Re: <nettime> Re: your mail

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Language is a residue; thought is by and large unthought through and in
language. I think this goes back all the way to J. Hadamard, Psychology of
Invention in the Mathematical Field; the symbolic or program/matic is what
happens after the "grey blurs" are moved about. When I do mathematics, I
notice the same thing; I'm not thinking _in_ symbols, but only _through_
mathesis, which might as well be Tao; when it's written I can look through
cursor or cursorily for the appearance of error. Look for that matter at
Duhem versus the British - abstraction vs. modeling, to be crude about it
- but both were considered languaging. It's the substrates that fascinate
me - not the gaps between word and word or language and world or world and
world, but the very gaps that only later are manifested as inguistic emer-
gence. This some like the Kristevan chora; one doesn't need to go to the
irrational when the thetic will do. Levinas' _there is_ or the thetic
reach of Tran Duc Thao's gestural origins of language (sweeping the arm -
the bison's beyond the hill - mix of indexical/ikonic) are always already
there as a mass/mess (which is why Parmenides' wondering about the mud as
a Platonic ideal form was so disturbing at the time). 

- Alan, gesturing & wilding all the way back in Courier 10-point

Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt 
Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html
Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm





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