August 11, 2005

• Kaleidoscope, continued

  From Clifford Geertz, The Cerebral Savage:

  “Savage
  logic works like a kaleidoscope whose chips can fall into a variety of
  patterns while remaining unchanged in quantity, form, or color. The
  number of patterns producible in this way may be large if the chips are
  numerous and varied enough, but it is not infinite. The patterns
  consist in the disposition of the chips vis-a-vis one another (that is,
  they are a function of the relationships among the chips rather than
  their individual properties considered separately).  And their
  range of possible transformations is strictly determined by the
  construction of the kaleidoscope, the inner law which governs its
  operation. And so it is too with savage thought.  Both anecdotal
  and geometric, it builds coherent structures out of ‘the odds and ends
  left over from psychological or historical process.’

  These
  odds and ends, the chips of the kaleidoscope, are images drawn from
  myth, ritual, magic, and empirical lore….  as in a kaleidoscope,
  one always sees the chips distributed in some pattern, however
  ill-formed or irregular.   But, as in a kaleidoscope, they are
  detachable from these structures and arrangeable into different ones of
  a similar sort….  Levi-Strauss generalizes this permutational
  view of thinking to savage thought in general.  It is all a matter
  of shuffling discrete (and concrete) images–totem animals, sacred
  colors, wind directions, sun deities, or whatever–so as to produce
  symbolic structures capable of formulating and communicating objective
  (which is not to say accurate) analyses of the social and physical
  worlds.

  …. And the point is general.  The relationship between a symbolic structure and its referent, the basis of its meaning, 
  is fundamentally ‘logical,’ a coincidence of form– not affective, not
  historical, not functional.  Savage thought is frozen reason and
  anthropology is, like music and mathematics, ‘one of the few true
  vocations.’

  Or like linguistics.”
  

  Edward Sapir on Linguistics, Mathematics, and Music:

  “…
  linguistics has also that profoundly serene and satisfying quality
  which inheres in mathematics and in music and which may be described as
  the creation out of simple elements of a self-contained universe of
  forms.  Linguistics has neither the sweep nor the instrumental
  power of mathematics, nor has it the universal aesthetic appeal of
  music.  But under its crabbed, technical, appearance there lies
  hidden the same classical spirit, the same freedom in restraint, which
  animates mathematics and music at their purest.”
  

  -Edward Sapir, “The Grammarian and his Language,”
    American Mercury 1:149-155,1924

  From Robert de Marrais, Canonical Collage-oscopes:

  “…underwriting
  the form languages of ever more domains of mathematics is a set of deep
  patterns which not only offer access to a kind of ideality that Plato
  claimed to see the universe as created with in the Timaeus;
  more than this, the realm of Platonic forms is itself subsumed in this
  new set of design elements– and their most general instances are not
  the regular solids, but crystallographic reflection groups.  You
  know, those things the non-professionals call . . . kaleidoscopes! *  (In the next exciting episode, we’ll see how Derrida claims mathematics is the key to freeing us from ‘logocentrism’ **– then ask him why, then, he jettisoned the deepest structures of mathematical patterning just to make his name…)

  * H. S. M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes (New York: Dover, 1973) is the great classic text by a great creative force in this beautiful area of geometry  (A polytope is an n-dimensional analog of a polygon or polyhedron.  Chapter V of this book is entitled ‘The Kaleidoscope’….)

  **
  … contemporary with the Johns Hopkins hatchet job that won him
  American marketshare, Derrida was also being subjected to a series of
  probing interviews in Paris by the hometown crowd.  He first
  gained academic notoriety in France for his book-length reading of
  Husserl’s two-dozen-page essay on ‘The Origin of Geometry.’  The
  interviews were collected under the rubric of Positions
  (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981…).  On pp.
  34-5 he says the following: ‘the resistance to logico-mathematical
  notation has always been the signature of logocentrism and phonologism
  in the event to which they have dominated metaphysics and the classical
  semiological and linguistic projects…. A grammatology that would
  break with this system of presuppositions, then, must in effect
  liberate the mathematization of language…. The effective progress of
  mathematical notation thus goes along with the deconstruction of
  metaphysics, with the profound renewal of mathematics itself, and the
  concept of science for which mathematics has always been the
  model.’  Nice campaign speech, Jacques; but as we’ll see, you
  reneged on your promise not just with the kaleidoscope (and we’ll investigate, in
  depth, the many layers of contradiction and cluelessness you put on
  display in that disingenuous ‘playing to the house’); no, we’ll see
  how, at numerous other critical junctures, you instinctively took the
  wrong fork in the road whenever mathematical issues arose…
  henceforth, monsieur, as Joe Louis once said, ‘You can run, but you
  just can’t hide.’….”

  • 8:16 am
  • Leave a comment