Looking backward,
figuring forward:
Modelling, its discontents
& the future
Willard McCarty
King’s College London
staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~mccarty
DH2007
J. M. W. Turner, The Morning
after the Deluge (1843)
1. In need of help
2. From comfort to claustrophobia
3. From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
4. A Metamorphoses Game?
2
Two styles of reasoning
Nobel Prize medal for Physics &
Chemistry: the Genius of Science
unveiling the goddess Isis
Nobel Prize medal for Literature: a
young man, sitting under a laurel tree, being
instructed by the Muse & writing down her song
φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, “nature loves to hide”
(Heraclitus frag. 123)
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1. In need of help
2. From comfort to claustrophobia
3. From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
4. A Metamorphoses Game?
4
Relational model of personification superimposed on Picasso’s La mort d'Orphée (1930)
5
1. In need of help
2. From comfort to claustrophobia
3. From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
4. A Metamorphoses Game?
6
mathesis, n. 1. Mental discipline; learning
or science, esp. mathematical science. Now
rare.
2. After M. Foucault: the science or practice
of establishing a systematic order of
things.
poiesis, n. [< Gk., creation, production < ποεῖ ν
to make, create, produce, thus poetry] Creative
production, esp. of a work of art; an instance
of this.
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“… our universes are limited, not by the demands of problems that need
to be solved but by extraneous standards of rigor. The result… is a mindset of reductionism, of looking only downward toward subsystems, and never
upward and outward.”
Robert Rosen, “On Biology and Physics”, in Essays on Life Itself
(Columbia, 2000): 2.
“I live in a world of others’ words. And my entire life is an orientation in this
world, a reaction to others’ words (an infinitely diverse reaction), beginning
with my assimilation of them… and ending with assimilation of the wealth
of human culture…”
Mikhail Bahktin, “From Notes Made in 1970-1”, in Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays, ed. Emerson and Holquist (Texas, 1986): 143
“For there is no [context] as an objective structure, existing in nature. There are
practices of [contextualizing]… of articulated reaching. And there’s no shortage of
dubiously useful ways for characterizing ‘structure’ in the frozen object called [‘the
context’], given the possibilities of transcription, recording and terminological
classification”
David Sudnow, “Going for the Jazz”, in Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten
Account (MIT, 2001): 126
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1. In need of help
2. From comfort to claustrophobia
3. From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
4. A Metamorphoses Game?
9
VR reconstruction:
Struder model, St Gall
1.
Constructing
resources
2.
Inventing
new genres
Prosopography of
Anglo-Saxon England
4.
Modeling for
(synthetic)
5.
Modeling for
possible worlds
Ivanhoe
Game
3.
Modeling of
(analytic)
Second Life
Artificial vs natural
(Paul Wegener, Der Golem,
wie er in die Welt kam, 1920)
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Afterwords
1.
A text is a unit of language that is not reducible to a series of propositions.
1.1
Texts do not establish how “the world is all that is the case” but instead foster
imaginative inquiry into all that could be the case if appropriate scenarios could
be constructed. To treat writing as a text is to set it against the fixities of the
world and against the disciplines we trust to establish those fixities.
1.11
Considered historically, texts weave into one another in networks of
intertextuality. So in dealing with textuality there is no feasible principle of
closure. Texts are generative.
Charles Altieri, “Tractatus Logico-Poeticus”, Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007: 528), my
emphasis
Nature does not reason, and its operation is at one with itself.... Ultimately, shouldn't we
say that nature is a more perfect art, since it is inside the thing itself, and is immanent and
immediate?
Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis (Belknap, 2006): 24
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