RE: [-empyre-] Writing and Pattern Flows

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

> > A difficult question, no doubt, but what is 'meaning', fundamentally?
>
> I find Michael Polyani's notion of subsidiary and focus to be useful
> here.  He achieves a balance between what he terms "personal knowledge"
> and the more universalizing tendencies of an abstract rationalism.

Hi Kennth, yes, I can see the need for such a balance, ie, for both, and
functioning together. What is the goal of Polyani's writing? Is it work in
AI? Semantics? Something else?

> In programming things like art machines, encoding media practices,
> encoding culture, and encoding the poetic, I often think of this in
> terms of procedural vs. declarative knowledge: How vs. What.   Deleuze
> further articulated the production of ideas (meaning?) as a process of
> deterritorialization... of associative relationship "and", rather than
> disjunctive/propositional "or" "is".  Making meaning is an active
> performative gesture on the part of the one constructing the meaningful
> relationship, synthesizing the datum of sense/body into a focal point
> of meaning/awareness.

Yes, the emphasis you put on the production of meaning as process seems
right. The mechanics of making meaning from language is not solely a matter
of working with more verbal language but perforce also involves other things
like images and sounds, sensations, etc. And it is this multi-modal
aspect--admitting it as language, though not verbal--which is what many of
us have been on about for some time concerning 'new language'.

That we are coming to notions of writing that entertain such language is
part of the exciting change in writing. There has been considerable
discussion of, say, the synthesis of the visual and language, but this is
broader than that.

And this is not solely a change in literary art but accompanies efforts in
computer science, for instance, in grappling further with notions of how we
process experience, read the world, respond--how and what we are.

> This is also resonant with Michel Chion's
> characterization of what happens in the multi-modal, audio-visual
> medium of cinema: the visible and audible streams are synthesized
> through a process he terms synchresis into an experience that contains
> new elements contained in neither the audible or visible.  Collisions
> of media modality in time....

Interesting. Yes. There are some new media literary works that operate on
this sort of level of language. And this can be quite complexly meaningful,
actually. In the same way that memories of moments can be complexes of
'multi-modal' impressions and associations, for instance. Intensely
poetical.

Thanks for your post, Kenneth. That helps me a lot.

ja
http://vispo.com