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Italo Calvino's 1985 book of five short essays, Six Memos for the Next
Millennium, which discusses the "hypernovel" as a network, was published
posthumously not as designed.
What was supposed to happen was for Calvino to travel from Italy to Harvard,
Massachusetts and deliver the Memos as a series of lectures: The Charles Eliot
Norton Poetry Lectures for 1985. Being deceased, such delivery could not and
did not occur. The sixth Memo, which was to have been written in Cambridge
while delivering ("reading") the first five was never written. All we know is
its title, "Consistency," and that one example from literature it was going to
discuss was Melville's 1853 short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of
Wall-Street" about copying texts: "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
What might have happened, and happened differently, if Italo had lived to
fulfill the design of these six memos? Who might have attended the lectures,
seen the person reading them, and heard their words spoken before ever reading
them written? Would that have had different results? Perhaps. Who was a
student at Harvard in 1985? Who were the faculty? Might their intellectual
futures have been different if they had heard these lectures that never
occurred? We don't know. It's possible that no experiences or events would
have been different, no conversations at coffeeshops after the lectures and no
alteration of any course syllabi, choices of major, or PhD theses. It's
possible too that some things might have been different. Might the lectures
not possibly have caused a minor sensation?
Some of what we do and can know is that "Consistency" is a topic which was
discussed by mathematician Kurt Gödel who said that if a system's axioms are
consistent then the system must be incomplete. Only if a system's axioms are
inconsistent can everything about the system be proven by them. This kind of
relates to Bartleby, if you think about it, and Calvino discussed Gödel in the
first five Memos (which do exist, and were written). Calvino also discussed,
in Six Memos, the then-six-year-old book about Gödel, consistency,
incompleteness, art, music, and computer intelligence titled Gödel, Escher,
Bach (or GEB) by Douglas Hofstadter. Thus these inter-references are plausibly
non-random.
Six Memos is kind of like a syllabus or list of works and authors Calvino was
recommending that his audience (which never existed) should read. This
syllabus was for a "course" if you will about the "next" millennium, the one
after 1985's millennium which was the second, i.e. the third or that to which
this year (2023) belongs. Six Memos proposed the idea that the second
millennium was the "millennium of the book": the years 1000 through 2000 being
the years in which the technology of book production and distribution reached
its full extent and fullest impact not least in facilitating the creation and
sustainment of many modern languages in their present forms, what we call
"English," "French," "German," "Hungarian," "Italian," as well as the laws,
borders, states, and histories we call "English," "French," "German,"
"Hungarian," "Italian," etc.
What is the third, next, and current millennium the millennium of? Perhaps the
computer. Books were the chiefest information-processing technology of
1000-2000, and computers are the chiefest of 2000-3000, is what Calvino may
have been trying to insinuate. When he talked about novels as networks, he was
talking about both book-networks and computer-networks, second millennium
literature (verbal and visual imagination intertwined) and third millennium
literature. Of course he also talked in several Memos quite a bit about first
millennium literature too and even mentioned literature from some earlier
millennia before the first.
In 1979, the same year GEB was published, Calvino published a novel about
computers that would "read" every novel published, apply certain algorithmic
processes, then "write" the new novels to be published, then repeat the cycle.
That 1979 novel was about today, in part, i.e. about non-human
information-processing machines that can read and write novels, as well as
about Hofstadter and Gödel.
If one takes the hint about Bartleby, trying perhaps to reconstruct some image
of what might have happened but didn't in 1985, one might be prompted to read
Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale. This novel was influenced by
Shakespeare as well as by Thomas Browne, a physician and alchemist who wrote
about decussation and experimental method in Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall in
the mid-1600's, and by Thomas Carlyle, who wrote Sartor Resartus (which means
"the tailor re-tailored") in 1833. Sartor Resartus outlines a
"Clothes-Philosophy" in which the production, weaving, changing, and wearing of
clothing is compared to intellectual, scientific, and technological history,
for example Goethe. Moby-Dick also talks about the world as being woven of
given conditions, choices, events, and chance.
An article appeared this week in Quanta magazine about how entanglement and
measurement combine to "weave" information more or less richly into quantum
systems, a phenomenon some scientists believe may have something to do with how
humans and human brains, and their activities, process information phenomena to
enact consciousness in the real flow of events through time. I.e. it's like
weaving.
To view garments as metaphors is a process which can occur both backward and
forward, or not occur in one or the other direction or both. One may look at
past garments such as the garment of the Mona Lisa as a metaphor or not as a
metaphor. As a node or knot in a web of information networks and systems the
Mona Lisa's garment may function as a metaphor of technology and art or not as
such a metaphor. The network of meaning in which this node exists functions
differently if the garment is a metaphor or not a metaphor.
The bridge in a painting of a garment which is a metaphor functions differently
than a bridge in a painting of a garment which does not function as a metaphor.
This might or might not change other functions of other elements in said
information-processing system of words and images and any other systems
(information-processing or otherwise, human or non-human, machine or
non-machine) with which those systems might interact.
You just can't say.
The amount of time required to decipher an encrypted piece of data in a system
can be predicted with accuracy to the extent that the method of decryption that
will be applied is understood. A structure's collapse or disappearance can be
timed to the extent that the rate of decay of any materials, such as bricks,
with which it is built is known. Therefore such phase transitions of any
related networks of quantum information, such as paintings or the courses of
rivers, can be predicted and therefore designed.
+++
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/norton-lectures
+++
https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2023/03/renaissance-30
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