Phatic Workshop

A "Top highlight" from an arbitrarily selected post on Medium. These top highlights can function as a crowdsourced "tl;dr" -- although not every post enables them. Highlights can also be discussed in comments following the post. Incidentally, here maybe the medium is the message -- one person's highlight becomes a possible occasion for further discussion.   And yet, the way comments work on Medium, there is no such thing as a discussion thread!  So there is only a collection of perspectives on the piece -- a sort of "functorial" utopia. (There are discussions on Medium, but they're just not very typical or obvious.)

[p. 7] Thus Individuation starts with a double critique: on the one hand of the Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism of matter and form, on the other of the monistic reduction of nature to a fundamental substance. The critique of hylomophism is reviewed by Tim Ingold in Making, following Deleuze and Guattari, who were probably following Simondon, who I'm thinking was probably following Bergson.  The basic critique is that 'form' is not, in general, imprinted on matter in the way that a brick is shaped in a mold. For the record, Aristotlelian forms and Platonic forms are a bit different, but even so the co-emergence of form and matter is "modern" (say, Bergsonian) idea.  I'm less clear on the difference between Simondon and Bergson here. But interesting to note that Simondon is firmly not a monist.  Given that some of our earliest posts here were written with The Monist in mind -- and that we continue to write with Pierce in mind -- it's worth rooting out ...

See Storify https://storify.com/DemFromCT/jason-p-steed-on-humor-and-humor Here's the info about the PhD thesis he was referring to. Title: Joke-making Jews/jokes making Jews: Essays on humor and identity in American Jewish fiction. Creator: Jason Paul. Steed Contributor: Joseph McCullough; University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Subjects: American literature -- 20th century; Anecdotes; Comedy; Comedians -- United States; Sociology; United States -- Study and teaching; Thesis (PhD) Is Part Of: 65-08A. Description: Beginning from the premise that humor plays a prominent role in the construction of group and individual identities, as a social phenomenon and a simultaneously alienating and assimilating force, these essays explore and examine humor and its construction of American Jewish identity within the context of various works of American Jewish fiction. Though organized as "chapters," the essays do not build upon one another progressively, nor do they center on...

It strikes me that this is related to our cause: It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, ...

Here are a couple images from Modeling Narrative Discourse , a PhD thesis by David K. Elson.  I was looking at this because I thought it might have some clues about how to represent narratives, which is something I'm interested in vis à vis my computer programming work.  And it does seem to have some nice clues about that!  It also has some interesting results that I've skimmed about representing literary social networks, which seem at least a bit related to what we were talking about vis à vis scholarly social networks.  A few pictures and a short quote are probably worth just over 2000 words. The notion of extracting social networks from literary texts offers a wealth of possible collaborations between computer scientists and literary experts. Studies about the nineteenth-century British novel, for instance, are often concerned with the nature of the community that surrounds the protagonist. Some theorists have suggested a relationship between the si...