part resonance / Traditional historical biblical scholarship
5th Law Mapping: Synecdoche (misreading) / Talmud (precursor)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar
Media Temperature: Cool
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 236)
Medium: The Anxiety of Influence
ENH: ignore qualitative / devil is not in the details of the poem, inherent generalizations on offer
REV: qualitative as figure / Ginsberg, for example, becomes merely bad or good Whitman
RET: resonance as matching / misreading as resonance, precursor as matching
OBS: four-part resonance / "close reading"
5th Law Mapping: Metonymy (misreading) / Walter Jackson Bate (precursor)
Environment: Grammar of Rhetoric
Media Temperature: Cool
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 236)
Medium: The Western Canon
ENH: Past in terms of Present / Creativity
REV: Metaphor as connection, concept / "Indeed, a canon is an achieved anxiety, just as any
strong literary work is its author’s achieved anxiety. (492 paperback)"
RET: Making not matching history / Biblical canon formation
OBS: Historical determinism / Postmodern "School of Resentment (492 paperback)"
5th Law: Metalepsis (misreading) / St. Jerome (precursor)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar
Media Temperature: Hot
Medium: How to Read and Why
ENH: smallness, size / Read to re/discover yourself
REV: hyperbole / To read to re/discover is only worthwhile reason to read
RET: iconic awareness, involvement / Literature read for pleasure of intrinsic aesthetic value
OBS: literal/realistic scale / Critical Theory approach
5th Law Mapping: Litote (misreading) / Defenses of Sidney, Shelley (precursors)
Environment: Dialectic of rhetoric as grammar
Media Temperature: Neutral
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 209)
Medium: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
ENH: grandness, size / " ... Shakespeare not only reinvented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today. (Backside of paperback edition)"
REV: litotes / Accomplishment reduced to few characters as personalties "When we are wholly human, and know ourselves, we become most like either Hamlet or Falstaff. (745 paperback edition)"
RET: iconic awareness, involvement / "Bardolatry"
OBS: literal/realistic, scale / Evaluations of New Historicist school on Early Modern England
5th Law Mapping: Hyperbole (misreading) / Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt (critical precursors)
Environment: Rhetoric of Grammar as Dialectic
Media Temperature: Neutral
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 209)
Medium: Kabbalah and Criticism
ENH: ratio, interval between the two situations / Importance of Kabbalah to antithetical criticism
REV: connection, concept / Kabbalah is to Bible as anxiety of influence is to literary criticism
RET: transformation/transfiguration / Emanations of the Sephirah
OBS: rational experience / Kabbalah understands dreams to be prophecy through interpretation
5th Law: Metaphor (misreading) / Isaac Luria, Moses Cordovero (precursors)
Environment: Grammar of Rhetoric
Media temperature: Hot
–After Laws of Media tetrad (McLuhan & McLuhan 235)
Vivisections of Vivisections / Post-Mortem
Medium: Key Publications to Complete Understanding of Harold Bloom (The Critic)
Message: How to (Mis)Read/Write in Order to Recover/Discover Your True Self or Pneuma
Misreading: Litote / "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot reduced to psychic
warfare fought in letters (text not tête) between ephebe poet and poetic precursor
Precursors: Rhetoricians / Kabbalists, Freud, Derrida, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Walter
Jackson Bate
Gloss:
The colour scheme should illuminate how certain works by the same and by the other author complement one another. Kabbalah and Criticism and The Medium and the Light, for example, share red and "metaphor" for their misreading, texts in which McLuhan’s Catholicism as much as Bloom’s Judaism surface full force.
I contend, more importantly, each has completed their revisionary ratio and are such strong misreaders that environments they chose to take up in the trivium have become their mediums via their varying forms of appropriation or metalepsis of updating of grammar (for McLuhan) and rhetoric (for Bloom). This is no easy nor simple feat and helps explain much academic consternation with these scholars: one must be an out of the box artist-critic to accomplish such an essentially creative intellectual filling through, which quickly leads one astray of "proper" academic "practice." Many of their best works, indeed, read best seen in terms of audacious performances in scholarly mask.
9
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Q & A
"Explorers find what is new to exploit."
–Philip Morais, "The Declaration of Interdependence"
Gloss:
What follows below were prepared questions I desired to engage those in class in if I had had more time available. One, of course, grammatical in nature for one group. The other, naturally, rhetorical for another group. Hopefully, without much guidance, new tools I introduced could be applied to make sense not only of my presentation but of our class in its totality as a learning experience. People may not have found my presentation that exciting but that was my point, my imitation of my precursor in the same manner my precursor (Mark Federman) misreads his precursor (Marshall McLuhan).
Grammatical Question for Group One:
1) How do full-sized paper and markers vs. use of PowerPoint program seen in projection on screen change our experience of learning in class? Assume McLuhan’s ghost is this supernatural medium which blew lightbulb in our projector, What is its message?
Answer:
When that lightbulb blew class changed in the way that it did after our first blog. The medium of the blog, like the medium of writing by hand on full-sized pieces of paper with markers, involves us more in-depth and in that greater engagement we consequently substitute our figure (student in class) for our ground (person in life), thus everyone came more and more alive in the class as personalities. The singular grammar of the learning experience, in other words, birthed the multiple rhetorics of our manifest personalities, each distilling in the dialectic of this answer. What this ghost is trying to tell us, I believe, boils down to people must practice their role as a complete person in order to properly learn a living in a playshop you sharpen tools in, that shack at McLuhan Program being Coach House we sat in.
Rhetorical Question for Group Two:
Who are my influences & what are my misreadings?
Answer:
FOOTNOTE TO ANSWER. To even allow an answer on such questions remakes this metaleptical in its totality. If you choose not to believe me then this transforms what succeeds into a medium wearing a litote wearing a metonymy for content. If you, moreover, believe I deliberately set out to do this in order to further sell you on my investment in the tropes, whether or not I am correct on those tropes, we return to metaphor. In other words on words, this never ends. After all, all words are metaphors, all words save word word.
Influence: Mark Federman
Misreading: Metalepsis
Medium: ENH
Message: I enhance fifth law by not deeming this another law but half of the story of the laws themselves remade in the image of the revisionary tropes.
Influence: Harold Bloom
Misreading: Metonymy
Medium: OBS
Message: I obsolesce anxiety of influence as a form of literary analysis, now least among possible applications, through understanding of the revisionary ratios strictly through terms of the tropes.
Influence: Marshall McLuhan
Misreading: Synecdoche
Medium: REV
Message: Tetrads are only part of the story now with reversal in the form of the content consideration.
Influence: The Kabbalah
Misreading: Metaphor
Medium: RET
Message: What these esoteric texts are to exploration of God, these equally esoteric tools are to exploration of media. The retrieval manifests from Sefer Zohar & co. being ultimate historical antecedents of this rhetoric of grammar and grammar of rhetoric.
Influence: Pythagorean tetractys
Misreading: Hyperbole
Medium: 5th Law of Media
Message: I tied this all back to simple mystical formula of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, thus this must be medium my medium wears, top layer of clothing under which lies the trivium, under which lies The Kabbalah.
Influence: Grand Unifying Theory (GUT) or Theory of Everything (TOE) holy grail in Science
Misreading: Litote
Medium: Principle of Media Equivalency, Tetrad Chains & Clusters
Message: First I heard of such ambitious singular organization came from science. Obviously if this qualitative analysis is true, I reduce science to have half of the story if such quantitative counterparts exist.
10
OR
a TOE in a GUT
"First of all, I am about to enter into what is in many ways an unqualified argument in the sense that these questions are in general more general ones better suited to contemplation near the end of this type of a class however much I have framed its scope within the context of our first readings. Nonetheless, I cannot help how relatively familiar or relatively unfamiliar I am with Marshall McLuhan on entering this class, and would like to unpack my baggage publicly since I am curious as to how much or how little these views will change by the end of the course and want to have these fossilizations, of sorts, on record to refer back to when that future arrives. I apologize, moreover, for length."
–Philip Morais, "Understanding Understanding Media: The Extensions of McLuhan"
Necessity is not the mother of invention, invention is the mother necessity. The information that constitutes this new environment is "perpetually in flux" so we need not "fixed concepts" but traditional reading skills from literary grounds to navigate. Such an approach roots itself in literary criticism and makes artists of everyone via computers which create electronic scribes of us all and point towards Ancients regaining dominance in the trivium as much as Gutenberg’s printing press did for Moderns with rise of science since these new collective practices in totality amount to technological consciousness extension speeding to languageless communication and ultimately artificial intelligence, our emperor’s new mind which pattern recognition tailors toward tighter fittings of the feedback loop threading our social garment.
These are politics of adaptation to control adaption itself. The greatest revolution possible in the evolution of any species is finally complete control over that evolution, thus this presentation is titled "R/Evolution" since adaptation of consciousness nods in that direction. Such holism restored to left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere of the brain may provide beneficial generalization cognitively as much as physically development and coordination of fine prehensile motor skills in the hand rewired brains toward growth of their current size, after bipedalism perhaps our most radical modification. Minds, I mean, as hands, as antenna interfacers plugging into communication feeds of tactile information environs, consciousness as extremity-as-conduit to grasp what we once did with that earth-liberated paw:
"Hindsight indicates that the flexible, unspecialized primate hand was to prove a valuable asset for future evolution of this group. Had they not had generalized grasping hands, early hominines would not have been able to manufacture and utilize tools, and thus embark on the new and unique evolutionary pathway that led to the revolutionary ability to adapt through culture. (Haviland 88)"
FOOTNOTE ON QUOTE ABOVE. Reference: Haviland, William A. Human Evolution and Prehistory. 3rd ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.
A footnote on a footnote: this idea of tactility is curious in relation of five senses with five fingers. Fractals are computerized extensions of mathematical equivalencies Descartes found between geometry and algebra that when accelerated by electronic calculation return touch and kinesthesia in elaboration of patterns where figures become hidden grounds and hidden grounds figures, and so forth. The trivium operates likewise, perpetual synecdoche where division is this form of metalepsis reality manifests out of, whose retrieval would be impossible without computers outering our nervous system. If we define "beauty" to be proper proportion like we have "truth" with pattern recognition, this presents further retrieval of two preoccupations of classical art where "truth" is "beauty" and "beauty" is "truth."
A footnote on a footnote on a footnote: John Wheeler, physicist and colleague of Einstein and Niels Bohr, suggests human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well in an intergalactic variation on Schrödinger’s famous thought-experiment with a cat, consciousness as a reality’s creative and determining principle. Perhaps light (dialogue of wave/particle) is to consciousness (symphony in five senses) as energy is to matter where only time or different rates of particle motion distinguish these four elements –indeed in The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking posits 10 dimensions of space plus one of time, realms of light and consciousness which serve to measure space, the former quantitatively through speed, the latter qualitatively through comprehension. The point: if the trivium maps consciousness as consciousness maps the universe, the trivium potentially may be an important translation for physics as much as what Wheeler speaks of essentially puts in terms of matter what artist-critic T. S. Eliot outlines as a theory of literary history in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" –that is, pastness made in the image of the present ("individual talent") being our only matching available ("tradition"). Please see:
Folger, Tim. "Does the Universe Exist if We’re Not Looking?" discover.com Vol. 23 No. 06 June 2002. <>
A revolution of evolution, yes. The genetic code has been decoded by Moderns who conclude human beings are 99.99% similar to chimps. Since Homo sapiens are obviously more than 00.01% advanced of great apes we need wisdom of Ancients to crack an enigmatic "perceptual code" to truly understand who we are, which this rhetoric of grammar and grammar of rhetoric in the form of pattern recognition or common sense of the sensus communis helps facilitate, playing loincloth of sorts for language apes beginning to walk erect with their intellectual faculties and finding themselves exposed for the first time in a reality not negotiated by facts but breathed in through our swarms of movements about one another. In effect, this is presentation presents what nearly all of us have created in our own minds, a social and a cultural history of our time, each vastly different yet still related by webs of history, styles of our lives, and rivers of being becoming becoming we refer to by an intimate and indefinable of word, consciousness. Consciousness!
