Dear IFWP and all,
At long last, all is revealed.
kerry
==================
The 'argument' of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ opens in
angry clouds, the destructive wrath of revolution; for 'the just man'
(energy) has been compelled from his own dangerous and
flourishing pursuits into 'barren climes' by the hypocrite (reason)
who 'in mild humility' pretends to virtue in the power of moral law:
Once meek, and in a perilous path,
The just man kept his course along
The vale of death.
Roses are planted where thorns grow,
And on the barren heath
Sing the honey bees.
Then the perilous path was planted,
And a river and a spring
On every cliff and tomb,
And on the bleached bones
Red clay brought forth;
Till the villain left the paths of ease,
To walk in perilous paths, and drive
The just man into barren climes.
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.
Revolutionary wrath roars, 'shakes his fires in the burden'd air,' and
gathers forces in the hovering black clouds as the voice of Blake
speaks out to state the doctrine implicit in the scene.
Swedenborg was right. This is a millenial occasion, and at this
point the opposition of the just man and the hypocrite is
philosophically and politically correct. Blake enunciates the
revolutionary principle of thesis and antithesis toward which the
ideas no less than the arrangment of the lyrics had pointed -- the
conflict of contrary interests and the tension between them that is
the condition of their development. He does this in such terms as
were available to him, a mixture of theological and metaphysical
abstractions:
'Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion;
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence. From these contraries springs what the religions call
Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the
active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.' ... And
it is 'the Voice of the Devil' -- that is, of the just man, of Blake, the
tiger -- which continues: 'Man has no Body distinct from his Soul;
for that call'd Body is a portion of the Soul discern'd by the five
Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age. Energy is the only life,
and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward
circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.'
Blake, with his ill training, is striving to say something that men of
the 19th century, like Emerson, or of our own, like Yeats -- men
educated after a formal subjective philosophy had been propounded
-- found simple enough. There is no difference between Blake's
angular and energetic statement and Yeats' easy
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul....
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Yeats resorts to metaphor by the poet's preference. Blake was
forced from an angular prose into an even more angular
metaphorical statement of his theme. In _The Marriage_ he
continues to strive with his prose: 'Those who restrain desire do so
because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer
or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.' Reason and
energy, body and soul, matter and spirit -- these are the familiar
duos. Blake is struggling towards a higher conception of reason
(toward _Vernunft_ from _Verstand_) that will transcend the
antithesis.
-- Mark Schorer, William Blake: The Politics of Reason. (NY:
Vintage 1959) pp 216-7.
==========
Particularly speaking, in Blakean metaphor
There was a time when we had only human language, which served
our communications between man and man, even man and beast.
Then came computers, and something new was needed with which
to communicate between man and machine. Although it was called
'machine language' from its beginnings, it was only with the advent
of networks that machines addressed machines using it.
But man found this language awkward, built a translator so that
machine language could be interpreted in man-language, and was
thus able to maintain the appearance of men speaking with men
_by means of_ machines.
At about the same time, other historical forces led to a commercial
language, with which business spoke to business. Again, there
were those who felt it important to continue to translate, so that
man was reassured that man was still dealing with man through
this language of 'currency.'
Finally, the interconnecting communities of business and
machines have met in the Internet, and the pretense that man is in
any way involved has been dropped, leaving him confused. On one
hand, he related to the machine world as an enlightened guide and
educator; on the other, he had been accepted as an obedient and
tractable minion. Now both roles were removed from him --
business was to be master to the even more obedient machine --
and the world of man was shattered.
Of the fragments, we can readily distinguish the 'hacker,' who lives
intimately with his favorite machine, tapping out machine language
and vowing that business shall never prevail; and the 'politico,' who
offers to business the one service that remains cost-effective:
keeping the (other) minions in order and protecting business from
the hacker. But between these extremes of isolated superiority
and subservient promiscuity there remains a segment which has
as yet not been well recognized, which I propose to identify as the
*translator.
For in their haste to merge, the global meshes of business and
machine have overlooked the matter of language. Machines care
nothing for currency (a.k.a. time: "Supporting the notion of
temporality is among the most important -- and difficult --
challenges in database application development" --Rick
Snodgrass), while business has little interest in the Internet's
'operation' (to use a word which itself may need to be re-translated
into man-language: from the same root come opera and peroration,
both intrinsically linguistic.) That is, business focusses always on
the object and the objective ('e.g. the bottom line), while the
machine world consists entirely of process. Someone -- not some
corporate or electromechanical thing -- needs to act as the
Generalized Usage Interpreter.
We have the experience, from our teething on 'high level' or 'natural'
languages on one hand, and our efforts to conceive an 'artificially'
intelligent machine. (One wonders, at the prospect of these two
threads converging, if the synthesis will be called a Borges-Borg,
neither language/ process or creature/ object. But such
wonderment is only the obverse of the translational blind-spot; of
mans failure to see that these are Blake's contraries: "Man has no
Object distinct from his Process... Process is the only life, and
[flows] from the Object; [Objective] Reason is the bound[ary] of
Process. Energy [or 'emergy'] is Eternal Delight.")
We have the vision to comprehend that while these age-old polarities have now both
been *displaced -- as business is McLuhan's extension of the Body, so the Internet is
the extension of man's mind or Energetic Soul -- nev
ertheless the tension remains and must remain. (Displacement is of course not
replacement; individually we will continue to wrestle with energy and hypocrisy, goods
and evils, regardless.) To accept an 'end of history' (o
r 'final solution') on one level is to accept it on all levels, as a majoritarian
ethos on one level will drive consensus on any other level to extinction.
And we have the language, for language is our game; its the primordial lever by which
we bootstrapped ourselves down from the trees. To distinguish between the thing and
the name of the thing -- no other entitted entity c
an do this! To keep in mind rather than in the hand, to relate and correlate, count
and recount, collect and recollect -- what else so characterises man as this knack,
this talent, this aptitude for and habit of (re)arran
ging ideas instead of things? To (t)romp the mother of all
inventions by referencing things which do not exist in themselves;
that is, *names?
Yet here we are, between the stool and the school -- the robber-
guard and the garderobe, if you life -- looking down a perilous path.
Perilous, because our language has been transgressed by both
camps. No, I shouldnt say that: when we were hacking, we gave
pet names to our machines and their operations, for we *knew they
would not 'really' use them. When we were politicking and
bootlicking for business, we traded names for recognition, but
continued to act as if we would never be called to account. What it
is is, in short, we oversold our stock, and now by all accounts, the
tilly-tally is due. The deal is down, and the Fan Dolls have the
handles because we gave them to them. Bummer. Why didnt
somebody *tell us?
=========
Enteromission (0xEF min)
Tarnal Delight, eh? What sort of game is that? Is it a ploy, or just
another employ? Can we occupy the middle ground, or are we to
be occupied as professional concupiscenting adjolts?
Here the play's within: Too old to hack the long knights, two too-
young Freibergers pool their emergency rations, and cook up a
Gnu-lang hootch! With a craptrapdoor, no less, into which three
witches moil and mubble their tried ice of Knute and ornery Told!
Yah, mere flitch it looks (and smalls) like, but donut juice
chirInslawte F-ree free KingTing Ingsite! Then Il Kannig, Ear of Dis,
and 'Emporior of 'Emporium, spake unto them: Gimme Gimme! (for
that is the parlour-view of Ibis Island). Verily, schmerrily, they say,
and pour it un, dieu, trout -- dunder drain, and sashay away.
Whoo! Istar Consternation or Wot?
And meanwhile, the play without: The Failure of Libertarianism. As
the scene folds, and the lamp dimples, we see the audience in
distress. All the while they thought they were defending the Right
Hon Toby Contraire, when they were given their, I mean his, head
on a plate: Go for it, they heard: Take Power. Its Yours. But so
used to being Hout with pizzazz, they knew not how to bee Finn or
Gin or even Kin amongst themselves. So they frittered their Fortune
and with it their Opportunity to reach the Kitty of Sod.
The hairy-dairy moral? Ubetchum.dat = Show bits.
===========
Part the second of the Ways
What if, all things considered, it was found expedient to *patent the
Internet? Certainly its 'emeregent properties' were not obvious to
one conversant in the field at any given time over the past forty
years since Vannevar Bush. It is a novel application, lets stipulate,
and proceed to the Description:
A means -- no, a technique of communication, by means of
electronic switching of information-quanta.
Is Communication covered by any antecedent patent? No, we'd
better define that too:
The transmission (conveyance? establishment? acceptance?) of
an idea between two others, which had been accepted earlier. (If
the PO doesnt accept acceptance, we're SOL.) An idea consists
of one (or more) info-quantum(-a) beyond (or between) which
nothing more need be accepted, I mean said.
Okay, on with the Disclosure:
The state of the art accepts that a continuous flow must be
maintained (transmitted?) for information to be 'contained in' or to
'travel on' it; for instance, sound 'waves' or 'facsimile' pages. That is,
the 'context' -- the conditions suitable for sustaining the continuity --
conditions the 'sense' of an idea; e.g. the proximity and ambient
environment required for a 'speaker' to communicate an idea to a
'listener' themselves determine in large part the 'content' of the
'message.' Similarly, the format and timing of a fax establish a
context in which the speckles on the page become
'understandable.' (Redundancy of content is something else we
may have to go into.)
The novelty of the Internet consists in removing every vestige of
such contextual flow. A single quantum of information will very
likely be entirely meaningless, as neither proximity, nor timing, nor
any other environmental factor is pre-established. One does not
know until the quanta reassemble themselves in human-readable
(whazzat?) form either *who is 'speaking' or *why, or even if one is
the 'intended recipient.' That is, there is only content -- and yet it
suffices for communication (or so we aver) by virue of its
_becoming its own context_. On this ground and sundry others to
be appended (in regard to the protocols, etc), we petition for a right
of patent. Signed, etc.
Well fine says the investigating patent officer, but how *do you
know who is speaking? We look at the earliest quanta, which form
the header, we say, where we may recognize the address.
What is an 'address'? she says. Its a character string one chooses
when one 'gets on' the Internet. Some of it is idiosyncratic; other
parts are established by ones ISP, etc., but the entirety is unique,
er, um.
Uh-huh, she says, why is this 'establishment' not a 'context' in the
manner you have stipulated? Arent you contradicting your own
claim to be 'conveying' information if your technique relies on there
being antecedent knowledge?
Ah, we say, we're glad you asked! The form of your first question
suggests that you took 'the message' to be what we described as
the 'idea'; but as you correctly perceived, this idea can in fact be
split in two, between the 'address' and the 'text.' Now, in speaking
of the address as the idea, that too can be disassembled: there is
an 'expectation' that it really attaches to the person we suppose is
its owner, but at the same time, there is a 'scepticism' that it may
be spoofed, or misappropriated, or otherwise misleading. That is to
say, for each level at which a 'whole idea' is identified, there is a
'fragmented' level where there are two different ideas. The essence
of our claim is that there is no absolute, irreducibly bottom level
which is necessary for communication. It is the sole responsibility
of the recipient of information-quanta to decide where to locate the
line between context and content, or, bluntly, between meaning
and junk. She, out of interest (or gullibility as may be), translates
that line *for herself alone, in that place at that time*.
To put it another way, nothing need be, and indeed nothing can be
said to be, 'given' in advance, and anything that 'determines' the
line of meaning is ipso facto junk because it *undermines the
ineffably human skill or facility or competence of 'calling' or 'naming'
or 'identifying; what is an idea and what is not. Neither Business
nor Machine can supererogate this craft; on the contrary, since
without it they will never be able to collaborate, it is in their own
inter-essence that they quit feeding Man junk, and sustain his (or
her) holding the line as their dedicated go-between; that is,
translator.
I see, says the investigator. In that case, I accept that my
technique of persistent disassembly, which assumes that a
'bottom line' of information that 'everybody knows,' and which
admittedly has proved adequate in all other applications, is not
relevant to this case. Further, I accept that as one skilled in the
art, this was not an obvious outcome. Therefore your claim has
merit, and your patent will be duly issued.
(Hope this helps, she says, throwing in a foo/T-note!)
===========
Epilogue
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a
prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty
to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is
at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his
guilt." --- John Philpot Curran
