January 19, 2007

• The Painted Word, continued:

  Semantic Transparency
  
  "... semantic transparency ... would allow disparate systems to share some understanding of the actual concepts that are represented..."

  -- IBM Developer Works on October 7, 2003

  From Wikipedia's
  "Upper Ontology"
  and
  Epiphany 2007:
  

  "There is no neutral ground
  that can serve as
  a means of translating between
  specialized (lower) ontologies."

   There is, however,
  "the field of reason"--
  the 3x3 grid:
  

  

  Click on grid
  for details.

  From a Log24 entry of January 7, 2007:

  
  "One of the primary critiques of modernism that Learning from Las Vegas
  was engaged in, as Frederic [sic] Jameson clearly noted, was the dialectic
  between inside and outside and the assumption that the outside
  expressed the interior. Let's call this the modernist drive for
  'expressive transparency.'"

  -- Aron Vinegar of Ohio State U., "Skepticism and the Ordinary: From Burnt Norton to Las Vegas"

  From this week's New Yorker (issue dated Jan. 22, 2007)--

  "A Life," by Zbigniew Herbert
  (translated from the Polish by Alissa Vales):

  I was a quiet boy a little sleepy and--amazingly--
  unlike my peers--who were fond of adventures--
  I didn't expect much--didn't look out the window
  At school more diligent than able--docile stable

  For the rest of the poem, click here.

  From the Wikipedia article on Zbigniew Herbert:

  "In modern poetry, Herbert advocated semantic transparence. In a talk given at a conference organized by the journal Odra
  he said: 'So not having pretensions to infallibility, but stating only
  my predilections, I would like to say that in contemporary poetry the
  poems that appeal to me the most are those in which I discern something
  I would call a quality of semantic transparency (a term borrowed from
  Husserl's logic). This semantic transparency is the characteristic of a
  sign consisting in this: that during the time when the sign is used,
  attention is directed towards the object denoted, and the sign itself
  does not hold the attention. The word is a window onto reality.'"

  (Wikipedia cites as the source--
  Herbert's talk at the meeting "Poet in face of the present day,"
  organized by the "Odra" journal. Print version: Preface to: Zbigniew
  Herbert "Poezje," Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1998, ISBN 83-06-02667-5.)

  Fom Nabokov's Transparent Things (pdf):

  "Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow.  This is, I believe, it:
  not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of
  the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being
  to another.  Easy, you know, does it, son."

  Related material:
  

  Confession

  

  • 7:00 pm
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