Looking backward, figuring forward: Modelling, its discontents

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Looking backward, figuring forward Modelli
ng, its discontents the future

• Willard McCarty
• Kings College London
• staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/mccarty

DH2007
J. M. W. Turner, The Morning after the Deluge
(1843)
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• In need of help
• From comfort to claustrophobia
• From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
• A Metamorphoses Game?

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Two styles of reasoning
Nobel Prize medal for Literature a young man,
sitting under a laurel tree, being instructed by
the Muse writing down her song
Nobel Prize medal for Physics Chemistry the
Genius of Science unveiling the goddess Isis
f?s?? ???ptes?a? f??e?, nature loves to hide
(Heraclitus frag. 123)
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• In need of help
• From comfort to claustrophobia
• From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
• A Metamorphoses Game?

5
Relational model of personification superimposed
on Picassos La mort d'Orphée (1930)
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• In need of help
• From comfort to claustrophobia
• From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
• A Metamorphoses Game?

7
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. lt Gk., creation, production lt p?e? ?
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
mind-set 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 theres 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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• In need of help
• From comfort to claustrophobia
• From claustrophobia to (foolish?) agoraphilia
• A Metamorphoses Game?

10
5.Modeling for possible worlds
VR reconstruction Struder model, St Gall
1. Constructing resources
Ivanhoe Game
4.Modeling for (synthetic)
2. Inventing new genres
3. Modeling of (analytic)
Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England
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