FAT WORM OF ERROR

Whenever I’m feeling sad or frustrated, I look at this photo of Gilles Deleuze and imagine he’s making a prank call.

I found a copy of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird with a detail from the Last Judgment by Hieronymous Bosch on the cover.

I’m obsessed with note taking systems and Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten is the most fascinating note taking system I’ve come across.

Luhmann stored all of his notes on index cards. But what made his note-taking system unique is that he created conventions for generating unique citation IDs for each card.

The citation IDs meant that he could cross-reference index cards and create a proto-hyperlinked network of ideas. His Zettelkasten eventually grew so complex that he was convinced his engagement with it counted as genuine communication.

Here is Luhmann:

As a result of extensive work with this technique a kind of secondary memory will arise, an alter ego with who we can constantly communicate. It proves to be similar to our own memory in that it does not have a thoroughly constructed order of its entirety, not hierarchy, and most certainly no linear structure like a book. Just because of this, it gets its own life, independent of its author. The entirety of these notes can only be described as a disorder, but at the very least it is a disorder with non-arbitrary internal structure. Some things will get lost (versickern), some notes we will never see again. On the other hand, there will be preferred centers, formation of lumps and regions with which we will work more often than with others. There will be complexes of ideas that are conceived at large, but which will never be completed; there will be incidental ideas which started as links from secondary passages and which are continuously enriched and expand so that they will tend increasingly to dominate system. To sum up: this technique guarantees that its order which is merely formal does not become a hindrance but adapts to the conceptual development (Communicating with Slip Boxes).

While browsing through old Public Domain Review articles I came across this one on Gottfried Leibniz, Ramon Llull and early computation “machines.”

Here is Jonathan Gray:

Ultimately he [Leibniz] hoped that a perspicuous thought language of “pure” concepts, combined with formalised processes and methods akin to those used in mathematics, would lead to the mechanisation and automation of reason itself. By means of new artificial languages and methods, our ordinary and imperfect ways of reasoning with words and ideas would give way to a formal, symbolic, rule-governed science — conceived of as a computational process. Disputes, conflict, and grievances arising from ill-formed opinions, emotional hunches, biases, prejudices, and misunderstandings would give way to consensus, peace, and progress.

Leibniz’s ambition points to a paradoxical status of reason in the history of philosophy. On the one hand, ever since Aristotle’s definition of human as “rational animal,” philosophers have viewed reason as essentially human and essential to being a human. On the other hand, reason’s formalism and universality leads philosophers to conceive of it as transcending the individual and thus its operation capable of being “automated” or “mechanized” in a non-human medium.

I came across a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project in a used bookstore the other day (strangely filed under “general history”) and couldn’t resist buying it. Even though I can’t foresee a time when I’ll have a chance to read it.

Posters designed Buckminster Fuller and Carl Solway.

The posters overlay diagrams from Fuller’s patents on photographs of his inventions. Interesting display of the relation between concept and actuality.

While doing research for a paper on Aristotle’s conception of homonymy, I found this charming passage in his Generation of Animals:

It seems Aristotle thought that if you fuck too much you’ll cum blood.

I finished Charles Dickens’s Hard Times today. Victorian literature doesn’t do much for me, but Dickens’s description of how bourgeoise economic thinking perceives the working class was striking.

Here’s Dickens, describing Louisa’s thoughts as she enters the apartment of a factory worker:

For the first time in her life Louisa had come into one of the dwellings of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to face with anything like individuality in connection with them. She knew of their existence by hundreds and by thousands. She knew what results in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time. She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or beetles. But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of toiling insects than those of these toiling men and women.

Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended; something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand; something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew the Coketown Hands to be. But, she had scarcely thought more of separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into its component drops. (Hard Times, 124)

I think a lot about Diogenes Laertius’s description of Aristotle in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.

For a few years now I've had an unfortunate interest in the intellectual and literary history of bodily fluid, particularly semen. Even the most level-headed philosophers and writers can’t contain themselves when their attention turns to cum.

The writing on semen I've found so far is strangely similar the folk-biology of, uh, certain male-dominated subreddits.

It seems that Honoré de Balzac is among those who bought into this seminal vitalism. Here is Simon Leys: