Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ ‘The materiality of the signifier’ was the mantra of my graduate school mentor whom I first encountered in 1980. He celebrated the modernist interest in formalism and its attention to device, even as he pulled us into the world of structuralist systems. His heroes were Dziga Vertov and the Ferdinand de Saussure of the Anagrams, Sigmund Freud of the dream-work and other formalist structuralists who turned their interest in matter into method. Under his tutelage we read Roland Barthes, Tvetzan Todorov and many classic semiotic texts. By insisting on the relational quality of semiotic systems while calling our attention to the deep shadows and silvery light of the nitrate prints we were still privileged enough to sometimes watch at the Pacific Film Archive, he alternatively exhorted and seduced us into a belief in the necessity of paying attention to the work of aesthetic artifacts as the very premise on which other interpretative activity could proceed. Probability was not in the mix in those days. But I am referring to the current vogue, such as N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), or the discussion in Marjorie Levinson's ‘What Is New Formalism’, PMLA, 122:2 (March 2007), pp.558-69, or Hans Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

² For a good treatment of materiality, even if focused on relatively recent discussions, see Matthew Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). The discussion of forensic and formal materiality is particularly valuable as a way to distinguish analysis of physical aspects and meaning-production features.

³ Textual scholarship informed by bibliographical studies is rare under the dominance of cultural studies, but the tradition persists among those most excellent and expert practitioners: Anthony Grafton, Eveyln Tribble, Elizabeth Lyman, Jerome McGann, William Sherman, Stuart Sillars, Randall McLeod, Steve McCaffery and the late Douglas McKenzie, to name just a handful of outstanding figures.

⁴ As a science, probability arose from games of chance, Pascal and Fermat, in 1654, were drafted by a nobleman who found himself losing more than he wished to at the gambling table. Why, he wondered, were his own calculations of outcomes so mistaken? Probability and statistics arise in the same era, at the beginning of the long eighteenth century that inaugurates our modern world and its attempts at empirical understanding of all and every aspect of the natural universe. Probability lays the groundwork for the administrative computations of human and social phenomena, for the universe of ‘political arithmetic’ articulated by the aptly named William Petty and his precursor, William Graunt. Probability was originally intended as a way to calculate the odds, control an apparently uncontrollable outcome, make chance the servant of decision and strategy. Among its followers, the frequentists, so termed for their addiction to figuring how much out of how often and other numerically measured factors. Statistics arises as a set of laws of error, means, averages. Pierre Simon Laplace, passionate inventor of the error function, Francis Galton, the regression to the mean, tendency of extremes and outliers to move back towards the science so social physics, discovered by the Frenchman L.A.J. Quetelet's, and the work of the brilliant Fourier, who predicted that heat energy neatly compressed into a single source would distribute itself in perfect performance of a distribution of error curve if left undisturbed as it dissipated. The statistician's alchemical arts, turning the dross of real behavior and commerce, mortality tables and actuarial computations into the gold of predictable outcomes serves as a mainstay of the modern state (the term status from which each word derives is only the start point of their common cause). See T.M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

⁵ I'm referring here to complex systems theory, which emerged from chaos theory, and the work of Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).

⁶ See my essay on the white space in a page of William Morris's Chaucer, in ‘Visual Performance of the Poetic Text’, in Close Listening, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp.131-61 and also in a more developed form in ‘Graphical Readings and the Visual Aesthetics of Textuality’, Text, 16 (2006), pp.267-76.

⁷ Cratylus, translated by Benjamin Jowett, < http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/cratylus.1b.txt> [10/05/2009].

⁸ Gerard Genette, Mimologiques (Paris: Seuil, 1976).

⁹ Clement of Alexandria, Stromates, Chapter IV, Divine Things Wrapped up, in Figures, < http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf02.vi.iv.v.iv.html> [10/05/2009].

¹⁰ R. A. Markus, ‘St. Augustine on Signs’, Phronesis, 2:1 (1957), pp.60-83. For a detailed discussion of the intellectual background from antiquity in the Hellenistic thought from which Augustine's concept of signs is drawn, < http://philpapers.org/rec/MARSAO> [10/05/2009].

¹¹ R.A. Markus, ‘St. Augustine on Signs’, p.65.

¹² Caroline Bynum, Lectures on Christian materiality, given at the Stanford Humanities Center in March, 2009.

¹³ Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

¹⁴ Mary Philadelphia Merrified, Medieval and Renaissance Treatises on the Arts of Painting (London: John Murray, 1849), consisted of her translations of texts from the twentieth century through the eighteenth century.

¹⁵ Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1975).

¹⁶ A.G. Lehmann, The Symbolist Aesthetic in France (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950).

¹⁷ Gotthold Lessing, Laocöon. An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry: With Remarks illustrative of Various Points in the History of Ancient Art, trans. Ellen Frothingham (Boston: Little, Brown, 1904).

¹⁸ Michel Seuphor, Abstract Painting (New York: Dell, 1964).

¹⁹ Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocöon’, Partisan Review, 1940.

²⁰ Francis Frascina, Pollock and After (New York: Harper and Row, 1985) and Johanna Drucker, Theorizing Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

²¹ Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plain (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1947).

²² Johanna Drucker, ‘Visual and Literary Materiality in Modern Art’, in The Visible Word (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.49-90. Also, Ezra Pound, ‘From the Manuscripts of Ernest Fenellosa’, < http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/etext05/7cnpj10.htm> [10/05/2009].

²³ Anna Lawton and Herb Eagle, Russian Futurism Through its Manifestos (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Maurice Denis, ‘Remember that a painting – before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’, in Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, eds Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976).

²⁴ Pavel Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p.57.

²⁵ C.K. Ogden, I.A. Richards, J. Wood, Foundations of Aesthetics (New York: Lear Publishers, 1925), p.28.

²⁶ Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern: A Source Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

²⁷ Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism (New York and The Hague: Mouton, 1980).

²⁸ Paraphrasing Mary Carruthers here.

²⁹ Ernst von Glasersfeld, Radical Constructivism: a Way of Knowing and Learning (London: Falmer Press, 1995).

³⁰ Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Cognition (Boston: Shambala, 1987).

³¹ My former colleague, Jerome McGann, came up with this analogy of page and text as a wave function that collapses when he was reading Heisenberg in our SpecLab days.

³² Similarly, the concept of non self-identity from George Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, came to me through the readings of Jerome McGann.

³³ Gestalt principles originate with Max Wertheimer, but almost any contemporary psychology of vision book replicates these examples and the images that demonstrate them. See, for instance E. Bruce Goldstein, Sensation and Perception (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1984).

³⁴ Malcolm Parkes, Scribes, Scripts, and Readers (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), Linda Brownrigg, Medieval Book Production (Los Altos Hills: Anderson-Lovelace, 1990) and Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Tranformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

³⁵ Heniz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (New York: Springer Verlag, 2003).