At 15/11/02 13:46 -0800, Ian Murray wrote:
For the sake of possibly providing an example of some concreteness, the link is to an essay which conjoins Sartre's and LeFebvre's notions of counterfinality [law of unintended consequences meets the fallacy of composition] with computational complexity theory and fractal geometry to redescribe Bologna, Italy. I think in an indirect way it represents the kind of localized intellectual environment that Negri is working in. That is to say, the vocabularies and idioms of some Italian intellectuals are influencing *him* to a greater or lesser extent than one can get simply from reading his latest work; while Negri may be writing for a [virtually] global audience, his writing participates in a specific environment of ideas communicated with his [possible] colleagues.http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Mandelbrot.html Ian
The URL appears to be a useful biographical summary of Mandelbrot in an academic archive by a department of mathermatics.
Could you provide a URL that explains your perception of a link in Negri's thinking with Mandelbrot's ideas? Google provides some interesting references if you put both names in the search field, but what is the link you saw?
(I agree that Negri was powerfully influenced by local Italian conditions which may be creatively different from those in the USA or UK, but may also be a cause of confusion. The leap to global relevance may be at a high level of abstraction, and may depend on a debatable reading of Spinoza.)
To be specific, therefore could you explain what link you see between Mandelbrot and Negri?
Chris Burford
