MachineMachine /stream - tagged with language http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net On the trail of the wild and wonderful @Horse_ebooks http://splitsider.com/2012/01/the-ballad-of-horse_ebooks/the-ballad-of-horse-ebooks-splitsider On the trail of the wild and wonderful @Horse_ebooks : http://t.co/QYGn0092 #fb ]]> Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:06:45 -0700 http://splitsider.com/2012/01/the-ballad-of-horse_ebooks/the-ballad-of-horse-ebooks-splitsider All Language Is Murder http://www.vice.com/read/language-is-murder/all-language-is-murder-vice The Word is the Murder of the Thing http://t.co/Y1H5W9zS ]]> Wed, 14 Dec 2011 03:50:14 -0700 http://www.vice.com/read/language-is-murder/all-language-is-murder-vice Worth a new Mass? http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2011/12/worth-a-new-mass.html/the-tls-blog-worth-a-new-mass Worth a new Mass? "How should seminal texts from the remote past be translated in a contemporary idiom?" http://t.co/K8ek35Lh ]]> Thu, 08 Dec 2011 08:06:14 -0700 http://timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/2011/12/worth-a-new-mass.html/the-tls-blog-worth-a-new-mass Is mental time travel what makes us human? http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The… ]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece The Chomsky-Foucault Debate [excerpt, part 1/2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:40:12 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WveI_vgmPz8&feature=youtube_gdata Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!) http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French. The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called “logical positivism” or… ]]> Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:08:16 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Death Is Not the End (Long Live theory!) http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Was theory a gigantic hoax? On the contrary. It was the only salvation, for a twenty year period, from two colossal abdications by American thinkers and writers. From about 1975 to 1995, through a historical accident, a lot of American thinking and mental living got done by people who were French, and by young Americans who followed the French.

The two grand abdications: one occurred in academic philosophy departments, the other in American fiction. In philosophy, from the 1930s on, a revolutionary group had been fighting inside universities to overcome the “tradition.” This insurgency, at first called… ]]> Thu, 18 Aug 2011 01:48:43 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/death-not-end Michel Serres, The Natural Contract http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8687570754 “Suppose two speakers, determined to contradict each other. As violent as their confrontation may be, as long as they are willing to continue the discussion they must speak a common language in order for the dialogue to take place. There can’t be an argument between two people if one speaks a language the other can’t understand. […] Can an individual actor, lost in these gigantic masses, still say ‘I’ when the old collectivities, themselves so lightweight, have already been reduced to uttering a paltry and outmoded ‘we’?”

- Michel Serres, The Natural Contract ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 05:36:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8687570754 Traces of humanity http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/traces_of_humanity/ What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space

Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the earth that nobody particularly intended to leave anywhere. But much of what we’ve left in space is intentional. Some of it is symbolic artifacts intended for an audience of people here on Earth - the fallen astronaut, the American flag on the moon, a CD containing a list of over half a million people who wanted to send their names to a comet, courtesy of a NASA… ]]> Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:32:57 -0700 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/traces_of_humanity/ Michel Serres's Milieux http://www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/ There is a Yiddish expression used in London which always gives me a little jolt of pleasure whenever I hear it. ‘In mitten drinnen’ corresponds to German ‘In mitten darin’, which means ‘in the middle of it’ or ‘in the middle of things’. Actually, in common use, the phrase might be more idiomatically rendered as ‘right in the middle’: though this is a bizarre-enough phrase in itself. If it is really right in the middle, dead centre, as we also sometimes say, then why does the word used to signify this seem to have a list, in etymologically leaning to… ]]> Tue, 02 Aug 2011 04:49:58 -0700 http://www.stevenconnor.com/milieux/ Content-free prose: The latest threat to writing or the next big thing? http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it. ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:46:50 -0700 http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ Michel Serres on the word 'human' http://www.universite-du-si.com/en/conferences/8-paris-usi-2011/sessions/961-michel-serres Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From 1956 to 1958, he served as an officer of the navy: squadron of the Atlantic, reopening of the Suez Canal, Algeria, and squadron of the Mediterranean Sea.
 
Michel Serres defended his thesis in 1968 and taught philosophy in Clermont-Ferrand, Vincennes (Paris I) and at Standford University. In his books, he focuses, among other themes, on the history of sciences (“Hermes”, 1969-1980). His philosophy, concerning as much sensibility… ]]> Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:15:38 -0700 http://www.universite-du-si.com/en/conferences/8-paris-usi-2011/sessions/961-michel-serres Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7233736409 “All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.”

- Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus ]]> Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:02:43 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7233736409 A Home Before the End of the World http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-home-before-the-end-of-the-world/26568/ Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria… ]]> Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:11:54 -0700 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-home-before-the-end-of-the-world/26568/ New 'Solaris' translation locked in Limbo http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has finally been translated directly into English. The current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem, himself a fluent English speaker, was always scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of two film versions of the… ]]> Sun, 19 Jun 2011 05:29:33 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/104691 First ever direct English translation of Solaris published http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris The first ever direct translation into English of the Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem's most famous novel, Solaris, has just been published, removing a raft of unnecessary changes and restoring the text much closer to its original state.

Telling of humanity's encounter with an alien intelligence on the planet Solaris, the 1961 novel is a cult classic, exploring the ultimate futility of attempting to communicate with extra-terrestrial life. The only English edition to date is Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox's 1970 version, which was translated from a French version which Lem himself described as poor.
… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:07:40 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris Inside the Box: Notes From Within the European Artistic Research Debate http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when their circulation is grounded on an imprecision inherent in language. The connotative meaning of a word, if I may be forgiven for stating the obvious, can diverge greatly from what are often contradictory origins, allowing ideology to reify itself on a lexical level. Let’s examine the word science itself. It derives both from the Latin, scientia, “to know”—but also from the Greek, scienzia, “to split, rend or cleave.” That art… ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2011 03:13:52 -0700 http://e-flux.com/journal/view/233 Digital Autonomy http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl

“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.”

Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction [1]

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:02:00 -0700 http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl/is-an-ephemeral-image-a-moment-in-a-streaming-video-a A Medium for the Masses http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/05/05/a-medium-for-the-masses/ The word “meme” first appeared in Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins defined a meme as being any sort of idea that spreads from person to person within a culture and catches fire. It played on the notion of a gene, as both genes and memes multiply with human-to-human contact. As UC Santa Cruz computer science professor Gerald Moulds put it, “Every idea that manages to self-replicate is a meme.” Internet memes are much the same thing. They spread from website to website, from community to community, from user to user across the Web, mutating and bonding together,… ]]> Mon, 06 Jun 2011 02:25:06 -0700 http://www.cityonahillpress.com/2011/05/05/a-medium-for-the-masses/ Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/is-twitter-writing-or-is-it-speech-why-we-need-a-new-paradigm-for-our-social-media-platforms/ Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend to be at once so ubiquitous and so generally unsatisfying…the answer may be that, collectively, we have yet to come to consensus on a much more basic question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech?

Twitter versus “Twitter”
The broader answer, sure, is that it shouldn’t matter. Twitter is…Twitter. It is what it is, and that should be enough. As a culture, though, we tend to… ]]> Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:19:30 -0700 http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/is-twitter-writing-or-is-it-speech-why-we-need-a-new-paradigm-for-our-social-media-platforms/