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Machina Memorialis

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Machina Memorialis

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Nothing says it better than a whole page of fuck

22 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by John in Comics/Anime/Manga, Life, Meta, Quotes

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Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.1 Continue reading »

  1. I feel compelled to acknowledge I’m ripping this off from Spider Jerusalem. And yes, that is fuck repeated 8,000. Count ’em. [↩]

Machina Memorialis and Verbal Networks of Meaning

21 Thursday Oct 2010

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Quotes

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From The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities:

When we see words on a page, do these words stand directly for external realities? No. As we gave seen, words and the patterns into which words fit are triggers to the imagination. They are prompts we use to try to get one another to call up some of what we know and to work on it creatively to arrive at a meaning. Blending is a crucial part of this imaginative work, and, as we have seen blending is not the mere addition of one existing meaning to another to get their sum. Words by themselves give very little information about the meaning they prompt us to construct. (146)

Conceptual Blending and Metaphor

17 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by John in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Probes, Quotes, Reading

≈ 3 Comments

[I ought to have a category label “my cognitive turn.” You might call this part of the series “My Adventures in Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Rhetoric, and Cognitive Poetics” that began with “My Cognitive (Re)Turn.”]

conceptual blend diagramI’ve read a fair amount of books and articles on blending, a topic with which I seem to have, metaphorically speaking, a “tip of the tongue” relationship. I understand it and understand how it describes the cognitive processes behind various mnemonic practices I’m interested in, but I have a hard time explaining it. Sort of. I mean, I can explain it and do so in such a way that people seem to understand what I’m talking about, but, at the same time, I feel like I don’t get it. Maybe my problem is with diagramming blends beyond something simple such as the diagram on the right, taken from Mark Turner’s “Blending and Conceptual Integration” page and used in a number of publications authored and co-authored by him.1 Any way, having read a fair amount of this stuff, I thought I’d post a good, succinct definition of conceptual blending or conceptual integration since I always find myself rereading to assure myself I’m not missing something:

Blending is a process of conceptual mapping and integration that pervades human thought. A mental space is a small conceptual packet assembled for purposes of thought and action. A mental space network connects an array of mental spaces. A conceptual integration network is a mental space network that contains one or more “blended mental spaces.” A blended mental space is an integrated space that receives input projections from other mental spaces in the network and develops emergent structure not available from the inputs. Blending operates under a set of constitutive principles and a set of governing principles. [From Mark Turner’s “Blending and Conceptual Integration” page.]

Gilles Fauconnier, co-developer of conceptual blending and frequent collaborator with Turner, explains that “the essence of the operation is to construct a partial match between input mental spaces and to project selectively from those inputs into a novel ‘blended’ space” (1).2 Actually, in contemplating this, I think I struggle with identifying the generic space as well. But I’m getting a head of my self here. Let’s back up and I’ll provide a concrete example of a blend and explain it in terms of the diagram.

I think I first encountered the theory of blending in Turner’s The Literary Mind. One example was the anthropomorphic personification of Death, the scythe-carrying hooded skeleton. This representation of Death, Turner explained, is a blend that emerged out of agrarian medieval Europe. Mental spaces provide for us the inputs from which the blend emerges. In this case, Turner suggests, we have clerical class and their clothing, particularly monks, from which we get the cowl and scapular; dead and decayed bodies, from which we get the skeleton; and harvesting, from which we get the scythe. So, for this blend, we have three mental spaces providing three inputs. The generic space, if I had to guess, is death/end of life. Clergy, Turner explains, are connected to death because of funerals, funeral processions, and praying for the dead. I assume I don’t need to explain the connection dead bodies and the harvest have to death. 🙂 Okay, so, the three input mental spaces (medieval clergy, dead bodies, harvest) selectively project into our new blended mental space, the concept of an anthropomorphic personification of Death (aka Grim Reaper) that functions as a harvester of souls.

If this sounds similar to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor, that’s because it is.3 Both emerge out of cognitive linguistics and serve as evidence for embodied cognition. Traditionally, while rhetoric and poetic have regarded metaphor as a special use of language, these theories argue that metaphor underlies all thought to such an extent that we don’t recognize most thought as metaphorical. From the places and images mnemonic and the cognitive images of monastic rhetoric to understanding how social memory functions rhetorically—to say nothing of database rhapsody—metaphor has its tentacles throughout my scholarship. My pedagogy too.

I’m scared of metaphor.

I’m scared of metaphor because I could become lost in it. I could just dive into the study of metaphor and never return to anything else. I also ind myself flailing around until I go cross-eyed and develop a headache when I try to read some of the more complex theories of metaphor. So, metaphor scares me. For me, studying metaphor is a studying a black hole. No matter how close I might get drawn to into it, there’s an event horizon I dare not cross, only, the closer in I go, the more strongly it pulls me in and that damn event horizon isn’t clearly marked at all. So I’m scared of metaphor.

Today I decided I needed to delve in again by reading Paul Ricoeur’s “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling” (Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978: 143-159), an article I’ve been avoiding for a few years now.4 Good stuff. What I found most interesting about this article is that Ricoeur sets the stage for the work of Turner, Lakoff, Johnson, and Fauconnier. Ricoeur, writing in 1978, demonstrates the inadequacies of traditional theories of metaphor and concludes that “there is a structural analogy between cognitive, the imaginative, and the emotional components of the complete metaphorical act […]” (159). The theories of blending and conceptual metaphor and other related concepts provide the cognitive model Ricoeur argues we needed.

  1. Truth be told, I never been able to do more than diagram a simple sentence, so maybe it’s diagramming and not blending I have a problem with. [↩]
  2. From his presentation “Conceptual Integration,” available online as part of the proceedings of the 2001 Workshop Emergence and Development of Embodied Cognition. [↩]
  3. See Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By and Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things [↩]
  4. Avoiding, of course, because I’m scared Ricoeur might be an event horizon. [↩]

Monastic Composition: A Definition

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

Posted by John in Medieval/Medievalism, Quotes, Rhetoric and Composition

≈ 2 Comments

While I regularly reference monastic composition as defined by Mary Carruthers, searching through the blog, I don’t think I’ve ever properly summarized it. Here’s my summary, taken from Ch. 2 of my dissertation:

Monastic Composition

In The Craft of Thought and elsewhere (“Late Antique Rhetoric,” “The Mystery of the Bed Chamber,” and “The Poet as Master Builder”), Carruthers argues that medieval memoria has its origins in monastic rhetoric, which, she explains, “emphasized ‘invention,’ the cognitive procedures of traditional rhetoric” (Craft of Thought 3).1  Monastic rhetoric, she argues, was “an art of composing” rather than an art of persuasion, and its practice of mediation involved the creation and use of “mental images or cognitive ‘pictures’” as the building blocks of invention. She summarizes her concept of monastic composition thusly:

The orthopraxis, or normative “way,” of monastic meditation was directed towards the vision of God by means of what amounts to a form of literary invention, using as its primary materials or res the texts of the Bible, considered not as “objects of study” in any way we would now recognize as scholarship, but as recollective “sites” for new compositions, constructed by drawing in (tractanda is a word of choice for composition) and augmenting a textual “seed” with other matters, “collected” (another favorite word) in long chains (catenae) of freely ranging associations (concatenations) on the part of the mediator. (“Late Antique Rhetoric” 241).2

While monastic in origin and originally intended for the creation of monastic art, monastic composition’s reliance upon the techniques of memoria came to be practiced outside monastic culture. For example, as Yates, Carruthers, and others have argued, poets such as Dante and Chaucer made use of these compositional practices. In “Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame,” Beryl Rowland argues that medieval poets such as Chaucer took words from books, made them images in their mind, and then turned those images into new words, into new poems. Likewise, in “Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame,” Rowland argues that Chaucer’s House of Fame “may be seen as an externalization of [the] memory process” described in Bradwardine’s De Memoria Artificiali. Building upon Rowland’s arguments, Elizabeth Buckmaster argues that The House of Fame is an exploration of the practice of Prudence, the cardinal virtue intimately tied to ars memoria because it requires knowledge of the past, present, and future. Buckmaster also argues that in The House of Fame Chaucer represents this connection by presenting his knowledge of the sciences, arts, and philosophy by creating memory palaces in the poem, one for each book. The first palace represents the past, the second the present, and the third the future. She concludes that The House of Fame is an inner journey, an act of meditation such as we find in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.

Works Cited

Buckmaster, Elizabeth. “Chaucer and John of Garland: Memory and Style in the First Fragment.” Medieval Perspectives 1.1 (1986): 31-40.

—. “Meditation and Memory in Chaucer’s House of Fame.” Modern Language Studies 16.3 (1986): 279-287.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

—. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400 – 1200. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 34. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

—. “Late Antique Rhetoric, Early Monasticism, and the Revival of School Rhetoric.” Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: From Classical Theory to Medieval Practice. Ed. Carol Dana Lanham. London: Continuum, 2002. 239-257.

—. “‘The Mystery of the Bed Chamber’: Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess.” The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne. Ed. John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2000.67-87.

—. “The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24 (1993): 881-904.

Rowland, Beryl. “The Art of Memory and the Art of Poetry in the House of Fame.” Revue de l’Universite d’Ottawa 51.2 (1981): 162-171.

—. “Bishop Bradwardine, the Artificial Memory, and the House of Fame.” Chaucer at Albany. Ed. Rossel Hope Robbins. New York: Burt Franklin & Co., 1975. 41-62.

Yates, F.A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966.

  1. In “Late Antique Rhetoric,” Carruthers defines monastic rhetoric as a “shorthand phrase for a small set of terms—and rather large set of practices—that evolved especially during the fourth through the sixth centuries, roughly from the time of John Cassian (ca. 365-ca. 435) through that of Gregory the Great (ca. 540-604), during the earliest efforts to institutionalize monasticism in the West” and that many of these ideas and practices have their origins in the “Greek- and Coptic-speaking desert holy men and monks in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and other sites of the ancient eastern Mediterranean” (239). [↩]
  2. For a more detailed account of this method of composition, see Carruthers’ The Book of Memory, 124-29. [↩]

Paul Miller on Remix as “Database Rhapsody”

16 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by John in Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology, Memory, Quotes, Rhetoric and Composition, Teaching

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About two minutes into his segment in the To the Best of Our Knowledge program “Remix Culture,” Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), comments on remixing as a new literacy, a practice of composition I’ve taking to calling database rhapsody:

“Take a Wikipedia page entry, you know, copy it and paste it into a William S. Burrows novel and take that remix and put in The New Yorker and you’ve got new fiction or something, you know? The pun for me is that we’re looking at new kinds of literacy: digital media, cut and paste imagination, non-linear thinking, you know, kind of the whole twentieth century, McLuhan The Medium is the Massage kind of thing. It’s just come home to roost.”

The Apparatus and Weak Technological Determinism

05 Friday Dec 2008

Posted by John in Digital Studies/New Media, Media Ecology, Probes, Quotes, Scholarship, Technology

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I’m slowly making my way through Ulmer’s Teletheory and I thought I’d go all commonplace bookish and post some passages and thoughts. (Which reminds me, I intended to write some posts based on Ulmer’s Applied Grammatology.) I’m most of the way through chapter 2 and I’m really looking forward to getting to chapter 4 (Memory I: Place/Roots)  and chapter 5 (Memory II: Tour/Routes).

As Eric Leed demonstrated, the distinction between “voice” and “print,” between orality and literacy in general, is an explanatory myth (a “theory”). This myth was devised by bourgeois intellectuals, themselves products of literate culture, to define everything they were not—their other. Another case of the analytico-referential discourse constructing a primal order. Oral culture and its opposition to literate culture, then, is a “concept” […].

Rather, using the logic of the apparatus, he suggests that the qualities associated with orality and literacy are not so much effects as causes—capabilities turned into values. In the myth, then, orality represents the values of social integration into the folk community, while print represents the values of individualism and critical autonomy. The effects of mass media, in a postindustrial culture, are associated with oral culture—as secondary orality—and one’s attitude to the electronic paradigm will tend to be determined by the attitude to these values […]. (26)

I’m still processing the idea that the distinction between orality and literacy as an explanatory myth. Frankly, I’m fascinated by the fact that while I seem to balk at “explanatory myth,” I’m much more comfortable with calling it a “theory,” and I’m even comfortable with a formula like “explanatory myths are to orality what theory is to literacy, ” which means, I think, that my roots in print culture are clearly showing here. I mean, isn’t this part of what Ong means when he writes that “literacy is imperious,” that “[i]t tends to arrogate supreme power by taking itself as normative for human expression and thought” (23)? 1

At the same time, however, is it really a theory or an explanatory myth? Ong would argue that he was describing features that we find present in these two noetic processes (or more broadly what I call techno-cultural-noetic matrices) and the artifacts that emerge from them. And as someone who studies the oral-literate transitional culture of medieval England and Scandinavia, I see these differences at play. And to push this further, how does current thought on oral tradition work with all this, the idea that the “orality’ of an oral poem is rooted in a set of practices that are not dependent upon the means of transmission.2 If we take as a given that there is such things as oral tradition and oral poetry, and I do, doesn’t that mean the distinction between the oral and the literate is more than just a theory, more than just “analytico-referential discourse constructing a primal order,” that is, more than just an explanatory myth?

Or is the myth, the theory, our understanding, our construction, of orality and literacy? That is, is the myth, the theory, not difference between oral tradition and written text, the distinction between The Iliad and the Encyclopedia Britannica for instance, but our construction/explanation of orality as concept and literacy as concept? That I can get behind wholeheartedly.

While I clearly need to read Leed,3 Whether we think of these qualities as causes, as effects, or as part of a larger dynamic process, I do like the idea of identifying them as “capabilities turned into values,” and I think all three perspectives agree on this point. And this brings me to the idea of weak technological determinism.

Weak technological determinism doesn’t assume X will happen because of Y but that the affordances and constraints (i.e., the capabilities) of X help or hinder the possibility of Y happening, understanding that this help or hindrance occurs within a larger ecological context. Apparatus theory, as I understand it, seeks to identify and understand the role of ideology within this ecology, with specific ideologies bringing with them their own affordances and constraints

  1. Ong, Walter J. “Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought.” The Written Word: Literacy in Transition. Ed. Gerd Baumann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. 23-50. [↩]
  2. For instance, in How To Read An Oral Poem, John Miles Foley argues that oral poetry can live its entire existence from composition to reception as a written text. [↩]
  3. Leed, Eric. “‘Voice’ and ‘Print’: Master Symbols in the History of Communication.” The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture. Ed. Kathleen Woodward. Madison: Coda Press, 1980. 41-61.) the above makes more sense in light of the second paragraph with its claim that “the qualities associated with orality and literacy are not so much effects as causes—capabilities turned into values.” From a strong medium theory perspective such as McLuhan’s, we would of course argue the opposite, that the qualities associated with orality and literacy are medium-based effects. Ong, on the other hand, would argue that these qualities are neither simply causes or effects but that they exist as one part of a much larger dynamic process embedded within the extant culture. (( See, for instance, the “Complications and Overlappings” section of ch. 2 in The Presence of the Word. [↩]
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