This document discusses the concepts of transculturation, transliteracy, and generative poetics in the context of global communications and its effects on language, identity, and creative practices. It analyzes John Cayley's digital work "Translation" which uses machine algorithms to transform text in a way that abstracts it to its underlying structural patterns while removing recognizable semantics. The document argues that meaning depends on context, and that language, culture, identity, and technology should be seen not as isolated concepts but as constantly regenerating networks of relations that inform each other.
Originally run at University of Tartu for Undergraduates and up.
Audience: anyone with an interest in the meaning and philosophy behind our interaction with the technological world around us.
Cultural Competence and Intercultural Communication on the Ground of Contempo...inventionjournals
This paper’s subject is the reflection on the cultural problems on the grounds of the modern glottodidactics, including the current issues of the intercultural approach to the teaching of foreign languages with putting the emphasis on the important place and significant role of the intercultural competence among the objectives of the language teaching, as well as emphasizing the mutual relationship between the communication competence and intercultural competence. The authors aimed at presenting the theoretical conditions and characterising the concepts forming the basis for the practical solutions of the intercultural education and accentuating the function of glottodidactics consisting in familiarization of the culture of the target language and making the students aware of the cultural differences to shape the cultural competence and develop the intercultural communication.
Class 1 - Introduction to the Semiotics of Digital Interactions.
Originally run at University of Tartu for Undergraduates and up.
Audience: anyone with an interest in the meaning and philosophy behind our interaction with the technological world around us.
Originally run at University of Tartu for Undergraduates and up.
Audience: anyone with an interest in the meaning and philosophy behind our interaction with the technological world around us.
Cultural Competence and Intercultural Communication on the Ground of Contempo...inventionjournals
This paper’s subject is the reflection on the cultural problems on the grounds of the modern glottodidactics, including the current issues of the intercultural approach to the teaching of foreign languages with putting the emphasis on the important place and significant role of the intercultural competence among the objectives of the language teaching, as well as emphasizing the mutual relationship between the communication competence and intercultural competence. The authors aimed at presenting the theoretical conditions and characterising the concepts forming the basis for the practical solutions of the intercultural education and accentuating the function of glottodidactics consisting in familiarization of the culture of the target language and making the students aware of the cultural differences to shape the cultural competence and develop the intercultural communication.
Class 1 - Introduction to the Semiotics of Digital Interactions.
Originally run at University of Tartu for Undergraduates and up.
Audience: anyone with an interest in the meaning and philosophy behind our interaction with the technological world around us.
Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Po...Asari Bhavyang
Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207
How Does This Work? An Affective, Diffractive Storytelling AnalysisJakob Pedersen
All credits to Daniela Gachago and Siddique Motala, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. This presentation was given by Daniela Gachago and Siddique Motala on 18 June 2015 as a seminar for the NRF Posthumanism Research Project
Part of a duo presented at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, UK to the Production and Research into Transliteracy (PaRT) group.
No one is ever more than six feet from an act of translation. While the original caution from which these words are adapted is—hopefully—an urban myth, our lives are undeniably surrounded by acts of translation: in the mediation between self and other, the negotiations of our journey through time and across space, the processes of cognition through which we make sense of the world. Translation has, in that regard, more than an exchange value. What we might think of as a translational awareness has a crucial ethical dimension: it destabilises correctness of interpretation, rightness of assumption, self-containment of being. It urges—or should urge—its users to look at things differently. In this regard translation, as a cultural practice, inserts itself into one of the most powerful and potentially fruitful tendencies of modern thought and art: the questioning of representation—how we represent cultural difference, how we imagine time and space, how we understand our relatedness to the world. Acts of translation are, in that sense, everywhere. And yet in the modern foreign-language classroom, translation is all too readily traduced as little more than an exercise in comprehension, and the translational awareness that informs it frequently subsumed into learner error terror. This talk is concerned with the implications of this particular translation of translation.
Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Po...Asari Bhavyang
Todd Presner, ‘Comparative Literature in the Age of Digital Humanities: On Possible Futures for a Discipline’ in Ali Behdad and Thomas eds. A Companion to Comparative Literature’ 2011, 193- 207
How Does This Work? An Affective, Diffractive Storytelling AnalysisJakob Pedersen
All credits to Daniela Gachago and Siddique Motala, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa. This presentation was given by Daniela Gachago and Siddique Motala on 18 June 2015 as a seminar for the NRF Posthumanism Research Project
Part of a duo presented at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, UK to the Production and Research into Transliteracy (PaRT) group.
No one is ever more than six feet from an act of translation. While the original caution from which these words are adapted is—hopefully—an urban myth, our lives are undeniably surrounded by acts of translation: in the mediation between self and other, the negotiations of our journey through time and across space, the processes of cognition through which we make sense of the world. Translation has, in that regard, more than an exchange value. What we might think of as a translational awareness has a crucial ethical dimension: it destabilises correctness of interpretation, rightness of assumption, self-containment of being. It urges—or should urge—its users to look at things differently. In this regard translation, as a cultural practice, inserts itself into one of the most powerful and potentially fruitful tendencies of modern thought and art: the questioning of representation—how we represent cultural difference, how we imagine time and space, how we understand our relatedness to the world. Acts of translation are, in that sense, everywhere. And yet in the modern foreign-language classroom, translation is all too readily traduced as little more than an exercise in comprehension, and the translational awareness that informs it frequently subsumed into learner error terror. This talk is concerned with the implications of this particular translation of translation.
Language Illuminated: Navigating the Profound Importance and Dynamic Evolutio...abdulshaikh5253
Embarking on an illuminating journey into the depths of human communication, this comprehensive article explores the profound importance and dynamic evolution of language.
Unlocking the Power of Language: Navigating the Nuances, Impact, and Evolutio...abdulshaikh5253
Embarking on a captivating exploration of language, this comprehensive article delves into the intricate tapestry of human communication. As we navigate the nuances, impact, and evolution of language, the narrative unfolds to reveal the profound influence language wields on our understanding of the world.
The Paper tries to unveil the vital actions and counteractions of language and culture upon each other. A language neither can originate nor live without the culture. Language and culture, thus, are inseparable. Language rolls on the concrete passage of time encountering many alike and opposite processes like a culture, de cultures and re culture and gathers moss. Particularly, in post colonial context Odia language encounters some radical changes and reaps new products with respect to words, morphology, prefixes, suffixes and many more things. In post colonial context, we encounter a special kind of language called ‘hybrid language or ‘glocal language. The paper emphasizes the dimensions of language change with a global perspective as well as with local perspectives. Dr. Santosh Kumar Nayak ""Language in Glocal Cultural Context"" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-3 | Issue-3 , April 2019, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd23304.pdf
Paper URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/odia/23304/language-in-glocal-cultural-context/dr-santosh-kumar-nayak
Translation, a Bridge for Cultural Hybridity in a Globalized Literary Worldinventionjournals
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention (IJHSSI) is an international journal intended for professionals and researchers in all fields of Humanities and Social Science. IJHSSI publishes research articles and reviews within the whole field Humanities and Social Science, new teaching methods, assessment, validation and the impact of new technologies and it will continue to provide information on the latest trends and developments in this ever-expanding subject. The publications of papers are selected through double peer reviewed to ensure originality, relevance, and readability. The articles published in our journal can be accessed online.
Teaser Preview: 'Twelve Gemstones of the Bible, Decoded,' and 'Developing Med...GemsOfGod.com
The history of humanity has been defined by significant gaps that have influenced the worldviews of billions. Today's scientific evolution involves rediscovering forgotten paths, bringing us back to a more human-scale and nature-aligned perspective. This journey transcends boundaries, uniting physics and metaphysics in the virtual realm, paving the way for a grand restructuring of science and a rapid understanding of our place in the universe.
RESEARCH ARTICLEA Theory of Vernacular Rhetoric The Case.docxronak56
RESEARCH ARTICLE
A Theory of Vernacular Rhetoric: The Case
of the “Sinner’s Prayer” Online
Robert Glenn Howard
Abstract
This paper seeks to rigorously define and illustrate the analytic category of
“vernacular rhetoric” through an examination of the “Sinner’s Prayer” as it
appears on an amateur web page. In the online environment, this invitation to a
traditional prayer performance seems to be a strategy for converting non-
Christians. Through the application of the concept of vernacular rhetoric,
however, it becomes clear that the deployment of the prayer can also function as
an invitation for the already-converted to “testify” to their faith. In this way, the
apparently evangelic prayer form also functions as an invitation for the already-
converted to perform previously held values. By applying the concept of
vernacular rhetoric to this example of online discourse, its value as an analytic
category becomes clear because it can address the performative nature of World
Wide Web-based documents.
Introduction
This paper seeks to more rigorously define and illustrate the analytic category of
“vernacular rhetoric” through an example of the “Sinner’s Prayer” as it appears
on an amateur web page. The invitation to this traditional prayer performance
seems be a strategy for converting non-Christians. Through the application of the
concept of “vernacular rhetoric,” however, it becomes clear that the deployment of
the prayer is also an invitation for the already-converted to “give testimony” to
their faith. In this way, the perspective of vernacular rhetoric reveals that the
explicitly evangelic prayer form also functions as an invitation for group insiders
to perform previously shared values. Where this is the case, both the performance
of the prayer and the invitation to its performance are examples of epideictic
rhetoric. Persuasive language can be termed “epideictic” when a speaker
articulates values already accepted by his/her audience in order to indicate group
identity. The existence of epideictic discourse on the World Wide Web points to the
performative nature of some online documents.
In research into network communication over the past few years, it has become
popular to cite the remark of the symbolic anthropologist Clifford Geertz that
“man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Geertz
1973, 5). For many researchers, Geertz’s quote seems almost a prophetic vision of
the “virtual” world of hypertext documents that would arise with the emergence
of the public World Wide Web in 1992 (Castells 2001, 9ff). Envisioning all systems
of meaning as a symbolic “web,” Geertz gives credit for the idea to the early
sociologist Max Weber’s conception of verstehenden or “interpretive” cultural
analysis (Keys 2002, 237ff). Geertz’s work, however, was also heavily influenced
Folklore 116 (August 2005): 172–188
ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/05/020172-17; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
q 2005 T ...
This paper purports to be a starting point to revisit existing approaches dealing with the origin and spread of languages in the light of the changed circumstances of the Twenty-first century without in any way undermining their applicability across space and time. The origin of spoken languages is intricately and inseparably interwoven and intertwined with the origin of human species as well, and in this paper, we propose a ‘Wholly-independent Multi-Regional hypothesis of the origin of Homo sapiens’ in response to both the highly-controversial and arguably antiquated ‘Out-of-Africa theory’ which we have stridently and vehemently opposed, along with all its protuberances and the contending Multi-Regional Hypothesis as well. The key tenets of this paper are therefore articulated based on this fundamental premise which is likely to upend existing presumptions and paradigms to a significant degree. Having said that, we must hasten to add that the evolutionary biology of language encompassing physical anthropology or genetics and other related areas of study, are wholly outside the purview of this paper. Structural linguistics and semantics are also outside the scope of this paper. In this paper, we examine the origins of spoken and written languages in pre-historic, proto-historic, historic, pre-globalized and post-globalized contexts and propose an ‘Epochal Polygenesis’ approach. As a part of this paper, we also provide a broad overview of early and current theories of the origin and spread of languages so that readers can compare our approaches with already existing ones and analyse the similarities and differences between the two. We propose and define several new concepts under the categories of contact-based scenarios and non-contact based scenarios such as the autochthonous origin of languages, the spread of properties of languages from key nodes, the ‘Theory of linguistic osmosis’ and the need to take historical and political factors into account while analysing the spread of languages. In this paper, we also propose among others, the ‘Theory of win-win paradigms’ and the ‘Net benefits approach’. We also emphasize the need to carry out a diachronic and synchronic assessment of the dynamics of languages spread and propose that this be made a continuous process so that the lessons learnt can be used to tweak and hone theories and models to perfection. This paper is likely to significantly up the ante in favour of a dynamics-driven approach by undermining the relative torpor now observed in this arguably vital sub-discipline and contribute greatly to the rapidly emerging field of language dynamics. We also hope that synchronic linguistics will finally get its due place under the sun in the post-globalised world, and will become a major driving force in linguistics in the Twenty-First Century.
The article entitled Techniques and Gaps in Translation of Cultural Terms is an attempt to find out the techniques adopted in translates in cultural terms an observe gaps in the process of translation. The main purpose of this study has to evaluate the techniques of translation of cultural words and to find out the gaps. For this purpose, the researcher collected cultural terms as corpus of data for the study from Nepali cultural words and the corresponding translated words from the English language. They were categorized them into five different categories. Findings of the study shows that ten different techniques such as literal, addition, deletion, claque, back translation, borrowing, definition are to be found to have been employed in translating cultural words of the novel.
From the article just published in Psychology Research to my presentation on Monday 20, Nobvember 2023 on DISJUNCTURE vs REVOLUTION, POSTGRESSION vs. PROGRESSION, the central question of the emergence of language and the passage from oral language will be central. A video presentation covering the first part of the general topic with the newly discovered Hominin Homo Naledi in Souith Africa in the background on IFIASA site, presents this Hominin who had reached the level of transcribing his oral language into symbolical geometric signs. The second part on the phylogeny of language from the emergence of oral articulatred language to the writing of of all languages will openly being the question of freedom and freedom of choice in archaeological times for Hominins. The third part on the Versailles Treaty and how it still dictates the present and future of the world will be kept for publication.
Within 15-20 years ouor appeoach to the emergence of Humanity on this planet has run a tremendous distance and we can now envisage that human mental and culturazl characteristics existed several hundred years earlier than we though around 2000. Somze of these chjaracteristics also existed in pre-Sapiens hominin species like Naledis and Neanderthals and certainly Denisovans, plus some even older species. That’s why the brutal events we are still going through in our times are pathetic. And miserable.
Can AI do good? at 'offtheCanvas' India HCI preludeAlan Dix
Invited talk at 'offtheCanvas' IndiaHCI prelude, 29th June 2024.
https://www.alandix.com/academic/talks/offtheCanvas-IndiaHCI2024/
The world is being changed fundamentally by AI and we are constantly faced with newspaper headlines about its harmful effects. However, there is also the potential to both ameliorate theses harms and use the new abilities of AI to transform society for the good. Can you make the difference?
Book Formatting: Quality Control Checks for DesignersConfidence Ago
This presentation was made to help designers who work in publishing houses or format books for printing ensure quality.
Quality control is vital to every industry. This is why every department in a company need create a method they use in ensuring quality. This, perhaps, will not only improve the quality of products and bring errors to the barest minimum, but take it to a near perfect finish.
It is beyond a moot point that a good book will somewhat be judged by its cover, but the content of the book remains king. No matter how beautiful the cover, if the quality of writing or presentation is off, that will be a reason for readers not to come back to the book or recommend it.
So, this presentation points designers to some important things that may be missed by an editor that they could eventually discover and call the attention of the editor.
White wonder, Work developed by Eva TschoppMansi Shah
White Wonder by Eva Tschopp
A tale about our culture around the use of fertilizers and pesticides visiting small farms around Ahmedabad in Matar and Shilaj.
Expert Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) Drafting ServicesResDraft
Whether you’re looking to create a guest house, a rental unit, or a private retreat, our experienced team will design a space that complements your existing home and maximizes your investment. We provide personalized, comprehensive expert accessory dwelling unit (ADU)drafting solutions tailored to your needs, ensuring a seamless process from concept to completion.
Transculturation, Transliteracy And Generative Poetics
1. Transculturation, transliteracy and generative poetics
What effect are recent developments in global communications having on
language and its readers and writers; those defined through their relations
with language? What happens to our identity, as linguistic beings, when our
means of communication and associated demographics shift? What is driving
this? Is it the technology, the migrations of people or a mixture of these
factors? How are these dynamics reflected, within and upon, in contemporary
creative practices with language and new media?
Mapas Mundi
Language is motile, polymorphic and hybrid. Illuminated manuscripts, maps,
graphic novels, the televisual and the web are similar phenomena in that they
2. evidence language to be something that has never been restricted to the
word. Language has always included the visual, aural and tactile.
Dead Sea Scroll
The widely held assumption that the written word is the ultimate source of
knowledge/power (a hermeneutic) has never been the case. Don Ihde’s
‘expanded hermeneutics’ (Ihde 1999), proposes, as part of an expanded
system of signification, that what appear to be novel representations of
phenomena and knowledge are not necessarily new. Meaning, and the value
that derives from it, has been encoded in diverse forms and media for
millennia. Only a few of these resemble the classic written text that was
assumed, in conventional hermeneutics, to be the ultimate source of meaning.
In a number of cultures the written was word never assigned this peculiar
status as the primary repository of knowledge and thus was not invested with
the authority that flows from that.
3. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri’s painting ‘Carpet Snake Dreaming’, 1991-92.
Australian aboriginal cultures are characterised by their coherent and highly
complex world-views, embedded in a web of narratives we know as the
‘dreamtime’. These narratives were developed, sustained and shared through
the use of ritual activities, such as corroboree, as well as through music and
visual artefacts. Historically these societies did not employ written language in
the sense that this is understood in some other cultures – but theirs was, and
is, a highly literate world; just not one based on writing. Clifford Possum’s
painting ‘Carpet Snake Dreaming’ is not just a painting of snakes approaching
a water-hole or other site of interest. It is also a map of a terrain, most likely
actual rather than imaginary. It is a container of a mythic narrative, evoking a
story that for those who know it is as much history as parable. This artwork
thus embodies knowledge and is not a work of the imagination.
4. Visualisation of the blogosphere by Matthew Hurst 2007
In contemporary science we see graphic representation in ascendance over
written text as the complexity of the data-sets involved increase beyond the
capacity of the written word to contain them and our ability to interpret such
information through text is tested to the limit. It is now often left to computers
to interpret our complex data-sets for us, employing codes that are rarely, if
ever, read by a human being. Knowledge is now created and disseminated
via diverse media and codifying systems, invisible to us as often as they are
visible. Rendering these invisible landscapes and networks in a manner by
which we can apprehend them has become one of the functions of the
contemporary artist, designer and informatician.
Fernando Ortiz (Ortiz 1947) proposed the concept of ‘transculturation’, which
may offer insights that will assist in apprehending how these changes in
culture and language have proceeded.
“I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the
different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another
5. because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which
is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process
also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture,
which could be defined as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea
of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be
called neoculturation.”
The suggestion here is that we are all engaged in an interplay of cultural
interactions and appropriations, which is now occurring within a world of
highly mobile people’s saturated with communications media. Language, a
technology fundamental to the human condition, is the primary means by
which this process occurs. The political implications suggested by this lead to
the question; are we creating a universal ‘neo-pidgin’ or are our cultures
fragmenting into linguistic ghettoes? Are we witnessing the emergence of a
new cultural hegemony or the collapse of old certainties?
A selection of ethnic costumes, Fanny's Play House Inc.
6. People define themselves through language and create their own sub-cultural
linguistic fields, their own ‘tribal’ codes, in order to establish their identity and
be identified by other members of their ‘tribe’. This might be done through the
clothes they wear, the language they employ or the means through which they
transmit their messages. This is an iterative process where people evolve new
dialects that in turn define self. Transculturation functions not only within the
established context of the colonial but also the post-colonial, where human
migration has proceeded, for multiple reasons, in multiple directions.
The concept of pluriliteracy (Garcia 2006) proposes that certain individuals
and communities function within highly multilingual environments where
multiple languages are employed in various contexts. A central feature of this
model is that multiple languages are acquired at the same time but do not
necessarily have similar value.
Transliteracy (Thomas et al 2007) is defined as “the ability to read, write and
interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality
through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks (ibid).”
In the media-saturated societies of today’s world it can be assumed that many
people are transliterate, capable not only of interpreting information across
media and linguistic forms but also translating information from one cultural
context to another.
Thomas’s concept of transliteracy can be seen as related to Garcia’s idea of
pluriliteracy, although transliteracy is less concerned with spoken and written
language and rather with forms of linguistic activity involving other modalities
of representation across numerous media. However, the arguments regarding
one likely inform those of the other.
Does the notion of ‘transliteracy’ offer the possibility of reconciling cultural and
linguistic differences whilst allowing difference to function. Or are these
phenomena aspects of a bi-directional compacting, and potentially
7. desiccating, dynamic? Does creative work with language that employs digital
media necessarily expose these dynamic processes of signification?
A number of authors and artists have concerned themselves with these
issues, amongst them John Cayley, a well known author in the field of digital
poetics. He has also worked as a research librarian in the Chinese section of
the British Library and as a translator. His interests have often engaged
issues around translation and transliteration.
Image from Translation, by John Cayley with Giles Perring, www.shadoof.net
In Cayley’s (with Giles Perring, audio) generative QuickTime based text and
sound work ‘Translation’ (Cayley 2005) Cayley produces an ever-changing
‘linguistic wall hanging’ - as he refers to it (Cayley 2004) - the generative texts
emerging at or beyond the limits of lissibility.
‘Translation’ functions across a number of languages, shifting from version to
version, but nearly always incorporating English, German and French. The
primary components of the work are not recognisable words from any specific
8. language but rather the structural patterns that underlie written and spoken
language. These are patterns that are visual or aural in their nature, where
word ‘shapes’ are retained but their conventional semiotic capability severely
compromised. Cayley writes of language ‘drowning’ and ‘resurfacing’
throughout the work, suggesting that the legibility of the text is the necessary
oxygen the reader requires and will always seek, even struggle, to find. What
happens when that oxygen is removed and the ‘text’ abstracted to its material
and a-semiotic components?
Image from Translation, by John Cayley with Giles Perring, www.shadoof.net
Cayley writes ‘my literal art, has been involved, in terms of one of its most
obvious formalisms, with transliteral morphing from one given text -
transcribed in machine-encoded alphabetic script - to another’ (ibid). Here
Cayley explicitly employs the term transliteral to describe not a reader’s
literacy across media and significatory systems (as defined by Thomas et al)
but to illuminate the automatic machine based algorithms that underpin the
technical and conceptual nature of the artwork. As such, he conflates the
9. technical with the cultural, evoking Terry Winograd’s earlier observations on
the relationship between language, culture and thought. As Winograd notes,
‘The computer is a physical embodiment of the symbolic calculations
envisaged by Hobbes and Leibniz. As such, it is really not a thinking
machine, but a language machine. The very notion of ‘symbol system’ is
inherently linguistic and what we duplicate in our programs with their
rules and propositions is really a form of verbal argument, not the
workings of mind’ (Winograd 1991).
What Winograd is proposing here is that the computer is a form of writing;
specifically automated writing. The context in which he makes this proposition
is a discourse on artificial intelligence, his position being that computation is
not so much concerned with the replication of thought but rather with
language. Cayley has more or less taken this idea literally and built an
instance of a language machine that functions to embody it, focusing on the
structural aspects of how such a machine might work.
‘Translation’ takes as its source text fragments of Walter Benjamin's essay,
'On Language as Such and on the Language of Man' (Benjamin 1916). As an
active translator Cayley is acutely aware of what Benjamin refers to as the
‘kinship’ of languages and how translation is not so much concerned with
similarity but an ‘affinity of difference’. I take this to mean a structural
correspondence where the difference between components can be seen to be
similar to one another, even when the instrumentality of languages can seem
extremely alien to one another. This concept would appear not unrelated to
Derrida’s intent when coining the term ‘differance’ (Derrida 1982), Cayley’s
automated script evoking an infinite deferral of meaning but never
compromising our apprehension of an instance of language that is writing
itself.
Cayley’s abstracting of a text into an a-semiotic but nevertheless profoundly
linguistic phenomena can be seen to be evoking this ‘affinity of difference’ in
its emphasis on structure and the internal relations of the work rather than
10. through presenting associations between signifiers and the things they signify.
The question thus arises whether the ‘text’ that Cayley has produced is one
composed of signs or whether something more concrete than that? What are
the signifiers that compose this work, when they have no signified associated
with them? Perhaps they only signify themselves or, otherwise, they speak of
writing itself.
Given our earlier observations about the visible and invisible languages that
compose our transliterate culture perhaps the distinction that is sustained
between that which signifies and that which is abstract becomes meaningless
as we recognise that meaning is dependent on its context and the internal
relations of signs are as unfixed as their relations with that which they
represent.
Similarly, as implied in Garcia’s concept of pluriliteracy, the manner in which
people construct and sustain their identities is a function of their relations with
others and with things and is thus highly fluid. We can be many different
people, our characteristics contingent on how we interface with others. It has
become a common observation to note how people construct their identities,
in social environments such as Second Life, and how these constructs can
differ from how these same people present/construct themselves as a function
of other relational contexts. Self has always been a negotiated construct, our
social interactions mediating our being.
Cayley’s artwork evokes how the internal structures of language may remain
discernable, irrespective of context and association. Perhaps our constructed
and contingent human identities also retain discernable internal relations.
However, the idea of an authentic self, to be discovered within its internal
organisation like a fingerprint, seems difficult to sustain as it is a relational
construct. There might be no productive purpose in questioning the
authenticity of such (social) constructs as self-hood or language. It might be
more productive to query the polymorphic character of how these dynamics
interact, each (the self, the social, language) informing the other in a
generative cycle, similar to how the various elements in ‘Translation’ are
11. contingent on their relations with one another to determine their further
emergence.
It could be argued that there is nothing new about so called ‘new media’ and
that the idea of computation is not novel. If we agree with Winograd that the
computer is language then we might also accept that language is
computational, extending this to our understanding of language and
recognising its autopoietic character (Maturana 1980). Perhaps culture, like
language, can be considered as a network of constantly regenerating
relations? If so then the implication is that technology is not the cause of
change but rather the material manifestation of the social, technology’s most
pervasive materialisation being in the form of language. In this sense the
dynamics of the relational can be regarded as akin to those of the poetic and
also the computational.
Simon Biggs
Edinburgh, September 2008
Thanks to John Cayley and James Leach for their assistance.
Benjamin, W (1916); Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913-1926
Walter Benjamin, Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University
Press.
Cayley, J (2005); Translation, located and navigable to at http://www.shadoof.net/ (accessed
01.09.2008).
Cayley, J (2004); Overboard, Dichtung Digital,
http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm (accessed 01.09.2008).
Derrida, J (1982); Margins of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press.
Garcia, O (2006) with Bartlett and Kleifgen; From biliteracy to pluriliteracies, in Handbook of
Applied Linguistics on Multilingual Communication, Mouton.
Ihde, D (1999); Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science; Northwestern University
Press.
Maturana, H (1980) and Varela, FJ; Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living,
Springer.
Ortiz, F (1947); Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar; Re-published 1995, Duke
University Press.
12. Thomas, S (2007) with Joseph, Laccetti, Mason, Mills, Perril and Pullinger; Transliteracy:
Crossing divides; First Monday, V12, N12,
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