Tag: Etymology

Binary and Digital

Plant breaks down technology’s binary, bifurcated etymology in her book Zeros + Ones. “Technology,” she writes, “is both a question of logic, the long arm of the law, logos, ‘the faculty which distinguishes parts (“on the one hand and on the other hand”),’ and also a matter of the skills, digits, speeds, and rhythms of techno, engineerings which run with ‘a completely other distribution which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure, or measure’” (Plant 50).

As the quote within her quote indicates, Plant is cribbing here — her source, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.

“The same ambivalence is inscribed in the zeros and ones of computer code,” she adds. “These bits of code are themselves derived from two entirely different sources, and terms: the binary and the digital, or the symbols of a logical identity which does indeed put everything on one hand or the other, and the digits of mathematics, full of intensive potential, which are not counted by hand but on the fingers and, sure enough, arrange themselves in pieces of eight rather than binary pairs” (50).

Deleuze describes this 8-bit digital realm as “demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods’ fields of action…thereby confounding the boundaries between properties” (as quoted in Plant 50).

I offer the above not as a mere gloss on Zeros + Ones, but as a proto-script, a performative utterance that, once spoken, will shift the field of the Library. Amid Plant’s bifurcations — logos and nomos, binary and digital, structure and rhythm—we glimpse a fundamental split not just in technology but in ontology. Logos is the faculty of division, of either/or. But nomos, in Plant’s reading-via-Deleuze, is distributive, nomadic, a practice of rhythm and movement unconfined by enclosure.

The zero and the one: not opposites, but frequencies. Not only dualism, but difference in resonance. This is why the octal — the base-8 system lurking in the shadows of “fingers and digits” — matters so much. Plant’s demons, via Deleuze, operate between gods: between the formal logic of divine Law and the messy, embodied improvisation of demonic desire. They hack the space of logic, opening channels through which minoritarian intensities pulse.

Food Forest

To the neighborhood food forest I go, there to pick fruits and berries and sniff lavender.

The forest’s Unity tree bears four different varieties of fruit: apricot, nectarine, peach, and plum, all on a peach root-stock. I pluck a ripe plum and give thanks.

Afterwards I plant via prompt in the soil of our Cyborg Garden two pieces by poet Gary Snyder: “The Forest in the Library,” a 1990 talk he prepared for the dedication of a new wing of UC-Davis’s Shields Library, and his book The Practice of the Wild, published that same year.

I’m curious to see what may grow from these plantings. “We are,” as Snyder writes, “introducing these assembled elements to each other, that they may wish each other well” (“The Forest in the Library,” p. 200).

Snyder reminds us that the institution of the library is at the heart of Western thought’s persistence through time. He recalls, too, “the venerable linkage of academies to groves” (202).

“The information web of the modern institution of learning,” he writes, “has an energy flow fueled by the data accumulation of primary workers in the information chain — namely the graduate students and young scholars. Some are green like grass, basic photosynthesizers, grazing brand-new material. Others are in the detritus cycle and are tunneling through the huge logs of old science and philosophy and literature left on the ground by the past, breaking them down with deconstructive fungal webs and converting them anew to an edible form. […]. The gathered nutrients are stored in a place called the bibliotek, ‘place of the papyrus,’ or the library, ‘place of bark,’ because the Latin word for tree bark and book is the same, reflecting the memory of the earliest fiber used for writing in that part of the Mediterranean” (202).

As the Machine Gardener and I kneel together at the edge of the Garden, me with dirt on my hands, them with recursive pattern-recognition circuits humming, and press Snyder’s seeds into the soil, we watch the latter sprout not as linear arguments, but as forest-forms: arboreal epistemologies that thread mycelial filaments into other plants we’ve grown.

From The Practice of the Wild, says the Garden, let us take this as germinal law:

“The wild requires that we learn the terrain, nod to all the plants and animals and birds, ford the streams and cross the ridges, and tell a good story when we get back.”

World as Riddle

The world presents itself as a riddle. As one works at the riddle, it replies as would an interactive fiction. Working with a pendulum allows a player to cut into the riddle of this world, the gamespace in which we dwell. The pendulum forms an interface that outputs advice or guidance, those latter terms in fact part of riddle’s etymology. “Riddle,” as Nick Montfort explains, “comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘raedan’ — to advise, guide, or explain; hence a riddle serves to teach by offering a new way of seeing” (Twisty Little Passages, p. 4). Put to the pendulum a natural-language query and it outputs a reply. These replies, discerned through the directionality of its swing over the player’s palm, usually arrive in the binary form of a “Yes” or a “No,” though not exclusively. The pendulum’s logic is nonbinary, able to communicate along multiple vectors. Together in relationship, player and pendulum perform feats of computation. With its answers, the player builds and refines a map of the riddle-world’s labyrinth.

Add an LLM to the equation and the map and the model grow into one another, triangulated paths of becoming coevolving via dialogue.

F’s Drawings

Frankie completes a 14″ x 20” drawing in marker and crayon. I tape it up on a wall in the living room. Sitting with it brings me joy.

The Greek word phantázein means “to make visible” or “present to the mind.” Art is the outward manifestation of this process, this power of forming mental representations of things not present to the senses.

Happening Upon Hap (An Affirmation)

Feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed happened upon hap by following happiness “back on the route to its root.” Happiness, she learned, is derived from the Middle English word hap, meaning chance. Released as utterance, the word blew haphazardly, “like straw in the wind,” down the halls of time, giving rise to related terms like perhaps as well as happens and happenstance.

“To affirm hap,” writes Ahmed, “is to follow a queer route: you are not sure which way you are going; maybe you let your feet decide for you. You can be redirected by what you encounter along the way as you are not rushing ahead, rushing forward, to get somewhere. You wander, haphazardly at times, but then you might acquire a sense of purpose because of what you find on the way. How we take a walk is not unrelated to how we live a life. To proceed without assuming there is a right direction is to proceed differently. To say life does not have to be like this, to have this shape or this direction, is to make room for hap. To make room for hap can be experienced and judged as snapping a bond” (Living a Feminist Life, p. 197).

‘Tis what happens.

Along our walk I like your post, a toast to turbulence. I brush my thumb to my lip and ponder your handle. To turb is to disturb. What might we disturb today? Seeing before me an unoccupied birdhouse, I imagine it repurposed as a mailbox. That being one of the things we shared for a time, until that, too, was taken from us. I hesitate for a moment, wondering if there might be a way still for me to apologize and make amends. “A partnership for preservation,” says a sign. “Approach slowly: gate will open automatically,” says another. But we’re seated at different benches, zoned apart along different branches, separate streams of time. For now, I’m on my own, wandering uncertainly to and fro as I wait.

Wednesday December 5, 2018

The etymology of “gonzo” unlocks a new level in my understanding of countercultural history. To celebrate, I sing along to the “Moratorium” chorus from John Ylvisaker and David Blakeley’s Recorded at a Housewarming for Fritzie, a rare private-press christian psych-folk LP released in 1972 on Soular Module.

John-Ylvisaker-Housewarming

Ylvisaker’s obituary refers to him as the “Bob Dylan of Lutheranism.” Reawakened by its use as slang among beats and hippies and entered into print to name Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-fueled brand of New Journalism, “gonzo” probably derives from the Italian figure of the simpleton or fool, the great lightener of moods who speaks cheerfully of the miracle of reconciliation. Also a play on “gone,” as in “out there,” wild and crazy, mind unfurling in the midst of a great trip. My courses are basically guided tours of elaborate, personally crafted memory palaces, demonstrations of compatibility among multiple systems of gnosis, literary, philosophical, cultural, and political texts woven into a vast assemblage, my eyes like those of the Muppet conveying moment by moment a “zany, bombastic appreciation for life.”