By approach ing sensing diff er ently, not as the senses or as a human point of medi-ation, it is possible to begin to account for the ways in which sensing prac tices reson-ate with partic u lar entit ies and rela tions
This is probably the biggest point in this short article. To understand sensing as a practice irreducible to the human focus on 5 senses, we might begin to become sensible to other bodies that similarly cannot be reduced to or represented by the human body.
With these devel op ments in mind, how might it be possible to rethink and rework the prac tices, entit ies and envir on-ments of sense within this broader context where the assumed subjects and traject or-ies of sense are shift ing?
This is a KEY question and one that I hope animates DFMI 2019;
Citizen sensing also consti-tutes a set of sensing prac tices that is meant to enable and empower people to sense for polit ical eff ect, giving rise to ques tions about the polit ics of sense, and how sensing entit ies trans form into agents of provoca-tion and change
We often think of responsibilities of citizens, but what of their sense-abilities?
New registers of sense are becom ing evident as organ isms express diff er ent and dynamic ways in which envir on ments are chan ging
These multi-species collaborations are at the heart of what Myers and Hartigan wrote about and what Hartigan will be discussing in his talk.
The planet may carry on, but life on Earth is precarious today
I hope one day to write such an opening sentence
“I see Posthumanism as a methodology: a conceptual framework that can be applied to the field of graphic design.”
An important undercurrent in all of our readings is methodology. What methods does posthumanism orientations require, invent, frustrate, occlude?
This alternative strand within Western philosophy has been expressed momentarily, debated over time, and rearticulated vari-ously by figures including Spinoza, Godwin, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Tolstoy, Althusser, Foucault, Irigaray, Cixous, Deleuze and Latour, among others
People often neglect how tough it was for Deleuze to articulate this alternative history of/for western philosophy. In some aspects, just looking at Deleuze's career one might see a very grand and long drawn out attempt to write a literature review that rearticulates the problems and possibilities of western philosophy.
In fact, however, the ‘new Humanities’ are best considered less as a current break with European modernism and its humanist tradition of progressive Enlightenment; and more as a continuation and elab-oration of an alternative contemporaneous thread evident within the modern period of Western philosophical thinking about the nature of humanity and of human knowledge.
Perhaps the older humanities was a break to which posthumanism is finally returning too?
For us, these congruencies evidence the contemporary contribution that Indigenous philosophies can make to global efforts currently underway to imagine a ‘new Humanities’
This is very much an affirmative response to confluences between continental philosophy (philosophies?) and indigenous philosophies.
or example, a positive relationship between humans and a river would be evidenced by human land management practices that enable a river to maintain and enhance its mauri, which would result in its life-generating capacities being maintained. In this way, the mauri of the river is grown or maintained through ensuring that its life-generating vibrancy is not diminished. Simultaneously, the mauri of people is maintained through the provision of food and other resources to the humans from the river
This resonates very deeply with Spinoza's understanding if a body well composed in his Ethics.
ogies, and events. Rocks, rivers, birds, plants, mountains, animals and oceans, all possess a genealogy, and the divine genealogical order of whakapapa extends through aeons to a common genealogical origin which is Io, the Creator of the Cosmos
Such temporal registers echo/precede those requested by Braidotti.
The world’s Indigenous peoples are diverse and cannot be identified homogenously; however, many Indigenous Nations find they share significant commonalities associated with a philosophy of ‘being-more-than-human’ and a science based upon ‘natural laws of interdependence’
I've always been curious about, and ignorant of, the conflation of indigeneity into a homogenous category. Whenever someone brings up "indigenous thought" I keep wanting to ask "which indigeniety?"
We ask:what is at stake pol-itically when Indigenous ways are conceived erroneously as unstructured and deterritorialising, when (Western) subjectivities are constructed as ‘nomad’ but nomadism is no longer marked as a mode of existence special to Indigenous humanity, and when (Western) subjective transformation is construed as a process of ‘becoming-autochthonous’3 that erases the specifi-city of ‘the Autochthon’ and results in her self-alienation? Whobenefits from this construction, andhow?
Similar critiques have been leveled against D&G by disability studies scholars regarding their use of "schizo-analysis" as an interpretive/inventive frame.
Power being multi-layered (potestasandpotentia); the contemporarybeing multi-dimensional (the present and the actual); time being multi-directional (ChronosandAion), and cognitive capitalism being tuned intobio-genetics and informational codes – there is nothing left for criticalthinkers to do other than to pursue the posthuman, all too human praxisof speaking truth to power and working towards the composition ofplanes of immanence for missing peoples. Instead of new generalizationsabout an engendered pan-humanity, we need sharper focus on the com-plex singularities that constitute our respective locations. The criticalposthumanities can be the epistemological vehicle for this project
I appreciate this passage an an opening to think differently about power. We typically and habitually think of power as only top-down hierarchy which not only elides how power is distributed throughout any given system but that habit of thought reinforces the humanist model of governance/relation. To think how power (and any capacity for change and invention) might operate differently would need to think about the temporal registers as well as the multiplicity of relations in any given situation.
I hope the readerswill take my over-crowded article as an attempt to compose a missingcommunity of posthuman scholars: the essay as assemblage
Another line of thought I would like for use to pursue is method. Braidotti turns to cartography here as a method (always selective, impartial, mobile). What other methods are suggested, enacted, demonstrated through the readings to respond to what Braidotti calls the "posthuman predicament"?
eohumanist2claims
One of the big concerns or critiques leveled against posthumanism is that it never gets "beyond" the object of its critique but I wonder to what extent is that exactly the point?
posthumanism on the one handand post-anthropocentris
Interesting parsing here to discuss
A TheoreticalFramework for theCritical Posthumanities
We debated whether or not to include this essay last or first. The thought was that this kind of essay is something we might want to arrive to after building up a case for posthumanist thought, but we decided instead to start at the end and then reverse engineer this "effect."
A practice proceeds as an infectious germ that activates (metastasizes) new relationships (metamorphoses) within an ongoing habit (metastability) of relations (metaphysics).
Remember....meta can be both/and. Both above but also beside. Just like human and posthuman, individual and collective. Which one? It depends.
In “(Meta)Physical Graffiti,” Jenny Edbauer remarks that for a writing body “[affect] is the experience generated by relations—by your body-in-relation” (142). She proposes that affective literacy, one that a posthuman practice aims to exercise, involves understanding that “when we encounter writing, it not only signifies some-thing to us, but it also combines with us in a degree of affectivity. Writing, in other words, involves a mutuality between sensual and signifying effects” (151
READ this essay. Along with the Pickering, it is crucial for this article
means that an adequate social theory can amount, at most, to a set of sensitivities in our encounter with empirical phenomena: we should especially look out for post humanist interlinings of the human and the nonhuman—the construction of subjects for objects, as well as vice versa—and we should recognize that in general nothing substantive endures in the encounter of material and human agency. (17
This passage (and the article from which it comes) is perhaps the most crucial and more influential text for this project. The problem os practice without a subject is one that grips both Pickering and my projects.
l, irreducible to an individual’s agency.
Which is not to say it does not include an individual's (whatever that might mean) agency
Weber
This guy would have been a GREAT teacher for this course.
River
This guy is OK, I guess.
Whatever that subject or object might be, rhetoric as a reflective practice re-trenches itself as a practice for dividing subjects and objects.
This is a crucial statement here. Reflection is a practice too, not something that is against practice but what does it practice? Well...for me...reflection is a divisive practice. Not divisive in the sense of politics (though in some ways dividing subject and obejct IS the politics par excellence) but more of a ontological practice whereby it literally determines (in a creative sense) what IS
Posthuman practice unfolds not through the traditional conception of rhetoric as critical reflection about an object but as an ongoing series of mediated encounters.
This is pretty much the whole project here (as well as the book). The serial encounters includes not only the individual human and her activities but the body (broadly construed) that enacts that individual human as such.
Preserving
Really love the proposal overall and look forward to seeing what comes of the project(s).
One slight thing I'd like to mention here, in the interest of furthering the critical diversity is that, in addition to our need to preserve data/archives, I'm increasingly being persuaded of the need to construct data prevention policies and techniques that would allow many people--protestors, youth, citizens, hospital patients, insurance beneficiaries, et al--much needed space to present clean-ish slates.
laws of hospitality
I'd be interested in thinking through (and perhaps doing a closer read) on how "laws" and "ethics" are becoming intertwined throughout this book (and perhaps in general).
In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray argues that digital environments have four essential properties. They are procedural, participatory, spatial, and encyclopedic. They are procedural because software is an authored set of procedures, which can be used to “write rules . . . that are recognizable as an interpretation of the world.”[2] Her focus is on storytelling, but we will see that any piece of software can be seen as an expressive, rhetorical model of a system. In addition to being procedural, digital environments also invite participation in that their rule-based behaviors are “responsive to our input” and they also “represent navigable space.”
Could be of interest to bring back Kitchin and Dodge's understanding of code/space to this discussion.
However, the symmetry of “friending” on Facebook remains an important feature of the software and of the social graph that the company continues to build. Different software platforms and different social networks are shaped by how the software imagines relations between users—that is, by different ethical programs.
It's interesting to see how FB incorporates the asymetry that other social networks (like twitter, tumblr, Instagram, et al) started with. You can see how the initial symmetrical relationships (born in large part within the metaphors of "friending" as Brown mentions here) determined a certain kind of future for FB.
It's fascinating to see FB try to work against that initial framing to redefine its ethos/habitat.
From wiretapping to censorship of pornography, governmental entities infringe upon the private or, at the very least, draw and redraw the line between the public and the private.
Yes....in an age of networks, the private and public spheres give way to the private and public sectors where the latter of which (public sector) is increasing encroached upon by the former (private sector networks, infrastructures, data, etc).
Hospitality is the defining ethical predicament of networked life, as it describes the difficulties surrounding “what it is that turns up, what comes our way by e-mail or the Internet.”[15] Life in a networked society means that terms such as place, home, host, and guest are thrown into question.
And with it, issues of what counts as private and public.
Arriving in the Domodedovo Airport or Red Square or other public spaces, the suicide bomber takes advantage of the hospitable infrastructures of networked life. But this “black widow” perished due to this same structure of hospitality. This bombing is particularly instructive given this book’s discussion of hospitality and software. The bomber’s payload was detonated by a spam message from a cell phone provider. That text message, arriving on her phone through a hospitable network, arrived because she had connected herself to that network and, therefore, had welcomed the message.
What a perfect example. The dynamics of networked relation entail a mutual exposure.
Ethical programs are enacted constantly, by both humans and computational machines, and software studies presents a set of terms and concepts for making sense of those programs.
I'll be interested in tracking how this ongoing-ness of constantly enacted ethical programs figure into "decisions.'
they are not always the result of deliberation
Hmm.....this will be for me a very important touchpoint. How ethics might not always be the result of deliberative action is something that pushes against most understandings of ethics.
This predicament, which is entirely unavoidable, refigures ethics as something beyond individual choice. Yes, I make decisions about who or what might enter my home, who or what has access to my Twitter feed, but this only happens in the face of an ever-present exposedness to others. Prior to the large-scale availability of networked computational devices, Levinas described the relation that defines networked life. Levinas likens this predicament to that of the hostage, and he suggests that if “we” as humans share anything at all, it is this experience of being held hostage by another that resists representation, that arrives over and beyond our attempts to make sense of that other.
The basis for a networked ethics...the fact that we are all always and already connected to others.
This book suggests not that networked computing creates the predicament of hospitality but rather that it takes up this very old problem—the problem of others arriving whether we invited them or not—over and over again.
But Facebook privacy functions shift and Dropbox usernames are hacked, meaning that the concept of the invitation is mostly a pleasant fiction.
This is an idea that me and Rob Gehl wrote about a little concerning the shifting natures of terms of service agreements as/as contracts, but I LOVE how Brown is setting it up here as perhaps the grounding for a networked ethics. I'll be tagging such references as I go along.
A well-de- veloped color, then, appears to partake of the "body" metaphor more than of the "painting" metaphor, for it is an integrated, unitary, natural- seeming part of the argument that persuades by its appearance of truth (lnst. 11.1.58-59), while a speech whose co/ores are discernibly "added-on" and not integrated fails to persuade
too much
At first, then, let us speak s if being affected, being moved and being active are the same thing.
I love the implications/potential for thinking of this "as if." It does make the actual/virtual analogy (from last note) perhaps an even better fit.
Very Massumi.
here is then a way in which things are affected by their like and a way in which they are affected by their unlike, as we said. 5 3
This might be something to think through further. Reminds me a bit of Spinoza, but I can't quite articulate it.
oo would be spoken of in two ways, both as in potentiality and as in activity. And in the same way the sense-object too .., will be s17ken of both as being in pote~ and as being ~y.
Not an exact match, but could be an analogous relationship here as between actual/virtual (Massumi, et al)
But it is clear that the perceptive faculty is not in activity, but only in potentiality and for that reason does not perceive on its own, just as the combustible thing is not burnt in itself without the thing that burns
Hmmm....I wonder how this plays with hylomorphism....
Rather, what concerns me is the symbolism by which populations and individuals are established as need- ing help, as being inferior, and the role played by disability in that sym- bolism, because it has a long history of being placed in the service of dis- crimination, inequality, and violence. What I am calling the aesthetics of human disqualification focuses on how ideas about appearance contrib- ute to these and other forms of oppression. My claim is that this symbol- ism depends on aesthetic representations that require further clarification
To look at the way we look at disability, this essay proposes a taxonomy of four primary visual rhetorics of disability: the wondrous, the sentimental, the exotic, and the realistic
Reminds me of the medieval texts like "wonders of the east" where "otherness" is mystified and monstrous.
Modernity, as many scholars have shown, is ocularcentric. 8 The very devel- opment of photography in 1839 and its rapid flourishing thereafter testify to this urgent primacy of the visual. As Roland Barthes claims despairingly in his meditation on photography, "One of the marks of our world is [that] we live according to a generalized image repertoire." 9 In modernity, the image mediates not only our desires but who we imagine ourselves to be. In- deed, Alan Trachtenberg argues that photography has made us see ourselves as images. 10 Among the myriad, often conflicting and never disinterested im- ages modernity offers us, the picture of ourselves as disabled is an image fraught with a tangle of anxiety, distance, and identification.
really good account for the ocularcentricism and alternative is Viet Erlmann's "Reason & Resonance" that traces the visual-rational dominance and offers an alternative in sound-resonance. GREAT read.
cause disability has such potent cultural reso- nances, its visualization has been enlisted to manipulate viewers for a wide range of aims. This essay focuses on how that manipulation has operated and what meanings it has carried.
This essay explores popular photographic images of disability rather than medical images, whose circulation was generally limited to text- books and clinical studies aimed toward a specialized and often elite audi
How has culture developed technologies to extend and enhance the senses, cre- ating an “exosomatic” array of devices that compensate for the limits of our crea- turely nature?
Always a bit allergic to the supplementary/extension framing for technology. Seems prevalent lots of these discussions of sense (cf. McLuhan).
Indeed, we have come to acknowledge the mediation of the two in such a way that it has become increasingly difficult to isolate one entirely from the other. Meaning comes to a great extent through the senses, while the senses filter the world through the prior cultural meanings in which we are immersed. It is not for nothing that the Greeks could employ “common sense” ( koina aisthe tika , which in Latin became sensus communis ) as a synonym both for doxa , or common opinion, and for the faculty that allows the different senses to subsume a singular object under universal categories
We are talking a lot about sense in the individual but what of these common senses? The public sense?
The models criticized earlier do not need to be trashed. They are not just plain wrong. It's just that their sphere of applicability must be recognized as limited to a particular mode of exis tence, or a particular dimension of the real (the degree to which things coincide with their own arrest).
This seems to be applicable to method discussions. Certain methods are applicable to certain audiences. Perhaps reductive...
The member of the mob, right at the heart of the confusion, who participates in the killing, in its acts and its cries, and who receives its sounds and smells in the liberation of the Dionysiac impulses of the crowd, does not visually analyse the picture; unlike the spectator, he experiences the events through the senses 'of proximity' -touch and smell - but he could not describe the spoliation of bodies and scenes of horror, which he does not experience in this way (Corbin [1990] 1992). The pathetic, so common at the end of the eighteenth century, like the picturesque, implies a mechanics of the gaze and the use of a socially restricted sensory hierarchy
Collective sense.
iterative-inductive research (that evolves in design through the study), drawing on a family of methods,
Hmmm....I really like this articulation of method and find it analogous to "affect theory." That is...the slipperiness that we often encounter in affect theory is often a result of the formal commitments to an ongoing process of evolving terms. Here..."iterative-induction" works well to foreground that process of change.
By a ‘sensory ethnography’ I mean a process of doing ethnography that accounts for how this multisensoriality is integral both to the lives of people who participate in our research and to how we ethnographers practise our craft
I suspect method might be a very important part of discussions from here on out ("how do we do this") so it's great to have a quick and readily available definition here.
This piece has been taken up in scholarship treating a range of popular culture phenomena, and interesting is how their version of “ feminine style ” depends on Keillor ’ s enlisting of multiple senses, which, Foss and Foss argue, collapses distance and creates a nearness
Test
A path is not composed of positions. It is nondeeomposable: a dynamic unity, That comil/ulty of movement is of an order of reality other than the measurable, divisible space it can be con firmed as having crossed.
Again...another instance in which identity/position is subordinated to movement and emergence. Placing the position before the movement result in logical aporias, but forgoing identity/position is to acknowledge movement.
Even though many of the approaches in question charac terize themselves as materialisms, matter can only enter in indirecdy: as mediated. Maner, movement, body, sensation.
Succinct take on why we needed a "new materialism" to differentiate from this historical materialism (rooted in cultural studies rooted in marxist thought).
Of course, a body occupying one position on the grid might succeed in making a move to occupy another position. In fact, certain normative progressions, such as that from child to adult, are coded in. But this doesn't change the fact that what defines the body is not the movement itself, only its beginning and endpoints. Movement is en tirely subordinated to the positions it connects. These are predefined. Adding movement like this adds nothing at all. You just get twO successive states: multiples of zero.
This is very much like [go with me on this one] an organizational chart that breaks down an organization's hierarchy. All the nodes are specialized and individual (person/position) but the lines are all the same. Thus...movement (of succession/information designated by the connecting lines in that org structure) is elided in favor of positions/identities within that organization. Verbs are lost in favor of the nouns.
But this thoroughly mediated body could only be a "discursive" body: one with its signifying gestures. Sig nifying gestures make sense. If properly "performed," they may also un make sense by scrambling significations already in place. Make and un make sense as thcy might, they don't sense
Targeting the poststructural/cultural studies object as a negative example here.
When I think of my body and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand out. IIIIIOVCS, It/eels. In fact, it docs both at the same time, It moves as it feels, and il feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this: an intrinsic conne ct ion between movement and sensation whereby each immediately summons the other?
The body is not prior to its sensations/movements. A body does not sense and move through space but movement and sense embodies.
The term rarely appears in the plural, it just seems to expand from individual to collective, like breath
Hmmm....missing a term for the middle ground individual and collective..."collected"?
The orator has little use for an imaginative world three inches in diameter. His world must be twenty feet in diameter and must include every atom of his own
This talk about "diameter" reminds me of Burke's notions of "circumference."
Aesth ē sis
I'm very interested in pursuing this term further in the seminar. I'm especially interested in how Jacques Ranciere has engaged its pre-Kantian connotations. In short...post-Kant seems to emphasize/rely on a distance between a subject and object as a way to ascertain value (aesthetics). Aethesis in an Aristotelian sense might collapse that distance between subject/object...emphasizing sense in a productive way.
“ An aesthetic rhetoric counts on, attends to, and takes into account the body and its senses; an epistemic rhetoric tries to bypass them but cannot.
They go on to discuss the energy (voltage) necessary to stimulate the audience, but they caution against using an amount of energy “ so great as to destroy the circuit.
I wonder what other electric words might prove useful here. I'm thinking explicitly about something like rhetoric's "conductive" character. Can rhetorical practice be thought through conduction?
“ that we feel more through the public exposure to others ’ emotions than through an interior circuit of sensation.
“ sense data by themselves are not experience. Experience is sensation plus meaning . Sensation alone is meaningless . ”
ooof.
the sensing package that constitutes our participation in the world.
The idea of a sensing package, a bundle of constitutive, participatory tendrils, may help press past commonplace conditional observations — e.g., that rhetorical activity is embodied — and could offer a way to think about connective, participatory dimensions of sensing. This I think is where sensation can go. But where has it been?
They are three-intellectual training, casual encounters, and the philosophical sciences.
And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life.
Because a definition of any artist which covers more than is included in the rules of his art is superfluous and defective.
Nothing to excess?
It is useful, in framing laws, not only to study the past history of one's own country, in order to understand which constitution is desirable for it now, but also to have a knowledge of the constitutions of other nations, and so to learn for what kinds of nation the various kinds of constitution are suited.
Governing policy
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.
Most common definition of rhetoric, widely used.
The orator's demonstration is an enthymeme, and this is, in general, the most effective of the modes of persuasion.
Important claim here. We'll be coming back to enthymemes a lot.
“You observe,” I would say to him, “the nature of the multitude, how susceptible they are to flattery; that they like those who cultivate their favor better than those who seek their good; and that they prefer those who cheat them with beaming smiles and brotherly love to those who serve them with dignity and reserve. You have paid no attention to these things, but are of the opinion that if you attend honestly to your enterprises abroad, the people at home also will think well of you. But this is not the case, and the very contrary is wont to happen. For if you please the people in Athens, no matter what you do they will not judge your conduct by the facts but will construe it in a light favorable to you; and if you make mistakes, they will overlook them, while if you succeed, they will exalt your success to the high heaven. For good will has this effect upon all men.
His conception of audience and ethos.
I maintain also that if you compare me with those who profess54 to turn men to a life of temperance and justice, you will find that my teaching is more true and more profitable than theirs. For they exhort their followers to a kind of virtue and wisdom which is ignored by the rest of the world and is disputed among themselves; I, to a kind which is recognized by all. They, again, are satisfied if through the prestige of their names they can draw a number of pupils into their society; I, you will find, have never invited any person to follow me, but endeavor to persuade the whole state to pursue a policy from which the Athenians will become prosperous themselves, and at the same time deliver the rest of the Hellenes from their present ills.
Works through a negative opposition here and several other places. What might we think of this style? What does it offer?
Let me ask you, however, not to pay any attention to what you have heard about me in the past from my would-be slanderers and calumniators, not to credit charges which have been made without proof or trial, and not to be influenced by the suspicions which have been maliciously implanted in you by my enemies, but to judge me to be the kind of man which the accusation and the defense in this trial will show me to be; for if you decide the case on this basis, you will have the credit of judging honorably and in accordance with the law, while I, for my part, shall obtain my complete deserts.
Another instance of asking his audience to withhold judgement until he's finished performing.
charging that I corrupt young men
Like Plato's Socrates.
Indeed no one may rely on the honesty of his life as a guarantee that he will be able to live securely in Athens; for the men who have chosen to neglect what is their own and to plot against what belongs to others do not keep their hands off citizens who live soberly and bring before you only those who do evil; on the contrary, they advertise their powers in their attacks upon men who are entirely innocent, and so get more money from those who are clearly guilty.24
This might seem very far from what we'd consider as civic engagement, but is it?
I beg you, then, neither to credit nor to discredit what has been said to you until you have heard to the end what I also have to say, bearing it in mind that there would have been no need of granting to the accused the right of making a defense, had it been possible to reach a just verdict from the arguments of the accuser.
Postpone judgment, allow me the space to discuss, no matter what. How closely does this defense align with what we might think of as education?
But now, although he alleges that I am able to make the weaker cause appear the stronger,17
Dissoi Logoi and the usual charge against a sophists or rhetorician
Watching over them and training them in this manner, both the teachers of gymnastic and the teachers of discourse are able to advance their pupils to a point where they are better men and where they are stronger in their thinking or in the use of their bodies.
Outlines a consistency here between training the body and training the mind.
But I urge all who intend to acquaint themselves with my speech, first, to make allowance, as they listen to it, for the fact that it is a mixed discourse, composed with an eye to all these subjects; next, to fix their attention even more on what is about to be said than on what has been said before; and, lastly, not to seek to run through the whole of it at the first sitting, but only so much of it as will not fatigue the audience.16
Pay attention to what is about to be said is a never ending task.
applying the analogy of an art with hard and fast rules to a creative process.
An "analogy of art" and not the art itself? Sounds similar to something else we've read.
oblivious of the fact that the arts are made great, not by those who are without scruple in boasting about them, but by those who are able to discover all of the resources which each art affords.
"arts are made great" by "those whoa re able to discover." An interesting turn of phrase to be sure.
they pretend to have knowledge of the future"
Another reference to the future. What might be the connection from above to the gods?
Homer, who has been conceded the highest reputation for wisdom, has pictured even the gods as at times debating among themselves about the future
When considering the style of rhetoric we have seen so far--that of the law courts and arguing for/against--the image of the gods also playing out that same scenario is striking. "Debating the future" is a quite generative turn of phrase.
An art I do not call it, but only an experience, because it is unable to explain or to give a reason of the nature of its own applications. And I do not call any irrational thing an art; but if you dispute my words, I am prepared to argue in defence of them.
A pretty high bar Socrates is setting here. Is experience then not a "real" thing? Must all "real" things be able to be explained in a definite, rational way?
SOCRATES: And will you continue to ask and answer questions, Gorgias, as we are at present doing, and reserve for another occasion the longer mode of speech which Polus was attempting? Will you keep your promise, and answer shortly the questions which are asked of you?
What might Socrates be doing here?
For one body many bodies of men came together, men greatly purposing great things, of whom some possessed great wealth, some the glory of ancient and noble lineage, some the vigor of personal strength, and others the power of acquired cleverness.
The power of discourse stands in the same relation to the soul's organization as the pharmacopoeia does to the physiology of bodies.
This is an important sentiment, one that we might see repeating in other readings. In what ways is language a drug? In what ways does language intoxicate or heal?
For if all people possessed memory concerning all things past, and awareness of all things present, and foreknowledge of all things to come
Another instance where memory is valorized as something having great worth if not power. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this as our readings unfold.
Two-fold arguments concerning the good and the bad are put forward in Greece by those who philosophize
Logoi
Hi, all!
Please forgive any typos in the text. I had to encode in a rush and I'm afraid I missed a few things.
I kept wishing there were more examples to support this particular argument, rather than the sheer weight of assertion, as if this facet of the vegetal world were generally understood to be the case. Our grids of identity are certainly complicated when we consider plants, but that doesn’t mean they are abolished.
In On War, Carl von Clausewitz argues that every battle revolves around a “central hub” of activity—a center of gravity or “heavy point” (Schwerpunkt)—that forms the nodal point of the enemy’s material military power. Info War, however, makes civil society itself the center of gravity. Info War targets not only the physical infrastructure of information (nodes, cables, links, servers, towers, routers, electricity grids)
Test text.